SMOKE and MIRRORS: What the Demolitions Are Really About,THE

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura

In 2013, a university don was “arrested on suspicion of obstructing and assaulting (both emphasis mine) the police” by the Metropolitan Police in north-east London. Her real crime was “offering a 15- year-old boy a legal advice card”. Konstancja Duff, the “culprit”, then lectured at the University of Nottingham. The boy she had helped had been caught “in a stop and search sweep on the Wilton estate in Hackney”. When confronted by the Met police, Duff declined to reveal her identity, which caused the officers to order her into a police van and whisk her to the police station.

Miffed by her refusal to cooperate by refusing to speak to the police, the duty officer at the police station, Sergeant Kurtis Howard, commanded three female custody officers to strip search Duff, whose clothes were cut off with scissors. Reflecting on why she had been arrested, Duff would later record that “I felt like what I had been arrested for was for sticking up for somebody’s legal rights…I had been arrested for offering a-know-your-right card.”

If, for a moment, we were to remove the names of the towns, locations and police stations, the incident described above could as well have taken place in one of the sprawling suburbs of Kenya’s capital city Nairobi. And there would be no argument whatsoever that the behaviour of the Met officers captured here exactly mirror those of the predatory and primordial city askaris.

The similarities in the behaviour and modus operandi of the Met Police of greater London and the Nairobi City Inspectorate city askaris are not coincidental. The Met Police was formed in 1829 by Conservative Party politician Robert Peele primarily, according to the International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice, to “maintain order, without having to call the aid of the army. A police institution that would be trained to restore order without guns and sabres.”

Peele, who had served as a Home Secretary, may have felt there was a “desire for order and tidiness on the streets of the late 18th and early 19th century cities”. His vision was to have a police force that did not have jurisdiction over the square mile of the wealthy and powerful of the city London, but one that ensured safety and cleanliness around the greater metropolis. This arrangement has existed to date: “Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the city of London still has its own, independent police.”

The Nairobi City Inspectorate, whose askaris are charged with maintaining law and order in the greater metropolis, was modelled on the Met Police, a retired senior city askari reminisced to me recently. “Known by their other name, ‘enforcement officers’, the city askaris are supposed to enforce city by-laws,” he said. “The ‘manual’ on how the city askaris were to go about their duties was imported from London. But while London did away with many obnoxious by-laws, post- independence Nairobi retained many, if not all, colonial by-laws.”

The Met police, which in those early days recruited unruly young men to serve as officers – men who oftentimes reported to work drunk – would beat up Londoners for the flimsiest reasons, though it was professionalised and reformed later. But old habits die hard, as the incident above demonstrates.

The City Inspectorate is a creature of colonial Nairobi, which was made a city in 1904, more than 100 years ago. After World War II, the city askaris were deployed by the British colonial government largely to control the movement of the African male who was employed in the city as migrant labour. The “native” was considered too unsophisticated for the emerging township.

“It is therefore not out of context for the city askari during the colonial times and indeed even in the post-colony to have arrested a native for loitering or walking in a manner and intent to suggest that he was likely to commit a crime or commotion or even cause and create disaffection and disharmony,” the former askari told me. “A white man could stroll in the streets of Nairobi to window shop or walk his pet around, but a native with his dog wandering around the streets was considered a ‘nuisance’.”

He went on : “The natives who walked around with their ‘mangy’ dogs risked being arrested and their animals confiscated. Many times such dogs would be killed and then dumped in the landfill in Dandora.”

Up to late 1980s, city askaris would be deployed from time to time into the estates in the eastern part of Nairobi armed with collared straps to ensnare and round up “stray” dogs that would be quarantined in the dogs’ section of the Nairobi City Council pound at City Park in the Parklands area. Many of them were put down.

Mercy Muendo, who lectures at the Mount Kenya University, points out that “variations of these rules remain on the books to date. The [Nairobi] County rules demand that dog owners must be licensed…This rule can be read as discriminatory because the vast majority of lower- income earners now find themselves unable to keep a dog in the city.”

After independence in 1963, the work of the Nairobi City Council askari (popularly known as “kanjo”, which is derived from the word Council) was clearly spelt out: stem the movements of the African man on the streets of major towns. Muendo notes that some of the archaic laws that these askaris enforce can be traced back to legal ordinances that were passed by the colonial government between 1923 and 1934. She says that these laws were used to curtail the freedom of movement of and the enjoyment of public spaces by the “native” Africans and to even hinder the growth of the economy.

“To curtail freedom of movement and enjoyment of public spaces by non-whites, the settlers created categories of persons known as ‘vagrants’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘barbarians’, ‘savages’ and ‘Asians’” she writes. An example she offers is the 1925 Vagrancy Ordinance, which after independence became the Vagrancy Act that wasn’t repealed until 1997. The Ordinance “restricted movement of the African after 6pm, especially if they did not have a registered address”.

The law lecturer observes that “anyone found loitering, anyone who was homeless or who was found in the wrong abode, making noise on the wrong streets, sleeping in public or hawking” risked arrest without warrant and imprisonment. The colonial city askari’s main mission, therefore, was to implement the British colonial government’s racial and segregationist policies in urban centres and towns.

However, his post-independence counterpart is a different creature altogether – he is crude and anachronistic and his role is poorly defined. He can be beastly and brutish. Like the Metropolitan Police of early 19th century London, he is unkempt and unruly, uneducated and uncouth, sadistic and savage.

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The year was 2016 and it was around 5.00pm. I had an appointment with Steve Owiti, a street vendor who has supplied me with books and magazine for close to two decades. His bookstand is located next to the Ambassadeur Hotel facing Tom Mboya Street. When I arrived at the bookstand, I found a commotion: street vendors and hawkers were running helter-skelter after they had been ambushed by the vicious city askaris.

With the vagrancy law gone, the city askari can no longer accost you for loitering on the streets of Nairobi, but he can prefer obstruction and assault charges against you – of course, with the connivance of the duty officer manning the occurrence book (OB) at any of the city’s frightening police stations. It is a story I know too well. As fate would have it, one of the fruit vendors, a girl barely out of her teens who was carrying a baby strapped on her back, was cornered. She was violently shoved by one of the askaris. She fell backwards, pressing the baby on the ground. I could not believe what I was witnessing. So I lost my cool and turned on the askari. For heaven’s sake, I asked him, what on earth did he think he was doing? The young lady had a baby – why did he have to use so much violence arresting her?

Not used to being confronted or even questioned, the askari turned on me, angrily accusing me of meddling in his work. A crowd quickly built up where I was standing and the askari, losing confidence, took off promising to be back. Seconds later, four mean-faced city askaris surrounded me. The crowd had not yet dissipated but now the askaris had a quorum and would not be easily cowed. In the foulest language they could muster, and all four speaking at once, they harangued me: “Hata Uhuru Kenyatta mwenyewe hawezi kuingilia kazi yetu…wewe ndio nani?” (Even [President] Uhuru Kenyatta cannot interfere with our work…so, who do you think you are?) “Leo ndio utajua sisi ni akina nani.” (Today you’ll know who we are), they promised me.

Howling at the indignant crowd to scatter, one of the askaris unleashed a pair of handcuffs and with a show of force, handcuffed my hands and frog-marched me – the other three askaris in tow and swearing – to the waiting City Inspectorate van some 20 metres away. I was bundled into the rear of the van. Apparently, I was the first culprit arrested that evening by this particular squad. They locked me inside and off they went to catch other wajuaji (know-it-alls).

The city askaris that accosted me were part of the infamous gang of four – Brown (Alfred Marenya), Ochi (Julius Ochieng), Sarara (Protus Marigo) and Wasi Wasi (Ambani Akasi). These fearsome four askaris, then as now, were known to carry daggers. In January 2016, the quartet was charged in court with the murder of a street vendor. Street vendors I interviewed told me harrowing stories about the four beating up and knifing traders. Hawkers in Ngara, off Forest Lane, showed me dagger marks on their ribs, thighs and stomachs. They said Irungu Kamau, the hawker the gang of four were accused of murdering, was only one of several they had killed. One street vendor was stabbed right through his anus by one of the four, and for many months, he could not sit up or work. Feared and loathed, the gang of four have generated revulsion among street vendors and hawkers. This I found out when I spent the night at a Central Police Station cell.

Street vendors I interviewed told me harrowing stories about the four beating up and knifing traders. Hawkers in Ngara, off Forest Lane, showed me dagger marks on their ribs, thighs and stomachs.

By 6.30pm, the askaris had rounded up a number of street vendors who could not part with the bribe of between Sh500 and Sh1,000 (either because they could not raise the money or the askaris refused their money – sometimes they do that to punish the stubborn). These vendors were bundled and squeezed alongside me in the van. “Huyo jamaa ata kama yuko na pesa usichukue, lazima alale ndani,” (Even if that man has money, don’t take it, he must spend the night in the cells), said the city askaris. They were referring to me.

“Ofisa, tumekuletea mjuaji… Anaingilia kazi yetu na kujifanya anajua human rights sana. Vile amezuia tukamate mhalifu, wacha yeye sasa alale ndani” (Officer, we’ve brought you a know-it- all…He’s one of those human rights types who won’t let us go about our duties. So, now that he prevented us from arresting a criminal, let him spend the night instead). My name was entered in the OB and the duty officer asked me to remove all my valuables: money, mobile phone, wrist watch and leather belt. At 7.15pm, we heard the clanking of the heavy padlock on our cell NO. 4. “Tuonane kesho asubuhi” (See you tomorrow morning), howled the policeman on the other side of the metal door as he sauntered away, his voice echoing in the corridor. My cell was packed with street vendors who talked the whole night. We became friends. They asked why I was in there with them. I told them what had happened. My story evoked much laughter – not directed at me but at the whole rigmarole of my arrest. “Hao makanjo unajua ni makreki – si watu wa poa. Ukiwaona unawatia zii” (City askaris are crazy, they are wicked people, avoid them when you see them), my new comrades counselled me.

It is from these street vendors that I learned of the callousness and viciousness of the archetypal city “kanjo” askari and the apparent impunity he exhibits as he forcefully demands bribes. Failure to pay up leads to a violent beating. One time, they narrated, Brown and Co. boasted to them that they could kill or maim without fear of the law. “Tungepewa bunduki ndio mungetutambua” (If only we were armed, we’d teach you [street vendors] a lesson), they had been warned.

I asked them why the askaris were such a reviled powerful force on the streets of Nairobi. “Wewe unafikiri mabigi wa Inspectorate wanamanga aje? Hawa makanjo si ndio wanawapelekea mkwanja” (How do you think the City Inspectorate bosses line their pockets? The askari is the conduit for the fat bribes). Apparently, the predatory networks run by askaris on the streets of Nairobi go all the way up to City Hall Annex, the main offices of the City Inspectorate.

The “kanjo” askaris have been accused of sexual assault and rape of female hawkers. To peddle their wares without harassment, some hawkers are even forced to have sex with the askaris; some of these women end up pregnant or infected with HIV. “The askaris don’t care that some of their victims could be married,” said the vendors, “and the women dare not report to anybody because the askaris are so dangerous”.

The vendors also had their own “triumphant” stories to share and laugh about. Kang’ethe had been a malevolent and nasty “kanjo” who used to beat up street vendors on the slightest provocation, rob them of their stuff, and strut around like a sheriff around town. So the street vendors bid their time, waiting for an opportune moment to strike back. When he was spotted walking alone on Mfangano Lane, the back street behind Njogu-ini Bar and Restaurant, the hawkers and vendors quickly set upon him, beating him to a pulp and leaving him for dead. “It is truly shocking that Kange’the didn’t die,” said the vendors.

Kang’ethe’s story, told inside the police cell, confirmed to me the dangerous relationship that exists between the city askari and the street trader. “Since Kang’ethe’s narrow escape from death, the askaris never walk alone and avoid the alleyways and backstreets where they can easily be waylaid,” the vendors surmised. Later, I learned that Kange’the had been rescued by fellow askaris and had a long stay in hospital where he nursed life-long injuries. When he was back on his feet, his bosses at City Hall Annex transferred him to Mombasa Road, far from the “murderous” vendors. He was lucky to have survived, but his face bears the scars of his ordeal.

At 9.00am the next morning, a police truck parked directly at the entrance of the station and all the “criminals” were asked to file past the OB office to collect their items before they entered the truck. At the City Hall magistrate’s court, we were sequestered in the basement, waiting to be read our charges. It is there that a court clerk, dressed in a City Inspectorate askari uniform, came to me. “My friend, why are you here?” It was obvious I was an oddity: I could not have been a hawker.

“I was arrested by the askaris.”

“What happened?”

“I was caught up in a street vendors’ melee.”

“Listen my brother, I’ve been an askari for more than 35 years and I’ll be retiring soon. But I want to give you a piece of advice. Please take it for your own good. I know what happened. – you must have challenged the askaris when they were arresting the vendors? Never ever get in their way. Those people are murderous; they are ill-educated and they have the instincts of a predator – the can easily kill you, especially a person like you, who takes them on their turf. Their poor education makes them dangerously bad. Please, I implore you, when next you see them, take a different vector. Avoid them completely.”

The magistrate came late, so we had time to chat in the basement. “You must understand this creature called the city askari,” opined the court clerk. “He is not a professionally trained security officer, neither is he exactly your normal City Council civil service employee. He has scant education, if any education at all. He got employed because he proved himself to be one of the baddest boys in a councillor’s campaign team. Oftentimes, he is himself is a criminal and has spent some time in police custody or even in jail.”

The court clerk said the city askaris became even more violent when the Inspectorate acquiesced to their demand to not wear uniforms, because, ostensibly, uniforms were hampering their work. The argument was simple: for them to successfully execute their mission – of arresting street vendors – they needed to be incognito. The uniform was giving them away. It was an irrationality that the City Inspectorate bosses quickly bought into.

“It was the gravest mistake that the City Inspectorate did: it now gave the askaris carte blanche to be even more ruthless, to murder and maim. And as if that was not bad enough, it becomes impossible for the Inspectorate to differentiate the criminal elements from the good askaris. At one time, the askaris even had the audacity to propose that they be afforded firearms, presumably because the street vendors were becoming increasingly rebellious and difficult to control and tame.” (The askaris, of course, were not be allowed to carry guns, but when they started carrying knives, the City Inspectorate looked the other way.)

The lady magistrate finally showed up. And when she called my name, she looked at me above the frame of her glasses to suggest: “Look, I am just doing my job”. I was charged with three offences: Obstructing, assaulting and fighting the askaris. I paid a total fine of Sh4,500 – Sh1,500 for each offence – and was released.

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 Dauti Kahura

Days after I had written on the Kibera slum demolitions by the government, I met with some senior General Service Unit (GSU) intelligence officers. The GSU is a paramilitary outfit that was formed in 1948 by the British as Regular Police Reserve to suppress native resistance in the Kenyan colony. Today, the unit supports the Kenya Police Service in accordance with Section 24 of the National Police Service Act, 2011. GSU officers are basically trained to deal with riots and civil disturbances. Menacing, merciless and ruthless, the government usually deploys them to beat up and maim Kenyans who stand up against state authorities.

“The Kibera demolition was a litmus test for the government,” said one of the officers. “The demolitions were a 100 per cent success in view of the government’s projected plans on future demolitions elsewhere in the city and countrywide, especially in the slum dwellings.” The government had gone to Kibera armed to the teeth, expecting resistance. “Tough orders had been issued from the presidency to quell any semblance of remote resistance by scorched earth policy – clear anybody and anything on site,” surmised one of the officers. The Kibera demolitions were the testing ground of the state to gauge its effectiveness in completely subduing the bastion of opposition politics in Nairobi city and indeed in the country. “If the government succeeded in pulverising the Kibera populace, breaking its will to fight back, cowing any remaining residue opposition to the government, the government would, easily now demolish any slum within the city,” opined another officer.

According to Jacinta Wanjiku, a resident of Mathare, the government has already issued notices for evictions from the expansive Mathare Valley in order to complete Muratina Road – the road linking Jogoo Road to Juja Road and the Mlango Kubwa slum which links to Thika Superhighway. However, the government has been dithering in effecting the demolitions for several reasons: Huge sections of Mathare Valley slum, unlike Kibera, are populated by the Kikuyu, the bedrock of President Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta’s, and by extension, his Jubilee Party’s loyal support. Some of the Mathare Valley slumlords have invested heavily in brick and mortar structures that are protected by the so-called Nairobi Business Community aka Mungiki.

Both loyal supporters and Mungiki were used by President Kenyatta and Jubilee as a bulwark against a recalcitrant and rejuvenated opposition that threatened to snatch the reins of power. If politically irritated, both can mount a backlash against a ruling party now riven with divisions. “Now Uhuru can find a justification to destroy buildings and structures in Mathare in the full knowledge that even if he faces resistance, he will cow in easily. If Kibera can come down, what other slum in Nairobi cannot come down?” posed a GSU officer.

But there is also another reason why the pulling down of a section of Kibera was possible: The March 9, 2018 political handshake between Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga on the steps of Harambee House. “The Kibera demolitions could not have been effected had the handshake not taken place,” said one of the GSU officer’s friend. “One of the enduring and biggest benefits of the handshake is that it has given President Uhuru a breather and a lifeline – he can at least now plan his exit agenda freely and without too much pressure, without constantly having to look over his shoulders and worrying what Raila could be up to.”

According to the officers, if there had been no rapprochement between Raila and Uhuru, a section of the Kibera slum would not have been flattened to create room for the link road. “We would have been deployed there to beat the people into total submission. The people, properly mobilised by Jakom [Raila] would have fought back. There would have been multiple deaths and destruction all over. Ngong Road would have been a no-go-zone and the central business district, uneasy about protests and looting, would have shut down.”

“One of the enduring and biggest benefits of the handshake is that it has given President Uhuru a breather and a lifeline – he can at least now plan his exit agenda freely and without too much pressure, without constantly having to look over his shoulders and worrying what Raila could be up to.”

This scenario would have likely played out given the social and economic challenges facing the country. Faced by a populace that is reeling from hard economic times because of massive theft by state officers, an already discredited President coming out of a seemingly stolen election would have found little favour among the people and, therefore, would have been forced to back down. The glare of the international media would have made the demolitions untenable.

The GSU officers told me that the next biggest slum awaiting demolition was Mathare Valley. “We have already been signalled to stay alert. The Mathare people saw what happened in Kibera – the message is clear: you cooperate or we come down on you like a tonne of bricks.” All the buildings and structures that line the valley and river, from Muthaiga to Mathare 4A, are expected to be pulled down. “But for now the government has to tiptoe around the slum, looking for the best opportunity to pounce.”

Informal settlements and the state’s response to them

As you drive down on the Thika superhighway from Muthaiga, you descend into a depression. Looking askance on your right, there is a river at the bottom of the valley. There is a lot of activity at this point of the river: the first obvious one is the car wash that is evident from afar. But as you approach the river, you will find women washing clothes and up river young boys, some as young as 10, swimming and generally having a great time playing in the water.

This part of the river is called Githathuru River, a tributary that feds into Nairobi River. It is from here that the demolitions will take place. The Nairobi River basin consists of three main rivers: Ngong, Nairobi and Mathare. These rivers assemble east of Nairobi and join river Athi, eventually draining into the Indian Ocean. Other than Githaturu tributary, Nairobi’s other tributaries are Kamiti River (aka Gathara-ini), Karura Ruiru, Kirichwa and Rui Ruaka.

Over the last couple of weeks, “riparian” has become a catchy word for Nairobians, much to the amusement of environmentalists and riverine settlers. The word first became prominent among Kenyans when John Njoroge Michuki was made Minister of Environment and Natural Resources by President Mwai Kibaki in 2008. As soon as he assumed his new portfolio, he decreed that all people and structures along riparian lands would be ejected and that the rivers would be restored and reclaimed.

Michuki’s first target was the polluted Nairobi River, which rises 20 km west of Nairobi in the southern extreme of the Aberdares, sometimes referred to as Kikuyu Springs. He began cleaning the river at it most polluted stage – along Kirinyaga Road and Kijabe Streets in the central business district, where mechanics had turned its banks into garages.

But I am jumping the gun.

In reality, the fight against riparian lands, land reclamation and forest lands was actually started by Prof Wangari Maathai, the late Nobel laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement (GBM). Prof Maathai started the GBM in 1977 and by the time of her death seven years ago in 2011, her organisation had planted 47 million trees across the country. The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, awarded solely on the account of her sustained battle against environmental degradation, Kenyans particularly remember her for waging war in 1989 against former President Daniel arap Moi and his Kanu party in their attempts to “grab” and erect a 60- storey building in Uhuru Park, Nairobi’s largest public park, complete with a full-size statue of Moi and an underground car park for an upward of 2,000 cars. Maathai eventually won that battle, but had to suffer repeated police brutality and arrest. Maathai is also credited with saving Karura Forest. Today, Kenyans from all walks of life and expatriate denizens can walk, run and just saunter around the forest, thanks to Prof Maathai, who in her many battles to save the forest, which is just five kilometres from Nairobi city centre, was once beaten by Moi’s security forces and her braids plucked out, leaving her bleeding from the head. Invariably, Prof Maathai also vociferously opposed the construction of the recently demolished Ukay Nakumatt Centre and Oshwal community hall and temple, which face each other in the Westlands area of Nairobi. Together with the posh Westgate Mall, which is 100m from the Ukay Centre, Prof Maathai argued for their demolition to save riparian land from further destruction.

The first demolitions of any kind in the city of Nairobi are believed to have taken place half a century before. This was in the mid to late 1960s and mid-1970s during the mayoral tenures of Charles Rubia and Margaret Kenyatta. Rubia was the mayor from 1962 to 1967, while Kenyatta took over City Hall in 1970 and stayed till 1976.

Just like riparian is now a cautionary word, seemingly portending disaster and doom among Kenyans who have encroached on the riverine ecosystem, today Nairobians first came to learn of the word “bulldozer” – and to fear it – in the late 1960s. “Bulldozers were first sent to ‘City Carton’ slum on Kijabe Street along the Nairobi River around 1966, I think,” says Mzee Sylvester Oduor, a long-time resident of Nairobi. “The poor lived in houses made of cardboard boxes which were considered an eyesore as well as a security threat by the city elites, said Oduor, who knows the history of Nairobi like the back of his hand. “Most of these people when they were ejected from City Carton moved to Mathare Valley and joined the people who were already living there – near the banks of the river.” Once they had settled in Mathare, they took up urban farming – they started growing arrow roots, sugarcane, sweet potatoes and yams and vegetables such sukuma wiki (kales) and spinach. Sukuma wiki and spinach supplemented dietary consumption at home, while arrow roots, sweet potatoes and yams acted as “cash crops” to be sold for surplus income.

Farming was a new venture for the former City Carton dwellers. But one activity they carried along from Kijabe Street was chang’aa brewing. Chang’aa is a traditional liquor from western Kenya. The British colonial government had outlawed the brewing of traditional drinks, such as busaa, changaa’a and muratina, and the independence government, under Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, adopted the same colonial logic and continued to view traditional brews with the same suspicion with which the British had viewed them.

The growing of sugarcane by the enlarged Mathare Valley slum dwellers by the river side was to augment their chang’aa brewing business. The brewing of the illicit liquor was the other reason that the City Carton dwellers had been ejected from Kijabe Street. The City Council, then under Mayor Charles Rubia, argued that the Kijabe Street chang’aa dens were too near the city.

The first informal settlement in the city was the Majengo slum created after World War II in 1945 in Pumwani, northeast of Nairobi, for migrant African male labour. In 1967, Thomas Joseph Mboya (popularly known as TJ), the mercurial and youthful MP for Kamukunji constituency, led the first demolition of Majengo’s mud-walled Swahili houses. “TJ had the clear intention of completely doing away with Majengo,” said Mzee Oduor. “He is the one who canvassed for the building of California estate next to the slum by the City Council. TJ’s American connections were evident even in the naming of the well-designed estate in his constituency. TJ’s policy was to house every resident who had lived in Majengo – whether they were sex workers, some of whom came from Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi – or government workers.”

Mzee Oduor told me that many of the commercial sex workers were a priority in Mboya’s housing scheme and ended up getting the houses, which then were some of the best-modelled houses in Nairobi’s Eastlands area. “The sex workers were compensated by being the first to acquire the houses. To this day some of the sex workers who got houses in California still remember Tom Mboya fondly and nostalgically,” said Mzee Oduor.

Two of the most famous Kenyan artists in the 1970s and 1980s, Mzee Pembe (Omar Suleiman) and Mama Tofi (Aisha Juma), who lived in the slums, got houses in California estate. Another famous TV artist, Kipanga Athumani, whose full-time job was as a Kenya Bus Service (KBS) driver, was moved to Wood Street in Eastleigh. The trio acted in the popular Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) TV skit called Jamii ya Mzee Pembe, a precursor to Vioja Mahakamani. Today, Wood Street is named after Kipanga Athumani, arguably Kenya’s first stand-up comedian. Athumani was an ethnic Maasai.

Kipanga lived in Pangani slums. “In those days, Pangani slums, which stretched from today’s Riverside posh residences all the way to the current Pangani Girls High School, was then one of the largest slums in Nairobi,” narrated Mzee Oduor, “It bordered Ngara estate, then an exclusive estate for Indians. Pangani slums were called Pangani because the tin houses had iron sheets for their roofing. The Pangani and Majengo slums were homes to people from the coast of Kenya, Tanzanians, Ugandans and other Kenyans who professed Islam as their religious faith and that is why even up to today Kiswahili is widely spoken in Majengo. In fact, Pangani and Ziwani estates’ names are derived from the Kenyan coast. The original Pangani is in Kilifi,” said Mzee Oduor.

