And the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality,THE VIRUS THAT

‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality

By Njoki Wamai

In the midst of the 2017 Kenyan election process and subsequent petition, a little- known Nairobi street sweeper became an overnight celebrity in mainstream national and international media after his picture started circulating among Kenyan social media users. The sweeper, Martin Kimotho, popularly known as Marto, was among the many Kenyans who were queuing before dawn on the 8th of August while eating githeri, a popular maize and beans meal, from a plastic bag as he waited for his turn to vote. Another youthful Kenyan, Ian Kinuthia, who was voting for the first time in the same polling station, took a picture of Marto and sent it to his friends on WhatsApp. The next day, Kenyans online, especially middle class Kenyans often found on Twitter, had christened the 42-year- old sweeper the “Githeriman” (#GitheriMan) and had decided that he was Kenya’s hero because he had united Kenyans of different ethnic groups as they praised him for going to vote at 5 in the morning while eating his “measly githeri”.

Saviour mentality

Leading corporates, including Safaricom, the multibillion-shilling telecommunications company, lined up to donate gifts to and dress up Marto in their own image. Marto’s over-sized brown jacket was quickly replaced with fitting designer suits by a suit company where our political elite buy their clothes. They gave Marto a total make-over with clothes and shoes to look the part of a sleek Nairobi executive. A real estate and mortgage company also showed up with a house. This has been a harvest season for Marto’s rise from grass to grace – just because he ate githeri from a polythene bag at dawn.

Githeri is a common meal across Kenya’s social strata, but in this context, the way he was eating it from a polythene bag rendered him a poor man who needed to be rescued from himself as soon as possible by patronising Kenyans online. I read one tweet where a former Kenyan celebrity offered to buy the “poor Marto” a pizza, which is ironical given that Marto’s githeri is a much healthier meal than a pizza. But the Kenyan middle class couldn’t see their folly in the excitement to save Marto from his githeri and his over-sized brown jacket, which was serving him perfectly well in his Kayole neighbourhood where he lives with his family while working in Dandora where he grew up.

I read one tweet where a former Kenyan celebrity offered to buy the “poor Marto” a pizza, which is ironical given that Marto’s githeri is a much healthier meal than a pizza. But the Kenyan middle class couldn’t see their folly in the excitement to save Marto from his githeri and his over-sized brown jacket

This trend where the Kenyan middle class and corporates on Twitter save low- income earners instead of challenging and volunteering themselves to fix that political and economic system that keeps the wananchi from attaining their potential is now a popular trend. Fly-by-night saviours with cheques and cameras appear immediately after something happens to Kenyans on the other side of town East of Moi Avenue. The story of the couple who had a Ksh.100 (about one US dollar) wedding comes to mind. Middle class Kenyans on Twitter and opportunistic corporates rewarded the couple with a honeymoon in Mombasa and land ready for irrigation in Isinya.

Like some Western saviours’ need to save African children and women from their society, Kenyans online are increasingly becoming patronising towards those from the other side of town through their saviour actions.

The complexity of Nyambura

Unemployed youth in Kenya are also using placards to get jobs, which is thinking outside the box in a country with a very high unemployment rate. Nyambura’s placard on Nairobi’s Moi Avenue a week or so ago was the most attention-grabbing. The placard said that she was looking for a husband to help her take care of her daughter. She had decided to play by the rules set up by Kenyan middle class saviours. They want to save someone, she is up for it and she has learnt the current rules of the game: show up, tell them your needs and let the saviours save you from yourself.

Many of those who run to dress up those who show up in their Twitter world in the comfort of their penthouses in Nairobi’s up-market neighbourhoods have challenges similar to those that Nyambura is facing – the need to connect with another human being deeply, the need to find a mother or father figure for your children to help them with homework. So when Nyambura shows up with such human needs, the saviours online become mute. Her case is too complex for a saviour story.

Interestingly, the Kenyan middle class saviours online have not been forthcoming with goodies, such as employment or offers of marriage, in Nyambura’s case as her story is not attractive enough for their corporate social responsibility (CRS) section of the annual report. The husband story in there complicates matters. Saviours like simple stuff. Nyambura is looking for something deep and complex, a relationship, even though she needs a better income and education for her daughter. She is out to connect with another soul. She is human. She is not a statistic. She cannot be given a moniker like “Githeriman” or “100 bob wedding couple” because Nyambura represents our complexities as human beings.

I genuinely hope that she finds someone to assist her to find employment or earns an income that can allow her to take care of her daughter. I also pray that a genuine partner who is willing to be her companion shows up.

The question is, why have we turned Marto and others like him into a fetish? The reason is that the Kenyan middle class is constantly looking for someone to save and Marto showed up on 8th of August fitting the bill. Nyambura, however, did not fit the bill. Unlike Marto, she represents complexity.

Active citizenship

It is time to become active citizens on and outside Twitter by holding our national and county governments to account so that they can provide quality public services that can restore the dignity of all Kenyans, not just the dignity of one “Githeriman”. We must stop creating private solutions to public problems. If we had a system that worked for every Kenyan, the middle class wouldn’t need to save the “Githeriman” and others like him. They would recognise them alright but not through fetishising them. I am very happy when low-income earners, such as Marto, get to benefit from an unfair capitalist economic system in these saviour circles. However, Kenyans online can do much more by moving beyond small populist gains that make the middle class feel good about themselves to systemically challenging the government and the corporates to guarantee dignity for all Kenyans.

So, as a way forward, before joining the next online saviour series, how about starting a movement for quality healthcare in public hospitals and improvement of public education in your neighbourhood, town, city or county. How about also asking Safaricom to reduce their cost of transactions so that Marto and other low-income people can have enough money to buy food for their families because many low-income Kenyans spend a large proportion of their income on airtime for their mobile phones. How about asking those corporates lining up to have a photo op with “Githerman” to commit to equipping and maintaining the cancer machines at the oncology department at Kenyatta National Hospital to ensure treatment for Marto’s neighbours. You get the drift…on to the next saviour series.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality

By Njoki Wamai

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Njoki Wamai

“I’m conflicted. Sometimes I want them to just tear it down. But it’s also part of our history. If we don’t deal with the legacy of that past then we are likely to repeat the same mistakes”.

Wachira Waheire spends several of the first minutes of our interview sizing me up. As he shares this observation with me, he is guarded and measured, uncertain that he will collaborate with me until he establishes who I am and why I need to speak to him. It is Saturday morning in the Kenyan capital Nairobi and the museum coffee shop where we are meeting is buzzing. Only when I show him samples of my previous writing on my phone does he begin to relax and speak a little more freely. “You know this story is very traumatising,” he tells me. “Every time a journalist asks me to talk about it, I give a piece of myself away. I relive the experience again. It’s very hard.”

Waheire was bundled back into the vehicle and driven around for hours before he was dropped off in the bowels of a building he didn’t recognise. “I was promised a short questioning – I ended up in prison for four years. But had I not been so young and healthy I’m not sure I would even be here today,” he says, laughing mirthlessly.

This story is the 17 days Waheire spent in the tower looming over us during our interview, days in which he was beaten, tortured and interrogated before he was finally transferred to a maximum security prison, where he was held in solitary confinement for four years. In 1986, Waheire was 25 and two years out from university when Kenyan Special Branch officers showed up at his office and asked him to follow them. The officers calmly escorted him to the back of a four-wheel-drive vehicle and took him to his home. There, they found a political poster featuring an ear of corn and an AK-47 that stated that food insecurity was the root of revolution. The officers argued that that was enough to charge him with sedition. Suddenly the mood shifted. Waheire was bundled back into the vehicle and driven around for hours before he was dropped off in the bowels of a building he didn’t recognise. “I was promised a short questioning – I ended up in prison for four years. But had I not been so young and healthy I’m not sure I would even be here today,” he says, laughing mirthlessly.

The building where Waheire was held is Nyayo House, once the Nairobi provincial headquarters and administrative heart of the city. Commissioned in 1973 by the Ministry of Works, it was initially planned as the 14-storey “Nairobi House”. In 1979, a year after he assumed office following the death of his predecessor Jomo Kenyatta, President Daniel arap Moi, also known by the sobriquet Nyayo, renamed the project Nyayo House. In a 2003 interview, the then chief government architect, the late A. A. Ngotho, said that by the time they broke ground, the decision to use the building for Special Branch offices as well as other government ministries had been taken.

Nyayo House is loaded with symbols of the relationship between the two presidents. It was for several years the second tallest building after the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, a nod to the way Moi, who served as vice president under Kenyatta, always positioned himself as secondary to his predecessor. Indeed, the word “Nyayo” is Kiswahili for footsteps – a nickname that Moi gave himself and his political philosophy to indicate that he would follow in the footsteps of his predecessor. Thus the building initially conceived as Nairobi House became Nyayo House on completion, and for almost 22 years, Nairobi’s big men symbolically presided over the capital city until Times Tower was completed in 1995.

The Moi regime was on shaky grounds from the beginning, but its most severe challenge was an attempted coup by the air force in 1982 that triggered a wave of punitive repression that arguably didn’t end until the Moi regime itself ended and reached its apogee in sites like Nyayo House. Between 1982 and 1985, after the building had been finished, the government architects who oversaw the project were asked by the Special Branch to make several alterations to the original planning that would turn an office block in the heart of a major city into one of the most secretive and notorious prisons in the country. Twelve strong rooms in the basement were turned into pitch black holding cells and concrete slabs blocked elevator access to all but five floors. Access to the top three floors was blocked almost entirely, except through a single door.

In a 2003 interview with a local paper, the then police commissioner Bernard Njiinu argued that even he didn’t have a sense of the full scope of what was happening in the building. “I knew what I read in the newspapers like anybody elsewhere,” he told journalists, even though he was building a picture of his own from titbits of information he gathered independently.

Waheire gives credence to this argument. “It used to be a very busy government office,” he recalls, “but we were always brought in at night, and they made it so that the office workers never knew what was happening in the basement.” Thus, while by day bureaucrats pushed paper and traded water cooler banter, by night hundreds of political prisoners were held incommunicado in the basement, shuffled to the rooftop for painful beating and interrogation sessions, and then shuffled back downstairs for more torture in the form of sensory deprivation and environmental manipulation. Those in the offices may not have known the particulars, but certainly most of Nairobi suspected that all was not well within the building. There were too many “suicides” off the top floor. There were too many armed police officers milling about in the corridors and at the entrances, shouting at civilians to stay away from the staircases.

The scale of the operation was eventually so large that it couldn’t be contained completely and locals would swear that even the air around the building was sodden with the stench of death. The fear and paranoia it triggered is still reflected in the way Nairobians who remember that time navigate the city, leaving a wide berth around Nyayo House even if it is the shortest route to their destination. It is seared in the collective memory of the city.

Do buildings have memory? The phrase “institutional memory” generally refers to the way ideas get preserved and transmitted across a network over time. But there isn’t really a word to describe the ways in which negative energies become indelibly associated with buildings or constructed artefacts that have been used to violent ends. Yet violence like torture marks buildings not least with the physical debris of damaged human bodies: blood stains the walls and floors and soaks into the concrete; human waste in substantial quantities festers in poorly ventilated spaces.

Walking through such spaces, especially when these spaces have been built or altered to accommodate such uses, one often gets a sense of claustrophobia. Spiritualists may argue that this is the weight of tormented spirits that succumbed to unnatural deaths in these spaces, but non-spiritualists would probably observe that our perception of physical spaces is altered by the uses we associate with them.

Moreover, there’s the more ethereal sense of oppression that lingers even after the torture. Walking through such spaces, especially when these spaces have been built or altered to accommodate such uses, one often gets a sense of claustrophobia. Spiritualists may argue that this is the weight of tormented spirits that succumbed to unnatural deaths in these spaces, but non-spiritualists would probably observe that our perception of physical spaces is altered by the uses we associate with them. The philosopher Saul Fisher argues in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy that beyond aesthetics or beauty, our experience of the built environment contributes to our state of mind – “the ways we experience architectural objects may contribute to how we comprehend, and interact with, those objects.” So an ugly building used as a space to save lives will evoke an entirely different emotion from a beautiful building used for torture.

The experience – even if second hand – of associating a building with torture, or even with deep uncertainty that is amplified by watching others’ anxieties around such buildings, shapes the way we experience these buildings. You feel it when walking through the basement of Elmina Castle in Ghana, a major stopover for the transatlantic slave trade, where hundreds of thousands of slaves were held in near complete darkness before being shipped off to slavery between 1637 and the abolition of slavery in 1814. It is present in the small rooms of Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where almost 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and killed during Pol Pot’s regime. Long after the blood stains have dried and the smell of decaying flesh has wafted, the weight of history hangs in the air in these places, altering our experience of even the most banal bureaucratic artefacts.

But does it persist forever?

Certainly, a collective memory of oppression changes the way people interact with buildings and constructed artefacts: a step is just a step until a parent tells you that it is the “naughty step” where you’re expected to wait out a time out. But buildings like Nyayo House in Nairobi or John Vorseter Square (Johannesburg Central Police Station) in Johannesburg, which both remain in quotidian use, raise the question of whether the legacy of torture is imprinted indelibly into the structures’ DNA. Like Nyayo House, John Vorseter Square was at the heart of a violently oppressive state in which political prisoners were arbitrarily detained, tortured and killed. The similarities don’t end there; John Vorseter Square is also an architecturally uninspiring building that would be left out of any city tour of Johannesburg were it not the site of so much of the apartheid state’s machinery of murder. As with Nyayo House, none of this is a secret, but governments continue to use these buildings.

It’s been 25 years since the last confirmed incident of torture at Nyayo House, and in the lead-up to the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the city has still not resolved what to do with the building. The Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) convened in 2008 and suggested that it should be turned into a museum, a move that Waheire – who worked with the commission – supports. “It’s a symbol of unfinished business because it remains there and it remains in use,” Waheire reflects. Yet, Waheire isn’t convinced that demolishing the building would give victims the closure that they need. “It should remain,” he tells me, “and they should retain the name to retain the essence. If they change the name they can change everything. It should remain Nyayo House so that the history is encapsulated.”

Memory is an idea that Waheire obsesses over, especially as he watches the state erase the truth about Nyayo House torture from the minds of younger generations by leaving it out of the current school curriculum. In other countries, such buildings are decommissioned and turned into museums – spaces where a community can reckon with an ugly chapter of its history. But Nyayo House is a staggeringly tall tower in the heart of a city struggling for space. There simply aren’t enough artefacts from the 12-room cell below and the three stories at the top to fill every space of the building as a museum.

Waheire sees a compromise, arguing that the basement alone should be turned into a museum, instead of its current use as a storage space and dumpsite for office waste from above. “The government hasn’t accepted the idea [of Nyayo House as a historical site] so they are attempting to delete that history. It’s filthy. It is a dumpsite. It was cleaned in 2013 during the [TJRC] hearings but since then …” he trails off. Preserving the memory of these dark years is Waheire’s main work that he does as a volunteer, pushing for the public to rally and protect this memory so that it may never happen again.

Nyayo House is one of a pair of buildings in downtown Nairobi indelibly marked by a legacy of torture, the other being Nyati House, a squat and architecturally uninspiring stack of gray concrete that once served as the headquarters of the dreaded Special Branch, a clandestine arm of the police force that was instrumental in arresting, detaining and torturing real or imagined dissidents during the Moi era. In a 2012 interview with a local newspaper Wanyiri Kihoro, a former detainee, observed of Nyati House that “people would get shivers just from passing by the building’s entrance. It was shrouded in so much mystery that it would seem your own personal demons came alive with each step towards it.”

Over time, stories began to leak, especially when it became impossible to ignore the sheer number of “suicides” reported at Nyayo House. It seemed strange that while no one was allowed access to the top three floors of the building, and at a time when suicide was technically illegal in Kenya, a dead body having allegedly jumped off the top floor would show up every few days. Growing up in Nairobi in the 1990s, I remember being advised to walk past the building quickly in case a body was falling. Nyayo House, on the other hand, has at least some architectural merit. The dull orange exterior dominates the intersection of two of Nairobi’s main thoroughfares – the Uhuru Highway and Kenyatta Avenue – and its phallic symbolism is all the more prominent as it towers past the trees of the three parks that comprise the southern boundary of the central business district.

Although fundamentally an archetype of the sterile brutalism of Nairobi in the 1980s, it is not an entirely uninspiring example. Rather than a solid rectangular shape, it has a doubled-H shape, and is essentially three towers connected by a corridor. The orange of the two outer towers contrasts slightly with the dull brown of the core tower, and its corners are rounded where other towers have sharp edges. Combined with the flamboyant two-tone colour, the structure of the building adds a touch of quirkiness to the austere design.

In 1985, when it was opened, Nyayo House reflected a style that was perceptively different from the city’s Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC). The latter conformed to the flamboyance of the African modernist frenzy of the 1960s and 70s – the euphoria of the independence era leading to fanciful, extravagant designs that birthed a rotating restaurant flaring from the ceiling of a tower like an elaborate head dress, while a squat plenary hall echoing the lines of a traditional hut sits nearby. Nyayo House, on the other hand, was a concession to the pragmatism of the economic austerity of the 1980s – clean, tame lines with only the smallest concessions to artistic flare.

Both Nyayo House and Nyati House were at the heart of the Moi regime’s torture network, and Kenyans who remember the 1986 to 1992 period still associate the two buildings with arbitrary arrests, detentions and disappearances. Growing up in Nairobi, we avoided walking past Nyati House, especially because of rumours that you could be arrested and held incommunicado for simply looking at the building in the wrong way. In a 2014 interview with the local press, John Ng’aari, a pro-democracy activist in the 1980s, said that he still felt an urge to urinate in fear whenever he walked past Nyati House and that “seeing it evokes memories of the old terror days when speaking out was a crime. Amongst our prayer items in those days was ‘may God save us from Nyati House’”.

Waheire’s ambiguous position on Nyayo House is indicative of the less categorical perspective that Nairobians have towards Nyayo House compared to Nyati House. Unlike Nyati House, which is still used as a police building, and is therefore, closed to the public and shrouded in secrecy, Nyayo House has always been a mixed-purpose building. Since 1983 when the building was completed, it has been home to the Department of Immigration, the provincial administration where Nairobi residents applied for various permits and official documents, as well as the head office for the first privately owned television station in the country’s history, the Kenya Television Network (KTN). Given this expansive use, it has always been and remains one of the busiest buildings in the country, with queues for new passports and permits often snaking around the parking lot and into the street. All of this went on even while people like Waheire were moaning in misery – beaten, deprived of food, sleep and water – in the basement below.

Ngotho, in the Saturday Nation of 5 May 2012, insisted that Nyayo House was not deliberately built for torture, but testimony given at the Kenya Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission argued otherwise. In their summary findings, the commission argued that “the infamous Nyayo House torture chambers were designed and built […] specifically for the purpose of terrorising those who were critical of, or perceived to be critical of, the established regime.” Waheire concurs. “After the 2002 change of government,” he tells me, “they tried very hard to destroy evidence of all the torture that had happened but when they tried to demolish the torture chambers, the architects told them that if they did that it would undermine the structural integrity of the whole building. That suggests that the torture chambers were part of the structure from the beginning.”

Ngotho argued otherwise. He told a newspaper in 2003 that the sound- and waterproof rooms that would become the main torture chambers were designed as strong rooms for the storage of important documents produced by the government officers upstairs. They were poorly ventilated because people were not expected to spend extended periods of time there, he insisted. Similarly, the elevators to the basement only served certain floors because only the occupants of those floors required access to the money and the secret documents kept in the basement at any time.

Another architect working on the project concurred with Ngotho. Gideon Mutemi Mulyungi told the TJRC that the rooms were initially designed to store cash and sensitive and valuable government documents, and that they were built with reinforced concrete so that they would be fire resistant, and that because of the lack of natural ventilation, air was piped in through special air vents in the roof and walls to assist in climate control.

Still, Ngotho conceded that the Special Branch did, in fact, have a hand in the final design of the building. He recalled that two senior Special Branch officers and a British national, a “Mr. Parkins”, regularly briefed his team on changes that needed to be incorporated into the structure. And to make the situation really work, the building’s administrators put in place several restrictions on the structure’s use. For instance, the original elevators to the basement only served five of the 27 floors: “those government offices that really needed them”, recalled Ngotho. When public elevators were made available, civilians were prohibited from using the staircases even to the first floor, meaning that the lifts at Nyayo House were always crowded. Eventually, the flow of everything from people to recycled air was structured around restricting access to the extremities of the building.

Eventually, the building could no longer contain its secrets. Over time, stories began to leak, especially when it became impossible to ignore the sheer number of “suicides” reported at Nyayo House. It seemed strange that while no one was allowed access to the top three floors of the building, and at a time when suicide was technically illegal in Kenya, a dead body having allegedly jumped off the top floor would show up every few days. Growing up in Nairobi in the 1990s, I remember being advised to walk past the building quickly in case a body was falling. The suicide theory held up only as long as the autocratic regime remained in power. Soon after the democratic vote in 2002, survivors and security officers who had worked in Nyayo House confirmed that those who died during the torture would be thrown off the top of the building to mask the extent of their injuries.

In a 1995 article for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, law professor Mark Osiel defined an administrative massacre as “large scale violations of basic human rights to life and liberty by the central state in a systematic and organised fashion, often against its own citizens.” An administrative massacre is particularly horrifying because it involves building a bureaucracy around human rights violations in order to sanitise them and create an illusion of legality. The political theorist Hannah Arendt first used the term to describe the horrors of British colonialism, especially in India, when colonial administrators would justify widespread murders and deportations of locals in the most sterile bureaucratic terms, a practice that extended to Nazi Germany, where SS officials kept meticulous records of the machine they built to exterminate Jews, Romas, homosexuals and other groups deemed “undesirable and irredeemable”.

Architecture is an integral part of an administrative massacre, particularly where the state in question wants a visible monument to both contain the horror and make an example of those who endure it. Buildings like Nyayo House that are geared primarily to this purpose are not designed to horrify – a remarkable building that stood out from the rest of the architecture would quickly become a focal point for protest and possibly revolt. Rather, the more banal and routine the exterior, the more citizens are likely to accept that what goes on within is a normal part of state function – even if this banality is a function of how quickly the buildings are put together by an autocratic state.

Examples of this type of building can be found on every continent. Many have been turned into museums, like Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh and the Stasi prison in Berlin. Some are still in continuous use, like John Vorseter Square. The US government’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba is the most notable addition to the list, although similar smaller sites, like Richmond Hill prison in Grenada, also exist. Oftentimes buildings that facilitate administrative massacres are modified from other functions, but rarely are they as architecturally striking as the Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada in Buenos Aires – the largest detention centre used during Argentina’s Dirty War from 1976 to 1983. Even though it was an educational facility like Tuol Sleng, this classical revivalist building, with its four imposing pillars, looks more like a museum than any of the other buildings on this list, and so the transition into a museum of the period was perhaps smoother.

Nyayo House was part of the administrative massacre of Kenyans in the 1980s. Unlike generalised violence in neighbouring countries like Uganda and Somalia, it percolated slowly and relied on the acquiescence of the public rather than on widespread demonstrations of force. It focused on fear as a method of control rather than outright destruction, and caused significant physical harm to a few in order to impose psychological control over the majority. It also altered the character of the city significantly – until the mid-2000s, pedestrian traffic around Loita Street was uncharacteristically light for a bustling African city, as civilians avoided walking past both Nyayo House and Nyati House in order to avoid getting caught in the dragnet of a paranoid state.

