RC's President Felix Tshisekedi and Rwanda's President Paul Kagame. Flickr/Paul Kagame/Photo Courtesy
For the past few years, the relationship between the governments of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) had been improving. Now Kigali and Kinshasa are ratcheting up tensions by accusing each other of supporting rebel groups in the eastern DRC.
In late May and early June, as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) accused Rwanda of backing resurgent the M23 rebels, the latter counter-accused the former of working with the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR).
Among the leaders of the FDLR are people who participated in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide who have lived in eastern DRC for nearly three decades. FDLR members are from the Hutu ethnic group and M23 is largely made up of Tutsi of Congolese descent.
The DRC has played a crucial role in weakening the FDLR in recent years. In 2019, the armed Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) – DRC national army — killed Sylvestre Mudacumura, the FDLR’s main leader. The FARDC killed many other FDLR leaders since 2019. By By Musinguzi Blanshe, The Africa Report
Raila Odinga (left) is out of the country with Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka. [Dennis Kavisu, Standard]
Azimio la Umoja One Kenya coalition presidential candidate Raila Odinga is out of the country and his handlers did not say where he had gone.
Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka, Raila’s nominee for chief cabinet secretary, is also with the former prime minister. Kalonzo is Kenya’s Special Peace Envoy to South Sudan.
Raila had spoken of the trip during the burial of Stella Memusi, wife of Kajiado Central MP Kanchory Memusi, on Tuesday.
While addressing mourners, the ODM leader thanked the lawmaker for rescheduling his wife’s burial. “The burial was meant for Thursday. I told him that I will be out of the country on Thursday as I would be jetting out tomorrow,” Raila said.
Yesterday, Dennis Onsarigo, the press secretary of Raila’s campaign secretariat, confirmed that the former prime minister was away. He, however, did not give details of where he would be and for how long.
Our efforts to contact Raila's and Kalonzo’s allies were unsuccessful.
We could not reach his campaign team's spokesperson Makau Mutua and Makueni MP Dan Maanzo on phone.
His trip comes 60 days before the General Election, one billed to be a contest between him and Deputy President William Ruto.
Before his trip, Raila held rallies in Nairobi and Nakuru after the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) cleared him and his running mate Martha Karua as candidates in the August 9 elections.
President Uhuru Kenyatta also flew to Mogadishu yesterday for the inauguration of new Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. By Brian Otieno, The Standard
Pst Jane Wairimu of AIC Maragwa during the Kenya Kwanza Women Charter at the Nyayo Stadium in Nairobi, on Friday, June 10, 2022.
COURTESY
A pastor who was praying for Deputy President William Ruto and his running mate, Mathira MP Rigathi Gachagua, mistakenly referred to the Kenya Kwanza coalition as Kenya Kwisha.
The pastor, Jane Wairimu of AIC Maragua, caught the crowd by surprise when she called Kenya Kwanza, Kenya Kwisha, with some of the leaders who were seated in the front being unable to hold back laughter.
Ruto and Gachagua were standing in front of the crowd when the pastor made the mistake. She hurriedly ended her prayers as various leaders giggled.
Pastor Jane Wairimu of AIC Maragwa during the Kenya Kwanza Women Charter at the Nyayo Stadium in Nairobi, on Friday, June 10, 2022.
COURTESY
"We want to come into agreement with the Kenya Kwisha, I mean Kenyan Kwanza women that every handwriting has been erased," the pastor stated.
The DP was the chief guest at the UDA Women Charter signing event held at the Nyayo Stadium in Nairobi.
The event has been referred to as a move to neutralise the wave created by Azimio La Umoja One Kenya coalition presidential running mate, Martha Karua.
On Thursday, June 9, Kenya Kwanza Coalition urged media houses to send an all-woman crew to cover the event.
According to the coalition, the request to deploy all-female crews is part of celebrating the role women play in various industries in the country.
"We encourage your Media House/Online News Blogs to deploy a Women Crew as we seek to celebrate and highlight the important role played by women in all sectors," UDA Communications Director, Wanjohi Githae, said in a media invite.
