African press review 4 February 2017

More on upcoming Kenyan elections make the headlines as well as South Sudan, on whether the capital should be moved from Juba to Ramciel, and finally follow up on the ill patients deaths in South Africa.

Kenya’s The Standard leads today with Jubilee saying they “won’t be shaken” as NASA brigade moves to Rift.

Opposition leaders under the National Super Alliance (NASA) umbrella will hold Saturday their first rally since they formally endorsed their new coalition.

But more importantly, speaking of the upcoming elections, The Standard also has an article on how the electoral commission is working with the National Registration Bureau (NRB) to verify voters’ ID details a week after it admitted almost 130 000 voters were registered more than once.

According to the latest data, the NRB has confirmed that almost 60 000 ID numbers used in the registration are non-existent in their system while just over 20 000 are cases of a single ID used to register more than once.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) data indicates that cases of double registration are spread across the country.

Opposition CORD leader Raila Odinga said he feared the number of ghost voters will be around 1.5 million and he said he had evidence that IEBC data was being manipulated.

The Daily Nation on the other hand leads with “The sorry state of public schools across the country can be revealed today.”

A survey conducted by the Saturday Nation presents a picture of “decay, disuse and neglect in the schools.”

The article says that pupils learn under difficult conditions while teachers struggle to create order where chaos reigns.

The article reveals that in many areas it is a case of absence of infrastructure as children sit on the floor, or stones and logs and open sewers, dumpsites in schools, crumbling ceilings, cracked walls and potholed floors, characterise the conditions under which many children in public schools learn.

An official - who refused to give his name for fear of reprisal from bosses at the Nairobi County Government - told the Daily Nation, that many officials, including those from National Environment Management Authority (Nema) and an engineer from the county government had visited the school and pledged action, but nothing had been done.

Education experts decried the meagre allocations for school repairs, maintenance and improvements under the Free Primary Education programme, currently set at Sh127 per child, which they say is inadequate to maintain school infrastructure.

The East African leads with Uganda ruling out trusteeship in South Sudan. The government said imposing an external "trusteeship" government on South Sudan to try to end a three-year ethnic civil war and potential genocide in the world's youngest nation would only make its security situation worse.

Ugandan Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Okello Oryem rejected the notion, saying such interference would be considered a “colonial mentality”.

And speaking of Juba  - plans to relocate South Sudan's capital from Juba to Ramciel in Lakes State received a boost after Morocco agreed to fund a $5 million feasibility study says the East African. The commitment offers a lifeline to the broke government of South Sudan.

South Africa’s The Star leads with the “Long wait ahead for mentally ill patients”. The article says that the arduous process of moving hundreds of Life Esidimeni patients from ill-equipped NGOs will likely begin only in the coming weeks.

This after the office of Gauteng Premier David Makhura announced that a task team would be able to effect change only once it had gathered enough information on the number of living patients still without real care and how many competent facilities there were to house them.

A number of NGOs that may have been responsible for the negligent care leading to at least 94 deaths have refused to speak out, insisting the government should answer for the tragedy.

For a more information on this story though, there is a full 68-page long report in Business Day today.