Although the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) recommended that the Nyayo House torture chambers be converted into a museum, the government has so far resisted this recommendation for many reasons. Quite simply, the state refuses to acknowledge the magnitude of the suffering it inflicted on its citizens.

Buildings like Nyayo House are integral to the process of administrative massacres because they allow authorities to bureaucratise the process of torture and killing and to normalise the process as a function of the state. It is, therefore, almost predictable that the most banal exterior should house a bloody history of violence because the form of a building that truly manifested the function of such buildings might prove too grotesque to contemplate. Similarly, the decision to use buildings close to the proximity of the city centre serves not only to speed up the process of arbitrary arrest and detention, but also serves as a visual reminder of what the state is doing. An administrative massacre relieves the perpetrator of the need to entirely mask what they’re doing: they need the public to suspect just enough so as to incite paranoia and paralysing fear.

Although the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission recommended that the Nyayo House torture chambers be converted into a museum, the government has so far resisted this recommendation for many reasons. Quite simply, the state refuses to acknowledge the magnitude of the suffering it inflicted on its citizens. Many of those who ended up in office after the end of the authoritarian Moi regime had served under that regime. Mwai Kibaki, the president who set up the TJRC, was once vice president under Moi and also served as chair of the National Security Committee that oversaw internal security at the time that the Nyayo House machine was being deployed. Beyond having knowledge, it is possible to infer that he was complicit, and thus had no incentive to adopt the recommendations of the commission. Kibaki’s successor Uhuru Kenyatta, who received the final report of the TJRC in 2013, has also failed to adopt the commission’s recommendations.

This leaves survivors like Waheire in limbo. On the one hand, they have been financially compensated following prosecutions against the state in the days after Moi left office, but, on the other hand, they sense that without a physical monument to their suffering their place in history is being systematically erased. Kenya is a young country with an average age of 18.1 years, meaning that an entire generation has already emerged since the last prisoner left Nyayo House: an entire generation that doesn’t know why people walk quickly and look up when passing Nyayo House.

Waheire believes that such collective amnesia is disrespectful and undermines the stability of the country in general. As a founding member of the Nyayo House Torture Survivors Association, he battles the state on preserving the memory of the era. (The organisation remains unregistered because the state said its mission was prejudicial to national security.) Waheire volunteers to keep information archived and organised, sharing the Kenyan story at regional and international meetings of torture survivors but is pushing back against apathy from other survivors who, once compensated, argue that the past is better buried.

The sole “good” dimension of the administrative massacre is the meticulous record-keeping that makes such memory projects possible. “We have all the information we need,” Waheire tells me. “We know 98 per cent of the names of the people who were held there and my long-term goal is at least to be able to memorialise them in a plaque or statue of some kind.”

Until then, the tower remembers for everyone. The torture cells below can be buried underneath reams of waste paper but they cannot be detached from the building, which also means that they cannot be physically erased from our collective memories.

This article was initially published in Disegno Magazine, #15, June – August 2017.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Njoki Wamai

Never in my life, did I imagine that in the name of democracy, a massive fraud would be committed against the Kenyan people with the participation of the international community. The Kenyatta oligarchy, having bought the complicity of the international community through inviting them to buy into the privatization of our schools and hospitals, turned against the Kenyan people and made international players like UNDP, John Kerry and the Carter Center cheer them along. Never has the victory of racism been so complete in Kenya. It has made the world expect so little of Africans that they do not care whether the freedom we have is genuine, or whether the elections are fairly done. I trace the build up to international complicity in this massive fraud to 2015, when the governments of France, Netherlands and Norway, together with the Gates Foundation, plotted with the Government of Kenya to collapse public healthcare by denying public hospitals of staff, and making their working conditions so unbearable, that the private hospitals could harvest medical workers that had been trained by taxpayers. The private hospitals, in turn, received massive investments from European countries whose citizens would never have accepted such a defrauding of the people. From then on, it became impossible for the international community to really critique what the Kenyatta oligarchy was doing to Kenya.

The collapse of public healthcare was a harvest for private insurance. Bliss Pharmaceuticals, through AON Kenya that is reputed to have top politicians among its shareholders, received a KES 11bn contract to provide healthcare for government paid teachers and police officers. Meanwhile, NHIF – the health fund that is compulsory for Kenyan employees – was paying record amounts of money to private hospitals. As billboards for political campaigns went up around Nairobi, so did the billboards of insurance companies. To add insult to injury, the fast rising billionaire Peter Nduati rubbed salt in our wounds by gloating that Raila could not be president because he could not govern a majority Jubilee government. According to him, Kenya needs to get on with business.

The so-called victory of Jubilee is a victory of private business, and in the next few years, Kenyans should expect the collapse of public institutions and an increase in militarization to keep the people of Kenya in perpetual fear. Peacemongering and violence in the national and international media

The stage was set for the Uhuru usurpation by a blitz of local and international media articles that prepared Kenya for an inevitable Uhuru victory based on the tribal numbers. Local and international media published data that said that Kenyans never choose their presidential candidate for a reason other than tribe, essentially saying that all Kikuyus would vote for Uhuru and he would win because they were the largest ethnic group. To make this purported inevitability acceptable, local businesses and the UN, with the voices of prominent media personalities, fueled a parallel message that Kenyans must keep the peace.

But as we all know, numbers do lie. Like Cathy O’Neil reminds us in Weapons of Math Destruction, numbers reflect the social biases of those who generate them. In the Kenyan case, it should be fairly obvious by now that Kenyans who live in metropolitan areas, who are in inter-ethnic families and who have a certain level of education are likely to choose presidential candidates on reasons other than tribe. However, these factors are never accounted for in research. Even locally, the polls would have kept on feeding us with the inevitability of an Uhuru win, until NASA chose to carry out their own poll. It was only then that the local media conceded that polls are not gospel truth.

The other local driver of the inevitable Uhuru win based on numbers has been the ideologies of the tyranny of numbers and of Uthamakism. As Mutemi wa Kiama explains, these ideologies stem from a concerted effort to exploit Kenya without the possibility of an uprising, since Kenyans would feel Uhuru has already won on the strength of ethnic numbers.

One must also add that the Kenyan media did not invest enough in analyzing the issues that Kenyans should have voted. The much hyped presidential debate ended up being a series of sound bytes from the lesser known candidates and an interview of Raila Odinga, because Uhuru Kenyatta refused to attend the debate. Before that, the media barely discussed the party manifestos, and attempts of Anne Kiguta and Yvonne Okwara to interview David Ndii on the NASA manifesto literally collapsed. In the case of Anne Kiguta, she had clearly not read the manifesto, and it didn’t help when Ndii asked her if she had read the Constitution as well.

For as long as we do not provide opportunities for Kenyans to discuss politics on any other basis, the tribalism influencing the elections is a self fulfilling prophecy . I did try my best to provide an alternative narrative with doing a review of the manifestos with the hashtag #ManifestosKE on facebook, but they were much too little and very much late. But more than that, an interesting discovery I made was that actually, the manifestos barely delved into the social issues besides employment and health, and health could have been largely a product of the doctors’ strike that sparked a serious public awareness on public healthcare. Indeed, I concluded, Kenyans still define politics almost solely from a business perspective.

Essentially, the point here is to say that if ALL Kenyans did vote on tribe alone, which I find difficult to believe is universally applicable, it is because we were set up to vote on nothing else. And that paradigm has a distinct political advantage for Jubilee or any other Kikuyu-centric political party: it sets up Kenyans to believe that a Kikuyu presidency is inevitable. And democratic.

It is on this point that the peace message becomes necessary. Where numbers do not work, the Kenyan people are fed with an ideology that equates peace with accepting Uhuru as president, and equates questioning the Uhuru regime with violence. Sparked off by the glamorous Julie Gichuru, a darling with global capital who has done moderation gigs at Davos, the peace narrative shook the Kenyan population and distracted intellectuals into addressing the problems with the peace narrative. A few days before Julie Gichuru released the controversial video, I was part of a group of bloggers who were called to the US Embassy to find out how we can push the peace narrative, and other forums were organized by foreign embassies and NGOs to lobby for the same as well.

The peace narrative got another spooky boost from the Kenya Private Sector Alliance that sponsored a video advert in which the post-election violence victims arise from coffins as zombies and urge people, ironically, to shun inciters and instead choose peace. Essentially, the ad said, the people to blame for 2007-8 violence were not those who organizing the violence, but ordinary Kenyans who accepted to be organized to commit violence. The twisted logic of the ad has made a number of us call on KEPSA to withdraw the ad because it is a form of psychological violence, but the calls have fallen on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Safaricom – Kenya’s largest firm – kept off the word “peace” but numbed us with videos of a diversity of Kenyan celebrities going over the great virtues of Kenya. Another peace message that told us “the law works for us,” and that the courts were the only option for addressing electoral disputes, was sponsored by Uwiano initiative, which brought together UNDP and various organs of the government.

Essentially, Kenyans were coerced into accepting the dichotomy of peace and justice, and the branding of anyone who raises questions as advocates of violence. It is simply stupid for the international community to expect that a vote carried out among a people so beaten down with psychological manipulation can be genuinely called credible. The only reason that such a message becomes acceptable is because of a deeply racist belief that Africans cannot think, and only act on instinct.

Praise singing by international observers

Yesterday, it was mind blowing as watching successive groups of international observers praising the election process. Speaking from Radisson Blu, one of the upscale hotels of Nairobi, international observers, which included the European Union and the Carter Center, all restricted their observations to the long queues and the counting of votes, when the rigging was done before and after the actual casting and counting of ballots. And to supposedly capture the quaint Kenyan flavor of the process, they all joked about election ink being put on babies to prevent different women from using the same baby to jump the queue to vote.

The more explicit positions were inherent in their platitudes about Kenya being more than elections, and about accepting the result. But as former US Secretary of State John Kerry inadvertently revealed, this was a message that they gave to Raila Odinga but not to Uhuru Kenyatta. The stage managed press-conferences conveniently avoided the pertinent questions about the credibility of the tallies and their posting on the IEBC portal. They were very quiet and polite, but when NASA gave its presser later, the press literally shouted at Musalia Mudavadi. The contrast between the press conferences is a lesson in the anti-African bias of the media.

I also found it amusing to hear the EU and Carter Center observers say that the independence of the judiciary was a concern of “both” the main political parties. They essentially walked into Jubilee’s trap, which I flagged many weeks ago when I said that Jubilee’s criticism of the judiciary was a performance meant to fool the international community that Jubilee did not have home advantage in this election. Anyone with a decent knowledge of history could see that coming, except that the Kenyatta family has successfully alienated history from the school curriculum, and with the horror of a new education system it wants to impose on Kenya, our collective ignorance will only get worse.

Why Africans must care

Essentially, what will now be praised as a “peaceful” election was the connivance of international racist global capital against the Kenyan people. The praises of Kenya being an icon in the African continent are all lies meant to make Africans accept Eurocentric dominance as the model for freedom. But worse, the narrative of this Kenyan democratic monster has been constructed on a Euro-centric, racist ideology that does not believe that Africans are capable, or even worth, a genuine nation that does not marginalize the majority to line the pockets of a minority. The international community did not have time to waste on understanding the complexity of African life, African thought and how we interact with institutions. It has better things to do, like attending cocktails and ranting about Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the international community has left Kenya with a festering wound, a people groaning under the yoke of indignity and madharau, with few prospects of a national reconciliation that rights the injustices of the past and the present. And if, God forbid, the situation explodes, the same international community will feed us platitudes about peace in a situation whose deterioration it supported and celebrated.

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Article originally posted here. Photo courtesy of PAWA254

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality

By Njoki Wamai On 31 July 2017, the day that Chris Msando’s body was found at the city mortuary, I was on the eighth floor of the Cardinal Otunga Plaza in the middle of Nairobi’s central business district. The floor houses the office of Cardinal John Njue, the head of the Catholic Church in Kenya. I was there to discuss peace and justice issues that the church had been conveying to the country in the lead-up to the 8 August 2017 general election.

I had squeezed in a meeting with his personal secretary, Fr. Calistus Nyangilo, who informed me that the body of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)’s acting ICT manager had been located. “Actually I was with his eminence when the report came through,” Fr. Nyangilo told me. “This is bad for peaceful elections,” Cardinal Njue had told him.

First, a word about Chris Msando. I had met Msando about two months ago at a workshop that had sought his audience to explain the IEBC’s election preparedness to a group of journalists, election specialists and observers. He spoke last. For 45 minutes, Msando took us through what he considered to be a water-tight technological schedule to curb electoral malpractices.

Throughout his stay at the workshop, he took notes, but when he stood to speak, he spoke off the cuff, without a script. He was confident, eloquent and knew his subject matter very well. He had his facts on his fingertips. Another 30 minutes was spent answering inquisitive and tough questions from the participants. At the end of our engagement, many of us gave the IEBC the benefit of the doubt. Initially, we were sceptical about the IEBC’s prep work, but Msando reassured us.

“I want to debunk the myth that the Catholic Church has not been preaching about both peace and justice,” said Fr. Nyangilo. “Maybe the messaging could be wrongly worded, but the church has been adamant that peace and justice are a prerequisite for a credible and just election.” Shooting from the hip, I had begun by asking the Cardinal’s personal secretary why the church seemed to be concerned more about peace, as opposed to justice, or even a credible election.

Sometime in June 2017, lawyer Charles Kanjama, addressed the Catholic church’s top clergy and told them that the church had been sourly “divided in half” during the 2007 general election ethnic flare-up. The one-on-one discussion took place at the Queens of Apostle Seminary in Nairobi, situated off Langata Road. Because of this division, the church could not speak in one voice. It had been deflated and had lost its legitimacy, and could, therefore, not be trusted by its laity or even by the rest of Kenyans. On 27 July 2017, the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) had issued a pastoral letter titled “Seeking Peace and Prosperity” that quoted from the Book of Jeremiah 29:7. Said the letter in part: “The clarion call has been to have Just, Fair, Peaceful and Credible Elections.”

But the pastoral letter was a far cry from the homily and punchy letters that the Catholic church had issued in the past. The letter, just a two-page affair and signed by Rt. Rev Philip Anyolo, the Bishop of Homa Bay and the chairman of KCCB, is nothing more than an exhortation by the Catholic church’s top clergy to the Kenyan people: “We are calling upon all Kenyans to seize this opportunity to exercise our constitutional right and give us leaders of integrity.” The letter ends by “beseeching God to take charge of the whole process of elections.” Then the letter signs off by calling for peace…peace…peace.

That the Catholic church – the biggest and most influential and powerful of the Christian denominations in Kenya – has lost its legitimacy and trust among Kenyans has been a public secret since the botched general election of 2007. Indeed Fr. Nyangilo himself told me as much. “The church has been trying to reclaim its trust – and it takes a long time. That election divided the clergy and it was one of the lowest moments of the church and it has not been easy.”

Since the post-election violence of 2007–2008 that almost tore the fabric that had held the country together since independence in 1963, the Catholic church has been hoping to exorcise the ghost of disunity and division that threw the church off balance. “I will be honest with you, it has been both an individual and collective struggle to reclaim the unity of the church,” said Fr. Nyangilo. He told me that the Archdiocese Justice and Peace Committee had deployed some of its members to talk about justice and peace around the country among the Catholic laity, albeit away from the limelight of the mass media.

Why is the Catholic Church not broadcasting its powerful message loud and clear?

The apex of the Catholic church’s ethnic division peaked when a Catholic priest was killed during the 2007-2008 post-election flare up. Fr. Michael Kamau was a priest who hailed from Nakuru diocese but taught at Tindinyo Seminary in Bungoma. On 30 December 2007 or thereabouts, he drove from Tindinyo heading to Nairobi. He was coming to pick a fellow priest who had been seconded to teach at the same seminary. He was excited and happy since the priest he was going to pick was to teach the same subject he was teaching.

On reaching Nakuru, Fr. Kamau, aware that taking the Nairobi-Nakuru highway was risky, took the Kabarnet-Mogotio road leading to Mogotio town. Mogotio was an area that he was familiar with because he had worked there as a parish priest. He, therefore, knew the residents well. But little did he know what lay ahead of him. He was stopped by marauding youth, who, upon realising that he was a Kikuyu, killed him on the spot.

“Father Kamau was killed in the area he had worked as a priest,” a priest from Mitume parish in Kitale, who knew him well, would later tell me. “The people who killed him knew him and they killed him because he was a Kikuyu,” said the priest when we met in Nairobi. Consumed with anger and bitterness, my priest friend told me: “We must avenge the death of Father Kamau…the Kalenjins killed one of our own. We must get our justice.”

Justice has been a difficult subject for the Catholic church’s clergy since 2008. Itself wrought by ethnic division, the church could not purport to talk about justice, even among its laity, when in 2008 its clergy lost all pretense of being united by the Catholic creed.

Otieno Ombok, a staunch Catholic and a peace expert who sits on the board of the Archdiocese of Nairobi Justice and Peace Committee, admitted to me that the Catholic Church completely lost it in 2008. “For a long time after the 2007–2008 debacle, brother priests from warring ethnic communities could not talk to each other,” said Ombok. “The conference of bishops was worse: it was a diametrically divided house.” He added that the senior bishops – “and you know who I am talking about” – could not even sit and share a meal for the longest time.

The antagonism between some of the bishops has been palpable. So bad has been the ethnic and political division among the Catholic clergy that an Archdiocese of Nairobi priest, who asked me not to reveal his name for fear of retribution, told me point blank, “I do not recognise Cardinal Njue as my spiritual head.” The Cardinal, he said, ruined the church when he openly sided with Party of National Unity (PNU). (PNU is the vehicle that former President Mwai Kibaki used to seek re- election in 2007.) “As the head of the Catholic Church, his titular role is to steer clear from partisan politics,” he added. “Yes, the Cardinal is entitled to his personal political opinion, but he should not make it public, or be seen to openly associate with a political figurehead or a political party for that matter.”

The Cardinal’s predecessor, Cardinal Maurice Otunga, said the priest, was pro-establishment, no doubt, but the one thing he never did was to openly and tacitly side with President Moi and his Kanu party. “Today, every Catholic, every Kenyan knows Cardinal Njue is pro-establishment, he is pro- Jubilee. His role in the lead-up to the 2007 elections was obvious for everybody to witness.”

The renegade priest reminded me that the reason why the Catholic church is limping in this electioneering period is simply because it cannot pretend to moralise to anyone; its leadership is punctured and there is little trust among the college of bishops. “The feeble peace messages sugar- coated with weak justice expressions is simply because the church’s head is interested in maintaining the current political status quo. When the conference of bishops comes together to issue a pastoral letter – like they did on 27 July 2017 – it was to give the impression that they are united and are speaking in one voice, but all that is a PR stunt.”

Yet, while the church that has been struggling to reclaim its power and glory, it has also been readying itself for any post-8 August 2017 election eventuality. In the last month, the conference of bishops has been inviting “election experts” at its Waumini House offices in Nairobi to help it think through the probable scenarios in the lead-up to and after the elections.

In one of these sessions, a facilitator presented the following four possible scenarios:

Scenario 1: Good elections – that will be credible and peaceful. The victor and the loser will both accept the results. Therefore, the transition of power will be smooth.

Scenario 2: Good elections – that will be credible, but that will result in violence because the loser – even after losing fairly – will not concede defeat, hence will not agree to hand over power.

Scenario 3: Bad elections – but “peaceful” because the might of the security apparatus that will be deployed massively will force a false peace. The people will be coerced to accept bad results – leading to a “negative peace”. (Otherwise called the Ugandan peace scenario.)

Scenario 4: Bad elections – that will result in an explosion of violence, even with the presence of the mighty security apparatus. Anarchy will reign supreme.

The in-house discourses that the KCCB has been holding with various experts are ostensibly to help it craft appropriate messages to Kenyans, as well as to prepare itself for the best of times and the worst times. “That notwithstanding, the Catholic church clergy can craft a theology of justice – if it wanted to,” said Ombok. “It doesn’t have to wait for experts to tell it what to do.” Ombok said a larger part of the problem is that the church’s leadership sits comfortably with the state, therefore implicitly, it is pro-establishment.

The truth of the matter is that ethnic division is not only a preserve of the Catholic church; all the mainstream churches in Kenya today are a reflection of political/ethnic division. During former President Moi’s time, the African Inland Church (AIC) was openly identified as both a “Kanu and Kalenjin church”, so much so that its then head, Bishop Silas Yego, openly associated with Moi, and occasionally even attended some Kanu meetings. Yego even helped Moi fend off criticism from the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), the umbrella body that brings all the Protestant churches together. After the introduction of political pluralism in 1991, Yego instigated a breakaway group of evangelical churches that accused NCCK of being a political outfit. (NCCK had been on the frontline of exposing Moi’s excesses and in urging him to open up the political space for multiparty politics to thrive.)

Interestingly, NCCK today is a pale shadow of what it was in the 1980s and 1990s when it openly challenged the Moi regime. Today, under the leadership of Rev. Peter Karanja, it has all but gone quiet. Rev. Karanja, although an eloquent church minister, is apparently a victim of the 2007–2008 post-election violence that saw a large section of the non-Kikuyu Anglican laity view him as an apologist for a “Kikuyu state”.

The Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), from its inception in Kenya in the early 20th century, when the missionaries first set foot in the central Kenya areas of Tumu Tumu in Nyeri and Thogoto in Kiambu, has always been associated with Kikuyu nationalist apologists. A Maasai evangelical pastor once told me that after the Scottish PCEA missionaries had gone, the Kikuyu church leadership that was left behind sought to Kikuyu-ise the church. “When the PCEA church came to evangelise in Maasailand, for example, many of the Maasai children’s names would be turned into Kikuyu-sounding names; others would be given outright Kikuyu names – all in the name of receiving baptismal names.”

In 2007, the PCEA church leadership openly took sides in the politics of the day. It drummed up support for President Mwai Kibaki and the PNU party. Its adherents, many of them from the ethnic Kikuyu community, tended to conflate their church creed with Kikuyu political leadership. When violence erupted in the North Rift, where the church has a great following among the Kikuyus, the church leadership allegedly funded retaliatory attacks.

This is not to say individual PCEA ministers have not opposed the church’s apparent contradictions and paradoxes. Timothy Njoya, now a retired PCEA reverend – though he still preaches at his favourite PCEA church in Kinoo in Kiambu County – fought epic battles within the church and with the state. These battles are acknowledged nationally and globally.

The recent death of Reverend John Gatu in May 2017, a one-time moderator of the PCEA church in Kenya and a good friend of Rev. Njoya, reminds us of the battles he also waged against the state during Jomo Kenyatta’s time. In his biography Fan the Flame, he chronicles how he opposed the 1969 Gatundu oathings and the threats that were levied against him. Njoya remembers Gatu as a church minister, who like himself, fought for justice everywhere and for everyone.

“To the various church establishments, the preaching of peace, and not justice, means that they are only interested in maintaining their own status quo and that of the government of the day,” says Ombok. “It is the way the church has been socialised, since the missionaries’ activities coincided with those of the colonial masters.”

