Night runners want county funding, claim nocturnal activities have massively boosted security in the area

 

The self proclaimed President of the night runners, Jack Songo aka Moses Okinyi who claims to have been elected by colleagues.Photo/File 

The self proclaimed President of the night runners, Jack Songo aka Moses Okinyi who claims to have been elected by colleagues.Photo/File - See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/night-runners-want-county-funding-claim-nocturnal-activities-have-massively-boosted-security#sthash.IOChYzL8.IpmGY355.dpuf

Night runners have demanded funding saying Migori and Homa Bay county governments discriminate them. Attempts to pursue development initiatives have flopped since the counties have channeled the funds to other projects, said Kenya Night Runners Union Jack Songo.

“Our nocturnal activities have massively boosted security in the areas. There is need for the government to recognise our union and allocate us some funds,” he said.

The union has domesticated wild animals through witchcraft, Songo said.

He said it has tamed 214 hyenas and hippos which members ride during their nightly activities.

He added that crocodiles and snakes have also been domesticated.

Songo spoke to the Star on phone on Thursday, from Gwasii area in Homa Bay, where he attended the burial of a member who died "in the line of duty"

“Our colleague died while enjoying a night ride on a hyena during his duties. The overjoyed animal had jumped into a thicket when a tree stump hit his chest,” he said.

He said the burial was "indecent" because of the lack of a welfare association and county support.

Songo further urged Sports CS Hassan Wario to ensure that money is allocated to their activities.

“We also want the government to direct CIDs to give us certificates of good conduct. Police only offer us bad conduct documents,” he said.

He said the union has about 7,500 members, mostly from the Coast.

- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/night-runners-want-county-funding-claim-nocturnal-activities-have-massively-boosted-security#sthash.IOChYzL8.IpmGY355.dpuf

Night runners have demanded funding saying Migori and Homa Bay county governments discriminate them.
Attempts to pursue development initiatives have flopped since the counties have channeled the funds to other projects, said Kenya Night Runners Union Jack Songo.
“Our nocturnal activities have massively boosted security in the areas. There is need for the government to recognise our union and allocate us some funds,” he said.
The union has domesticated wild animals through witchcraft, Songo said.
He said it has tamed 214 hyenas and hippos which members ride during their nightly activities.
He added that crocodiles and snakes have also been domesticated.
Songo spoke to the Star on phone on Thursday, from Gwasii area in Homa Bay, where he attended the burial of a member who died "in the line of duty"
“Our colleague died while enjoying a night ride on a hyena during his duties. The overjoyed animal had jumped into a thicket when a tree stump hit his chest,” he said.
He said the burial was "indecent" because of the lack of a welfare association and county support.
Songo further urged Sports CS Hassan Wario to ensure that money is allocated to their activities.
“We also want the government to direct CIDs to give us certificates of good conduct. Police only offer us bad conduct documents,” he said.
He said the union has about 7,500 members, mostly from the Coast.

- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/night-runners-want-county-funding-claim-nocturnal-activities-have-massively-boosted-security#sthash.IOChYzL8.IpmGY355.dpuf

Nomiya Church leader dies after 40 years at the helm

Charles Owalo taught Raila at Maranda School. PHOTO | COURTESY 

 

By JOHN KAMAU

Posted  Thursday, February 26  2015 at  19:38

For the past four decades, Archbishop Gideon Charles Owalo of Nomiya Church bestrode his house of worship like a colossus — perhaps following in the footsteps of his father. Nomiya was one of the African independent churches (AICs) that emerged in 1914 after Owalo’s father, Nabi Yohana, left the Catholic faith and founded the church.

Scholars say that the original church combined Luo traditions with Judaism and Unitarian Christianity, and used the Anglican Book of Common prayer.

But it also had something different. Nabi Yohana had told his Luo followers that he had received a vision from heaven which dictated that all male must be circumcised, which was contrary to Luo customs. It is a rite that all Nomiya followers follow to date with pride.

Nomiya emerged when other AICs were mushrooming in Kenya. Nabi Yohana had previously taught at the Church Missionary Society School in Nairobi and in Oginga Odinga’s autobiography Not Yet Uhuru he is said to have taught Jomo Kenyatta before he changed faiths to become a Muslim, then a Catholic.