One of the reasons why TJ was unbeatable in Kamukunji was his sophisticated cosmopolitan type of politics. Itself a cosmopolitan constituency, Kamukunji, even in those days, had the ethnic Kikuyu as the majority voters, “but TJ’s representation knew no tribe, or favouritism,” said Oduor. “The California estate project propelled Mboya’s political profile to even to greater heights – he became unstoppable and unconquerable. But as fate would have it, he was gunned down in July 1969 and that is how TJ’s Majengo housing project came a cropper.” Today, Majengo is hemmed in and marooned by Bondeni estate (named so because it is built on the valley across Nairobi River; bondeni is Kiswahili for valley), Gorofani estate, Shauri Moyo estate, Starehe and Biafra estates.

The City Council argued that it was demolishing illegal structures within the capital city essentially because it had enough houses for anybody who wanted to live decently and legally. “The City Council was building houses, especially in Eastlands, such as the Huruma and Kariobangi South flats and large estates like Jericho (Lumumba and Ofafa), Maringo, Uhuru and Jerusalem, where Jaramogi Oginga Odinga maintained a council house for a very long time.”

When in the 1970s manufacturing processing factories and plants started expanding and mushrooming in the Industrial Area in the southeast of Nairobi, the Mukuru slums (today referred to as Mukuru Kaiyaba, Mukuru kwa Njenga and Mukuru kwa Reuben) quickly mushroomed next to the plants and along the Ngong River. “The slum dwellers were putting up structures on riparian land because they claimed it was no man’s land,” explained Oduor. (Ngong River runs through Kibera and passes through the Industrial area. Mukuru is the Kikuyu word for valley.)

More fundamentally, the river provided fresh water for human consumption, as well for urban farming, a practice the slum dwellers took up, just like their counterparts in the Mathare Valley. The dwellers also took up chang’aa brewing because there was lots of water, a crucial ingredient. “In the days of Rubia and Margaret Kenyatta (Kenyatta succeeded Isaac Lugonzo as mayor who had served from1967–1970), the biggest rationale both the City Council of Nairobi and government used for demolishing the people’s structures in the slums was because they were illegal. City by-laws and the laws of the land did not allow semi-permanent structures in the city,” recalled Oduor. “And, because slums then did not have electricity, criminals used them as hideouts.”

Selective demolitions

The current demolitions are ostensibly spurred by infrastructural developments on government land that has been grabbed and illegally occupied for ages through political patronage, and like President Uhuru said on August 12, 2018 to Faith Evangelistic Ministries’ Church’s Karen congregation, “it is difficult to stop the (demolitions), because we must fight impunity”. According to the president, it is also the desire of the Jubilee government to reclaim riparian lands and preserve the fragile riverine ecosystem.

“Road expansion, fighting runaway (state) corruption, saving our environment…there is something eerily disingenuous about these suddenly discovered lofty social ideals by President Uhuru,” quipped a former Central Kenya MP. “Most of the plots of land along Langata Road all the way to Galleria Mall opposite Bomas of Kenya are owned by politicians – past and present – and were illegally acquired through political connections and impunity. Will President Uhuru ask for their demolitions now that we know from Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko that it is President Uhuru who has sanctioned the arrest of certain individuals and the demolition of the suddenly ‘undesired’ buildings?”

In a video clip that went viral several days ago, Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko is heard telling his counterpart from Kiambu, Governor Ferdinand Waititu, that orders to arrest the latter’s wife for putting up a building on unapproved piece of land are from above. Who else would be above Governor Sonko other than the President himself? “Orders from above”, the former MP told me, can only mean one thing, and in Kenya, it has always meant one thing: the President himself.

Impunity and patronage politics in Kenya did not start today, said the former MP. “Are you aware the land where InterContinental Hotel is built was once Parliament land? Are you also aware that the land was hived off from Parliament by none other than President Jomo Kenyatta?” Similarly, the ex-MP told me, Serena Hotel sits on Uhuru Park, which was public land that was given to the Aga Khan, again by Jomo Kenyatta. “So the question we must ask ourselves as Kenyans is: From when should the government seek to reclaim grabbed government land or land meant for public use that is now in the hands of private entities?”

In the church where the President was addressing the congregation on the difficulty of stopping the demolitions, he also spoke of losing many friends because of the ongoing destructions. He said his friends had been calling him, asking him to stop the demolitions, but he reiterated that impunity must be fought. And it did not matter whether the “culprits” are politically powerful, influential or moneyed.

“Can the people of Kenya reclaim Uhuru Park, can the Parliament sue to get its rightful land back?” posed the former MP. “The current demolitions by any stretch of imagination are selective and targeted. It is doubly interesting that Java Coffee House and the Shell Petrol Station in Kileleshwa … had to come down. Just next to the Java there are flats whose rear parking bay encroaches onto the river bank. Why was it spared?” The Central Kenya politician said the flats belong to a member of a former First Family. “There are demolitions and there are demolitions. I can guarantee you that these demolitions are political – they have nothing to do with fighting corruption, neither are they for curbing corruption.”

“President Uhuru Kenyatta told Rev Bishop Teresia Wairimu that he is being bombarded by telephone calls from people asking him to stop the demolitions,” said the former MP. “That might well be so. My friend Maina Kamanda (former Starehe MP and now a Jubilee Party nominated MP) has two blocks of flats in Buru Buru Phase III. They are built on a road reserve and he acquired them when he was a powerful political city honcho and when he hobnobbed with the political aristocracy. Now I hear they may be pulled down. My political bird whispered to me that Kamanda had reached out to fellow Murang’a political buddy David Murathe to plead his case to President Uhuru on his behalf.” (One of the block of flats faces Buru Buru Community Centre, Church of God and houses Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) offices and ATM machines on the ground floor.)

“President Uhuru is just entertaining the masses…bringing down a building here and there, as the masses clap and ululate. In their temporary excitement, they crave for another building to come down and momentarily forget that the President is involved in a nested game of political juggling and survival as he buys time and crafts the trajectory of his tempestuous second term,” said the former MP.

A game of optics

“Kenyans are living under one of the harshest economic times in modern Kenya, but they have been made to believe that demolishing an important building here and there will assuage their hardships,” said the former MP. “The president is engaged in a game of optics – what he is doing is creating optical illusions and mirages for Kenyans as they wallow in socio-economic difficulties. What happens when he will have demolished enough buildings and cannot demolish more? He will have to move onto something else, because Kenyans must be kept preoccupied,” he lamented.

“Just the other day, President Uhuru enthralled Kenyans by telling them that the government would import polygraph equipment that would be used on civil and public servants, in a move to ensnare corrupt employees,” observed the former MP. “What happened to the furore that accompanied the President’s June 1, 2018 pronouncements? Are government employees still waiting to be lined up for the lie detector tests? What about the much talked about lifestyle audit – is it ever going to materialise?”

President Uhuru is stuck; he does not know what to do or, even where to move next and is desperate, said the politician. “There is no money at all in the government: all the money was scuttled in a stealing spree that emptied the coffers in the first term of Uhuru and his deputy (William) Ruto’s rule.” The 2013–2017 Jubilee coalition government profligacy was of unmitigated proportions, said the former MP, “and now the people are lurching from hope to desperation. They are disillusioned and dispirited and a trifle embarrassed: They gave President Uhuru their all. At the very least, they expected he would cushion them economically. Now that that may not happen, not even in the foreseeable future, they cannot turn around to claim they did not know that they were being duped.”

The former MP said Central Kenya people are now quietly wishing that Raila Odinga, the opposition supremo, who led the National Super Alliance coalition against President Uhuru’s Jubilee Party in the 2017 August elections, would be in the opposition to check President Uhuru Kenyatta’s government. “Raila is the only person who can candidly and openly shout about flagrant theft in the government, expose the culprits – whether they are Cabinet Secretaries or parastatal heads – thereby shaming them and helping stop the haemorrhage and pilferage.”

Among the Central Kenya political elite, the MP former intoned, some have been audacious, albeit in hushed tones and in private corners, to suggest that President Uhuru should bite the bullet, swallow his pride and call in David Ndii to fix the economy as the Treasury boss. (David Ndii is an economist who played a significant role in the economic recovery strategy of Mwai Kibaki’s first presidential term. Until the famous “handshake” between Raila and Uhuru, he was also instrumental in steering Raila’s campaign against the Jubilee government.) “He [Uhuru} can play politics later if he so wishes…he can, after two years, either instigate his [Ndii’s] sacking or blame him for the flailing economy if it refuses to pick up,” said the former MP, seemingly capturing the sentiments of his fellow Central Kenya politicians.

“There might, after all, be a logic to the demolition ‘madness’. If that be the case, more power to President Uhuru. If, on the other hand, the demolitions end up as a sob story for those whose property has been destroyed for nothing, and if the demolitions will not have solved the economic morass that Kenyans find themselves in, then President Uhuru could as well be riding a dangerous, mutinous horse.”

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 Dauti Kahura

A responsible government takes care of its poor people until they are strong. – Mwalimu Julius Nyerere: 1922–1999.

On the fifth day after the surprise dawn evictions at the infamous Kibera slums that lay in the path of a new road that is being constructed, I visited the area to witness first-hand the scorched earth policy that the government had employed to rout out the hapless slum dwellers. It was a bright sunny mid-morning with a clear blue skyline above but the area was eerily silent: From the District Officer (DC)’s offices, one could look yonder, as far as the eye could see, where once upon a time, there were structures and those structures housed human beings and their pets – cats, dogs, chicken, doves and rabbits, but now, all one could see was flattened land. The only movement was that of the Caterpillar bulldozer rumbling along like a military tank detecting land mines.

Kibera shares a border with the Nairobi Royal Golf Club, which is near former President Daniel arap Moi’s home, Kabarnet Gardens, and runs all the way down towards the Langata area. I met three elderly women who were watching the earthmover as it levelled the land where once stood their structures.

“I have lived here since 1969, and in my close to 50 years, I’ve never seen such a brutal, cold and calculated demolition from such a cruel government,” Mary Gikunda, a landlady whose structures (she declined to say how many she had) were flattened in a matter of seconds. “Those structures were my income, as well as my financial support for my children,” reiterated Ms Gikunda, who told me that all her (many) children were born in Kibera. Now in her mid-60s, the landlady seethed with fury against politicians, against state bureaucrats, against the security apparatus, against journalists, against anybody associated with the Jubilee government.

“Why would the government do this to us? I woke up very early to vote for Uhuru Kenyatta, believing and trusting that he would not allow this kind of demolition to occur, but obviously we were duped; we are always duped by these politicians,” posed Ms Gikunda. “Trust me, I will never vote again, I’m done. I’ve ran the course of my voting life. These people should leave me alone now. A road is a good thing – nobody in his right senses would oppose such a development. But is a road worth the wanton destruction you’ve just witnessed? Is it more important than people’s lives?”

She and the two women were eating dry githeri (boiled maize and beans). “I was born here in Kibera,” said Josephine Munee. “I’ve spent all my life in Kibera, I know no other home. In all of my 65 years, we grew up being threatened by demolitions and evictions, but we fought back and we survived. Somehow, the past governments would perhaps think twice and have mercy on us, but this Jubilee government is something else.” Ms Munee observed that as the “wretched of the earth”, slum dwellers anywhere in Nairobi city were not the “owners of the land”, and so, the powerful and the mighty could do whatever they deemed fit, “but at 65-years-old, where would they expect me to go?”, she wondered aloud.

Rhoda Muthei, 87, was the oldest among the women: Because of her advanced age, her colleagues had looked for a plastic chair for her to prop up her back and rest on. In her Kikamba mother tongue, she asked them who I was and what is it that I wanted.

“I’m not in a mood to speak to anyone,” she told them. Persuaded to talk to me because I was not a state officer, she came to life and said, she came to Kibera via Langata in 1963, settling in her current abode proper in 1972. But now, it was no more and she did not know what to do and where to go. “I witnessed Jomo Kenyatta (the first President of the Republic of Kenya and the father of the current and fourth President Uhuru Kenyatta) being sworn in as the country’s first black leader in Langata and we ululated throughout the night, ecstatic in the knowledge that we could now henceforth self-govern ourselves. In the sunset of my years, I have no place to call home because the government does not have time for poor, old and dying women like me.”

However, even in the worst of adversity, people can have something to smile and live for. I walked 20 metres from where the three women were, navigating huge boulders to where Rachel Kerubo was, and found her preparing lunch on an open makeshift three-stone hearth. Charming and welcoming, she heartily invited me to lunch: ugali and omena (sardines) with kunde (indigenous bittersweet greens leaves). A delicious and nutritious dish, eaten mostly in low-income households, the meal is a mouth-watering combination that fills the stomach and is very pocket-friendly.

“I came to Kibera a decade ago after I was displaced by the 2007/2008 post-election violence in the Rift Valley,” said Kerubo. “There’s no respite for the poor and the weak in this country. Now it looks like I’m on the run again.” Her house in Kibera had been flattened, but she counted herself lucky: She was just in time to rescue her wooden chicken coop, part of her income-generating project when she came to Kibera. Her three-week-old chicks were scrounging the rubble for food with the help of the mother hen. In her mid-50s, Kerubo is as enterprising as they come.

Besides rearing chicken, she grew tomatoes on a 20X10 plot that she had rented next to where she lived. The tomato plants too had been flattened. With a group of other seven residents – five women and two men – Kerubo and her group had fund-raised to buy 10,000- and 5,000-litre plastic water tanks, where they stored water which they would sell to their fellow slum dwellers for a marginal profit. She also used part of the water to grow her tomatoes. “We were given two alternatives – we pour all the water and therefore save our tanks – or the bulldozers crush them,” Kerubo narrated to me. I found the water tanks lying on their belly on their raised wooden support, proof indeed that their contents had been rendered to the ground.

Across the field, on the other side of the wall, about 60 metres away, I found Halima Burhan cleaning dishes. Her ageing great aunty and daughter sat close by on the ground crossed-legged, their backs leaning on a semi-demolished mud wall. Tall and ebony black, Halima, at 63-years-old, is as energetic and as active as ever. Looking a little rugged, perhaps because of the vicissitudes of slum life, she still retains a trace of the impossible beauty that Nubian women are known for. “The Monday [July 23, 2018] morning demolition took us by complete surprise,” said Halima in proper Kiswahili sanifu (formal Kiswahili language).

“On July 16, government officials [these were Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) personnel] descended on our homes, marked them with a red X sign, and told us that all the people who would be affected by the impending evictions would be paid a consolidated three-month payment to move away,” said Halima. “We asked them when the eviction notice was due, but they dodged the matter. They assured us nothing untoward would be done without our prior knowledge. Little did we know they had come for a last reconnaissance tour to confirm that all the intended houses and buildings to be demolished were clearly marked, as they duped us that nothing sinister was in the offing.” In hindsight, said Halima, it was the calm before the storm.

On July 16, government officials [these were Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) personnel] descended on our homes, marked them with a red X sign, and told us that all the people who would be affected by the impending evictions would be paid a consolidated three-month payment to move away,” said Halima. “We asked them when the eviction notice was due, but they dodged the matter.”

The KURA officials had gone down to the three affected villages of Kichinjio, Mashimoni and Lindi that would be razed down on Monday to pave way for the link road between Langata Police Station and Karanja Road in Kibera, ostensibly to enumerate and take the slum dwellers’ particulars for what the dwellers were made to believe would result in restitution. Four days later, KURA sent out a WhatsApp message and copied both Amnesty Kenya and the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR). The message read as follows: “A multi agency team has successfully completed the Kibera enumeration process on 20th July 2018. The team is now analysing the data collected and once the process is complete, the Resettlement Action Plan (RAP) report will be availed to the public.”

Yet, perhaps, unlike many of her slum mates, Halima should have been aware of the demolitions, “if only I had not brushed away my grandchild’s naggings.” On Sunday [July 22] evening, her grandson Masud Talib was playing football near the DC’s offices, when he saw the bulldozers being parked at the compound. Eleven-year-old Masud, acting on a child’s instincts, ran back home and called out his grandma: “Bibi, bibi, tutavunjiwa, nimeziona matrekta zikipaki pale kwa DC. Nimewasikia wakisema watabomoa manyumba.” (Grandma, grandma, they will demolish, I’ve just seen the bulldozers being parked at the DC’s compound and I overheard them saying they will demolish our houses. “We Masud nawe acha hayo,” (Please Masud stop that) Halima responded. There was nothing usual about the presence of bulldozers at the DC’s place – the road (Karanja Rd) connecting to Ngong Road was still under construction. About 12 hours later, at around 6.00am, Halima was woken up by earth tremors beneath her house and wondered what possibly that could be. The demolitions had began and people were scampering from their houses. Because her house is 500 metres from the DC’s offices, the bulldozers’ earthshaking movements were audible from far, and her house was among the first ones to fall under the hammer. “Alhamudillahi my grandson is alive,” said Halima in supplication. Inside her house was her 90-year-old great aunty, grandson Masud and her daughter and her 12-week-old newborn baby. “Since demolitions, we have been sleeping outside, Allahu Akbar [God is great], the elements have so far not affected the baby.”

“I was raised on my paternal grandfather’s land – this land that they have just evicted me from,” recalled Halima. She had now stopped doing the dishes and we were standing next to the ramshackle ruins – a crude reminder of what she once called home for more than half a century. Her grandfather, Marjan Sakar, a soldier of the British army, was among the first Nubians to be settled at Kibera.

Nubian origins

Kibera, which for the longest time has been synonymous with the Luo people, owes its existence to Nubians’ bravery and diction. Kibera is a corruption of Kibra, Ki-Nubi for forest or a bushy area. The Nubians came from Sudan, around the Nuba Mountains. They were identified first by the Egyptian ruler Emin Pasha and later by the British imperial government as brave soldiers. At different times, they were enlisted by both Pasha and the British to wage wars on their behalf.

Modern Nubian history records them as having been settled in Kibera around 1897, just before Kenya become a British protectorate. Those that were settled in Kibera were part of the 3rd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles who formed the bulk of the soldiers who had been deployed to fight for the British Empire. By 1900, Kibera was already a military reserve. This designated area, next to the railway, was surveyed in 1917 and was gazetted the following year. The land was estimated to be 4197.9 acres. From 1912 to 1928, Kibera was administered as a military area under the direct control of the army authorities. Anybody who wanted to settle in the area needed a special pass and one of the requirements was to have served in the army for at least 12 years.

In 1963, Kibera was fully incorporated into the city boundaries of Nairobi. By 1970, the original area of 4197.9 acres had been reduced to just 500 acres. Today that land is just under 300 acres. Large portions of Kibera were swallowed by middle-class estates, like Ayany, Jamhuri, Langata and Ngei, along Ngong Road, leaving the Nubians to be concentrated at Lindi, Kambi Aluru, Kambi-Lendu, Kambi Muru and Makina and along Karanja Road. In the fullness of time other ethnic communities, such as the Kikuyu, Kamba, Kisii, Luo and Luhya, settled in Kibera.

In 1933, the colonial government appointed The Carter Land Commission to study and report on the land problems in Kenya. In reference to Kibera, the commission wrote: “It appears that this area was assigned to the King’s African Rifles in 1904, although not gazetted until many years later. There is nothing in the Gazette to show for what reasons so large an area was required, but it is common knowledge that one of the objectives was to provide home for the Sudanese ex-askaris.” “In 2016, Nubian elders took the government to court,” Halima told me. “They were seeking to stop the road passing through our land and the intended demolitions and evictions.” On August 5, 2016, the “Abdulmajid Ramadhan & 3 Others V Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) & 4 Others” case was filed at the Environment and Land Court in Nairobi (Petition N0.974).

The court ruling

On April 28, 2017, Justice S. Okong’o ruled on the matter and directed KURA as follows: “In the interest of justice and in order to avoid human suffering, I order that the petitioners herein be included in the Langata/Kibera Roads Committee and be actively involved in the Relocation Action Plan (RAP) for the Project of the Affected Persons (PAP). I order further that the 1st, 2nd, and 5th respondents shall not evict or demolish the houses belonging to the petitioners until the agreed resettlement plan for the persons affected by the road project in question is put in place.”

In essence, what Justice Okong’o had done in his ruling was to order the Attorney-General, KURA and the road contractors, H.YOUNG, to enter into a preparation of the relocation action plan. From the time of the ruling in April 2017 to July 16, 2018, when KURA showed up with the eviction notice, they did not do anything to obey the court orders: they did not involve the Nubian elders or its committee; they did not come up with a discernable relocation action plan; and, in truth, they did nothing to show that they respected the law of the land.

Then, suddenly, KURA got caught up in a flurry of activities: On July 13, 2018, it requested a meeting with Nubian elders, KNCHR and the Mohammad Swazuri-led National Lands Commission (NLC) at its offices located at the Ministry of Roads offices ostensibly to convince these bodies to come up with the relocation action plan as per Justice Okong’o ruling. An official who attended that meeting told me, “The July 16 enumerations was a way of showing that KURA was keen on honouring the court’s ruling with the ‘false’ promise of giving something small to the people as compensation.”

The official told me that it was very odd that KURA would summon, among others, an independent body such as KNCHR to its offices and “KNCHR, unashamedly would troop to another body’s offices to scheme on how to bend and obstruct the constitution, while disobeying a court’s ruling. I had along chat with KNCHR commission members and I did not mince my words,” the official said to me.

“In respect to the brutal evictions in Kibera, the commission punched below its weight. The 2010 Constitution and the KNCHR Act of 2011 grant the commission immense powers to summon state officers, the power to sue for injunction, through the courts, for such violations of human rights, and the power to investigate and prescribe remedies. So far the commission has deployed only a fraction of these powers,” added the official. The official explained to me how KNCHR is entrusted with quasi-judicial powers to summon the minister in charge of roads to explain eviction notices. He said the commission can equally go to court to secure an injunction on behalf of an aggrieved party and exercise powers to collect data, and even enforce corrective action.

Forced evictions: A violation of human rights

On my second day in Kibera, I met up with 61-year-old Joseph Omondi. Born and bred in Kibera’s Katwekera village, he is tall and sturdy and is always up and about and laughter is his second nature. When elated, he breaks into uproarious laughter and can crack your ribs with his practical jokes. “But on the day they demolished Kichinjio, Mashimoni and Lindi, I broke down and wept,” said a reflective Omondi. We were at the backyard of Kabarnet Gardens. At the Administration Police (AP) camp inside the stately home, there is a makeshift food kiosk, where food affordable to the security officers and their retinue is sold. “In respect to the brutal evictions in Kibera, the commission punched below its weight. The 2010 Constitution and the KNCHR Act of 2011 grant the commission immense powers to summon state officers, the power to sue for injunction, through the courts, for such violations of human rights, and the power to investigate and prescribe remedies. So far the commission has deployed only a fraction of these powers,” added the official.

In between a meal of ugali and matumbo (fried intestines), Omondi told me he had witnessed forced slum demolitions over time in Nairobi – in Soweto (next to Spring Valley suburbs), in Kibagare (next to posh Loresho), in Muoroto (that used to be next to Country Bus Station) and in Mathare 4A. However, according to him, “This Kibera one ranks among the most horrendous, perhaps only to be rivalled by the brutal Muoroto slum eviction which took place at 3.00am and which resulted in some people losing their lives. How can a government be so brutal, merciless and conniving against its own people like this? In a post 2010 new constitution?”

“The state had come prepared to mow down the people in case they resisted or became violent,” pointed out Omondi. “But on this day the people did not resist. They watched, dazed, as their structures went down with their earthy belongings, with no time to salvage anything. With a 1000- strong force of regular police, AP, the brutal and inhuman paramilitary GSU (General Service Unit), it was going to be a futile resistance. So the people stood aside, the earthmovers roaring, flattening anything and everything on site, much like a military operation.”

I found Oscar Indula and David Lwili, both in their late-20, seated on a bench and pensively looking over the horizon beyond the site that they had once called home as residents of Kichinjio slum. “The state had come fully armed and it was a stealth operation. They had taken us by surprise, there was no time to mobilise. They came at dawn and many people were just waking up. Confused by the attendant commotion and seeing the encroaching excavators, the people panicked. Then, they became lost and bewildered. But even if we could have mobilised, we would have been completely pulverised. It was a full army battalion, we stood no chance. We were gazing down at a massacre.”

Omondi told me he could only liken the Kibera evictions to the brutal demolitions that had razed down people’s homes and businesses in Zimbabwean cities and towns a dozen years ago. On May 19, 2005, the then Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government security forces rolled down on the capital city Harare’s informal settlements and flattened homes and businesses. It was a violent affair, overseen by the police and army, and soon spread to other major cities and towns.

Operation Murambatsvina (Operation Restore Order) was dubbed “Operation Tsunami” because of the speed and ferociousness with which it attacked the settlements. According to the “Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe to assess the Scope and Impact of Operation Murambatsvina by the UN Special Envoy on Human Settlements Issues in Zimbabwe”, an assessment carried out by Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka between June 26 and July 8, 2005, about 700,000 people across cities in Zimbabwe lost homes, sources of income and sometimes both.

“The Kibera demolition affected between 30,000 and 35,000 families in the three villages,” George Odhiambo told me. “The exact figures are not known, but for those talking about 30,000, they should know that that is a very conservative estimate.”

Odhiambo is the founder of Adventure Pride Centre, a school that catered for pupils from pre-school to Class VIII and which was located in Kichinjio village. He took me to the precise place where the school had stood. It is difficult to believe that a stone building with a cemented floor once stood erect at Kibera’s ground zero. The only sign that learning used to take place here were the scattered text books and some completely new and unused exercise books. Nothing was spared in the wake of the demolitions.