“The peace narrative in the slums is a euphemism for veiled threats and subtle intimidation, coupled with scriptural menacing carefully selected by the quasi-messianic and self-styled pastors, who are just out to eke a living.” Faced with the daily vicissitudes of slum life, the social worker told me, the peace message, when constantly drummed, can easily influence those who are constantly being reminded that “a demand for justice is tantamount to a demand for violence.” The implicit message being passed on is: between peace and “violence” what would you rather have?

Six months to the 2007 general election, a motley group of evangelical/revivalist churches’ leadership came together under the auspices of the House of Bishops. They agreed to speak publicly on the critical issues that would ensure a smooth election that year. The issues included accountability, credibility, fairness, justice, transparency and, well, of course, a peaceful election, among other things.

But unbeknownst to some of the bishops, a splinter group went to the State House and reportedly met President Kibaki. “After the ‘clandestine’ State House meeting, our friends’ demeanour and all the issues we had said we would champion and vocalise changed overnight,” a bishop who was part of the House of Bishops coming together confided in me.

Apparently, the group that had been left behind came to learn that there had been greasing of palms, but more fundamentally, the group that had gone to eat ugali (eating ugali in Kenyan political parlance has come to mean going to State House to be bribed) all belonged to one ethnic community. “There are no prizes for guessing from which community the group of bishops who had gone to see the president came from,” the bishop, who sought anonymity, told me. That is the same group that insisted that the important thing was the country to remain peaceful.

“In the slums of Nairobi and its environs, it is these evangelical/Pentecostal/revivalist churches that are now being used to spread this false message of peace,” said a social worker with a community- based organisation in Kibera, an informal settlement that was the site of much violence in 2007-2008. “My hunch is that they have been given money by the Jubilee Party to cause ‘fear and despondency’, even as they claim to advocate for peace,” said the social worker, who because of the nature of his work, asked that his identity be concealed.

“Life in the slums is always tenuous, people live on the edge all the time – but in peace. When you begin talking about keeping the peace and being peaceful, you inadvertently create doubt in people and the ‘peace’ that is being preached acquires a different meaning,” said the social worker. “The peace narrative in the slums is a euphemism for veiled threats and subtle intimidation, coupled with scriptural menacing carefully selected by the quasi-messianic and self-styled pastors, who are just out to eke a living.”

Faced with the daily vicissitudes of slum life, the social worker told me, the peace message, when constantly drummed, can easily influence people who are constantly being reminded that “a demand for justice is tantamount to a demand for violence.” The implicit message being passed on is: between peace and “violence” what would you rather have?

I found this to be true when I spoke to a middle-aged father of three in Lakisama estate, which neighbours Mathare North, another low-income area in Nairobi. “What we want is peaceful elections – not violence.” Violence here is interpreted to mean disruption of the daily and natural order of life. “Elections will always be stolen. So long as they let us (voters) be, there’s no problem. In any case, leaders are chosen by God not man – that is what the Bible says.”

Thus, the peace narrative’s other purpose is the normalisation of electoral malpractices, which people should just “accept and move on.”

A more nuanced message that the peace narrative is not talking about – yet that is being hinted covertly – is the notion that a nation’s leader is picked by God. It does not matter whether the leader in question coerces, kills, maims, rigs or steals to remain in power. For the religionists and Christian Right, the end justifies the means. And that is why the peace narrative is largely being drummed by evangelicals – quasi “criminal” men and women – who themselves were “chosen” by God to preach to the people. These kind of pastors litter the slums, where they have converted semi-permanent iron sheets structures into Christ’s tabernacles.

A self-respecting mother of two from Kiamunyi estate in Nakuru told me that a country’s president is ordained by God. “The language of justice, which translates into violence and opposition politics, cannot be equated to the language of peace – which is all embracing and Godly. God is telling us to be peaceful and he is the one who will give us a president.”

Nobody captured the contradictions of the Kenyan church better than my friend Fr. Carole Houle, an American Maryknoll priest and an anthropologist by training who is now resident in the United States. Before retiring, he was the Superior General of the Maryknoll Fathers in East and Central Africa. I got to know Fr. Houle after he came to Kenya from Tanzania, where his congregation had headed the Musoma diocese for close to 25 years, and where he had also forged close ties with the late Tanzanian president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.

“When I came to Kenya,” recalled Fr. Houle, “I found a Catholic church that was highly ethnicised. The priests coalesced around their ethnic identities and so did the laity.” Even in those early days of the 1990s, he could foresee that this was a recipe for disaster, especially for a fragile nation-state like Kenya. “Depending on the occasion, my Catholic friends and priests alike were Catholic first, Kenyan second, and their ethnic identities third.”

This would be the order of their identity priority when in the church precincts, but immediately after the parishioners stepped out of the church, the order would be re-organised. “They would assume their ethnicity identity as their first priority, they would be Catholics second and Kenyans third.” These identities, he observed, could shift effortlessly.

“Peace is an important ingredient of the electioneering process,” says Ombok, “but not at the expense of justice. Kenyans are a peaceful lot – it is an oxymoron to ask Kenyans to keep the peace. What Kenyans are demanding for is justice.”

Ombok has been working with Ghetto Radio to spread the message of peace during this electioneering period. His programme is supported by the International Republican Institute (IRI), which also supported peace caravans around Nairobi County in 2013. “Our peace messages are an exhortation to the youth – many of whom listen to Ghetto Radio – not to allow themselves to be (mis)used by politicians from across the political divide to cause mayhem in the campaign period.”

It is not only the church has that been struggling to peddle a peace message that Kenyans are interpreting as lullabies to lull them into “accept and move on” once more. A captain of the insurance industry who is also a member of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) recently told me, “All what KEPSA is doing – pretending to preach peace – is to hope the status quo can remain and to pray for the best.”

“But I will tell you this, the KEPSA leadership is living in a bubble,” said the insurance guru, who asked me to conceal his name so as not to antagonise his company and the KEPSA fraternity. “It is disingenuous for the KEPSA leadership to purport to preach peace instead of calling for credible elections.” The private sector, the captain confided, is undergoing its greatest test ever, “all because of the Jubilee coalition’s ineptitude and grand looting.”

“I think there is going to be violence,’ he predicted. “Nobody is buying this false narrative of peace and remaining calm.” He said his Asian colleagues were closing shop a week before the elections, travelling abroad, from where they will monitor the unfolding events. “If all turns out well, we will be back in business by 15 August,” his colleagues had told him.

“As the country is being inundated with peace messages, drums of war are being beaten in certain sections of the country,” said a lawyer friend who has been doing litigation work in Eldoret. “I have been in the North Rift for the better part of July and I can tell you the voters there are being militarised as if being prepped for battle.” The lawyer, whose clients include both Jubilee Party and NASA coalition candidates, said he had also been in Baringo County for two weeks and what he witnessed there left him with no doubt that the clarion calls for peace was a diversionary tactic of the Jubilee Party. “Songs of war, talk of defending our birthright, people being asked to protect their leaders – by all means, by any means necessary. This is what is happening in William Ruto’s key fanatical support zones,” said the lawyer.

Drinking copious mugs of tea in a Nairobi restaurant, the lawyer said he had an eerie feeling of the calm before a storm when he was up in Eldoret and Baringo County. “I was on my tenterhooks all the time I was in Kabartonjo and Kabarnet…the Kalenjins have sworn not to let power slip through their hands. I am not sure about anything anymore.” He said that when he was in Bomet and Kericho he felt more relaxed.

In spite of the peace messages ostensibly being broadcast all over Nairobi and central Kenya, many of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s fanatical supporters are speaking a different language: a combative language of not ceding ground. “If we are not going to have ‘peaceful’ (read going our way by hook or crook) elections, then let Uhuru unleash the military might on these people (these people being anybody opposed to the leadership of the Kikuyu hegemonists),” said an Uhuru supporter from Kiambu County.

In the opposition turfs, the peace messages are being interpreted to mean: this time around, we are not falling for your (President Uhuru’s) ruse – of accept and move on. “If President Uhuru tampers with the election results, we are not going to court, we will burn the country,” my ghetto friends from Huruma have vowed. “We are ready…for any possible eventuality.”

A couple of day ago, a gangland youth leader from Kariobangi North was addressing his gang members of about a hundred young men. “This time ni kufa kupona, Jakom anawahi uprezo na lazima tumwapishe.” (This time round, it will be a matter of life and death, the chairman – Raila Odinga – will win the presidency and we are going to swear him in). “Ounye anataka kumwaga amiero, lakini pia yeye ajua tuko chonjo.” (Uhuru is planning to unleash the army on us, but he should know even us we are prepared).

The gangland youth was congregating a stone’s throw away from the Holy Trinity Catholic Church. The peace narrative, it seems, may just turn out (this time around) to be just that: a once-upon-a- time narrative.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Njoki Wamai

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality By Njoki Wamai

On June 2, 2010, the then Speaker of the National Assembly Kenneth Marende declared the Makadara seat in Nairobi vacant. The MP, the late Dick Wathika had lost the seat after a successful petition by Rueben Ndolo, a former holder of the seat (2002—2007). The by election was slated for September 20, 2010.

Three weeks to the by election, I had an interview with Wathika — popularly known as Mwas, his mtaa (estate) nickname — at a posh Nairobi hotel. He was in his element: exuding an unusual confidence. He boasted to me how he was going to wallop yet again his opponent Ndolo, who was contesting on an ODM ticket.

Finding him vain, I reminded him the fight was no longer between him and his known adversary, but was now going to be a three-pronged battle, which in my view, needed a different tact and strategy. A third contestant had entered the fray and his name was Gideon Mbuvi Kioko alias Mike Sonko.

“Wewe Dauti ni nini sasa…kwani umesahau kule tumetoka?” (You Dauti what’s up with you? You’ve forgotten where we’ve come from?), he chided me. “Huyo ni nani unaniambia stori yake. Ndolo ndiye opponent wangu. na nitam KO.” (Who’s that you telling me about? My opponent is Ndolo and I’ll knock him out). Wathika, in his heydays, just like Ndolo was an amateur boxer, the only difference being Ndolo had taken his boxing a notch higher and fought as a professional.

Within two and a half years, Sonko was transformed from a political neophyte to a juggernaut.

Mwas could afford to get up close and personal with me, because I had known him since childhood. We had grown up together in Maringo estate. In 1991, after former President Daniel arap Moi had repealed the infamous Section 2(a) of the old constitution, multi-party politics had returned to the fold.

The following year, Wathika joined politics through the Ford Asili party which had split from Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), the first opposition party formed after the political liberalization. Kenneth Matiba formed Ford Asili, while the then doyen of opposition politics Jaramogi Oginga Odinga formed Ford Kenya.

As luck would have it, Mwas was a boy wa mtaa (local boy), all the electorate; young and old who had desired change voted for him and he run away with the popular vote. Wathika was elected as the Maringo ward councillor — defeating the KANU incumbent, Kiura Kirandu — hands down.

Wathika had had a great run as a politician from 1992, when as a 19-year-old elected rookie, he become one of the youngest minted multiparty party era politicians. In between 1992—2010, he had served three terms as a councillor, a mayor for two years and an MP for two and half years, including a stint as Assistant Minister for a year and four months. But his streak of luck would suddenly end with the arrival of Sonko.

Sonko, shot to political prominence, when he was first elected to parliament as Makadara MP on September 20, 2010. To the utter surprise of Wathika and Ndolo, Sonko, then 35 years old and running on a Narc Kenya ticket, caused a major upset by polling 19,535 votes against his closest rival, Ndolo’s 16,613.

Wathika, the incumbent pooled a poor third. “I must admit I did not see the defeat coming…I had had it too easy,” he was later to tell me when we again met in December 2010.

The entry of Sonko into the abrasive city politics immediately did two things: He sent Wathika packing — first to an emotional declaration of quitting politics altogether, and after he had recollected himself, into exile in Mukurweini constituency in Nyeri County. Sonko also confined Ndolo to ODM party politics. Within two and a half years, Sonko was transformed from a political neophyte to a juggernaut.

The naming of his matatus completed the picture and in a somewhat subtle way, told Sonko’s own shady story. They bore names such as — BROWN SUGAR, CONVICT, FERRARI, LAKERS and ROUGH CUTS.

By March 2013, he was so confident he had outgrown his parliamentary seat, he threw his force into contesting the newly created senator seat. He won the Nairobi senator seat by the biggest number of votes cast for any senator or governor countrywide. Running against his closest competitor Margaret Wanjiru, he polled 808,705 votes against the burly priestess’ 525,822 votes.

In Nairobi County, Sonko proved to all and sundry he was the king of politics. Running on The National Alliance (TNA) party, he polled even more votes than either his party boss, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, who got 659,490 votes, or he latter’s rival, Raila Amolo Odinga, who received 691,156 votes. It was evident that Sonko had stomped the city politics like no other and, any politician who ignored him could only do so at their own peril.

Who is Sonko and how is it that today he is the most talked about politician, only after President Uhuru Kenyatta and the leader of Opposition Raila Odinga?

Sonko appeared on the Nairobi scene in the early 2000s just like in the movies: with a bang. One day, Nairobian woke up to the sleekest No. 58 matatus operating on the Buru Buru Phase V, IV and III estates’ route. Sonko had invested in a fleet of matatus that came to be known as nganya — a super pimped matatu — a superlative of manyanga, which is an ordinary pimped matatu.

His crew staff did not disappoint: His drivers and conductors were the whippiest lads you could find anywhere in the matatu transport industry. They were funky and wore the latest fashions. Equipped with the latest hi-fi music systems complete with woofers, Sonko’s matatus could be heard a kilometre away.

The naming of his matatus completed the picture and in a somewhat subtle way, told Sonko’s own shady story. They bore names such as — BROWN SUGAR, CONVICT, FERRARI, LAKERS and ROUGH CUTS. His matatus were so hip, trendy Buru Buru schoolkids would not board any other matatus.

Sonko’s investment in the matatu industry has been surrounded with a lot of mystery and allegations of money laundering. He entered the industry with a great deal of razzmatazz, buying many matatus at one go and for a while, the quiet talk among his fellow matatu owners was that the source of his wealth was the illegal drug trade.

Two years after he was arrested and taken to Shimo-la-Tewa Prison, it is said he smuggled in cash in a briefcase into the prison, which his acolytes had passed onto the prison warders.

Indeed, the late Minister of Interior Security, Prof George Saitoti in December 2010, named him in Parliament as one of the country’s drug lords. Talking to one of his close buddies recently, he reiterated that Sonko has never been taken to court over that mention or the allegations that were swirling before and even after. “To the best of my knowledge, the mention by the late Saitoti about Sonko involvement in drugs, has remained just that: a mere mention, nothing, more…nothing less,” he said.

The source of Sonko’s wealth though has never been fully publicly explained. Years before, then known as Gidion Mbuvi Kioko, he was a middle man selling parcels of lands in the Coast region, where he had grown up.

Many a time, it is alleged, he would take off with all the money after a land sale. In 1997, he was accused of having falsified documents relating to land belonging to Eliud Mahihu, the former all- powerful Coast Provincial Commissioner during Mzee Kenyatta’s era.

Two years after he was arrested and taken to Shimo-la-Tewa Prison, it is said he smuggled in cash in a briefcase into the prison, which his acolytes had passed onto the prison warders. They, in turn, are said to have facilitated his escape after he was taken to Coast General Hospital feigning a range of ailments — from epilepsy, HIV/AIDS to Typhoid. Later, in mitigation, Sonko was to argue that he had run away from jail to attend his mother’s funeral.

Just a few years later, Sonko was hanging around then Wab Hotel, at the Buru Buru shopping centre, clad in denim jeans and a T-Shirt, chatting away the boys. His matatus then employed an upward of 50 youth.

In January 2003, after the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), an alliance dislodged the ruling KANU from its 24-year-old stranglehold of power, President Mwai Kibaki appointed the late John Michuki as the Minister of Transport. Michuki was used to getting his way — from his days as a colonial administrator in the 1950s, when he was a district officer in Nanyuki, up to even when he entered politics. The “Michuki rules” which he initiated immediately he assumed the transport docket and which quickly resonated with the people, remained a diktat, until Sonko went to court in 2006. Sonko won his case because, as the High Court reminded the Transport Ministry, without official publication in the Kenya Gazette, the rules were just that: Michuki “personal rules”. It was only after the court case that the rules were now formally gazetted. One of Michuki’s more infamous edicts was that of barring matatus from entering the central business district of Nairobi. It was a clearly selfish decree because of the conflict of interest that arose from an exception to the rule, allowing in vehicles belonging to the City Hoppa matatu company in which the Minister had invested heavily.

Listening to him explaining his tribulations, Kenneth inadvertently casts himself as a “choice candidate” who was owed and had been let down by the Jubilee Party cabal at the Pangani headquarters.

Sonko, whose matatus were affected by this unlawful rule, went to court. To the surprise of many, he won the case after a protracted battle. His matatus were allowed back into the city centre, along with a select few from other owners. The judicial victory improved Sonko’s standing among his employees and followers, who viewed him as their “Mr fix it”.

But more significantly, it, catapulted him to the chairmanship of the then amorphous and now defunct Eastlands Matatu Operators Association. The position gave Sonko influence and power commanding then close to 8000 matatus.

From being the darling of the youth, he became the darling of the masses. The passengers who used to be dropped off at the dusty Muthurwa, and who would then have to trek to the city centre — there were no boda bodas at the time — could not thank him enough. It was just a matter of time before he moved to the next level. When the Makadara constituency election was nullified by the High Court in April 2010, an opportunity availed itself and Sonko seized the moment and ran with it.

After becoming MP, Sonko sought to endear himself to his constituents. He would engage the City Council to get his constituents exempted from paying parking fees within Makadara constituency. The court injunction was only temporary but he had made his point: he would always be ready to fight for his people. For a while, he also made it tenuous for slum lords to arbitrarily evict tenants. He would go to court on behalf of the tenants and file a case.

On Sunday March 19, 2017 on national TV, Sonko ranted against Peter Kenneth, then one of his more formidable opponents for the Jubilee Party ticket for the Nairobi gubernatorial contest. From the onset, it was evident in the interview Sonko pulled no punches and held no prisoners when describing Kenneth. His apparent contempt for the former presidential candidate was palpable.

The 51-year-old Kenneth would later quit Jubilee Party, after losing the nomination battle to Sonko, to run as an independent candidate. He came off as a sore loser who had expected his path to the nomination to be smoothened for him. And therein lay his Achilles Heels: entitlement. Listening to him explaining his tribulations, Kenneth inadvertently casts himself as a “choice candidate” who was owed and had been let down by the Jubilee Party cabal at the Pangani headquarters.

But more than giving the implicit impression that he was the favoured son, Kenneth has been unable to shake off the label of being a “political project” or a front for other interests. First, he was a project of the “Murang’a Mafia”. Now, he is viewed as a “Governor Evans Kidero project”. It cannot get worse.

Yet, the project tag is not the only label he is struggling with. When Sonko first taunted him as a foreigner and a Johnny-come-lately to city politics, Kenneth laughed it off and made light of the remark by pointing out that even when he represented Gatanga constituency, he slept in Nairobi.

The bad news for Kenneth is that this refuses to go away. “Peter Kenneth is a foreigner to Nairobi politics”, says a Nairobi lady restaurateur known as Wa Carol. “Where has he been for four years?” the restaurateur, who herself voted for Sonko during the nominations, muses loudly. His goose was cooked the day he announced he was running in Nairobi, she says.

Still, of the 15 mayors Nairobi had between 1963 and 2012, only 4 were non-Kikuyu. Many Kikuyus have therefore come to regard Nairobi city as an extension of Kiambu County

“After PK first announced his bid in January, Maina Kamanda afterwards came over and addressed us Kikuyu business people in Nairobi and told us: ‘we need someone to protect our property and the man to do precisely that is Peter Kenneth’. I thought Kamanda was kidding me. I do not own any property in Nairobi”, says the lady who is in her late 40s.

It is the same reaction that my friend, Elvis Kinyanjui, who has been a street vendor in the CBD for the last three decades, had: “Kamanda is talking of protecting property — whose property?”

The Peter Kenneth who ran for presidency in 2013 is radically different from the man seeking to be the governor of the capital city. In 2013, he projected himself as a de-tribalised, smooth and urbane Kenyan — the poster child of cosmopolitanism with refined features. Barely four years later, he agreed to be repackaged as a Kikuyu sheriff coming to the city with a mission to rescue a propertied class ostensibly under siege.

Pitted against a man — Sonko — who has carved himself a niche as the spokesman for the city’s underclass and defender of their trodden rights, Kenneth’s apparent aloofness and association with the moneyed class casts him as removed from the everyday struggles of the city dweller.

In the nominations that he has bitterly disputed, Kenneth was walloped by Sonko, 138,185 votes to 62,504. Could Sonko have wrestled the power and glory from the Murang’a business elite’s grip on Nairobi, thereby redefining the politics of Nairobi?

Nairobi city politics have always been under the grip of Kikuyu business and political elites save for two major periods — between 1969 to 1970 and 1983 to 1992. In 1969, Isaac Lugonzo took over from Charles Rubia and in 1983, former President Moi disbanded the City Council when Nathan Kahara was mayor to form several commissions till the return of multiparty politics in 1991.

From way back in the 1960s, when the first Minister of Trade and Commerce was Dr Gikonyo Kiano, who like Rubia, the city mayor, hailed from then Murang’a District, the city’s business allocations and licenses tended to favour the Kikuyus from Murang’a. That is why, it not a coincidence that many of the city business godowns in the industrial area are owned by Murang’a tycoons. That is also why many of the buildings in downtown Nairobi, especially on River Road and Kirinyaga Road, are owned by the famous Rwathia group, which has its origin is in Rwathia in Murang’a.

Similarly, many of the small traders — from hawkers to street vendors— are Kikuyus from Murang’a many of whom are today settled in Starehe constituency. It is equally not a coincidence that Maina Kamanda, another Murang’a supremo, started his political career at Ngara West Ward (one of the wards that make Starehe constituency), eventually running for the parliamentary seat. The ward, and indeed the entire Starehe constituency, is populated majorly by Kikuyus from Murang’a.

“The thought of Sonko running the affairs of the biggest economy outside the national government at the City Hall is just frightening”, the earlier quoted businessman confided.

After the re-introduction of multiparty politics, the position of the mayor may have been whittled down, but still, Kikuyu political mandarins controlled the mayoral seat, if not directly, then indirectly. Between 1992, after the first multiparty elections and 2002, the mayors were all Kikuyus. From Steve “Magic” Mwangi, John King’ori, Sammy Mbugua, John Ndirangu to Dick Waweru, whose second term ended in 2002.

The only other time a non-Kikuyu was boss at City Hall was between 2003—2004 when Joe Aketch, a nominated councilor, was mayor. Aketch owed his mayoral seat to Kamanda. The vicious infighting between the Kikuyu councillors at City Hall that ensued after the Narc victory, forced Kamanda, the newly elected Starehe MP, to throw his weight behind Aketch’s candidacy.

