Ronald Elly Wanda

From the onset, this year’s general election in Kenya reads like a dry and dutiful political tale similar to a ghost story. The constituent being haunted is the Kenyan electorate.

Sometimes, a day in the garden can have a double-barrelled climax. I have just had one of the best.

Tanzania is often portrayed as an African success story of state and nation-building, surrounded by nervy neighbours like Kenya whose 2008 post-election violence left an indelible scar on its political conscience; or Uganda, South Sudan, and more recently Pierre Nkuruzinza’s Burundi, all of which

When we think of ethical problems involving the nature of democracy in Africa, probably none is more paradigmatic than the issue of social justice. The linkage and interface between democracy and social justice in the continent remains such a heated subject.

What makes something good or bad, right or wrong? This is a philosophical question that communities across the world have discussed and argued about for thousands of years. They have come up with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different and conflicting answers.

The recent awakening wave of civil society in Africa, especially the confrontational and oppositional segment, is in large measure a response to the declining political capacity of the African state.

The beginning of June saw Uganda’s capital Kampala, the heartbeat of Africa, play host to the first ever Review Conference of the Rome Statute, which in 2002 gave birth to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

‘Stars come and go,’ said William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade. And Goldman was right.

The history of contemporary political ideas around Africa is a neglected field in the continent and even more so outside of it.

At the beginning of last year, whilst at a send-off party in London for a Ugandan friend who worked for Citigroup bank in New York, I remember a Morgan Stanley employee, so tipsy yet confident of his abilities and apparent access to capital, bragging that he would one day buy the Central Bank of