One of Kenya’s most respected law scholars, Prof Hastings Winston Opinya Okoth-Ogendo, is dead.
Prof Ogendo, a former vice-chairman of the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission, died on Friday night in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he had gone on an assignment for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.
He had left the country last Saturday. According to Ed Rege, a close family friend, Prof Ogendo fell ill last Monday.
“And for the next three days, his illness got worse,” said Mr Rege while briefing the media at the deceased’s {www:residence} in Karen.
“He was, on Wednesday, joined by his wife, Mrs Ruth Okoth. We understand that he was taken to hospital on Thursday to seek treatment but, unfortunately, he did not make it.
He died on Friday night while under intensive care,” Mr Rege said.
He told the Sunday Nation plans were already in place to bring the body back home by Tuesday this week.
He said an autopsy would be done before the release of the body.
A tentative burial date has been set for May 9 at Gem Rae in Nyando district. This is subject to approval from the family.
On receiving the news of Prof Ogendo’s death, Prime Minister Raila Odinga said it was a “blow to the pro-reform movement in the country”.
“I have received the news with disbelief. In Prof Ogendo, the country has lost a top brain. He was an undisputed authority on land law,” said the Prime Minister in a statement.
Mr Odinga said the don had hugely contributed to the National Constitutional Conference at the Bomas of Kenya and the search for a new constitution.
He added that the country had lost a patriot, a fighter and a high-calibre scholar.
Similar messages of condolences were sent by Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi and former Nyakach MP Peter Odoyo.
Dr Ben Sihanya, the dean of University of Nairobi Law School, said Kenya had lost a distinguished scholar, who participated in the {www:establishment} of the school.
“It’s a big shock to us. He is indeed irreplaceable. His expertise in land law was unrivalled on the continent. He has advised many governments on these issues. We shall miss him,” the dean said.
Born in 1944, Prof Ogendo attended Maseno and Alliance high schools before proceeding to the University of East Africa in Dar es Salaam and the Oxford University for his bachelor’s degree in civil law.
He then attended University of Yale between 1973 and 1978, where he earned a Doctorate of Science of Law.
Pennsylvania, USA (AP). – An economics professor at a Pennsylvania university said Saturday he supports efforts to spread democracy in his native Ethiopia, but denied backing an alleged coup attempt there that led to the arrests of 35 people by the government.
“I’m very suspicious that there was an attempt at all,” said Berhanu Nega during an interview at his home outside of Lewisburg in north-central Pennsylvania. “This is not a government that has any credibility whatsoever in terms of telling the truth.”
He said he did not know who may have been arrested, and said it could have easily been some sort of overreaction.
“The government, every time, it panics,” he said. “It’s always treason, always acting against the government.”
Berhanu, 51, said he came to the U.S. as a young man in 1980, is married to an American citizen and has two sons. He is an associate professor of {www:economics} at nearby Bucknell University, a private liberal-arts school that enrolls about 3,400 undergraduates.
He previously taught at the university from 1990 until 1994, when he returned to Ethiopia to work at Addis Ababa University, according to a profile on the university’s Web site.
In 2005, he became the country’s first elected mayor when he won the mayoral race in Addis Ababa, the nation’s capital. But post-election violence over the election results led the Ethiopian government to shoot 193 protesters and to later jail Berhanu, other opposition leaders and thousands of supporters. Berhanu said the party was not responsible for the violent demonstrations.
The opposition leaders stood trial for nearly two years on charges of challenging the constitutional order — the charge was lessened from treason. The main clique of 38 opposition leaders pleaded guilty and were pardoned in 2007 after appealing to the government.
Berhanu and several other party leaders then left for the U.S., returning to the country in August 2007. He rejoined Bucknell as a visiting international scholar in economics in Spring 2008.
“It became very clear immediately after our release that they will not at all tolerate any opposition, meaningful opposition,” he said.
Berhanu also urged President Obama’s administration to “carefully revisit its policy toward Ethiopia.”
“It is just unseemly for any democratic government such as the United States to have any relationship with it,” he said.
(Associated Press writer Anita Powell in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this report.)
NORWAY (Epoch Times) — Droves of African families recently received asylum status from the Norwegian quasi-judicial Appeals Board (UNE), which handles appeals of rejections by the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI).
If these families were not allowed to {www:remain} in Norway, their daughters risk circumcision—a brutal practice that can leave women crippled. Most of these African applicants come from Somalia and Ethiopia, while a few of them are from Nigeria, Sudan, and Mali.
New data from Norway this year shows that 91 percent of Somalian applications have been approved and only seven have been rejected. Last year 84 percent of applicants were accepted into Norway.
