Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta said on Thursday the country’s Supreme Court staged a “coup” against the will of the people when it annulled last month’s presidential election that he won.

“A coup in Kenya has just been done by the four people in the Supreme Court,” Kenyatta said in a live, televised speech delivered mostly in Kiswahili. “(The court is saying) ‘numbers don’t matter, it is processes that matter.‘”

The court’s decision on Sept. 1 was the first time a judicial body has canceled the election of an African president and the ruling sent shockwaves through the country and beyond.

The court ordered a re-run within 60 days between Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga, who had rejected the result of the Aug. 8 vote and challenged it in court. The election board had declared Kenyatta the winner by 1.4 million votes.

The re-run is tentatively set for Oct. 17 in a vote being watched for any sign of instability. Kenya, a Western ally, has East Africa’s richest economy and is a hub for diplomacy, security, and trade in a region often battered by conflict.

The date for the re-run now looks unlikely since election officials lack time to prepare.

The court’s detailed judgment given on Wednesday hinged on the failure of the election board to check electronic tallies, which are vulnerable to typos, against paper forms intended as a fail-safe backup before announcing results. Judges did not say they found evidence of rigging.

Kenyatta said he would respect the court’s decision but said it subverted the will of the people.

“We have reversed everything in this country by the decision of a few people. I don’t know how history will judge these gentlemen,” he said. “The citizen has been told he does not have a voice … If that is not a dictatorship, then I don’t know what to say.”

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United Nations humanitarian agencies on Thursday called for more donor funding to reverse a 25 per cent reduction in food or cash assistance for more than 100,000 refugees in Rwanda.

“We thank donors for their continued generosity and support, while urging them to further fund humanitarian assistance so that we can give refugees the assistance they depend on,” said Jean-Pierre de Margerie, Rwanda Country Director of the World Food Programme (WFP).

Some 130,000 Burundian and Congolese refugees in Rwandan camps rely on humanitarian assistance.

Full rations of nutrition support for refugees provide 2,100 calories per person per day, the minimum for a healthy life. However, funding shortages forced WFP to trim assistance to 90 per cent in November and December, and since January, WFP has reduced the ration sizes to 75 per cent.

Some $11 million are needed to restore full support for the next six months.

For its part, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had secured only 19 per cent of its total funding needs as of December 2017.

UNHCR, WFP and others have started moving towards targeting to ensure the needs of the most vulnerable are considered, while continuing supplementary feeding and promoting self-reliance by supporting a Government pledge to ‘graduate’ 18,000 camp-based refugees from food and/or cash for food assistance programmes by mid-2018.

“Now more than ever is the time to find innovative and long-term solutions for refugees in Rwanda,” said UNHCR Representative Ahmed Baba Fall.

A Government-UN joint strategy on economic inclusion of refugees enables more refugees to become self-reliant and contribute to the economic development of their host communities by creating access to formal employment opportunities for up to 60,000 refugees and providing banking services for a similar number of refugees by mid-2018.

President Paul Kagame and Commander in Chief of Rwanda Defence Force has promoted RDF Officers and approved the promotion of Other Ranks as follows:

a. From Lieutenant General to General – 1

(1) Fred IBINGIRA

b. From Major General to Lieutenant General – 1

(1) Jacques MUSEMAKWELI

c. From Brigadier General to Major General – 12

(1) Charles KARAMBA

(2) Eric MUROKORE

(3) Emmy RUVUSHA

(4) Emmanuel BAYINGANA

(5) Joseph NZABAMWITA

(6) Andrew KAGAME

(7) Charles RUDAKUBANA

(8) Aloys MUGANGA

(9) Ferdinand SAFARI

(10) Albert MURASIRA

(11) Jean Jacques Laurent MUPENZI

(12) Innocent KABANDANA

d. From Colonel to Brigadier General – 6

(1) John Bosco NGIRUWONSANGA

(2) John Bosco RUTIKANGA

(3) Vincent NYAKARUNDI

(4) Francis MUTIGANDA

(5) Fred MUZIRAGUHARARA

(6) Willy RWAGASANA

e. From Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel – 14

f. From Major to Lieutenant Colonel – 68

g. From Captain to Major – 79

h. From Lieutenant to Captain – 11

i. From Second Lieutenant to Lieutenant – 457

2. A number of Non-Commissioned Officers were also promoted in their respective categories.

Congratulations to all those who have been promoted

Experts say good time keeping is an essential thing toward success; which means clocks and wrist watches should be taken as time keeping devices instead of ornaments because time is expensive.

