President Yoweri Museveni has said the government will soon commence with electronic registration and monitoring of all boats on Uganda’s lakes and rivers for easy and quicker identification/location.
Electronic registration and monitoring will require all boats, ships, ferries and canoes to install a chip that will be easily monitored on the Global Positioning Systems popularly known as GPS.
“The government has also ordered for the electronic registration and monitoring of all the boats so that we can know who is where on the lake and why,” President Museveni said in a statement.
The directive came few hours after a boat, that was owned by a Kampala businessman Templa Bissase capsized in Lake Victoria on Saturday evening claiming lives of over 32 people with others still missing.
The boat, MV Templa, believed to have been overloaded with over 120 partygoers, yet its capacity was 50 people, was headed to a beach known as K-Palm before it capsized a few metres to another beach called Mutima Beach in Mukono district, as it attempted to get an emergency docking.
After successfully testing the electronic monitoring and registration of Boda Bodas, (Safe Boda, Uber Boda and Taxify), the government is convinced that the same GPS technology must be applied to all boats on Ugandan lakes sooner than later.
This will help in case of any needed emergency.
BY PAUL TENTENA
