Hundreds of mismanaged infrastructure projects have stalled in Kenya and it will cost around $10 billion to revive them, the IMF said in a report whose findings point to a growing power struggle at the heart of government.

Amid mounting public anger over ballooning state debt and a series of graft scandals, President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday confirmed acting finance minister Ukur Yatani in the post after its previous incumbent, Henry Rotich, was charged with financial misconduct — an accusation he denies.

The government has acknowledged that some past investment projects did not pass muster, and Yatani told a budget preparation meeting on Wednesday that available resources would be “dedicated only to projects and programs that will ensure higher economic and social returns.”

Yatani, an ally of Kenyatta while Rotich was closer to Deputy President William Ruto, has won support from voters since provisionally taking over at the ministry in July.

The International Monetary Fund report, published on Wednesday, lays bare the scale of the task Yatani now faces. It said an estimated 500 projects — around half of the total v had ground to a halt due to “non-payment to contractors, insufficient allocation of funds to projects, and litigation cases in court.”

The state would need to raise around 1 trillion shillings ($10 billion) to complete them, the report said.

Kenya has ramped up public investment projects since 2010. But that increase “occurred without enough screening for project viability and readiness before they entered the budget,” the IMF said.

“There has been a subsequent squeeze on ongoing projects in the absence of fiscal space, which is now accruing large costs to the government.”

The fund named no specific projects, but construction of roads, markets and stadiums has stalled all over the country. Unpaid bills from the infrastructure department to suppliers and contractors totaled 78 billion shillings as of June, the IMF said.

Yatani said the government was reconstituting its planning and project monitoring unit to “ensure timely completion of projects and realization of value for money.”

His confirmation as finance minister was part of a government reshuffle that adds to signs of a rift between Kenyatta, who must step down when his second five-year term finishes in 2022, and Ruto, who considers himself the heir apparent but has begun to fall out of favor.

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In April, just weeks after his summit with U.S. President Donald Trump collapsed in Hanoi, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un decided to ramp up the pressure on Washington.  

“We will wait for a bold decision from the U.S. with patience till the end of this year,” Kim said in a speech to North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly.

Just three weeks later, Kim launched his first missiles in nearly a year and a half and would conduct 12 more rounds of launches in 2019, underscoring the urgency of his year-end deadline.

At one point in early December, North Korean state media published near-daily warnings of Kim’s deadline, including one threat from a Foreign Affairs Ministry official regarding a potentially sinister “Christmas gift” for the U.S.

The top U.S. Air Force general in the Pacific region said he expected North Korea’s gift to be a long-range missile launch. The U.S. increased surveillance flights around the Korean peninsula, apparently on alert for weapons tests.

The Christmas gift never came, though.  

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With Nuclear Talks Stalled, N. Korea Says Up to US to Select ‘Christmas Gift’

North Korea wants sanctions relief before making concessions

Maybe, some analysts said, North Korea was waiting for Kim’s annual New Year’s speech to unveil a major, provocative announcement.  

That didn’t really happen either. Kim’s New Year’s comments were relatively restrained, striking a more pessimistic than provocative tone.  

All of this raises questions. Why did North Korea steadily raise tensions for much of 2019, only to let them apparently fizzle out once the deadline passed, and what does that say about how North Korea will act in 2020?

North Korean ‘strategic patience’

The short answer is that nobody knows.  

One big clue is Kim’s New Year’s remarks, which came at the end of an important meeting of ruling party politicians in Pyongyang.  

Kim warned the world would soon witness a “new strategic weapon” and said he no longer feels bound by his moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear tests, which he unilaterally declared in April 2018, just as his diplomacy with Trump was beginning.

Kim did not formally abandon nuclear talks, though. Instead, he said their progress depends on the U.S. — progress that won’t likely come anytime soon, he added. North Korea, he said, should be prepared for a “long-term” standoff with Washington.

That could be North Korea’s version of “strategic patience,” according to North Korea analyst Koo Kab-woo. That is a reference to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s attempt to apply carefully calibrated economic and military pressure until Pyongyang was ready to make concessions at the negotiating table.

