South Africa’s slippery slope

Why the arrest and detention of Jacob Zuma is dangerous for the unity and stability of the “rainbow nation”

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | The arrest and detention of former South African president, Jacob Zuma, for contempt of court is a sad event. No wonder, many South Africans have taken to the streets in violent protests at it. It is very possible the arrest of Zuma can lead to the disintegration of the post-apartheid state in South Africa, at least as we currently know it. This is largely because post-independence African elites use theories drawn from textbooks, written at Harvard and Cambridge, Stanford and Oxford, explaining experiences of Europe and North America, as the solution to our problems.

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Lessons from imperial hubris

How the US and her NATO allies lost trillions in a vain effort to turn Afghanistan into Denmark

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | After twenty years of occupation and trillions of dollars spent fighting the Taliban, the United States and her NATO allies are beating a hasty retreat from Afghanistan. As they withdraw, the Taliban are rolling across the country against little resistance from the Afghan national army. According to media reports, soldiers from the national army are abandoning their military posts without a fight. The situation in Afghanistan is the best evidence of the follies of foreign aid in all its forms – financial, technical, humanitarian, military, state-building, and democratisation.

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Celebrating one’s misfortune

How public anger against Uganda government’s response to COVID is driven more by prejudice than facts

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | Last Saturday, I lost my auntie, Princess Damali Komukyeeya of Toro. I tweeted that although she had COVID, she was fairly fine Friday evening. She developed breathing difficulties on Saturday morning. When rushed to hospital, “there was no oxygen” but that was a poor framing imposed on me by Twitter’s limits on characters. She found all the beds at Mulago occupied, so there was no place for her to be put on oxygen. My tweet went viral; viewed by 540,000 people with 54,000 engagements.

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The challenge of democratic politics

Who is a moral candidate for parliament: the candidate who promises electricity or one who distributes cash to voters?

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | Someone sent a quote allegedly from a one “Prof.” PLO Lumumba to an internet chatgroup I belong to. Lumumba seems to have run for a parliamentary constituency in his native country of Kenya. He is alleged in the aforementioned quote to have complained that: “I held 250 town hall meetings. I articulated solutions to our problems in my constituency. My opponent did not campaign at all. He gathered money and showed up one day to elections. He distributed money. He won. Africans are not moved by ideas. Their stomach leads them.”

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Inside the COVID resurgence

Why government needs to think differently about where it needs to invest in order to effectively contain the pandemic

THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | COVID has returned with a vengeance and is now ravaging Uganda. In March and April, the virus seemed to disappear. Out of an average of about 2,000 people being tested daily, only 12 (0.7%) were positive. Today, out of 8,000 tests daily, an average of 1,500 (17%) are testing positive. Last year, Mulago Hospital had set aside 500 beds to handle COVID patients. At the height of the pandemic in late November and early December last year, Mulago ran out of COVID beds – it had 490 patients at any one time.

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On Museveni’s new cabinet

The president’s choice of ministers and what it tells us about the factors that shape the character of cabinet

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | President Yoweri Museveni’s recent cabinet has excited a lot of debate. Many pundits question its competence to manage the country and lead it to the proverbial middle income status. Yet I don’t think that is the main aim of cabinet. In a poor, backward almost fictional nation-state like Uganda, the main role of cabinet is nation building, not technical and economic management. Hence, the most critical issue is whether the cabinet represents the different social groups that make up the polity called Uganda. These social groups are ethnic, demographic, religious and increasingly gender.

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Anatomy of policy disaster

How Uganda’s tax policy on real estate has destroyed the once thriving sector and stifled economic growth

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | This week, the government will read the 2021/22 budget. Given the poor performance of the economy, government is proposing new taxes. For instance, it has proposed to increase rental income tax from 20% to 30%. Many have made fine arguments in opposition to this tax but I don’t think government will listen. Uganda’s tax policies towards real estate have been growing from bad to worse since 2012. This article seeks to explain this development.

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