The {www:percentage} for Ethiopian applicants are even higher. This year, 436 out of 467 applicants from Ethiopia have had their cases approved by the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI).
The Woyanne-led Ethiopian government has arrested 35 people suspected of a coup {www:attempt} allegedly backed by an Ethiopian economist now teaching at a Pennsylvania university, a government spokesman said Saturday.
Government spokesman Ermias Legesse said the group, which calls itself “Ginbot 7” (May 15) after the date of {www:controversial} 2005 elections in Ethiopia, was led from the U.S. by former opposition leader Berhanu Nega, who is an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University.
“It is the party led by Berhanu Nega,” said Ermias. “If he comes to Ethiopia, we’ll arrest him.”
He said the alleged plotters were arrested Friday.
Interviewed in Lewisburg, Berhanu, 51, said he had no role in organizing any coup attempt.
“I’m very suspicious that were was an attempt at all,” he said. “This is not a government that has any credibility whatsoever in terms of telling the truth.”
Berhanu was elected mayor of Addis Ababa in 2005 but was arrested afterward along with more than 100 other opposition politicians and stood trial for {www:treason}. He and the others were freed in 2007 in a pardon deal. He left Ethiopia after the trial.
“It became very clear immediately after our release that they will not at all tolerate any opposition, meaningful opposition,” he said Friday.
Ermias said the group of suspects arrested Friday was comprised of two cliques, one of former soldiers, another of civilians.
“They were caught with weapons, uniforms, even plans,” he said. “I don’t want to give details about the plans; it’s for the court case.”
Ermias said the charges have not been set and court proceedings will begin soon.
“They decided to change the government in an unconstitutional way,” he said.
Asked if he considered violent regime change inevitable, Berhanu said he was still pushing for a peaceful, negotiated solution, but the Ethiopian government was showing “absolute intransigence.”
“When the option becomes freedom (or) living in some sort of slavery, I have no doubt that people will fight for freedom,” he said.
He did not deny raising money in the U.S. for Ethiopian opposition groups.
“All opposition groups raise money in the U.S.,” he said.
He said he hoped the administration of President Barack Obama would realize it is “unseemly” for the U.S. to have any relationship with the Ethiopian regime.
The opposition won an unprecedented number of parliamentary seats in the 2005 vote, but not enough to topple Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The opposition claimed the voting was rigged, and European Union observers said it was marred by irregularities. The election was followed by violent protests. Ethiopia acknowledged that its security forces killed 193 civilians protesting alleged election fraud.
Since 2005, there has been only one opposition-led political protest in Ethiopia, held this month in Addis Ababa.
Berhanu said he believed the government is wracked by internal {www:turmoil}, perhaps even within the military.
“The government is becoming increasingly unstable and is lashing out at anyone it thinks is even mildly popular inside the country,” he said.
OSLO (Reuters) – A tree that covers a large area of eastern Ethiopia but has only recently been categorized by botanists raises hope for finding new {www:species} elsewhere, experts said.
The acacia fumosa tree, which grows in an area the size of the island of Crete, was not “found” for scientific purposes until 2006-7, mostly likely because its main habitat is a war zone.
“I have spent a lifetime looking at plants and describing species — it knocked me sideways when I heard about this tree,” David Mabberley of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, told Reuters.
“The total numbers must be in the millions,” he said of the pink-flowered, 6-m (20-ft) tall tree that covers hillsides in an {www:inaccessible} area of 8,000 sq kms (3,100 sq miles) near the border with Somalia.
In an article in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, he wrote that the tree had been overlooked by generations of botanists, apparently because of few visits to the area where the Ogaden National Liberation Front is fighting for autonomy.
The discovery was an encouraging sign that other overlooked large species might still be found, from rainforests to the ocean depths. Still, he said, scientists were “highly unlikely” to find another tree dominating such a large area.
The discovery contrasts with gloom about destruction of habitats and global warming threatening more extinctions. Environment Ministers of the Group of Eight are meeting in Italy from April 22-24 discussing ways to slow a loss of biodiversity.
“It’s an upbeat story for a change,” Mabberley said. The tree was found by Swedish botanist Mats Thulin and previously described in a Nordic journal.
People in the sparsely populated region did not exploit the tree except for firewood but it might have commercial uses, for instance in gum used for foodstuffs or glues.
About 10,000 new species of plants or creatures are described worldwide every year, most of them tiny, he said.
COELACANTH
Among exceptions, a coelacanth fish known only from fossils was caught off South Africa in 1938. The wollemi pine, also known from fossils, was found in Australia in 1994. And the saola antelope in Vietnam and Laos was identified in 1992.