For North Korea, strategic patience includes emphasizing “self-reliance, an increase in its nuclear deterrent, and stronger diplomacy that could bring about the denuclearization [of North Korea] if the U.S. lifts its confrontational policies,” said Koo, a scholar at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, at a recent conference.

While that strategy may include more weapons tests, as hinted at in Kim’s speech, North Korea may be reluctant to cross any “red line” that would prompt a major reaction by Washington, Koo said.  

An intercontinental ballistic missile or nuclear test could also upset China and Russia when both countries are pressuring the U.S. to relax sanctions on North Korea, analysts have said.  

As a result, North Korea may not fully provoke or fully engage the U.S. in the near future — a policy of intentional ambiguity, Koo said.

Bigger moves coming?

Not everyone agrees with the strategic patience analogy, though.

“Strategic patience implies that North Korea has expectations from U.S.-DPRK diplomacy,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an analyst for the North Korea-focused NK News online publication, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  

According to Lee, Kim’s New Year’s comments signaled he has “little to no hope” for a diplomatic breakthrough.

“My feeling is that he is buying time for himself, not because he is hopeful of concessions from the U.S., but because he is not ready to showcase the ‘new strategic weapon’ yet,” she said.  

There’s still a possibility that North Korea may act more forcefully this year, Lee said.

“It could be that Kim feels it’s not the right time to provoke. It could be the China factor, it could be that Kim is waiting for the right moment in the U.S. presidential election, or it could be that he wants to see some progress on the problems on the economic front,” she said.  

Status quo

If North Korea is reluctant to upset the status quo for now, though, that may be just fine for Trump, who is entering a more intense phase of his reelection campaign and has been focused on other foreign policy issues, such as Iran.

“As long as North Korea doesn’t launch long-range missiles and doesn’t test nuclear devices, I think Trump can claim that everything is alright,” said Artyom Lukin, an international relations scholar at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia.

Trump’s reelection campaign has portrayed the North Korea talks as a major foreign policy win, and Trump remains publicly optimistic about their eventual success, even as North Korea stormed away from talks and conducted a near-record number of weapons tests in 2019.  

However, there does appear to be a limit for Trump. Last month, he signaled he would be disappointed if Kim resumed ICBM or nuclear tests. “He knows I have an election coming up. I don’t think he wants to interfere with that, but we’ll have to see,” Trump said.

Trump may be employing his own version of strategic patience, according to Lukin, describing the approach as: “We are ready to talk when you are ready, but we can wait.”

Who will move first?

If both the U.S. and North Korea are showing signs of “strategic patience,” the big question is: Who can afford to wait longer?  

In Lukin’s view, the situation is much more urgent for North Korea.

“Any radical move they make is only going to make their position worse. If they start testing long-range missiles, it will carry all sorts of risks for them. If they start real denuclearization, it’s also a very risky thing,” Lukin said.

“The only thing that’s left for Kim Jong Un is to wait, wait, and wait. But you could wait a long time — you could wait forever and nothing could happen, actually,” he added.  

Signs of frustration

One sign of North Korean frustration came last week, when senior North Korean Foreign Affairs Ministry official Kim Kye Gwan accused the U.S. of taking advantage of the relationship between Trump and Kim.

Though the Trump-Kim relationship remains “not bad,” it is also not enough to ensure the talks progress, he said. 

“Although Chairman Kim Jong Un has … good personal feelings about President Trump, they are, in the true sense of the word, ‘personal,'” the diplomat said.  

Nuclear talks can only resume, Kim said, once the U.S. agrees to totally accept all of North Korea’s demands. 

“But we know well that the U.S. is neither ready nor able to do so,” he added.
 

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High on the wall of a German church where Martin Luther once preached, an ugly remnant of centuries of anti-Semitism is now at the center of a court battle.
    
The so-called “Judensau,” or “Jew pig,” sculpture on the Town Church in Wittenberg dates back to around 1300. It is perhaps the best-known of more than 20 such relics from the Middle Ages, in various forms and varying states of repair, that still adorn churches across Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
    
Located about 4 meters (13 feet) above the ground on a corner of the church, it depicts people identifiable by their headwear as Jews suckling on the teats of a sow, while a rabbi lifts the animal’s tail. In 1570, after the Protestant Reformation, an inscription referring to an anti-Jewish tract by Luther was added.
    
