Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua was on Tuesday evening running against time in his fight to stop today’s Senate hearing of the Motion to impeach him.

Gachagua rushed to a three-judge Bench picked to hear his petitions after the High Court earlier rejected his prayer to stop the process.

His lawyer Paul Muite asked Justices Eric Ogola, Fridah Mugambi and Anthony Mrima to hear their prayer for conservatory orders before the Senate starts its proceedings today. 

“It will be purely academic to appear tomorrow at 9am. Asking us to appear tomorrow morning, it will render our application nugatory,” argued Muite. 

Gachagua also asked the Bench to block President William Ruto from submitting the name of a nominee for the Office of Deputy President to Parliament until the cases are heard and determined.

After a back and forth between the lawyers on if the court should sit at 6pm yesterday or at 9am today, the judges decided to hear them late in the evening.

Early in the day, Justice Chacha Mwita had ruled that while the High Court has jurisdiction to hear and determine his petition, it could not interfere with Parliament’s legislative authority.  

“The court cannot injunct the Senate from carrying its constitutional mandate on impeaching the deputy president,” he said.

“There should be a delicate balance in the respective mandates of different arms of government. Courts should strive to achieve this balance and respect what Parliament is constitutionally required to fulfill.” 

Mwita explained that the Constitution has laid out the mechanisms through which governors, the president and his deputy can be impeached, noting that courts can only intervene in cases of outright constitutional violations.

He argued that the Supreme Court has previously addressed the issue of courts interfering with the business of tribunals and quasi-judicial bodies.

Mwita noted that Gachagua’s impeachment is a first in Kenya’s history and that Parliament should be given the opportunity to conclude the process. 

He acknowledged that Gachagua’s case raises new claims regarding public participation, alleged violations of his constitutional rights, and the fairness of the procedure invoked by the National Assembly to impeach him last week.

In his last-minute effort to salvage his political career, Gachagua told the three judges that Justice Mwita had observed that the issues raised were weighty.

However, the National Assembly argued that it would be unfair to hear and make a ruling on the same issue that Justice Mwita had ruled on.

In the meantime, lawyer Ndegwa Njiru argued that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission had not been constituted, hence the court should determine if the President could appoint a new deputy president.

The three judges directed that they would give each party seven minutes and give their verdict at 8am today. 

In the case before Mwita, Gachagua’s legal team had argued that the impeachment process was flawed, and that the DP was not afforded a fair hearing due to the limited time of 12 days. 

Muite contended that the standing orders guiding the impeachment contravened constitutional requirements for due process.

Further, Gachagua told the court that the impeachment Motion amounted to a “vicarious assault” rather than a legitimate inquiry, alleging that the proceedings were marred by intimidation and undue influence on MPs.

He accused the National Assembly of rushing the process to avoid judicial oversight, thus undermining constitutional principles.

The DP’s legal team criticised the impeachment as a personal attack on him and his family, claiming that the accusations did not meet the threshold of gross misconduct. 

Muite also argued that the Motion violated the legal doctrine of exhaustion, asserting that alternative remedies should have been explored before resorting to impeachment. 

He also claimed that the public participation mandated by law was insufficient and shambolic, depriving Kenyans of a meaningful opportunity to engage in such a critical process. 

To demonstrate this, Muite cited Keiyo South Constituency in Elgeyo Marakwet County, where he alleged that records indicated that 43 people participated in the exercise but the outcome indicated that 71 supported the impeachment while three opposed.

“Senators may choose to uphold the National Assembly’s resolution, and within an hour, a new Deputy President could be appointed,” Muite noted

The Senate and the National Assembly had opposed the prayer, asserting that Gachagua would have the opportunity to defend himself. 

“The Deputy President has not demonstrated that this petition will be rendered moot if the Senate is allowed to proceed with its constitutional mandate,” argued Senate Speaker Amason Kingi. By Kamau Muthoni and Nancy Gitonga, The Standard

Wildlife tourism rangers could be a “powerful” force in conservation monitoring, according to the results of a research project in Uganda.

Surveying wildlife is a costly and difficult part of conservation. But this project, done with African lions in Uganda, found that local rangers were well-equipped to dramatically improve the data.

A paper describing the study, by an international team of researchers and Ugandan rangers, is published in Communications Biology.

“What you’ll typically find in a lot of these research settings in Africa and Asia is, to be quite blunt, rangers are often used as security personnel,” lead author Dr Alexander Braczkowski, a conservation biologist at Griffith University, tells Cosmos.

“They don’t really have much collaborative inclusion in this process, so that they themselves can jump into the scientific process.”

This is at odds with their expertise, according to Braczkowski.

“There’s more than 250,000 rangers that are installed in the global conservation force, and they obviously have immensely close and intimate relationships with wildlife and wild places. They probably know these places better than anybody.”

The project was part of a larger survey, establishing African lion populations across Uganda.

“We did workshops, and we taught a very wide variety of stakeholders, essentially, how to survey lions,” says Braczkowski.

At one site, Murchison Falls National Park, Braczkowski and colleagues worked with rangers from the Uganda Wildlife Authority.

“They have a very, very, very intimate understanding of lion behaviour, where lions are hiding, which thickets they’re using, spatially, which parts of the landscapes they’re occurring in,” says Braczkowski.

“This was the first scientific study of wildlife where I directly participated and my first entry point into science,” says co-author Lilian Namukose, a ranger with the Wildlife Authority.

“Through rigorous training in three workshops across three national parks, we quickly learnt to incorporate lion data collection alongside our daily field duties.”

Namukose and her colleague, co-author Silvan Musobozi, recorded 102 detections of lions across 76 days, giving the researchers valuable ecological data. These included multiple photos of each lion, so that the researchers could identify individuals.

For comparison, the team also set up 64 expensive infra-red camera traps in the area. These state-of-the-art devices recorded 2 usable detections over 1,601 nights.

The team concludes that tapping into ranger knowledge can improve both ecological data, and give rangers an opportunity to be more involved in conservation research and management decisions.

“You could just get so much more return on investment by bringing rangers into the scientific process,” says Braczkowski.

“Through capacity building and training, rangers can be better incorporated into the scientific and management process,” says Musobozi. By

Vasundhara Oswal has been in prison since October 1, the family claims.

Pankaj Oswal claims his daughter Vasundhara has been illegally detained in Uganda, facing false charges and denied legal representation since October .