Uganda: The Independent Newspaper’s Puff Piece On Gen. Salim Saleh Is Laughable Fiction

By Zacharia Kanyonyozi Photos: YouTube Screenshots The recent Independent Uganda puff piece on Gen. Salim Saleh, Dictator Museveni’s younger brother, was amusing. But not in the way the author intended it to be. True, there were some good revelations. A case in point is this, “[Saleh] said colonialism sought to take control of the economy of Uganda from the indigenous peoples and place it in British hands. The agency for this process was the formation of the Uganda Company founded in 1903 with British shareholders. The Uganda Company was to be the industrial arm of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a “civil society” agency for British rule in Uganda. I had always thought CMS was only the ideological arm of colonialism, not an industrial and business agency. Saleh told me that BK Barrop, who introduced cotton seeds in Uganda in 1903, was one of the founding shareholders in this company,” The Independent revealed. “The interesting twist in Saleh’s narrative was that, the first attempt at the nationalization of Uganda’s economy began in 1953. It was initiated by Governor Andrew Cohen and was occasioned by the creation of the Uganda Development Corporation (UDC). The aim of UDC was to be the...