Charles Onyango Obbo

In small corners, in small ways, we can build back our environment to secure it for our futures and the beautiful beasts with whom we share this fair Earth. We don’t need to speak it. Or if we do, do so gently. Tororo, Uganda | Charles Onyango-Obbo – BIRD AGENCY …

By Charles Onyango-Obbo About free markets, democracy, and why world peace might be bad I am writing this letter directly to you Andrew Mwenda. First, to say, I am glad that you are now like the prodigal son who is – kind of – returning home.  For a few years …

By Charles Onyango-Obbo The normal, the unusual, and very strange things about Kenya election Kenya went to the polls on March 4. It was the first election under the new and quite liberal constitution that was adopted in August 2010. For Ugandans seeking to understand how the election played out, …

By Charles Onyango-Obbo Recently I was visiting with Andrew Mwenda, the Strategy and Editorial Director of The Independent at his Butabika home when he squeezed me for a favour. He asked that I write about what I thought President Yoweri Museveni was trying to achieve with his “reconciliatory” actions towards …

By Charles Onyango-Obbo It takes Museveni more men to stop Besigye from walking, than it took US President Obama to kill terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. After the recent violence-riddled weeks in Uganda as the government cracked down on the opposition-led “walk-to-wolk” protests, and crowned it by an unnerving savage …

By Charles Onyango-Obbo People have lost faith in elections and stayed away in 2011. That’s why he did not use violence this time because people were not fighting back. President Yoweri Museveni’s victory in the February 18 elections, and the fact that his percentage of the vote increased from 58 …

By Charles Onyango-Obbo Uganda is a medium-size African country, but at 71 has the continent’s second largest cabinet. Even more remarkable, it has the world’s third largest cabinet after North Korea! The question is, to what end? There is an increasing body of literature that argues, quite convincingly, that there …

By Charles Onyango-Obbo Inside the belly of the beast I have just spent a few days in the countryside, and I noticed one change from just five or so years ago; everyone is talking about “how bad corruption is in Uganda”. Some refer to the various incidents of corruption involving …

By Charles Onyango Obbo Mr Yoweri Museveni has made many notoriously bad mistakes in his 23 years as president of Uganda. However, there are two things he hardly does: One, it is rare for Museveni to lose initiative in any big political confrontation. And he almost never leaves an opponent …

By Charles Onyango Obbo Andrew Mwenda’s ‘A Tale Of Two Presidents, Two Nations and Two Revolutions‘ has generated a lot of debate. On one hand you have Rwanda’s President Kagame, who has the image of being iron-fisted, and leads a poor country that has been able to make far-reaching achievements, …