Jon continues to file his daily snowmail reports from under African skies, giving us an insightful first hand feel to how all this really relates to the African nation.



Filming Idi - 5pm July 5

Bang! Bang! Bang!

No not war in some urban side street in the Ugandan capital - but a scene from the Last King of Scotland, a British movie about Idi Amin, directed by Kevin Macdonald, of Touching the Void fame.

Idi Amin may be dead, but he's still an internal subject of discussion - they know he was a brute. You meet so many people who lost relatives to his tyranny. But many people also believed he gave Uganda a voice.

Either way the very fact that more than 50 westerners can pitch up here for 3 months and sit about in directors chairs with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of cameras lights and effects is a signal not only of the safety and tranquillity of Kampala but also that the country has come to terms with its past - even to the extent to having a movie made about the old ogre.

In the scene I saw, the uncannily Amin-like Forest Whitiker trundles down the hill in a presidential merc into an infernal assassination attempt - hence the bangs. But this is what our programme is about tonight - not the movie, but that it is possible to for a country to come from tyranny to significant economic growth.

And what the G8 really has to do is to see how globalisation can now carry countries like this to the next level of development.

I've filed a report with some wonderfully mystical images shot by my cameramen Chris Hease and Ray Queally. Try not to miss them!

Over on the other side of Africa Sue Turton has had the intriguing assignment of following George Weah about the country. He's not playing football, he's playing to be president. She finds out if he really has what it takes to lift the most war-torn and dispossessed country in Africa from ruin to riches?

You also get the chance to come with me to a small video hall. Remember the silent movies and the pianist? Well this is something of the same.

You see this is a country with seventy tribal tongues, you couldn't possibly dub Rambo or anything else into all of them. So there are these guys who go about the country translating films onto DVD - and they do it live.

Jingo does it better than any one because as you will see he doesn't just translate, he comments and at times it can be very funny.

For the rest, African leaders have gone to Libya to meet ahead of the G8 tomorrow to try to work out their response to whatever the world leaders come up with.

Whoops - On the road now with Richard my driver, and just been passed by the most enormous military convoy. Who should be in it but President Museveni flanked by the Israeli defence minister. Well, there's a funny thing. With what do we associate the Israelis and Entebbe?

Yes, the Israelis liberating the Air France airliner in the 70s on which Palestinian hijackers were holding mainly Jewish passengers hostage. That man Idi again - how the world turns…

I will leave Africa as I always do with a heavy heart - this place is magic and I still quite can't quite put my finger on why. Flight connections willing I'll talk to you from the sun-kissed, protest-strewn summit meeting in Scotland tomorrow. Will it be raining I wonder?

We shall see, do join us tonight however for our last report from Africa, at seven.

Jon Snow

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Uganda's abducted children - July 4

Tonight, as the G8 jockeying reaches a crescendo in the north and some of the leaders descending to nationalistically driven attacks on the British hosts - Chirac questioning "What has Britain ever done for European agriculture? - mad cow disease". Oh and he also accuses Britain of appalling cooking.

This all looks rather tawdry from down here in Uganda and it only adds to the sense that many on this continent see what's going as business as usual.

I'm afraid it' s business as usual for the worst war in Africa - as you read this, five thousand children aged between 5 and 12 will be taking sanctuary in Gulu to avoid nocturnal abduction by the Lords Resistance Army.

Some of them walk twelve kilometres every night to the safety of the town's hospital. I have been there and seen them and spent much of the night with them. There are a few mothers there but almost entirely children in most parts of the hospital.

And why?

Because this remains Africa's worst unresolved war - a consequence of a collision between the LRA who abduct the children and brainwash them to commit murderous deeds and the Ugandan army which in a supposed effort to protect the population has herded 1.5 million people into hundreds of protective camps.

I've been to them too - and now that people have lived in them for nearly 2 decades the sense of moral breakdown; social drift and sense of loss is palpable.

They are slums. Yet these people are all farmers living in one of the most fertile parts of Africa. My report is at 7

I should add that we needed someone to translate something a child victim had told us in Gulu. I found someone in housekeeping in my hotel who speaks the language.

