Era of academic specialisation is gone, African universities should brace for bright, creative, high-tech nomads

Era of academic specialisation is gone, African universities should brace for bright, creative, high-tech nomads

knowledge cultures of interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity and non-disciplinarity remain alien to the academia of Makerere University in this 21st century of knowledge integration and reintegration. When the university recently celebrated its first 100 years of existence, it was more or less celebrating how far it had gone with disciplinarity.

Read more
Recalcitrance: How academic arrogance and insecurity undermines collective knowledge growth in Ugandan universities

Recalcitrance: How academic arrogance and insecurity undermines collective knowledge growth in Ugandan universities

We talk of tribes in human society, especially in Africa, but there are also academic tribes in universities. We talk of ethnocentrisms in human society, but there are also ethnocentrisms in the academic world. Academic tribes are the disciplines. Academic ethnocentrisms and academic tribalism are responsible for the predominancy of academic hegemony in our universities. Academic hegemony is the reason why it is not easy to penetrate a certain academic tribe and rise in it if you were not nurtured in it from the beginning.

Read more
New El Dorado? With Guyana joining Africa as ‘hottest frontier oil play’ there’s more to learn

New El Dorado? With Guyana joining Africa as ‘hottest frontier oil play’ there’s more to learn

With less than one per cent of known global gas reserves, Trinidad and Tobago became the world’s leading exporter of two gas-based products, ammonia and methanol, and went on to become one of the world’s top five liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters. Today, Trinidad and Tobago has one of the highest gross national incomes (GNI) per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean ($17,640 in 2015). Guyana is well on its way to following Trinidad and Tobago’s example, and I hope African nations like Namibia will do the same.

Read more
Sociology of Uganda’s elites: Why pursue intellectual excellence when you can do barter trade with politics?  

Sociology of Uganda’s elites: Why pursue intellectual excellence when you can do barter trade with politics?  

Any Ugandan elites who are not connected to the president and State House politically, economically, socially and financially are inconsequential. Such elites include the political elites in the Opposition to the ruling political party, the National Resistance Movement Organisation (NRNO).

Read more
Decluttering the mind: Why there is need for emancipation in Uganda’s higher education

Decluttering the mind: Why there is need for emancipation in Uganda’s higher education

Structural enslavement of minds is, and has been, pronounced in our universities since the colonialists brought them to us. I am saying universities, but really it was one university the colonialists left for us – The University of East Africa, of which Makerere University College was a constituent College.

Read more
How poor Uganda transited from cheap slave labour to illicit hawking of body organs

How poor Uganda transited from cheap slave labour to illicit hawking of body organs

The organ trade is already scaring many Ugandans, especially the poor, away from government and even private hospitals, fearing that their organs or those of their people, will be stolen from them to renew the health of the rich in Uganda and abroad. They have heard that some big people are involved in the bloody trade, and may be in league with some health personnel to steal their organs.

Read more
When he seized power in Uganda, Museveni dabbled in barter trade then commodified goods, services and relationships

When he seized power in Uganda, Museveni dabbled in barter trade then commodified goods, services and relationships

Today Uganda is firmly in the armpit of the IFIs, although China has also extended its ecological footprint through loans and projects, and the country’s debt which was in billions of shillings by the time Idi Amin was toppled from power by combined Obote and Museveni forces, is now over 80 trillion shillings after 37 years of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s rule, accompanied by untold impoverishment of once prosperous indigenous communities.

Read more
Press freedom: It’s 11 years since American journalist Julian Assange began was taken in as a political prisoner

Press freedom: It’s 11 years since American journalist Julian Assange began was taken in as a political prisoner

This weekend marks 11 years since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and began his confinement as a political prisoner. The torture that he has endured is not just an attack on his rights to free expression and journalism; it is an assault on your right to be an informed citizen.

Read more
Uganda needs to match ‘environmentality’ with ‘governmentality’ for conservation to make sense

Uganda needs to match ‘environmentality’ with ‘governmentality’ for conservation to make sense

One writer has said that governmentality represents the tactics of government that allow it to define and redefine what its own competences are. Or else it refers to a complex set of processes through which human behaviour is systematically controlled, individually or in groups, to enhance the capacity of the political regime to govern.

Read more
Uganda’s greatest threat to environmental democracy will be state’s vow to arresting sterile money culture

Uganda’s greatest threat to environmental democracy will be state’s vow to arresting sterile money culture

Renewability of the environment is not inbuilt in the programmes and projects. Those supervising or implementing them are environmentally illiterate. We have seen in our lifetime the political power that be undemocratically deciding to erase whole ecosystem and habitats to replace them with extensive plantations of oil palm and sugarcane grasses.

Read more