Deputy President William Ruto (left) and his running mate Rigathi Gachagua being ushered to ACK St Paul's Mother Church in Kabete. FILE
“UDA is a women’s party. It has the largest representation of women across the board. All opinion polls indicate UDA is the most popular party in Kenya and has a record majority of women,” Ruto stated. By Mumbi Mutuko, Kenyans.co.ke
Literature scholar and author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. File | Nation Media Group/Photo Courtesy
As Kenya marked its 59th anniversary of internal self-rule on 1 June 2022, a controversial play by the nation’s foremost author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was staged in sold-out shows. It had been 45 years since it was banned and the author detained. The performance offers a useful filter to illuminate how the nation has fared in recent years.
Democracy is gradually taking root, but corruption is still rife. This makes Kenya’s largely youthful population restive. Without a doubt, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) is the most consequential piece of writing by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his collaborator, the late Ngũgĩ wa Mirii. The drama tells the story of Kiguunda, a peasant whose tiny strip of earth is being targeted by Ahab Kioi, a local tycoon who represents international financial interests.
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Using multiple story threads, the play captures the tempestuous romance between Kiguunda’s daughter and Kioi’s son, which results in an unwanted pregnancy and a bleak future. Kiguunda’s delusion of a white wedding as social leverage leads to nothing but mockery and dispossession.
Within months of its writing and subsequent staging, in late 1977, Ngũgĩ was detained without trial. Under Kenya’s old constitution, which was replaced by a more progressive one in 2010, it was lawful for the president to detain anyone without trial. Although the reason for Ngũgĩ’s detention has never been given, he told me recently its timing affirmed he had been targeted for writing in his indigenous language, Gikuyu:
I thought: Wait a minute, I have been writing in English over the years and nobody ever bothered with me. I write one play in Gikuyu and I’m detained, so I’m going to write in Gikuyu…
Ngũgĩ spent a year at the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. His detention helped shine a light on Kenya’s human rights record. It also shaped his life in writing and political activism.
Released in 1978, after the death of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, Ngũgĩ was denied the right to return to his old job at the University of Nairobi. He went into exile in 1982. Although the rest of his books were not banned, they were not taught in Kenyan schools for the next two decades.
In a sense, Ngaahika Ndeenda was both a point of departure and a point of return.
From activism to exile
In 1967, Ngũgĩ recorded in Decolonising the Mind how colonial power structures reproduce through education and the imposition of European languages and literature in Africa:
After I had written A Grain of Wheat I underwent a crisis. I knew whom I was writing about but whom was I writing for … In an interview in 1967 with Union News, a student newspaper in Leeds University, I said: ‘I have reached a point of crisis. I don’t know whether it is worth any longer writing in English.‘
In 1977, Ngũgĩ returned to his village in Limuru, just outside Nairobi, and mobilised the community to build a makeshift community theatre. This was to protest their denied access to the Kenya National Theatre.
He and Mirii scripted a play they thought reflected the realities that confronted ordinary villagers and factory workers in Limuru, subsisting on the verge of destitution. The actors, too, were ordinary workers and peasants from Limuru.
In a recent conversation, Ngũgĩ reflected on this:
I still believe in the power of ordinary peasants in narrating their experience.
The open-air theatre in Kamiriithu was razed by the government. Ngũgĩ was detained. His co-author, Mirii, fled to Zimbabwe, as did the play’s director, Kimani Gecau.
In detention, Ngũgĩ produced the allegorical Caitani Mutharaba-ini (Devil on the Cross), which he wrote on toilet paper in Kamiti, alongside the prison memoir Detained. It was while promoting these two texts in London, in July 1982, that Ngũgĩ received a coded message warning him he’d receive “red carpet treatment” upon his return.
He returned to Kenya only in July 2004, after multiparty democracy had been restored. Although he was mobbed by hordes of ordinary Kenyans at the airport, his return had a tinge of tragedy. He was brutally attacked and his wife raped.
The return of Ngaahika Ndeenda to Kenyan theatres re-introduces the work to generations of Kenyans who were not yet born before the play’s initial release and subsequent exile of the author. It also marks the evolution of the nation’s artistic freedom arena.
