Lockdown as seen from streets of social media

In the past few days, we have been dealing with a communications meltdown, with the networks going crazy and services being shut down for hours on end. Now that the networks have returned to stable, I am typing this article in the dying minutes of my computer battery because Umeme-supplied power is also off for who-knows-how-long. If the power blackout persists, I can forget my plans of working at home and staying put like a good, law-abiding citizen. I may have to go looking for the juice in places I shouldn’t be.

Away from my problems, which have not yet happened, I decided to take a walk through the streets of social media, just to gauge the temperature outside my cocoon. Out there in the jungle, is where you will run into tweets about concerned Ugandans like Dr Kizza Besigye trying to remind everyone that health is a public good and the choices we make matter and should be made collectively.
Alongside the recommendations on how to handle health services better, you have memes, jokes and appeals on the much anticipated Covid-19 relief funds. Five hundred thousand is the magic number here. Five hundred thousand homes are set to receive the funds and if your phone has at any time received Shs500,000, you do not qualify. The payment will be made once during the 42-day lockdown; you do the maths.

In a style reminiscent of the ugali weighing scale demo of the last lockdown, a calculation was done for proposed expenditure of the Shs100,000 package, with the basket containing 20 kilos of maize flour, 10 kilos of beans, cooking oil and a bar of soap. 
However, it seems the person who assembled this proposed basket has not been doing regular shopping. Tweeps were quick to point out that a litre of cooking oil does not cost Shs4,000. In fact, you only get half for that. 
Anyway, the relief fund managers probably need not worry about these wiseacres on Twitter as many will not make the list of the vulnerable, if you have seen the roll of the eligible doing the rounds. 

While the government understandably has limited funds to give away to the needy, for future purposes, someone may want to commission a study on who is actually needy in this economy; the findings could surprise them. 
Onward to Covid-19 treatment, ICU beds are still scarce and pricey around Kampala. Check out the newly created Kampala Covid-19 Bed Dashboard if you want to know. It is a good idea for those who can afford to pay the ICU costs and if only the status did not show ‘full’ for more than half of the hospitals on the dashboard.
 
The price of a 20ml  bottle (more like vial) of the new wonder drug, Covidex, has risen from a few thousand shillings to anywhere between Shs110,000 to $200 and beyond. Having been given the go-ahead by National Drug Authority, by the weekend, the medicine, was reportedly on its way to regional markets, with the price climbing per minute.

That, of course, is just social media speaking. We do not know the ‘who’ or ‘where’ this drug is headed and if nobody steps in to do anything, it looks like we will be watching this episode spiral out of control from the relative safety of our homes, behind our computer or phone screens. 
And, of course, the big one for social media this week was the phasing out of the social media tax (OTT), to be replaced with a 12 per cent tax on data. We will be here on social media waiting to see how this plays out.

Ms Nampewo is a writer, editor and communications consultant     
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