Politics

One night as they slept a group of girls, aged between 12 and 16, were abducted from the campus of their elite school in a village 25 kilometers outside the northern city of Lira in Uganda.  For 4 brutal days they were frog marched through the bush into virtual slavery by the LRA, the rebel army that was marauding in the region.

Just days before Christmas 2012 there took place in the northern city of Lira (Uganda) a gathering of the tribe. The Langi, a major nationality group in Uganda numbering some 3 million converged on the war ravaged city from all corners of the land and from around the world. Decades of conflicts in Uganda had produced a disproportionately large Lango Diaspora.

The Sudan that Mo Ibrahim knew came into independence on January 1, 1956 waving the visionary horizon of being the bridge between Black Africa and Arab Africa. From its northern border with Egypt to its southern border with Uganda it hosted the River Nile and its mission of robbing rich soils from the highlands of Ethiopia and East Africa and hauling it to fertilise and support crop-growing agriculture in Egypt.

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was created in the year 2002 the expectation was that the court would do some good for a troubled world. More than ten years on, it is not unfair to ask of the ICC, if it has done the world some good.

BBC’s defense correspondent Mark Urban has uncovered some troubling links between Iran moving towards a nuclear bomb and a Saudi Arabian decision to produce its own nuclear bomb with Pakistani help. Urban notes that Saudi Arabia has invested in Pakistani nuclear weapons project and now the Saudis believe they could obtain a nuclear bomb at will.

Last week diplomats at the UN were amazed when Saudi Arabia did what no country had done before; turned down the seat it had just won on the Security Council.

About a month ago, the United States was poised to go to war in the Middle East. This threat of war was triggered by the allegation that President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria crossed the red line President Obama argued was set, not by him, but by the international community against the use of chemical weapons

Had the twentieth century been an African century, the kingdom of Buganda and its centuries-old monarchy located in present day Uganda might have loomed large on the world stage. Africa had seen some powerful kingdoms and empires. Who can or what can rival Mensa Musa and his Malian Empire of 14^th century?