Elections, jobs and Twitter porn
This morning, Ugandan elections, from presidential through to local, have kicked off, which most likely will give Museveni, an American backed head of state who just wrapped up his 25th year in power (sounds familiar?), a sizable victory. The man is still popular with a large portion of the population, which makes it a bit surprising he raided the state coffers to finance his own electoral campaign and hand out brown envelopes (cash ‘donations’) when necessary.
Then again, it’s likely Museveni wants this to be the most peaceful elections in Ugandan history, while still making sure he’ll easily come out victorious. To do so requires him making sure he’ll have a majority backing, some of it aided by facilitating voters’ decisions at the ballot box with cash infusions.
There’s a subdued but clear alertness (article in Dutch by Marlies Pilon, a Dutch freelance journalist here in Kampala) in the west that the elections here could turn nasty. Then, there was an alert sent out by the Ugandan Inspector General of Police, which warned of terrorist attacks in the run up to the election. This, after an attack last year killed 74 Ugandans watching the soccer world cup finals. Which proves again that there are better ways to spend your time than watching soccer.
Insider information told me that the Inspector General has business ties with security firms, which might explain the supposed heightened perceived tension and I’m not easily impressed by such warnings anyway, but when, on Wednesday night, explosions rocked Dar es Salaam, I was considering being more careful. Until the explosions turned out to be an armory accidentally exploding, killing at least 20 people in the process.
Sadly, this was the second time in two years this happened.
Meanwhile, last night, I hosted a quiz at Bubbles O’Leary, where the previous quiz’ winners have to host the next one. Of the seven members of my team, only Wouter and myself showed up to host the quiz, with me MCing. Thankfully, it wasn’t just me, as the hosts have to also correct all the players’ answers, which is a lot of work, with a required ten rounds and, yesterday, eleven teams.
Vacancies
If you’re looking for a job in the international NGO sector, check out Neil Smith’s jobs4development.com. An excellent no-nonsense job board that’s easy to navigate and has lovely filtered RSS feeds available to its users. He’ll have a hard time fighting the big guys in the sector, though. Particularly the still horribly unusable, but very successful, devnetjobs.
Porn on Twitter
Interesting trend: porn stars who tweet: @AsaAkira, @flowertucci, @JenaveveJolie to name a few. Here’s an exciting tweet in honor of Valentine’s Day.