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We often lose sight of the joy of childhood and youth as we age, until natural truths remind us of what we’ve overlooked. However, these forgotten truths are expressed in traditional sayings such as “harvest what you plant,” “a stitch in time saves nine,” and “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

Starting secondary school at the age of 12 or 13, long ago, some of us who weren’t into math found the scientific ideas confusing and hard to understand, often sounding like nonsense.

As my struggling Physics teacher (a Catholic Reverend Brother) repeatedly tried to clarify the gravitational force acting on a falling object that sped up at an “increasingly increasing” rate of 9.8 meters “per second per second,” my thoughts would drift toward calculating how many years remained before I could abandon the “crazy” sciences.

To prevent myself from falling asleep as the teacher and some “good” boys worked out their gravity-related problems, I attempted to create nicknames for the innocent man of God and draw cartoons of him, hoping the bell would ring so we could move on to more engaging subjects like History and languages.

Fifty years later last week, the concept of “increasing at an increasing rate” came back to haunt me as I watched Uganda’s Presidential CEO Forum, where the country’s leading executives discussed the future of the nation’s tourism industry.

A representative from the Uganda Wildlife Authority was stating some statistics about the lion population, indicating that in 1974 the country had more than 1,000 lions.

The 2014 lion count revealed more than 400 remaining. The 2024 lion count showed the number of these large cats has dropped to just 291! Thus, although it took forty years to reduce the population by half, it has only taken ten years to decrease it by a quarter. The decline is truly “accelerating.”

It is agonizing when the boy who struggled to grasp concepts like “increasing at an increasing rate” grows into an elder now worried about the future of the nation, humankind, and the Earth, as he watches his country’s environment deteriorate at an ever-accelerating pace.

It becomes even more painful when he realizes that another country, which has taken physics seriously, is establishing conditions they inherently lacked and is witnessing a growing lion population at an accelerating pace, while Uganda’s is declining rapidly and could vanish within a few decades unless significant actions are implemented.

This troubled elderly individual is discussing the desert nation known as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which, during the period he was declining to study physics, ranked lower than Uganda in various human development metrics.

Then, as young boys, we were amazed by the generosity of our unconventional president, Idi Amin, when he declared aid donations to assist our unfortunate brothers in a challenging location we only knew as Dubai, whose appreciative leader, His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, even visited Amin in Kampala.

Fifty years on, the UAE has become a major global economic force, providing assistance to Uganda and, during the Covid-19 crisis, generously supplying us with food to support many of our citizens throughout the lockdown.

When it comes to rapid growth, the UAE has established various wildlife reserves, such as the Sharjah Safari Park, which was launched three years ago following just seven years of planning. Located on a small area of eight square kilometers, it provides almost all the experiences you’d encounter in Africa, but without the complications or dangers found in the UAE.

Subsequently, despite all the names, referring to it as a “safari” park, they have, along with other prominent African reserves, recreated the Serengeti in a more compact form.

At Sharjah Safari Park, you can observe lions, giraffes, black rhinos, and elephants, along with a section known as Predators Kingdom, where cheetahs and leopards also reside. No matter what you wish to see from Africa’s wilderness, you can experience it up close in comfort and elegance under “natural” conditions within the UAE.

This is what civilizations that prioritize science can accomplish within a short period.

Buwembo is a journalist based in Kampala. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc.Syndigate.info).