After Stella, for that was her name, had done the translation she told me amazingly hat she was among 109 children abducted in the 1990s and that she was one of only four who escaped. That tells you how insidious this thing is even though the vast majority of Uganda is untouched by it.

Lindsey Hilsum has been to Sierra Leone and Sudan and she reports on the massive upsurge in Chinese investment across Africa - designed primarily to gain raw material for their burgeoning economy. But she also demonstrates at the first Chinese built refinery ever to be constructed outside China that the lust for oil affects votes in the UN and explains the watering down of motions on Darfur.

We'll be talking with Gordon Brown, and with senior ministers here. With Mr Brown about the current state of G8 play and African perspectives on what's happening with the ministers, corruption.

Must dash - fish to fry, see you at seven, best wishes,.

Jon Snow, Kampala

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Time and (lack of) motion - Sun, 3 July, 2005

We have driven into what has to be seen as the heart of Africa.

As remote as you’re likely to get, to the banks of the River Nile, 70 miles from its source in lake Victoria.

Thirty seven years ago I was a volunteer teacher here as student. Coming back reveals the scale of the challenge to the G8.

The school that had 700 pupils when I was here – housed in buildings that had once been a cotton shipping terminal – is down to fewer than 200, and because the school has dwindled, a consequence of urban Uganda sprouting new schools, the rural economy here is suffering desperately.

Fifteen miles from the nearest small town, the hutted villages about depended exclusively on the school. Now less and less of their food is being bought and there is no other market.

The school will almost certainly move or close altogether and then this community will have no source of market. The contrast from 30 years ago is acute.

Worse, in just the small encampment around the school there are 40 orphans of AIDS. But the worst scourge is malaria. I haven’t met anyone today who doesn’t suffer from it. The amateur chemist handles 50 cases a day, the nearby decaying clinic 150.

Poverty exacerbates Malaria. Malaria intensifies poverty.

Tonight on Channel 4 News we are live from this settlement called Namasagali.

From this micro intensification of poverty we extrapolate the wider challenge.

Also Faisal Islam analyses how the outside world interacts with this economy and what the G8 might do to change it.

See you at 7.30, as ever is, best wishes.

Jon Snow in Namasagali

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Is Africa watching? - Sat, 2 July, 2005

Well right across the globe Live8 is throbbing through the ether making a fabulous spectacle. Amazing sounds from Tokyo to Moscow, particularly spectacular in Hyde Park London and Johannesburg.

I say right across the globe but here in Kampala I find the words to that song ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ flooding through my brain.

Here it is a case of do they know it’s Live8?

I am afraid they do not.

I’ve just been on the roof of Uganda Television with an engineer trying to hand crank the satellite dish to a point at which they might somehow connect with pictures offered up from South Africa.

Even the power supply to make the crude search machine work had to be cobbled together from three old links of flex, the rooftop and its equipment looked as it had been rejected by some museum in the 60s.

And that’s the core of the problem: infrastructure!

There is almost no sub-Saharan state outside South Africa that has anything like a 21st century communications system that would make Live8 widely available to its people. In any case only one in 10 people here have a TV.

I have scoured the markets and wandered dusky alleys but I have encountered almost no one who has either heard of Live8 or G8.

In fact so desperate was I, that I went to the bar at Makerere University – which was packed, the TV was on, but on the wrong channel.

So it’s a good time Saturday here but if you’re thinking global for G8, Live8 and all the razzmatazz, even if this continent is the target, forget any idea that anyone knows.

Actually there was one exception - the Bishop of Busoga who I encountered in a South African style shopping mall here in Kampala, he knew lots about the summit but nothing of Live8.

In a way, today’s extraordinary event has a telling moral in the pale – Africa is desperately disconnected from the rest of the world.

We are live at 6.40 in a seething bar on a glorious African street – don’t miss it.

See you then.

Best Wishes

Jon Snow in Kampala.

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Bulldozing Ahead - Fri, 1 July, 2005

Appalling scenes out of Zimbabwe tonight. The idle world eyes this continent and Mugabe chooses this moment to use his bulldozers not only to destroy house of the already impoverished slum dwellers but also to kill some of the people who live there - including a small child.

As a head of South Africa's International Policy Network, and brother to the president, Moeletsi Mbeki tells us tonight there's little his country can do. He condemns what happens outright but says invasion probably even sanctions are completely out of the question.

We're live from here in Uganda with our news from Africa - we have a digest of news from all over the content, news of importance here, but rarely ever seen in the north. I shall be discovered tonight next to a university swimming pool in Kampala. You may well wonder why? And I tell you it's about Aids.

This country has amazingly slashed the incidence of the disease from 29% of the adult population to 6%. Aids is still a death sentence here, only 1 in 10 gets the anti retro-virals that allows people to live with the Aids. But the unique rolling back of the disease in this country, which is being copied back by many other countries in Africa, maybe under threat.

The American Embassy here is candid - the aid that they are giving to combating the disease has in the last year been shifted from the brilliant ABC system, Abstention , Being faithful, and use of Condoms, to a campaign of sheer abstinence from sex. Hence the swimming pool.

We shall be live from air with two thousand Pentecostalists who will be about to make the pledge of abstinence. The pastor performing the rite is a man whose burnt condoms on this campus in his advocacy of abstaining.

I have been to schools, treatment centres and the Aids ward in Mulago hospital and witnessed the extraordinarily sophisticated programme that has cut Aids incidence. The question tonight whether outside funding is threatening and interfering with the last best hope of challenging the disease?

On the eve of the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, Nick Glass will be voyaging through some of the Africa music Bob Geldof seemed to forget. And Sarah Smith is up in Edinburgh amid the massive preparations up there.

Down here, I can tell you that I have seen one person on a roundabout with a placard.

It did indeed read 'Make Poverty History.'

Lovely girl - we passed the time of day and I moved on. But that's the only signal I've seen in this country that anything is happening in Edinburgh at all. That is not to say that the political classes are not more than ay of what's going on up there.

Anyway that's enough wittering from me - I can promise you an absolute electric show tonight.

Going on air at 7, live from Kampala. Look out for the pastor…

Best wishes as ever,

Jon - Musira (Ugandan for the white stuff) - Snow

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Thurs, 30 Jun, 2005

Bit late tonight - traffic jams coming back into Kampala. We're live tonight at Uganda's parliament building in the immediate aftermath of the MPs vote that has allowed a change of the constitution. This change enables President Museveni to run for a third term.

Museveni, lauded for bringing Uganda from the abyss of Idi Amin through to democracy is now in serious danger of being seen as an African leader who is heading the African way - from freedom fighter to elected dictator.

That's what his critics say but those who praise him say he is precisely the kind of leader that the G8 can do with, when they meet in Gleneagles next week.

Tonight we talk to him about democracy, the G8 and Robert Mugabe. He says of the G8 why should there be bargains for debt relief? Why sit as some "omniscient" panel deciding whether we have the kind of democracy that fits their model? A magnetic and intriguing character - judge for yourself at seven.

But our lead story comes from next door in Eastern Congo - a devastating account from Jonathan Miller as he becomes the first westerner to visit the thousands of tin miners who trudge many miles through the jungle carrying on their back the tin ore that provides crucial elements for our electronics in the northern hemisphere .

It's an absolutely amazing and shattering film report that highlights the issue of mineral exploitation in conflict zones - armies and militias control the mines, and the profits from the export to the West in turn fuel the violence. The mine we visit has been controlled by five different armed groups in the past 2 years. Maybe this film will make you think three times the next time you click the mouse…

You can see the pictures taken by our redoubtable Jon here:

Photo Gallery: Congo's Tin Soldiers

What an amazing continent this is, a roller coaster of experiences from abject poverty to sumptuous surroundings and stimulating conversation.

Tonight, is our overture to our live transmissions from Africa and we'll be live out of here every night until the G8 gets to business next Wednesday.