Geoffrey Majiwa, then the Baba Dogo ward councillor was the Nairobi mayor after President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga formed the grand coalition government in 2008. George Aladwa served between 2010—2012, after he took over from Majiwa, who had to step aside after he was allegedly implicated in a cemetery land corruption scam. Following the 2013 election, which rung in new constitutional arrangements, especially devolution, Evans Kidero, a Luo, defeated his Kikuyu rivals to clinch the Governorship.

Still, of the 15 mayors Nairobi had between 1963 and 2012, only 4 were non-Kikuyu. Many Kikuyus have therefore come to regard Nairobi city as an extension of Kiambu County due to its proximity, notwithstanding the fact that Kiambu Kikuyus appear to have ceded control of the city businesses to their cousins from Murang’a. In March 2017, a Jubilee Party parliamentary candidate from Roysambu was interviewed on Inooro TV. When asked who should be the governor of Nairobi, his answer was curt. “A Kikuyu of course”. “Why?” posed the interviewer. “We Kikuyus are the owners of the city”.

This reasoning among the Kikuyus is buttressed by the notion that many of the city businesses and investments’ operations are run by Kikuyus. Also, because of the proximity of Kiambu and to a large extent Murang’a Counties, coupled with the fact that the first post-independent government of Mzee Kenyatta encouraged many Kikuyus to come to Nairobi, Kikuyus have always been numerically superior. According to some reports, one in three Nairobians is a Kikuyu.

Since Sonko declared his intention to run for the governor’s seat, a section of the city’s business community has become uneasy and wary of his burgeoning grassroots support across the city electorate. Towards the end of last year, Kikuyu businessmen in the city met and proposed a “sober and mature” person to run for the seat, in the hope of unseating governor Evans Kidero. “We had to act and come up with a name, in view of Jubilee Party’s apparent lack of a saleable candidate,” said one businessman who was privy to the meeting.

That is when they proposed Peter Kenneth. There is no gainsaying the fact the bulk of the most influential Kikuyu businessmen in Nairobi hail from the greater Murang’a County. Before, the carving out of additional districts from the original Murang’a largely by President Daniel Moi, Murang’a District began just after Thika town extending all way to the border of Karatina town, which is in Nyeri District. The urban and thoroughly cosmopolitan Kenneth is from Kirwara sub- location in Murang’a.

When the businessmen argued that they did not know where Sonko came from and what business he does, they were subtly saying he is not one of them. It did not matter that he is a Jubilee Party loyalist. “The thought of Sonko running the affairs of the biggest economy outside the national government at the City Hall is just frightening”, the earlier quoted businessman confided. To calm the Murang’a Mafia fears and sooth their egos, Sonko has picked a mid-career corporate professional, Polycarp Igathe, who hails from Murang’a County as his deputy.

I was informed that Sonko oftentimes sneaks in at night to catch up with wazito — the gangland (heavy weight) leaders, who also boasted of having Sonko’s direct contacts.

Sonko’s mocking of academic papers during his high pitched monologues to Citizen TV host Mohamed Hussein — never mind he has himself rushed to get them — is a testament to how these credentials have come to mean nothing insofar as the governor’s seat is concerned. Dr Evans Kidero with his “excellent” academic papers and “management experience” and presumed “track record” has ensured that these qualifications will not be anything to brag about when canvassing for the governor seat’s votes.

Kidero’s rival was Ferdinand Waititu, a former MP of the larger Embakasi constituency. Waititu started off as a councillor for Njiru ward, which was then part of the constituency. He also deputized mayor Wathika. Waititu is always remembered for his “unparliamentary” behaviour of throwing stones and boxing his constituents.

Yet, in uncanny twist of fate, he outmanoeuvered his competitors to clinch the TNA party ticket. One of the more formidable candidates in the Nairobi governor seat elections in 2013 was one, Jimnah Mbaru who ran on the defunct Alliance Party of Kenya (APK) after he failed to secure the TNA nomination. He performed dismally, coming a distant third.

Like Kenneth today, Mbaru had always been dogged by claims of being elitist and not “a man of the people”, since the first time he entered electoral politics in 1992, when he first ran for a parliamentary seat. Waititu’s chief campaigners in 2013 rode on that narrative to besmirch Jimnah. He was painted by Waititu as a man who would not soil his (well pressed) suits to get into the mud to help the people.

A cursory glance at Sonko’s city support base today quickly reveals a demographic stratum that comprises voters who care nothing about academic qualifications and management experience. Disenchanted with Kidero’s apparent lack of vision for the city — Nairobians were hoping for a makeover and an invigorated capital city — this voter bloc has all but dismissed these “elite” qualifications.

Four months ago, I conducted a reality check in Mathare constituency, one of Sonko’s electoral bastions. Mathare is made up of six wards. In Huruma, the “area boys” told me Sonko was their guy. No doubt. Speaking to me in that lyrical Sheng only spoken in the toughest of the city ghettos, the young men spotting crew cuts dismissed Kenneth as an “impostor”. “Huyo mlami alikuwa wapi hizo siku zote?” Where was the white man all these time? “Kenneth ni candidate wa mababi”. Kenneth is the city’s bourgeoisie choice.

Of course, Mathare is not Sonko’s only voter catchment area. The entire Eastlands area — including the Central Business District — is considered to be his political playground. From the City Stadium roundabout, the area sandwiched between Jogoo Road and Lusaka Road is populated with Sonko’s presumed loyal supporters. This area straddles basically four constituencies: Makadara, Starehe and Embakasi South and Embakasi West.

In Makadara constituency, Sonko’s support is to be found in the larger Buru Buru, Ofafa Jericho and Jericho Lumumba, Maringo, Mbotela and Hamza estates. Add to these estates, Mukuru kwa Njenga slum. In Starehe constituency, Sonko’s biggest support base is in the Mukuru kwa Rueben sprawling slum which is adjacent to the other Mukuru and other scattered slums in the Industrial area. In Embakasi South constituency, his most ardent supporters are in the heavily populated Pipeline area. In Embakasi West, his supporters are to be found in Umoja I and II, Mowlem and Kariobangi South.

Separate from the Jogoo Road/Lusaka Road axis, Sonko also commands great support in the area between Juja Road and Heshima Road, which runs through Bahati and Jerusalem estates. This area mainly encompasses Kamukunji and Embakasi North constituencies. In Kamukunji constituency, his greatest support resides in Biafra, Majengo — popularly known as Kije — and Shauri Moyo estates. Majengo, one of the city’s oldest and most densely populated slums, is heavily Islamized and Swahilised — cultural traditions that Sonko easily identifies with and vice versa.

In Embakasi North, the sprawling Dandora areas I, II, III, IV and V, including Gitare Marigu ghetto are Sonko’s forte. Away from Eastlands, Sonko can also call support in Dagoretti South, a peri-urban and semi-rural constituency.

To the macho ghetto youth, the fact that Sonko spent time in prison, means he is a “made man”. “Sonko ni mtu alikuwa piri…na saa hii yuko wapi?” (Sonko was in prison…now look where he is).

Sonko’s penetration of these urban poor areas was facilitated by his supposedly philanthropic outfit; the Sonko Rescue Team, which would supply the one golden commodity that is scarce to many Nairobians, rich and poor — water. For many of these people, they did not need to see Sonko physically: The SRT vehicles would announce the presence of the unseen Sonko.

Invariably, Sonko’s supporters will not be voting for him because he is in Jubilee — his core constituency is to be found across the ethnic divide and would vote for him wherever he would take them. It is that simple. Nobody cares to remember that Sonko is a Mkamba from Mua Hills in Machakos County.

My street vendor friends — many of them Kikuyus and who ply their trade in the CBD, have told me they are rooting for Sonko. They believe he will be kinder to them. “Sonko ni mtu anaelewa works ya vijana.” (Sonko is a man who understands the struggles of the youth). “Yeye hukuja kutucheki na ametupromise ata deal na mabigi wa hii tao.” (He comes by to say hello, and has promised, he will deal with the city’s bigwigs).

Sonko won the street vendors’ favour, when he confronted the city askaris, who consistently and persistently harassed the vendors. Sonko had been consistently vocal about the violence at least since 2014, and in January 2016, three notorious city askaris, who have since been charged with a spate of murders involving street vendors, were arrested days after he threatened to resign.

Sonko has promised to put the city askaris firmly in their place, should he win. “Sonko alitushow atanyorosha hao makanjo.” (Sonko told us he will straighten up the city askaris — if he becomes the governor).

Typically, nearly all the boda boda riders who operate in the CBD are Sonko’s supporters. Like their counterparts, the street vendors, they regularly fall afoul of the archaic city by-laws, and hence are a perpetual target of harassment by city askaris seeking to extort bribes; oftentimes violently.

Sam Ochieng who is an Advertising Executive, says he will vote for Sonko. “Sonko animates politics in a way no other Kenyan politician does.” My restaurateur friend, Wa Carol, told me she will cast her vote for Sonko, because she believes he is a man of action and will be accessible. “Kidero is a total flop. All he did was to increasingly levy taxies on small enterprises without offering any services. Look at my restaurant’s backstreet: piles and piles of garbage…and every month we are required to pay service charge.”

Away from Sonko’s presumed multicultural support base, his ethnic city support is also as good as assured. It is not for nothing that Mukuru kwa Reuben and part of the Mukuru kwa Njenga slums are solidly behind Sonko: in the city politics’ parlance, they are Kamba ghettos. So is Biafra in Kamukunji, Mbotela in Makadara and Pipeline in Embakasi South.

According to Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) latest figures on the total registered voters, out of the city’s 2.3 million registered voters, 450,000 are Kambas, the second- largest voting block after the Kikuyus. With his entry into the governor’s race, Sonko has complicated the ethnic arithmetic for Evans Kidero/Jonathan Mueke ticket. The retention of Mueke as a running mate was essentially to tap and harvest this Kamba vote.

Three weeks ago, Johnstone Muthama, one of NASA’s fundraisers and campaigners called for a meeting at City Stadium, where every eligible Kamba voter had an automatic invitation. On the agenda: how to marshall Kamba support for Kidero/Mueke NASA ticket. Regardless, Hannah Mutiso from Buru Buru, told me her vote for the governor is for Sonko and so did Mbula from Pipeline in Embakasi South.

If the Kamba vote will prove to be problematic to Kidero, the Luhya vote may also not be automatic. A City County Luhya employee, who requested anonymity, confided in me that not all Luhyas will vote for Kidero. “We have not forgotten how he caused so much grief for our people when he was the boss at Mumias Sugar Factory.” Kidero has been variously accused of mismanaging and misappropriating the company’s finances, a charge that has yet to be proven in the courts, but which has refused to go away and sticks out of Kidero’s lapel like a rotten flower.

Sonko’s works of charity — though driven more by his need to shore up his votes rather than real philanthropy — in places like Kosovo, another of Mathare’s wards, are seen as actos of noblesse oblige in one of the riskiest slums in Nairobi. There, I was informed that Sonko oftentimes sneaks in at night to catch up with wazito — the gangland (heavy weight) leaders, who also boasted of having Sonko’s direct contacts.

Some of the philanthropic activities that Sonko continues to dazzle Nairobians with include paying school fees for some needy students and providing a free ambulance service. As MP, he claimed to have regularly purchased a geometrical set for every pupil in his constituency who sat for the Kenya School of Primary Education (KCPE) examination.

In six short years, Nairobi politics has seen Sonko capture the aspirations of the hoi polloi sequestered in the dangerous, horrid city ghettos, where in the true Hobbesian fashion, “life is short, nasty and brutish”. If his criminal record is supposed to stick out as a sore thumb, the contrary is true. The record, which he does not shy away from, has proved to be a magnet to the youth — who form the strength of his fundamental support.

Cutting the figure of a flashy, flamboyant, jewelry-clad gung-ho, Robin Hood type of a Mafia don, Sonko popularised the street slang name — sonko — connoting a man of limitless wealth. Adored by the millennial and generation Z, whose every day dream is to be a sonko, like the real Mike Sonko, they are expected to come out and vote for him en masse.

Sonko who converses in the “rebel language” of the slum-trodden youth, has impressed on them that you do not need an education to live it up. In the process, he has “sonkonised” the politics of Nairobi.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality

By Njoki Wamai

The last opinion polls have been published and the final rallies announced for Saturday 5th August. The long, painful political race in Kenya is almost over. It is time therefore to produce my third and final review of events since mid-July and my eve of poll prediction of the results in the upcoming general election.

As with the first two pieces, this is a not-for-profit work, which does not campaign for any party or make value judgements about either’s fitness for office. I am not perfectly neutral of course. Having made a series of predictions over the last year, I may be too embedded in my own thinking and place more weight on evidence that supports my previous opinion than that which contradicts it. Only time will tell. It is based on the idea that things will carry on much as before over the last few days before the poll, and that there will not for example be a major terrorist incident or the death or injury of a senior politician. In such situations, all bets are off.

So, where do we stand at the presidential level? The lacklustre Jubilee campaign improved from May 2017 onwards, but still seems – as I said in June – “strangely unconvincing”. They have “poured” less money into the campaign than expected, though this is changing in the last few days with a centrally organised mobilisation using county assembly members (MCA) to cement their homelands and get the vote out. Jubilee as a party has barely campaigned in the national media, instead using cabinet secretaries and state media to sell its achievements and focussing most of its party campaigning messages regionally. Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto have been dispatched on a punishing schedule nationwide for the last two months, most of their messages focussing on local development and jobs for local communities, but with a subtext of “we may not be perfect, but we have delivered some things, and better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. In the last two or three weeks, the drift to NASA has stopped and their respective vote shares have stabilised. There are fewer and fewer “undecideds”. There is confidence in the Jubilee campaign, but they remain jittery and there seems a consensus that their campaign has been poor.

However, [NASA’s] main “bandwagon” strategy – that they can and will win – has been undermined by their repeated claims of election rigging by or through the IEBC, of which there have been more than 30 during the last 12 months.

The NASA alliance meanwhile has continued to campaign effectively and appears to have matched Jubilee financially, though they are apparently running short of money in the last few days. Their criticisms of state corruption and high food prices and promises of greater inclusion resonate with many (though they also discourage others for whom inclusion means an ethnic affirmative action programme). However, their main “bandwagon” strategy – that they can and will win – has been undermined by their repeated claims of election rigging by or through the IEBC, of which there have been more than 30 during the last 12 months. Some have been genuine and valid concerns, but many others have not. NASA now have a poor reputation for accuracy and have made several potentially unwise and incendiary statements. While many in NASA genuinely believe they will win, it seems some are preparing to demand power-sharing and negotiated democracy when they lose, using their history of allegations and the events of polling day to demand that Western powers intervene.

There have been several more opinion polls since my last piece, but the key ones were both published on 1 August (the last day that polls are permitted under Kenyan law). IPSOS’ results matched closely their July poll: a 3- point lead for Kenyatta by 47% to 44%, with 8% still undecided, refused to answer or not voting. Reapportioning the undecideds, this gives Uhuru and Ruto a 52% to 48% lead. Infotrak’s poll produced a tiny lead for Odinga by 50% to 49%, but the normal methodology for the poll was absent. TIFA and Infotrak also produced several county-level polls during the period (on Nairobi, Embu, Mombasa and Kakamega amongst others). Although these are less reliable and some may have been “tweaked” to favour particular candidates, they still provide useful data at county level (if taken with a pinch of salt). The alliances also use their own resources to poll voters, trying all the time to hone their message and focus in on swing voters. Whilst voter targeting through social media platforms is less sophisticated than in western markets (and much cheaper to buy), it is in use in Kenya. Jubilee have spent significantly on Google, Facebook etc both in advertisements and sponsored links. Unfortunately, social media has also been the platform for delivery of an unprecedentedly high level of fake news, with anonymous identities used to seed fake videos, opinion polls and agreements between politicians into Twitter, WhatsApp and other loosely networked platforms which persuade a few that they are true (cementing prejudices they already had) but are also picked up by the mainstream media and thereby have a secondary impact. The widespread use of fakes and lies in the campaign by both sides has further brought into question the probity of Kenya’s political class.

The size and scale gap between 2013 and every other election for the past 15 years is hard to explain. So, building a turnout model based on 2013 and adjusting for changes since then risked building in rigging to the prediction.

Regionally, there has been modest “churn” – no county or community has switched sides entirely, but some have moved one way, some the other by a few percentage points. It appears that NASA are indeed stronger in Meru than I assessed in July (though Jubilee will still win easily), and have cemented their hold on the Maasai vote, but Jubilee is stronger in Bungoma and Bomet. There have been few public defections by significant political players, and the agreements stitched together by both alliances with small parties to support one or other’s presidential bid have all held firm.

Predicting the Presidency

Trying to improve on my presidential prediction model, I have made a dozen or more changes in vote share predictions in response to the opinion polls, significant rallies and other less tangible factors. I’ve shifted Nairobi even further towards NASA (now 55% for Odinga, 44% for Kenyatta), though I think it will be closer than recent polls suggest. In Machakos, Bungoma, Trans-Nzoia, Migori and Bomet I’ve upped the prediction of Jubilee’s performance, but reduced it in Narok and Kajiado (though Jubilee may still win Kajiado because of the non-Maasai population), Kiambu (parts of which are now a multi-ethnic suburb of Nairobi), Turkana and Meru. The strength of the internal insurgencies in Bomet (Isaac Rutto) and Machakos (Alfred Mutua) remain some of the great imponderables, with public and private polls giving contrary results and few sure of the outcome. Opinion polls are also giving Odinga more support among the Somali of Mandera, Wajir and Garissa than an examination of the parties’ candidates and the history of negotiated democracy between Somali clans and sub clans would suggest.

I still predict a Jubilee victory by 52% for Kenyatta and Ruto to 48% for Odinga and Musyoka, with all others less than 1% combined. On a 76% turnout, that would be just under 8 million votes for Jubilee and just over 7 million for NASA.

The other change made to the model is more significant. For some time I have been wrestling with an ethical problem. Reviewing the 2013 turnouts, in comparison with that from previous national elections since 2002, it became clear with the benefit of hindsight that turnouts were implausibly high not just in Luo Nyanza and Central Province, but in many other places. Even given the greater attention and sensitivity around the 2013 polls, the suspicion is that both parties found ways to pad their vote, and that this happened in many places. The graph below shows the turnout by county for every national presidential election or referendum since 2002, with 2013 bolded in red. The size and scale gap between 2013 and every other election for the past 15 years is hard to explain. So, building a turnout model based on 2013 and adjusting for changes since then risked building in rigging to the prediction. It might be more accurate – because if they have done it before, they may find a way to do it again – but it’s not right. So, instead I have changed to a weighted average model of turnout in the last five national contests: the 2013 presidency, the 2010 constitutional referendum, the 2007 presidential election, the 2005 constitutional referendum and the 2002 presidential election. Three of these are generally accepted to have been “free and fair”. The new model is weighted because it takes 50% of its prediction from 2013, 25% from 2010, 12.5% from 2007, and 7.5% from each of 2005 and 2002. The result of applying this change is that predicted turnout drops sharply, though it continues to follow the same national pattern (Central Province and Nyanza the highest, Coast the lowest).

To my surprise, when reviewing the IEBC list of gubernatorial candidates, there are 13 counties were NASA has not put up a candidate from any allied party, already conceding the seat to Jubilee and potentially depressing the Odinga Presidential vote there. There are only two (Makueni and Vihiga) which Jubilee has similarly conceded.

Putting it all together, the predicted result has changed since July, but not by much. I still predict a Jubilee victory by 52% for Kenyatta and Ruto to 48% for Odinga and Musyoka, with all others less than 1% combined. On a 76% turnout, that would be just under 8 million votes for Jubilee and just over 7 million for NASA. This assumes that the new IEBC technology delivers at least some of what it promises, by preventing the dead from voting and clerks from voting for absent voters after the polls close. Note: one box is one county, whatever its geographical or population size.

Around the Counties

Turning to the counties and the Gubernatorial races, there have been few surprises, except for the inability of either side to get their defectors (standing as independents or as candidates in allied parties) to stand down. The pressure now to do deals will be intense and several more will retire over the weekend. NASA still risks losing the governorship in one or more of Taita-Taveta, Kwale, Lamu and Narok due to split votes (though they solved their problem in Machakos). There is a tension here, as intense local competition within an alliance pushes up the Presidential vote for their side, while it risks a split vote and losing the seat at county level, which partly explains the ambivalence of both party leaders in addressing the problem. I still predict that Mike Sonko will win Nairobi, narrowly but Peter Kenneth’s persistence despite entreaties from Uhuru, and his 3-5% support base might allow Kidero to be re-elected on a split pro-Jubilee vote. Most of my other predictions remain unchanged, though KANU is putting up a decent showing as the only real opposition to Jubilee in the North Rift, and in Western the situation is increasingly confusing as ANC, ODM and FORD Kenya take on each other as much as Jubilee. I’m predicting Wamanagati (Ford Kenya) to take Bungoma, Otuoma (pro-Raila independent) Busia, Oparanya (ODM) Kakamega and Chanzu (ANC) Vihiga. To my surprise, when reviewing the IEBC list of gubernatorial candidates, there are 13 counties were NASA has not put up a candidate from any allied party, already conceding the seat to Jubilee and potentially depressing the Odinga Presidential vote there. There are only two (Makueni and Vihiga) which Jubilee has similarly conceded. Overall, my final prediction is 24 Governorships for Jubilee and its allies (including KANU, FAP, PDR, EFP, PDP, PNU, MCC, NARC-Kenya and pro-Uhuru independents) and 23 for NASA and their allies and independents, a slight improvement on Jubilee’s performance in 2013. Senator and Women representatives will follow a similar pattern, though there will be less ”six piece suite” voting than in 2013, when voters’ had no experience with their roles in the new political structure. But a voter’s choice of ticket is more likely to stem either from their Presidential and Governor preference or from their MCA and Parliamentary choice, less often from their Women’s Rep or Senator.

It is the constituency Returning Officer who is the formal declarer of the presidential results (as with parliament and MCA), and therefore the electronic results sent direct from polling stations to the screens at the Bomas of Kenya are advisory only.

At the 290 parliamentary constituencies level, it is near-impossible to apply the same level of scrutiny, but at a high level, the pattern is similar. Roughly 54% of parliamentary constituencies look like being pro-Jubilee (including affiliate parties and independents); 46% pro-NASA.

An Uncomfortably “Hot” Seat

The situation for the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is far from comfortable, tasked with running every aspect of this election under intense and hostile scrutiny. The design of the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS), which will be used (for the first time) to capture, check and transfer the polling station results to the counts, looks strong on paper. If the system has been built as intended, it is a robust and effective tool to control rigging and ease results transmission. However, there is still the risk of errors in the IT implementation (which only extensive testing would detect) or security flaws, plus the ever-present risk of human error. And there remain confusions among the public as to whether the electronic results sent from the polling stations or the Form 34 results are the “master” (it is the latter), and whether the court’s decision regarding declaration of results empowered the polling station presiding officer or the constituency Returning Officer to announce the presidential results (again the latter). It is the constituency Returning Officer who is the formal declarer of the presidential results (as with parliament and MCA), and therefore the electronic results sent direct from polling stations to the screens at the Bomas of Kenya are advisory only. If there is a partial or systematic failure in the electronic systems or in the mobile networks (as there was in 2013) forcing some POs to “go manual”, there will be a gap between the (incomplete) automated results displayed and the (complete) official results from scanned and physical form 34s, which will take longer to arrive (being sent by email). The IEBC has decided not to announce constituency results, relying on Returning Officers to do so instead, but the result will be a discrepancy between the real tally and the one displayed on the screen, which could be the source of serious misunderstandings. This could be even more of a worry because the results will trend in favour of NASA at the start (as the urban areas are mostly pro-NASA) and towards Jubilee towards the end (most of the biggest, semi-arid northern counties are pro-Jubilee). Unlike in 2013, when the commission chair repeatedly informed Kenyans that only the paper results were valid and the electronic system just a check on them, the IEBC has been far less clear this time, relying on the mantra that “We do not expect any variances between the forms and the electronic data.”