“Adventure, alongside two other schools – Egesa Children’s Centre and Makina Self-Help Primary School – rested on Nairobi Royal Golf Club’s private land, contrary to the popular belief that everything that was demolished was on government land,” said Odhiambo. “The management of the Club had had an understanding with the schools’ owners to operate on its land, as long as they used the premises as learning institutions.”

I asked Odhiambo what would happen to the Class VIII pupils who will be sitting for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) this year. “The pupils are very confused, distraught, disturbed and will need counselling,” observed Odhiambo. “Currently, all the pupils are at home, as we think of what to do next. For the Class VIII, we have to quickly find alternative centres where they will sit for their exam. Already, as it is, they learn under some of the harshest conditions that one can possibly imagine and yet have to compete in the same exams, with kids going to exquisite schools, laden with textbooks, learning materials and whose teacher-student ratio is at most 1:15 and where teachers are always present.” In total, there were eight schools in the three villages that were brought down: Adventure Pride Centre, Egesa Children’s Centre, Love Africa Primary School, Mashimoni Primary School, which had been there since the 1970s, Makina Self-Help, Mashimoni Squatters, Mashimoni SDA and Saviour King School.

Josiah Omotto, of the Umande Trust, an NGO that works in the water sector in Kibera, said that between 2008 and 2009, the ministry responsible for housing led a team of experts to scout for best practices on eviction guidelines. The team borrowed from the United Nations and best practices from visits to Brazil, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.” The result was the compilation of the government’s document: “Towards Fair and Justifiable Management of Evictions and Resettlement: Land Reform Transformation Unit (LRTU) secretariat.” Chief among its recommendations were:

1. Evictions should be carried out when appropriate procedural protection are in place 2. These protections are identified by the UN Commission as Economic and Social and Cultural Rights 3. An opportunity for genuine consultation with those affected 4. Adequate and reasonable notice for affected people prior to the eviction 5. Information on the proposed evictions must be fully provided 6. Government officials and/or representatives to be present during the evictions 7. Evictions are not to take place in adverse weather or at night. 8. Government to ensure that no one is rendered homeless or vulnerable to the violation of other human rights as a consequence of evictions 9. Adequate alternative housing and compensation for all losses must be made available to those affected prior to eviction, regardless of whether they rent, own, occupy or lease the land in question.

“The saga of the Kibera-Langata link road is very puzzling. There are too many shortcuts, too many loose ends and illegalities,” observed Omotto. “And they are being let to pass, while in fact, we have a precedent to follow.” He reminded me of the Kwa Jomvu evictions in 2015 and how the Kenya National Highway Authority (KeNHA) redeemed itself by owning up to orchestrating forceful eviction of the Jomvu houses and business premises without following the due process of the laid out stipulations.

On May 17, 2015, more than 100 inhabitants of the Kwa Jomvu informal settlement along the Mombasa-Mariakani Highway were woken up by a bulldozer trampling on their structures at night, between 11.00pm and past midnight. The bulldozer, escorted by armed police, flattened their houses and business premises. “Driven Out For Development: Forced Evictions in Mombasa”, a report by Amnesty International, says the people complained that they had not been consulted beyond being given a January 2015 eviction notice. They had not received any information on eviction process, resettlement, or compensation.

On August 13, 2015, KeNHA organised a public sensitization meeting and owned up to carrying out the forced demolitions. The roads authority asked the people to form a committee to tabulate their losses and present the same to KeNHA. It also educated the people about the Environment and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) and Resettlement Action Plan (RAP) for the project. In September 2015, KeNHA took responsibility for the evictions and agreed to pay compensation till the end of 2015.

Then last month, once again, one of the most famous slum colonies in Africa was in the international news: On the days I was there, the slum had attracted its usual voyeuristic suspects – local and international news corps, “development” workers and NGO crusaders, all hoping to share a piece of the slum’s soul.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura

“Christianity began as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. When it went to Athens, it became a philosophy. When it went to Rome, it become an organisation. When it went to Europe, it become a culture. When it went to America, it become a business.” – Anonymous.

In the last few weeks, Deputy President William Ruto, who has made it known to all and sundry that he has clearly set his sights on the presidency come 2022, has made troubling theological statements which cannot stand biblical scrutiny. And all this while the church’s leadership across Kenya has been eerily mum on these utterances that border on both fallacy and heresy.

At a church function in Kiambu County on June 17, 2018, feeling sufficiently sanctified to be within the precincts of a Catholic church – the most influential and powerful religious institution in the country – and after contributing what he must have considered to be an amount that would please God and the church’s coffers, Ruto was audacious enough to later claim that his cash donation was tantamount to future “risk” investments in the hereafter. After the church fund-raiser, the Deputy President met some religious leaders at the Blue Post Hotel in Thika, where he is reported to have stated: “Some people condemn me for going around raising money here and there and in church. It is up to them. I’m investing in heavenly matters…some people invest in funerals, let them continue…”

The utterances at St Benedict’s Church in the Ngoingwa suburb of Thika town were followed exactly a month later by another stupendous statement by Ruto, clearly indicating that he was confident that he was on uncritical and all-embracing grounds. On July 15, 2018, he was the chief guest at the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa (AIPCA) Patanisha, in Kayole, a populous suburb 10km south-east of Nairobi city centre, where he gave Sh2.5 million (about $25,000) to the church and said: “They say I’ve been purchasing seats for the churches. And because we do not ask them why they take their money to witch doctors at night, they should leave us alone to give money to church for the work of God.”

To date, no church leader – Catholic or otherwise – has found it necessary to correct his misleading statements and to remind the Deputy President that his contributions to different churches are in no way a measure of his Christian virtues, neither are they a passport to eternal bliss or a favour to churches and Christians. But the church leaders have been quiet, perhaps hoping that he will tone down on his quasi-religious utterances as they continue to reap from his humongous cash donations.

According to a July 22, 2018 Daily Nation report, in a short span of just six months, Ruto’s generous spirit has led him to dish out amounts totalling Sh60 million (roughly $600,000), most of it in cash, to various churches. The distribution of Ruto’s cash donations to Catholic churches and institutions in Central Kenya and Nakuru County are as follows: Kairuri Catholic Parish, Embu County, Sh5 million (during the fundraiser, Ruto pointed out that the contribution was a joint effort between him and President Uhuru Kenyatta); Mary Immaculate Primary School, Nanyuki, Laikipia County, Sh3 million; Holy Cross Catholic Church, Nakuru County, Sh2 million; a Catholic church project in Njoro, also in Nakuru County, Sh2 million; Baricho Catholic Church, Kirinyaga County, Sh1 million; and Murugu Catholic Church, Nyeri County, Sh1 million. (Interestingly, Nyeri town constituency is represented by the rookie MP, Wambugu Ngunjiri, the de facto leader of Central Kenya MPs, most of whom are also first-timers and who are opposed to the perception of Ruto as the Jubilee Party’s automatic presidential flagbearer after President Uhuru Kenyatta’s term ends in 2022.) This adds up to Sh14 million solely given to Catholic churches.

If we add to this the contribution to Murang’a High School, which received Sh15 million for the construction of a multipurpose hall, Ruto’s total donation to Central Kenya and Nakuru counties amounts to Sh29 million, or roughly half of his total contributions. The Catholic churches on their own have gobbled 23 percent of Ruto’s harambee donations.

At the function, where Cardinal John Njue was present (Embu County is his ancestral home), the presiding Embu prelate, Bishop Paul Kariuki, egged on Ruto, telling him: “This is the time to do what you were told, kutanga tanga (to roam). Do not be afraid because to those who will start visiting us in 2022, we shall ask them where they have been and didn’t loiter earlier. In 2022, I shall write a letter banning politics in the church.”

“Unlike God,” said Ruto, defending his generous hand towards the church, “….none of us is being asked to give more than we can.” In separate church fund-raisers, Ruto has reiterated that he has been giving “cheerfully and proudly”. Outside of the Catholic churches, which cumulatively have received the largest amount from Ruto’s largesse, the single biggest contribution to a church has been to the All Saints Cathedral in Nairobi. He gave the church Sh8 million and pledged to deliver another Sh2 million. Apart from contributing to Catholic and Anglican churches, Ruto has also given Sh3 million to Evergreen Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) in Nairobi.

“Churches in Kenya have become – for all practical purposes – sanctuaries for politicians to do as they feel,” proffered an evangelical pastor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Priests and pastors alike have rendered themselves manipulable to the politicians because of their runaway greed, political partisanship and because of their corrupt, unethical lifestyles.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the evangelical and Pentecostal churches, added the pastor. The rise of the evangelical/Pentecostal churches in the last 30 years or so in the country has led to a proliferation of churches, many of them independently run by individuals who claim they have a calling to serve God and who in the strictest sense of the word are not trained theologians i.e. they are not schooled at recognised theological institutions or seminaries.

“Many of these pastors are careerists who run the church as personal enterprises and fiefdoms – to be passed onto their wives and children – hence they are driven by a great desire not to serve as shepherds but to use their positions … as platforms for acquiring riches,” said a pastor who ministers with one of the Nairobi Chapel/Mavuno Churches in Nairobi, and who asked that I conceal his/her name for the sake of not offending his/her fellow Christians. “Other than peddling drugs, the surest way of becoming a multimillionaire in Kenya today is starting a church. The majority of such pastors fall under the banner of the evangelical/Pentecostal churches. Is it a wonder that many of them are easily compromised [by politicians], because they have no scruples and all they are interested in is amassing enormous wealth and living large? But above everything else, they have no sound theological grounding and training to anchor their scriptural command and understanding.”

The gospel of prosperity

The rise and proliferation of these evangelical churches that were weaned off mainstream churches, such as the Catholic and Anglican Churches (with their theology of moral righteousness, sin and repentance) came with it a new Gospel teaching: the so-called prosperity gospel.

The institutional churches – the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), the Baptist Church and the African Inland Church (AIC) – all brought to Kenya by white missionaries – proselytised the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the local people by asking them to repent their sins and to accept the Lord if they hoped to inherit the Kingdom of God. This was the Gospel of obeying and trusting God to meet all their needs. However, the white missionaries did not preach to the local people that their faith would lead them to greater wealth.

The prosperity theology of the modern Pentecostal movement has its roots in the Bible Belt of the United States. This theology frames earthly material gain as a sign of divine blessing and unrelenting faith in Jesus Christ.

The prosperity gospel, also known as the health and wealth gospel or the Word of Faith movement, is a skewed interpretation of the Synoptic Gospel that claims that God rewards those Christians that continually increase their faith in him. Anchored in the belief that one’s (proper) faith must lead to great health and wealth, prosperity gospel proponents present the gospel as the panacea for a Christian’s earthly material needs, which include plenty of cash in the bank, multiple houses, several motor vehicles, acquisition of land and generally posh living.

Paul Gifford, religious emeritus professor at the School of African and Oriental Studies, in his book, African Christianity: It’s Public Role, published in 1998, points out that, “African Christians believe that success is determined by your faith.” He says that prosperity gospel preachers have moved beyond traditional Pentecostal practices of speaking in tongues, prophesying and healing to the belief that God will provide money, cars, houses and even spouses – in response to believers’ faith. According to Gifford, the prosperity gospel arrived in Kenya in the mid-1980s. After the failure of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), Kenyans lost confidence in the stringent austerity policies executed through the government by these two Washington-based bodies. The social recovery safety nets and the government’s purported ability to bail them out failed. A notoriously religious society, Kenyans turned to the new revivalist churches that were now fervently preaching the prosperity gospel.

God-fearing dictatorship

There was another reason why Kenyan turned to these churches: The tightening of political freedoms of speech and movement under the stranglehold of the one-party dictatorship of KANU and President Daniel arap Moi led to the emasculation of people’s rights, and with this came the rule of fear and despondency.

The Bible-toting Moi is a fervent born-again Christian and a member of the African Inland Church and of the evangelical/revivalist persuasion that had swept the East African region from Uganda at the beginning of the 20th century. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography describes the Tukutendereza Yesu (We Praise You Jesus) as the revivalist movement within the Anglican Church of Uganda that began in the Kingdom of Buganda, hence Balokole (Luganda for the saved people). Today, the term Balokole has been embraced beyond Buganda as a movement of saved or born-again Christians across the East African region. Likewise, the Luganda hymnal song, Tukutendereza, has become the theme song of revivalist Christians throughout East Africa.

Moi reached the pinnacle of his dictatorship in the late 1980s, just when the revivalist churches were entrenching themselves in the country. To further keep the people in check and continue running a tight ship as he maintained an iron grip on the state, Moi would invite international prosperity gospel evangelical preachers to Kenya to hold massive crusades.

Two of the better known preacher men who visited Kenya in the late 1980s and early 1990s were Morris Cerullo from America’s southern Bible Belt and the German Reinhard Bonke. Both were friends of Moi and their first port of call was the State House. The undertone of their preaching then was that Moi was a God-fearing, divinely-ordained leader like the kings of the biblical yore and it was only through unwavering faith in the Almighty that the people would count and reap their blessings in abundance.

These new churches preached the gospel of materialism and miracles. Burdened by economic woes and spiritual poverty occasioned by the devastating austerity measures of the SAPs, Kenyan Christians turned to these apostles and prophets in the hope that they would alleviate their suffering and offer them earthly happiness. As fate would have it, prosperity gospel thrives in Kenya because it resonates well in societies that are economically afflicted and are hostage to spiritual powers, believing these powers control the fortunes of all.

The churches’ leaders had appealing fancy titles to announce their arrival: apostle, prophet, visionary. They offered utopian hopes to disillusioned and dispossessed poor people through miracles and promises of prosperity. Gifford, in his essay, “Expecting Miracles: The Prosperity Gospel in Africa” (www.christiancentury.org published in 2007), observed that the churches equally had fanciful names, such as Jesus Breakthrough Assembly, Triumphant Christian Centre and Victory Bible Church.

According to theologians and experts in the scriptures, there is probably no religious phenomenon today that has attracted as much controversy and varied interpretations as the prosperity gospel among Christian believers. Efe Ehiogae and Joseph Olanrewaju, in their essay, “A Theological Evaluation of the Utopian Image of Prosperity Gospel and the African Dilemma” (https//pdfssemanticscholar.org), argue that the African continent, alongside Latin America, is considered to be the richest hunting ground for evangelical Pentecostalism, one of the fastest growing religious movements globally. There are some religious leaders who today argue that the ancient practice of selling the blessings of the church has been subsumed by the prosperity gospel.

For many Christians, theology is a vague and an oblique academic notion. It is true many people consider theology to be the science of religion, and rightly so, but oftentimes they associate it with the quaint branches of academic disciplines, like numerology, that few people today take seriously.

Liberation theology

One enduring fact is that Africans as a whole have continued to suffer defective Christian theologies. One such theology – the remnants of which persist to date – is white theology, a carry-over of the white missionaries’ gospel teaching of doom and gloom, of trust and obey (for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey). That white theology, instead of contextualising the people’s developmental needs vis-à-vis their spiritual growth, has continued to create frightening doomsday scenarios of sinners eternally roasting in balls of hell-fire and brimstone.

White theology should be understood in context and especially in relation to its nemesis – black theology. In the United States, white theology was associated with racism, slavery and the oppression of African-Americans, but above all with white supremacy. This was also the case in Latin America and Africa where the gospel was proselytised by white missionaries who brought their white culture and biases with them. In South Africa, white theology was propagated by the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) to sanctify the segregationist rule of Apartheid.

Dr. James H .Cones, who died in April this year, and who was considered to be the father of the black liberation theology movement in the United States, invited Americans to understand the corrosive effects of white theology: “Christianity was seen as the white man’s religion…the Christian Gospel is not the white man’s religion. It is the religion of liberation, a religion that says God created all people to be free. But I realized that for black people to be free, they must first love their blackness,” he said. He defined black liberation theology as the interpretation of the Christian Gospel from the experiences, perspectives and lives of people who are at the bottom in society – the lowest economic and racial groups.

In the United States, white theology was associated with racism, slavery and the oppression of African-Americans, but above all with white supremacy. This was also the case in Latin America and Africa where the gospel was proselytised by white missionaries who brought with them their white culture and biases.

Emeritus Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and the Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu is today remembered for his fearless fight against the Apartheid system in South Africa, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. What many people, particularly Christians, may not know is that for him to confront the all-powerful Apartheid state machinery that was spiritually sanitised by the Dutch Reformed Church, he had to confront the theology propagated by this church, which claimed that the principle of separate and unequal co-existence (segregation) of black and white South Africans was biblically ordained. Just as the African-American Christian leaders during the civil rights movements in the 1960s came up with black theology to fight the monster of racial discrimination, so did Tutu, who also came up with a black theology in South Africa to liberate his people.

In Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, where a great majority of the world’s Catholics lived, a different type of theology was taking shape: liberation theology. It was propagated by the likes of Archbishop Helda Camara and Leonardo Boff (then a Franciscan priest), both from Brazil, the Peruvian Dominican friar, Gustavo Gutierrez, and the Spain-born Jesuit priest, Jon Sobrino, who migrated to El Salvador where for many years he performed his major ecclesiastical work.

Liberation theology in Latin America was the fusion of Marxist teachings – class differentiation and means of production – and Catholic teachings, especially of the small Christian communities tradition (in Kenya known as jumuiya ndogo ndogo). It was Sobrino who in the late 1960s said that Latin America had reached a “theological boiling point”. In short, what Sobrino was advocating was a new theology to tackle debilitating poverty under military dictators who oppressed and killed their people. In his view, as indeed in the views of his contemporary like-minded Catholic priests, the theology of sin and repentance was not working.

Fr. Gutierrez, now 90-years-old, who is considered the father of liberation theology, argued in his book, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, published in 1971, that there are two schools of thought on poverty and both are derived from the synoptic Gospels: The first talks of Christ’s sensitivity towards the poor and their sufferings. The second, that Christ himself “had lived a life of poverty, and so, Christians from their origin understood that in order to be his disciples, they also had to live a life of poverty.” Both of these schools of thought are true, pointed out Gutierrez, “but we interpret these two points of view on the bases of our historical context and of our lives.”

“The first perspective is found in Luke’s version of the beatitude of the poor (Blessed are you, for the kingdom of God is yours). The second is reflected in Matthews (Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven),” he wrote. “I think both lines of thought – poverty as scandal and poverty of spirit can be useful, although their meaning must be actualized in our historical context.” The Catholic priest argued in the book that poverty is not a result of fate or laziness but a result of “structural injustices that privilege some, while marginalizing others.” When Jesus said, “blessed are the poor,” emphasised Gutierrez, he did not mean, “blessed is poverty.”

The church and politics in Kenya

In Kenya, our Christian clergy may not have evolved any particular theology but the country nonetheless produced, in its heyday, fearless church ministers who were not afraid to speak the biblical truth as they understood it, to both the powers that be and to their flock. Such clergymen included the controversial Anglican bishop Alexander Muge, the fearless Reverand Timothy Njoya of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), Anglican Bishop David Gitari and the mercurial and politically savvy Bishop Henry Okullu. (All are dead except for Njoya. The death of Muge in 1990 in a bizarre road accident is still shrouded in mystery.)

When Jesus said, “blessed are the poor,” emphasised Gutierrez, he did not mean, “blessed is poverty.” In 1975, as the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) bishop of Maseno South, Okullu published his seminal book, Church and Politics in East Africa, which soon become a bestseller and a guide for church leaders, church groups and students studying Christianity in the region. It was under Okullu, who was first elected as the chairman of National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) in 1976 and went onto serve for two terms, that the NCCK, during its annual general meeting in 1977, crafted the all-important statement regarding the central role of the church: “The Church being the conscience of the nation, should teach and safeguard intrinsic values of persons, knowing that all men and women are children of God. The church should endeavour to show, both in action and preaching, that it is not wealth, education or status that matter, but the individual’s intrinsic value.”

Dr. Okullu was a firebrand prelate. In 1998, I had the chance to meet him. Soft-spoken and cheerful, Okullu liked regaling one with stories. I remember him telling me how many Kenyans did not know that before rubbing the Kenyan political establishment the wrong way, he had locked horns with Ugandan President Milton Obote in the late 1960s when he served as the first African editor of the Church of Uganda-owned newspaper New Day. In 1967, Okullu had to come back to Kenya after he penned a scathing editorial on the one-party system, which Obote had introduced through the Common Man’s Charter policy document.

With the demise of these outspoken institutional church leaders, who in their own limited ways sought to speak truth to power, the mainstream churches’ leadership has been clipped and is a pale shadow of its former self. Even the elaborate voice of the Catholic Church, which used to be relayed through powerful pastoral letters, has been dead for a long time.

“The mainstream churches lost the plot in 2005,” said a Catholic priest from Kitale diocese. “That referendum [on the new constitution] split the churches along ethnic fault lines and they have never recovered to date.” The referendum that proposed a new constitution pitted the opposition, led by Raila Odinga, against President Mwai Kibaki. It was the first real test of Kibaki’s grip on state power. When Kibaki lost the referendum, the opposition knew it had rattled his power base.

“The church leadership, instead of stepping in and cautioning against the imminent ethnic battle lines that had been drawn out by the mini-election, which, if went unchecked, would definitely escalate into ethnic warfare, also entrenched its ethnic position that had informed how it had voted in the referendum,” said the priest. “Remember these leaders would openly canvass for their political sides to their respective congregations, which fell in place.” The priest said when the presidential election came in 2007, “all it did was accentuate the leaders’ ethnic positions”.

Since 2007, the story of Kenya’s church leaders has been the same: in 2013, they led their congregation to vote along ethnic lines. The same happened in 2017, observed the priest. “What Ruto is now doing is heavily infiltrating the churches’ leadership and exploiting their political differences and personal greed by dishing out lots of money, because everybody understands it’s their time to make hay while the sun shines.” Meanwhile, people facing hard economic times have been crying for help from their shepherds for moral courage and help, as well as guidance, but the clergy, unbothered and unconcerned by the “disconcerting noises” from their flock, continue with their privileged lifestyles.

The priest said the Deputy President has deliberately targeted the Catholic Church in Central Kenya because he reckons that this could possibly be one of the best strategies for penetrating and winning over the difficult Kikuyu constituency. “Even if he doesn’t win all of them, it would still be important if he got a foothold in the region.”

He said that in Kenya today, the church cannot speak in one voice and will not condemn institutionalised state corruption because it is fragmented and its leadership across the board has benefitted from that same corruption’s largesse. “It is not too difficult to see what is happening: The people are crying, the people are hurting, the people have been rendered poor and the Levite priest is on his way to Jerusalem.”

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.

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura Recently, I boarded a Nissan matatu on my way to Sigona Golf Club, off Nairobi-Nakuru Highway, 17km from the city centre. Once we hit the highway, the conductor started collecting his dues. Soon an argument arose between the conductor and five of the 14 passengers: was the fare Sh50 or Sh70? The conductor insisted the fare was KSh70, the five passengers said they had been told by the freelance touts at the terminus the fare was KSh50, and therefore, they were paying not a penny more.

The back and forth shouting match went on until we reached the Shell Petrol Station, one kilometre up from Gitaru bus stop. At the petrol station, that argument continued for 20 minutes – the five passengers were adamant that they were being ripped off, the conductor retorted he was not in the business of philanthropy: The conductor gave them an ultimatum: They either pay him the full amount or the driver reports them to the police at Kikuyu Police Station.

They dared him to do so whereupon the driver took us straight to the police station. Had I alighted at the petrol station, I could have walked to the 500m to Club. At the police station, the cops were gleeful they would have some “culprits” to manhandle and extort from. The five passengers were bundled out and locked in the cells. As the matatu turned to take us to our respective destinations – the end destination was Kiambaa another four kilometres from Sigona Club – a more sober debate among the remaining nine passengers dominated the talk. Was it really fair to have let the five be locked up at the police station for lacking a mere Sh20 each? The passengers were unanimous it is highly unlikely they were bluffing: nobody in his right senses would want to spend time in a Kenyan police cell, just because a matatu guy was cheating them off such a small sum.

Because I was seated in front with the driver, I asked him why they had taken the drastic step,. “Boss, business has been very bad, very bad,” he said solemnly. “The matatu owner has been breathing on our neck because we have not been meeting his targets. Because matatu crews already have a bad name, the proprietor doesn’t believe us when we tell him business is bad: he thinks we are stealing from him. There are days we have not paid ourselves, just to make sure we deposit his full day’s collection.” This was one of those days that if they did not do their math wisely, they would go home without pay. “It is those pennies collectively that take care of the larger currency notes. Can you for a moment ponder, how much money we would be losing if every trip we forewent Sh100, just because some people cannot pay the full amount?” Discussion in the matatu turned to how life had become harder: “It is very possible the five passengers did not have the extra Sh20 and, if they did, it had been pre-budgeted,” said one passenger. “Following the recent heavy rains, sukuma wiki (kale) has become very cheap. With Sh20, you could buy enough for supper to be eaten with ugali and live for another day. Today, there is no such thing as little money. Every coin counts,” he summed the discussion. The passengers all agreed that money had taken to hiding and murmured to themselves in Kikuyu about the irony of how, even after voting for Uhuru Kenyatta twice, life had become twice as hard. “No tukeyumeria kweli na mathina niguo maingehire?” (Will we ever make it and the way our problems seem to multiply?).

