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Showing posts from January, 2012

Uganda’s electoral politics remains a ruse

We are both privileged and unprivileged to live in these interesting times where electoral politics seems to be taking the angle of an elitist pass time for a cabal of a wealthy few.    As at October 2010 when the Electoral Commission opened for nomination of directly elected MP candidates, Uganda had a population of about 34 million people with 50% of this population being above 18 years.   Mathematically, this means that well about 17 or so million citizens qualified by age as potential candidates to run for elective offices.     However, out of such an enormous figure, only about 1,700 individuals offered themselves to run for the available 380 parliamentary seats.   This represents only 0.01% of the potential candidates and about 0.001% of the total population.    Various reasons may have contributed to this glut.   According to a friend who ran for an MP position in the Western region, one requires about three hundred million shillings to run a descent successful campaign.  

The politics of ‘sedation’ is going to kill us

Every time a super-raging debate on piercing issues like corruption comes up, the NRM members of parliament are urgently called to Kyankwanzi for ‘sedation’.   While retreating, the anesthetic care involves light presentations focusing on how to navigate the winds of censure against the corrupt ‘NRM historical members’, meat roasting, donning military fatigue, engaging in trivial physicals and generally merry making.   Kyankwanzi seems to have become a political dispensary specializing in issuing political paracetamol instead offering any serious curative remedies for pressing national issues. No doubt a similar malady is experienced around most of our government medical centers which either have no medicine or specialize in the issuance of paracetamol even for the popularly known ravaging diseases. Today Uganda is facing a host of national ailments including run-away inflation, spiraling corruption, malignant mismanagement of national resources, compounding unemployment, declining