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Discussing the recent elections, Luke Melchiorre argues that Uganda’s Bobi Wine is a symbol for a generation's desire for political change. However, his power has often distracted attention from the underlying politics of his People Power project. Melchiorre explains that Wine did not disavow the country’s underlying neoliberal moorings, but instead fixated on the ruling party’s history of ‘poor governance’.

From the editorial of the latest issue of ROAPE, Elisa Greco provides an excoriating denunciation of Africa’s underdevelopment in the context of the pandemic. Unpicking the political strategy of neo-extractivism, she argues that every global recession, or primary commodity prices downturn, African economies which bought into this model succumb to crisis and recession.

Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu - better known to the public as Bobi Wine - is a singer turned politician who is currently campaigning in the general election to oust Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni who has been in power for more than 30 years. Pitasanna Shanmugathas looks at the elections and the hope for a better life in Uganda.

Issue 137

Issue 32

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig and Hannah Cross ask if the experience of life with the Covid-19 outbreak is the common experience of life and death in the South. They argue that now is the moment to build unity behind an alternative social structure to capitalism in Africa and the Global North.

In a radical call for reform of the IMF’s pro-creditor and anti-growth approach to indebted countries in Africa, Ndongo Sylla and Peter Doyle argue that the continent has a choice to make. Creditors, using the IMF, must be stopped from forcing devastating output losses by imposing high primary surpluses.

Nigerian trade unionist and activist, Lai Brown, argues that annual debt servicing in the country has a debilitating impact on the poor. In a country with poor health services, massive youth unemployment and broken health and education facilities, the Buhari regime is seeking an additional multi-billion dollar loan. The vicious cycle must be broken.

In a report on a recent conference in Dakar on the Revolutionary Left in sub-Saharan Africa, Adam Mayer celebrates a gathering of activists and researchers, which could not have been more different from the mega-conferences of academia today. The conference examined the extraordinary vibrancy of left politics and movements across the continent in the 1960s and 1970s.

Capitalizing on the growing disillusionment of Uganda’s development and the ubiquitous anger and discontent of the country’s youth, which represent over 75% of the population, Bobi Wine’s movement, known as People Power, has become a formidable political force. Sam Broadway tells the story of the people where Wine grew up and where much of his political operations and support are centred today.