Today, there is no such thing as little money. Every coin counts

The passengers talked off how people had become more and more uncaring and wicked and moaned loudly that if only Kenyans were a little more mindful of each other, life would be a lot better. I suspected they were shying away from candidly and publicly discussing the elephant in the matatu, which if they did, would lead them to pinpointing why they truly were facing economic hard times: bad political choices, propelled by a vicious ethnic entrapment that they had over time been politically socialized to believe was their fate.

The trip back after my meeting was even more revealing. I crossed the highway to catch a matatu back to the city centre. The Nissan matatu I took had two other passengers. It had come from Kiambaa. Between Kiambaa and Sigona, there is one major terminus – Zambezi. It was edging towards 2.00pm and if the matatu did not secure enough passengers at Zambezi, it would not augur well. From Kiambaa to the city centre, there are 11 major stops along the highway: Kiambaa, Zambezi, Gitaru, Muthiga, Kinoo, 87, Uthiru, Kangemi, Agriculture (adjacent to the Kenya Agricultural & Livestock Research Organization), Safaricom and Westlands. By the time we reached Agriculture stop, the matatu had not added a single passenger.

The driver was clearly agitated: “Oo niguo tukuruta wira?” he groaned. “Is this how we are going to get the job done?” The driver said the whole of this year, his matatu business had been hard hit by a lack of travellers. “Why weren’t people travelling? It is not as if they had relocated,” he mused aloud. At the Agriculture stop, a few passengers boarded, paying Sh20 to the city centre. “These people cannot even afford to pay Sh30?” lamented the driver. Usually the fare, especially at the onset of the rush hour, would be up to Sh40.

After alighting at the terminus on Kilome Road in downtown Nairobi, I looked for a freelance tout to explain to me the oscillating dynamics of matatu fares for people going to Kiambaa and Limuru. “During off-peak hours, it is normal practice for matatus, big or small, to charge Sh50,” said Davy. It is understood that off-peak hours are from 9.30 am–3.00pm and from 8.30pm–10.00pm. “The fare for peak hours ranges from Sh70 to even Sh100 when there is a downpour.” At the moment, the matatus were asking for Sh80. Davy told me an interesting story: “The passengers have learnt how to play the waiting game with matatus. Most of the menfolk would rather go home after 8.30pm, when the fares have substantially dropped, even if it’s by Sh10.”

Davy said the matatu owners have been itching to increase the fares since the beginning of the year, but they sense rebellion from the passengers. “Already they have surreptitiously increased the Kiambaa fare by KSh10 to KSh80 and the people have been grumbling quietly about the increase, which they have been made to believe is temporarily.” According to Davy, the matatu owners really want to hike the fares, but they do not know how to without raising a commotion among the people. When I asked what was necessitating this urge, he blamed operating costs and low business trends over the previous last eight months. “The business class had hoped that the [9 March] handshake between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, would work magic, return the business climate back to normal, but business had stagnated,” said Davy. A freelance tout for close to 10 years, Davy told me he had worked in the matatu industry long enough to know when people had surplus money in their pockets. “People are broke, their disposable income has dwindled, so they are not travelling as frequently. The cost of living has also certainly gone up,” he said.” People today are budgeting to the last shilling.”

“The business class had hoped that the [9 March] handshake between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, would work magic, return the business climate back to normal, but business had stagnated.”

I had gone to Sigona to meet a petroleum products’ magnate who asked not to be named. “Business is tough my friend,” said the tycoon. “The first half of this year, we’ve have not done any meaningful business and so, the profit margins have been dwindling. The increase in the fuel levy in the budget was not helpful: Business has become even harder – and the profit margins have become slimmer. This is a volume business; if you don’t move volumes, you’re not doing any good business.” He said that bureaucrats at the Ministry of Energy were not making life for oil businessmen any easier when they went to renew their import licenses, among other things. “They’ve been unrelenting and squeezing us for even heftier bribes which, as you know, run into in the millions.” Life for the ordinary mwananchi was about to get even tougher as they passed on the costs, he hinted.

Already, he could tell the people were experiencing hard economic times. “The vehicular movement in Nairobi has certainly reduced. There are less traffic jams, because many people are leaving their vehicles behind, parked in their compounds, only using them when it is very necessary. I have been long enough in this oil business and understand the patterns of fuel consumption vis-à-vis motor vehicle movements.” The businessman, apart from distributing petroleum products in bulk across the East and Central African region, also owns, in partnership with others, several petrol stations across the country and in neighboring Uganda. “Fuel usage in Kenya is at its lowest. People are facing economic hard times.”

To fully comprehend the impact of what the oil tycoon was saying, I looked for my matatu crew friends to explain how the fuel increase would affect their businesses and customers. “Diesel was increased by six shillings per litre, from Sh98 to Sh104,” said my tout friend. “For sure, as night follows day, we will increase the fares – all the matatus Saccos in Nairobi have met and agreed. It is just a matter of time. We’ve have no choice but to do that. Whether people resist or not, will they walk to work?”

The matatu crew friends said, business had become tougher: “It is as if people have migrated. Since the beginning of the year, people have not been moving around as much, so we had to find a way of increasing the fares, but quietly. If, say, we used to charge Sh30 off peak hours, we increased it to Sh50. Likewise, if during peak hours the fare was Sh70, we increased it to Sh80. We knew people would be up in arms, if we just raised the fares formally and directly and publicly.” The clarification somehow explained the tiff between the conductor and the unrelenting passengers, who could not part with their Sh20.

“For sure, as night follows day, we will increase the fares – all the matatus Saccos in Nairobi have met and agreed. It is just a matter of time. We’ve have no choice but to do that. Whether people resist or not, will they walk to work?” Budgeting to the shilling, as Davy the tout told me, were the key words. Because it is not only the folks who use matatus and live in less privileged neighbourhoods that are currently feeling the pinch, in money matters. A Runda housewife who buys all her green groceries at City Park Market, opposite the Aga Khan Hospital in Parklands area, told me how for the first time she had to write down her shopping list of all the vegetables she needed. “When I unleashed list the next time I went to the market, carefully picking what I wanted and not just throwing things in the basket, my fruits and vegetables vendors asked me: “Nikii thiku ici mutaragura indo? Mwaga kugura, murenda tucitware ku?” (Why are you people not spending as much? If you don’t buy these goods, where do you expect us to take them?)

Her husband, a real estate magnate, had told her she needed to curb her free spending mania. “So, I have also taken to writing a list when I’m shopping at my favourite supermarket; Chandarana. Do you remember how I used to just shop, throwing anything and everything in the trolley? My budget has now been drastically trimmed and I must account for every penny spent. Kweli (truly) times are hard, that it is me, daughter of Mwaniki, who has taken to writing a shopping list.” She said her hubby had told her, money had become scarce and the country had yet to achieve political equilibrium. “I think he has decided to hoard the money, until such a time, there will be money in the economy.”

“Nikii thiku ici mutaragura indo? Mwaga kugura, murenda tucitware ku?” (Why are you people not spending as much? If you don’t buy these goods, where do you expect us to take them?)

If the posh people, like my friend from Runda estate, were scaling down on their spending, what about the rank and file? I decided to pay a visit to Githurai Market, one of the busiest markets in Nairobi. Githurai Market is 10km from Nairobi’s central business district, off the Thika Superhighway. It has one of the widest catchment areas that goes all the way to Thika town (30km from Githurai) and its environs, apart from its Nairobi area shoppers.

The market, which is completely controlled by the Githurai chapter of the Nairobi Business community aka Mungiki, receives truckloads of fresh produce from as far as Tanzania and eastern Uganda. I was going to meet Susan Mweru, a fruit seller, who has been transporting oranges and tangerines from Michugwani and Mwanza in Tanzania to Githurai Market for the last five years. “We are reeling from very tough economic hard times, there is no business…‘aahh wira we thi muno’ (business is really low),” she moaned.

“In the best of times, I would offload a 12-ton truck of top-class oranges from Tanga, home of sweetest oranges in East Africa, in two days flat and I would be on my way back to Tanga to bring more oranges.” She told me the oranges would be snapped up by retail fruit sellers from as far as Makongeni in Thika town, and as near as Kasarani, Mwiki, Roysambu, and Ngara market, which is just 7km from Githurai, in Nairobi.

She would alternative her travels between Tanga and Ukerewe, the largest island on Lake Victoria, where the juicy fruits much loved by Nairobi’s well-to-do are grown.“Itonga cia Garden Estate, Kahawa Sukari, Kahawa Wendani na Juja mokaga kugura matunda na waru guku Githurai thoko.” (The rich people of Garden Estate, Roysambu, Kahawa Sukari, Kahawa Wendani and Juja, come to buy their fruits and potatoes at Githurai Market.)

However, when I went to see her, she had not travelled for the third consecutive week. “Even these rich people, they are not spending: The consignment I brought in three weeks ago is still with me – the fruits have been moving at a snail’s pace. Nikii kiuru? Ndiramenya kurathie atia.” (What’s wrong? I don’t understand what’s going on.)

Mweru introduced me to her colleague, Muthoni, in the market, who majorly deals in potatoes, some of which come from as far as Moshi, whose rich and fertile red soil is akin to that of Kiambu County. She is one of the biggest potatoes sellers in the market. “Before things become bad, I’d move up to six sacks of potatoes daily, and you know how they pack those sacks – nearly half of the potatoes are packed outside the sack itself,” said Muthoni, sitting on one the potato sacks. “Today if I sell two sacks in a day, I count myself lucky…nikuru muno” (the situation is very bad).

The women told me they had hoped the national budget read in June would somehow alleviate the situation – it was hard for me to understand their ubiquitous optimism – but said their hopes had been dampened by the tax increases on petroleum and paraffin products. “You know if the government increases fuel, it negatively affects everything else.”

“Life is about to become even harder for the ordinary folk,” says Joy Ndubai, a tax expert with Oxfam. “The Finance Bill 2018, which proposes to hike fuel and kerosene will impact on other mwananchi necessities such as electricity, food and transport. The Bill intends to do away with indirect taxes, that is zero-rated and excise duty taxes. Take it from me, if that happens, the price of unga Kenyan (staple food), will shoot up and matatu fares will increase manifold and life will become really hard for Kenyans. Perhaps the Unga Revolution squad should start regrouping for foodstuff protests in the coming days,” said Ndubai tongue-in-cheek. The Unga Revolution was a civil society initiative basically driven by Bunge la Mwananchi (People’s Parliament) members, who, in 2017, loudly agitated for reduction of price of maize flour, which had skyrocketed and was out of reach of the ordinary Kenyan.

Ndubai says the government wants to get rid of Value Added Tax (VAT) rebates or refunds that it gives manufacturers. Indirect taxes such as VAT on consumable goods such as, bread, milk and sugar, are hidden in the prices and in order for the government to cushion manufacturers, it encouraged them to reclaim the 16 per cent tax rebates from its exchequer. This is what is referred to as zero-rating. “What it will mean now is that the government will remove the zero-rating and the manufacturers will be exempt from claiming any tax relief. Sounds good on paper? What this means is that the consumer will have to bear the burden of increased taxes on everyday commodities.”

One of the most common expenditure by wananchi that will be hard hit is electric power. “The cost of electricity is certain to go up, because of the intended increase of fuel levy. This is because we still rely on diesel engines,” said Ndubai. “Manufacturers had been given a 30 per cent allowance on electricity. Electricity was among the expenditures that manufacturers count, at 100 per cent, when deducting their profits [for tax purposes]. So now, what this means is that the manufacturers will add 30 per cent over and above, to their respective expenditures. Guess who the added 30 per cent will be pushed to? The mwananchi.” It was as if the national budget was written by the Kenya Association of Manufacturers mandarins, observed Ndubai. “There isn’t anything pro-poor in that budget, the budget favours the manufacturers and the big boys all the way. Majority of Kenyans are too bamboozled by real big, impossible numbers, trillions of shillings, to really take time to understand” the implications of the budget.

“What it will mean now is that the government will remove the zero-rating and the manufacturers will be exempt from claiming any tax relief. Sounds good on paper? What this means is that the consumer will have to bear the burden of increased taxes on everyday commodities.” The tax expert said the Kenyan people need to wake up to the realization that their lives will soon be very difficult to manage and they should come out to protest to safeguard their social interests because that is the only way they will be heard. She gave me the example of Jordan and how Jordanians had forced their Prime Minister out of his office, through mass street protests and camping out at his office.

A conservative society, Jordanians rocked the capital, Amman, with a wave of mass protests, culminating in the resignation of Prime Minister Hani Mulki. They were protesting austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund on the Kingdom. Unemployment and stiff price hikes occasioned by high inflation had become unbearable and on June 3, 2018, 5,000 Jordanians camped at Mulki’s office. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the critical price hikes were in electricity and fuel. In 2012, the same Jordanians had also gone onto the streets to protest against increasing economic hard times, after the government bowed to IMF’s stiff conditions by cutting off fuel subsidies, all in an attempt to secure an IMF loan to lower the public debt. Jordan’s national debt, which runs into hundreds of billions of shillings, just like Kenya, is equivalent to 95 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

The mere mention of IMF for some Kenyans old enough to remember the 1980s, sends cold shivers down their spine. The Washington-based financial institution, once described by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere as The International Ministry of Finance, introduced what came to be known as Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in many of the Africa countries heavily indebted to western nations, beginning 1980. Prof Said Adejumobi, a political economist who has written numerously on SAP wrote in his paper in 1997; The Structural Adjustment Programme and Democratic Transition in Africa: “For Africa, the 1980s could be better described as the ‘adjustment decade’ as most African countries, in response to their ailing economic conditions, introduced one form of adjustment reform or the other.” Other political scientists, such as Adebayo Olukoshi, called the 1980s the “lost decade” for Africa.

Kenya first became an IMF patient in 1980; that is when the first SAP was introduced in the country. To fully comprehend what SAP meant and did to Kenyans, I will quote Adejumobi: “But what is the political import of SAP? SAP is a class project which seeks to create a ‘stable’ economic environment for the accumulation of capital by local and foreign bourgeoisie, while suppressing labour through wage freeze, insistence on strict work sector, reduction in workforce, (retrenchment), especially in the public sector. It also seeks to contract the provision of social services and infrastructure, like health, education and transportation.”

During the just ended G7 meeting in Quebec, Canada, President Uhuru Kenyatta was spotted engaging Christian Lagard, the IMF’s Managing Director, on the sidelines. In his article – One Week in March: Was the Handshake Triggered by the IMF? for the E-Review – John Githongo, wrote: “On the 6th of March, the Minister of Finance, Henry Rotich, made the surprise announcement that the government was ‘broke’. He would deny this a day later in rather incongruous fashion. On the same day he and the Central Bank Governor Patrick Njoroge essentially signed on to an IMF austerity programme. It wasn’t the traditional IMF programme circa 1980/90s, but it nevertheless was an acknowledgment that we were complying with a range of ‘confidence building’ measures ‘agreed’ with the IMF as we renegotiated our expired precautionary facility with them.” David Ndii, reiterated in another E-Review article, A Quest of Power – Why Ethiopia’s Economic Transformation is a Cautionary African Tale, the fact that “Kenya is surviving on speculative capital inflows and juggling debt as it negotiates an IMF bailout.”

To add salt to injury, Ndubai told me that the cost of M-Pesa transactions had gone up as a result of a 2 per cent increase in excise duty imposed by the government. M-Pesa is today the most transacted money transfer channel in the country. “The biggest population that uses M-Pesa is the ordinary man and woman, especially the rural folk and urban poor, because these people do not have bank accounts. When M-Pesa came, it was relief, but now it may end up being a burden. Think of the rural elderly who receive pensions. With the increased tariff, which Safaricom is going to push to the consumer, it is going to be difficult for the poor people of Kenya to effectively use mobile transfer platforms.”

“Kenya is surviving on speculative capital inflows and juggling debt as it negotiates an IMF bailout.”

I found out this to be true, when I went to meet Mweru at Githurai Market. She asked me whether M-Pesa charges had been increased. “I do all my payment through M-Pesa and I have noticed these people are taking a lot more of my money. This is very unfair,” she lamented. Going to Githurai Market had also revealed something else: during off-peak hours, Githurai residents pay Sh20 as matatu fare to the city centre and vice versa. “But some matatus were being adventurous by charging Sh30,” said Mweru. “If they push the fares further up, they are going to annoy the people. I think they are testing the waters to see how the people are going to react.”

I now understood what Sh20 meant to the five matatu travellers on their way to Kiambaa: in Githurai, it covers your entire fare back home. When I returned to Kiambaa stage at Kilome Road terminus after talking to Ndubai, the fares had been pegged at KSh100, irrespective of the weather. Hard times indeed.

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.

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris By Dauti Kahura

On the evening of the day that saw twenty National Youth Service (NYS) officials arraigned in court to answer charges of institutional corruption, I went to see one of the lawyers who had been in court and who spoke to me on the condition that I would not disclose her identity. She was nonplussed about all the hullabaloo surrounding the NYS scandals and the subsequent parading of some senior government officials in the corridors of justice. “The courts have seen these kinds of court dramas before: nothing new and nothing out of the ordinary. It’s their season. They will come and go and the courts will go back to their usual routines. Take it from me, the courts are not in a mood to execute the Executive’s factional wars in the name of fighting state corruption,” she stated.

The advocate described the ensuing drama as a big, noisy circus. “I’m a trial lawyer,” she said. “If there will be any prosecutions, I will be glad for another day. What I’m saying is this: NYS 1 was juicier than this NYS 2 farce – were there any prosecutions? I hear it is the ‘Imperial’ legacy term. Please get me correctly: there will be no prosecutions, this is a circus show and NYS 3 is yet to come up.” (The lawyer was referring to the two multi-billion-shilling corruption scandals at the NYS, dubbed NYS Season 1 and NYS Season 2, within a short period of just three years.)

“Fish begins to rot from the head”

The fight against institutional corruption is not about fixing a certain cadre of people who don’t have the political connections and wherewithal and who will most likely be innocent victims or pawns in the political chess games of corrupt and powerful individuals, said the advocate. “It is immoral to harass and punish civil servants who are used as conduits of corruption by powerful state officials and politicians and when the crunch time comes, instead of the hammer falling at the right place, they are used as scapegoats. The NYS 1 corruption scandal involved powerful state officials who owned up to money getting lost. Some of them were even hauled in the courts of law – were there any convictions? Some of the NYS1 culprits are even more powerful today and presiding over bigger budgets. Let him [President Uhuru Kenyatta] fool no one that he is fighting corruption. Fish begins to rot from the head.” The lawyer acknowledged that the civil servants were also corrupt and the reason they were being hounded is because they had exposed their greed, hence were found culpable. A Treasury official told me that the fish had been rotting for a long, long time. “What you’re seeing is the whirlwind before the calm. Everything about this razzmatazz sting operation stinks to high heaven. The biggest amount of money in the government is usually stolen just before the government closes its financial year and reads its budget. This year’s budget was read on June 14, so that means the 2018/2019 financial begins on July 1. It is not, in my view, a coincidence or for nothing that the government allegedly decided to release the dossier on NYS weeks before the national budget day. The coffers will be emptied before they are refilled again.”

The official said that in the two weeks before the budget is read, those who have the authority to incur expenses (AIEs), accountants and procurement personnel scheme to pilfer government money. Since the government is expected to close its books, all the monies that have been allocated for whatever use have to either be returned or expended. “This is the time when fictitious payments are paid out by accountants and AIE holders, who include directors, heads of department and permanent secretaries. The two weeks before the budget is read are always very busy as procurement officers invent ways of disbursing government money to dubious and hollow companies as they collude with the accountants and AIE holders to defraud the government,” said the Treasury official. “It is ridiculous for the President to talk about using polygraphs to gauge whether civil servants will be corrupt or not. Corruption is solely an ethical issue – it is not about whether you can master a truth test. If the government is interested to know, for example, who among the civil servants are corrupt, it should begin by conducting a lifestyle audit among AIE holders, accountants and procurement officers.

“The biggest amount of money in the government is usually stolen just before the government closes its financial year and reads its budget.”

The officer told me that the NYS report on the said scandals was ostensibly leaked by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) to media houses to create the impression that the media had simultaneously and suddenly stumbled on a massive corruption scandal. “These NYS scandals have always been there, they are not fresh scandals,” said the civil servant. “The impression one gets from government is that the corruption being exposed now could have happened just recently. Suffice it to say, they are a smokescreen of a much bigger scam that could be on its way. They are a farcical high drama of up-round-and-merry-go-round shows and Kenyans love street shows for their cathartic effects.”

“This is no longer corruption but outright theft”

But for Babra Singh, an elderly shopkeeper in Nairobi, the NYS scandals are like the street dramas he has witnessed in the city for many years – except that these scandals are not entertaining but truly tragic. “This is no longer corruption but outright theft,” said Babra in his tiny office on Kirinyaga Street. “I witnessed Jomo Kenyatta’s corruption, then Moi’s, which, sad to say, was assisted by some of our crooked Asian brothers. Then came Mwai Kibaki’s corruption with the Chinese, which was also massive. But Uhuru’s corruption has spiralled out of control; it is no longer corruption, it is purely mega theft, looting of unprecedented proportions, criminally driven by people who simply don’t care about the country.”

Babra was 18-years-old when he first set up his bicycle duka on the dusty Grogan Road in 1954, two years after President Uhuru Kenyatta’s father, Jomo, was detained by the British colonial government and a state of emergency was declared. Grogan (now known as Kirinyaga) Road was named after the rabidly racist Briton, Ewart Grogan, who later emigrated to apartheid South Africa in 1961 after he swore that he would never be ruled by a black leader (Kenyatta had been released from detention in 1959 and was poised to be Kenya’s first Prime Minister.)

“Since 2015, I’ve been laying off my workers one by one; what you see here is just skeletal staff. The cost of production exacerbated by unwieldy importation tax on spare parts, hefty bribes demanded by the customs officials and theft of spare parts by the very same customs officials had become unmanageable,” said Babra, who is a devout Sikh. “I’ve seen my workers – some of them have been with me for 40-plus years – become poorer and poorer by the day. I’m 82-years-old now. Much of my energy has been sapped out of me. I’m no longer as strong as I used to be and I’ve been keeping the company running, not because of me, but because of my workers.”

A. Gikandi, an aspiring politician from Kiambu County, told me that Kiambu residents, who happen to be the bastion of Uhuru’s ethnic support base, are poorer today than when Uhuru became president in 2013. Gikandi, who did not want his full name revealed said, “They’d very much like to explain their increasing levels of poverty by blaming other forces and not President Uhuru’s government, maybe because that makes them feel better, but the truth of the matter is they just can’t: his government has not helped them in any way. These spurious NYS scandals have not made them angry because they are fast becoming immune to anger. They are simply bamboozled that so much money, running into billions, can be stolen to enrich a few well-connected cabals while they can’t afford the daily necessities of life.”

The people are exasperated, he said. They are disengaged. Many of the “tenderpreneurs” mentioned in the scandals are millennials (he himself is one) “and, in fact, one of the people mentioned is a friend. To be honest, I was surprised when I saw his name mentioned. I called him up.” He added that his friend told him that connections to powerful state mandarins had got his name expunged from the final list of tenderpreneurs.

“It is absurd that you can pretend to prosecute a Principal Secretary and other senior civil servants and leave out the Cabinet Secretary,” said Gikandi. “Nothing happens in the ministries without full authorisation of the CS. Is it a miracle that the responsible CS is off the hook? She is properly wired.”

“Only a revolution will save this country”

Only a revolution will save this country, said the political aspirant. “The conditions are not ripe yet – but we’re headed there. After the national budget pronouncements, life will become even harder. We are headed for tougher times because austerity measures are here with us.” The crux of the matter, said Gikandi, is that it is the Kikuyu people who are suffering the most, but they cannot vocalise their disenchantment because they have been made to believe they have a collective duty not to be seen to be critising one of their own. “Don’t be surprised if the revolution begins with them,” he added.

A day after President Uhuru Kenyatta presided over the June 1st Madaraka celebrations this year in Meru town, 250km north of Nairobi, I went to see my friend Dennis Kimani, who is a second-hand clothes seller. “Did you listen to Uhuru yesterday?” he asked me. “I was so disappointed by Uhuru, talking about some gadgets to detect lying civil servants. I asked my wife whether what I was hearing was real. The people are crying, the people are suffering, the people are down, and all what Uhuru is talking about is importing lie detectors.”

Dennis told me he voted for Uhuru in the 2017 elections. “We Kikuyus are in a bind. When it comes to politics, we exhibit a herd mentality that has become so difficult to extricate ourselves from. On October 26 [the day of the repeat presidential elections], I had to be seen to have gone to vote – by my relatives and business friends – lest I’m branded bad names such as I’m a traitor, betrayer to the cause, NASA sympathiser, a Luo, or worst of all, have my Kikuyu identity questioned.”

For Jayne Rose Wairimu, a mother of three and a bookseller in Thika in Kiambu County, 40 km northeast of Nairobi, the decision not to participate in electoral politics was precisely because of “what we are now reading in the press on the orchestrated NYS scandals”. She said she did not vote in 2017 because elections had become pointless and futile. “The NYS saga is a racket by the two most powerful politicians in the country, President Uhuru and his deputy William Ruto. These monies that are being flung right, left and centre have been stolen on their behalf. You cannot convince me otherwise. It is so immoral to parade non-entities and hapless civil servants to hoodwink Kenyans that the state is now fighting corruption. NYS is Uhuru’s eating machine. Kibaki had his, the roads built by the Chinese. Moi’s was the Goldenberg scandal and such is life.”

Wairimu said that in this country you can engage in all manner of state corruption as long you have two cardinal things: tonnes of money and political influence. “Remember Kabura? She even confessed to carrying sacks of money. On whose behalf was she ferrying the money?”

Josephine Kabura was believed to be the hairdresser of the former influential and powerful Devolution Ministry Cabinet Secretary, Ann Waiguru. In her affidavit, Kabura named Waiguru as the focal point of the first Sh1.6 billion heist at NYS. The scam led the embattled Waiguru to resign in November 2016, but not before President Uhuru had defended her as a hardworking CS. Of particular interest was that in one year, the NYS budget had jumped from Sh13 billion to Sh25 billion. “Trust me, I smell a rat…There’s huge corruption coming… And then, as usual, the government will spin another yarn – ng’ano cia marimo (ogre tales). Uhuru is not fighting corruption, he’s engaging in a political circus,” said the bookseller.

“Remember Kabura? She even confessed to carrying sacks of money. On whose behalf was she ferrying the money?”

In Kikuyu town, Kiambu County, Amos Gatina, a businessman, told me that the NYS missing monies have just not gone missing now. “These are old corruption networks, some of which, I believe, were used to finance the second presidential election on October 26. All these funny people who are now being lined up for show were just conveyer belts. These NYS scandals are a melodrama created by Uhuru and his people to fool people that in his second term he’s going to be a no-nonsense President.” That the corruption scandals were being revealed this time told a much bigger story than just the government being interested in chasing corrupt state officials, he observed.

Gatina told me that the country was being run by political and financial mafia. “The Central Bank of Kenya governor, Patrick Njoroge, has a lot of explaining to do. How can all these financial shenanigans be going on around him, yet he is sitting pretty? Second-tier banks were used as conduits to transfer and withdraw humongous amounts of money, flagrantly breaking all the banking rules and you want to tell me we’ve not ceded the country to criminal gangs?”

“It is Ruto who is being fought”

A public policy analyst who worked with Uhuru Kenyatta in 2003 when the latter was the leader of the opposition, told me that the President is all talk and nothing more. “These fulminations about the NYS scandals by Uhuru are just that – fulminations. His railing against the pervasive corruption is nothing more than ensuring that [William] Ruto doesn’t succeed him. The scandals have been released to the public, not because the government has suddenly stumbled on runaway corruption, but because the Deputy President must be stopped from becoming President in 2022. It is Ruto who is being fought. Period.” The policy analyst said that he had advised Uhuru, who chaired the Parliamentary Accounts Committee on financial and economic matters, regarding his lead role in checking Kibaki’s government. “He never did anything. His was to fulminate and exhibit great annoyance, but it was all for public show.”

In January 2009, Uhuru Kenyatta was appointed by President Mwai Kibaki as one of two Deputy Prime Ministers and as Minister of Finance. In May of that year, he was involved in a Sh9.2 billion scam at the Treasury. “Do you remember how Uhuru explained away the scandal?” the policy analyst asked me: “He casually termed it as a computer glitch.” The issue of an extra Sh9.2billion being added to the Supplementary Budget had been raised by Imenti Central MP, Gitobu Imanyara. On May 11, Uhuru, accompanied by his Permanent Secretary, Joseph Kinyua, told the Parliamentary Budget Committee that, “yes, there may be a typing error, but that to me may not be a major cause of alarm.” (The committee exonerated Uhuru.)

A senior civil servant at the Ministry of Health told me he was unimpressed by Uhuru’s supposedly tough talk on the NYS scandals. “The president’s unconvincing assurances that money stolen from NYS will be recovered, and the subsequent threats that all those involved in the scandals should carry their own cross and will be punished, is just blowing hot air.” The bureaucrat said that one of the biggest scams to be unearthed during President Uhuru’s first term was in the health ministry. “We all know some of the people involved in forming dubious companies to swindle the ministry of hundreds of millions of shillings. A scandal doesn’t stop being a scandal because it was schemed by close relatives of the president and, therefore, conveniently swept under the carpet and ignored.”

Ten days after the President had hosted the Anti-Corruption, Governance and Accountability Summit – a public relations breakfast meeting ostensibly to carry out a corruption reality check and to have a “frank” discussion on how to curb runaway corruption – at State House in October 2016, his sister, Nyokabi Kenyatta Muthama, was named as one of the people who, in September 2013, barely five months into Uhuru’s first term, had already formed a company to supply goods to the ministry. Nyokabi, with their cousin Kathleen Kihanya, had registered Sundales International Company Limited on September 12, 2013. On October 29, 2016, The Star reported that the company, had been awarded five tenders worth Sh270 million by the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (KEMSA).

The senior civil servant at the health ministry told me that the media’s exposé of the scandal, so soon after Uhuru’s breakfast meeting, was a calculated move by the Deputy President to embarrass the President. Why? Because, he said, the Ruto camp had interpreted the summit as a charade whose upshot was that state corruption was being perpetrated by the Deputy President and his henchmen. “No sooner had the debate on corruption at State House been over than his [Ruto’s] people were all over at the ministry looking for the ‘Nyokabi files’. What I am saying is the Ruto people leaked that scandal to the media within days as a way of fighting back the mantra that ‘It is William Ruto who’s corrupt and not the President’. These factional fights between the Uhuru and Ruto camps did not start now.”

The senior civil servant at the health ministry told me that the media’s exposé of the scandal, so soon after Uhuru’s breakfast meeting, was a calculated move by the Deputy President to embarrass the President. Seemingly frustrated by the unceasing corruption in his government, President Kenyatta, while talking down to, among others, the then Attorney General, Prof. Githu Muigai, the Auditor General, Edward Ouko, and the President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Paul Kihara (who succeeded Githu as the new Attorney General in 2018), moaned loudly: “Do you expect me to go set up a firing squad at Uhuru Park so that people can be happy?” Earlier on, the President, in a speech, had said that “corruption is just being used as a political circus.”

State House mandarins had invited two of the most vocal voices on state corruption, John Githongo and the economist David Ndii, to the breakfast meeting. The two declined the offer, which they interpreted as a ruse by State House officials to dupe Kenyans into believing that the President was serious about fighting corruption.

Indeed, a political stalwart of the former Party of National Unity (PNU), which ushered in Mwai Kibaki’s controversial second term and who is still very close to the former President, said, “There’s nothing new in these supposed corruption exposés. These are old corruption perpetrated by the state itself. Let’s cut to the chase: it is William Ruto who’s being fought here. This is about succession politics for 2022. He [Ruto] now needs to know who’s really in charge and what they are doing is cutting him to size.”

This former PNU official observed that Ruto showed his hand too early in wanting to succeed Uhuru. “He was abrasive, cocky and openly disrespectful to President Uhuru. You may be indeed intelligent and smarter than your boss, but in politics, you never undermine or seem to undermine the President. It is a cardinal rule anywhere in the world. Of all the things that Ruto learnt from [former president] Daniel arap Moi, he didn’t take home the most important lessons – humility and quietly biding your time.”

A bromance gone sour

In the days and weeks after assuming power in 2013, Uhuru and Ruto were inseparable, the “bromance” kept alive by sometimes dressing alike – matching white shirts and red ties, high-fives and always appearing in public with broad smiles and easy laughs. Then Uhuru would not have dared to describe his deputy as a reckless young man because it was a co-presidency. However, after a short five years, the bromance is fast fading. The pretence of co-presidency is gone and the exposure of corruption are signs of a factional fight over “brotherly love” gone sour.

The former councillor was, however, despondent about revelations about the looting: “Matikiire muno. Thirikari eno ya Uhuru ni iire muno.” (They’ve stolen too much, this Uhuru administration is stealing too much money.) “I pity our children and grandchildren. The country is sliding very fast into a bottomless pit and I don’t see a future at this rate.”

“Uhuru couldn’t act between 2013 and 2017 because he needed a second term,” said a former Nairobi city councillor. “Now that he has crossed the bridge, he must wield the sword.” For the former councillor, “wielding the sword” means calling Ruto’s bluff. On May 30, 2018, while presiding over the issuance of title deeds in Embakasi East constituency in Nairobi County, President Uhuru Kenyatta, apparently unprovoked, described his deputy thus: “Hii kijana anaitwa Ruto unajua kila wikendi ana tanga tanga kila pahali. Atakuwa anapitia hizi machorochoro akiona kuna kitu inaenda kona kona mumwambie, si namna hiyo? Si namna hiyo? Tuhakikishe kazi ya wananchi imefanyika…tumekumbaliana? Ni wa ngapi wamesema tuwache siasa twende kazi? Twende kazi….” (This young man called Ruto is loitering everywhere every weekend. He has taken to roaming everywhere. He will be passing by and, if he sees things are not working as they ought to be, you report to him, is that okay? Is that okay? Let’s ensure the ordinary people’s work is done…are we agreed? How many of you concur that we stop politicking so that we work? Let’s get to work.)

The PNU official told me that the President’s use of the word “kutangatanga” (loitering) was a warning to Ruto. His remarks were intended to let his deputy know that “we are aware the slush funds you’re using every weekend to campaign are gotten from the state coffers”. Bottom line: the NYS corruption scandals have been unearthed supposedly to seal the loopholes. “So, take it from me, nobody’s going to jail, but Ruto must feel the full force of the state machinery and perhaps for the first time, must realise who’s in charge.”

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.

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura In the past, opening a bank account in Kenya was an elaborate and tedious affair. It was akin to applying for a job: you presented your “curriculum vitae” to bank officials who would determine your fitness as a financially serviceable client. There were forms to be filled (in duplicate) that captured details such as date of birth, schools attended, employment history, reasons for choosing that particular bank and referees to vouch for your suitability. Some banks even asked whether you had spent nights in a police cell and whether you had a criminal record. It was like joining an exclusive members’ club – the odious scrutiny made it look like it was a privilege to be allowed to join the “banking club”.

The procedure for getting a loan was even more stringent and punitive: you would be asked to deposit a valuable item, such as a log book, jewellery or a title deed, as collateral. Money matters were serious business.

That was then. Today technology, particularly smartphones, has revolutionised the financial sector, so much so that traditional banks must be ruing the day smartphones became second nature to humanity. These days getting a personal loan online is easier and faster than calling your nearest bank or micro-finance lending facility. Thanks to mobile banking, a smartphone owner can borrow from as little as Sh500 to as much as Sh70,000 without breaking into a sweat. All he or she needs is to be social media savvy. Having a social media account, such as a Facebook account, is understood by both the online loan apps and the borrowers to be an unstated primary requirement for accessing a loan. There are at least 50 mobile phone lending apps operating in Kenya.

A FinAcess (financial access) survey done in 2016 by the Central Bank of Kenya, the Kenyan National of Bureau of Statistics, FSD-Kenya and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor found out that 77.5 per cent of Kenyans own a mobile phone. Out of this group, according to a 2018 digital credit survey, 35 per cent, or roughly six million people, have taken at least one digital loan. In essence, the survey found that digital credit had become a leading source of credit in Kenya. Using a sample size of 3,000 Kenyans, the survey showed that digital credit appeals to younger customers, out of which 55 per cent are male and from urban areas. The study also found that by far the most common reason for taking a loan is to meeting day-to-day needs. Financing education also drives use of credit while just over a quarter of users take loans to support their business and agricultural activities. However, many of these borrowers struggle to pay back their loans. According to a survey by Microsave, a financial services consultancy, 2.7 million borrowers have been negatively listed by the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) in the last three years, 15 percent of them for amounts of less than Sh200. (CRB is the body charged with the task of flagging or blacklisting all loan defaulters and ensuring that they are barred from borrowing from or transacting with any financial and legal entity, including the government.)

Eliud Njoroge, a financial risk management and private equity fund consultant, told me that mobile phone lending firms financed by venture capitalists were taking advantage of the vulnerability of impressionable youth. “The youth of today want instant gratification – they want it now and here. The notion of delayed gratification, that is, the idea of being patient and thinking through your financial needs, wants, opportunity costs and apparent risk considerations are alien concepts to them,” said Njoroge. “The ‘Java’ generation lives for the moment and developers of these digital apps are exploiting this social phenomenon in the epoch of social media, where the imagined reality of life is being played instantly.” (By Java generation the private equity fund manager, who himself is a millennial, was alluding to the Java restaurants in Nairobi that are popular among the city’s slick young urbanites.)

According to a survey by Microsave, a financial services consultancy, 2.7 million borrowers have been negatively listed by the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) in the last three years, 15 percent of them for amounts of less than Sh200.

“The crux of the matter is that today the aggressive marketing gimmicks by the owners of these apps are singularly directed at the post-millennials – guys barely out of their teens and who have zilch idea of what constitutes a financial budget, leave alone a plan,” notes Njoroge. “Because they still solely rely on their parents, guardians, benefactors, relatives and friends for their upkeep, they have no qualms misusing and squandering money. Hence, the apps have specifically been developed largely with this group of people in mind. They are ready and willing to spend, but most importantly, borrow money to feed their peer-driven lifestyle habits.”

Njoroge’s opinion is based on his wide experience in advising multinational banks and international financial corporations and, more specifically, financial start-up companies that are being funded to loan cash to young people (read anybody below 33 years of age). Njoroge has worked as a financial risk management consultant in Ethiopia, Rwanda and the United Kingdom. Now based in Kenya, he currently works with start-up companies on the look-out for potential big and small loan risk takers. “I will tell you for free that these online apps will explicitly not come out to state that they are targeting these young adults, but I know it from experience and interactions with today’s bankers and venture capitalists that this is the case.”

However, the 2018 digital credit survey found that “digital borrowers are more likely than average to run their own business or be employed” and “less likely to be … dependent on family or government transfers”.

Njoroge says that the apps make young people believe that they can both save and borrow money, but this is not the case. “There is no saving. The apps exist solely for ensuring that you borrow endlessly.” He says another lie being perpetrated by these apps is that they promote small business enterprises. “A complete lie. These apps would like to masquerade as micro-finance entities. They like to market themselves as tools that reduce the cost of borrowing through technology. But I can tell you for a fact that micro-financing is a different financial ball game, technology or no technology. If indeed there are times when they will provide loans for micro-financing, it is because they must be seen to do so, and therefore, it will be incidental and not the primary intended goal.”

The tragedy of these apps, says the financial consultant, is that the cost of repaying these loans can be very punitive. “Firstly, their interest rates are way above the rates charged by banks. The Java generation is impervious to these high interest rates – they borrow and spend money that they have not sweated for. The developers of these apps figured this a long time ago.”

In addition, “if today you default, your name is immediately forwarded to the CRB. If that happens, trust me, you will not even be allowed to borrow from Okoa Jahazi (a platform for borrowing airtime from Safaricom, the biggest mobile network provider in Kenya).”

CRB has to date blacklisted half a million people, according to the Transunion Credit Bureau’s CEO, Billy Owino, Just three years ago, there were only 150,000 loan defaulters in Kenya. Woe unto you if you are ever blacklisted. You are not off the hook even after you have repaid your loan. CRB still considers you a credit risk for seven years. What this means is that for seven years financial institutions will be wary of you when you approach them for a loan. “Most of the borrowers don’t know that they got blacklisted. We get 200 calls daily from individuals in this category, asking how they ended up in the blacklist.”

Twenty-year-old Charles, a University of Nairobi student, says that he took the trouble to compare the interest rates of the various online money lending apps. He eventually settled for KCB-M-Pesa because it had the best rates.” He says that on average he borrows between Sh2,000 and 3,000 twice a month.

“What do you borrow the money for?” I asked him. “I use the money to finance my Sport-Pesa (gambling) expeditions. I bet for big matches.” Although Charles is a college student, he has not yet outgrown indulging in play-station games. “Apart from betting, I also borrow money to afford my play-station games escapades.”

The digital credit survey found that only 3 per cent of borrowers get a loan in order to gamble. It is possible that this number is an underestimate given the finding that “digital borrowers are almost twice as likely to have tried mobile betting at least once in their lifetime”.

Sports betting

Sports betting has become big business in Kenya and ensnared an entire generation. A GeoPoll survey done in March 2017 found that 76 percent of young people in Kenya are into betting and that these youth spend more money on betting than their Ugandan and Tanzanian counterparts. The survey also identified mobile phones as the preferred tool for sports betting among young people.

Read also: BETTING THEIR LIVES AWAY: How online gambling is ruining Kenyan youth

SportPesa, a sports gaming company that was established about five years ago, is today the biggest sports betting platform in Kenya. It is among the dozen or so sports gaming companies that have sprouted in the country recently. These sports gaming companies have developed an impassioned craze among millennials and zillennials (the post-millennial teenage youth born after 2000) who have taken to betting as a way of life. The GeoPoll survey found that Kenyans gambled more frequently than their fellow Africans, spending an average of Sh5,000 a month. Charles has yet to win big cash (most people have never won more than Sh5,000) but feels that he has to keep on feeding his craving, which started as a hobby.

A GeoPoll survey done in March 2017 found that 76 percent of young people in Kenya are into betting and that these youth spend more money on betting than their Ugandan and Tanzanian counterparts. The survey also identified mobile phones as the preferred tool for sports betting among young people.

According to Banker Awards held in the UK in December 2017, Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) is the largest bank countrywide in terms of asset size and has 12 million customers registered for the KCB- M-Pesa mobile service. The KCB M-Pesa loan app, which started in 2015 as a savings account, charges between 4 per cent and 6 per cent interest rate. Its phone loan service rose from 35 per cent between January and March 2016 to 41 per cent in the same quarter in 2017. Because of the success of mobile money borrowing, financial transactions at the branch level fell to 20 per cent from 31 per cent previously. Said KCB Group CEO and Managing Director, Joshua Oigara, in an in- house 2017 KCB newsletter: “We’ve seen a sharp rise in loan requests on all our mobile loans following the decrease in interest rates.” The newsletter stated that the average value of loans per customer was Sh1,800.

Like Branch International Inc., an international online money lending consortium that has its headquarters in San Francisco in California, and which launched its services in Kenya in 2015, KCB M-Pesa, vigorously advertises on Classic FM’s most popular morning radio show. Its target audience, just like Branch’s, is post-millennial youth who have just turned 18, who are college-bound and who have just acquired a national identity card. Branch is giving loans of up to Sh70,000, and according to the radio promos, it claims to have up to a million Kenyan borrowers. “You do not need any collateral, any bank account or a referee, all you need to do is download the Android app and you will receive your loan in 10 seconds flat,” proclaims the ad.

The advertising language used to sell the online borrowing apps is deliberate and intentional, targeted at a generation that is just starting to discover itself and excited about owning a gadget that, to them, seems to unlock hitherto unimagined infinite possibilities. The one-minute radio promos of these online lending apps are couched in language that would appeal to young adults. “Unlocking your growth potential” and other slogans are targeted at a generation that had little or no financial knowledge.

Ken, like Charles, borrows to finance his gambling habits. “So I will borrow every time there are big matches being played on the English Premier League,” admitted Ken. “I bet on Sport-Pesa and I borrow between Sh1,500 to 3,000. He said his favourite app was Tala because, “it is very prompt when relaying the money. I wanted an app that does not waste time in giving me instant cash.”

Dates and other emergencies

The online app of choice for 19-year-old Steve, a Technical University of Nairobi student, is M- Shwari. “I opted to use M-Shwari because it is a solid brand that works together with KCB, another solid brand.” Steve said he borrows between Sh1,000 and 3,000 a month to finance his college lifestyle habits. “Cut a brother some slack,” he said. “I need to enjoy some good life while I’m a student.” Steve said he relies on his parents for pocket money “but can what they give me be enough? I oftentimes have to deal with emergencies, hence the need to have a channel where you can quickly run to for fast cash.” These “emergencies” include impressing and winning over impromptu dates.

Steve told me it is not just once that he did not have the cash to entertain some girl in a fancy restaurant. “On several occasions I have had hot dates, but trust me, I did not have a penny. But tell me, would you let slip a date you’ve been chasing like there’s no tomorrow just because you’re not liquid?” Steve said he relies on his parents for pocket money “but can what they give me be enough? I oftentimes have to deal with emergencies, hence the need to have a channel where you can quickly run to for fast cash.” These “emergencies” include impressing and winning over impromptu dates.

Steve said he has walked confidently into a Java restaurant a couple of times with a “beautiful catch” with not a single penny in his pocket because he knows he can borrow money from M-Shwari “of course, without her knowledge”. The instant loan is deposited into his M-Pesa account, which he uses to settle his bill. Meanwhile, the Java generation belle will not have the slightest hint that her expensive lunch treat was financed by a loan and that the young man will have to figure out how to repay it later.

By 2017, the M-Shwari (shwari means to be calm or peaceful in Kiswahili) online loan portfolio had 420,000 applications every day; of that, 70,000 are processed daily for repayment every 30 days. It has more than 80,000 agents countrywide and processes US$20 million daily payments, according to a study done by Tamara Cook and Claudia McKay. M-Shwari is operated by Safaricom, the biggest mobile network operator in Kenya, and is considered to be the mother of mobile phone lending apps, largely because it was the first mobile phone loan application in Kenya.

Started in 2012, M-Shwari has to date 21 million customers in Kenya. The minimum threshold required of an M-Shwari borrower is to possess a Safaricom sim card and to be registered as an M- Pesa user. Therefore, technically speaking, anyone with an M-Pesa account qualifies to borrow from M-Shwari. The beauty with M-Shwari, its users tell me, is that you can borrow offline so long as you are on the M-Pesa platform. M-Shwari charges a one-time “service fee” of 7.5 per cent on all loans.

M-Shwari is actually a creation of a partnership between Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) and Safaricom, who split the revenue accrued from the lucrative business. According to the How M- Shwari Works: The Story So Far report written by Tamara Cook and Claudia McKay in 2015, Safaricom provides access to customers and transactional data on mobile phone and mobile money usage. CBA, on the other hand, develops credit scoring algorithms that analyse the transactional data to make credit evaluation decisions. The actual lending is done by the bank. One of the single biggest reasons why the M-Shwari app is preferred is because money is promptly credited to your phone immediately. But just as you receive money on the spot, you must also pay it back on time. Deferment and delayed payment can be costly and punitive. “I have always endevoured to pay back on time,” said Steve.

According to a Safaricom manager, M-Shwari is busiest from 3am to 5am and from 8.30pm to 10.30pm, not because of the nocturnal spending habits of young men like Steve, but because of the business acumen of women vegetable hawkers (known as mama mboga). From as early as 3 in the morning, the women vegetable sellers begin to borrow money from M-Shwari because they need to go their respective markets to buy their wares, fresh and in good time. These women are experts in M-Shwari borrowing. By the evening, when they are reconciling their figures, they will begin repaying their loan, usually from between 8.30pm and 10.30pm, in preparation for the dawn borrowing. The women borrow anything from between Sh3,000 and Sh5,000 daily. On a good day, the mama mboga will repay her M-Shwari debt and still remain with a tidy sum as profit. However, these women, who are M-Shwari’s most loyal customers, are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to paying back their loans.

Chebet, a student at the University of Nairobi, does not even care to know the interest rates charged by these mobile phone apps. She told me that she borrows between Sh1,500 and Sh3,000 per month. And she was very forthright on why she borrows the money: “I borrow to satisfy my spendthrift behaviours. I am always buying shoes, bags and clothes that my meagre allowance that I am allowed by my parents cannot satiate.”

The 19-year-old said her favourite borrowing app is Tala. “I got used to Tala because it is advertised a lot on mobile smartphones. Tala is truly one of the money-lending apps that is advertised 24/7 on Android smartphones. The pop-ups are constantly in your face every time you navigate through the phone.” (Tala was previously known as Mkopo Rahisi, Kiswahili for “easy loan.” The app has devised a system where it rewards referrals: for every person you recommend Tala to, you are paid Sh200. Users of Tala, nonetheless, have to part with an additional charge in the form of M-Pesa transaction fees because the app uses a Pay Bill number. I asked her whether she paid her debts in time; she said she had defaulted a couple of times.

Tasha, like Chebet, has no clue how much interest rate she is charged by Tala. Blandly honest, the 20-year-old student told me she told me she borrows “to buy myself make-ups.” Hence, every three months she will borrow between Sh1,500 and Sh3,000 from Tala.

Tala, which was started in March 2014 by Shivani Siroya, a former United Nations employee, began by dishing out Sh10,000 loans in Kenya; today it gives loans worth up to Sh50,000. The app has the highest interest rate among its competitors – between 11 per cent and 15 per cent. (Branch charges 8.4 per cent.) Tala charges 11 per cent if you pay your loan weekly and 15 per cent if you choose to pay monthly.

Tala has also come up with a system that can detect when customers change their mobile phone number. It has a default message that reads: “Your account is linked to another device.” It is a polite warning from Tala that it would be improper and risky to run away with their money, for example, thinking that by changing your sim card, you will be off the hook insofar as repaying your loan is concerned. Chebet, in not too many words, confirmed to me Tala’s tightening of its lending procedures: “You can run, but you cannot escape.”

Mariam, another 19-year-old, is hooked to Tala. Although not a spendthrift like Chebet, she nevertheless said a good thing will not pass her simply because she cannot afford it. “That’s why these apps came about; to be rescuing some of us when we are stuck.” Getting stuck often means not being able to do things, like going to concerts with your peers, because you don’t have the money. “The first time I borrowed money from my phone was when there was a big music show in town and I just could not afford to miss it. All my friends were going there. How could I be left behind?” Mariam uploaded the Tala app and in the blink of an eye she had money in her M-Pesa account. “I resorted to Tala because it’s really advertised on the phone, plus my friends invited me to use it.” Mariam says Tala’s interest rates are high, yet she opted to stick and continue using the app because she finds it convenient. She borrows between Sh1,000 and 2000 every month.