It was in 1907 when he got his vision, and as he told his followers, went to heaven and was brought back to the earth with a message. “Nomiya” is Luo for “I was given (God’s Word)”.

The new church banned dancing, smoking and followed the Old Testament like most other independent churches that emerged after the First World War.

But the spread of Nomiya was curtailed after Yohana’s sudden death in 1921 which left it in the hands of Bishop Petro Ouma and later, Bishop Benjamin Oundo who continued to hold on to the church’s original teachings.

Owalo watched as the church spread towards Tanzania and in the Nyanza belt. By 1966, when he was 47, the church had more than 50,000 faithful and was also facing splinter challenges. It was this time that John Father Pesa’s breakaway Nomiya Luo Roho Church was started.

Pesa claimed to be Yohana’s successor and for that he was expelled in 1967 together with those who believed in healing powers and speaking in tongues.

While most of the previous church leaders had little education, Owalo was different by the time he took over the church leadership in the mid 1970s. He was one of the pioneer students at both Maseno School and Makerere University, after which he became a high school teacher of mathematics and agriculture for many years.

Some of his well-known students include Cord leader Raila Odinga whom he taught at Maranda High School, the late National Assembly deputy Speaker Joab Omino whom he taught at Maseno School and West Mugirago MP James Gesame whom he taught at Kisii School.

His other students include the late Orwa Ojode, High Court Judge Nicholas Ombija and Siaya Governor Cornel Rasanga.
It was perhaps the urge to follow in his father’s footsteps that Owalo retired from his teaching job to join the pulpit. Apparently, he was still an infant when his father died in 1921.

The church and its history has been a major ingredient in the secondary schools syllabus of both religious education and history.

Despite not having any history of ill health, his health suddenly plummeted in the recent past after losing several family members in quick succession, including his first wife, a scientist son, archeologist daughter, and then finally his first born daughter late last year. He died on February 21 at Aga Khan Hospital in Kisumu.
One of his best known sons is Nairobi-based management consultant Eliud Owalo, who was Raila’s campaign manager.
How the church holds after his death will be his legacy. But for the last four decades, he has successfully steered the church through the storms of leadership and a court case. He is survived by two widows and many children and great grandchildren. His remains will be intered at his rural home in Asembo, Rarieda constituency on March 7. 

Saturday, February 21, 2015 Fatou Bensouda grip on William Ruto may be too tight for Jubilee

 
Deputy President William Ruto and his defence team at The Hague. So far, 29 witnesses have testified against Mr Ruto and former radio journalist Joshua Sang, and only one remains to conclude the prosecution’s case. FILE PHOTO |  ICC


By WALTER MENYA
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In Summary

• Bid to have the trial stopped gained urgency after prosecutor withdrew charges against President Kenyatta.

Efforts by Jubilee politicians to extricate Deputy President William Ruto from the International Criminal Court (ICC) could come a cropper because of the strides made by Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in the case, legal experts say.

The experts told the Sunday Nation that Mr Ruto’s fate rests squarely with the ICC judges, and neither the uproar by Kenyan politicians nor the African Union can help.

“Legally, a case in court can only be resolved using judicial ways. I am not sure non-judicial ways are going to be effective,” said George Kegoro, executive director of the Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists.

Mr Ruto is charged together with former radio journalist Joshua Sang with crimes against humanity for their alleged key roles in perpetrating the 2007/08 post-election violence.

The trial is scheduled to resume tomorrow in The Hague before ICC judges Chile Eboe Osuji, Olga Herrera and Robert Fremr, with the last prosecution witness 727 testifying via video link.

The judges on February 17 directed the government of the country where the witness was relocated “to facilitate, by way of compulsory measures as necessary, the appearance of witness 727 for testimony by video-link before the Chamber”.

GAINED URGENCY

The government’s push to have the case against Mr Ruto dropped has gained urgency after Ms Bensouda withdrew charges against President Uhuru Kenyatta.

While welcoming the withdrawal of charges against President Kenyatta on December 5, 2014, Foreign Secretary Amina Mohammed had said the government would pursue ways to have the ICC drop the charges against Mr Ruto and Mr Sang “with the same energy and passion”.

“At The Hague, the prosecutor has dismissed the charges (against President Kenyatta). We are not done yet; we will pursue the dropping of charges of the other cases,” she said.

