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Recent events show that no media market is immune to erosion of press freedom but resistance is possible COMMENT | LEON WILLEMS | Every year on May 3 – World Press Freedom Day – news producers and consumers pause to reflect on the state of global media. This year, as journalists …

Economists are confident that Africa’s development model will be different from that of East Asia COMMENT | BRAHIMA COULIBALY | Recent projections indicate that several Sub-Saharan African countries will experience robust economic growth over the next five years. By 2023, around one-third of the region’s economies will have grown at an …

  Mobile money to the rescue as banking sector remains too shallow to leverage financial inclusion COMMENT | ENOCK NYOREKWA TWINOBURYO | In line with statutory requirements, all banks are supposed to publish their financial statements by the end of April of each year. The published banks’ results for 2017 are …

The intimate connection between political and economic institutions is the heart of development COMMENT | ENOCK NYOREKWA TWINOBURYO | I recently visited the Rwanda – residing largely in Kigali. I was particularly impressed at the transition and strong faith by citizens in their development trajectory. There is strong unionism and strong …

Financial flows regularly wreak havoc, so the absence of protest against their integration is strange COMMENT | ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN | Most economists wax eloquent about the benefits of “real” global integration that is, virtually uninhibited cross-border flows of goods, labour, and technology. They are less certain when it comes to global …

Why legislature needs to embrace activism and duty protect and promote human rights COMMENT | ISABELLA BWIIRE | In the exercise of its legislative powers, Parliament must promote human rights in three specific ways: It must repeal all existing laws that violate the rights protected in the constitution, ensure that none …

Why bringing them in a hostile environment may not solve the problems of a malfunctioning healthcare system COMMENT | CISSY KAGABA | The recent rather interesting proposal by the government to hire Cuban doctors who would earn Shs5.4 million a month has attracted divergent views. There has not been sufficient stakeholder …

Tax codes written for an analog economy and statistics that fail to capture real wealth won’t do COMMENT | MARGARETA DRZENIEK-HANOUZ | Before the threat of a US-China trade war arose, surging stock markets and corporate profits had obscured the fact that the global economic system is under existential stress. Global …

THE LAST WORD: How a book celebrated by the world’s leading economists is actually an intellectual absurdity THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Last Saturday, my intellectual friends and I held a thrilling debate on a book by James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu titled `Why Nations Fail’. The book …

Why it is not true that African presidents can do whatever they want, unencumbered by democratic constraints COMMENT | NIC CHEESEMAN | Africa is often imagined to be a place in which presidents can do whatever they want, unencumbered by constitutional or democratic constraints. A large body of literature has developed …