About me.

Andrew M. Mwenda is the founding Managing Editor of The Independent, Uganda’s premier current affairs newsmagazine. One of Foreign Policy magazine 's top 100 Global Thinkers, TED Speaker and Foreign aid Critic



Saturday, July 23, 2022

Uganda’s fictitious disagreements

How this South Asian country is transiting from a stable liberal democracy into a chaotic illiberal mobocracy

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | The news from Sri Lanka is intriguing and confounding both as politics and as economics. Let us begin with its politics. Sri Lanka has, since independence from Britain in 1948, been consistently a liberal-democracy. Only India has that record in South Asia. Elections have always been held and are fairly free and fair. Control of government (the president, prime minister and parliament) has consistently changed hands from incumbent to opposition and back again. True some powerful individuals and families have dominated the politics of Sri Lanka at certain times, but that is the stuff of politics in many democracies.

Sunday, July 17, 2022

Mob rule in Sri Lanka


How this South Asian country is transiting from a stable liberal democracy into a chaotic illiberal mobocracy

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | The news from Sri Lanka is intriguing and confounding both as politics and as economics. Let us begin with its politics. Sri Lanka has, since independence from Britain in 1948, been consistently a liberal-democracy. Only India has that record in South Asia. Elections have always been held and are fairly free and fair. Control of government (the president, prime minister and parliament) has consistently changed hands from incumbent to opposition and back again. True some powerful individuals and families have dominated the politics of Sri Lanka at certain times, but that is the stuff of politics in many democracies.

Saturday, July 9, 2022

Uganda’s biggest handicap

How low levels of skill impact our nation’s ambitions in government, private sector and our homes

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | A friend has lived in America for the last 15 years, having left the country in her early twenties. Before, during and after her graduate studies, she worked in private companies in America and international organisations around the world but mostly in Washington DC. Thanks to COVID, she has been able to come live and work from Kampala even though her office is in DC, via zoom. But it has also been a tough period of adjustment for her. Most of the people she has had to work with have frustrated her to exhaustion.

Saturday, July 2, 2022

Apartheid at Uganda’s immigration

Inside the discrimination, humiliation and mistreatment of Ugandans of Kinyarwanda culture

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M MWENDA | By And so it was that while going through the Ugandan section of my library this week, I picked a copy of President Yoweri Museveni’s autobiography, Sowing the Mustard Seed; the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda. Chapter Eleven of the revised edition deals with Rwanda and Congo. Museveni says he recruited Banyarwanda into the struggle against Idi Amin. But when he tried to integrate them into the national army, and I quote, “UPC launched a campaign against them, insisting they should not be integrated into the UNLA. Why?” Because they came originally from Rwanda. However, these boys and girls had stayed here (Uganda) for over 20 years, indeed some of them were born here.”