Kenya then went to the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties (ASP) in New York seeking to have its proposed amendments discussed.

A key plank of the amendments to the Rome Statute was to grant immunity to sitting heads of state and senior officials in government.

The effort failed, with criticism that the executive appeared less committed in its lobbying at the ASP after President Kenyatta’s case was withdrawn.

Then came the lobbying at the 24th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa where Kenya was seeking to have at least 14 other countries sign the Malabo Protocol on the establishment of an African Court of Justice and Human Rights.

That did not yield tangible results either, and the Kenyan delegation came back more or less empty handed. The matter could take centre stage again at the June AU summit in South Africa.

PACIFY RUTO

The proposed amendments to the Rome Statute and the AU lobbying have largely been seen as efforts by the TNA wing of the Jubilee administration to pacify Mr Ruto and his Rift Valley political constituency.

However, “unfixing” the Deputy President is a tall order, given the progress the ICC prosecutor has made so far in the case. Ms Bensouda is left with just a single witness to conclude her case.

So far, 29 witnesses have testified against Mr Ruto and Mr Sang. Once witness 727 testifies, the prosecution will give way to the defence to either file a no-case-to-answer motion, or if that is denied, to begin calling their witnesses.

“They can’t get anywhere. The court process has kicked in, and one would recall that the appellate chamber of the ICC had determined that the only way the case could be dropped was if a similar case was taking place in the national courts. That isn’t the case,” said Mr Mokaya Orina, a public international law expert.

Mr Orina further said the diplomatic and political agitation by Kenya and the AU outside the ICC will have no impact on the case.

“Amending the Rome Statute is a long shot. I don’t understand why anyone would think of it. The African court also can’t help, even if it was established today, because it is not complementary to the ICC,” he explained.  

According to Article 127 of the Rome Statute, not even the motion of Bumula MP Boniface Otsiula for withdrawal of Kenya from the ICC can help Mr Ruto in his case.

Jumping the ICC summons, based on such a motion, could land him in trouble as the judges could lift his conditional excusal from being present during the trial and even issue arrest warrants.

Article 127 of the Statute states: “A State shall not be discharged, by reason of its withdrawal, from the obligations arising from this Statute while it was a Party to the Statute, including any financial obligations accrued.”

In any case, a withdrawal from the Rome Statute is not instantaneous; it can only take effect one year after the date of receipt of the notification.

Mr Otsiula told the Sunday Nation that the motion he has drafted was not meant to save any particular individual “but for posterity”.

Nandi Senator Stephen Sang recently demanded that the Waki report on the post-election violence, sections of which have been admitted as evidence against Mr Ruto, be brought to Parliament to be “scrutinised”.

“The report has many grey areas and the Waki team had very limited time to compile it. It is, therefore, grossly misleading,” Mr Sang said.

He said the defence lawyers, as a way of countering the prosecution’s allegations, could benefit from the inconsistencies that could have been raised in Parliament.

Makerere and her grand plans for a new 20-floor Mwai Kibaki Library

Friday, February 20, 2015

In any case, seeing how much “at home” Bwana Kibaki felt at Makerere last week, one might have been forgiven the assumption that he had never really gone away. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP 

In Summary

• In any case, seeing how much “at home” Bwana Kibaki felt at Makerere last week, one might have been forgiven the assumption that he had never really gone away.
• He blended in so well with the Professors, like Chancellor Kagonyera and Vice-Chancellor Ddumba, that it appeared as if he had always been on the “Hill”, pursuing the scholarly career that he had naturally embarked on, till Jaramogi summoned him home in 1960 to manage his party’s affairs. He heeded the call and left, but apparently he and Makerere never really parted ways.

By Austin Bukenya
More by this Author

A young man in Nairobi once asked me if I was a contemporary of Mwai Kibaki at Makerere. Now, that was a truly double-edged compliment!

Just imagine me, Mwalimu “AB”, playing in the same league as Kenya’s third President, sharing a hall and exploring together the ways and byways of the famous Wandegeya neighbourhood on a Saturday afternoon.

We might even bowl and bat a ball or two on the cricket pitch (called Freedom Square today), just below the “ivory-towered” Main Hall, since neither of us had yet graduated to tennis or golf. So, you can see how flattering the question of the young man was.

