February 27, 2022 marks three years since our southern neighbor Rwanda abruptly and unilaterally shut its borders, initially, ostensibly to upgrade its customs post and transit route. Later, under soft pressure, it became a full-blown political dispute with Rwanda accusing Uganda of hostility towards its citizens resident in Uganda or who frequently travel to Kampala.
Wednesday next week marks 36 years since the resilient and glorious National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A) led by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni captured Kampala. The battle for Kampala marked the defeat and retreat of fascist remnants ending reigns of terror, uncertainty, and political anguish that accompanied national ruin and state collapse for two decades since independence.
Kindergarten, primary and secondary school gates flung open on Monday this week after eighty three months’ Covid-19 induced closure by government, with many including government owned ones across the country seemingly unprepared in physical sense, judging by the photographs published on various media platforms.
Apologists for the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) Islamist terrorists aren’t amused that the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) is in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) conducting military operations to sweep the terrorists out their safe sanctuary of twenty seven years. This time, the UPDF is in DRC with full consent, written and jointly signed agreement between the DRC and Uganda governments, and are in fact conducting joint operations against the terrorist and other negative forces.
This week while on a drive around Mbalala Industrial Area in Mukono district I chanced on an old friend now working for Grainpulse Limited whose shareholder l discovered is another friend, Hannington Karuhanga. Karuhanga is a very low-key man you easily pass in town.
Slowly but surely Kizza Besigye is coming to the end of his times as the leading let alone reasonable opposition voice in Uganda and therefore his recent ‘demand’ that the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) withdraws immediately from its current offensive against the Allied Democratic Front (ADF) terrorists who have used the DRC as their fertile ground should be treated with scorn coming from a terrorist apologist.
After three months of stay and extensive travels in China, as a witness to its rapid and tremendous rise as the second global power l returned home a much humbled person. I had fifty three field visits across China even under the COVID-19 pandemic including to the military museum in Nanxhang Jianxi province where the Long March began.
Former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (RIP) who led his country for thirty years from third to first world country wrote that the progress of a country is proportional to the quality of its leaders. He then admonished "if you elect or have leaders on the cheap trying to equaliser opportunities and results, you're done for."
The COVID-19 pandemic has blindshielded the world from other equally serious global issues like America's ongoing change of course. It's three months since the US beat a hasty, chaotic and humiliating retreat from Afghanistan upon defeat by the Taliban it ousted twenty years ago in a war of occupation where it installed and propped a puppet regime. The rapid and unceremonial collapse of President Ashraf Ghani's regime left US policy and craftsmanship in shumbles.
The developed countries who are the big environmental polluters of the northern hemisphere this week concluded COP26 summit in Glasgow, UK where they drumed up support for the scare over climate change and its gathering catestrophic consequences already facing humanity.
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