A series of protest marches both against and in support of President Jacob Zuma will be staged across the country over the next two days.
More than 20 civil rights and faith-based organisations are taking part in a march today afternoon in Cape Town.
Protest organiser Bruce Baigrie says: “The principal aim is to send a message to the MPs, especially those who are with the ANC, to recall President Zuma and to honour their constitutional obligations.”
The march will start in Keizergracht Street at 3pm and then proceed to Parliament.
Event organisers say that they are particularly targeting members of the ruling party.
Civil rights organisations like the Right2Know Campaign, Social Justice Coalition, and the Treatment Action Campaign will form part of the expected mass action.
Axed deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas is named as one of the speakers at the gathering.
“This is a very significant milestone for the country. This is probably the beginning of what could well be a national movement that begins to write to a new agenda for the country.”
National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete is expected to announce today whether the no-confidence vote will take place in the form of a secret ballot vote or not.
TO BE REPLACED? US Ambassador to South Sudan Mary Catherine Phee presents her credentials to President Salva Kiir. Photo credit/state.gov
The United States has nominated Thomas J. Hushek to be its Ambassador to South Sudan, to replace Mary Catherine (Molly) Phee who has been US Ambassador to the troubled country since July 2015.
The White House said President Donald Trump intends to nominate Hushek, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, class of Minister-Counselor, who has served as an American diplomat since 1988. He is currently the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (Acting Assistant Secretary) in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the Department of State.
A three-time Deputy Chief of Mission and senior official at the State Department, Hushek has extensive experience in management and communications, coordination of humanitarian programs, and crisis management. Mr. Hushek has served at eight US Missions overseas.
He earned a M.I.A. from Colombia University and a B.A from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He speaks Russian and Persian (Dari), a according to a statement released by The White House.
DURING HAPPIER TIMES: President Salva Kiir with former SPLA commander Gen. Paul Malong Awan
South Sudan President Salva Kiir has denied arresting Paul Malong Awan, former Chief of General Staff of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army whom he ousted out of office last May.
President Kiir, according to Daniel Awet Akot, his adviser on military affairs and a leading member of the political bureau of the governing Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), has not arrested General Malong, a former ally who played a key role in the conflict which erupted in 2013.
“There have been reports and people calling me to inquire whether Paul Malong has been arrested and my answers were no, I am not aware. When these calls persisted, I decided to ask the President and he told me no, he had not ordered any arrest for Malong,” Awet Akot said.
“The President also told me he did not receive any report about his health. If he was sick, the President would have been informed. There are people with him,” he added.
But while Akot denied the arrest of Awan, Lucy Ayak, Gen. Paul Malong Awan’s wife called President Salva Kiir to allow him (Malong) to travel out of the country for a medical attention, saying she was concerned about the health of her husband.
“The last time I spoke to you Mr President, you promised me that my husband would not be harmed, and I took you at your word because I believed that you are a man that stands by your words Mr President. But I should bring to your attention the fact that my husband is not currently in good health, as I am also sure that you well know. He has been having routine checkups and treatment both in Juba and Nairobi over the time he has been working under your command,” wrote Ayak.
She said the condition under which her husband was being held and the tension surrounding the house was becoming a cause of concern to the family. She further underscored that he has no access to his doctors or any other medical personnel.
“I, therefore, appeal to your usual humanity and sense of correctness your Excellency, please allow my husband to seek the medical help he urgently needs because it is the right thing to do to him and the family at the moment,” she called.
The South Sudanese security services kept briefing President Kiir that Malong has been working to evict him and take the lead of the leadership of the country. His role in the military confrontation in Juba in July 2016 and the initiatives he had taken however convinced many in the country that he had no consideration for his hierarchy.
After his removal, the General Malong denied intention to rebel against the government.
In a speech delivered at a public rally held in Yirol town, Eastern Lakes State, where he suspended his travel to his home region of Aweil, he asserted that all that had been said against him were just rumours and that he only wants peace to prevail in the country.
When comedian MC Mariachi came up with jokes about Muslims, perhaps he thought all would end with him receiving his pay cheque, but the situation has turned nasty, with a top Muslim cleric stopping short of ordering him to flee the country.
Indeed, everything appears to have backfired for MC Mariachi and with mounting pressure, the comedian who was accused of mortifying Islam, was quick to ‘apologise’ but still did that in a comical way!