In the pre-colonial period our ancestors used sun and shade with help of a stick shadow to tell time, and the invasion of colonialists in Africa brought new time keeping devices like clocks and wrist watches which spread all around the continent later on after the first Anglo-boer war in South Africa in early 1880’s.

In our daily life it’s common for people to buy wrist watches which is a good thing, but it seems not everyone is able to comprehend its importance. Some when asked why they wear watches they say ” Because it looks expensive that’s why I put it on my arm”. Others say ” A friend of mine gave it to me as a gift; I had no other options so I had to put it on”. Nevertheless, intellectuals take time as a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into future and also the measure of duration of events and the intervals between them thus the accomplishment of goals and objectives being set to be achieved.

This signifies that for a country to develop rapidly and boast its economy; its citizens need also to respect and apprehend the importance of time and also consider the negative side effects of not being time conscious onto their daily life and perhaps stop being ignorant of it through buying and taking wrist watches as decoration only instead of time keeping devices.

2016 has been a good year for the Norwegian wind industry, with an expected total of 2,000 MW of new wind capacity expected to be generated by the end of 2016, according to NORWEA, the Norwegian Wind Association.

Major investments have been finalized this year, with 1,430 MW of projects such as Fosen, Hamnefjell, Tellenes, Egersund, and Raskiftet, and an additional 600 MW of additional projects expected to be confirmed by 2017.

The investments enable Norway to close in on power production of 10TWh per year from a wind power production record of 2.5 TWh last year.

Andreas Thon Aasheim, special advisor to NORWEA said: “It’s a tremendous indication of the health of the Norwegian wind industry, and represents total financial investment somewhere north of NOK 20 billion (US $2.4 billion).”

He added: “Between 2010 and 2012 the industry was basically at a standstill until a decision to enter the Swedish Certificate System was made. It’s taken time to get going again, and only now we’re seeing that projects have matured enough to reach final investment decisions.”

The development of new wind technologies has helped compensating for low electricity prices in the region.

He said: “These factors have enabled many excellent projects to compete in the technology-neutral certificates market… It’s those that we’re seeing now.”

Aasheim also said: “We’re seeing virtually every wind farm being invested in has some degree of foreign investment made towards it… We’d never have reached these figures without foreign money. Take Fosen, that’s 40% owned by Credit Suisse via the Nordic Wind Power Consortium, while the Tellenes and Egersund projects will be fully owned by foreign investors.”

More than half of the 2016 investments will represent foreign investment, according to Aasheim.

NORWEA has played a key role in the investment projects, thanks to an annual finance seminar held since 2012, which enables networking for investors, banks, and Norwegian developers.

Aasheim said: “It’s a sort of Norwegian Wind 101 — an excellent way of making opportunities in Norwegian wind more accessible to investors… “

The projects won’t come to term before a couple of year, but the expected growth was welcomed by the Norway’s domestic industry.

These topics and more will be discussed at the Sustainable Investment Forum, taking place on September 20th 2016 in New York.

Rwanda Transportation Development Agency boss accused by whistleblowers of vested interest in delays on important Burundi-Rwanda road.

A group of whistleblowers from within the Rwanda Transport Development Agency has sent a stack of documents to The Rwanda Focus alleging possible misuse of public funds in a project to renovate and asphalt the multinational road linking Rwanda and Burundi, the Gisiza-Rubavu Road.

Due to irregularities they cite, work on this road has stalled for over a year now, and the concern is that the funders – the African Development Bank – may altogether withdraw the monies for the 48-kilometer highway.

The first, and most obvious irregularity occurred when RTDA Director General Guy Kalisa wrote a letter – a copy of which we have – to the resident representative of the African Development Bank, AfDB, requesting for non-objection for award of the contract to a Chinese company called Hunan Road & Bridge Corporation. The letter is dated 12 August 2014.

In response the Resident Representative, Gabriel Negatu, among other things wondered why the non-objection request – presumably so that Hunan Road and Bridge Corporation would commence the work – came more than 7 months after the bids were opened, on 23 December 2013. This, according to tendering procedures, is a very long time to ask for a non-objection and it is irregular, and “anyone doing so would know AfDB wouldn’t give it.” AfDB asked for clarifications.

It was at this point, according to a whistleblower memo we have, that Guy Kalisa decided to impose his views on the evaluation committee working to respond to the AfDB clarification request. “It seems the RTDA director made the request for non-objection in an ‘abnormally long’ period intentionally, knowing this would open the door for him to slot in a company of his preference, the Sinohydro Corporation.”

This was even after members of RTDA evaluation team prepared a memo for Kalisa detailing a response to AfDB’s request for clarifications, showing why Hunan Road & Bridge was still the most suited company, technically and cost-wise, despite the RTDA chief’s late request for non-objection. We have a copy of the memo.