“(Jomo) Kenyatta put me in a maximum security prison. Moi drove me into exile. Uhuru (Kenyatta) received me at the State House,” Ngugi says, recalling the 2014 visit when he was hosted by Kenya’s current president.
While Kenyatta’s hosting of a former dissident is a powerful visual of reform and expanding democratic space, the social ills that Ngũgĩ highlighted 45 years ago still fester.
Stranger than fiction
The core themes in Ngaahika Ndeenda – social inequities and justice – have universal appeal. Nairobi’s youthful population turned up to watch the new production, as did the urban expatriate community. But there were also enthusiasts bussed in from distant rural locations. They had no tickets, which had to be purchased in advance, online.
Ngahiika Ndeenda is prescient in its vision of a land riven with class strife, greed and avarice.
Ngũgĩ is now polishing a Gikuyu version of his first novel, The River Between, now titled Rui Rwa Muoyo (or The River of Life). He calls the process “restoration”: returning to African languages narratives that have been domiciled in European-language granaries.
Young people need to know it is possible to write and perform in African languages. They need to be reminded of that possibility. Source: Daily Nation/By Conversation
President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has reiterated his call for peaceful elections in South Sudan if the country is to gain lasting peace.
According to a press release by the Presidential Press Unit (PPU), Museveni made the call Wednesday while meeting the Speaker of South Sudan’s Transitional National Legislative Assembly (TNLA), Jemma Nunu Kumba, at State House Entebbe.
"If you conduct elections, the nation will not have arguments to answer the questions of 'who and what' regarding the governance of the country because the elections minimize arguments and internal quarrels," said the President, adding that elections are an approval for legitimacy expression.
For almost eight years, South Sudan has been embroiled in a vicious war caused by jostling for political supremacy between President Salva Kiir and his current first vice president, Riek Machar. Ever since the country gained independence in 2011, it has never held presidential elections partly due to the ongoing war.
According to the Revitalized Peace Agreement that was signed in 2018, the country is supposed to hold elections in 2023 but all indications are that this might not be possible because of the failure to meet key milestones of the peace agreement, including the total silencing of guns and the unification forces to form a national army.
President Museveni emphasized that the "who and what" questions make the political situation difficult.
Speaker Kumba assured Museveni that South Sudan is at peace. The meeting was also attended by the Speaker of Parliament of Uganda, Anita Among, and her Deputy, Thomas Tayebwa.
Relatedly, the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) has beefed up security on the Uganda - South Sudan border following reported attacks by armed cattle raiders suspected to be from South Sudan.
Last Saturday the UPDF and SSPDF clashed in Chubi in Owinykibul, Magwi County. One SSPDF soldier was killed and two others injured. Following the clashes, the South Sudan authorities deployed SSPDF reinforcements along the border with Uganda to cool down tensions.
Last week, residents of Pogee accused the UPDF of encroaching into South Sudan territory and carrying out patrols which caused panic.
Brig. William Bainomugisha, the UPDF 5th Division commander, on Monday, said the deployment came after a meeting between residents of the affected areas and security agencies.
The affected areas include Nyimur, Potika, and Agoro sub-counties in Lamwo District in northern Uganda along the border with South Sudan.
“Residents wanted assurance from us [about security] and we have done that. Formerly, those (border) areas were peaceful but we have had to beef up security due to attacks by gunmen,” Brig Bainomugisha said.
“Some of them (gunmen) are from South Sudan. These groups sneak in here and cause insecurity,” he added.
Brig. Bainomugisha said the army has dispatched up to three battalions of soldiers to the border, which stretches across Lamwo, Kitgum, and Agago districts.
During the security meeting at Nyimur Sub-county headquarters last week, local leaders said several residents have lost their lives and hundreds of cattle.
According to Moses Bali, the Local Council 3 chairman, the raiders storm villages and forcing locals to flee their homes before rounding up the cattle and fleeing with them.
“We are hopeful that the deployment of armed security personnel will calm the situation because the impact has been disastrous in the past month. In some homes, people lock themselves inside their houses with animals for fear of being attacked,” Bali said.
Hilary Onek, Uganda’s minister of relief, disaster preparedness, and refugees, who is also the Lamwo County MP, said the raids hinder livestock farming. - Radio Tamazuj
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