Uganda

Thursday

James Walton

I worry Romesh Ranganathan might not have enough work

Let’s say, for the purposes of this joke, that I was recently staying in a hotel and kept hearing through the wall a voice shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ At first I assumed it was someone having sex – but I later found out that the next-door room was occupied by Romesh Ranganathan’s agent. This year’s Comic Relief featured a W1A sketch where one of the gags was about how Ranganathan now presents everything on television. But the truth is, apart from that sketch, his only TV gigs so far this year have been presenting The Weakest Link, presenting the Baftas, co-presenting Rob & Romesh Vs…, co-writing and starring in the

Saturday

Archie McKenzie

Uganda faces a fraught election

On 14 January, Ugandans go to the polls in what is likely to be the closest election the country has ever had. Their unusual choice: embattled incumbent Yoweri Museveni or popstar-turned-politician Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name Bobi Wine. Yoweri Museveni is Africa’s third-longest ruling leader. He is a political chameleon — once a Maoist revolutionary, he has posed as both a liberal progressive and a nationalist conservative while in office. The three-and-a-half decades of the Museveni administration are difficult to describe in a sentence or two, perhaps because most Ugandans cannot remember them all: the average Ugandan was born in 2004 (compared to the average American, who

Thursday

Robert Jackman

The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change

Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact, that the song ‘Wind of Change’ — recorded by the hair metallers Scorpions — was actually a CIA campaign to encourage anti-Soviet uprisings. Now he wants to prove it. This week’s episode, the fourth of eight, takes Keefe to a collectors’ convention in Ohio in pursuit of an internet user called ‘Lance Sputnik’ who creates