The comic apology was rejected by the spokesman of the Kibuli Muslim faction, Sheikh Nuhu Muzaata, who said it was mockery, and warned the comedian to either flee the country or increase his security “otherwise Muslims are going him make him pay for mocking their religion.”
But Mariachi was quick to sense the danger and escorted by other comedians, trekked to Kibuli Hill and apologised. Knees to the ground, Mariachi asked for forgiveness and pledged never to come up with similar jokes.
He was ‘forgiven’ but warned of dire consequences if he repeated similar jokes.
Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) has today unveiled Neymar Junior after activating the €222million (£199million) release clause in his contract, making the Brazilian forward the most expensive player in football history.
Neymar’s world-record transfer is reported to be worth about £450m in total, taking into account fees and wages, which will see the forward earn around £540,000 a week after tax.
Formerly with Barcelona, Neymar Jr will be officially presented to fans on Saturday and is committed to PSG for 5 years until June 2022.
The 25-year-old, who joined Barcelona for £48.6m from Brazilian club Santos in 2013 leaves after winning 1 champions league, 2 La liga titles, 3 Copa Del Rey titles, 1 uefa supercup winner, 1 spanish super cup winner and 1 Fifa club world cup winner.
The Parisian club’s official website also announced that Neymar will wear the No.10 jersey at the Parc de Princes. Javier Pastore has given up his shirt number in order to welcome Neymar to the club.
La Liga had rejected an attempt by Neymar’s representatives to pay the sum that would trigger his release clause at Barcelona but the money was later accepted by the club at Camp Nou.
Televangelist Gilbert Deya of the ‘miracle babies’ infamy has been deported from United Kingdom to Kenya.
Mr. Deya, who was arrested in London by the Metropolitan Police on December 13, 2006 and faces child abduction and trafficking charges, arrived at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at 4.40 am on Friday August 4, aboard a Kenya Airways flight.
A police spokesman said Mr. Deya was detained under an arrest warrant issued by Kenyan authorities, and was ordered by a court on November 8, 2007, to be extradited from the UK to Kenya to face five counts of child trafficking.
He is set to face child trafficking charges after being handed over to the Kenyan authorities following accusations that he coordinated the trafficking of children, who his church would later present as ‘miracles’ for barren mothers. Police also alleged that Deya stole five children between May 1999 and December 2004 from Pumwani Hospital to facilitate his ‘miracle babies’ project.
Earlier in 2005, Mr. Deya’s wife Mary Deya was handed a three-year jail term after she was found guilty of stealing a child from the Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi. Mary falsely claimed that the baby was hers, but it was later confirmed that she had stolen it.
Deya was ordained by the United Evangelical Church of Kenya and styles himself ‘Archbishop’. He was an evangelist in Kenya in the late 1980s to early 1990s, but moved to the UK, establishing Gilbert Deya Ministries in 1997.
DEMO: Parents and pupils of Bridge International Academies protest the closure of their schools outside Parliament. Photo/nbstv.
A coalition of 174 civil society organisations has called on international donors, including the UK government, to drop support for the Bridge International Academies (BIA), a private school company operating in Africa including Uganda.
BIA provides technology-driven education in more than 500 primary and nursery schools in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Liberia and India, and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are among the high-profile philanthropists from whom the American startup has received funding.
Pupils of the Bridge International Academies (BIA) in Uganda
But late last year Uganda’s high court ordered the closure of 63 Bridge schools last year, ruling that they provided unsanitary learning conditions, used unqualified teachers and were not properly licensed. No schools have been closed and Bridge is in dialogue with a government team, that includes among other stakeholders the Minister of Education Janet Museveni, who has previously expressed skeptism about the operations of Bridge schools in Uganda.
And in a statement, ‘anti-Bridge’ campaign groups said the firm charges prohibitively high fees and that teachers are poorly paid, receive little training, and are given inflexible, scripted lessons to read from tablets. The organisations also accused BIA of intimidating its critics, a claim the company has denied.
The statement, signed by organisations from 50 different countries including Global Justice Now and Amnesty International, cited research suggesting that the poorest students cannot afford to attend Bridge schools.
“BIA’s model is neither effective for the poorest children nor sustainable against the educational challenges found in developing countries,” said the campaigners, who alluded to “mounting institutional and independent evidence that raises serious concerns about BIA” and warned of “significant legal and ethical risks associated with investments” in the company.