The IEBC needs to develop and publish protocols for how it will handle various failure scenarios (such as : the KIEMS electronic transmission doesn’t match the scanned form 34; there are two form 34s; the scanned form 34 has been clumsily altered; there is no physical form 34 at all; there is a failure of the electronic system half way through polling) before they actually occur, to reduce the risk that they are accused of ‘cooking’ the results when – rather than if – things go wrong.

Their recent announcement that clerks would no longer mark the register when voters voted electronically was a smart anti-rigging move, as it mean clerks don’t know who voted, and that means they can’t go manual and “fill in” the votes for those who didn’t turn up by closing time (as is suspected to have happened in the homelands before). However, it introduces a new risk – if the electronic system fails midway through the day, then voters who voted in the morning electronically could all vote again in the afternoon physically (if they can get the ink off their fingers), which would cause complete chaos if it occurred on a large scale. Nobody really understands how a mixed mode election might work in a polling station if the electronic systems fail part way through for whatever reason.

The unprecedented level of scrutiny by the courts of the IEBC’s actions during 2016-17 has improved the integrity of the process and public confidence in it, but it has severely delayed the IEBC’s preparations. Despite their public protestations, things are far from smooth and the murder of their ICT head Chris Msando has further stressed an already pressured organisation and brought once more into sharp relief the risks of election rigging at the IEBC headquarters, despite the fact that presidential results will be issued at the constituency level. Conspiracy theorists, of which Kenya is never short, have developed several lines of thought as to why Msando was killed. Few believe his death was unconnected to his IEBC role, but the logic as to why it was done remains impenetrable. Hard-line elements in Jubilee (or the security services) are the main suspect in the minds of many, but Jubilee is the main loser from Msando’s death and the manner in which it occurred, as it strengthened fears about the risk of rigging, deepened speculation about passwords and backdoors into the IT systems, and provided yet more ‘grist to the mill’ for NASA to demand that the election be annulled in the event they lose. The possibility that it was a message to others in the IEBC organisation to follow orders on election day cannot be discounted either.

As well as the IEBC’s own systems and collation activity, several news desks and the main political parties will be running parallel constituency level counts. The ELOG domestic observer group will also be running a parallel vote tabulation, texting in the results from a sample of 1700 polling stations, which should provide a degree of validation (if available in time) for the IEBC’s results. International and domestic are also fanning out across the country this weekend to add their more anecdotal assessments of whether the election was conducted freely and fairly. The situation as the results come in is going to be even more noisy and confused than before, and if fake news is injected into the mix, the cocktail is potentially explosive.

The situation as the results come in is going to be even more noisy and confused than before, and if fake news is injected into the mix, the cocktail is potentially explosive.

Looking at the risk of post-election violence, it is near certain that there will be trouble somewhere, but it is unlikely to occur with the ferocity and scope of 2007. The security forces are far better prepared, and the continued alliance between Ruto and Kenyatta and Kikuyu and Kalenjin neutralises the fault line with the greatest potential for trouble. But there will be violence in Nairobi, Kisumu and elsewhere as the results come out if NASA have lost or if the electronic systems fail early on (few have considered a situation where the security forces are called out to respond to mass violence by pro-Jubilee youth if they are defeated). Much depends on how far the loser’s leaders are willing to go. The two key factors influencing the likelihood of trouble are the size of the winning margin for the victor and the success or failure of the IEBC in administering the election effectively, without obvious rigging. If the election is well run, turnouts and results reasonable and the margin of victory 5% or more, there will still be complaints and localised demonstrations, but they will be modest and limited. If the result is within 2% (i.e. 51%-49%) or the election proves an administrative mess and rigging is visible and widespread, the risk of trouble on 10-11 August rises dramatically. While the losers have the option to escalate to the Supreme Court through a petition, the opposition’s attempt in 2013 was unsuccessful, hamstrung by the short timeframes and burden of proof, and they are indicating an unwillingness to take that route again, in which case mass action and street violence is quite likely.

If the result is within 2% (i.e. 51%-49%) or the election proves an administrative mess and rigging is visible and widespread, the risk of trouble on 10-11 August rises dramatically.

For now, having published this prediction, I have to step back and stand or fall by it. In a strange way, if I am proved wrong, this will be good news for the country, as it will demonstrate that the old rules of “bribe and tribe” no longer dominate Kenya’s politics. Whatever the result, I wish you all the best and look forward to seeing you all “safe and sound” on the other side.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant. The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality

By Njoki Wamai

About a month ago, I bumped into an old friend by sheer chance on the streets of Nairobi. Night Atieno and I grew up together in the same city estate and, although we hardly met thereafter, every encounter was an opportunity to catch up and laugh about the good old estate days.

After the usual exchange of pleasantries, Night straightaway asked me what my thoughts on the impending August general election were. “We are planning to vote very early in the morning, after which we must leave town by latest 9am,” she said. “We will then drive all the way to Mwanza. By nightfall, Inshallah, we shall be taking supper with my in-laws.” Mwanza, the second largest city, after Dar es Salaam, is the lakeshore town in the northwestern region of Tanzania.

THIS TIME, THERE’S NO GOING TO THE SUPREME COURT

Looking at me right in the eyes, she whispered: “Listen, this time, there’s no going to the Supreme Court.” She was referring to the first ever Presidential Election Petition case No. 5 taken to the inaugural Supreme Court of Kenya in March 2013 by the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD), the opposition coalition led by Raila Amolo Odinga, seeking to overturn the election victory of the Jubilee coalition led by Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, today the fourth president of Kenya.

On March 9, five days after the general election that was held on March 4, 2013, Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), through its then chairman Issack Hassan, announced the election results thus: Uhuru Kenyatta — 6,173,433 votes which constituted 50.07 percent of the total votes cast, beating Raila’s 5,340,546, which comprised 43.31 percent.

Suing the IEBC on March 16, 2013, Raila sought to stop the swearing in of Uhuru as a president. It never came to pass. Uhuru was sworn in as the president on April 9, 2013 at Kasarani Stadium.

The Supreme Court judges led by then Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, in arriving at their verdict, said: “In summary, the evidence in our opinion, does not disclose any profound irregularity in the management of the electoral process, nor does it gravely impeach the mode of participation in the electoral process by any of the candidates who offered himself or herself before the voting public.”

The judges further said: “It is not evident, on the facts of this case, that the candidate declared as the president-elect had not obtained the basic vote-threshold justifying his being declared as such. We will therefore disallow the petition, and uphold the presidential election results as declared by IEBC on March 9, 2013.”

That Supreme Court judgment read under less than 10 minutes cast a shadow of devastation and disquiet over the opposition’s core supporters. The promulgation of the new Constitution in August 27, 2010, had created the hitherto new Supreme Court and heralded a new confidence in a much- maligned justice system among Kenyans in all walks of life.

So, when Raila went to the Supreme Court to seek electoral justice, his loyal supporters who had just fervently voted for him, believed in the benign promise of a new court that had promised to dispense justice without fear or favour. It is not hyperbole to state that ever since the reading of that very short judgment by former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, a majority of Raila’s supporters have yet to overcome the spirit of deflation that engulfed them.

When Raila went to the Supreme Court to seek electoral justice, his loyal supporters who had just voted for him, believed in the benign promise of a new court that had promised to dispense justice without fear or favour

To date, the subject of one of the shortest judgements ever passed by a Supreme Court, has become a taboo narrative among opposition supporters and even among some of the leading lawyers across the country. “Let’s just put it this way,” a prominent Nairobi lawyer who did not want his name disclosed, told me, “The Supreme Court failed in its maiden moment to inspire confidence among Kenyans. It made this worse by its mode of presentation of the verdict.” The lawyer said even among themselves as senior counsels, the conversation around the Supreme Court judgement leaves “a sour taste in the mouth.”

In a parting shot, Night, who is a businesswoman, told me “Kama mbaya, mbaya…wacha wanaume waonane.” If the worst comes to the worst…so be it. Let men face each other!

Night’s scheduled temporary migration in August is part of a silent movement that has been taking place since December among the people of Nyanza and the larger western Kenya who live in Nairobi city, Eldoret and Naivasha towns.

“In the guise of travelling upcountry for Christmas holiday 2016, many family men from the ghettos of Nairobi transported their wives and children to their rural homesteads in Nyanza and Western Kenya,” said my source who spoke to me in confidence. “The month of December was just the right time because the children were on holiday, were relocating to their rural homes and so there was ample time to transit to new schools.”

“I’m a board member of a school in Siaya County,” my confidant told me. “When we sat in January 2017, to admit fresh pupils and pupils seeking transfers, we dwelt mainly with parents from Nairobi and Eldoret.” Investigating further on where the parents from Nairobi were from, he found out they largely came from Kariobangi North, Mathare North, Mathare 4A, Ngei/Huruma and Ngomongo.

It is not for nothing that the parents from some of the toughest slums of Nairobi are sending their children and extended family back home. These slums, today divided between Embakasi North, Mathare and Ruaraka constituencies, were the sites of bloodletting following the bungled December, 2007 general election that led to at least 1,400 people getting killed and 600,000 Kenyans displaced countrywide, especially in the Rift Valley region.

These ghettos, which are inhabited largely by the two “antagonist” ethnic communities — the Kikuyus and Luos — exploded into violence on December 30, 2007, when young men from the two communities faced off with weapons such as daggers, hunting knives and, pangas.

NOBODY IS TAKING ANY CHANCES, ESPECIALLY IN THE NAIROBI SLUMS

Regardless of whatever outcome is anticipated a month from now, given the heightened tensions, “Nobody is taking any chances, least of all the people living in the slums, who bore the greatest brunt of the violence,” said my informant.

If the slums are witnessing a vertical exodus, that of families moving from the urban to the rural, the men who have remained behind have been also moving, but horizontally. In Ngei and Huruma slums, which are in Mathare constituency, and are adjacent to each other, Luo and Luhya men have been changing houses, moving closer to their kinsmen within the same area. In the sprawling Mathare slum. for example, there are areas that are predominantly populated by Kikuyus, while others are populated by Luos. This “cross-border” movement — of shifting rented accommodation to beef up and secure their respective ethnic group safety— has been going on since January.

If the slums are witnessing a vertical exodus, that of families moving from the urban to the rural, the men who have remained behind have been also moving, but horizontally

In the peri-urban areas bordering the city on the south, a similar movement has been also taking place. Non-Kikuyus, mostly Luos living in the Riruta Satellite area, too have been sending their family back to their ancestral homes in western Kenya. Riruta Satellite is a quasi-rural, quasi- ghetto,village bordering the Waithaka area, mainly populated by Kikuyus. Translation: We have been neighbours. On 8th of August don’t divide us

Riruta and Waithaka areas are in Dagoretti South constituency, which in Kenyan political parlance “belongs” to the Jubilee Party coalition. A friend — a veteran journalist who worked for the defunct Kenya Times in the 1980s and is from the Luo community and who has lived in Riruta Satellite for close to three decades — confided to me that his kinsmen have been shipping their families back home during the December and Easter holidays.

To the north of Riruta is Kawangware, a sprawling ghetto today populated equally by Kikuyus and Luhyas. Many Luhya families were settled in Kawangware and Kangemi areas, which are in Dagoretti North and Westlands constituencies respectively, during the time of Fred Gumo when he was appointed as a City Council commissioner by former president Daniel Arap Moi in 1989. Gumo was later to serve as a three-term MP for Westlands.

GET THE AWAY FROM SODOM

The Luhya families, like their counterparts from the Nyanza region, have relocated their wives and children — “Wacha wao waende nyumbani tubaki tukilinda mji (Let the women and children be sent away so that we men can remain to guard the homes),” a Luhya man from Sodom told me. Sodom is a sprawling slum in Kangemi that stretches down to the valley that borders the leafy suburb of Lavington.

During the 2007-2008 post-election violence, Sodom, especially the area around Kihumbu-ini Primary School and Kangemi gichagi (village), became a site of violence pitting the Luhya community against the Kikuyu, who consider themselves indigenous to the area.

The slumlords who had built the timber shacks rented by the Luhyas quickly changed sides and, as the violence spiralled into us vs them, meaning the Kikuyus versus anybody else, whoever was deemed not to have voted for president Mwai Kibaki was harassed and even killed.

Mungiki, whose peripheral meaning is translated as the multitude, is a Kikuyu youth movement that began in the plains of Ng’arua and Sopili in Nyahururu around 1987. Over the years, it mutated into a militia for hire by the political elite.

Thiong’o, who is a landlord in Kangemi, told me there is a silent face-off between the Kikuyus and Luhyas: “Right now, we are not talking to each other [meaning no discussions that may lead to politics] until August 8. But we are ready for them. If they think they will be voting Raila so they can be paying reduced rent… they are in for a rude shock. We landlords have agreed that in the very unlikely event Raila is sworn in as president, we would rather burn the houses than see these western people dictate to us the rents we charge.”

Still, with all his bravado and ethnic machismo, Thiong’o nevertheless whispered to me that once he has voted, he will be gone to his rural home in Murang’a to follow the vote count among his relatives.

“Kikuyu tenants too have been changing houses and moving closer to their fellow kith and kin,” said a tenant I interviewed recently. “If you may recall, there used to be a village called Kijiji cha Chawa (the louse village), sandwiched between Huruma and Mathare 4A, that was largely inhabited by Kikuyus. Many of them were killed [during the 2008 post-election violence]; those who were able to escape, ran away, and whatever was left was destroyed youth from the Luo community.” Today, what used to be a slum dwelling is a playing field connected to Huruma by a footbridge.

“The Kikuyu landlords are aware of these movements, but they will not talk about them openly,” said a landlord from Huruma, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “In fact, some of them are abetting these movements, as they also prepare to secure and safeguard their property.” Once bitten, twice shy. Landlords who burnt their fingers in the violence following the 2007/8 general election have come up with ingenious ways of ensuring their steady income is not interrupted and their property not destroyed.

“Kikuyu landlords, the majority of whose tenants are Luos, have evolved a symbiotic relationship with them. The tenants have been given the freedom to pick one of their own as the buildings’ caretakers, collecting rent on the landlords’ behalf, as they also ensure that the buildings are well maintained.”

In the Kibera slum, quiet movements have been taking place. For instance, Kikuyu families living in Gatwekera village, which is largely composed of Luos, have been relocating to Laini Saba village, nearer to their fellow Kikuyus

The horizontal movements have not only been taking place in the northeastern slums of Nairobi. In the infamous Kibera slum, quiet movements have been taking place as the country hurtles towards elections. For instance, Kikuyu families living in Gatwekera village, which is largely composed of Luos, have been relocating to Laini Saba village, nearer to their fellow Kikuyus.

The regrouping of the menfolk along ethnic lines in the major ghettos and peri-urban areas of Nairobi is to create buffer zones, just in case the violence of 2007/8 is repeated. “It is as if you were watching a pantomime: There are a lot of rhythmic motions by silent men, who very well know what they are plotting against each other, but nobody has the guts to stop and say; ‘But why are we doing this to one another?’,” observed my confidant.

Barely 100km northwest of Nairobi, Naivasha, one of the towns in the Rift valley region that was badly affected by the 2007-2008 post-election violence, is witnessing its own vertical and horizontal migrations. Presiding over a memorial service in the town in mid-June, Nakuru Catholic Diocese head Bishop Maurice Muhata observed, “Some families are transporting their children to their rural homes ahead of the election and this is very wrong.”

A cosmopolitan town mainly populated by Kikuyus, Naivasha nonetheless has a minority migrant labour force mostly drawn from Nyanza and western Kenya, who are employed as casual labourers in the large mechanised flower farms in Karagita, Kawere and Kongoni on the Moi South Road. Ten years ago, as the violence spread into the inner towns, Naivasha and Nakuru’s migrant workers bore the brunt of revenge violence by marauding Mungiki youth imported into the towns to murder and pillage the Luo people and their property.

Since the trashing of the presidential petition on March 30, 2013, the silent narrative out there among the opposition’s legion of supporters has been that there is no turning to the (Supreme) Court and there is no crying foul in case their party is (at least to their minds) unfairly defeated yet again. Beginning in 2016, this resolve has been gaining currency, telling opposition supporters that they should be prepared for any eventuality.

WE ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS LYING DOWN

The National Super Alliance (NASA) presidential flagbearer Raila Odinga seemed to feed into this urgency when in an exclusive press interview at his home in Nairobi’s Karen suburb, he told the interviewer on January 28: “I have said clearly, we are democrats. We would like to have a fair game. If we lose unfairly, we will not accept… We are saying we are not going to take it lying down this time round.”

“Roundi hii kutawaka nare” (this time round, there will be real fire), a fiercely loyal supporter of the opposition told me last year. “Ile gwoko ya 2007, itakuwa chai ya saa nne,” (The violence that erupted in 2007 will be likened to ten o’clock tea). Middle-aged and going by the moniker Roger Millah, the Luo man declared, matter-of-factly: “Electoral theft cannot be allowed to continue unchecked; this thing has to be sorted out once and for all.”

For Florence Kanyua, a vocal Bunge la Mwananchi (people’s parliament) activist from Nairobi, there is no mincing of words: “Every Kenyan is hoping for a peaceful election, but a peaceful election does not mean we should not demand justice and when that justice is taken away, we are expected ‘to move on’, just because, apparently, Kenyans love their peace. This time, Kenyans will say no monkey business. The governing coalition has been warned that it cannot steal the election once again and hope to get away with it.”

Kanyua was addressing her fellow Bunge members, who have created their own space at the cross- section of Mama Ngina Street and City Hall Way, right in the CBD centre. Here, the members congregate in the evenings from 6.pm-8.30pm to dissect the day’s political happenings. When we met, she had a special topic she wanted to lecture them on.

“The church does not know what it’s talking about, because it has been overtaken by events. Its peace message is tired and useless — what we need is justice, not peace,” her tenor voice boomed, reverberating beyond the ethnically diverse group of men who surrounded her. “In 2007, when the peace message would have made sense, the church was nowhere to be found or heard; it had compromised itself by taking sides in the politics of the day.”

The result, Kanyua told her crowd, was that the church lost its credibility because it had become partisan. “Kenyans were killed in a church in Burnt Forest in Eldoret — where was the voice of the church when Kenyans needed that voice most? It was nowhere. Why? Because the church became part of the post-election violence. The church ought to know Kenyans are a peaceful people: what they are craving for is justice. The church should not douse us with its peace rhetoric.” The truth of the matter is Kanyua was not saying anything new. Months after a peace agreement had been ironed out between President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga in February 2008, with the help of former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, I had a long chat with a Diocesan Catholic priest from the Archdiocese of Nairobi.

Every Kenyan is hoping for a peaceful election, but a peaceful election does not mean we should not demand justice and when that justice is taken away, we are expected ‘to move on’, just because, apparently, Kenyans love their peace. This time, Kenyans will say no monkey business

“Why did the Catholic Church — the largest, most influential and powerful church in the country — fail Kenyans in the 2007-2008 post-election violence?” I asked him. “The church did not fail Kenyans in 2007/8,” said the priest, who spoke to me on condition that what we were discussing was strictly between a parishioner and his confessor. “The post-election violence was the culmination of a church that had ceded its moral authority to the state five years earlier. The church was reaping the fruits of its lack of moral indignation and its overt indulgence of a state that had come to regard the Catholic Church as its ruling partner.”

In the 1990s, the Catholic Church had thrown it weight behind a fledging opposition that was continually harassed by former president Daniel arap Moi. When, in 2003, Mwai Kibaki, the compromise opposition candidate, floored Moi’s protégé Uhuru Kenyatta, the Church celebrated with the new President.

After all, he was a Catholic, “But fundamentally, the then head of the Catholic Church in Kenya, retired Archbishop Ndingi Mwana ’Nzeki, was a friend of Kibaki,” the priest reminded me. “The Church literally went to bed with the state. A criticism of the government was considered to be a criticism of the president himself.”

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH LOOKED THE OTHER WAY

The Catholic Church is very hierarchical, just like the military – you must obey your superiors without question. “Individually, a priest is a mere cog in the institutional, powerful wheel that is the Church. You do not want to mess with it — you can be easily crushed.” The priest told me president Kibaki indulged the Church and did its bidding. In return, the Church unquestioningly looked the other way, as his government took the Church’s support for granted, and engaged in wanton corruption.

“I knew the Church had completely lost its moral compass, when in the lead up to the 2007 general election, our brother priests in Central Kenya openly canvassed for president Kibaki from the pulpit.” The priest told me that some of his fellow priests went beyond their call of duty to invite politicians to politick from the pulpit itself. “The Church had become the state and the state had become the Church.

“Should it shock anyone that when political violence threatened to blanket the country, the Catholic Church did not stand up to be counted?” asked the priest. “The post-election violence aftermath divided the Episcopal Conference of Bishops so much that they never could agree on anything for a long time. The violence had divided the bishops on ethnic fault lines with great bitterness and so too the legion of priests working in the thousands of parishes spread all over Kenya.”

The priest nostalgically told me how he longed for the days when the Church was led by the late Michael Cardinal Maurice Otunga. “Yes, he was conservative, yes, he was pro-establishment — but pro-establishment with checks and balances.” The priest told me even president Moi knew his limits with Cardinal Otunga. “In his reign, as cardinal, he never allowed the Church to be divided along ethnic lines and would never have allowed any politician —including president Moi — anywhere near the Catholic Church pulpit.

“How we miss the pastoral letters penned by the Episcopal Conference of Bishops then: They were direct, powerful and spoke to the heart of the nation. After addressing the nation and the government through the letter, Cardinal Otunga would direct the letter be read and communicated to the Catholics parishes all over the country.”

Two days before Raila and his NASA team went to campaign in Tharaka Nithi County in Meru on June 16, 2017, I visited a printing press on River Road in downtown Nairobi. The press, owned by a Tharaka man, was incidentally printing flags and posters to be used in NASA’s rally. Out of the blue, he said: “Hawa watu wamezoea kuiba kura za Raila, wajaribu tena… kutawaka moto. (These people who are used to stealing Raila’s votes, we dare them to try again….they will be starting a fire).”

THE SPECTRE OF VIOLENCE HAUNTS KENYA

Although I have been conducting my interviews in formal English and Kiswahili and very often in Sheng, not even that lyrical “rebel” language spoken in the ghettos and county council estates of the Eastlands area aptly captures what Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor calls the third official language of Kenya — the language of silence (after English and Kiswahili). As these “political” realignments in the ghettos of Nairobi take place silently, but openly, in anticipation of an ominous “uncertainty” a spectre could be haunting Kenya — the spectre of violence.

“Uncertainty is not a good experience,” a Kenyan university don told me recently. “Since 2007, uncertainty in the Kenyan political terrain has come to mean a foreboding of violence.” We were having a sumptuous lunch in an exclusive Nairobi club, where the nouveau riche pontificate on the shifting sands of Kenyan politics far from the madding crowd.

The Kikuyus living in the North Rift would be well advised to take leave before August 8. They live there at the mercy of the Kalenjins. They should not wait to be collateral damage

“Let us not us not kid ourselves,” said the professor, who asked that I should not reveal her designation. “After the post-election violence of 2007-2008, our national politics has never been the same again.” The don, a Kikuyu, teaches at Kabianga University in Kericho County. “I timed my 2017 annual leave to fall in the month of August. I am not taking any chances.”

She observed how her boss, a Kalenjin professor, had, with a light touch, teased her about being timid. “I thought now we are on the same side?” She said she laughed about it, but still presented him with her leave form. “It is better to be safe than sorry.”

“I was there when the March 2016 Kericho Senator seat by-election took place,” she explained. “Although it was strictly a family feud, there was an eerie feeling that if matters were to get out of hand, violence would erupt.” Seemingly thinking aloud, she added: “The Kikuyus living in the North Rift would be well advised to take leave before August 8. They live there at the mercy of the Kalenjins, They should not wait to be collateral damage. I mean if things were to go wrong…”

The crux of the matter is that the relationship between the Kikuyus and Kalenjins in the Rift Valley region has always been fragile and frosty. Since the orgy of violence that visited the North Rift after the 2007 general election, the area has remained a powder keg of bottled up emotions.

The International Crisis Group addresses the professor’s fears in its latest report, Kenya’s Rift Valley: Old Wounds, Devolution’s New Anxieties. It quotes a governance expert saying: “The alliance between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin following Jubilee’s 2013 election victory lulled many into believing historical foes were on an ‘irreversible’ course to overcoming animosities. Yet Rift Valley reconciliation remains superficial. What we have is negative peace … calm.”

This false calm seems to have reared its ugly head once again in Eldoret town and its environs. After the shambolic and bruising Jubilee Party nominations in April, the battle for the Uasin Gishu County governor’s seat has boiled down to a fight between the incumbent Jackson Mandago and Zedekiah Bundotich Kiprop alias Buzeki, a middle-aged, lean, bespectacled nouveau riche, who is running on an independent ticket and looks poised to snatch the seat from Mandago.

Feeling the heat from Buzeki, the exiting governor has resorted to the time-tested politics of us versus them in his bid to fend off the younger contestant, invoking the lingo of “aliens amid our people.” Mandago and his allies have been sending a menacing warning to outsiders who must know their place or else… vacate the county forthwith.

The aliens being referred to here are the Kikuyus, who are mostly to be found in Eldoret town itself and in its satellite towns such as Turbo. In Turbo, most Kikuyus are concentrated in Huruma ward, the most populous ward, so much so that the Member of the County Assembly is also a Kikuyu. Ditto Market ward in Eldoret town. It is populated by Kikuyu people, most of whom are traders. Market ward’s MCA is also a Kikuyu.

Why do the Kikuyus in the North Rift find themselves, once again, in the shadow of the valley of death — even though “they are on the same side with the Kalenjins?”

When the violence of 2007/8 erupted in the North Rift, Huruma and Market wards were the most affected. No prizes for guessing why.

In 2014, I travelled to Karatina, a market town about 100 km north of Nairobi, on the Nairobi-Nyeri highway, to meet one Njeri from Nyeri town. Njeri had been one the biggest mitumba (secondhand clothes) traders in Eldoret town. She had lived in the town — to be precise, in Market ward — for 15 years. “I had built my business from scratch. Every Eldoret resident knew me as ‘Njeri wa Mitumba.’ I was successful, I had made it. But then the 2007 general election came and everything all of a sudden went topsy-turvy.”

Between sips of cold White Cap beer at Star Bucks Hotel, Njeri narrated to me how on December 30, 2007, her world came crashing down. “The arsonists specifically went looking for my godown. They bayed for my blood. But before they got me, they torched the godown and my Ksh5 million stock went up in flames.”

What saved her life, she told me, was that her Kalenjin friend called her in the dead of the night and asked her to leave the town immediately. “Don’t take anything — just go.”

How has this old man ever wronged us? If Raila led this country, what would happen? Let him now lead so that there can be fireworks. We the Kipsigis people are tired of the chicanery shown to us by these two thugs , Uhuru and Ruto

“I went back to my folks’ place in Nyeri town, where I grew up, with nothing but the clothes I had on.” Seven years later, she was yet to rebuild her life — not so much in terms of capital to start a new life, but that she had yet to adjust to Nyeri life. “Eldoret had been my home. I went there as a determined young girl ready to sacrifice and work my arse off.”

Njeri told me that when, in 2013 Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto teamed up to run for the presidency, she was devastated. “My fellow Kikuyus from Nyeri could not understand me, but then how could they, I had spent my adulthood in the Rift Valley diaspora and that is when it dawned on me that there is a huge difference in how ancestral Kikuyus and diaspora Kikuyus view national politics.”

AN ARMISTICE WRITTEN ON QUICKSAND

As I headed back to Nairobi and she to Nyeri, she stated that political violence will always stalk the Kikuyus in the North Rift. “Have the people who perpetrated the violence ever been punished? The artificial armistice between the Kikuyus and Kalenjins is written on quicksand.”

The rumour in the town is that Buzeki, whose wife is allegedly Kikuyu, will attract the Kikuyu votes – which, if that happens, could be the game changer. The intra-Jubilee Party political squabbles are nowhere near safer for the Kikuyu community in the tumultuous North Rift than they were in the lead up to the December 2007 general election. “We will count the votes Buzeki gets and if he gets 100 votes, then a certain community will have to move out of Eldoret,” Mandago is quoted to have said.

Yet something more sinister allegedly took place in Eldoret that went unannounced. Early in February 2017, when the IEBC opened voter registration centres countrywide, Mungiki youth were purportedly shipped from towns such as Nairobi and Nakuru to register in Eldoret North constituency, Deputy President Ruto’s former constituency. It did not take long for the local community to realise there were “strangers” among them. According to reports, the young men were thrown out of town and the story did not reverberate beyond Eldoret.

All this despite the fact that Deputy President William Ruto, whose International Criminal Court case once threatened to tear up the manuscript on which the Kikuyu-Kalenjin truce was written, has stayed united with President Uhuru Kenyatta.

The International Crisis Group report notes that the “dismissal of Ruto’s case [in April 2016] brought particular relief in Rift Valley, where uncertainty over his fate was beginning to sow division within the governing coalition. Claims Kenyatta was not doing enough to get his Deputy President off the hook fed Kalenjin mistrust, heightening fears of renewal of inter-communal tension.”

Yet, with a section of the Kalenjin nation seemingly throwing its support behind the opposition coalition NASA, it is likely that were violence to start, it would consume Bomet County and the adjoining towns of Kericho and Sotik, says Ali Abkula. Abkula was The National Alliance (TNA) political director in the lead-up to the 2013 general election. TNA is the political vehicle that President Uhuru used to ascend to power.

Bomet County Governor Isaac Ruto in April 2017 joined the NASA Four — Raila Odinga, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, Musalia Mudavadi and Moses Wetangula — to form the Pentagon. Ruto is a Kipsigis, the largest and the most populous of the nine Kalenjin sub-tribes. They mostly inhabit the South Rift and for the better part of Jubilee rule, have been complaining of how they have been receiving the short end of the stick from the Jubilee government, even after voting for the coalition en masse in 2013.

On the weekend of June 17-18, Ruto addressed a rally in Nakuru town and hit out at both President Uhuru and his Deputy William Ruto (no relation). Reminding them that the country does not belong to two tribes — the Kalenjins and Kikuyus — he accused them of sending the country down the drain. He told the crowd what the electorate wanted was justice and not war. “Sisi hatutaki vita….tunataka kupiga kura kwa amani ndio tupate haki… wasitutishe. (We do not want war…what we want is to vote peacefully and get justice…we will not be threatened).”

Among the Kikuyu speakers, an eight-minute video clip has been making the rounds through the social media, warning them of relinquishing power to the opposition

The community’s beef with the senior Ruto, the Deputy President, who himself is a Kipsigis, but grew up among the Nandis of Eldoret after his parents migrated north in the late 1960s, is that he dished out all the plum state jobs to the Nandis and neglected to fulfil the development promises he lured them with.

An elderly Kipsigis man, having tea in a kibanda (roadside shack) in Kericho town in early June, got into an argument with fellow tea customers about the forthcoming elections. In a fit of anger and fury, he stood up and said: “Saa yote huyu mzee…. Saa yote huyu mzee… Huyu mzee ametukosea nini? Kwani Raila akiongoza itakuwa nini? Wacha sasa aongoze moto iwake. Sisi Kipsigis tumechoka na uongo wa hawa majambazi wawili (Every time this old man….Every time this old man. How has this old man ever wronged us? If Raila led this country, what would happen? Let him now lead so that there can be fireworks. We the Kipsigis people are tired of the chicanery shown to us by these two thugs (Uhuru and Ruto).”

Determined to slice off a chunk of the huge Kalenjin consolidated vote, Governor Ruto has stoked real fear in the heart of the Jubilee coalition. “Sometime early this year, the Kipsigis elders met and gave the Governor the go-ahead to form an alliance with the opposition NASA,” an elder from the community said to me.

On June 17, Emurua Dikirr outgoing MP Jonathan Ng’eno was in Narok North attending a funeral service. Looking visibly agitated he asked the congregation: “Kwani tukipigia Raila kura tutakufa? (If we choose to vote for Raila, are we going to die?)”

“The intransigency and the digging in by both Jubilee Party and NASA is ominous,” says Ali. “It does not augur well for the country. Like in the 2007 general election, the August 8 election involves the unseating of an incumbent.” Such a scenario, he says, is always fraught with overtones of political violence.

On the same day Ng’eno was telling his constituency they could vote for the opposition leader Raila Odinga, Raila himself was telling the Maasai people in Kajiado County to not dispose of their land hastily. The comment was quickly hijacked by Jubilee Party aficionados who used this remark to paint Raila as a warmonger. No sooner had Raila finished uttering those words than leaflets were already in circulation in the county.

“We woke up the following day to find leaflets strewn everywhere and pinned on electricity poles saying that ‘foreigners’ such as Kikuyus and Kisiis should vacate Kajiado,” said Mzee Kanjory who lives in Corner Baridi. Mzee Kanjory said that many of the leaflets were dropped off in the Pipeline area. Pipeline is the stretch between Isinya and Kiserian towns.

“This area is really cosmopolitan; Kikuyus, Kisiis, Luhyas, Luos, Maasais all have invested in this area,” said Mzee Kanjory. “It would be a good starting place to foment ethnic tension in Kajiado County.” If violence were to occur in Kajiado, the Mzee assured me, it would be brutal and genocidal.

“This is a county that has been harbouring festering wounds for a long time among the local Maasai people, who, even though they sold their land on a willing-buyer willing-seller basis, still feel they were cheated. It would only take a small trigger to ignite an inferno.”

The forthcoming general election, which is already showing signs of being the hottest contested ever, has put Kenyans on edge. Among the Kikuyu speakers, an eight-minute video clip has been making the rounds through the social media, warning them of relinquishing power to the opposition. Entitled Mt Kenya Group — Ngai Emwena Witu — “God is on our side,” the video is a montage of Kikuyu popular songs carefully selected to evoke ethnic passions, as well as to create a siege mentality among the larger Kikuyu community.

The lyrics disguised as a clarion credo to rally The House of Mumbi — a catchphrase used by ethnic bigots to evoke a sense of emotional oneness among the Kikuyu nation — are a subtle call to arms if the opposition NASA coalition were to wrest power from the Kikuyu.

CALING ALL KIKUYUS

Calling all Kikuyus, wherever they are, to vote for President Uhuru Kenyatta, the jingoism expressed in the amateur production is frighteningly unabashed and unapologetic in its war cry: “We must protect Uthamaki (political king) at all costs. We must stop the opposition from capturing power by all means. We will not accept to be defeated, because defeat does not exist in our lexicon. Therefore, the House of Mumbi cannot be defeated.”

In a bizarre request to the Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet, the Kiambu County governor seat candidate and Kabete MP Ferdinand Waititu asked him to deploy only Kikuyu police officers to the county. “The deployment is the only way our people will effectively communicate to the police and therefore boost security,” said Waititu on June 29.

With a fidgety ruling coalition seemingly under siege from a resurgent opposition, determined to snatch power from a faltering coalition — but one with immense powers of incumbency — we could be headed for a civil war if the election is not properly conducted.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Njoki Wamai

Not since January 25, 1986 had I felt the slow-burning, debilitating fever that I did on May 20 this year, a fever you would know if you are Iraqi, Syrian, or Ugandan over 20, or South Sudanese of any age or era:

Although akin to malarial lethargy, it is not a proper fever, its toll on your body and mind operating at a remove from the latter. It will neither ground nor kill you, but as with malaria, you are sapped of energy, you have no appetite, the joie de vivre by which you claim membership to life has flown away. You want to withdraw into a dark corner and curl up.

I am labouring to describe in unfamiliar, personal terms, the physiological experience of being caught up in a violent military coup. To live through such a moment, is to experience war compressed into hours, days or weeks. There is a prolonged bath in adrenaline that is physically and mentally draining. There is the upending of routine and rule that kills your spirit.

So on May 20 this year, when I left the house and went to town, and this fever suddenly broke out in me, I instinctively understood that Uganda had turned a corner from which return may not be possible. And yet the trigger could not have been more trivial: My telephone line had been cut.

I had expected that to happen. In fact, I had wilfully participated in the loss of my line. An announcement had been made in early April saying that all phone users must re-register their lines or be cut off in seven days. I refused to comply. On the sixth day, the Prime Minister’s Office said the deadline had been extended by a month. I stayed home. The month came to an end and promptly, the lines were cut.

The people at the mall trying to get their phones reconnected were largely upper crust, in government, in cushy private sector, NGO, UN, jobs – expatriates, well-to-do locals, denizens of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, well-fed and secure in their status. But now their faces reflected fear mixed with confusion

When I got to town, I was more staggered than I could have expected. There at the mall, standing in ragged lines with the sun beating down on them, was a mass of people, local and international, who could no longer make or receive calls. It was the look on their faces that reminded me of 1979, 1985 and 1986, the coup years. It was the look of people in the midst of a calamity beyond prevention.

Betrayal of the docile consumer

I had refused to comply with the directive. But those in the lines had complied; was it just inefficiency or had they been guilty of forwarding memes the state disliked? It mattered not what had happened. There at the mall, with its high-end branded products, something heartbreaking was happening:

The people there were largely upper crust, in government, in cushy private sector, NGO, UN jobs – expatriates, well-to-do locals, denizens of Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, well-fed and secure in their status. But now their faces reflected fear mixed with confusion. This was their thing, this government and the economic ideology it espoused. Many had got their jobs by following regime diktats, not making noise, not being seen with noise-makers.

The economic encyclical they knew by heart had said that capitalist excess was good. Investors and consumers were protected by the regime. Yet now, the telephone, which had brought vast investments into the country, with its millions of dollars in taxes, had been switched off.

The regime had for over 20 years touted its openness. It had enthusiastically done what the IMF and World Bank had asked it to do, back in the early 1990s when it carried out what was then clothed in the euphemism of “structural adjustment policy” but today goes in the explicit nudity of “austerity”. It had punished its people with gut-wrenching impoverishment so it could please the Western powers and avoid regime change. Over the decades, barriers to “free trade” had come down. Uganda, the IMF told all who cared to listen, was business-friendly.

So to wake up that Saturday morning to the reality of a ham-fisted regulation, one that could strangle any multinational co-operation, was astounding. The faces in that mall asked all these questions but in the abstract: What had we done wrong? Had we not consumed (and done so conspicuously) like all well-brought up boys and girls are taught to? Had we not behaved like responsible adults by heeding Gordon Gecko’s dictum that greed is good? Had we not volunteered our energy and time on earth as a good, mostly Christian country and devoted our energy to making the rich richer? Why this punishment now?

In lieu of competitive politics, Museveni’s first decade in power had operated under a ‘broad-based’ system, a serious attempt at an ideology, a kind of reconciliation by which the soviets set up at parish level (going by the name of Resistance Councils) could also include, rather than execute, kulaks

To such exemplary behaviour were due such little rewards as walking into the most expensive restaurants, not so much to eat, as to snap pictures of the dinner for Instagram. Going out the door each day was a Facebook challenge. Now even that was no longer possible. I saw in their faces horror at the prospect of returning to the anonymity of the 1990s, to operating VCRs and having to twirl cassette tapes on a Bic pen to rewind them.

We always knew the military would turn around and bite us

The Museveni government had acted out of character. What had been concealed and contained for 31 years of his time in power had at last erupted, very publicly. We had lived with a military government for a full generation. One day, we always knew, it would turn around and bite us. If you had watched the Museveni regime for the past three decades, you would have noticed that at the close of each decade, his rule shifted gear in consequential ways. We were at the start of the fourth decade, which meant a new tempo had been embarked upon.

The first 10 years had been unchallenged rule by the complete set of ideologues he had brought with him from the bush war. They were the gushing, forward-rushing youthful stage during which the government could do no wrong and genuinely tried its best not to. That was the forward-rushing youthful stage. In lieu of competitive politics, the decade had operated under a “broad-based” system, a serious attempt at an ideology, a kind of reconciliation by which the soviets set up at parish level (going by the name of Resistance Councils) could also include, rather than execute, kulaks. The “good leadership”, “political will” by which Museveni has been described, were products of this period. Victory had brought goodwill and he was eager to show it.

The period ended with the passing of the 1995 constitution, the biggest goodwill of all. And then it started. Looking back, it would seem that Museveni’s longer lasting troubles began with that document. Ugandans had given the regime the benefit of the doubt in the first decade. Now they wanted something in return. The 1990s ended with the now famous “missive” Dr Kizza Besigye wrote in 1999 declaring Museveni a dictator. Besigye’s courage took Museveni aback, as did the massive crowds Besigye attracted when he first ran for president in 2001, dwarfing the numbers Museveni attracted, for the first time giving the president an undiluted assessment of what Ugandans thought of him.

The departure of Besigye from the war veterans’ camp opened the door for the haemorrhage of Museveni’s bush war colleagues, a bleeding he and the Movement were never to recover from; what was worse, the end of the second decade marked very emphatic victories against him from a Uganda Museveni thought he had vanquished.

Through a series of legal battles, lawyers of the Uganda People’s Congress and the Democratic Party, doyens of the anti-colonial years that had been banned from operating, revealed the contradiction between Museveni’s claim to have returned constitutional rule to Uganda, and his refusal to obey the same constitution. In an attempt to pre-empt the return of political parties, the government had organised the infamous Referendum of 2000, whose cloying rationale fooled few. The banned opposition parties, unwilling to lend political legitimacy to Museveni, refused to participate, whereupon the government propped up straw parties to act the part of the Yes side while it hogged the No role. In a poorly attended exercise, 90.7% of those that bothered to vote, estimated at 30 % of registered voters chose a “No Party” Movement system against the 9.3% who chose a “Multiparty” system.

To show how much it believed in multiparty democracy, the government needed a stronger Yes than the 90% garnered by its No side the last time. It allowed a Yes percentage figure of 92.44 %. Some 4 million democracy-shy Ugandans now resoundingly allowed multiparty politics to operate

The result served as legal cover for one-party rule (described now as “no party rule”). But in 2004 a seven-judge panel of the Supreme Court declared it null and void. As if to save face, to show that it had known what it was doing, the government organised a second referendum on the same question, in 2005. This time, it was a little tricky. The government decided it wanted parties back, which meant that it was now sentimentally on the same side as the parties it had banned. It therefore invited the parties, which by law did not exist, to take the government’s side in declaring that it, the government, had been wrong. The parties refused to agree whereupon the government stood alone in acting the Yes side. But for the suffrage to be legal, there had to be a No side. For two decades, the government had said No. Now the government was saying Yes and therefore no one was saying No. Once again, props had to be found and money found to fund their No.

To show how much it believed in multiparty democracy, the government needed a stronger Yes than the 90% garnered by its No side the last time around. It allowed a Yes percentage figure of 92.44%. Some 4 million democracy-shy Ugandans now resoundingly allowed multiparty politics to operate.

Nobody loves the jackboot

Having kept them under the military jackboot for 20 years, Museveni now castigated the parties for refusing to support their own return to life. They were “not contributing to Uganda’s development,” he said.

That was the spirit in which Museveni ruled for 20 years, that play-acting at magnanimity, the third- rate theatre by which he blarneyed his way through, year after year. He was after all a “good” leader and that called for “good” behaviour. It is easy to forget, but in the first two decades, Museveni cut a figure somewhere between a likeable clown and a deadly fighter.

The judicial humiliations of 2004-2005 were not isolated events. The end of his second decade in power presented Museveni with new realities neither he nor Ugandans could have anticipated. This period of irrevocable change started in 2003 and did not end until 2006-2007. Museveni’s perennial bogeymen, the figures he could invoke to frighten Ugandans into obedience, Idi Amin and Milton Obote, died (2003 and 2005), deaths that left him exposed. Suddenly, he was left alone. The shadows of the past gone, he would now be judged by his actions alone.

And then the war in northern Uganda jolted to an abrupt end. What had provided political ballast, the spectre of Nilotic rule that had made the Bantu southerners so uneasy, faded rapidly. To further complicate life for Museveni, the end of the northern war left him without a diversion to distract restless, politicised military officers, nor cover for the classified budgets to defence that had hitherto provided a useful slush fund.

But not as yet. An election was still looming in 2006 and Besigye had learnt nothing from the beatings and imprisonment he had suffered. Yet if the returned political parties were triumphant, the electorate did not share this triumph. The 92.44% voters who wanted them back did not show up for them. The crowded field of presidential candidates, which included Milton Obote’s widow, Miria Obote, played supporting roles to the protagonists.

Museveni, realising that the constitution he had nursed to life would not be on his side, began to make the moves that would lead to the funereal pall of May 20, 2017. He appointed one General Kale Kayihura as Inspector General of Police. The disastrous militarisation of the police had begun. Kayihura had made his name as commander of the Revenue Protection Unit, which went after smugglers and tax dodgers with methods that threw the operation into disrepute. He was not a nice man. Kayihura, Uganda’s longest serving IGP https://www.theelephant.info/uploads/2017/06/Uganda-Police.mp4

Footage courtesy of New Vision TV

Not forgetting what it had done to him, Museveni also moved against the judiciary through appointments and outright humiliation. In a striking display of what would characterise the next decade in power, the so-called Black Mamba squad invaded the High Court and rearrested 22 suspects granted bail by the judges. They were allegedly part of the People’s Redemption Army, allegedly linked to Besigye.

Newer global forces, particularly ‘terrorism,’ provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was an ally in the ‘war on terror.’ Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and inject income-replacing lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda

The drift away from constitutionalism had begun. It is still unbelievable, the degree of violence that the army and the police deployed in this, Museveni’s third decade in power, from the brutal actions on the streets during the 2011 elections, to the disarmament of Karamoja pastoralists. Whoever was in charge, was not of the calibre of Besigye, whose stewardship of battalions in the first decade of Museveni’s rule had won so much respect in most parts of Uganda. These were a raw, untempered lot. As the decades piled up, principled men and women refused to work with Museveni, leaving the dregs to exercise power.