Judaism considers pigs impure, and no one disputes that the sculpture is deliberately offensive. But there is strong disagreement about what consequences that should have and what to do with the relief.
    
A court in the eastern city of Naumburg will consider on Tuesday a Jewish man’s bid to make the parish take it down.
    
It’s the second round in the legal dispute, which comes at a time of mounting concern about anti-Semitism in modern Germany. In May, a court ruled against plaintiff Michael Duellmann, who wants the relief put in the nearby Luther House museum.
    
Judges in Dessau rejected arguments that he has a right to have the sculpture removed because it formally constitutes slander and the parish is legally responsible for that. Duellmann appealed.
    
The relief “is a terrible falsification of Judaism, a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people,” Duellmann says, arguing that it has “a terrible effect up to this day.”
    
Duellmann, a former student of Protestant theology who converted to Judaism in the 1970s, became involved in the issue in 2017, the year Germany marked the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. He says he joined vigils in Wittenberg against the sculpture and was asked if he would be prepared to sue when it became clear that the church wasn’t prepared to take it down.

‘Culture of remembrance’
    
Luther is said to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of another church in Wittenberg in defiance of Roman Catholic authorities in 1517, starting the German Reformation. He also is known for anti-Jewish invective, from which Germany’s Lutheran church has distanced itself.
    
Luther preached at the Town Church, now a regular stop for tourists visiting Wittenberg.
 
When the church was renovated in the early 1980s, the parish decided to leave the sandstone sculpture in place, and it was also restored. In 1988, a memorial was built on the ground underneath it, referring to the persecution of Jews and the killing of 6 million in the Nazi Holocaust.
    
In addition, a cedar tree was planted nearby to signify peace, and a sign gives information on the sculpture in German and English.
    
Pastor Johannes Block says the church is “in the same boat” as the plaintiff and also considers the sculpture unacceptably insulting. The parish, he says, “also is not happy about this difficult inheritance.”
    
However, he argues that the sculpture “no longer speaks for itself as a solitary piece,” but is embedded in a “culture of remembrance” thanks to the memorial. “We don’t want to hide or abolish history, but take the path of reconciliation with and through history,” he says.
   
 “The majority of the Town Church parish doesn’t want this to become a museum piece, but to warn and ask people to remember history on the building, with the original,” Block says.
    
Duellmann isn’t impressed. “The ‘Jew pig’ is not weakened” by the memorial, he says. “It continues to have a terrible anti-Semitic effect in the church and in society.”

World Heritage site

There are mixed opinions in the church, too. Last year, the regional Lutheran bishop, Friedrich Kramer, said he favors taking down the sculpture from the church wall and exhibiting it in public at the site with an explanation. He doesn’t favor putting it in a museum. He praised the 1988 memorial but said it has weaknesses, including a failure to address Luther’s anti-Semitism.
    
If judges do order the sculpture removed, that may not be the end of the story. Block says the church would ask authorities to assess whether it is possible to remove it from a building that is under a preservation order, and more talks with the court would probably follow.
    
The church is a UNESCO World Heritage site, a status that it gained in 1996.
    
Plaintiff Duellmann has little sympathy with the church’s preservation order dilemma. He contends that authorities deliberately failed to mention the offending sculpture at the time of the application in order not to endanger it.
    
Whatever the outcome, Block says he regrets that the case went to court.
   
 ‘We are not advocates and initiators” of the sculpture, he says. “We are heirs and are trying to deal very conscientiously with this inheritance.”

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The Trump administration is set to release Thursday updated guidance on prayer in public schools that officials are touting as President Donald Trump’s commitment to religious freedom.

Trump has made religious freedom a signature issue in his domestic and foreign policy, declaring a Religious Freedom Day and directing the State Department to host an annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, among other actions.   

The updated U.S. Education Department’s guidance on prayer in public elementary and secondary schools is drawing cheers from Trump’s most vocal supporters among Evangelical Christians.

What does the law say about school prayer?

