Insecurities of Foreign Direct Investment: From Returnee to Investor-Citizen Available to Purchase

Chapter 4 focuses on the Ugandan government’s efforts to attract Indian national investment, individual investors, and capital to the nation since the late 1990s and early 2000s in relation to the rise of BRICS, South-South cooperation, and Global South–based neoliberal developmental authoritarianisms. Museveni and the NRM are engaged in the noncitizen racial incorporation of Indian entrepreneurs and other South Asian migrants and laborers, constructing “Asians” as valuable investor-citizens. These new practices have relied upon new transcontinental assertions of Ugandan and Indian nationalisms and racialized capitalism, practices of race-making, and gendered expressions and new claims surrounding Afro–South Asian connection and the 1972 Asian expulsion. Conducting research at the Uganda Investment Authority and other urban sites to examine “Africa Rising” discourses and South-South cooperation discourses, this chapter examines the insecurities of expulsion via new modes of neoliberal and racialized inclusions and exclusions across Black African, African Asian, and South Asian communities in contemporary Uganda.