I haven’t been great about updating lately — I’ve been busy planning the July Student Global Ambassador Immersion and watching The L Word with my housemates. But then Salim Saleh went and gave me the push I needed to start writing again:
State minister for finance Gen. Caleb Akandwanaho [Salim Saleh, brother of President Yoweri Museveni] has lashed out at scholars for failing to invent solutions to eradicate poverty and corruption in Africa.
“We need to blame you the academia for failing to conceptualise our problems and get solutions to our people’s problems. You just talk, then write a few sentences and blame everybody else except yourselves,” the minister told a three-day conference organised by a network of Black American policy specialists and the Makerere University Business School in Kampala yesterday.
— “Uganda: Saleh Attacks Scholars Over Graft Solutions,” Alfred Wasike
I have to think about this for a second. Salim Saleh, who has been implicated in scandals in the UPDF and the Uganda Commercial Bank and the DRC, who then went on to become Uganda’s Minister of Microfinance thanks to his sweet family connections, is blaming students for corruption in Uganda.
The only way reporters at the New Vision must be able to keep a straight face is the constant threat of firing, arrest and/or deportation, courtesy Robert Kabushenga.
Press freedom, my ass.