The Embarrassing English Uganda took to Brussels

Minister of Foreign Affairs Sam Kahamba Kuteesa

Ugandans are the best speakers of the English language on the African continent, according to reports. Indeed, some Ugandans are more fluent in English than their first language. Recently however, I came across the website (homepage) of Uganda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Belgium) https://brussels.mofa.go.ug/ and what I saw and read there shocked me – glaring errors that had gone uncorrected for months.

I thought I had seen enough only to open another page and find errors that would make a Primary Two pupil in a Kampala UPE school frown. The people managing these pages probably spend most of their time in Belgium. They fly Business Class, receive fat allowances and maybe European standard salaries.

Let us try to make sense of this:

“Workshop on Diaspora Awareness

The Office of the Special Presidential Assistant on Diaspora is organising a workshop on Diaspora awareness workshop in December. We would like this inform to be uploaded for information.”

Before that could sink in a bold, coloured, headline,  captured my attention:

“Amb. Mirjam Blaak Ugandan students at the Wageningen University”

I quickly imagined that the missing word was “meets,” just before “Ugandan.” The caption proved me right: “On 3rd September Amb. Mirjam Blaak met Mr. Felix Ojok and Mr. Jamada Bwambale both Ugandan students at the Wageningen University pursuing a Master�s degree. The meeting took place during the Centennial celebration in Wageningen at the world famous agricultural university.”

I went ahead and opened the “Workshop on Diaspora Awareness” link and what I found there was a repetition of the errors on the first page.

To err is human but if it can take months and someone cannot see and correct an error in an online headline then they are simply not fit for that job.

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