A Catholic priest died on the spot and several passengers were seriously injured following a road accident involving five vehicles along the Nairobi-Nakuru highway.

During the accident at Kinungi Trading Centre, 20 people, including children, were injured.

The accident occurred after the driver of a lorry going downhill lost control and rammed into a personal car carrying the priest.

According to Henry Mbugua from Naivasha Safety Group, the lorry also hit another lorry that was heading in the opposite direction.

He said the 2am accident attracted motorists who parked by the roadside to assist those injured or trapped in the wrecks.

“In the process, a bus heading to Western Kenya veered off the road to avoid ramming into the wrecks and ended up hitting a Nissan matatu parked by the roadside,” said Mbugua.

Naivasha OCPD Benjamin Boen confirmed the incident, adding that the injured were rushed to Naivasha Sub-county Hospital, where six were admitted.

“We had an accident involving five cars along the highway where a Catholic priest lost his life while scores of passengers were injured,” he said.

Meanwhile, scores of motorists were stuck along the Mai Mahiu-Limuru Road for over four hours following an accident involving five trailers.

The situation was worsened by overlapping drivers along the narrow section of the road following the morning accident near Mai Mahui town.

A driver of one of the trucks, Sam Njue, said they were losing tens of hours every month due to the perennial jams on the section of the road.

“Two trailers were involved in an accident crossing one side of the road, and within 30 minutes, the road was impassable due to overlapping drivers,” he said.

Njue, who had spent three hours on the road, admitted that the solution lay in expanding the road.

“There is a need to think on how this road can be widened as the traffic flow has also increased,” he said. - Antony Gitonga, The Standard

The onus is now on President Salva Kiir to succeed in silencing the buzzing gunfire in Sudan and achieve a long-lasting truce after receiving backing from the regional leaders, who had initially appointed his Kenyan counterpart, William Ruto, to lead the mediation.

This is after Kiir met his counterparts from Kenya, Eritrea, Djibouti and Sudan in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the Saudi-African Summit on Saturday, where the situation in Sudan formed the basis of discussion. 

A statement by the Presidential Press Unit issued on Sunday noted that sideline meetings focused on ways to resolve the raging war in Sudan, which was conducted without a representative of Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, famously known as Hemedti.

However, it revealed a resounding backing from William Ruto of Kenya, Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, Ismail Omar Guelleh of Djibouti, and Sudan’s Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, who is leading the Sudan Armed Forces battling the RSF.

“Foreign Minister Dr. James Pitia Morgan said regional leaders have given their full support to President Kiir to continue engaging the Sudanese political and military leaders to find an amicable solution to the eight-month conflict,” the PPU noted, quoting South Sudan’s foreign affairs minister. 

It further added that the minister revealed that President Kiir would soon host meetings with the Sudanese political leaders and the current warring parties to review the situation in the country.

But as Kiir plans to join the list of mediation mechanisms that have yet to bear fruit, policy analysts and activists argue that South Sudan must adopt a different approach for it to succeed where others have failed.

Edmund Yakani, the Executive Director for Progress Organization, argued that the president should appoint a special envoy and technical teams who will be participating in regional dialogues for him to succeed his mediation. It will be a toll order succeeding a one-man army, Yakani argued. 

“Kiir need to have a neutral character and special envoy that could be trusted by democrats just like the IGAD has its own special envoy. He needs to appoint a technical team to the African Union, a technical team to Gulfs, and then a technical team to EAC,” Yakani said.

He said President Kiir does not appoint such representatives, Sudanese peace mediation may likely flop.

“These three technical teams will help him consolidate consensus of regional bodies. And our ambassador in New York will lead the international community role. For me, if he does not improve in that setup, he will find it hard to lead this Sudan crisis and may be losing than weight,” he said.

Before this, the IGAD Quartet—a body comprising Kenya, Djibouti, South Sudan and Ethiopia—had settled on Kenyan President William Ruto to lead the mediation.

But on June 16, 2023, the Sudanese military government of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan rejected Ruto’s mediation role claiming that he was an ally of Hemedti.

“The Government of the Republic of Sudan announces its rejection of Kenya’s chairmanship of the IGAD Committee concerned with addressing the current crisis in Sudan, given that the Kenyan government and its senior officials have adopted RSF positions, sheltered its elements and provided them with various types of support,” Sudan’s ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement in Arabic. 

Ruto later on denied Al-Burhan allegations that he was keeping Hemedti in Nairobi.

The devastating clashes between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) which erupted on 15, April, 2023, has killed an estimated 9,000 people in the country and another 5.6 million forced to flee their homes during the conflict and have seek refuge in the neighboring countries, according to the United Nations.

The United States and Saudi-Arabia led peace talks in the Gulf Kingdom, and the Inter-Governmental Authority Development (IGAD) attempts to push for a ceasefire and negotiations between the two conflicting military factions. The two are yet to bear fruits. By Matik Kueth, The City Review

 Here we take a look at the major controversies from Ms Braverman’s time in office:

As attorney general, Ms Braverman drew criticism from the legal profession for backing the Internal Market Bill, which was described as breaking international law in a “limited and specific way”.