According to the whistleblowers, it came as a complete surprise to them when Kalisa told the evaluation team to stop everything they were doing, suggesting that AfDB did not want the award to go to Hunan Road & Bridge Corporation, or even to KCS International (another bidding company whose tender showed they too qualified). The RTDA director general instead stressed that AfDB “prefers Sinohydro Corporation Ltd”.

This, according to the bids we’ve seen, would among other things cost 10 billion more francs than Hunan Road & Bridge’s bid, which came in at a total of Frw 32,295,082,869 minus taxes.

According to the whistleblowers the RTDA boss “tried to force” the evaluation team to rewrite the report, proposing instead that the award goes to Sinohydro. When The Rwanda Focus called the RTDA director general for his comments on these seeming irregularities, he declined to offer even a single comment, only remarking that since the bidding process hadn’t yet concluded, he couldn’t, by law, make any comment on it.

The whistleblowers further allege that when they declined “to doctor” the report to favor Sinohydro, Kalisa brought in an outside consultant to do it. “With Rwanda standing to lose up to Frw 10 billion, we could never participate in writing such a report, and so the DG could only bring in outsiders to do what he wanted!” concluded the whistleblowers.

President Paul Kagame on Tuesday met with a delegation from St Andrews University in Scotland. Led by Dr. Hazel Cameron, a lecturer in Criminology and Genocide studies and currently the director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, the delegation included four professors and eleven post-graduate students.

Speaking to the delegation on Rwanda’s progress, Kagame pointed to homegrown solutions as key to achievements.

“We have very high ambitions and scarce resources. Before we go out begging for things we may never get, we have to ask ourselves: have we exhausted the resources around us? This is how homegrown solutions start,” he explained.

With the majority of students interested in post conflict reconstruction, the President explained the reasons that led Rwanda to choose reconciliation over revenge.

“If you are fighting injustice and get to where you want to be, it is absolutely wrong to be the same person to practice injustice,” he said. “With a leadership that gives people a chance to forgive and think more about future than past, any society can overcome.”

On challenges that have shaped Rwanda, Kagame shared part of the vision that led to the liberation of the country. “Born in exile, living as refugees, we could not stay stateless forever. We could not give up. We chose to address the situation. We are moving ahead, learning from what works and what doesn’t work, and adjusting without losing sight of our goals,” he remarked.

During the visit, Hazel Cameron announced St. Andrews University’s partnership with Rwanda that will see scholarships offered to Rwandan students interested in international studies.

This year’s study trip lasted close to ten days and brought students from Germany, Hungary, UK, Greece, Czech Republic, Japan, USA, Austria and Norway researching regional security, investment in Rwanda, education, conservation, tourism, and health.

Representatives of the South-Korean cooperation agency Koica and the UN children’s fund Unicef have visited Bugesera to assess how health services providers and community health workers use Rapid SMS technology to assist pregnant women and newborns. Both organizations have supported the establishment of the system.

According to Unicef deputy representative Oliver Petrovic, beneficiaries of rapid SMS include pregnant mothers, newborns and children under the age of two, while users are among others community health workers, providers at health centers, district hospital local administrators, as well as private sector and policy makers at central and district level .

He said that he was impressed by the work being implemented on the ground, where the Rapid SMS system is reducing maternal deaths and improving the lives of mothers.

Sharing her routine work as regards Rapid SMS, demonstrated her daily activities and explained to the visitors her actual report tracking using Rapid SMS.

“Rapid SMS enable us to give real-time feedback messages, reminders, delivery notification and ensure follow-up of high-risk pregnancies, newborns,” explained community health worker Marthe Uwizeyimana. “It also has a red alert system that will trigger off ambulance services and quick referral of emergency maternal, newborn and child cases for urgent care at health facilities.”

Joselyne Murekatete, a mother of 3 among who a 7-month-old baby, said that the Rapid SMS system had been very helpful during her latest pregnancy, as the health worker was very close to her and reported on every single change in her body until she was about to give birth. She was also impressed when the hospital sent her an ambulance very quickly and that she received the required health care without any delay.

Jean Baptiste Byiringiro, the Rapid SMS manager at the ministry of health, confirmed that the technology has given a boost to efforts to further reduce maternal and newborn deaths.

Koica has put $4.5 million in the 3-year program to save the lives of children and mothers in 10 districts of Rwanda, which is helping Unicef and the ministry of health to enhance safe motherhood for over 140.000 mothers with newborns and to detect early signs of stunting for over 250,000 children aged under two.

In addition, over 8,000 community health workers are being trained in the use of Rapid SMS health interventions to manage the main child killer diseases which are malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea.