LEAVING HOME: Villagers flee from Witu in Lamu County.Photo/File
'ALIENS UNDER ARREST': The crackdown in Eastleigh. ?Usalama Watch ultimately became essentially an anti-Somali, anti-Muslim operation, both because of this bumbling approach to policy making and also because the primary institutions on which the regime is relying to implement these half-baked policies are themselves rotted through with corruption.?Photo/File
THE AFTERMATH OF TERROR: (Above) Lamu county residents mourn on seeing bodies of their relatives at Mpeketoni mortuary. Photo/Elkana Jacob
POST ELECTION VIOLENCE: (Left) Burning tyre on top of a vandalised car Unlike the cycles of violence in the 1990s, what is happening now in many parts of Kenya doesn?t appear to have an owner with the keys to turn things on and off.Photo/Elkana Jacob
FOUR OR SO years ago, speaking to a Lamu elder who was totally fed up with decades of marginalization from the political and economic center of the country, I asked about the post-election violence of 2008.
He response was unequivocal: “What we need here in Pwani is a gongo (bludgeon); a gongo greater than the one we have seen in the Rift Valley to teach them a lesson.”
In the 1990s, the Moi regime perfected the use of violence for political purposes. The violence was always most intense around election time – especially in the Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western Provinces.
The net effect of this was in part to turn the process of going to the polls every five years into existential events about which there was always the nagging fear that Kenya could slip into the abyss if the violence got out of control. The rigged election in 2007 almost proved these fears right when it resulted in a convulsion that was the most dramatic in Kenya’s history and took us to the brink of civil war.
Even though these cycles of violence displaced hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, after elections most of them made efforts to return to their land and rebuild their lives.
The unspoken understanding was this on their part: “we know these attacks are state orchestrated and political. After the elections, once Moi is back at State House, the violence will recede.”
In other words, the violence had an owner with the key to turn it on and off. In a bizarre twist of logic this meant the violence was far less destabilizing than one would perhaps have anticipated.
Things changed in 2007. The violence following that election was totally frightening because even though the political elite owned it at first, matters quickly slipped out of their control.
Across sections of the country young machete-wielding men manned roadblocks shaking down everyone who drove by who looked better off than they were. Had the violence persisted for another couple of weeks Kenya would have burnt down.
THE START OF THE GONGO IN PWANI
Over the past couple of months it would appear as if Pwani has bubbled over.
This is only the latest region go aflame in an arc of death that stretches from Southern Kenya at the Coast; crosses the country all the way to the borders with Somalia and Ethiopia stretching across the entire northern part of Kenya; and then down into Western Kenya.
Since June over 100 Kenyans have been murdered at the Coast in attacks; some of which, like the first attack on June 14 at the Lake Kenyatta/Mpeketoni settlement scheme in Lamu County, al Shabaab claimed credit for. Since 2012, over 20 Imams or Islamic preachers have been assassinated.
The most alarming thing for residents is that many of these attacks had been predicted, for example, the authorities admitted having been warned beforehand that the June 14 strike was coming but no mitigation measures were implemented. Even worse, after the deployment of security personnel, including the military, the attacks continued. In one case the attackers took time to harvest two acres of maize at night in an area supposedly crawling with security personnel.
Following an attack on Gamba Police Station and Hindi village on July 5 that killed 22 Kenyans, reports indicate that several Muslims from the vicinity were rounded up and detained.
Al Shabaab claimed responsibility for these attacks too. Unlike the cycles of violence in the 1990s, what is happening now in many parts of Kenya doesn’t appear to have an owner with the keys to turn things on and off. This is disconcerting when one considers the context.
All governments have a bumpy first year as they settle into the business of governing and the Jubilee regime is no different. However, its first year in power has been particularly difficult.
The President and his deputy have had to oversee implementation of a new liberal constitution that’s inimical to their personal political histories and instincts and hostile to their current commercial realities and ambitions, all the while also grappling with personal cases at the International Criminal Court.
In the meantime, over 100 so-called ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorist-related’ attacks since Kenya sent its army into Somalia 2011, and a generalized increase in crime have served to severely rattle Kenyans.
The climate of fear that has gripped Kenyans has as much to do with al Shabaab’s increased interest in us as with the overwhelming sense that the Jubilee regime simply doesn’t have a grip on the deteriorating security situation. It is like hiring a watchman to guard your boma at night.