In an interview she had with the Business Daily in January, Siroya said that Tala’s association with the M-Pesa platform had given her company access to 27 million users. Worldwide Tala has given out 4.5 million loans worth Sh25 billion to clients in the Philippines, Mexico, Kenya and Tanzania. Ninety-five per cent of her clients are repeat customers.

George, 20, a student at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology (JKUAT), was as candid as a college student can be. “What do you borrow the money for?” I asked. “To finance dates at fancy restaurants that I know very well I can hardly afford with my own meagre cash.” George also said he borrows to patronise expensive pubs, which ordinarily he would not afford. “How often do you borrow?” Often enough was his curt answer. “Which app do you usually use?” The student said he does not have a specific app and therefore did not also care to find out their respective interest rates. “I will use any as long as it gets the job done. But I have noticed, by and large, I tend to rely mostly on Tala and M-Shwari.” I also asked him whether he repays the loans, if at all. “I do, although I am always falling behind schedule.”

Just like her fellow college mate George, Barbara, 19, a student at the University of Nairobi, does not care about interest rates. “All that I care for is there is money coming my way.” She said she borrows “to get through to the end of the month, as well as to buy my writing books for assignments after squandering my allocated pocket that my parents give me for every month.” Barbara said she religiously borrows between Sh1,000 and Sh2,000 every month. “I use Tala simply because of peer influence – many of my friends use it and they recommended it to me.”

Perhaps it is because of his age that I found Joe’s reason for resorting to the online borrowing money apps reassuring. Joe is 21 and has almost completed his studies at JKUAT. He therefore is already thinking about what he will do after exiting college. He currently runs a mitumba (secondhand clothes) business, selling contemporary clothing to his fellow students. So when I asked him what he borrows the money for, he promptly told me that he borrows it to replenish his stock and to keep his business afloat,“because oftentimes, I’m not paid on time by my customers”. Every month he borrows a standard Sh2,000 from Tala, which he repays promptly.

Chomba, also a university student, borrowed just once because he had a real emergency. His sister’s child, who he was looking after when he was on recess, became sick and needed urgent treatment. “I had heard about KCB-M-Pesa and its reasonable interest rates, so I downloaded the app and borrowed Sh4,000. I later opened an account with KCB.”

Njoroge, the financial expert, pointed out to me that online loans are approved on the basis of the applicant’s reputation, “what they call reputational collateral”. Reputational collateral is dependent on such habits as how many times you make your calls and how often you transact on your M-Pesa account. “The apps’ engineers have developed algorithms that compile your personal data: your social media activities – the kind of Facebook messages you post, your type of friends, how many there are, the sites you like visiting, among other analytics.” He said all this was part of the data analytics that CRB also collects on individuals’ financial habits, which CRB uses to advise whoever requires the data.”

Danson Muchemi, CEO of Jambo Pay, the IT company that collects revenue on behalf of Nairobi County, especially revenue relating to parking charges, praises the online borrowing apps “because they brought down banking barriers. There is no more profiling. The technology has enabled the creation of ‘digital assets’ that approximates what type of a person you are. Armed with this information, the apps are able to sketch your character and identify your spending habits, needs and wants, even though there is a thin line that separates the two.”

“The apps’ engineers have developed algorithms that compile your personal data: your social media activities – the kind of Facebook messages you post, your type of friends, how many there are, the sites you like visiting, among other analytics.” He said all this was part of the data analytics that CRB also collects on individuals’ financial habits, which CRB uses to advise whoever requires the data.” Unlike the banks, which depended on your “CV” to arrive at a decision about whether or not they will advance you a loan, the power of technology is such that it can, with near precision, detect whether or not you will be a defaulter. By analysing your social media profile, the apps can sum up your personality and your willingness or ability to pay back. “Technology, as opposed to traditional banking methods, which took ages deciding on whether you qualify for a bank loan or not, allows mobile banking financiers to make that decision fast and instantly.”

“Old habits die hard” is an English idiom that explains acquired habits that later become difficult to get rid of. When a loan is just a click away, it is not hard to imagine a future where online borrowing will become a habit, or maybe even a harmful addiction, among Kenyans.

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.

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura The now (in) famous March 9, 2018 “handshake” between President Uhuru Kenyatta and the opposition coalition supremo Raila Odinga has ushered in a season of political “handshakes” between presumed antagonists.

After Uhuru, Raila shook hands with former Presidents Daniel Toroitich arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki, on April 12 and April 20, when he went calling on them at their homes in Kabarak, Nakuru County and Muthaiga, Nairobi County respectively.

Weeks later, during his annual State of the Nation address to Parliament, the President in a live-and- let-live gesture asked the House members to “cross-over” and greet each other, supposedly signaling the end of electoral hostilities and the beginning of a political détente and healing through an overplayed public act of penance.

Leading the way, Uhuru shook hands with the youthful Babu Owino, the vociferous MP for Embakasi East, who, during the electioneering period in 2017, is supposed to have epitomized the opposition’s collective hatred of him.

The spin-off effect of this publicized “presidential pardon” was a cacophony of contrite pleas from and between politicians, led by Deputy President William Ruto, who took to Twitter to seek forgiveness from those he may have “sinned” against, even as he forgave those who had “sinned” against him.

However, beneath the feigned efforts of the political class to ingratiate themselves to a discerning but disengaged electorate, the undercurrents of the 2022 presidential succession are raging.

Since that first handshake on the steps of the Harambee House, which took him by complete surprise, Ruto has not been resting easy. Raila’s meetings with Uhuru, and subsequently with Moi and Kibaki, have re-calibrated and re-oriented his political program for the next 4 years.

However, beneath the feigned efforts of the political class to ingratiate themselves to a discerning but disengaged electorate, the undercurrents of the 2022 presidential succession are raging. Attuned to brinkmanship and sabre rattling, Ruto’s initial attempt to respond may have boomeranged on him. If the stories swirling around are to be believed, he was denied an audience with Moi after arriving unannounced and uninvited at the Kabarak home of the man whose tutelage paved his path to political prominence. He and his entourage that included his close confidante, Charles Keter, the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, were nonetheless served with hot lunch, in the truest African tradition of welcoming even your presumed enemies, when they drop by suddenly.

Moi, through his interlocutors, was magnanimous in acknowledging the visit by the Deputy President of the Republic and assured Ruto that at an appropriate and properly arranged time, he would indeed meet with him. The DP was nevertheless flustered by the apparent public rebuff. In an effort to deflect from the missed opportunity, he blamed his woes on Moi’s son, the Senator of Baringo, Gideon Moi, who he accused of shielding his father from him.

Had the DP imagined himself in this situation so soon after the elections?

“The gloves are off,” said a member of the Mt Kenya Foundation, an influential lobby group that consists of some of the richest Kikuyu barons in Kenya and which helped bankroll Uhuru Kenyatta’s presidential campaigns in 2013, as well as 2017. We were at Sagret Hotel, in Nairobi, drinking bone soup, accompanied with sizzling hot mutura (traditional sausages stuffed with offal). Sagret Hotel, which has existed since the 1960s, has been the haunt for old Kikuyu money, patronized by some of the richest Kikuyu men and who’s who in Kikuyu society.

“Who is Ruto?” asked the mzee, a typical Kikuyu ethnic chauvinist: arrogant, contemptuous, entitled and moneyed. The loaded question presupposed, Ruto was a non-entity in Kenya’s dynastic politics. “Who was his father?” he mused aloud. “Bururi ni wa andu atatu: njamba, gitonga na muthamaki (A country belongs to three types of people: the brave, the rich and the anointed leader). It is true Ruto could be a brave man … Yet, that alone does not qualify him to rule over us. Raila is [also] a njamba, but we Kikuyus did not give him the presidency.”

The tycoon said the country’s influential political families had rejected Ruto. “Who are we to say he can lead us? Ikienda guthejuo, ndionagio kahiu (if you decide to slaughter an animal, you do not make it obvious by dangling a knife in front of it). Ruto should read the sign on the wall”, he said.

That the question of “who is Ruto”, now openly being asked by the Kikuyu elites, was also quickly gaining currency among the Kikuyu rank and file, dawned on me when I bumped into my long-time friend, Njuguna Gatheca, in the city centre recently. A city of Nairobi political operative since the inaugural days of plural politics in the early 1990s, Njuguna pulled me aside and animatedly told me: “giothi ni githaruranie” – the game had changed. “Who is Ruto?” It was a rhetorical question and he was not expecting an answer from me.

A country belongs to three types of people: the brave, the rich and the anointed leader). It is true Ruto could be a brave man … Yet, that alone does not qualify him to rule over us. Raila is [also] a njamba, but we Kikuyus did not give him the presidency.

“This country cannot be left to a person whose political pedigree is questionable,” said Njuguna. “Who knows, there might not even be an election in 2022. You keep abreast with global politics…you know what happened in Russia with Putin when his term was coming to end? Let me whisper something to you: Uhuru is not going anywhere, he must stay around to guard his family’s empire”.

Vladimir Putin was inaugurated on May 7, 2018, for his fourth term as president and has ruled Russia for 18 years, save for a brief period when he served as the Prime Minister in 2008. My friend was telling me that the Kikuyu would not vote for Ruto. He described Ruto as a man who really itched to be president – a familiar label previously attached to Raila in his effort to wrestle the presidency from Kibaki and later Uhuru. Now it had conveniently shifted to Ruto. “We know Ruto’s plan: he wants the presidency so much, so that he can gleefully bring down Kikuyus’ riches. We will not give him the pleasure of doing that,” said Njuguna.

“Ruto should not think we have forgotten, what he did in the North Rift and especially at Burnt Forest church,” said the old man at Sagret Hotel. He was referring to the violence that followed the bungled 2007 presidential election, much of it targeting Kikuyus in the expansive Rift Valley region, for which Ruto was prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. Three dozen of them were killed in a single incident, when a mob set fire to a church they were sheltering in.

I began openly hearing the “Burnt Forest church fire” narrative after the repeat October presidential election. But the fact is, the narrative had all along been there, but more muted after Uhuru and Ruto teamed up in 2012 to run for the presidency. “We are not foolish and we are not forgetful,” said the businessman. “We had to be tactical not to torpedo Uhuru’s presidency – but now we are free, we owe no one any apology or debt.”

He described Ruto as a man who really itched to be president – a familiar label previously attached to Raila in his effort to wrestle the presidency from Kibaki and later Uhuru. Now it had conveniently shifted to Ruto.

The mogul told me that as a Christian, he had forgiven Ruto for what he did to Kikuyus in the North Rift, but that did not mean he was welcome to be the nation’s president. He reminded me of the Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz’s famous aphorism: “The stupid neither forgive nor forget, the naïve forgive and forget, but the wise forgive, but don’t forget.”

He continued: “If Ruto is not tamed, his plan is to dethrone the dynastic families of Kenyatta, Moi and Jaramogi in that order, from future political participation.” To do that, “he must of necessity first destroy their business empires. For him to survive as a president and consolidate his powers, he must bring down the Kenyatta and Moi families down. That is the only way he will be president.” The mzee saw Ruto’s hand everywhere in the government, and thought it did not portend well for the nation if he became president: “He will finish the country.”

The old man was buoyed by the fact that in Kenya’s chequered political history, “vice presidents traditionally have not succeeded the president save for Moi only. Moi was a special case because President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta died in office, hence allowing for a smooth transition,” He did not find it necessary to mention that the Kikuyu Mafia had opposed Moi’s ascension to power from 1969 (when Kenyatta suffered a stroke) and increasingly from 1974, when it was evident that Kenyatta’s death was imminent because of his frailty. Kenyatta died in 1978.

“Even Kibaki, who was at one time Moi’s Vice President did not succeed him directly: He had to find another route. (Kibaki was dropped as VP following the disastrous mlolongo (queue-voting) elections of 1988 and left Kanu in 1991 to found the Democratic Party). The others, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Dr Josephat Karanja, Prof George Saitoti, Musalia Mudavadi, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, Moody Awori, fell by the way side.” Kibaki’s first deputy, Michael Kijana Wamalwa, died after just eight months into the job. 36 years before, Joseph Murumbi had also lasted less than a year when he resigned in 1967. “Ruto will not be the first,” opined the businessman.

The old man told me Ruto is both feared and reviled by many Kikuyu MPs and politicians. “They are too afraid to come out and oppose him. All they can muster to say in their safe confines is that ‘Ruto is bad because he is not good’”. In April 2013, the Mt Kenya Foundation members hosted some of Ruto’s bosom buddies at Blue Post Hotel off Thika Superhighway, 40km from Nairobi. “We wanted to find out from them, what exactly was Ruto’s political ambition,” confided the tycoon. He claimed that one of Ruto’s men told them: “Ruto anajua Wakikuyu hawawezi kumchagua…anataka kutengeneza pesa tu.” (Ruto knows Kikuyus cannot vote for him; he just wants to make money). But it was now evident that Ruto wants to be a powerful president like Daniel arap Moi was.

“The handshake had obviously disrupted Ruto’s post-October 26, 2017 election program,” said a Kalenjin friend, who worked closely with Ruto’s campaign team. We were sitting at a popular pub in Langata, south-west of Nairobi city centre. “His program was time specific: on Jubilee Party assuming state power, he would begin by dismantling the NASA coalition, in whichever way he could – separating and scattering the four principals, by the first half of the year. In the second half, he was to clean and revamp his image, by sprucing it up as a development conscious leader.” He said Ruto has had to reorder his priorities after he was taken by the handshake surprise.

“It is now a matter of urgency for Ruto to rebrand as a development conscious leader – far from his rabble rousing and cantankerous image, having spent nearly the whole of his first term in office hurling insults at the Opposition and especially at Raila Odinga,” said the friend. “He is also now vigorously pushing for the “hustler narrative” to repackage himself as this struggling, humble man who is now seeking the presidency against all political odds. If you were keen, you would have noticed the cap Ruto was wearing during the April 23, Kamagut chicken auction was branded ‘Jamaa wa Kuku’. The branding project had to be fast forwarded and will increase its tempo as Ruto combats the notion that he is perpetually in campaign mode.”

The “hustler narrative” is assiduously being propagated by Mutahi G. Ngunyi, the chief architect of “Tyranny of Numbers” myth that in 2013 fanatically excited scores of Jubilee Coalition supporters. In the new narrative that Mutahi is fashioning, Ruto is being cast as the underdog who, after a long and arduous political journey, is ready to be crowned the “peasant president”. In crafting the “Dynasty vs Hustler Nation” message for Ruto, Mutahi is targeting the voluble millennial generation, which constitutes a significant part of the Kenyan electorate. Still, more specifically, Mutahi’s new assignment is largely informed more by the emerging realization that the GEMA (Gikuyu Embu Meru Association) nation may, after all, not vote for William Ruto as a bloc. The question therefore that Mutahi is posing to the millenials is this: “In Ruto’s battle royal with the dynastic families that have controlled the politics of Kenya since 1963, who best captures your political imagination and who in your estimation mirrors your daily struggles?”

“We wanted to find out from them, what exactly was Ruto’s political ambition,” confided the tycoon. He claimed that one of Ruto’s men told them: “Ruto anajua Wakikuyu hawawezi kumchagua…anataka kutengeneza pesa tu.”

The other person who is pushing the “peasant president” agenda is the easily-provoked and provocative city lawyer, Ahmednasir Abdullahi. He has several times, through his Twitter handle, falsified Kenya political history, in his impressionistic efforts to portray Ruto as the first son of a peasant to contend for the country’s top seat.

The Kalenjin millennial who patronize the Langata pub I met my friend in are mostly the children of the Kalenjin elite who thrived during Moi’s 24-year-old reign. They are completely sold on Ruto’s presidential ambitions and his impending take-over in 2022. “Ruto’s a go-getter and that’s the kind of person, we want,” said one to me. “This talk about Ruto’s wanton corruption and enriching himself is just bull talk – who in this country among his accusers can hold a candle against Ruto? We know how the political dynasty families made their riches. You do not help to form a government then be expected not reap from it. If Ruto has a found his way of making money, why begrudge him?”

According to this group, Ruto has proven that he can deliver what he promises: “He delivered Langata constituency to us – for the first time in the history of Nairobi politics, we have a Kalenjin MP – Nixon Korir in Nairobi County. We believe Ruto is the person who will hold our hands after he gets the presidency in 2022, just like Moi held our fathers’ hands, when he became the president in 1978.”

Like Jomo Kenyatta before him and Kibaki and Uhuru after him, Moi rewarded his ethnic base with government jobs. One of the parastatals that came to be identified with Kalenjins was the then Kenya Posts and Telecommunications. “There was a time when Kalenjin dialects were the languages of instruction; nearly everyone from the Managing Director to the tea-girl and the corridor sweeper was a Kalenjin,” said a retired engineer to me.

The Kalenjin population resident in the greater Langata is neither accidental nor coincidental: many of the Kalenjin who came to Nairobi in the 1980s and 1990s from the largely rural Rift Valley, came as government employees. As it were, they were the beneficiaries of the government houses in Langata and elsewhere in the city.

If the Nairobi Kalenjins are of the view that Ruto is the man who will carry their collective aspirations, the rural Kalenjin is even more wedded to the view that Ruto should be the next president. Sila, a friend from Kapseret, in Eldoret, told me the issue is non-negotiable. “Tunataka kura millioni nne kutoka kwa hawa Wakikuyu.” We want four million votes from these Kikuyus. Kapseret is 20km from Eldoret town, near the Edoret International Airport on the Eldoret-Mosoriot Road. Some of the richest Kikuyus in Eldoret live in this general area. They have hotel businesses, hardware shops and restaurants.

The question therefore that Mutahi is posing to the millenials is this: “In Ruto’s battle royal with the dynastic families that have controlled the politics of Kenya since 1963, who best captures your political imagination and who in your estimation mirrors your daily struggles?”

Said Sila, “tunajua Wakikuyu wote pale wanaishi Uasin Gishu County, tutaenda kwa nyumba zao kuwaitisha kura…kuna watu watahama hii counti wakileta kujua.” (We know where all the Kikuyus in Uasin Gishu live. We will move home to home, asking for their vote … there are people who will vacate this county if they try to be too clever). To test Sila’s assertion, I talked to some of the Kikuyu residents from Kapseret and Mosoriot. “Look at these houses, are they made of mud?” one Kikuyu man asked me. “We will vote with the people here. We do not want to court trouble. We have lived in relative peace since 2013. Kikuyus from the central region do not speak on our behalf.”

At West Indies, a middle class suburb, I talked to Grace Gathoni. She emigrated to Eldoret in 1980, from Nairobi, but is originally from Warubaga, in Elburgon. “The new post-election narratives being formed by the political elites within the Jubilee fraternity are being closely watched by Kikuyu resident in Uasin Gishu County and elsewhere in the Rift Valley region,” said Gathoni. “I will tell you this: the Kikuyus in Rift Valley will vote for Ruto. It is not a question of whether we like him or not – we don’t. It will be a question of peace and survival.”

“There are some brutal facts to be faced,” said Gathoni. She blames Ruto for the brutality Kikuyus suffered in Uasin Gishu. “But he also teamed up with Uhuru Kenyatta and did what they did to form the government. Uhuru in 2013 and 2017 could not have formed the government without Ruto’s help. If you cohabited with an ogre, you don’t one day wake up and just walk away from it, it will certainly devour you. You must cleverly device a system to disengage yourself from it.” Gathoni told me that surprisingly, despite the 2008 violence, more Kikuyus had moved to Uasin Gishu, especially after 2013. “Today, many are engaged more in business and less in farming. And unlike pre-2007 and post-election violence, majority of them live in urban centres – Eldoret, Kitale, Moi’s Bridge, Matunda, Turbo. Those in farming nowadays just lease the land. They also became the wiser: not many of them live with their nuclear families. The men returned, but their families are in Juja, Kajiado, Kitengela, Ngong and Rongai.”

The outbreak of handshakes in Nairobi has startled Kikuyus in the Rift Valley where they thought they were safest. Meeting some wazees from Ng’ombe Imwe in Bahati constituency, Nakuru County, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) elders told me word was already quietly being subtly spread around that “it is paramount that Kikuyus wherever they are in the Rift Valley seek to live peacefully like they have been doing for the last couple of years.” Ng’ombe Imwe is one kilometre from Tabuga, where the Deputy President was hosted by the PCEA Church for a Sunday service on April 23. Listening to these wazees and Gathoni, it sounded to me like peace had been commodified in the greater Rift Valley region.

Another mzee, from Elburgon, told me how some Kalenjin men pointedly told him: “It is true the Kalenjins terrorized the Kikuyus in the North Rift during the post-election violence in 2007, but I hope you people, as we approach 2022, will appreciate the cost of peace. You’ve lived well with us for the last five years. It is important we continue living peacefully.” It was a chilling warning. “People have built permanent houses here,” he said. “They have crops in the farms and animals in the fields; the last thing they want is disruption, death and destruction. I will tell you this: Kikuyus from this area and the adjoining areas of Kuresoi, Molo, Mauche, Njoro and Solai will vote for Ruto, come 2022.”

It was Heinrich Himmler, one of Nazi’s most influential and powerful cadre who best captured the power of political terror: Said Himmler, “the best political weapon is terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But we do not ask of their love, only for their fear.” Talking to the 70- year-old from Elburgon, I could see terror in his eyes. The horror of the 2007 post-election violence in his area and the fear that filled his family and relatives, all were coming back to him. “I’m old now, I want to live the rest of my life here on earth in peace and watch the growth of my grandchildren,” he says.

“I will tell you this: the Kikuyus in Rift Valley will vote for Ruto. It is not a question of whether we like him or not – we don’t. It will be a question of peace and survival.”

The post-handshake fear and panic has also spread to the top echelons of Ruto’s squad. An Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission official stationed in Kitale whispered to me that the triple resignations in April of IEBC commissioners, Paul Kurgat, Margaret Mwachanya and Connie Maina, were a choreographed event allegedly orchestrated by Ruto himself. “This was done with the intention of ostensibly disabling he IEBC and buying time, in case the push for a referendum catches momentum,” said the official.

Ruto’s middle name is Kipchirchir. Chirchir in Kalenjin etymology, means “too quick”. When in a seemingly political crisis, Ruto supposedly does too many thing too quickly. When in the storm of the International Criminal Court in November 2010, he took the bold and risky step of travelling to The Hague in the Netherlands and spent 30 hours at the Court. He met everyone except the ICC’s then Chief Prosecutor Louis Moreno Ocampo. His mission flopped. When he came back, he took up a verbal war with everyone, blaming his woes on everybody but himself.

My Kalenjin friends like reminding me that the traditional symbol of Kalenjin leadership – the Sambut – a traditional cloak, has always remained with Moi and therefore never been transferred to anyone. In 2007, months before the controversial general election, in what came to be known as the Eldama Ravine Declaration, Ruto was enthroned as the Kalenjin leader, “but that was not the true enthronement,” say the friends. “Until and unless he hands over the Sambut, Moi will remain the true Kalenjin leader. When the apparently impulsive decision to fly to Kabarak for a photo-op backfired, Ruto again blamed everyone and everything save himself.

If he stays true to form, there may be tough times ahead for Kenya, regardless of all the handshakes.

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.

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura Ismael Kulubi is a 66-years-old radio production guru with a scintillating voice that is still in great demand even after retirement. Advertising executives in need of an experienced voice hire him to do radio promos. By all measurable standards, Ismail has had a fulfilling career – he is a widely travelled man who has enjoyed life’s successes as a professional media man.

But his advertising and media professional friends have been always been puzzled by Ismael. With all the riches he made over the years and his ascribed social status, Ismael has lived all his life in Eastlands area, the eastern part of Nairobi that every Eastlander seeks to run away from at the slightest hint of money and success.

Eastlands: “No pretensions here”

A practicing Muslim, Ismael grew up in Majengo, the sprawling slum sandwiched between the famous Kamukunji Grounds and Eastleigh, the inner-city neighbourhood that is often referred to as “Little Mogadishu” Majengo has always been infamous for its variety of sex workers, some of whom come from as far as Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. The slum dates back to the British colonial era when it was seen as place where prostitution thrived. Women living there were believed to be sex workers who met the sexual needs of the black immigrant labourers employed in Nairobi who were not allowed to bring their families to the city.

After every Friday afternoon prayers, which he religiously observes at Jamia Mosque in central Nairobi, Ismael heads straight to Majengo in his gleaming beige metallic Mercedes Benz, something he has done for many years. His vintage German engineering marvel is still a spectacle to be behold among the ghetto dwellers. But Ismael is considered one of them and his posh car parked outside on Majengo’s main street is as safe as the Kenyan currency locked at the Central Bank building’s underground vaults in Nairobi city centre.

Majengo has always been infamous for its variety of sex workers, some of whom come from as far as Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. The slum dates back to the British colonial era when it was seen as place where prostitution thrived. “Majengo has the best pilau you can find anywhere in Nairobi,” Ismael tells me matter-of- factly. Every Friday afternoon, his hot pilau, specially catered to his culinary tastes, awaits him. “Majengo made me and it is a place that gives me immense joy, helps me stay firmly grounded and connects me with the people.” For Ismael, the Friday afternoon sumptuous meal served on large dishes called sinia is a social affair: He has his usual group who he eats with that ranges anywhere from five to ten people.

At one time, Ismael earned a salary that was commensurate with what is paid to top executives of blue chip companies. But that never stopped him from driving from the Karen and Lavington suburbs, where his offices used to be, to enjoy a meal cooked in the ramshackle kitchens and restaurants of Majengo. “Good food is a social engagement, it is not so much about how much money you spend on it,” says Ismael. And he can spend a lot. On any given Friday afternoon, Ismael can spend an upward of Ksh5000, depending on the number of people he is eating with. They will eat from the same sinia with their hands, seated on the floor. “There are no pretensions here, we eat together the way we eat in our respective houses,” says Ismael.

