If knowledge and human capital are the engines of economic growth, what is the role of the foreign investment and infrastructure edifices that our governments are obsessed with? By DAVID NDII.
Listening to Christine Blasey Ford’s heart-rending testimony before the US Senate triggers traumatic memories for RASNA WARAH.
The President’s unusual speech at the UN General Assembly, in which he declaimed against the culture of corruption within his own government, is an unprecedented escalation in defeatism. If Jubilee has thrown in the towel, what options does the citizenry have but to take matters into its own hands? By MIRIAM ABRAHAM
In Cameroon, the government shut down the internet for an unprecedented 230 days. In Kenya, and at least five other African countries, governments, trying to plug holes as they slide into austerity, are taxing digital activity. But they still can’t control a frontier that they don’t fully understand. By NANJALA NYABOLA
The Jubilee administration gambled on mega-infrastructure projects to expand the economy. It has borrowed heavily to finance them. Over the past five years, it has conjured up a misleading set of economic data that paints a rosier picture than the grim reality now confronting the country. What is this fantasy in aid of? By DAVID NDII
A governor, accused of murdering his mistress, calls a press conference to admit to the affair, accompanied by his wife and children. The media obsesses on the murder and celebrates a culture of transactional love. In other news, a notoriously corrupt government raises taxes to pay for its profligacy; politicians urge the citizenry to tighten their belts to pay for development. In a nation of looters and grabbers, only the mad will survive. By RASNA WARAH
A controversial scholar attacks Museveni with her incendiary pen. She is accused of bad manners. But is she more badly behaved than a regime that peels away the skin of its people? By MARY SERUMAGA.
Recently released Treasury figures paint a frightening picture: not only is the government broke and struggling with declining revenues, it is now spending the equivalent of 90 percent of the wage bill on interest repayments and in July, failed to remit any monies to the Counties. Interest payments on debt are eating into recurrent expenditure, threatening to grind daily government operations to a halt. The low-down: big projects - including Uhuru Kenyatta’s legacy projects, the ‘Big Four’ Agenda and the Standard Gauge Railway - are off the table. And for Jubilee, the prospect of collapse is very real. By DAVID...
Four years since Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist BJP took power, dismantling the old Congress Party elitist stranglehold on power, RASNA WARAH returns to New Delhi for the first time in 30 years, to discover, among the chattering reasporan tech and financial privileged classes, a world of globalised sophistication peppered with rightwing prejudice.
More than five years after it was handed over to President Uhuru Kenyatta, the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission’s final report remains buried in the engineered politics of silence and prevarication - mostly to protect key political figures who were listed as Adversely Mentioned Persons. In its absence, however, the Jubilee government’s attempts to build bridges and engineer a cohesive nation will remain a mirage. By GABRIELLE LYNCH
A letter from 16 US Senators raises questions about Chinese debt-trap imperialism - and Washington’s role (via the IMF) in bailing out distressed countries. As Africa’s leaders are offered new sweeteners by Beijing, the continent becomes the stage for a new geopolitical contest between the 21st century’s Great Powers. By MARY SERUMAGA.
With the 2022 succession games already well underway, a cold war in Jubilee rapidly developing into an all-out fight, could the government collapse before the next election? At least five governors will be eyeing the national political arena with interest. Will any of them run? What does all this mean for future political alliances. NIC CHEESEMAN does some scenario-setting.
