Zohran Mamdani, who has been elected mayor of New York City, was born in Uganda in 1991 and is a Ugandan citizen, like his father, Prof Mahmood Mamdani, who has taught at Columbia University in New York and at Uganda’s Makerere University.
That has thrilled many Ugandans on social media. They have given the impression that Mr Mamdani has made Uganda proud and that Ugandans, somehow, have something to gain from his electoral triumph.
Yet as a dual citizen of the United States and Uganda, Mr Mamdani naturally places greater weight on his US citizenship and the city he calls home.
It is not clear how often he visits Kampala, Uganda’s capital, or when he last visited. But even if he visited regularly, his heart would still be in New York. After all, it is the city he knows best. It is where he has spent his adult life. What is more, the city is infinitely better known than Kampala.
Does Uganda or Kampala stand to gain anything from his mayoral role? There is, it seems to me, not a single direct benefit for Uganda or Ugandans.
Ugandans’ excitement about Mr Mamdani’s mayoral election reminds me of Africans who celebrated Barack Obama’s victory as the first African-American president of the US in 2008. Many genuinely believed Mr Obama was going to help Africa
As mayor of New York, Mr Mamdani will begin every day thinking about the city that has elected him and its people. I do not see how Kampala comes into the picture. Kampala is not one of the five administrative divisions (aka boroughs) of New York. Mr Mamdani cannot outsource jobs in New York to millions of unemployed young Ugandans. And even if he could, the question of whether those Ugandans have requisite skills would quickly arise.
The potential benefits would be in making it easy for Ugandans who wish to visit New York to secure visas. But the mayor of New York has nothing to do with how the US embassy in Kampala issues visas.
So what, really, is in it for Uganda in Mr Mamdani’s victory? Given how people carrying African passports struggle to get visas and to clear immigration at airports, it would not be surprising if Mr Madmani does not even carry a Ugandan passport.
Two stories by two well-known people—the Irish-Ugandan medical doctor Ian Clarke and the British Sudanese-born entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim—drive my point home.
Mr Clarke wrote on LinkedIn on November 5 to say that years ago, when he served as mayor of Makindye division, he was invited to a conference of mayors in Johannesburg, along with his counterparts from other divisions of Kampala, but he was the only one who managed to travel. The rest, who held Ugandan passports, needed visas that were not processed in time.
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And Dr Ibrahim said, in 2013, that he finds travelling across Africa much easier using his British passport than his Sudanese one.
Ugandans’ excitement about Mr Mamdani’s mayoral election reminds me of Africans who celebrated Barack Obama’s election as the first African-American president of the US in 2008. Many genuinely believed Mr Obama was going to help Africa.
But how could the president of the United States prioritise African issues? He is elected to lead the United States—and its people. Time exposed that reality. Their expectations were misplaced.
Yes, Mr Obama visited Egypt (2009), Ethiopia (2015), Ghana (2009), Kenya (2015), Senegal (2013), South Africa (2013) and Tanzania (2013), but these countries still face the same problems they had prior to his visits. And they are just seven out of the continent’s 54.
It is really hard to see what Mr Obama did for Africa that would make those who had high expectations of his administration proud.
Africans have a tendency to claim successful people who share their ancestry and to see them as “one of our own”. Nigerians, for example, are proud of Kemi Badenoch, who heads the UK’s Conservative Party, and want to see him as Nigerian.
But this past August she dropped a bombshell. She said she no longer identifies as Nigerian and has not renewed her passport since the early 2000s. As we say in Luganda, she was literally telling Nigerians: “Munerabire gye mwandaba”—forget about me.
The people of New York do not see Mr Mamdani as a Ugandan-American. They see him as an Asian-American politician and, above all, the mayor of New York City.
🔴 Musaazi Namiti is the Founder and Editorial Director of OJ-UGANDA. He previously led the Africa Desk at Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, worked for Globe Media Asia in Cambodia and writes a widely read column for Uganda’s Sunday Monitor. His work has been quoted by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Jeune Afrique, The Africa Report—not for playing it safe, but for saying what others will not.
Email: musaazinamiti@ojuganda.com
X: @kazbuk