When our political parties only have recourse to the realm of identity and culture, it is a smokescreen for their lack of political legitimacy and programmatic content. It is cynically unpolitical, and it’s all bullshit.
The government looks on as farmers and consumers are exposed to lethal pesticides that are banned in Europe but continue to be sold on the Kenyan market by European companies.
After considering China’s long-term approach to economic and social development, even the most ungenerous critics of the Asian country’s international partnerships strategy will probably concede that the idea that, in case of loan defaults, they would compromise the credibility of the Belt and Road Initiative around the world through depriving Africa of the expressways, public buildings and hydropower plants they are helping to put up, is more than a little far-fetched.
We need to be clear: what Ugandans have had was never “peace”, but simply security for the Empire’s interests. And without real peace, even that security will eventually disappear.
Geothermal development in Kenya is widely welcomed as green, clean and good for the country. But behind the glowing publicity is a hidden story of forced relocation, human rights abuses, land loss, shattered lives, joblessness, deepening poverty, and serious negative impacts on the health of local people and their livestock.
Trump’s attacks on liberal and progressive forces have morphed from an all-or-nothing insurgency to a highly networked guerilla war.
On 18 November, the insecurities of the past welled up in a bloody bout of peacetime carnage in Kampala – a massacre ignited by fear of a musician who has stolen the nation’s heart.
The patterns of state violence in Uganda are sadly repetitive as the ruling party obstructs burgeoning criticism to President Yoweri Museveni’s decades-long grip on power.
It is not an accident that much of the narrative war is being fought on social media. Social media is fertile ground for having one sided debate. For the elites, it is a place where captured attention can be exchanged for dollars and because of it, careful analysis, and nuance—arguably the most important characteristics of intellectuals—are disincentivised.
The incoming Biden administration will find monumental setbacks that are almost insurmountable in the age of COVID-19. Everyday, whether the stock market or unemployment figures reflect it or not, the economic reality for tens of thousands of Americans grows harsher.