As they eat, Ismael’s Mercedes Benz will be attended to by between three to five young men who give it a clean shine like no other. This is another ritual in Majengo. “My car is never washed anywhere else – the boys know it, they have cleaned it for many years, it is like going to the same barber for many years. You do not want to change him because he has learned the nooks and crannies of your bumpy head.” The young men know that every Friday, some good money will come their way. “Ismael ni boy wetu… yuko chonjo…ua anatucheki kitu poa,” (Ismael is our man…he’s cool and pays us real well), say the young men.

After the sumptuous meal, drowned by the freshest of unadulterated juice, Ismael does not leave Kije (Majengo’s popular name). He has his spot outside where he sits with other men to chew gomba (also known as khat or miraa) that is specially delivered to him by his supplier of many years. He will then chew gomba – handas and veve are variants of the same thing – accompanied by copious amounts of black coffee throughout the evening, after which he will drive back home to his house in Buru Buru estate.

“People who live in the so-called leafy suburbs have ghettoised Eastlands,” quips Ismael. “They live in a make-believe world that has blinded them to real-life happenings outside their presumed safe cocoons. They think Eastlands is one huge criminal world. You can imagine what they think of my hood Kije: we are all sons of harlots. That young people here neither have ambitions nor dreams. They are so wrong.” Ismael, whose long dead parents came from Saba Saba location in Maragua, Muranga County, says, “In Kije, the people are real, they have what it takes to live comfortably and decently and they are as informed with local and global current news as the Kenyans of Karen and Lavington.”

If you fly over Majengo slum, you would be amazed by the satellite TV dishes that adorn iron sheet rooftops. Inside some of these mud-plastered houses are some of the latest and funkiest hi-fi equipment and exotic furniture that one can only imagine in a Kileleshwa high- rise flat or in Loresho’s leafy suburbs. These dishes beam news outlets from such channels as Al Jazeera TV, BBC, CNN and France 24 English TV.

I was born and bred in Eastlands, but Eastlands is often viewed as a place – if you were “unfortunate” enough to be brought up there – where you finished school and once you were done, you quickly left the area. “If you entered some of the houses here in Kije, you would literally be taken aback,” says Ismael. “There are houses that have 42-inch smart cable TV and Persian Bukhara rags and Turkish carpets that can only be a dream for many of the pretenders to middle class tastes. You know those houses where you have to remove your shoes to enter?” Many of these items are imported from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar and Yemen.

The traditional suspicion about Eastlands as an area where “dreams are made” and once those dreams are actualised you flee from the area to go and live those dreams elsewhere is a long-held stereotype that persists to date. Indeed some of the Nairobians who started life in the Eastlands estates, dingy or otherwise, comprise a big chunk of the most successful Kenyans who now live on the west side of the city’s spatial suburbs. Their pastime is nostalgically recounting how they are wasee wa mtaa (estate mates). Yet many, having bought into the Eastlands narrative themselves, are publicly embarrassed to be associated with the area.

My recent encounter with a high school chum of many years convinced me that the Eastlands narrative is not fading away in a hurry. Steve Ngotho, who has lived in Pretoria, South Africa, for a long time was in town recently. When he gave me a shout, we met at a restaurant in central Nairobi. After the usual pleasantries, Ngotho, who I had always known to shoot straight, asked where I lived…nowadays. “I live in Buru Buru,” I told him. “Ah, you mean you still live in Eastlands?” he asked. What he really meant was: What in God’s name would you still be doing in Eastlands?

Ngotho grew up in the western side of Nairobi, the general area that is west of Uhuru Highway. Uhuru Highway is the trunk road that cuts across the city centre and links the city to the highways that lead to Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the port city of Mombasa.

I was born and bred in Eastlands, but Eastlands is often viewed as a place – if you were “unfortunate” enough to be brought up there – where you finished school and once you were done, you quickly left the area. Ngotho, you can bet, is not the only former Nairobian to still harbour the “Eastlands narrative” (even when he lives abroad) – a place for people with failed ambitions and aspirations, where dreams did not take off.

The Eastlands narrative has its roots in the colonial era when some “African” areas were associated with congestion and crime. Hence, Eastlands to date is viewed as a place that does not have the attraction and aura of suburban “posh living”. For Eastlanders, the “leafy suburbs” imply breezy air, lots of jacaranda and pine trees, bungalows and maisonettes with compounds and open spaces that can only be found across Uhuru Highway.

Dr. Mosley Owino, a consultant dentist, likes to remind me that East London, where he trained as a dental surgeon, has many of the same characteristics and reputation as the Eastlands area of Nairobi: It is a place riven with deep poverty and overcrowding and which is not immune from the social problems that afflict such areas – the existence of rival gangs, loafers, social misfits and petty and hardcore criminals.

Buru Buru: “Like a suburban British hood”

Buru Buru estate, where Ismael bought his house in the 1980s, is one of the iconic estates that sometimes still salvages the Eastlands reputation, even as the estate itself, which has five phases, struggles against ghettoisation. Largely built in the 1970s, with the last phase five completed in 1982, Buru Buru was the estate where newly graduated architects, accountants, lawyers, physicians, quantity surveyors, among other graduates, aspired to live and start out because it captured their upward mobility aspirational lifestyle, its Eastlands location notwithstanding. Construction magnate John Mburu has lived in Buru Buru ever since he graduated from the University of Nairobi in the early 1990s. With a yearly turnover of hundreds of millions of shillings, Mburu’s friends in the industry cannot understand why he still lives in the same house he started out in. A shilling billionaire, Mburu says Buru Buru is a suitable place to live in – it does not have the wannabe pretentious suburban lifestyle like many of the new estates that have come up: “It still retains decent, respectable and habitable estate characteristics that represents the lifestyles of people who have progressively grown their incomes.”

Buru Buru is among most famous suburban estates in East and Central Africa. When I first went to Tanzania, a quarter of a century ago, my newly acquired Tanzanian friends would ask me which part of Nairobi I came from. “Ule mtaa ambao unaishi mawaziri na wakuu wa serekali, unaufahamu?” (Do you know the estate that Kenyan ministers and top civil servants live in?) It was amusing to learn that my Tanzanians friends considered Buru Buru to be such a posh estate that only elite government people lived there.

“Buru Buru is very much like a British suburban hood,” says Stacy Wanjiku, who lived and studied at the London School of Economics (LSE), University of London. “Even the way people park outside their houses on the roadside is so British.” Wanjiku, who herself lives in Buru Buru, says the picket fencing may have long gone, but Buru Buru still retain its stand-out character with its shopping centres and it semi-detached architectural design uniformity.

Woodley and Kimathi: Civil servant estates

The estate that comes closer to once being a residential area for senior government civil servants is Woodley, which is located in the south-east of Nairobi, adjacent to Moi Nairobi Girls on Joseph Kang’ethe Road. Woodley is a fashionable estate made of a mixture of high-rise flats and bungalow houses with huge compounds and while it was not largely inhabited by cabinet ministers – at least certainly not in the 1980s – for some reason, Woodley was the residence of the senior-most Luo civil servants.

Alex Oduor, who lives in the estate, which is owned by Nairobi County, tells me that Woodley has all the trappings of a proper middle class neighbourhood: his house is in a safe secluded area, has a big compound for kids to romp about and to host a barbeque and is big enough to entertain guests and host visiting relatives from rural areas. Oduor himself lives in the three-bedroomed house once owned by Washington Okumu, the humongous jolly professor who brokered peace between Nelson Mandela of the African National Party (ANC) and Gatsha Buthelezi, the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), in Johannesburg, South Africa in the 1990s.

The estate closest in resemblance to Woodley in terms of design and layout is Kimathi estate in Eastlands. It is ensconced between Bahati and Jerusalem estates. Built in the early 1970s, Kimathi is your archetypal middle class neighbourhood that has a family ring to it: an “enclosed” estate with modest houses and little compounds. Mwai Kibaki, the third President of Kenya, kept a house there for the longest time. Up to 1974, he represented Bahati constituency which Kimathi estate was a part of. Hudson Mwangi, a businessman who has lived in Kimathi estate for many years, says the estate is unpretentious and allows him to operate “below the radar”, without attracting too much attention from the prying eyes of gossipers and nosy people.

Kilimani and Kileleshwa: “Lonely jungles”

The estates that were truly classical middle class neighbourhoods were the adjoining suburban areas of Kileleshwa and Kilimani located in the west of Nairobi. They were your conventional neighbourhoods for senior civil servants from 1963 to early 2000s. “But today, these areas have become concrete jungles; the high-rise flats that are coming up daily have completely erased the beautiful memory of the semi-detached bungalow and maisonette residential houses that adorned the area,” says print journalist Oyunga Pala, who grew up in the Kilimani area. “In the days that I grew up in Kilimani, the area was attractive and scenic, the houses had huge compounds for children to safely play and run around in, and the neighbourhood had lots of trees and kaiyaba (Kei apple) fences.”

The gentrification of Kileleshwa and Kilimani occasioned by the new money of the nouveaux riches and the recently minted millennial millionaires have transformed these areas into impersonal, “cold flats” where next-door neighbours live like total strangers, meeting only on the staircases and in lifts. Lilian Rice, a British national who lives in one of these flats, told me there is a “fake friendliness” among flat mates living in Kileleshwa. “Every time I visit my friend and workmate in Donholm in Eastlands, I notice the stark differences: the place is bubbly and full of life. The children are running helter-skelter, playing football or hide-and-seek. The neighbours pop in (unannounced) to share a funny anecdote or to enjoy a cup of tea together… I tell you the camaraderie is real and unpretentious.”

Rice says that the corner kiosks and green grocery vibandas (sheds) of Donholm really enchant her. “They serve as meeting points for people to banter and chat.” Rice concludes that Kileleshwa is “a lonely jungle” and Eastlands, with all its “dirt and disorder”, has “variety and vivacity.”

This variety of life was best captured for me by Rhoda Mbaya, who was brought up in an old Kileleshwa neighbourhood. When their father, a senior civil servant, died suddenly, the family had to move out of their five-bedroomed government house and relocate to Uthiru, a peri-urban and semi- rural area on the outskirts of Nairobi, 12km west of the city centre, in a place called 87. “Of course, it was at first traumatising, but we quickly adjusted,” said Rhoda. “The thing about living in the old Kileleshwa was that we led a secluded and shielded life, so when we had to move to Uthiru, it was obviously a scale-down, but we soon realised that Uthiru had its own advantages.”

Used to a subsidised life all her life, Rhoda was gratified to find that Uthiru had a cheaper and affordable lifestyle that was commensurate with her middle class tastes and which did not compromise her family’s social upward mobility. Her five siblings still rent out a five-bedroomed bungalow there, which is much more affordable than a house around the Kileleshwa/Kilimani “posh” areas.

“The vegetables are fresh and cheap, we get the milk straight from the cow, fresh and unskimmed and kienyeji (indigenous) chicken and eggs. The crux of the matter is that you can’t have your cake and eat it,” said Rhoda. “Uthiru is teeming with people, we weren’t used to that, but yet again, the people are cosmopolitan, friendly and hospitable…but you know what? We discovered mutura (a sausage-like delicacy made out of stuffed offal) and pork. Uthiru has the best pork place in town.”

The rapid gentrifications of the city’s better known neighbourhoods, says Oyunga, are robbing the city of its iconic suburbs and traditional beautiful look. Kilimani’s expanding gentrification is already encountering opposition. The Kilimani Residents Association is up in arms against Cytonn Investment Company, a real estate private equity firm that intends to mobilise funds and put up a multi-storeyed building in the area.

Eastleigh: “Where dreams are incubated”

Gentrification in Nairobi has not been confined to the western side of the city. The Somali people’s influx in Eastleigh has led to a rapid and haphazard gentrification of the area. High- rise buildings have risen: some magnificent, some ugly and an eyesore. The buildings are both commercial and residential. A couple of years ago, a former powerful cabinet minister was persuaded to visit Eastleigh – a place he himself had confessed he had not visited for “donkey years”. The minister was astounded beyond belief when he found the area was home to two- and three-star hotels, complete with deluxe suites for accommodation and a la carte three-course menus.

Amid Eastleigh’s chaos, confusion, grime, mounting garbage, open sewers and systemic failure of services, there are Somali residents who live like Arab sheikhs in some of the most crowded and ugly flats. When Abdulrahman let me into his house on the top floor of a flat facing Pumwani Maternity Hospital, I was taken aback by the apparent affluence: The large sitting room was bedecked with jewelry and Arabian Nights-like ornaments, an imported sofa and a thick Afghanistan carpet. His prayer room was a wall-to-wall carpet affair. His expensive cutlery was like that of an emir. It was only after I came out of the house that I realised that indeed I was in the shambolic Eastleigh neighbourhood. Inside Abdulrahman’s house, it felt like I was in an affluent flat somewhere in Qatar or Yemen.

One of the areas that has been under perpetual threat of gentrification is Eastlands itself. The vast estates of Bahati, Hamza-Makadara, Jericho, (Lumumba and Ofafa) Jerusalem, Kaloleni, Makongeni, Maringo, Mbotela and Uhuru that make up the “real” greater Eastlands area and whose fame has rested on council houses belonging to the now defunct Nairobi City Council, are being targeted by “private developers” who have been marking them for a long time to bring them down in the name of constructing “better” and more spacious accommodation for the residents.

“Eastlands maybe the place where dreams are incubated and people are not pretentious, but it can be also a place that drains and sucks up your energies”

It is true that many of these houses could be past their building life cycle. Their average lifespan is 60 years – Maringo estate was built in 1958, for example.The Kaloleni “bungalows” were built in the 1940s. During the 1960s, this was one of the poshest African quarters. Jericho Lumumba was built in 1962, a year before Kenya got its independence from the British. A beautiful, well-designed and laid- out estate, with ample open spaces for recreation, it still retains its shine despite obvious neglect that includes peeling paintwork that no one remembers when it was last undertaken, uncollected garbage, dilapidated plumbing and open sewers.

Peter Mugo, who is a resident here, allowed me into his “humble abode” for a cup of African tea that has the milk, tea leaves and sugar all boiled together. Mugo’s humble abode is a two-roomed affair but the house is nonetheless as middle class as they come: it has all the gadgets and trappings of modern urban living. He has the latest Samsung smart TV, Sony Hi-Fi music system complete with woofers, stylish settees and an expensive carpet to boot. “My subsidised rent allows me to save enough money to send my kids to quality private schools,” Mugo told me. His youngest 10-year-old son is busy with his play-station, while his second born daughter is on her laptop googling her school homework on the Wi-Fi that her dad has installed in the house.

“Eastlands maybe the place where dreams are incubated and people are not pretentious, but it can be also a place that drains and sucks up your energies,” says Victor Ochieng. Before moving to the west of Nairobi, Victor lived in Donholm for several years. “I used Jogoo Road (the trunk road that runs through the major Eastlands estates). All the time I lived in Doni I can tell you the traffic snarl- ups on Jogoo Road used to give me incessant headaches. Doni was also not an easy estate to live in: if it’s not water shortages, its garbage strewn all over. And when it rains, it floods. That was enough stress for me.”

Still, after moving to the west side of Nairobi, he now appreciates that people in Eastlands at least live within their means. “There’s a lot of flush money in places like Kileleshwa and the majority of lifestyles are sustained by credit cards. In essence, people here live beyond their means, all in the name of maintaining class and status.”

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.

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura In early 2005, I went to see Geoffrey Griffin, the director of Starehe Boys Centre, just before he died in June of that same year. We discussed many things, among them the 8-4-4 education system. “The fact of the matter is that there is intrinsically nothing wrong with the 8-4-4 system,” Griffin told me then. By the time of his death, he had overseen the system at the centre for 20 years. “The 8-4-4 students that Starehe has produced since its inception in 1985 are just as good and as vigorous as the students of the previous (7-4-2-3) system,” said Griffin, who explained that the system was based on a Canadian model of education. Even though the 8-4-4 system was supplanted onto a tested system, his students had excelled in it academically and even assumed professional jobs – locally and abroad – in which they had also excelled. “The system had fitted just well,” said Griffin.

Griffin, who maintained an annual tradition of taking a select number of Starehe students to study in universities abroad, said he had continued with this tradition. even with the onset of the 8-4-4 system. “In the beginning, I closely monitored their progress because I was interested in finding out how they were fairing compared to their predecessors, who had gone through the previous system and who I had been always confident they would have no problems pursuing further studies in top universities abroad,” said Griffin. “I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that my 8-4-4-students coped well and still stood out.” Throughout his leadership at Starehe, Griffin sent scores of his students to Ivy League universities in the United States and the Russell Group of universities in the United Kingdom.

“The 7-4-2-3 system was good because it separated the wheat from the chaff from early on and allowed students to identify their specialisation. It also helped them to gradually mature as students as they developed and gained analytical and comprehensive skills.”

We spoke during an entire afternoon in his office and by the time I was leaving the school I gathered that even though Griffin had embraced the 8-4-4 system wholeheartedly, he was nostalgic about his beloved 7-4-2-3 system. “The 7-4-2-3 system was good because it separated the wheat from the chaff from early on and allowed students to identify their specialisation. It also helped them to gradually mature as students as they developed and gained analytical and comprehensive skills.” Had it been his choice, it is unlikely he would have changed the system he had been used to. “In considering the merits and demerits of the 8-4-4 system,” said Griffin, as he rounded up our discussion, “you must always remember that the system began because of politics.”

WATCH: EDUCATION IN CRISIS: An insiders perspective

Exactly two years ago, on April 3, 2016, former President Daniel arap Moi was presiding over a thanksgiving day at Sunshine Secondary School in Langata, Nairobi, one of the high schools started by him. The school’s prize giving day gave him the platform he needed to tell off the government’s impending plans to do away with the 8-4-4 education system. Moi said the system had served Kenyans well and had proved itself as an education system whose students had gone on to doing well in both local and international universities. “The students brought up under the 8-4-4 are excelling…who’s that telling us that we got it wrong?” Moi asked the parents rhetorically.

Five years earlier, on August 1, 2011, while presiding over an Anglican Church of Kenya fund-raising event in Voi, Taita-Taveta County, Moi cautioned the government against scrapping the 8-4-4 system. He told the churchgoers that 8-4-4 was the best education system so far that had served Kenyans well, and therefore, there was no “urgent need” to change it. Every time Moi has smelt a whiff of change in the 8-4-4 system, he has always vehemently and vociferously opposed the idea. It has become his personal crusade.

Beneath Moi’s vigorous protection of the 8-4-4 system is a political decision that nobody dares to talk about openly. The educationists and education specialists I have spoken to over the years have always, in private, agreed that the 8-4-4 system was more of a reaction to a prevailing political situation and less an answer to a seemingly “faltering” education system that needed to be fixed.

The 8-4-4 education system was ostensibly started with the sole intention of making education in Kenya more amenable to vocational training. Then, as now, the government of the day did not prepare and train the teachers (the core implementers) in the system adequately. Hence, the 8-4-4 system never really achieved it primary objective – that of producing and training more technical- oriented graduates.

In his defence of the 8-4-4 system, Moi no longer speaks of these (noble) intentions. He invariably talks of how the system has (remained) competitive to the extent that 8-4-4 system students are “accepted by even the best universities” worldwide. The technical/vocational training that Moi had said would prepare the students to be self-driven and self-sufficient is no longer talked about – because it has always been non-existent.

Beneath Moi’s vigorous protection of the 8-4-4 system is a political decision that nobody dares to talk about openly. The educationists and education specialists I have spoken to over the years have always, in private, agreed that the 8-4-4 system was more of a reaction to a prevailing political situation, and less an answer to a seemingly “faltering” education system that needed to be fixed.

Academic versus creative learning

Fast forward to a dozen years later. It seems to me that both parents and teachers are at a crossroads concerning the 8-4-4 system. In the years since talking to Griffin, 8-4-4 has been beset by massive exam cheating. There is unprecedented corruption in the education sector. Rich parents have been gradually removing and shuffling their children from public and private schools that teach the 8-4-4 system to schools teaching international curricula, convinced that schools offering 8-4-4 are not giving them value for their money. This has been accompanied by a rapid commercialisation of the education sector. Faith Wambugu’s two children used to attend a private primary school that taught 8-4-4 until a year ago when she transferred them to a private school teaching the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) Cambridge syllabus. “For a while I had been agonising about whether my children should continue with the 8-4-4 system,” Wambugu, who is from Nakuru town, said to me recently. “When I found a suitable school with an internationally tried and tested educational system in Nakuru, I did not look back.” I asked Wambugu why she was dissatisfied with 8-4-4 system. “The system does not build confidence and impart skills to children; it is too focused on book learning and that this is not what I wanted for my children,” said the mother of two, who herself went through the 8-4-4 system.

“I want a system that does not only concentrate on academics, but one that also recognises other talents, such as music and drawing.” She said that the 8-4-4 system is straightjacketed and does not bring out the hidden creative potential that a child might possess.” The introduction of the new Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) system that is to replace 8-4-4 equally does not give her confidence that it is the best system for her children. “I do not have a problem with the CBC system per se, but is the government ready to roll out the system? I was worried my children would be caught up in an experimental project and I was not ready for that.”

As a middle-aged Kenyan Asian woman who has been through the previous GCE public education system told me, “Whereas before one could be sitting in class with your maid’s daughter, today students in schools are all from the same income group, which has created another kind of elitism and racial segregation.”

Although Calisto Ogutu is yet to remove his two children from the 8-4-4 system, he has already identified the school he wants them to attend. “I will be removing my children from the system,” said Ogutu, whose children go a well-regarded public primary school in a rich suburb in Nairobi. “I have had to wait for my children to be interviewed since last year because the waiting list is long.” The private school in Nairobi County that he wants his children to attend teaches the (General Certificate of Education (GCE) system. “I have done my due diligence and I am persuaded that this is the system that will serve my children’s educational needs.”

Ogutu faults the 8-4-4 system’s teachers for having a limited understanding of how to nurture talent and creative minds. “All what these teachers do is bombard the children with bombastic theoretical knowledge that cannot be of any help in the 21st century.” Ogutu said he wanted a school where his daughter will learn art and craft and be encouraged to learn a musical instrument. According to Ogutu, the 8-4-4 system produces students who are boring and cannot think on their own or on their feet. “The 8-4-4 system presumes that one can only succeed in life if one becomes a doctor, an economist or a lawyer. Yet if the quality of current professionals produced by the system in the last 20 years or so is anything to go, we have a long way to go as a country.”

The issue of an academic curriculum versus creative and exploratory learning was starkly brought home to me by Flora Muthoni, who narrated to me the story of her son who used to attend a well- known and expensive private primary school in Nairobi that teaches the 8-4-4 system. “Some time in 2016, I received a report card from my son’s class teacher that made me ponder over it for a long time,” said Muthoni. The report form said in part: “Your son is always doodling and twiddling under the desk when I am teaching. His concentration is poor. If only he could pay attention in class, his marks would improve.”

“That report card was my wake up call,” said Muthoni. “Ordinarily a rash parent would have set upon the son with tough talk about how it is important to pay attention in class when the teacher is in front teaching. But I decided to approach the matter differently.” Muthoni said she sought to find out from her son what interested him most in his life and what he would like to study in school. She found out that her 12-year-old son enjoyed drawing and painting. “I decided to look for a school that would encourage him to tap into his interest in the creative arts. After shopping around and asking colleagues and friends, I found a school that I thought would tackle my son’s ‘doodling and twiddling’ problem.”

The new Nairobi-based international school that teaches the International Baccalaureate (IB) system that Muthoni found for her son was a dream come true. “My son no longer doodles, he draws and paints without being afraid that he will be chastised,” said Muthoni. “I could not believe my eyes when during the school’s open day, my son’s two paintings were exhibited for all parents, teachers and visitors to see.”

Be that as it may, it was the deliberate and systematic neglect of public primary and secondary schools, beginning in the mid-1980s, that led to the rise of the so-called academies and private schools. This “apparent neglect” created a void for “educational private developers” to commercialise education by building “centres of educational excellence and wellsprings of education”. In essence, we created a class of educational entrepreneurs, whose primary motive was profit, all in the name of providing “special and quality education”.

The cumulative net effect of this privatisation of education was the creation of “class education” that dichotomised and segregated schools – an apartheid-like separation that pitted moneyed parents against less-moneyed parents. This is in sharp contrast to the previous system that was more egalitarian and merit-based, and which offered quality education to all, irrespective of financial capabilities and social status. As a middle-aged Kenyan Asian woman who has been through the previous GCE public education system told me, “Whereas before one could be sitting in class with your maid’s daughter, today students in schools are all from the same income group, which has created another kind of elitism and racial segregation.”

The teacher, who has taught the 8-4-4 system for 25 years, said that the government decided to introduce CBC without properly acquainting the teachers with the system beforehand. “It looks like the government is in a hurry to implement the system – for whatever reason.”

As some parents who have had their children go to school in these private schools told me, some of these private schools are over-rated and over-priced for nothing: They neither offer “private” education in its strictest sense nor quality education. It is about the bottom line – they are businesses that have invested in education to reap profits for shareholders.

