At least eight Kenyan Somalis have been killed in renewed fighting between two Somali clans in and outside the north-eastern Kenyan city of Mandera bordering Somalia early on Wednesday morning, a source from Mandera told APA in Mogadishu.
The fighting which erupted over the ownership of grazing lands first started in Koroney village about 14km south of Mandera and then spread into the town, Somali elder Abdi Samad Nur Ibrahim told APA by phone on Wednesday morning.
Abdi Samad Nur Ibrahim said in a telephone conversation with APA that 6 people were killed early Wednesday morning after they left a mosque in Mandera while 2 others were killed in Koroney village.
“The situation in Mandera is very tense today and the riot police are using teargas and rubber bullets to quell the intensifying fighting between Garre and Murale Kenyan ethnic Somalis,” he added.
“People were using swords, knives, bayonets and axes in the fighting and many bleeding people could be seen running everywhere in the city,” he added.
Schools and businesses were closed down because of the reigning tension and the clan-based hostility in the city.
Last week, at least 9 people were killed and dozens of houses burned when the two clans first fought over the ownership of grazing lands, but police and local elders were able to quell the incident.
Mandera is located in the north eastern part of Kenya, bordering Ethiopia and Somalia. It is located at 1000km from Mogadishu.
Inflation in most East African countries is said to be rising this year. In Ethiopia it moved from 33.6 % in August to37.2 % in September; In Kenya from 27.6% in August 2008 to 28.2% in September 2008 and In Tanzania a 10-year high point of 11.6 percent in September.
Inflation in Ethiopia for the month of September 2008 rises to 37.2 % from 33.6 % in August and from 27.6% in August to 28.2% in September in Kenya, while annual inflation in Tanzania surged to a 10-year high point of 11.6 percent in September owing to soaring food prices, official data from the National Bureau of Statistics show.
Inflation on food items in Ethiopia for the month of September 2008 has also reached 51.8 % from 46.9% in August. After the Ethiopian government TPLF announced lifting subsidy on fuel and shifted to importing wheat, many people including the opposition parties expressing their fear that the current inflation in the country will get worse.
According to critics, it is better for thegovernment Woyanne to continue subsidizing at least kerosene along with importing wheat and selling it with cheaper prices for the low income groups, which represents the majority of the around 80 million population of Ethiopia.
The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) indicated that the overall year on year inflation rate increased from 27.6% in August 2008 to 28.2% in September 2008. Underlying inflation, excluding food prices, rose more modestly from 13.1% to 13.3%.
On a monthly basis, food items (2%), housing costs (2%) and medical goods and services (1.4%) showed the strongest price increases. Year on year, food and non-alcoholic drinks (37.2%), fuel and power (31.6%), transport and communications (19.1%), alcohol and tobacco (15.6%) and medical goods and services (14%) had the largest price increases.
In August this year, the inflation rate in Tanzania was 9.8 percent. The recent surge indicates a 1.8-point increase within a month. In February this year, inflation was 8.9 percent.
Analysts say the government would not be able to bring down the inflation rate to seven percent by the end of the current financial year.
Dr Honest Ngowi of the Mzumbe University, said: “The seven percent goal is now unrealistic since, under the current system, Tanzania has nothing in place to control food and fuel prices, the two most dominant factors in the country’s inflation basket,” according to the citizen newspaper in Tanzania.
He said since the inflationary spiral was mainly on food, fuel and other production factors, it would be very difficult for the country to control it in the short-term.
“It could be easily contained if it was caused by excess money supply on the market. However, this is due to production factors,” he said.
He said this could worsen considering that the holiday season was just around the corner.
“Inflation will now be fluctuating between 10 and 12 percent. It requires magic for the government to bring it back to seven per cent,” said Dr Semboja Haji, of the University of Dar es Salaam’s Economic Research Bureau (ERB).
He criticized the government for having no mechanism in place to protect the country from the negative effects of economic developments outside.
PRINCETON, NJ — Barack Obama maintains a lead over John McCain in the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update from Saturday through Monday; the size of the lead varies between seven and 10 percentage points among likely voters, depending on turnout assumptions.
Among all registered voters, there has been fairly little variation in recent days, with Obama receiving between 50% and 52% of the vote over the last five reports and McCain in a range between 41% and 43%. In the current three-day rolling average of registered voters Obama remains ahead by 52% to 41%, exactly the same as Monday’s update. (To view the complete trend since March 7, 2008, click here.)
Gallup’s modeling of likely voters indicates the race is slightly tighter if we assume that voter turnout patterns will be similar to those seen in most presidential elections from 1952 through 2004. Using this “traditional” definition of likely voters, which takes into account respondents’ history of voting, as well as their current interest in the campaign and self-reported likelihood to vote, Obama leads McCain by seven points, 51% to 44%. This is tied for Obama’s largest lead among this group since Gallup began reporting likely voters in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.
