Museveni’s forgotten railway unit

Why 30 years later, we should not condemn but sympathise with the president’s fanciful and failed dreams

Last week someone sent me a video of President Yoweri Museveni speaking on December 22, 1988.

In it, the President who was just two years in power says: “We must have our own capacity to build houses, roads, dams, railways.”

Museveni boasted that he was “using the Kasese line as an opportunity to build a railways construction unit.”

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The triumph of colonialism

How European claims to promote `civilisation’ in Africa remain the supreme aim of all our governments

One of the most successful ideological projects in contemporary history has been European colonialism, or what Marxists used to call imperialism. Vladimir Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism. The growth of capitalism imposed certain demands on the European bourgeoisie. They needed to find new sources of raw materials for their industries, areas to invest surplus capital, new markets for their manufactured products and cheap labour.

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The fall of Jennifer Musisi

Finally Jennifer Musisi has resigned as executive director of KCCA. This was inevitable. However, her resignation points to a deeper malady that our nation faces: the gulf between our theoretical ambitions and the pettiness of our politics. Musisi has fallen because she aspired to do great things for a city the majority of whose residents are driven by petty politics.

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Africa’s highway to a dead-end

Why our obsession with foreign direct investment as a driver of our transformation is misguided
It is the Italian thinker-philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, who coined the term hegemony. He used it to refer to the sum total of beliefs, values, explanations and perceptions that a dominant class develops and which subordinate classes accept as the norm i.e. as the normal way things are and should be. Hegemony is therefore the universally dominant ideology that justifies the existing social, political and economic status quo as natural, normal, inevitable and beneficial to everyone. Yet any such status quo is actually an artificial social construct developed by and for the benefit of the dominant social group.

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Recasting debates on development

What a reading of Marx and Lenin teaches us about the effects of multinational capital on poor nations
Raymond Mujuni of NBS television tweeted that he has began his masters’ degree in development studies with a reading of Karl Marx. This column is a conversation with him on Marx’s insights on development. Marx was the first thinker to show the link between economic development and political action. Later thinkers within the Marxist tradition carried his ideas further. In this article I want to introduce Mujuni to the ideas of Marx and Vladmir Lenin.

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The future we must fight for

Why our democracy will not be strengthened by a violent contest but dialogue and compromise
 

The current struggle between President Yoweri Museveni on the one hand and the two most popular opposition groups to wit Defiance led by Dr. Kizza Besigye, and People Power led by Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine on the other, is over power not democracy or policy.

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Closing and merging public agencies

Why the new government reform measures should not throw away the baby with the bathwater

The decision by government of Uganda to reduce the number of semi autonomous government agencies, commissions and other bodies is a very good and long over due. Beginning the mid 1990s until only recently there has been a proliferation of these bodies many of which duplicate roles and functions. Therefore the justification for merging some of them and taking others back to their mother ministries is agreeable. However, and like many reforms, this one runs the risk of throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

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