The cost of doing politics in Uganda goes up

And then, 16 months before the 2011 elections, something exceedingly alarming happened. In September 2009, the King of Buganda, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, set off to visit a district his kingdom claimed as part of its territory. Kayunga, home to the Baruli community, had been a vassal state in pre-colonial Buganda, so the visit provided ironies all around, not least for Buganda, which was demanding the return of its properties from the Uganda state, the same kind of demand the Baruli were making of the Buganda Kingdom. The government blocked the visit, upon which Buganda erupted. The extremely ethnicised nature of the riots that followed were a frightening demonstration of what people felt, that Museveni and his ethnic group were “oppressors” hell bent on a massive land grab. It brought out fears of the kind that lie just under the surface of African politics.

The cost of doing politics in Uganda had gone up. In the run up to the 2006 elections, plainclothes operatives had fired live bullets and killed a man, just yards from where the Kabaka stood next to Besigye. It had been the single most chilling episode of that campaign period, one which left the Buganda, long mass supporters of Museveni who had in the previous two elections voted overwhelmingly for him, in no doubt of what they were facing. The 2009 riots were a delayed reaction. The country became a less happy place, if it had been happy in the first place.

But newer global forces, particularly “terrorism,” provided fresh nomenclature. Now Uganda was “an ally” in the “war on terror.” Renewed support from Washington boosted the regime and may well have bought it a decade extra in power. Sending troops to Somalia served to divert the military and replace lost revenue from Congo and northern Uganda. The modus operandi of Museveni has been that there must always be a war; as rulers throughout the ages know, war enriches soldiers and is also a neat way to get rid of problematic officers.

The opposition had gained traction by now. The public had seen a side to the regime it would not forget. Only voter intimidation and rigging ensured the ruling party stayed in power in 2006. In 2011, in a bizarre move, Museveni courted northern Ugandan voters. The ballots returned significant gains for the Movement. It was a shocking event, for Museveni had always ignored the northern vote. But now, he had also lost southern support. The cost of buying the northern vote, as well as the amount of fear-mongering needed to secure it, was too high. It was not tried again in 2016, when the opposition returned to its previous sweep of the region.

However, it must be noted that faith in elections ended in 2001; whatever little remained burned out in 2006. What the government may have missed was that by participating in the 2011 elections, the opposition was in effect, simply looking for a casus belli – daring the government to show its hand – by which to justify its next move. The state duly obliged. The world and the judges agreed that the elections had been a sham. The demonstrations that followed (this was Arab Spring season) in the well-reported “Walk to Work” protests in which political leaders “siding” with the poor ditched their cars and walked to parliament, initiated a novel approach to Ugandan politics. It also neutralised the use of armed force. It was a battle of image for which Museveni the guerrilla-fighter could not have been more ill-prepared.

Neoliberalism begins to unravel

It was also in this decade that the economic policies adopted in the early days of the regime had so endeared Museveni to Western powers, began to unravel. The failure of neoliberal economics to deliver promised “trickle down” benefits had done its damage in the Third World countries forced to swallow it. But following the 2008 banking crisis, the failures of that ideology had crept up from its Third World laboratories into the heartlands of extreme capitalism. While it had never really had a chance to work in a country like Uganda, the crisis meant that the lifeline of foreign aid that had tube-fed the Museveni government suddenly ran dry. Incapable of providing the patronage he had once dispensed, and with poverty underlining the degree of income inequality, things had come to a head by the time the third decade in power was coming to a close.

Enter Amama Mbabazi. He had been Museveni’s co-tribune, a Movement pillar and prime minister from 2011 to 2014. It had always been rumoured that he had been the organiser, the man who made things work. He first publicly expressed his presidential ambitions back in 2000 when he accused Besigye of jumping the succession queue. Had there been a pact between him and Museveni that he would be president after him? And how patient was he going to be? In 2015, when it became plain that Mbabazi had presidential ambitions, the Movement machinery whirred into action to do what it had rarely, if ever, done. It turned against its own.

The crisis meant that the lifeline of foreign aid that had tube-fed the Museveni government suddenly ran dry. Incapable of providing the patronage he had once dispensed, and with poverty underlining the degree of income inequality, things had come to a head by the time his third decade in power was coming to a close The subsequent ejection, failed presidential candidacy and fall of Mbabazi quickly faded out of sight and he was not to become a subject of public discussion afterwards. The essential rebellion had been Besigye’s 1999 missive. There was to be no repeat. Attention remained focused on the latter, whose arrests and trials continued apace.

That was on the surface. Underneath, the ouster of the cringe-worthily naive Mbabazi, as it is now turning out, was to provide the essential plot and character for Museveni’s entry into the fourth decade in power. It is the thread that led to the fear I read that afternoon of May 20:

The ouster of Mbabazi was accompanied by a purge of the government and of the Movement system of alleged Mbabazi supporters. The high-level paranoia that underneath his own system, rebellion was growing, denied Museveni trust in a system as complex as a government needs in order to function. And yet it had been that trust the knowledge technocrats had that the president was both reasonable and supportive, that had delivered the key achievements of his early days in office, like the economic recovery and the fight against HIV/Aids. These achievements had in various forms not survived beyond the first decade but the original impetus had created a momentum of goodwill, for the image of “good leadership,” once earned, is hard to lose, if only because society is desperate for it. At any rate, Museveni had always profited by the inexhaustible store of goodwill extended to him.

It was inexhaustible until it ran out. By 2014, when Museveni made the ill-advised and very public move to sign the so-called anti-gay Bill, there had been a considerable body of international opinion that he was not exactly a democrat. By inserting himself needlessly into the Western cultural wars, Museveni had blundered in a costly fashion. He may have calculated that it would improve his electoral chances back home, but his opponents were never going to support gay rights to start with. The advantage was cancelled out. His detractors in the West had their opportunity. They pounced.

Aid money was cut left, right and centre. They needed the money for their own people. What had been billed as economic recovery was revealed to have all along been baloney. Uganda under Museveni had never improved its productivity in real terms. It was an aid-money autarky all the time.

By the time the 2016 elections came and went, it was undeniable that the country was in serious trouble. Police and other civil servants, not least teachers, nurses and doctors, went months without pay. Medicine was unavailable in hospitals. At the same time, the internal witch hunt in government, and the air of fear and suspicion following the ouster of Amama Mbabazi was causing a cave-in from the other end: There was no money to pay public workers; at the same time, people in high office became afraid to work, in case they were seen to be ambitious.

Fear and intimidation take over

Museveni’s innate instinct, the use of force and intimidation, seems to have taken over. The perennial troubles of Kasese, the Rwenzururu Kingdom, which predated colonial Uganda, and which had been handled diplomatically since the Obote I government in the 1960s, now met military force. More than 100 people were gunned down. It was not as if such a small kingdom could have caused national damage (its cause remains obscure outside the Rwenzori region), but it reflects what one analyst told me is the mentality of those whom the president now puts trust in – use maximum force.

Every ministry, from Health, Education, to Energy, is feeling the chill wind of administrative paralysis, but not all of them have as yet displayed incompetence in the manner in which famine in eastern Uganda has shown up the Ministry of Agriculture. But it is coming Without respect and trust in the seasoned technocrats who shepherd political masters through the jungles of laws and acts and regulations that are effectively the “system,” a number of odd things have been happening in Uganda. Foremost among them is the failure to manage a looming food crisis in eastern Uganda. The coming environmental crisis, the first of which is the developing collapse of fish stocks, could have been avoided had the civil service been allowed to do its work. Every ministry, from Health, Education, to Energy, is feeling the chill wind of administrative paralysis, but not all of them have as yet displayed incompetence in the manner in which famine in eastern Uganda has shown up the Ministry of Agriculture. But it is coming. The spectacular bungling of telephone registration brought these issues to the fore.

A boyish, almost flagrant informality

An order was given that telephone users “verify” their numbers. However, Ugandan citizens were told they could not use driving permits, passports, work IDs, local council IDs, only National IDs. It was a telling admission that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was inept, that its identity documents were a sham. A properly functioning government would have been advised against such a move for the demands of one arm of government must be reconciled across all government arms to ensure systemic uniformity. It is the reason there is a prime minister and a Secretary to the Cabinet. This one was a weird call, until it was revealed that the call came from the IGP’s office.

At his first press conference back in 2005, which I attended as journalist at The EastAfrican, I watched Gen. Kayihura’s demeanour. I observed his short attention span, his easily distracted manner, twiddling with his phone in the middle of taking press questions and his affinity for a boyish, almost vagrant informality. It was a frightening projection of things to come.

In 2017, you could see Gen Kayihura’s hand in that telephone debacle. A chess piece moved at the end of the second decade in power, had showed its own hand at the beginning of the fourth decade in power.

What it said, and what precipitated that fever that we felt on May 20, was the fact that the administrative state in Uganda, had been overthrown by the security forces. There had been a coup. The Office of the Prime Minister, which supervised the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which supervised the Police, was forced to humiliatingly “follow” the orders of a policeman; parliament recognised its own impotence by attacking the line minister who formally made the announcement, knowing well that the minister had simply been following the orders of the IGP, whom they dared not touch. Prime minister, parliament and line minister were all to be further humiliated when the NRM parliamentary caucus overruled all of them. Four days after shutting down phone lines, they switched them on back again, and said we would have three more months to comply with the registration order.

There is the misled belief that an Orwellian-sized national biometric database will give the state means to track everyone and prevent an Arab Spring-style social media uprising. Sources say the government’s investments in electronic surveillance have been extensive. When it first asked citizens to acquire National IDs in 2013, very few people bothered to register. Then someone had a brain wave – threaten to take away their phones, that will bring them running. And so for all of April and May, the entire country was thrown into turmoil. We wait to see what happens in August when the three-month extension runs out.

It has become clear that there are now two centres of power in Uganda, President Museveni and IGP Kayihura. Everyone else, from the vice president to district officers, has gone quiet. In a sign of how disastrous this leadership model is, the “old” model was forced to intervene after President Museveni jumped protocol and directly accused fictitious Chinese diplomats of ivory trafficking. The incensed Chinese put their foot down and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had not been consulted when the letter of accusation was sent out by the president’s office, apologised publicly to China. What it demonstrated was the manner in which Museveni now micro-manages Uganda.

It has become clear now that, going into his fourth decade in power, Museveni has effectively shut down the Uganda state and is intent on ruling through a secret and sometimes not so secret cabal of gunslingers, chief among them his IGP Gen Kale Kayihura. But even in there, things are not going swimmingly, which may explain the ultra-violent execution of Gen Kayihura’s deputy, Felix Kaweesi, on March 17 this year. It was the killing that provided the justification for shutting down telephone lines. There is a deadly power struggle even within the securocratic redoubt into which Museveni’s fourth decade is retreating. The new front of cyber security and fear of the power of social media has meant that a new front of enemies has opened up; it is no longer just past leaders, Nilotics or opposition who are “against development”; it’s also now a teenager with WhatsApp who must be closely monitored.

There is a general realisation that time is running out. Those in positions of power and opportunity are taking as much cash out of the public and through their offices as they can while they still have the chance. Principled and seasoned individuals are opting out, leaving a bevy of the callow and ethnically loyal to take positions of authority. The centre retreats into self-serving fiction.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality By Njoki Wamai

The widely publicised recent invasions of wildlife conservancies in Laikipia County in Kenya have often been framed as conflicts between pastoralist communities and conservationists. However, the conflicts in Laikipia and elsewhere in northern Kenya ought to be looked at as a national security issue exacerbated by historical land injustices and the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that relegates the true owners of the resources to the periphery.

It is instructive that the state has identified environmental degradation as constituting a threat to national security. This was highlighted in a story published in the Sunday Nation on May 7, 2017 on Kenya’s plans to expand the military. Quoting from The National Defence Policy, the reporter stated that the government had identified environmental degradation as one of the threats to Kenya’s security.

This admission is significant because for a long time the country has taken for granted fatal consequences of wanton destruction of forests, rivers, habitats, ecosystems, as well as serious erosion of biological diversity. How individual actions affect the environment appears not to preoccupy most people’s minds in the country. Collectively though, such injurious individual actions result in a situation that has far-reaching implications, not just on the well-being of the environment or inability of ecosystems to supply life-nurturing environmental resources to citizens, but also on the security of the country.

On its part, the state has kept making one policy pronouncement after another without putting in place the necessary resources and personnel to implement the policies or to whip everyone into line. For many years now, the discord between what is said in official statements and what is done by citizens, companies and the state itself has given rise to serious crises. This greatly affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of Kenyans, some of whom opt for extra-legal measures to stay alive.

Many have gone on to equate Laikipia to the Biblical Eden; “it represents a lost Eden in European settler thinking, epitomised by the writings of Kuki Gallman, which are infused with an imagined sense of entitlement to and identification with her adopted land.”

Added to this is the long-running official neglect of arid and semi-arid areas of the country. Individuals and organisations that constitute the country’s conservation fraternity have capitalised on officialdom’s disinterest by experimenting with a conservation model that is harmful to the communities there. With financial support from multilateral and bilateral donors, as well as big- bucks international NGOs, the fraternity has literary taken over and has been running not just conservation, but also security, livestock marketing and conflict resolution in a manner that greatly interferes with the sovereignty of the communities that claim ownership of the land there.

This sad state of affairs is epitomised by the fact that one organization, Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), openly claims that it has brought into conservation a whopping 44,000 km2 of the lands in the upper Rift, north and coastal regions. The reaction to what happens there and how it affects the rights of the communities to their lands and resources, as well as how this translates into the apparent insecurity in Laikipia and elsewhere in the north, ought to be seen as social reverberations of historical land injustices and official neglect.

The historical narrative

In Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, Lotte Hughes paints a picture of pastoralist communities disinherited from their land on two different occasions in 1904 and 1911. The British author says that between 1904 and 1905, colonial authorities forcibly moved the Maasai people from their favourite grazing grounds between Naivasha and Nakuru into two reserves in order to make way for white settlement. Laikipia was one of the reserves while the other was in the south, on the border with Tanzania. According to Hughes, this was done following the 1904 Maasai Agreement through which the community was promised that it could keep the reserved areas “so long as the Maasai as a race shall exist.” She writes that the British did not honour their promise but went on to move the Maasai again seven years later “at gunpoint from Laikipia to an extended southern Maasai reserve.” More than 20,000 people and not less than 2.5 million livestock were moved between 1911 and 1913. All this was done mainly to pave way for white settlers, although, as Hughes says, there were other extraneous reasons, including the desire by the colonial administration to concentrate the Maasai in one reserve in order to better rule over them and to impose taxes. Consequently, the Maasai lost between 50% and 70% of the land they occupied before 1904.

Since the second “move” was implemented, the Maasai have maintained that this was not an “agreement” per se as their leaders signed it under heavy duress and coercion. “This effectively rendered the first Agreement void,” writes Hughes. This supports the intermittent claims made by activists from the community that they have a legal claim over the land now occupied by the mainly white ranchers in Laikipia.

The campaign for redress for this historical injustice reached a crescendo in the early 2000s when the community, led by the defunct Osirigi NGO and people like the late Elijah Marima Sempeta, intensified calls for a return of the lost lands. The latter was a young lawyer who travelled to Britain and unearthed documentary evidence ascertaining that the leases given to the white ranchers had come to an end and that time had come for the ownership of the land to revert to the local community. Following a spirited campaign, the matter fizzled out after Sempeta was murdered outside his home in Ngong Town in circumstances that remain unexplained. However, the push appears to have borne fruit when lease periods were lowered from 999 years to 99 years in Kenya’s 2010 constitution.

Defeating the land rights campaign

The white lessees of the land in Laikipia have adopted a multi-pronged counter-campaign and have shown – in words and deeds – that they are not ready to forfeit the land. According to Hughes, many have gone on to equate Laikipia to the Biblical Eden; “it represents a lost Eden in European settler thinking, epitomised by the writings of Kuki Gallman, which are infused with an imagined sense of entitlement to and identification with her adopted land.”

In Land Deals in Kenya: The Genesis of Land Deals in Kenya and its Implication on Pastoral Livelihoods – A Case Study of Laikipia District, 2011, John Letai says that Laikipia has “profound inequalities” in land ownership, with 40.3% of the land being controlled by 48 individuals. Among the biggest landowners in Laikipia include Gallman, whose Ol Ari Nyiro ranch is said to be 100,000 acres. Other large ranches include the Ol Pejeta ranch (92,000 acres) that was once associated with Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the Ol Jogi ranch (67,000 acres) owned by the late French billionaire art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. But even with this kind of inequality, it has been apparent that the ranchers cannot countenance the idea of ever giving up the giant parcels of land to the original owners. Some have been offloading the land to other rich people (some of whom are foreigners) while top business and political elites in the country have also increasingly acquired land there.

The white lessees of the land in Laikipia have adopted a multi-pronged counter- campaign and have shown – in words and deeds – that they are not ready to forfeit the land.

Another approach has been to front the sprawling ranches as important wildlife conservation areas. Targeted in this approach is a powerful and moneyed audience in the West that has contributed immensely to support wildlife conservation in cash and kind. Initially, the white ranchers had not taken wildlife conservation as seriously. For a long time, many had taken to large-scale livestock keeping but later realised that they stood to gain much more by converting their properties to either mixed livestock-and-wildlife areas or to exclusive wildlife conservation zones. They appear to have been inspired by arguments put forward by people such as Dr. David Western, a former Kenya Wildlife Service director, who championed the parks-beyond-parks concept, as well as the outcome of the 2003 World Parks Congress organised by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in Durban, South Africa. According to Dr Mordecai Ogada, a former chief executive of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, the central theme and message coming out of the Congress was “benefits beyond boundaries”.

“The model that proposed establishment of conservancies outside protected areas … gained immediate currency and caught the eye of donors as well as statutory agencies like the Kenya Wildlife Service, which were keen to gain more habitat for wildlife and secure reservoir wildlife populations that could augment those in parks via wildlife corridors,” says Dr. Ogada.

He says that this led to a “carefully laid out and presented plan” to secure the future of wildlife in these vast lands and to get financial support from private and institutional donors.

To avoid paying taxes and to continue enjoying the largesse of global supporters of wildlife conservation, many of the Laikipia ranchers registered their conservancies as non-profit organisations. Today, Ian Craig’s Lewa Conservancy and Kuki Gallman’s Ol-Ari Nyiro Conservancy are registered as non-profit outfits. However, this is a misnomer because many of them run exclusive, high-end lodges and camps that charge tens of thousands of shillings daily to tourists. For instance, with 12 tents that can accommodate 26 guests, Lewa Safari Camp located in the Lewa Downs charges between Ksh15,500 ($155) and Ksh42,600 ($426) per night depending on the season. The plot thickens

Getting the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to give world heritage status to the ranches is the third approach adopted by the ranch owners. The secret scheme to have UNESCO play ball is aimed at enabling the ranchers to maintain a lasting claim on the land and, therefore, “eternally” defeat any campaign to have it revert to the Maasai community. So far, this is a feat that only Lewa Conservancy has attained. The 60,000-acre ranch was given this status in 2013, as an extension of the Mount Kenya World Heritage Site together with the Ngare Ndare Forest, which is also in Laikipia.

However, there are those who say that the elevation of Lewa was an anomaly because according to the World Heritage Convention, the duty of ensuring the identification, protection and conservation of cultural and natural heritage sites “belongs primarily” to the state. In addition, Article 5(4) of the convention burdens states with the funding and the protection of such sites, besides coming up with laws to protect them. Further, Article 6(3) states: “Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to take any deliberate measures which might damage directly or indirectly the cultural and natural heritage.”

Nevertheless, Lewa’s success appears to have encouraged others with huge ranches, some which were constituted through the NRT, to seek similar status for their property. According to what I found out, the ranchers commenced this in 2014 when 24 wildlife conservancies and private game ranches made applications to be included in the world database of protected areas. These include Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Segera, Solio Ranch, Ol-jogi Ranch, Kisima Farm and Ol Ari Nyiro Ranch (see: https://protectedplanet.net/ ).

“There is a rush to create a super big protected area stretching from Lewa to Solio – all of it under the cover of Word Heritage Convention,” says Njenga Kahiro, a former Project Officer with Laikipia Wildlife Forum.

If this goes through, it will mean that the conservancies and ranches will be declared of outstanding universal value and natural beauty. It is also bound to have far-reaching implications for Kenya, which is a signatory to the World Heritage Convention. Formulated in 1972, the Convention protects the world’s cultural and natural heritage. In essence, the ranchers appear to be putting forward the argument that the land is special and only its present owners can be trusted to keep it that way. But this has attracted criticism from members of the Maasai community. “This is a misplaced idea and it will receive serious challenges and resistance from human rights and indigenous people,” said Mali Ole Kaunga, the director of IMPACT, an NGO based in Laikipia County. Ole Kaunga accuses the ranch owners of “hiding behind international conventions…in order to get the Kenya government to protect them as it is obliged to by the Convention.”

Laikipia has “profound inequalities” in land ownership, with 40.3% of the land being controlled by 48 individuals.

Eustace Gitonga, the director of the Community Museums of Kenya, says that this will prevent Kenya from ever changing the use of such a vast segment of its real estate. “This will mean that Kenya cannot access any mineral wealth suspected to be in these lands.” Gitonga believes that this will also affect Kenya’s sovereign right to decide on how best to use its resources.

Other dynamics have also set in to further disenfranchise the pastoralist communities. This includes acquisition of large parcels of land by top politicians and rich people, from different ethnic groups in Kenya. Added to this is the phenomenon of absentee landlords and the resettlement of smallholders, mainly from the Kikuyu community, there. According to Letai, today, smallholder farms constitute 22.21% of the land. Many of the owners of the small farms have abandoned their parcels, as ascertained by a study done in 2013 titled The Abandoned Lands of Laikipia Land Use Options Study). A whopping 238,000 acres have been abandoned by some 85,000 titleholders, most of whom live elsewhere.

The absentee landowners, who were settled there by the first independent government under the late President Jomo Kenyatta, ended up using the land as collateral to acquire loans, mainly from the Agricultural Development Corporation. Letai says that there has been a rush to buy off the land from the absentee land owners. “Former commercial ranch managers are identifying the title holders of the absentee lands to convince them to consolidate their holdings and sell them to foreign diplomats, aid workers and even some former Zimbabwean white farmers. He adds that after purchasing the land, the latter have been fencing them which “has created tension with the Maasai and other pastoralists who have been using this land over a long period of time.

NRT’s approach

This situation is compounded by the fact that the inappropriate conservation approach and, to some extent, the goings-on in the private ranches of Laikipia, is replicated in the sprawling communally- owned lands within Laikipia and neighbouring counties. Northern Rangelands Trust has been championing the well-oiled conservation initiative, arguing that it enables communities to get revenue from conservation activities, promotes security in the north and has been facilitating the mainly pastoralist communities to put in place grazing plans that lessen their vulnerability to frequent and severe droughts occasioned by climate change. The organisation further says that it is involved in bringing more lands into wildlife conservation through the development of strong community-led institutions and that this forms the basis for investment in tourism and community development. NRT-inspired community conservancies have now spread across Laikipia, Samburu, Isiolo, Marsabit, Baringo/East Pokot, Garissa, Tana River and Lamu counties.

