By Isaac Mufumba Are they a means to a political rather than social-economic end? For most of the last part of 2009, government was dolling out food to sections of the population in West Nile, eastern and northern Uganda, following a famine that ravaged those areas leaving at least 50 …

By Andrew M. Mwenda The killing of three Baganda youths by President Yoweri Museveni’s security detail at Kasumbi tombs is shocking but not surprising. There is a quiet battle between Museveni and Mengo. The president knows that Mengo is becoming a major pillar of resistance to his authority. Although this …

By Bob Roberts Katende  UNESCO experts plan to rebuild tombs             Govt agrees to pay Buganda debt Traditionally, the Baganda have a saying: ‘Akugoba yakuwa ekkubo’. It is similar to the phrase often attributed to the Mandarin of China that any crisis represents both danger and opportunity. The burning of the …

 By Mubatsi Asinja Habati In the March 22 Parliamentary by-elections in Rukiga County, NRM’s Edson Kakuru defeated three rivals after polling 10,910 votes against his closest opponent – FDC’s Jack Sabiiti with 9,329, Independent candidates Amos Mugisha’s 6,786 votes and Medard Gumusiriza’s 291 votes. The voter turnout was 63% of …

By Andrew M. Mwenda In his book, Weapons of the Weak, James Scott argues that studies of peasant resistance focus a lot on large scale revolts. ‘For the historical and archival records were richest at precisely those moments when the peasantry pose a threat to the state,’ Scott writes, ‘the …

By Patrick Kagenda Namboole Stadium outside Kampala was on March 13 the venue of an election that has become the talk of the country. ‘I have felt, smelt, experienced true democracy,’ screamed Dickson Opul to an excited crowd of about 1,000 people who gathered in the stadium last week for …

By Andrew M. Mwenda I was on a train at New York’s Grand Central Station on March 5 when a friend from my days at Stanford University entered. I was overjoyed yet embarrassed; one part of me wanted to hug her, the other to hide. She is a successful lawyer …

By Joseph Were The day the mountain Moved One survivor said it sounded like a bomb explosion. Another said the mud moved so fast that victims had no chance to escape. One man was in a church praying when he saw the mountain of rocks, debris, and mud pummeling downhill. …

By Andrew M. Mwenda In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama says he has always been troubled by the gap between the magnitude of America’s challenges and the smallness of its politics. This makes even more sense in Africa. Nothing demonstrates it better than presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire and those …

By Andrew M. Mwenda As Uganda heads towards the 2011 elections, we are seeing the creation of more districts. I had exaggerated in a 2003 article that in ten years, Uganda will have 100 districts. The NRM has beaten me again turning what I used as hyperbole into reality; in …