Africa’s premiere technology meeting, the Transform Africa Summit (TAS), is upon us again and Kigali is teeming will all sorts of geeks. Well, that is not all that is happening at the moment; at a different venue in Kigali, there is another equally important continental event taking place – though it has been over-shadowed by TAS – where public relations professionals, under their umbrella organisation, the African Public Relations Association (APRA) are meeting. The prospect of having Africa’s top spin-doctors must have been an event of a lifetime, but definitely not for the suspicious kind who might question whether it is not just a continental spin, with nothing tangible below the skin. What they are tackling has been on the agenda of many other continental meetings but with no tangible results; the need for Africans to tell their own story, a call that has been making the rounds for years but turns out to be pure hot air. Maybe now that public relations gurus have taken up the task, they might succeed to sell the story, especially now that technology is in the driving seat, and where else to learn newest PR apps than in Kigali at the moment? In another closely related event, up in the northern part of the country, the Seventh Annual National Security Symposium is taking place at Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) Command and Staff College in Musanze District. They received a pleasant surprise when Eugene Kaspersky, the internet security expert and father of the software that bears the same name, showed up. He is also one of the highlights – together with Sophie the robot of course – of TAS Today’s security threats have gone high-tech, so they got the full menu from the horse’s mouth. But this is quite a busy week and people should milk it for all it is worth.