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Wed, 29 Jun, 2005

I'm standing on top of the Sheraton hotel in Kampala as the sun sets on a bustling city beneath African skies.

There is none of the reek of tear gas that briefly and unusually punctuated proceedings here yesterday. Of that, more tomorrow - but suffice it to say parliament has been voting on letting President Museveni run for a third term in contradiction to the two term limit set out in the constitution.

The protestors charge that he is going the way of so many other African leaders - from freedom fighter to elected dictator. A point that I shall be putting to him on Channel 4 News tomorrow night.

Two tonnes of satellite dish and 73 boxes arrived today to facilitate our live transmission from Africa - value several hundred thousand pounds, insurance on the customs bond a good few thousand pounds alone. Did you ever wonder why Africa is so rarely reported on television? The will may be one thing, but no-one ever discusses the cost.

In making poverty history someone should think of putting some satellites above the African continent to enable Africa to talk with Africa and to talk with the outside world. For whilst the internet and the mobile have already made a profound difference to this continent bypassing a generation of technology - television remains an essential medium, and footage from here is all but absent from screens in the northern hemisphere.

Here in the south they are talking about democracy; they are talking about governance and in a strange way they are looking north to Gleneagles but with considerable diffidence.

"I mean who are they to tell us what to do?" some people say to me. "What do they know? How about evening up the odds to let us compete?"

So it's all to play for here and tomorrow night we'll be coming live 73 boxes, 2 tonnes and God willing. We'll also be bringing you a truly remarkable report out of Congo, a major interview with President Museveni and much else.

And we shall continue right up to the moment the G8 kicks off and then we'll transfer to the northern hemisphere and look back south again.

PS: We had another puncture on the way from Gulu and this time we discovered the jack was too small. A wonderful truck driver stopped to fix it all and an hour later refused to take a dime…

Tues, 28 Jun, 2005

It rained here in Uganda - people too in unimaginable numbers. The western world the looks a distance place from here even though your text messages or phone can go at any minute. 'Do I want my break pads done?' asks the garage in Primrose Hill. Break pads? What are they in Africa?

There is sheer ingenuity which confronts you every driving hour here - laden pick-up trucks with no brakes, some with apparently no engine either. And others are belching such deep black smoke that there is no other physical evidence of the truck at all.

And what of G8? Gleneagles? Mmm - very remote - yet what you feel is how very intimate the industrialised world is to the disequilibrium here in Africa.

I mean, when it came to breakfast in Gulu I looked for some nice medium roasted Ugandan coffee. What did I find? A revolting old tin of Nescafe instant - is it just six multinational companies that effectively control the entire industrialised world coffee consumption?

How ever did we all conjure things to produce a situation in which coffee rich Uganda is unable to put Ugandan coffee on its own table?

Poor G8 - so much to do it, only two days in which to do it. We continue to brew for our live transmissions of C4 News from Africa later this week.

Mon, 27 Jun, 2005

There is nothing as reminiscent of Africa as a punctured inner tube. Bad enough to see the flat tyre after two and a half hours driving but the speckled patches of earlier emissions of air create a jigsaw that is more patch than tube.

Yes we are on the road in Uganda in preparation for the transmission of Channel 4 News later this week, live from this country with reports coming in from Liberia, Congo, Sudan and just about anywhere else our sources can reach. This isn't my only return, but it will be my longest spell back in Uganda since Idi Amin was toppled and the contrast is intriguing.

The ribbon development on the roadside is thicker than it was but is as scatological as ever and the greenery more lush than I remember.

Small pink gingham dresses scamper along the roadside from school, their wearers with their red socks trailing along their ankles. Every school it seems, and you pass many, seems to have a different colour scheme and in each school there appears to be hundreds of children.

We shall be working in the north for a few days and I will try to give you a sense of what see. Intriguingly people along the way do seem to have heard of the G8.

As I write this, we are astride the Nile which is cascading through gorges on the right-hand side of the road. These are the Karuma Falls.

This is not a travelogue; I hope it will be a vivid insight into what is discussed next week. There aren't many in the G8 that have a view like this.