League of Former 'Extraordinary' Presidents or precedents?

Transition, Transformation and Radical Thinking.

A leading news provider with a vast global reach recently had an interview with a former president. The interview was prompted by phone calls and a 'back and forth' between a sitting president and a delegation regarding a controversy about a wall between two countries kind of like what happens after the romance ends, and you no longer want to fight over the paying for the meal.
He casually and with a flair of 'french' words explained some of the reasons why the economic 'war talk' was going to be damaging for the U.S. There are three countries that formed the core of his argument. Mexico and China came up both which he said, had an advantage in terms of trade. The third was India which was different in that the advantage was of a different kind-an Import Innovative minds whose numbers form the core of silicon valley. Even if the excitement for BRICS seems to have diminished, i think that another country ought to be added to the mix to make it MBRICS (a term my East African friends will appreciate given the tendency and difficulty some of us experience when confronted with words that start with 'B').
So Mexico, Brazil, Russia, India,China and South Africa. Dealing with next door neighbors will be a challenge and will bring about a mix of feelings. What might be necessary though will be a deliberate decision (strategy) to split between the local experience and post independence ones which split the new liberated country and pitted it against the Spaniards, English and host of other free agents. There is a lot to celebrate about the influence of immigrants on such a core aspect of business in a leading country. What i think frightens some, is the difficulty Americans have in decided what it means to be American and where to place the responsibility of the defense of what it means to be American. Every battle or war has a wide range of recruits. Unfortunately the bigger often end up being foot soldiers while the more intelligent will fight yes, but are more likely to sail through and function in a mental arena. Maybe the same principle works for other less obvious areas especially in the unconventional wars that have been a significant marker for the last two decades. While some will sacrifice for the cause in a physical manner others will engage with as much vigor and patriotism except this time expressing this in an intellectual space. How you deal with a group that is just as radical and authoritative but whose sole purpose it to perpetuate a different way of thinking?
How much time will it take to demonstrate that promises delivered during campaign mode and now within the one hundred days of executive orders form a solid enough demonstration of a 'draining of the swamp'. How should people separate between two distinctively different expressions of an executive? How much will be attributed to the Harvard Law Graduate and his tenure from bailouts to health reform to the confrontation with Wall Street? Maybe the orders which have been a direct response to a more liberal presidency and therefore a reversal of these changes will help in defining the rest of the first term but my guess is that instead it will impede the progress and agenda of the Business man eating into the time he needs to engage with his own agenda.

A tale of three dailies-my pelican brief

We are still dealing with some of the fallout after major rifts in the National Resistance Movement came to the fore. 

My interest for now, is to examine how three separate print media groups covered the story and how the content was delivered to the reading populace (given the literacy numbers and the incomplete social metamorphosis-a good chunk of our populace see only gibberish not words).

Print media still matters because it manages to keep the educated class interested and reading with a view of making good, massive investments In a floundering education system. 

It is this group that then works its way through the masses to digest the information...regurgitate it and then feed it to its underlings who more often than not can do with some analysis and education.

And so the good old radio complete with its funny men, doles out pieces of data from the experts while toying with the intelligence of the populace with flat bed truck presentations of dance and humor served with an appearance of some stars. 

The red pepper (15th March 2014 intelligence briefing) chose to focus more on relationships that grace had formed while in office and examined the results of the man hunt that followed. In a sense, they sought to see how many had benefitted from grace and who among those beneficiaries would remain faithful to the end. So the list gave names covering the full gamut of our known world complete with bio data and a little embellishment. This matters because people do not develop in isolation unless they are gods. 

These developments are connections which the Chinese refer to as guangxi. In these parts we used to have references to "mwana wa Ni" which has quickly collapsed and been overtaken by the use of force( another phenomenon which seems to point to the rise of the lumpen proletariat-something never before imagined). So it is not so much whose son are you, but also who do you know...and what can you do?

But even more than all of this-can you beat the crap out of the competition-literally not figuratively. This reminds me of the 'sudden' rise of a genre of movies that favors fights largely managed by wealth elites and handled by larger often less educated class groups (fight club as well as some of the movies that emerged out of the 

World Wrestling Federation).

The new vision was a little more cautious and rightly so...it has after all often been accused of towing the government line. What the reader needed was to depend on opinion pieces and separate contributions from columnists of influence instead of having to lean too heavily on the paper or the media group for that matter. A smart move given the stakes. 

The monitor, which is part of another jagarnaut was a little more bold in its expression perhaps owing much of this to frequent run-ins with the enforcement arm of the law (closures and arrests of key media personalities). It's responses and much of its coverage was sent to its regional office and presented in its East African version (March 15th-21st 2014 with an article discussing the fall out between two prominent leaders, and an interesting apology form the group regarding an article published in their May 14th-20th 2012 edition, September 27th-October 3rd dealt with the subject but mainly from the broader subject of loyalties and alliances). 

Experts or columnists from its smaller local daily the monitor were utilized for their knowledge but most importantly the paper also carried large ads about some major projects and ministries Karamoja, the Prison Department, Office of the Prime Minister to mention but a few.

The rest of the article that were published in between focused in 'untreated events' but equally important occurrences like the crisis in Southern Sudan (incidentally also loosely filed by a leadership challenge at the top), the award of tenders for the Standard Guage railway, and new developments in Malawi.

It would be tempting to go easy on a group that was literally paying the bills and allowing you to stay in business. 

In terms of strategy, this was probably brilliant on the part of the movement for countering the drive of the East African to reach a larger audience by littering the paper with ad pieces detailing progress on other related governance events thereby saving some fragments of public sentiment. 

Plowshares into Swords?

Plowshares into Swords?

Every time trouble breaks out in these parts, and a struggle begins, you immediately have the emergence of two groups. A group that chooses to stay and fight and one that chooses to leave.
http://www.monitor.co.ug/Magazines/PeoplePower/Lupembe--How-presidents-Lule--Binaisa-were-juggled/-/689844/2318542/-/4lmu90/-/index.html the article by Henry Lubega has some interesting similarities to this very idea. The difference though, is that these are being played out in a different context. 

Even if some could argue that there is no overt push towards and struggle similar to that of the eighties, certain challenges in the economy have forced many to leave and the harder core to stay. 

These differences have resulted in an interesting relationship between those who by circumstance have decided to work in foreign countries while supporting relatives and friends back home. The tensions that have arisen on the return of the former are still as palpable as those that were mentioned in the article by Lubega. 

There are some ways in which Post World War I and II, nations have been forced more that ever to devise other means by which to annihilate each other and even if the effects are often less gruesome they are still as effective and damaging if not more. In a sense, most of our modern day battles have become economic. The fallout from these battles has been an increase in poetry and a rise in real estate for ghettos and shanty towns. 

So the need to better circumstances has driven us abroad in search of better pastures. While many are unwilling to turn their plowshares into swords, they have none the less held on to these tools in preparation for a change of circumstance.