The largesse extended to the NRT is large and extensive to say the least. For instance, last November, the United States government channelled, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), some Ksh2 billion (US $20 million) in a new five-year scheme meant to expand NRT’s operations in 33 conservancies in Kenya’s coastal and northern regions. According to NRT’s website, the conservancies now cover 10.8 million acres (or 44,000km2) of the country and are spread across 11 counties. Announcing the grant, US ambassador Robert Godec said it was meant to “support the work of community rangers, conserve wildlife and fisheries, and improve livelihoods and advance women’s enterprises.”

The NRT was started in 2004 by Craig, with the initial aim of raising funds to aid the formation and running of wildlife conservancies. Its website says it supports the training of relevant communities and helps to “broker agreements between conservancies and investors.” It also says that it provides donors with “a degree of oversight and quality assurance.” Besides the US, the organisation’s activities are heavily funded by the Danish Development Agency (DANIDA), The Nature Conservancy (a US-based international NGO) and the French government’s Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD). Other financiers include Fauna & Flora International, Zoos South Australia, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ of Germany), US Fish and Wildlife Service, San Diego Zoo, International Elephant Foundation, Saint Louis Zo, and Running Wild.

However, it is the massive grants from USAID and Tullow Oil, the British company that has struck oil in Turkana County, which has attracted curious interest from observers who believe that there’s more than is being said in official communication. Pundits say that NRT’s approach affects communities negatively. According to Dr Ogada, the launch of community conservancies “began the mass disenfranchisement of communities in the name of conservation, and the rest is history.”

“Conservation is a noble cause, but like all other sectors, should be properly regulated. Kenya is currently failing to do that.”

In an interview with this writer, Michael Lalampaa, an official with the Higher Education Loans Board who hails from Samburu County, said that “even when droughts occur, pastoralists cannot access part of their lands that are now set aside for wildlife conservation and which constitute the community conservancies.” Indeed, many of the NRT-inspired community conservancies visited by this writer in late December 2016 had set aside big portions of the community lands as exclusive wildlife areas (or core areas). Some of these zones have better ecological characteristics and impressive landscapes favoured by tourists. Lalampaa complains that NRT compels communities to set aside the best portions of their lands for the exclusive use of wildlife and investors subsequently lease it to set up tourist facilities.

What is interesting, as this writer found during a tour of the Kurikuri Conservancy close to Mukogondo forest, is that the NRT not only brokers the investment agreements, but has also insisted on having its employees as some of the signatories of conservancies’ bank accounts. More alarming, the community in Kurikuri is required to meet some of the costs of running the lodges, which eats deeply into the cash they get from leasing out their land and from each of the tourists who visit the conservancy.

To ensure that the operations within the conservancies have the support of relevant communities, NRT has identified and co-opted local leaders and elites who aid in persuading the pastoralists to set aside land for conservation. As a result, some of the prominent personalities within the Samburu, Borana, Maasai and Rendile communities are on the NRT’s board.

Drought part of the problem

Although the prolonged drought that ended last month is believed to have triggered the recent invasions of ranches and conservancies in Laikipia, there are claims that some of the pastoralist communities there have unwittingly locked themselves out of parts of their lands through the conservancy agreements. “Once the agreements are put in place, it becomes impossible for the herders to access pastures in the conservancies as they are confronted by armed scouts who kick them out. It is sad that at times, livestock end up dying simply because their owners cannot graze them in what used to be their lands,” says Lalampaa.

The setting aside of huge sections of community ranches (which is facilitated by the NRT) for conservation purposes has created a dilemma for the communities and is proving to worsen rather than diminish insecurity, particularly in the upper eastern and northern Kenya regions. According to media reports, the alienation of land has contributed to the hardships suffered by local pastoralists, especially during the current prolonged dry spell. Reports paint a worrisome picture of members of communities invading either the areas they had earlier set aside or other private game ranches. For instance, armed herdsmen invaded the ranch belonging to Will Jennings, a mixed race Kenyan, resulting in a shootout between members of the Rapid Deployment Unit of the Kenya Police and the rangers. Other ranches invaded recently include the Loisaba Conservancy and Sera Conservancies established by the pastoralists, the 50,000-acre Segera Ranch owned by Jochen Zeitz, a former CEO of the Puma sports brand, and the Sosian and Galmann ranches. So far, one rancher, Tristan Voorspuy, has been killed in Sosian Ranch, while Gallmann is still recovering in hospital after being shot by herders. NRT’s security apparatus

Although the government has moved its security machinery into Laikipia, the long-running insecurity in Laikipia and other parts of the north is an indictment on its ability to pacify these areas. It is also apparent that the NRT has “filled the gap” by establishing a security apparatus that is considered one of the most controversial aspects of the organisation’s activities. On its website, the organisation says that it carries out anti-poaching operations, wildlife monitoring and that conservancy rangers are “invaluable to the Kenya Police in helping to tackle cattle rustling and road banditry.” NRT says that each conservancy has a team of uniformed rangers that are “employed by the communities and trained with support from NRT”. By 2014, there were some 645 such rangers.

Additional information posted on the organisation’s website shows that the rangers are given basic training by KWS personnel at the wildlife agency’s Manyani Training School. There, they learn “bush craft skills, as well as how to effectively gather and share intelligence, monitor wildlife and manage combat situations.” According to information posted on the website of the NGO Save the Rhino, some rangers have been given Kenya Police Reserve accreditation and “sufficient weapons handling training.” Such advanced training is done by 51 Degrees, a company associated with Batian Craig, the son of Ian Craig. Among the specifics of the training include tactical movement with weapons, ambush and anti-ambush drills, handling and effective usage of night-vision and thermal-imaging equipment and ground-to-air communications and coordination. The rangers are also taken through what is called “typical training of different operations in war situation”, as well as observation, stalking, camouflage and concealment, judging distance and map reading. NRT has also launched patrol boats for security operations in its coastal chapter, which has now benefitted from USAID’s finances.

The crisis is worsened by the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that has resulted in more disenfranchisement of the local people and led to rising incidences of severe drought as a result of climate change. The crisis is further exacerbated by neglect by the state and its unwillingness to stamp its authority in these areas –which has given undeserving space and say to the NRT and its foreign supporters.

“This formidable armed force is under the overall control of a CEO who is a civilian and isn’t even a citizen of this country,” said Dr. Ogada. He added that by allowing this to happen, KWS “has effectively abdicated its wildlife protection role” to the NRT.

Dr. Ogada believes that the immense foreign and private control over such a large proportion of the country’s resources and citizens calls for more overt dialogue and regulation. “Conservation is a noble cause, but like all other sectors, should be properly regulated. Kenya is currently failing to do that.” He adds that the sheer geographical, financial, cultural and political scale of this intervention calls for a lot more thought than has been given to it thus far.

It is apparent that the crisis in Laikipia and other areas in Northern Kenya is a multifaceted one that defies a simple explanation. It has its origins in historical land injustices that have not been addressed even after Kenya became independent. The crisis is worsened by the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that has resulted in more disenfranchisement of the local people and led to rising incidences of severe drought as a result of climate change. The crisis is further exacerbated by neglect by the state and its unwillingness to stamp its authority in these areas –which has given undeserving space and say to the NRT and its foreign supporters.

To address this crisis, all players must come together to examine, in a holistic and comprehensive manner, issues related to land ownership and use, security, economic well-being of the people, and vulnerability of the local communities to adverse effects of climate change, among other issues. The state must also pacify these areas, not merely by sending the police or members of the Kenya Defence Forces, but also by starting social and economic projects in a manner that will establish a meaningful and lasting economic footprint there.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

‘Githeriman’ and the Kenyan Middle Class Saviour Mentality

By Njoki Wamai

When Kenyan troops crossed the proverbial Rubicon and entered Somalia nearly six years ago, it caught almost everyone by surprise. It was Kenya’s first sustained and significant foray into its troubled neighbors territory and ran counter to the country’s historic pacifism -at least in international if not necessarily in domestic, affairs- as well as against the grain of the advice she had received from her much more experienced friends and patrons in the international community.

The immediate trigger of Kenya’s offensive was a spate of kidnappings of aid workers and tourists near the Somalia border, which had devastated the country’s lucrative tourism industry and which the government blamed on the al Shabaab terror group. Since 2007, the al Shabaab, had been fighting to oust the then transitional government in Mogadishu which was protected by AU forces under the AU Mission to Somalia (AMISOM). Allied to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, the al Shabaab had carried out atrocities both inside and outside Somalia, including the July 2010 bombings in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, which targeted football fans watching the soccer World Cup final and killed 76 people.

The objectives given by the Kenyan government for the invasion were both confused and confusing. Spokesman Alfred Mutua initially claimed the KDF was pursuing the alleged kidnappers across the border but later admitted that the kidnappings had been an excuse to launch a plan that had “been in the pipeline for a while.” Despite the fact that the al Shabaab had strongly denied having anything to do with the kidnappings and the government produced no evidence to back up its allegations, it still dispatched a letter to the UN Security Council citing the “latest direct attacks on Kenyan territory and the accompanying loss of life and kidnappings of Kenyans and foreign nationals by the Al-Shabaab terrorists” as reason for “remedial and pre-emptive action” undertaken “to protect and preserve the integrity of Kenya and the efficacy of the national economy and to secure peace and security.”

The stated objectives for the incursion quickly escalated. They ran the gamut from rescuing the kidnapped foreigners to pushing al Shabaab away from the border and establishing a buffer zone, to the capture of the port city of Kismayo, the dismantling of al Shabaab and the stabilization of Somalia. “We are going to be there until the (Somali government) has effectively reduced the capacity of al-Shabaab to fire a single round … We want to ensure there is no al Shabaab,” declared military spokesman, Major Emmanuel Chirchir.

The first few weeks were greeted with euphoric displays of patriotism from a polarized populace desperate for something to rally around. Less than four years prior, the country had almost torn itself apart following the shambolic and disputed elections of 2007. For a country used to seeing itself, despite the testimony of history, as “an island of peace in a sea of chaos”, the episode was profoundly traumatizing and left in its wake deep and disturbing questions about what it meant to be Kenyan. The adoption of a new constitution in 2010, a seminal moment in any nation’s history, had done little to quieten the nagging doubts. A Government of National Unity formed in the aftermath of the violence was proving to be a testy affair. The power struggles and political realignments within it, as well as the continuing and blatant theft of public resources it presided over, undermined rather than reinforced the already shaky idea of Kenya.

But if there’s one thing that can be relied on to rally a people, it is war. And war was what the media branded the invasion. “Kenyan troops off to war” blared the Daily Nation headline. “We are in a war against terrorists in and outside our country,” President Uhuru Kenyatta would declare in December 2014. However, there has never been an official declaration of war, either against Somalia or against Al Shabaab, which according to the constitution requires the authorization of Parliament.

Regardless, following the invasion Kenyans were treated to breathless coverage of the exploits and capacities of their valiant and heroic troops. Tales came about captured towns that few had ever heard of and one front page article even proclaimed the “imminent fall of Kismayo”. Uncomfortable questions about the aims and wisdom of the invasion were quickly swept aside. Still, as John Adams, the second President of the United States said, “facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

The first hints of the morass Kenya had got herself mired in came quite early on. Within weeks of setting foot in Somalia, the troops were literally stuck in mud as the invasion had been conducted at the height of Somalia’s dehr short rain season. 60 days into what had been branded Operation Linda Nchi, Franklin would report that “KDF ground units are bogged down in the mud of South Central Somalia or marooned in the vicinity of Ras Kamboni on the Indian Ocean. Bad weather seems to have severely limited sorties by fixed wing ground attack aircraft as well as KDF attack helicopters”. It would take the KDF nearly 7 months to capture Afmadow, al Shabaab’s logistical base, and a year to get to Kismayo, Somalia’s second largest port, which was the real prize. By this time, Operation Linda Nchi had been wound down without achieving any of its objectives and 4600 Kenyan troops transferred to AMISOM.

Back in Kenya, the novelty of war had worn thin and the country was settling down to yet another divisive and scary election campaign. It was also coming to terms with the fact that the battle with the al Shabaab would not just be fought in Somalia. Almost immediately after the invasion, al Shabaab leaders had begun promising “huge blasts” in Nairobi. An initial campaign attacks using hand grenades and improvised explosives badly damaged the already fragile perception of security. But what completely shattered it was the attack on the Westgate Mall in September 2013 where 4 terrorists murdered at least 68 people and ruthlessly exposed the incompetence and corruption at the heart of the national security establishment.

In fact, it is arguable that the biggest casualties of the invasion of Somalia have been the national security agencies and especially the KDF. Prior to the invasion, the KDF was seen as a professional, disciplined, if spoilt and coddled, military force. It was widely thought to be immune to the foibles and prejudices and moral and material decay afflicting the rest of the public service. Westgate put paid to all that. Few will ever forget the grainy CCTV footage of soldiers, who were meant to be battling the terrorists, instead strolling out of the Nakumatt supermarket carrying plastic shopping bags. The four-day fiasco, the friendly fire incident in which the KDF shot and killed a commander of the General Service Unit’s Recce Squad, the looting of the mall, the confused public updates and the inability to take on 4 armed men at the heat of the city destroyed public confidence in the KDF and in the intelligence agencies.

The carefully cultivated reputation of the National Intelligence Service, honed during its time as the Directorate of Security Intelligence, better known as the “Special Branch”, and favorite tool of surveillance and repression by the brutal regime of Daniel Arap Moi, was also in tatters. It would be completely obliterated by a series of large attacks which came within the two years following Westgate. These include the massacres in Mpeketoni and at the Garissa University College, and the attacks on buses and workers in Mandera, all of which claimed tens and sometimes hundreds of lives, and which were all, somewhat unfairly, blamed on failures of intelligence.

For the KDF, the bad news would keep on coming. It was again at the centre of the failures in both Mpeketoni and Garissa University, and was accused in a November 2015 report of profiteering from the Somalia deployment. A report titled “Black and White” by Journalists for Justice, accused the KDF of colluding with al Shabaab, the very enemy they are supposed to be fighting, to illegally export charcoal out of Somalia ports and to smuggle sugar into Kenya. Similar allegations had been made by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea and the KDF’s vehement denials and empty promises to investigate did little to salvage its reputation.

On January 15, 2016 the AMISOM base at the nondescript Somali town of El Adde, which was manned by troops from the Kenyan contingent, was overrun by the al Shabaab. Up to 200 soldiers were killed and a dozen kidnapped. A UN report by the accused KDF of failure to implement basic defensive measures and concluded that the al Shabaab faced “relatively little resistance from the Kenyan troops”.

Back home, the government and the KDF retreated into silence, obviously hoping the questions and calls for accountability would go away. They would be temporarily jolted out of their reverie a year later when another KDF-manned camp was overrun by al Shabaab, this time at Kulbiyow. Different accounts of what happened have been offered with The Standard claiming up to 68 soldiers were killed and the KDF putting the number at 9 with 15 injured.

None of this has done the KDF’s reputation much good. Today, its star is considerably diminished. It has turned out to be just as vacuous, corrupt, incompetent and unaccountable as nearly all the other public institutions in the political firmament.

Regardless of this, the government has not shied away from increasing the deployment of the KDF internally. In fact, especially since October 2011, the military has taken on a much more public profile. For a country which has never experienced the misfortune of military rule, Kenya has always had an uneasy relationship with its soldiers. Following two failed coup plots in the 70s and the 80s, the political elite has preferred to keep the troops happy, well fed and watered in their barracks. But, as Daniel Branch noted in Foreign Policy, by 2011, the KDF had “been trained and equipped to do much more than parade on national holidays.” Increased counter-terrorism funding from Washington had underwritten a stronger Kenyan military which in turn had “grown more confident and combative”.

It is arguable that the biggest casualties of the invasion of Somalia have been the national security agencies and especially the KDF. Prior to the invasion, the KDF was seen as a professional, disciplined, if spoilt and coddled, military force. It was widely thought to be immune to the foibles and prejudices and moral and material decay afflicting the rest of the public service. Westgate put paid to all that.

In the aftermath of the invasion of Somalia, it has now become almost routine for the government to deploy this capability to deal with local trouble spots within the country without seeking authorization from the National Assembly as required by the constitution. Neither does it appear that the Inspector General of Police is made “responsible for the administration, command, control and overall superintendence of the operation” as required by the KDF Act.

In December 2013 President Kenyatta raised hackles when he announced the formation of the Nairobi Metropolitan Command of the KDF citing the need to combat “the current threats in the country emerging from terrorism, drug trafficking, proliferation of small arms, and crime, among others, that tend to flourish in highly urbanised areas like Nairobi.” And seven months later, a bill was proposed (and later dropped) which sought to strip Parliament of its power to approve the deployment of the KDF within Kenya. “We need to ensure that we remove the roadblocks on the way that may derail the process of deployment of the military locally so that we can respond faster and swiftly,” declared National Assembly Majority Leader, Aden Duale.

Further, in addition to the larger role played by retired officers in the civilian security and intelligence agencies, President Kenyatta earlier this year appointed the serving Chief of Defense Forces, Gen Samson Mwathethe to chair the Blue Economy implementation Committee which oversees the implementation of government programs.

A scared people are much more willing to bargain away their freedoms for a sense of safety, however ephemeral. And by the end of 2015, Kenyans were a pretty scared lot. The Somalia invasion had backfired spectacularly and not only failed to deliver the promised safety, but made matters much worse. According to a report by the Daily Nation’s Newsplex, which cited data from the Global Terrorism Database, the most comprehensive unclassified database on terrorist events conducted by non-state actors and the Nation Media Group’s own archives, in the 45 months after Operation Linda Nchi began, there were nine times as many attacks as in the 45 months before the mission. The attacks were also more ferocious, with deaths and injuries multiplying eight-fold in the same period.

The government has instrumentalized the fear this has generated to scapegoat particular communities in order to distract attention from its own actions and to try to roll back the freedoms guaranteed in the 2010 constitution.

According to Andrew Franklin, a security consultant and former US marine, “Declarations of war justify extraordinary – and temporary – restrictions on all manner of normal domestic activities and curbs on many constitutionally protected freedoms. This is why going to war is considered a big deal and not just a matter of semantics.”

Yet the government has invoked the idea of a country at war to justify the concentration of power in the Executive, especially in the Presidency, the removal of existing constitutional restraints on the exercise of that power and the clampdown on media freedoms and civil liberties. In December 2014, the government forced through Parliament legislation expanding the powers of the President and imposing limitations of civil liberties, including the right to protest and fair trial, as well as curtailing media freedom to publish terrorism-related stories. Just two days before, State House spokesman, Manoah Esipisu, penned a telling op-ed in the Daily Nation in which he justified these measures on the basis that it was a “time of war”.

The primary targets of the government’s fear-mongering and scapegoating have been the Muslim community and especially, though not exclusively, ethnic Somalis. Be they Kenyan citizens or refugees from Somalia, they have been collectively blamed for the atrocities committed by al Shabaab and this has led to repressive “anti-terror operations” and deportations. In April 2014, the government deployed, according tosays Human Rights Watch, about 5000 police officers and KDF troops in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighborhood following a series of grenade and gun and in Mombasa. Operation Usalama Watch lasted several weeks during which “the forces raided homes, buildings, and shops, extorted massive sums, and harassed and detained an estimated 4,000 people – including journalists, registered refugees, Kenyan citizens, and international aid workers – without charge, and in appalling conditions for periods well beyond the 24-hour legal limit.” Further, in violation of its international obligations, the government is trying to close the Dadaab refugee camp, the world’s largest, and to force nearly half a million refugees back across the border.

In addition to this, extrajudicial assassination and disappearances have also become a preferred way to deal with those suspected of links to al Shabaab. Several radical Muslim clerics at the coast have been murdered and the Anti-Terror Police Unit has been accused of disappearing Somali and Muslim youth across the country and, more specifically, in the arid counties of the former North Eastern Province. This is not new. As the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission demonstrates, Somali and Muslim communities have historically suffered the bulk of atrocities committed by both the colonial and post-colonial governments. However, for much of that history, such oppression was carried out in the remote north and hidden from most of the public. During Usalama Watch, however, the state was blatantly carrying out large scale, systematic campaign of extortion and abuse right in the heart of the capital city and targeting a specific minority in broad daylight and with the tacit approval of a large segment of terrorized society.

Similarly, surveillance too has come out of the shadows. During the Moi dictatorship, the perception of widespread surveillance through networks of informers was key to keeping the population compliant and afraid. Citizens were afraid to criticize the state since one did not know who might be listening. However, today they welcome even more comprehensive and ubiquitous surveillance, via CCTV cameras and listening in on phone and online conversations, as reassurance that the state is looking out for -rather than watching- them.

In the weeks following the Westgate attack, the government introduced a programme labelled Nyumba Kumi which encouraged citizens to form neighbourhood teams that would spy on members and report “suspicious activities” to the government. It was borrowed from Tanzania where it was used by Julius Nyerere’s government as a means of political control, to strengthen one-party rule. The late Michael Okema in his 1996 book on the Political Culture of Tanzania wrote that the system was “designed to make the citizen more security conscious” and expected him or her “to be all ears on behalf of the state”. Nyumba Kumi has much more ancient roots in 4th Century BCE China where, as described by Rev. John MacGowan of the London Missionary Society in 1897, the Ten House System “was a small division of a ward in a city, and consisted of ten dwelling houses. Each of these was responsible to the government for the conduct of the rest.”

The invasion of Somalia and the brutal reaction it inspired have generated a climate of fear and fostered an unthinking and unquestioning patriotism which has paved way for the enforcement of an orthodoxy of “official truth”. Querying government misdeeds especially in the security sector and in the prosecution of its “war on terror” immediately attracts accusations of harboring terrorist sympathies. National security has become the carpet under which governmental ills are hidden. When, in November 2015, journalists reported on security procurement queries raised by the Auditor-General, three were immediately summoned to the Directorate of Criminal investigations and one was subsequently arrested, apparently on the orders of Internal Security Minister Joseph Ole Nkaissery. He demanded that they reveal their confidential sources claiming that their reports contained information “calculated to create a perception that there were malpractices relating to procuring security items within the Interior ministry” that could “expose our security forces to significant risk”. Ironically, they were accused of endangering public safety for reporting that the Auditor-General had specifically stated that the corrupt “purchase of second-hand arms and ammunition… had “seriously compromis[ed] the operations of the security agencies”.

Although the severity and regularity of terror attacks within the country have significantly reduced since their peak in 2015, Kenya remains a country on edge. Mass surveillance, ubiquitous security checks, xenophobia and state-sanctioned murder and disappearance of citizens have become normalized. Parliament, the media and civil society have shown little inclination to either demand accountability from the security sector or to encourage an honest public debate over the wisdom, strategy and objectives of continuing military operations in Somalia. Neither has there been anything resembling a deep introspection over the expanded domestic role of the KDF.

The October 2011 invasion may yet help provide Somalia with an opportunity to recover from its decades of turmoil but the experience has already severely degraded Kenya’s institutions and dented her ambitions of entrenching democratic and accountable governance at home. Its effects will be felt for generations to come.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.