An alternative, expanded likely voter model shows what would happen if turnout reflects voters’ self-reported likelihood to vote and campaign interest, but is not assumed to be dependent on their voting history. Under these assumptions, Obama leads by 10 points, 52% to 42%. — Frank Newport
(Click here to see how the race currently breaks down by demographic subgroup.)
Can we trust the polls this year? That’s a question many people have been asking as we approach the end of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is yes — with qualifications.
To start with, political polling is inherently imperfect. Academic pollsters say that to get a really random sample, you should go back to a designated respondent in a specific household time and again until you get a response. But political pollsters who must report results overnight have to take the respondents they can reach. So they weight the results of respondents in different groups to get a sample that approximates the whole population they’re sampling.
Another problem is the increasing number of cell phone-only households. Gallup and Pew have polled such households, and found their candidate preferences aren’t much different from those with landlines; and some pollsters have included cell-phone numbers in their samples. A third problem is that an increasing number of Americans refuse to be polled. We can’t know for sure if they’re different in some pertinent respects from those who are willing to answer questions.
Professional pollsters are seriously concerned about these issues. But this year especially, many who ask if we can trust the polls are usually concerned about something else: Can we trust the poll when one of the presidential candidates is black?
It is commonly said that the polls in the 1982 California and the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial races overstated the margin for the black Democrats who were running — Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder. The theory to account for this is that some poll respondents in each case were unwilling to say they were voting for the white Republican.
It’s not clear that race was the issue. Recently pollster Lance Tarrance and political consultant Sal Russo, who worked for Bradley’s opponent George Deukmejian, have written (Mr. Tarrance in RealClearPolitics.com, and Mr. Russo on this page) that their polls got the election right and that public pollsters failed to take into account a successful Republican absentee voter drive. Blair Levin, a Democrat who worked for Bradley, has argued in the same vein in the New York Times. In Virginia, Douglas Wilder was running around 50% in the polls and his Republican opponent Marshall Coleman was well behind; yet Mr. Wilder won with 50.1% of the vote.
These may have been cases of the common phenomenon of the better-known candidate getting about the same percentage from voters as he did in polls, and the lesser-known candidate doing better with voters than he had in the polls. Some significant percentage of voters will pull the lever for the Republican (or the Democratic) candidate even if they didn’t know his name or much about him when they entered the voting booth. In any case, Harvard researcher Daniel Hopkins, after examining dozens of races involving black candidates, reported this year, at a meeting of the Society of Political Methodology, that he’d found no examples of the “Bradley Effect” since 1996.
And what about Barack Obama? In most of the presidential primaries, Sen. Obama received about the same percentage of the votes as he had in the most recent polls. The one notable exception was in New Hampshire, where Hillary Clinton’s tearful moment seems to have changed many votes in the last days.
Yet there was a curious anomaly: In most primaries Mr. Obama tended to receive higher percentages in exit polls than he did from the voters. What accounts for this discrepancy?
While there is no definitive answer, it’s worth noting that only about half of Americans approached to take the exit poll agree to do so (compared to 90% in Mexico and Russia). Thus it seems likely that Obama voters — more enthusiastic about their candidate than Clinton voters by most measures (like strength of support in poll questions) — were more willing to fill out the exit poll forms and drop them in the box.
What this suggests is that Mr. Obama will win about the same percentage of votes as he gets in the last rounds of polling before the election. That’s not bad news for his campaign, as the polls stand now. The realclearpolitics.com average of recent national polls, as I write, shows Mr. Obama leading John McCain by 50% to 45%.
If Mr. Obama gets the votes of any perceptible number of undecideds (or if any perceptible number of them don’t vote) he’ll win a popular vote majority, something only one Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, has done in the last 40 years.
In state polls, Mr. Obama is currently getting 50% or more in the realclearpolitics.com averages in states with 286 electoral votes, including four carried by George W. Bush — Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico and Virginia. He leads, with less than 50%, in five more Bush ’04 states with 78 electoral votes — Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio. It’s certainly plausible, given the current state of opinion, that he would carry several if not all of them.
Of course, the balance of opinion could change, as it has several times in this campaign, and as it has in the past. Harry Truman was trailing Thomas E. Dewey by 5% in the last Gallup poll in 1948, conducted between Oct. 15 and 25 — the same margin by which Mr. Obama seems to be leading now. But on Nov. 2, 18 days after Gallup’s first interviews and eight days after its last, Truman ended up winning 50% to 45%. Gallup may well have gotten it right when in the field; opinion could just have changed.
We have no way of knowing, since George Gallup was just about the only public pollster back then, and he decided on the basis of his experience in the three preceding presidential elections that there was no point in testing opinion in the last week. Now we have a rich body of polling data, of varying reliability, available.
And we will have the exit poll, the partial results of which will be released to the media clients of the Edison/Mitofsky consortium at 5 p.m. on Election Day. These clients should, I believe, use the numbers cautiously for the following reasons.
