BLOGS

COMMENT | Samson Tinka | I first visited Karamoja in 2000 just before the elections the following year. After Soroti town, we hit the 148 kms murram and potholed road for a journey of nearly 18 hours. What I saw on the way stunned me. In almost every trading centre, I …

How all sides to this conflict made strategic miscalculations that will reshape the world order THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Today (February 24th) marks one year since Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine in what President Vladmir Putin called a “special military operation.” Since then, the war has only proved …

If buildings can collapse on their own in calm Kampala, what would happen if a 7.0+ earthquake visited Uganda? COMMENT | Samson Tinka | A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey’s southeast and neighboring Syria on February 6, killing more than 47,000 people and leaving more than a million people homeless along …

COMMENT | Olivia Nalubwama | The headline that Thursday morning was equivalent to ‘Man Bites Dog.’ Trending across multiple news feeds was the brutal arrest of torture survivors outside the offices of the national human rights institution. On February 9, five members of the Torture Survivors Movement Uganda attempted to deliver …

How the infrastructure in our capital city has declined to resemble that of Mogadishu after 30 years of civil war THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Kampala has ceased to be a city. It now looks like a war zone. The roads around the city have literally fallen apart. Potholes rule …

How politics in Kinshasa has united with interests in the “international community” to sustain Congo as a failed state THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Rwanda is a very unlucky country. It is the most developmentalist state in Africa. Yet its ambitions to modernise do not depend entirely on its own …

COMMENT | Olivia Nalubwama | It is now a year since a firestorm erupted in the wake of writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija’s torture ordeal in state custody. In December 2021, state agents broke into Kakwenza’s home, abducting him. In early January 2022, court ordered police to release Kakwenza – the police did …

Why we need to remove Western lenses when analysing politics in Africa THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | During the USA-Africa summit in December last year, President Paul Biya of Cameroon was videotaped in a highly compromising situation. Old and senile at almost 90, he entered the conference hall unaware of …

How I abandoned an addictive habit that had kept me company since my Senior 2 at Tororo’s Manjasi High School in 1976 SPECIAL FEATURE | Alfred Geresom Musamali | Flamboyant former Uganda Electricity Generation Company Limited (UEGCL) spokesperson Simon Kasyate was around 2018 taking members of the Public Relations Association of …

COMMENT | Olivia Nalubwama | In recent days, yet another embarrassing video of a geriatric African president failing spectacularly trended online – 89-year-old Cameroonian president Paul Biya lost his marbles for an excruciating three minutes during the December 2022 USA-Africa Summit. In the video, he farts, looks around seemingly unaware that …