But alas, was it possible to mistake me for an agemate of the great man? Maybe, but I must set the record straight. Mzee Kibaki and I are separated by just a little over a dozen years in age, he being a 1930s child and I a 1940s one. In fact, when he earned his historical First Class degree in Economics from Makerere in 1955, I was in Standard Four.

So, honouring me with the imagination that I was right there alongside Bwana Rais (Mstaafu) in the Makerere of the early 1950s is rather comically anachronistic.

It reminds me of the uninformed writer who claimed that our teacher, Margaret Macpherson, directed us in a star-studded production of Julius Caesar that included Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and maybe John Ruganda. Several of those personalities attended Makerere several decades apart!

However, as the years roll by, you reach a point where the difference between 10 or 20 years is not particularly significant. Especially in this era, where such a lot occurs in a flash, literally, anything stretching back beyond 60 or 70 years may, understandably, be regarded as prehistoric.

Thus, out there in the prehistoric “anthropocene” era, the Makerereans of the 1950s and those of the 1970s might as well be regarded as contemporaries.

In any case, seeing how much “at home” Bwana Kibaki felt at Makerere last week, one might have been forgiven the assumption that he had never really gone away.

He blended in so well with the Professors, like Chancellor Kagonyera and Vice-Chancellor Ddumba, that it appeared as if he had always been on the “Hill”, pursuing the scholarly career that he had naturally embarked on, till Jaramogi summoned him home in 1960 to manage his party’s affairs. He heeded the call and left, but apparently he and Makerere never really parted ways.

So, here he was, laying the foundation stone of the monument that is going to be erected in his honour, the 20-floor Mwai Kibaki Presidential Library.

It appears that the edifice will be a multipurpose complex, comprising not only the library but also units like the Mwai Kibaki Centre for Leadership, Public Finance and Public Policy.

It will also house the Mwai Kibaki Endowed Chair in Economics. Now, “Chair” in this context means a professorship, and word around Makerere is that it will be occupied by internationally recognised and specially invited economics authorities.

Mzee Kibaki is one of the best economics students that Makerere has ever produced, and he was one of the first African lecturers in Economics there, after his brilliant post-graduate study at the London School of Economics (LSE). Indeed the skyscraper at Makerere will be a symbol of fully deserved high achievement.

(The LSE is such an august institution in its own right that it struck me, utter economics illiterate that I am, with a total sense of my unworthiness to even enter it and look around.

During my brief stint at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which is in the neighbourhood, I contented myself with only staring at its towering gates).

One of the things that attracted me to the Mwai Kibaki event, apart from my avowed and professed “Kenyaphilia”, is Makerere’s readiness, even eagerness, to recognise and honour its own.

The “Hill” has produced so many distinguished personalities in every field of human endeavour that you would assume it takes its achievements and theirs for granted.

Not so, as we can see in this gigantic project, expected to be completed in five years’ time.

By the way, is it by coincidence that, apart from the Mwai Kibaki Library, the other monument in the works is the “Mazruiana” complex, in memory of our dear and recently departed Ali, another Kenyan?

I am willing to bet my last penny on a Ngugi wa Thiong’o something or other coming up before the Mwai Kibaki complex is complete. Could I have caught the “Kenyaphilia” from Makerere?

Another and more important aspect of the event is, of course, the concept of endowment, as implied in the proposed “endowed” chair in economics.

This is a way of funding universities that is seldom mentioned or considered in East Africa. Yet it is an established and very effective way of raising funds for universities elsewhere.

The way it works is that individuals, groups or institutions enter into agreement with a university to fund a programme, a centre or an institute at the university under specified conditions. Such donated funding is referred to as an endowment.

In North America, the commonest sources of endowment are successful alumni and alumnae who wish to give back to their schools, groups of former students who entered a school and graduate in a particular year, or professional bodies who may want to promote their professions through specialised study and research.

Thus you may get a William Gates Chair in Computer Studies at a certain university, a Class of 1968 Chair in English Studies at another or a Modern Language Association Endowment at yet another.

I imagine that the Mwai Kibaki Endowed Chair will be established and funded along such lines, as indeed, the distinguished Makerere alumnus himself hinted at the inauguration ceremony.

I think I should think of endowing a chair, if that forthcoming blockbuster of mine really takes off. But I can’t guarantee that it will be at Makerere.      

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in East Africa.