“I suspect there are still large species out there to be discovered,” Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of endangered species, told Reuters.
He said that countries that have suffered conflicts — such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia or Colombia — were likely places to find overlooked species.
And some types of beaked whales that dive to great depths were only known from washed up corpses. “There are probably still a few things in the deep ocean we haven’t found,” he said.
An acacia in northern Africa that grows six meters tall and dominates the {www:landscape} across an area almost three times the size of Rhode Island is new to science.
“It’s astounding,” says David Mabberley of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England. He summarizes the findings in the April 24 Science, though the tree was officially named Acacia fumosa online in the Nordic Journal of Botany in September 2008.
Finding a new species in itself isn’t such a surprise, he says. Scientists describe and give Latin names to some 10,000 new organisms a year. About 2,350 of these are flowering plants, with a new one from Africa appearing on average every weekday. Many of these new names go to plants that have been languishing misidentified or unidentified in collections, Mabberley says, and the complete surprises are typically uncommon plants or those that have tiny ranges.
But no herbarium specimens or botanical mentions of the new acacia existed, even though it’s widespread in its homeland, says Mats Thulin of Uppsala University in Sweden, who named the plant. He has named several hundred plants but never seen a case like this.
Science got such a shock from the tree because the acacia grows in Ethiopia’s Somali National Regional State, or Ogaden. Though politically part of Ethiopia, the sparse population of the region is mostly ethnic Somali, Thulin says. The Ogaden National Liberation Front is fighting for independence and has made traveling to the region perilous.
Thulin, who spent 18 years as editor of Flora of Somalia, had never visited Ogaden until 2006, when he joined a German zoologist who had arranged to study antelopes there.
“What happened to us several times both in 2006 and 2007 was that a group of rebels was suddenly standing on the road with machine guns directed toward us,” Thulin says. The scientists carried no weapons and had put a sign on their car saying so. Each time, after an hour or two of questioning, the armed party let them go. “An American, an Ethiopian or someone working for the Ethiopian government would have been in big trouble,” he says.
Almost immediately on seeing the acacia, Thulin says, he recognized it as an unknown species. It had unusual, smooth, gray bark, for example. On a later trip, he discovered that it burst into pink, sweet-smelling blooms during the dry {www:season}, when no leaves were on the trees. Its relatives bloom in yellow or creamy flowers during the wet season.
With a bit of travel and some help form Google Earth, Thulin realized how widespread the acacia is in its arid habitat. The tree provides vegetation in a landscape too dry for perennial grasses. And, like other acacias, has glands where ants sip nectar, so there may be a tree-insect mutualism.
Finding another such surprise may not be too likely, according to Tom Daniel, botany curator at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. New species, yes. Plenty to name. But something this widespread that scientists haven’t seen — “This is pretty unusual,” he says.
OTTAWA, CANADA -A decommissioned ambulance dedicated to former Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar will soon be in service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
At a handover ceremony outside City Hall yesterday, Councillor Diane Deans gave the keys to the ambulance to Samuel Getachew of Friends of Ethiopia, which organized the project and raised the money to ship the ambulance to Ethiopia. The group will also be shipping medical and educational supplies, along with computers donated by Algonquin College.
“It’s nice for citizens of Ottawa to give a second life to a decommissioned ambulance,” says Deans, who lobbied her fellow councilors to donate the vehicle. “That ambulance probably saved a lot of lives in Ottawa and now it will save a lot more in its new home in Ethiopia.”
Getachew has dedicated the ambulance in memory of Dewar, a “dear friend” who gave him advice in the early stages of this project. Her son, Ottawa Center MP Paul Dewar, was also at the City Hall ceremony yesterday.
“We wanted to send something useful, and Africans need something that can help them be self-sufficient, and we believe an ambulance is a good start,” says Getachew, who has worked on the project for almost two years.
The ambulance will be donated to the foundation run by Abebch Gobena, a well-known children’s activist in Addis Ababa. “She has raised 5,000 orphans, and she has a small hospital in her compound and branches all over Ethiopia.”
Pennsylvania, USA (AP). – An economics professor at a Pennsylvania university said Saturday he supports efforts to spread democracy in his native Ethiopia, but denied backing an alleged coup attempt there that led to the arrests of 35 people by the government.
OSLO (Reuters) – A tree that covers a large area of eastern Ethiopia but has only recently been categorized by botanists raises hope for finding new {www:species} elsewhere, experts said.
OTTAWA, CANADA -A decommissioned ambulance dedicated to former Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar will soon be in service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.