In Kenya, sending three children to a Bridge school is estimated to represent almost a third of the monthly income of families living on $1.25 (94p) a day, according to a joint study by Kenya National Union of Teachers and Education International, a federation representing 32 million teachers and support staff. The researchers noted that teachers are required to work between 59 and 65 hours a week for a monthly salary of $100.
In April, following an inquiry into UK aid spending on education, the chairman of the UK parliament’s international development committee questioned whether grant funding should have been provided to Bridge.
“The evidence received during this inquiry raises serious questions about Bridge’s relationships with governments, transparency and sustainability,” Stephen Twigg wrote in a letter to the international development secretary, Priti Patel.
But Bridge’s model, under which teachers are given electronic tablets containing lesson plans, is seen by some as an answer to improving access to education in low-income countries.
And responding to the criticism from civil society groups, BIA said it provides high-quality education to marginalised and remote communities across Africa. The company pointed out that it costs an average of just under $7 (£5) a month to send a child to Bridge, and that 10% of students are on scholarships. BIA added that teachers work about 54 hours a week and are given high-quality training before and during their careers, with salaries – between $95 and $116 a month in Kenya – higher than in other non-formal schools.
“Our pupils are outperforming their peers in national exams over consecutive years. Our model means that we’re able to attract new investment towards solving one of the world’s most pressing problems: hundreds of millions of children who are not learning,” the Bridge statement said.
“Public schools and Bridge schools can and do operate side by side to serve communities in countries where there are major shortages of nurseries and primary schools. We help governments quickly address the gap between how many schools they have and how many they need.”
The UK Department for International Development said: “We have supported over 11 million children in primary and lower-secondary education from 2011-15, including over 5.3 million girls.
“Many of the world’s poorest countries rely on privately run schools to provide an education where state provision is failing. Without privately-run schools, millions of children would be denied an education.”
Billionaire businessman Sudhir Ruparelia has filed his defence against charges of ‘extracting US$80 million (about Shs400 billion) from Crane Bank, brought against him by the Bank of Uganda and the latter, now in receivership, about two months ago.
Mr Ruparelia, who is the 1st defendant in Civil Case 493 of 2016, was one of the Non-Executive Directors and shareholders of the defunct Crane Bank, and through his lawyers Ms. Kampala Associated Advocates (KAA), contends that at no time did he breach his obligations while serving the Crane Bank in both capacities. The second respondent in the case, Meera Investments, is another company where Mr. Ruparelia is a shareholder.
In a 62-page defence filed in the High Court Commercial Division on August 3, Ms. KAA also indicate that by representing Crane Bank, opposite counsel, Ms. MMAKS Advocates, acted in ‘conflict’ of their client, Mr. Ruparelia’s interests, since the law firm was previously retained by Crane Bank, where he was one of the Non-Executive Directors.
In Section 90 of the defence, KAA aver their client Mr. Ruparelia, while non-executive director, participated in overseeing a buoyant Crane Bank which grew from one branch in 1995 to 46 branches at the BoU took over Crane Bank in 2016. At the time, the lawyers further aver, the Crane Bank had a customer base of over 600.000 customers, with the bank acquiring assets worth over Shs1.8 trillion, a development confirmed through an annual audit report carried out by international audit firm Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG).
Further, in Section 92 KAA avers that since the takeover of Crane Bank by the Receiver, in this case the BoU, their client Mr. Ruparelia and his other shareholders have not been given any accountability by the Receiver, ‘in total violation of the Receiver’s fiduciary obligations’. The KAA lawyers also contend Mr. Ruparelia will ‘at the earliest opportunity seek disclosure of all documents relating to the Agreement between the Receiver and DFCU bank and in particular the purchase price of the Plaintiff’s (Crane Bank) assets’.
Further, in the filed defence KAA lawyers contend that in January this year Mr. Ruparelia’s representatives, Mr. Kakembo Katende and Azam Tharani attended a meeting with lawyers Masembe Kanyerezi and David Mpanga at the chambers of MMAKS, ostensibly to share the contents of ‘an alleged PWC forensic report indicating the alleged extraction of US$80 million’.
