COLUMNISTS

By Andrew M. Mwenda On October 24th, I went to Entebbe Airport to catch a South African Airways flight via Johannesburg to Namibia. Airline officials said I needed a transit visa through South Africa. I explained that I was not going to enter the country, only to change flights in …

By Joseph Ossiya You cannot change what you will not confront. When one considers the historical aspects of the birth of the entity Uganda, they are fraught with political landmines and buried skeletons, the types of which have the capacity to unravel its very identity and challenge its existence. The …

By Andrew M. Mwenda On Wednesday last week, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) published results of its National Household Survey which showed that the proportion of people living in poverty has declined from 31 to 23%. It was good news for President Yoweri Museveni who had just been nominated …

By Kennedy Opalo What is good for the goose ought to be good for the gander or so you would think. In an era when the rise of China and India is forcing the question what the relationship wealth creation has to the type of government; whether democratic or authoritarian …

By Andrew M.Mwenda With nominations for parliamentary candidates finished, independents (largely malcontents who lost in the NRM primaries) are now the largest political party in the contest albeit a non-organised and unconscious one. By November 30, out of the 238 directly contestable seats, independents had fielded 269 candidates (in 95 …

By Andrew Mwenda Last week, I finished reading Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, an inside account of Obama’s approach to the war in Afghanistan. Then on Sunday night, I watched a two-hour documentary on National Geographic titled Inside Talibanistan, an interesting tale of the complexity of fighting the Taliban …

By Prof. Micheal Madill The debate about universal primary education (UPE) is mired in arguments about statistics and public relations. You only have to pick up a newspaper and read the finely calibrated comments on all sides following the publication of the Uwezo report. We are bickering about literacy rates, numbers …

By Timothy Kalyegira National events at Kololo Airstrip in Kampala like Independence Day, Labour Day and others used to last about two hours. Since 2008, they have started taking on the feel of mammoth, all-day festivals. The main reason is that as President Yoweri Museveni has gotten more insecure in …

By Andrew Mwenda Last Saturday, October 16, I was a guest on Capital Radio’s Capital Gang programme and our debate settled down to the subject of democracy in Africa ‘ specifically on Uganda and Rwanda. Like most debate on anything in Africa, the discussion did not use the facts of …

By Henry Zakumumpa If you were born today, which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly mobile life? This was the intriguing question posed in an unprecedented study by Newsweek, a leading American international magazine. The study was conducted between …