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The slow drift towards authoritarianism !

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 I will start this post with a Disclaimer: This text is not intended to describe any single country or government. It reflects patterns that have appeared in many societies at different times, including established and emerging democracies such as the United States and others . Readers are encouraged to consider whether, and to what extent, these dynamics may or may not apply to their own country. There is an old idea that power likes costumes. The more authoritarian it becomes, the more carefully it dresses itself. In countries showing authoritarian tendencies, people increasingly wonder whether they are witnessing ordinary governance or the quiet staging of a regime. When “masked” security forces operate with violence, intimidation, and raw displays of power that seem more focused on fear than on law, it is hardly surprising that citizens turn to history books in search of parallels they wish they did not recognize. This has led to comparisons with secret police forces of darker ...
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The mating dance for the procreation of power and why things that should not make sense make sense

T his blog entry is, as my brother Benon who proofread it for me said, “  an exposure of a mind filled with conflict of different ideologies, reality, disappointment, some hope (perhaps ?) and a call for more discussion. Above all it is an indication of the love the author has for a better Uganda, one where what leaders profess positively impacts everyone. Alas, it seems like a dream!” Growing up in the era of the  Ugandan 🇺🇬 bush war in the 1980s, not yet a teenager, both parents exiled , living with relatives and often literally sleeping outside because the houses were dangerous,  jumping off a moving vehicle while dodging bullets flying between Obote’s army and Museveni’s NRA rebel army, caught in the middle and sympathetic to the latter meant that the victory of the NRA IN 1986 was a huge relief for me. I got my savior in Museveni and like a thirsty dog after a long walk, I was eager to drink up all the ideology him and his ideologues preached. As a young boy in his...
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Uganda elites and Museveni's drip irrigation - A snake in the pot

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So, I have been following His excellency Yoweri Kaguta Museveni's demonstration-farming efforts in Luweero. The president has been encouraging Ugandan farmers (most of them are peasants by the way), to adopt the method of irrigation where used plastic water bottles are filled with water and a hole is drilled in the bottom to drip-irrigate each plant, i.e A water bottle per plant. I am lucky that I grew up in a rural village and at the same time had access to an elitist education (afforded of course by our boarding school culture and the fact that my parents had the means). When we had holidays from boarding school, many of my friends from the elitist school i attended, went to Kampala for holidays. A good number of them spent their holidays taking extra lessons ( we used to call it coaching) from places like Makerere University (anybody remember the famous professor Lugujo?). While my friends were busy at this, my father would send us to his plantations to plant/weed/harverst m...
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Notes without emotion? The intro ...

For quite some time now, I have been thinking of creating a new blog!! Rather I have been inspired (Thank you Simon Kaheru) to put my opinions into a medium that the public can consume. I have had many false starts and have got bored along the way!! In other cases I have not got the response that i imagined or expected. My other blog , a rather technical one, where i give tips on the use of a certain programming language called "R" almost has no visitors and is not often updated (where is the emoticon for shame when you need it?). However, in private whats-app and google groups, and on social media, I tend to express my opinions on topics ranging from from social and political issues to professional ones (I am an engineer by profession). In these spheres, I have often got positive feedback and some of the clever people ( i wont mention their names for fear that their vanity may increase) think it is selfish for me not to write to a larger audience. So here I am, putting new...
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