While school-sponsored prayer in U.S. public schools is prohibited, individual and group prayers on school grounds are not. American schools once used to start their day with a prayer or a reading from the Bible. That tradition came to a halt in 1962 when the Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayers violated the Constitution’s  prohibition on establishing an official religion. Subsequent court rulings have recognized prayer in school as constitutionally protected.  

What does the U.S. Education Department guidance say?

The guidance, last updated in 2003, requires local educational agencies to certify on an annual basis that they have no policy that prevents constitutionally protected prayer in elementary and secondary public schools. The education department can cut off funding to schools that don’t comply with the policy. The department provides tens of billions of dollars to public elementary and secondary schools. More broadly, the guidance keeps school districts apprised of the law and the extent to which school prayer is constitutionally and legally protected.

What is allowed?

Students are free to pray alone or in groups while not in class or engaged in other school activities. They can read the Bible or other scriptures, such as the Koran. They may be excused from class to attend a prayer. Teachers may similarly take part in religious activities as long as they make clear they’re not doing so “in their official capacities,” according to the guidance.

What is not allowed?

While religion can be taught in public schools, schools are not allowed to sponsor religious activities such as prayers. Teachers, administrators and school employees are forbidden from “encouraging or discouraging prayer and from actively participating in religious activities with students,” according to the guidance.  For example, teachers may not lead their classes in prayer. Nor can school administrators include prayer in school-sponsored events.

What is being updated?

The Education Department hasn’t disclosed details of the updated guidance. However, White House Domestic Policy Council Director Joe Grogan told reporters Thursday morning the guidance “will remind school districts of the rights of students, parents and teachers, and will empower students in others to confidently know and exercise their rights.”

In addition to the education department updating its school prayer guidance, nine federal agencies are releasing proposed rules that will remove “discriminatory regulatory burdens” that the Obama administration placed on religious organizations that receive federal funding, Grogan said.

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For almost two years, a group of dedicated young women in a conservative neighborhood of Pakistan has been working to beat the odds and change the culture around them. The women are doing it by cycling. VOA’s Ayesha Tanzeem reports from Pakistan’s largest city Karachi

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Prince Harry went back to work Thursday, mixing with children playing rugby and offering no hint of the days of turmoil that followed his recent announcement that he wished to step back from royal duties and become financially independent.

It was a fairly standard event for Harry, who watched as children from a local school offer a rugby demonstration on the Buckingham Palace grounds. Though ordinary, it marked the first time Harry had taken on a public engagement since announcing last week that he and his wife Meghan needed a change.

He joked with the kids and shook hands — offering flashes of the beaming smile that has made him one of the most popular members of the House of Windsor. He ignored a journalist’s question about ongoing discussions on his future.

“Look after the grass though, yeah?” he said to the children before retreating into his grandmother’s house. “Otherwise I’ll get in trouble.”

Queen Elizabeth II brokered a deal on Monday that determined there would be “a period of transition” to sort out the complicated matter of how to be a part-time royal. Meghan and Harry will spend time in both Canada and the U.K. as things are sorted out.

Royal aides are working around the clock to find solutions to the crisis. He is expected to remain in the U.K. into the coming week.

Meghan is already in Canada, where she has carried out visits to charities in Vancouver including Justice For Girls, which campaigns for an end to violence, poverty and racism for teenagers.

In the meantime, Harry released two video statements on causes he has long championed: mental health and the Invictus Games.

In the first video, he introduced a new initiative to champion the importance of mental health for those who play rugby. The initiative aims to combine sport with mental health awareness at a time when suicide is the leading cause of death for men between the ages of 20 and 49 in the U.K.

In footage posted on the Sussexroyal Instagram page, he also launched the next leg of the Invictus Games for wounded service personnel and veterans. The event will be held in Duesseldorf in 2022.

As part of his duties Thursday, the prince also hosted the Rugby League World Cup 2021 draw in the palace’s grand throne room. He spoke about sport having the power to change lives.

“It’s saving lives as well,” Harry said. “So I think for me and … everybody in this room, whether it’s rugby league, or sports in general … it needs to be in everybody’s life if possible.”

Harry then pulled the first ball of the draw, which decided the opening game for England’s men’s team. The country picked was Samoa. 

 

 

 

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