First, the exit polls in the recent presidential elections have tended to show the Democrats doing better than they actually did, partly because of interviewer error. The late Warren Mitofsky, in his study of the 2004 exit poll, found that the largest errors came in precincts where the interviewers were female graduate students.
Second, the exit polls in almost all the primaries this year showed Mr. Obama doing better than he actually did. The same respondent bias — the greater willingness of Obama voters to be polled — which apparently occurred on primary days could also occur in the exit poll on Election Day, and in the phone polls of early and absentee voters that Edison/Mitofsky will conduct to supplement it.
The exit poll gives us, and future political scientists, a treasure trove of information about the voting behavior of subgroups of the electorate, and also some useful insight into the reasons why people voted as they did. And the current plethora of polls gives us a rich lode of information on what voters are thinking at each stage of the campaign. But political polls are imperfect instruments. Reading them right is less a science than an art. We can trust the polls, with qualifications. We will have a chance to verify as the election returns come in.
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Michael Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics 2008” (National Journal Group). From 1974 to 1981 he was a vice president of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, a polling firm.
The top U.S. official for human rights and democracy issues has met Ethiopia’s TPLF leaders to express concern about pending legislation that critics say would curtail political freedoms. VOA’s Peter Heinlein in Addis Ababa reports Ethiopian Woyanne officials flatly reject the criticisms, arguing that the rights of citizens are being protected.
Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights David Kramer says he came to Ethiopia this week to ask Prime Minister Dictator extraordinaire Meles Zenawi to reconsider provisions in a draft law that would criminalize many activities of foreign non-governmental organizations. The bill is set for presentation to parliament in the coming days.
The so-called Charities and Societies Proclamation would give the government oversight authority over NGOs receiving at least 10 percent foreign funding, including money from Ethiopians living abroad. It prohibits these NGOs from promoting the advancement of human and democratic rights, gender equality or the rights of children and the disabled.
After what he described as a ‘useful and productive’ two-hour meeting with the prime minister, Dictator Assistant Secretary Kramer told reporters he had expressed U.S. concerns about a number of issues, including the conduct of recent local council elections and a newly-passed law limiting press freedom.
“I did convey to him concerns that we have and we have heard from others about some trends that would point to a closing of political space. When you look at the April election earlier this year, when you look at the media law that was passed. When you look at the draft CSO legislation, and we had a discussion about that,” he said.
Kramer says he is worried about provisions in the draft legislation that could force the closure of several aid projects funded by the U.S. government. “My bureau for example funds programs that deal with issues of women’s empowerment, with media, with conflict resolution, and based on my understanding of the latest version of the proclamation that I’ve seen so far, those programs could be adversely affected,” he said.
Ethiopian officials TPLF have staunchly defended the draft law, saying it will not jeopardize the rights of Ethiopians. In a recent VOA interview, senior government adviser TPLF cadre Bereket Simon dismissed criticisms that the proposal would constitute a blow to democracy. “This is simply a ridiculous assertion. Since we’re promoting democracy, I don’t think any genuinely democratic NGO shall be afraid of empowering our people. We are empowering our people. Nothing has been taken from the right of the people, and that’s what concerns us most, and if these NGO critics are really interested in what is taking place in Ethiopia, in empowering the public, I think there should be no concern or fear,” he said.
Assistant Secretary of State Kramer declined to speculate on what impact passage of the Charities Proclamation might have on the level of U.S. aid to Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa country is currently the third largest recipient of U.S. aid in Africa, after Egypt and Sudan. During fiscal year 2008, U.S. assistance to Ethiopia Woyanne totaled nearly $800 million, most of it humanitarian food military aid.
There are an estimated 3,000 NGOs currently operating in Ethiopia. Their combined budgets are believed to be more than $1 billion a year.
Somalia’s opposition leader, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, has declared that he is “hopeful” about the successful signing of a final peace agreement with the country’s Ethiopian Woyanne-backed interim government.
Speaking in Yemen, the chairman of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) told reporters Tuesday that Somali government officials and opposition delegates are expected to meet again next week in Djibouti.
“A final peace deal will be signed at the next meeting, which calls for the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops TPLF and a nationwide ceasefire,” Sheikh Sharif said.
He indicated that a delegation from the international community, led by UN Special Envoy Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, will attend the Djibouti negotiations as observers.
Piracy and the facilitation of humanitarian assistance will be hot topics at the next meeting between Somali government and opposition delegates, some of who just returned from a seminar in South Africa.
Sheikh Sharif especially thanked Yemeni President Ali Abdalla Salah for supporting policies aimed at bringing last peace to war-torn Somalia.
Some rebel groups have refused to recognize the peace deal between the Somali government and the ARS, including an ARS faction based in Eritrea and led by Islamist hardliner Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys.
On Tuesday, insurgents attacked Somali-Ethiopian Woyanne troops who were conducting search operations in Mogadishu’s Huriwa district.