Senior barristers particularly questioned her decision to seek advice on the Bill from three Brexit-supporting lawyers, including a junior barrister who had worked for the Vote Leave campaign, rather than the Government’s usual panel of legal advisers or the Treasury’s most senior lawyer.

Ms Braverman remained a staunch supporter of the Bill, leading to accusations that she had sacrificed the UK’s reputation and put the Good Friday Agreement at risk.

In September 2022, Braverman took a break from immigration to briefly join in the transgender debate. 

The home secretary launched her criticism at Sussex Police after it referred to convicted paedophile Sally Ann Dixon, who committed her crimes as a man and later transitioned to a woman, as a woman. 

Ms Braverman has been a major proponent of the Government’s plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda if they cross the Channel in small boats. 

The policy has attracted widespread condemnation from human rights groups, and Ms Braverman was criticised after telling an event at the 2022 Tory conference that it was her “dream” to deport people to Rwanda.

A major trade deal between the UK and India was reported to have been “on the verge of collapse” after Ms Braverman expressed “reservations” about the possibility of allowing more immigration from India and said there was a problem with Indian citizens overstaying visas.

A Government spokesperson said the UK and India enjoyed a close and positive relationship.

Ms Braverman was effectively sacked as home secretary towards the end of Liz Truss’s premiership after it emerged she had leaked confidential Cabinet papers to right-wing backbencher Sir John Hayes.

An investigation found she had sent confidential documents to her personal email address on a number of occasions as home secretary, in addition to leaking a draft ministerial statement to Sir John.

Her return to government days later, when she was reappointed by Rishi Sunak, reignited the row but Ms Braverman survived.

Shortly after her return to government, Ms Braverman again courted controversy by describing the arrival of asylum seekers on the south coast as an “invasion”.

Her comments came days after a man threw firebombs at a migrant processing centre in Kent, and migrant support groups likened her words to language used by far-right figures.

She was confronted over her comments by Holocaust survivor Joan Salter, but Ms Braverman said she would not apologise “for the language that I have used to demonstrate the scale of the problem”.

Mrs Braverman accused opposition parties of being a “coalition of chaos” when discussing the Public Order Bill to crack down on disruptive protests.

She told the Commons: “It’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, dare I say, the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption that we are seeing on our roads today.”

Ms Cooper said Mrs Braverman’s words were “astonishing”, adding: “The home secretary actually talked about a coalition of chaos – we can see it in front of us as we speak.”

In a comment piece in the Daily Mail, Ms Braverman claimed child grooming gangs in the UK were “almost all British-Pakistani”.

Muslim groups, medical bodies and others accused her of “amplifying far-right narratives” about British-Pakistani men, but Ms Braverman stood by her comments in a follow-up article for The Spectator.

In October, regulator the Independent Press Standards Organisation found that the claim had been “significantly misleading” as the Home Office’s own research had concluded that offenders were mostly from white backgrounds.

Mr Sunak faced calls to launch an inquiry into Ms Braverman over claims she breached the ministerial code by asking civil servants to arrange a private driving awareness course for her after she was caught speeding in 2022.

The Prime Minister decided not to launch an investigation after consulting his ethics adviser, concluding that Ms Braverman’s actions did not amount to a breach of the code even if “a better course of action could have been taken to avoid giving rise to the perception of impropriety”.

Ms Braverman drew outrage from LGBT+ groups after claiming there were “many instances” where asylum seekers had pretended to be homosexual or transgender to “game the system” and get “special treatment”.

She also said being a victim of discrimination on LGBT+ grounds should not be enough to qualify for asylum.

Human rights activists and prominent figures spoke out against her comments, with Sir Elton John saying Ms Braverman risked “further legitimising hate and violence” against LGBT+ people.

In a speech on migration in the US, Ms Braverman said multiculturalism in the UK had “failed” and threatened security.

Mr Sunak distanced himself from her comments which some commentators regarded as part of a pitch for the Conservative leadership should the Prime Minister lead his party to defeat at the next election.

Homelessness charities criticised Ms Braverman for reported plans to prevent them from giving tents to rough sleepers and claiming homelessness was a “lifestyle choice”.

The proposals did not appear in Tuesday’s King’s Speech, but the Prime Minister has not ruled out including them in a wider Criminal Justice Bill.

Amid multiple pro-Palestinian marches in the UK and concern about the use of antisemitic language, Ms Braverman accused police of “playing favourites” by tolerating the demonstrations while using stronger tactics against right-wing protests. 

Downing Street said it had not approved the comments, which were described by some as “divisive” and “inflammatory” and led to renewed calls for her to be dismissed.

She was sacked in a cabinet reshuffle the following week. By Albert Toth, The Independent