You know watchmen doze off once in a while but you’ve just realized yours is also a raving alcoholic. In other words, when the President, his deputy, the Inspector General Kimaiyo or the Interior Cabinet Secretary ole Lenku or any other senior official gives reassurances with regard to security, more and more Kenyans no longer believe them. This is an unhealthy condition to be, in no matter which party one supports.
REPUBLIC OF FEAR
A combination of blundering and hysterics has characterized the regime’s response to insecurity and this has only made matters worse.
On Saba Saba Day Nairobi was flooded with policemen, prison warders, National Youth Service personnel and other officers from different formations in what the regime’s supporters had explained was aimed at stopping the CORD leaders from orchestrating an ‘Arab Spring’ unconstitutional takeover of government or the start of a move to make Kenya ungovernable. Prior to this CORD had held rallies across the country that were generally so peaceful, indeed, media carried reports of off-duty police being sanctioned for being at the rallies.
The saturation police deployment was as unnerving to Kenyans as anything the opposition leaders said. It only served to demonstrate the regime’s deep-set sense of insecurity.
Such was the general sense of trepidation among Kenyans that the city was deserted, shops closed, roads virtually vehicle-less in some parts of the city, many schools empty or missing enough students to make holding classes impossible.
Such were the hysterics with the event dominating media headlines and commentaries for days on end, that when the very same media failed to give continual live coverage to the rally itself, despite having broadcast facilities at Uhuru Park, Kenyans were generally united in the belief that they had succumbed to State pressure.
That this perception is so widely held, including by those who enthusiastically lauded the media for “blacking out” the rally, signals mark yet another reversal vis-à-vis media freedom, whose space has been shrinking gradually since Jubilee took office. Meanwhile, even as police manned every corner of Nairobi, at the Coast – and elsewhere - violence was continuing unabated.
This week a second foreign tourist was murdered in broad daylight in Mombasa and in front of witnesses with enough to take pictures and tweet them.
THE BUGS BUNNY APPROACH TO SECURITY POLICY
While all this has been going on, the regime has presented to parliament legislation that would vastly expand the powers of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) essentially reversing some of the gains that were so hard fought for in the 1990s.
There is now talk, for example, of plans to give NIS officers powers of arrest and arms, as well as, for good measure, granting them powers to listen to phones and read emails without warrants. In truth, some of these changes would only legalise what most Kenyans took for granted was already happening. Additionally, controversial plans to create a vast monitoring and surveillance system in partnership with Safaricom have proven so offensive to many that the opposition has threatened to lead a boycott of the mobile company.
Just to reiterate the Bugs Bunny approach to policy making the Jubilee regime is developing a reputation for, at the same time as all this is in the offing, it is less than a month since the police announced that they are now building their own intelligence gathering capacity to essentially to make up for the incompetence of the NIS.
Meanwhile, as the Kenyan public sphere is in overdrive protesting at the inefficacy of the police, the President has issued a directive that puts the head of that institution, the Inspector General of Police, in effective command of Kenya Wildlife Services, Kenya Forestry Service and the National Youth Service in addition to his current brief.
We are witnessing both the gradual securitization of our politics – with the war against terror being used as an excuse - and the militarization of our internal security all at the same time.
Usalama Watch (actually called Operation Santization Eastleigh) ultimately became essentially an anti-Somali, anti-Muslim operation, both because of this bumbling approach to policy making and also because the primary institutions on which the regime is relying to implement these half-baked policies are themselves rotted through with corruption.
The deepening of graft under Jubilee has taken place because there are contradictory imperatives on this front as well. One part of the government seems keen to reducing graft while another is determined to feed off the State like a swarm of locusts. In a bureaucracy that has always watched carefully for signals from the top regarding ‘how much to eat and from where’, the default has become leave no stone unturned in the quest for corrupt deal.
Cynics argue that the generalized condition of fear and the grim reaper’s hood that the country wears actually serves the regime’s broader political interests. It allows it to rationalize a series of gradual constitutional reversals and has the potential to create us into a Republic of Fear in which a frightened populace is willing to give up its basic liberties a little bit at a time in exchange for the promise of security.
One national newspaper argued we should do as much in an editorial this past week. Authoritarianism works best when a population is frightened into literally imposing it on themselves.
There are those in the regime who admire the efficient police states of Rwanda and Ethiopia. However, even aspiring backwards like this requires a machinery with the coherence, discipline and effectiveness to deliver. Our soft eating machine isn’t quite up the challenge.
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