‘The Plaint contains excerpts of the report and from those excerpts the 1st Defendant (Mr. Ruparelia) has been able to establish that the alleged report is actually a draft document created by PWC on 13th November 2014
KAA also says it will line up over 20 witnesses to testify in favour of their client Mr. Sudhir Ruparelia, among them Mr. Ruparelia himself and his wife Jyostna Ruparelia; the Bank of Uganda Governor Prof. Emmanuel Tumusiime Mutebile and his deputy Louis Kasekende; the BOU Director of Bank Supervision Ms. Justine Bagyenda. Other witnesses include officials the BoU, former Crane Bank Directors and shareholders, lawyers Timothy Masembe Kanyerezi from MMAKS and David Mpanga from AF Mpanga Advocates; and officials from the audit firms of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC); Deliotte and Touche and KPMG.
Other witnesses include Godfrey Yiga Masajja and Susan Wasagali Kanyemibwa from BoU; Francis Kamulegeya and Uthman Mayanja from PwC; George Opio from Deliotte and Touche and, Benson Ndungu of KPMG.
The BoU-Crane Bank- Sudhir Ruparelia standoff comes in the wake of reports indicating that top officials at the Central Bank are divided over the procedures undertaken by the BoU that led to the filing of the court case.
According to sources, some top managers argue that the BoU, through its Bank Supervision Directorate headed by Ms. Justine Bagyenda, failed to execute its mandate. The protagonists further argue that before filing the case the BoU did not exhaust all avenues that could lead to a negotiated settlement of the stand-off.
Meanwhile, other reports indicate that the BoU/Crane Bank lawyers, Ms MMAKS Advocates and AF Mpanga Advocates, have allegedly refused to share information from a PwC forensic audit that had been requested for by Mr. Ruparelia’s lawyers, Ms. KAA law firm.
By press time efforts to contact opposite counsel were futile.
When BBS TV went on air last year, many people rushed to occupy the then virgin posts.
Many of the ‘deserters’ were from already existing TV stations and included Joe Kigozi from NBS, Juma Kirya, one Barry and Simon Paul Etiang from NTV.
But we have since learnt that after ‘things failed to work out at BBS TV’ some of them have started running back to their former work stations.
According to information on our desk, Etiang, Barry and Kirya resigned from their posts at BBS TV last week and have since gone back to NTV.
Though none is willing to reveal the reasons as to why they left, a reliable source tells us that the trio resigned over unpaid salaries.
Apparently, workers at the station have gone months without salary the reason why the BBS TV CEO, Joe Kigozi was sent on forced leave in June.
Following his return last month, some of their salaries were cleared but only up to May; they haven’t received their salaries for June and July and this has left many employees aggrieved.
Meanwhile, we have learnt that the station also fired some employees over performance, though some of them who preferred to remain anonymous insist their firing is based on the demand for their salaries.
Those fired after hasty meeting where newsroom employees were called and compelled to pledge allegiance to the station include Hadija Mwanje and Farouk Namatiti.
Renowned city ‘Pastor’Franklin Mondo Mugisha is currently enmeshed in a child neglect misunderstanding with a one Sarah Naigaga, who says she is the mother of his six-year old child.
Ms. Nagaiga says for a while, Mondo had been looking after the child till recently when he stopped and even refused picking her calls. Apparently, Mondo had pledged to provide for the child as long as she never took it to his church. “He told me he never wanted the kid to be seen by his flock but he would be providing for him and it was okay with me…….” she said.
And left with no other option, Naigaga says she went to the church but that unlike the previous times, this time Mondo started beating her up with the help of his bouncers.
“He no longer wants to pick my calls… He blocked all of my phones. Even when I try calling him using other people’s phones, he picks but ends the call as soon as he hears my voice on the other end. Now, how else can I hear from him other than going to (his) church?” Naigaga wondered.
After the alleged beating, Naigaga said police from Wankulukuku was called in and she was arrested on allegations of threatening to burn Mondo’s church.
Naigaga said when she went to report an assault case to Katwe Police Station, she found that a parallel case had already opened up against her by Mondo. He had even expressed doubts about being the father of Naigaga’s child. “If the child is not his, then why did he name the child (after himself)”?
She is now demanding for a DNA test if Mondo insists he is not responsible for fathering the child.
When reached for a comment, Mondo did not pick our calls neither has he returned our message on Facebook where he has been active all day.
Mondo is not the first pastor to be accused of neglecting his children.
‘Pastor’ Augustine Yiga was also taken to court in 2015 when he refused to remit monthly maintenance fee of Shs150,000 to a woman he allegedly raped and fathered a child with as she sought to be prayed for at his church.