It is no wonder that some rich parents, after sending their children to expensive private primary schools, will do anything to wean their children off private education to join national public high schools. A paradox, but one that explains the commodification of the education system in Kenya. Public high schools, such as Alliance Boys and Girls Schools (aka Bush Boys and Bush Girls), Kenya High (aka Boma), Lenana Boys (aka Changes), Limuru Girls (aka Chox), Mangu Boys, Nairobi School (aka Patch), Maseno School (the only national school on the Equator), Moi Girls Eldoret (former Highlands School), Moi Nairobi Girls and Catholic-sponsored schools, such as Loreto Convent Girls, St. Mary’s, Precious Blood, Riruta, Bishop Gatimu Girls School (formerly Ngandu Girls) and Strathmore School remain to date star attractions for parents, who value high schools imbued with a sense of missionary and civic philosophy. Luis Franceschi, the Dean of the School of Law at Strathmore University in Nairobi, says that over time he has been observing differences in his Bachelors of Law (LLB) students. “I can outright tell which students underwent the 8-4-4 system and those that went through international systems such IB, IGCSE and GCE,” says the Dean. “The students who have gone through international systems are confident, open-minded, better in analytical skills and research methodology. The students who have gone through 8-4-4, even though not lacking in knowledge, tend to be inward-looking and are not adventurous.”

Franceschi’s sentiments are echoed by a University of Nairobi don who says that today’s 8-4-4 system students arrive at the university expecting that their lecturers and professors will provide them with photocopied lecture notes. “They lack the simplest of analytical and conceptual skills. They are not imaginative. It is not them to blame, it is the system that they have been made to go through,” said the university don.

Brian Gitonga, a software engineer working for Google in Dublin, Ireland – one of only two African engineers at the firm (the other is a Nigerian) out of a total work force of 4,000 engineers working at the Google’s headquarters – told me that the 8-4-4 education system does not bring out creativity and imagination in a student, neither does it encourage the student to think outside the box. Recently in Nairobi, partly on home leave and partly to scout for talented Kenyan engineers, Gitonga told me that it was saddening that the graduate engineers he had a chat with “could not even in the widest margin qualify to work for Google”. And it is not because they make for poor engineers (there is a lot to be said about the teaching in the engineering institutions in Kenya, said Gitonga); it is because the graduate engineers have gone through an education system that teaches them to duplicate knowledge and material, instead of encouraging them to be exploratory and innovative.

CBC: What is it and why now?

The nervousness then shown by parents over the pending introduction of the new Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) that is meant to replace the much debated and doubted 8-4-4-system should therefore be seen in the context of parents being conflicted about what is the best system that will address their children’s educational needs in contemporary Kenya’s 21st century needs. To this end, I sought the views of teachers who will be central in ensuring that the new system is properly integrated and correctly implemented.

The greatest tragedy in this country is that we have left politicians and non-educational experts to experiment with our children’s education. “The only people who seem to know about CBC are ministry bureaucrats,” said Ms Achieng. “Who is supposed to be best equipped with CBC knowledge – ministry desk officials or teachers who are out there with pupils?”

“Parents, as well as us teachers, do not understand the new educational system,” says Mercy Mbai, a public high school Chemistry and Biology teacher in Kiambu County. “We are yet to be properly inducted and as it is currently many teachers are groping in the dark. We are learning as we go by.” The teacher, who has taught the 8-4-4 system for 25 years, said that the government decided to introduce CBC without properly acquainting the teachers with the system beforehand. “It looks like the government is in a hurry to implement the system – for whatever reason. Why wouldn’t the government take time to first acquaint the teachers with the new system, since they are the implementers?” Ms Mbai said she was slated to go for training in the CBC system in the coming weeks. “We are being trained on the job, we are learning the ropes as we go along.” The CBC system, as I vaguely understand it, ought to be a practical and workable educational system, one that is able to tap talents and redirect the students to their special areas of interest, be it academics, creative arts, sports or vocational training. However, it is not clear why this new system was introduced at this particular time, and without much prior consultation with the main stakeholders (head teachers, teachers, parents and students).

“As a teacher who has taught the 8-4-4 system for many years, I have pondered over several questions,” said Ms Mbai. “Why did the government find it fit to change the system? What is wrong with it? If there is something wrong with 8-4-4, have we first tried to rectify the problem? CBC sounds great on paper, but if, as we are being told, it is supposed to identify gifts and talents among the students, do our we have the necessary resources and infrastructure to facilitate the new system?”

The science teacher told me that the country could be rushing into adopting an educational system that might, in the long run, come a cropper. “As a student myself, I went through the 7-4-2-3 educational system. It was an educational system well-suited to most students of our time. Why? Because it allowed students, once they were in secondary school, to select subjects that they enjoyed and that they would eventually peg their future careers on. The system was a good sieve.”

For those who did not go beyond GCE “O” level studies or who did not qualify to go to university, there were tertiary and vocational institutions that could absorb them, said the teacher. These institutions included teacher training colleges for primary and secondary school teachers that awarded certificates and diplomas and technical-oriented institutions, such as the polytechnics and vocational training institutes.

Some of the better known primary teacher training institutions included Thogoto and Shanzu teachers colleges in Kiambu and Mombasa counties. The best science teachers’ colleges were Kagumo and Kenya Science Teachers College (KSTC) in Nyeri and Nairobi counties. Kenya Polytechnic, Mombasa Polytechnic, Eldoret Polytechnic, Rift Valley Institute of Science and Technology and Kenya Technical Teachers College trained some of the best middle cadre technical personnel that this country has ever produced. So what happened to these great institutions? “They were all converted to universities,” lamented Ms Mbai.

Victoria Achieng, a primary school teacher of many years, posed the same questions that Ms Mbai is grappling with: Why does the government seem to be in a rush to implement this new system? Have they (the state bureaucrats) told us (parents, teachers and all the people involved in education matters) what precisely is wrong with 8-4-4? Is the infrastructure ready and in place to roll out CBC? Have teachers been properly trained to teach the new curriculum? Do the current crop of teachers have the necessary skills to identify and scout for talent?

Ms Achieng told me that teachers have been “trained” for only three weeks and with that they are expected to fully comprehend the details of what they are supposed to teach. “I will tell you for free that many teachers – and head teachers – do not know, much less understand, what CBC is.”

Can the new system work in Kenya?

Ms Achieng said that ministry officials keep on assuring the teachers that they will acquaint them with all the necessary information and skills. “It is as if they are on a trial-and-error policy. Is the government piloting the students?” The teacher was categorical about what she thought about CBC: “It is a system that had been tried elsewhere and worked, no doubt, but it is not the panacea to our current educational crises.”

The Competence Based Curriculum (CBC), is an educational model used in countries such as Australia and the Scandinavian countries like Finland. It is supposed to be implemented right from pre-primary level – PP1 to PP2, then progresses to Grade I, II, III, which signals the end of lower primary schooling. Grades IV, V and VI end primary schooling. Primary schooling is followed by three years of senior school that comprise grade VII to Form 1. This is followed by another three years of learning from Form 2 to Form 4, and finally three years of tertiary and higher learning.

According to CBC proponents, the 2-3-3-3-3-3, or for some 2-6-3-3-3 system, is transformational and is supposed to evolve a new educational methodology that taps into the students’ creative juices. The system, its architects opine, will be skills-oriented rather than exam-oriented. Students will able to acquire all-round skills, ranging from sports to academics. The students will be judged on how they display their skills, not on whether they pass exams. They further argues that the system will allow specialisation for students. While at senior secondary, students will go for the subjects they are best suited for. It will allow students to excel because they will only select their areas of interest.

Ministry officials seem convinced that CBC will curtail cheating in national examinations. They argue that since national exams will be scrapped, schools will not be tempted to engage in exam cheating as they will no longer be competing against each other. Proponents of the new system are also convinced that students will now have room to express their talents and abilities. They point to the fact that the current system had totally neglected non-academic subjects, with teachers spending all their valuable time pushing students to cram for exams.

CBC’s advocates believe that the system will see increased success in many companies’ performance. This is pegged on the fact that CBC is not exam-oriented and, therefore, “students will no longer only be interested in passing exams, but also in nurturing the required skills in their field of specialisation”. Here is a summary of what the benefits of CBC are supposed to yield: focus on competencies, flexibility that creates room for specialisation, balanced and fair assessment of excellence, emphasis on education and learning.

We will just have to wait and see if the system will create a new breed of creatives and entrepreneurs who will propel Kenya into the 21st century. Let us hope that like the much-maligned 8-4-4 system, CBC will not be replaced with yet another system because it did not produce the desired results. Kenya, after all, is not Finland, where the government backs its policies with the needed infrastructure, training and budgetary allocations, and where the teacher-student ratio is one where teachers are able to not just spot talent, but nurture it as well.

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.

DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura

On March 9, 2018, at around 1.00 pm, Kenya’s tepid political weather experienced a sudden and powerful jolt when President Uhuru Kenyatta, the country’s elected president, and his political opponent, Raila Odinga, the so-called “People’s President”, were shown walking together and shaking hands on the stairs of Harambee House. The fiercest protagonists of the recent bare-knuckle political contest had met and were photographed at the seat of government offices, smiling and walking side by side.

On seeing Raila’s entourage enter the Office of the President, Njee Muturi, the Deputy Chief of Staff, is reported to have told Junet Mohammed (one of the politicians who had accompanied Raila): “When I see you people here and being welcomed like this, I am not even sure my job is safe anymore.” The others who accompanied Raila on this unexpected visit were Raila’s daughter, Winnie Odinga, Paul Mwangi, his legal advisor, and Andrew Mondoh, a former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Special Programmes, a ministry created during the coalition government of Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.

“Our future cannot be dictated by the forthcoming election,” stated President Uhuru Kenyatta as Raila stood beside him. The next general election is slated for 2022 – barring a constitutional crisis or political tsunami. “Prosperity and stability…and the well-being of our people” is what should dictate that future, said the president. Raila, echoing Uhuru’s statement, said: “My brother and I have therefore come together today to say this descent stops here,” It was instructive that Deputy President William Ruto was not a witness to the handshake that brought to an end a bitter rivalry that began five years ago during the 2013 election.

Many Kenyans across the political divide welcomed “the handshake” even though at least half the country was still nursing wounds precipitated by the 2017 elections that had deeply polarised the country: the “Jubilants” vs “ the Nasarites”, the Kikuyus/Kalenjins vs Luos, the centrists vs secessionists, the pro-establishment vs the anti-establishment. Although the National Super Alliance (NASA) opposition coalition is made up of a conglomerate of ethnic communities, the Jubilee Party and the government had politically profiled NASA as a Luo affair in the lead-up to both the August 8 and October 26 elections last year. This was evident in the violence that was visited upon Luo youth by the state, especially in the lakeside town of Kisumu.

In the years to come, body language experts will study the video clips of the Uhuru/ Raila handshake and unravel what was going through the protagonists’ minds and what their bodies were communicating to each other and to the outside world.

Raila’s first stop after the handshake was at the Kondele ghetto suburbs in Kisumu, and not, as would have been the norm, at the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi, home to his most fanatical and loyal urban support base. Many of the Luo youths who were killed by the state’s paramilitary machinery were from Kondele, a bastion of militant Luo youth.

John Okoth from Kondele called to tell me: “Baba [the moniker given to Raila by his supporters] came over this evening and gave us assurance that families that lost their sons would be compensated. He begged us to listen to him. But I can tell you the youths are still in a militant mood.” Okoth said that not everyone in Kisumu was convinced or happy or even knew how to react to the handshake. “The people are confused and divided about it. Their one big question is: So after the beatings by the state’s violent apparatus, the killings of youth, then the handshake comes. That is so confusing.”

The unanticipated handshake has spawned conspiracy theories; many believe that there was a secret pact between the two whose contents may never be known. “As long as it is only a few Kenyans who were privy to the events that led to the handshake, we will for sure never know what actually transpired between Uhuru and Raila,” said a National Intelligence Service (NIS) officer who knows both leaders well. Talk within the corridors of power suggests that the relationship between President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, has been frosty recently. An incident that took place at Harambee House on the day of the great handshake could be a pointer to this ostensible mutual distrust. As journalists were waiting for President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga outside the building, the Recce Squad that guards the building noticed a lone policeman also hanging around. Some of the Recce paramilitary approached him and asked him: “Na wewe ni nani na unataka nini? Kwa nini unaoneshana bunduki? Toka hapa mara moja, tusikuoane hapa tena” (Who are you and what do you want? Why are you exposing your gun? Get out of here). Apparently, the policeman had his pistol holster strapped on. The policeman walked away quietly.

Another theory is that Kalonzo Musyoka, Musalia Mudavadi and Moses Wetangula – Raila’s co- principals in NASA – had planned to defect to Jubilee on the Saturday before at Sugoi, Ruto’s Eldoret home. The plan was to welcome them with fanfare in Ruto’s local political base, which would send the message to Uhuru, Raila and Ruto’s Kalenjin constituency that Ruto was on top of his game and, in a manner of speaking, had hit the ground running. If this theory is true, dismantling the assiduously crafted opposition coalition would have been a feather in Ruto’s cap. The high-profile defections would have sent a message to Raila that he was now truly on his own and that it was time for him to pack up and retire. To President Uhuru, the message would have been different: “Look, I have started consolidating my base and troops – you will have no choice but to support me in 2022.” To his Kalenjin people, it would have indicated that Ruto was still their best bet for capturing State House. (Indeed, the day after the handshake, Ruto made a trip to Uasin Gishu County, probably to reassure his base that all was well.)

In such a scenario, the handshake then would have been a presumptive strike meant to forestall and pre-empt Ruto before he upstaged both President Uhuru and Raila. “Both Uhuru and Raila are agreed on one thing – Ruto would not be good for this country. He is a warlord, a destructionist who doesn’t mean well for the country,” claimed the NIS officer who cannot be named because he is not authorised to speak to a journalist.

“The handshake was a zero-sum game,” he said. “There were clear winners and losers and it does not take much guesswork to know who won and who lost.” Since the handshake, Ruto has been agitated and frantic while his base, the Kalenjins, have been confused, said the NIS man. After calming his base, Ruto quickly headed to the coast region, a stronghold of Raila’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) support outside the western region, to incite and offer political promises to those he knew had also been stunned by Raila’s move.

“Both Uhuru and Raila are agreed on one thing – Ruto would not be good for this country. He is a warlord, a destructionist who doesn’t mean well for the country,” claimed the NIS officer.

“Handshake or no handshake, we will not hand over the leadership of this country to the lake Nilotes” said Farouk Kinuthia, a 56-year-old Kikuyu who, although startled by the political rapprochement, hoped it would, at the very least, result in a better business environment. A “tenderpreneur” whose major business is cutting deals with respective national ministries’ bureaucrats, Farouk decried how business had dried up and how the last payments tenderpreneurs like him had received were in April 2017. His interpretation of the handshake was that President Uhuru’s best option in the prevailing circumstances had been to “tame the shrew”. “Raila is a wily politician who must be kept at close quarters, as we observe him and get to know what could be his real intentions. We still intend to vote for William Ruto in 2022.” Members of the ethnic Kikuyu community, to which Uhuru belongs, know that without a Kikuyu- Kalenjin alliance, the fate of Kikuyus in the Kalenjin-dominated Rift Valley is at stake. Memories of the post-election violence in 2007/2008 that targeted Kikuyus in the Rift Valley still haunt them. The union of Ruto and Uhuru prior to the 2013 elections was motivated not just by the fact that both politicians faced crimes against humanity charges at the International Criminal Court, but that they belonged to communities that have been at war since the 1990s, when President Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin, orchestrated ethnic clashes between the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin.

“The Kikuyu people were both shocked and relieved with the handshake. Shocked because the Kikuyu who have over time become politically intolerant of any opposition to their Uhuru Kenyatta and in essence to any force opposed to Kikuyu political dominance, did not anticipate him patching up with Raila, a man Uhuru had fought tooth and nail to retain the presidency – at whatever cost,” said a Central Kenya politician who is well acquainted with both President Uhuru and Raila. “Already torn between throwing their support behind Deputy President William Ruto and finding their own [Kikuyu] successor to President Uhuru, the Kikuyus are at a crossroads politically. With an exiting President Uhuru, who constitutionally cannot run for another term, and with a presumed ‘political debt’ hanging over them that they owe Ruto, the Kikuyus are faced with unprecedented political uncertainty for the first time,” said the politician, who served in President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s coalition government between 2008 and 2012.

“Uppermost in their minds, is how they will secure their political insurance once President Uhuru is gone. Split between settling a debt (grudgingly and however painful it is) and charting their own political path – meaning finding a Kikuyu politician to back for the presidency come 2022 – the Kikuyus will welcome any political move that will free them from their anxieties and from skipping a debt that was painfully imposed on them.”

Groups of Kikuyu men and women in Kiambu and Kikuyu towns in Kiambu County were categorical that the handshake did not now mean “that we [Kikuyus] can hand over the reins of power to Raila,” and by extension, to the Luos.” They reminded me of the prophesies of Mugo wa Kibiro, a great Kikuyu seer, some of which are related in Jomo Kenyatta’s anthropological treatise, Facing Mt Kenya. “Ruriri rwa Gikuyu ni rukanyarirwo in karuriri kanini kwa ihida, no nimagacokerio utongoria wa bururi”. In essence, they were saying that Mugo had prophesied that the Kikuyu would be dominated by a small tribe for a while. In their chauvinistic interpretation of the seer’s vision, that “small tribe” referred to the Tugen, former President Moi’s ethnic community. But after that, the Kikuyu would retake the leadership of the country and would not again cede it.

“Does it mean now we are friends with the Luos?” asked a middle-aged Kikuyu businessman. “It is really already too late for anyone to tell us to vote for a Luo. Raila’s name is too besmirched politically among the Kikuyus for them to even contemplate voting for him. The Kikuyu people cannot trust him. This position has been entrenched by Uhuru Kenyatta himself who told us that if Raila assumes the presidency, he will come for us.” The businessman said the handshake had introduced a new variable, but he was still convinced that many Kikuyus would rather vote for Ruto in the absence of not having one of their own candidates.

“With an exiting President Uhuru, who constitutionally cannot run for another term, and with a presumed ‘political debt’ hanging over them that they owe Ruto, the Kikuyus are faced with unprecedented political uncertainty for the first time,” said the politician.

Following the second presidential election of October 26, 2017, among the most economically hard- hit Kenyans were the Kikuyus. Their businesses have hit rock bottom and a majority of their youth are jobless and remain unemployed – a trend that even the political elites are concerned about.

A friend who is a stockbroker and who works for a securities firm surprised me when he told me that his firm had to move from their posh offices in downtown Nairobi because business was really bad. Many Kikuyus have invested in stocks and bonds; some of them have been trading for the last 50 years. Between August 2017 and March 2018, a mzee from Murang’a, who has been trading in shares since 1966, told me times had never been so bad and hard. He claimed to have lost millions of shillings in six months.” On the day of the Uhuru-Raila handshake, the shilling appreciated against the dollar, suggesting that the market was responsive to the political détente.

A Central Kenya politician said that the NASA-instigated boycott of products and companies associated with Uhuru Kenyatta and his Jubilee party had threatened to destabilise many of the businesses operated by Kikuyus around the county, be they long-distance buses that travel to western Kenya and the coast region or retail shops that sell Brookside Dairy products and Safaricom accessories. In just one short month, the blockade had inflicted a serious “profit dent” on Brookside Dairy Ltd (President Uhuru Kenyatta’s family-owned business), especially in western Kenya and some parts of Nairobi.

Even today, as I write, it is not easy to find a retail outlet in western Kenya that openly sells Brookside milk. Peterson Njenga, a tax consultant from Kikuyu town who has been doing some work in western Kenya recently, told me. “Once I asked for Brookside milk from a kiosk and the shopkeeper looked at me like I had asked for salmon fish,” said Njenga. “I was quietly informed the milk is an ‘illegal’ item in that part of the world. It almost sounded like it was contraband. I got the impression that shopkeepers stocked Brookside Dairy products at their own risk.”

But the Kikuyus are not resting easy just yet. A more worrisome question that is being discussed in hushed tones is: What if Raila swallows Jubilee the way he swallowed KANU [President Moi’s party that ruled with an iron fist for 24 years)? This is the talk in Kikuyu-owned restaurants, eating joints, social gatherings and homes. “This man Raila has a way of calming things down. Look the country is a lot less tense and at peace. But what is he up to? Does anybody for sure know? His ulterior motive must be checked and countered,” they say.

After losing to President Moi in 1997, when he contested the presidency for the first time on a National Democratic Party (NDP) ticket, Raila joined the ruling KANU party soon after. However, midway, when Moi was furtively crafting his successor within the party hierarchy, Raila broke ranks with some of his closest loyalists when he settled on a neophyte Uhuru Kenyatta as KANU’s presidential candidate, which necessitated an open revolt.

Raila, who led the rebellion, marshalled support internally and wrecked KANU’s stability, which has seen the party never recover to date. NDP’s symbol was a tractor while KANU’s was a cockerel. “Has the cockerel crowed again ever since it was swallowed by the tractor? Our people, let us be cautious with this handshake, even as we welcome it,” said an elderly Kikuyu. The mzee said that after the cockerel’s crow was choked, KANU was confined to Baringo area and pretty much nowhere else. (Baringo is President Moi’s ancestral home.)

Joseph Kamotho, the then the Secretary-General of KANU, was so riled by this merger and his deposition from his influential seat that he publicly berated his boss President Daniel Moi for the first time, something that he had never done since Moi politically rehabilitated him in 1989, after the “Sir” Charles Njonjo traitor saga in 1983, which led to the sacking of Kamotho. In an interview I had with Kamotho thereafter, the Moi loyalist told me: “Moi will one day come to regret KANU’s dalliance with NDP.” Kamotho was, of course, upset because his powerful party position had been taken away by his political nemesis, but it is also true KANU was never the same again after the entry of Raila and NDP.

A more worrisome question that is being discussed in hushed tones is: What if Raila swallows Jubilee the way he swallowed KANU?

Yet, overnight, in a space of 24 hours, Raila’s narrative among the Kikuyus – of being a political dinosaur – had changed, at least on the Kikuyu-language Kameme and Coro FM stations. (The former is owned by the Kenyatta family and the latter by the national Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) that had spent the better part of the campaign period lampooning Raila Odinga as a man whose sell-by date had expired.) During the weekend of the handshake, the stations’ respective political commentators and presenters were extolling Raila’s old age as a political virtue and his stature as that of a sage. “Niwamenya Raila niwe uranyitereire Opposition….eta muthuri wina experience ki siasa, niekuhota kutaraniria na Uhuru maundu makonie thirikari.” (You know Raila was the fulcrum of the Opposition…as an elder statesman, experienced in the art of politics, he will work very well with Uhuru in shaping the government.) The stations were effusive with praise for Raila’s political mastery, discovering suddenly that within the NASA fraternity his ODM party was the most popular and influential, with the most MPs even in areas that were not traditionally considered ODM zones.

“Raila is revered almost like a deity,” said a group of Luo elders to me. “Even when he does something we the Luo people do not understand immediately, we cannot publicly berate him. We will complain among ourselves and that is it.” In fact, some Luos from Nairobi told me tongue in cheek: “We had the tyranny of numbers when it came to the youths killed in the aftermath of both elections – we endorse the handshake.”

Not so fast, says Steve Owiti, a businessman from Nairobi. “Raila has been lured into the belly of the beast,” said Owiti, who is still seething with anger. “He never seems to learn from his political mistakes. We have faithfully stuck with him through thick and thin, we have been beaten and killed on his behalf, we have sacrificed time and money as we gave him our unfettered support, only for him to go and shake the devil’s hand. Is Raila now telling us that it is okay for the votes that we usually give him to be perpetually stolen and do nothing about it?” posed Owiti. He told me he would never vote again – not for Raila, not for any politician.

On a more sober and practical note, Otieno Ombok, a peace and conflict resolution practitioner, told me that western Kenya had been hit with hard economic times since August 2017 and that the pact between Raila and Uhuru was necessary to revive the economy there. “I was in Siaya County in the festive month of December and believe it or not, there are homes that did not have food even on Christmas Day. Five months of street demonstrations had meant that there were no meaningful economic activities that took place since the contested August 8 elections.”

“Raila has been lured into the belly of the beast,” said Owiti, who is still seething with anger. “He never seems to learn from his political mistakes. We have faithfully stuck with him through thick and thin, we have been beaten and killed on his behalf, we have sacrificed time and money as we gave him our unfettered support, only for him to go and shake the devil’s hand.”

Something else had taken a turn for the worse: “When NASA called for the economic boycott on Bidco Oil, Brookside Dairy and Safaricom companies, Safaricom kiosks selling airtime cards and accessories closed shop in the whole of western Kenya; the little income generated by these retail trading was no more,” said Ombok. “Coupled with a ‘resist’ mood that had pervaded the region, especially in the Luo counties of Kisumu, Migori and Siaya, the people were in for real economic hard times.” Around this time, Luo youth brought down two Safaricom masts in Migori County in November 2017, an incident that was not reported in the mainstream media. “Despite threatening economic meltdown in their own counties, the youth, who were ready for more destruction and war, had no choice but to welcome the handshake,” pointed out Ombok.

A security expert working in the Office of the President, who cannot be named because of the nature and sensitivity of his work and because he is not authorised to speak to journalists, told me: “What we saw on March 9 … is quintessential Raila. In 1997, after he ran for the presidential seat for the first time and came fourth on an NDP ticket, he formed an alliance with the ruling party KANU. He collapsed NDP, joined KANU, became its powerful Secretary-General and was even made a powerful Minister of Roads. After the 2007 general elections, which resulted in post-election violence, and after many people were killed, Raila, in a much publicised truce, shook hands with Mwai Kibaki and was made a Prime Minister, albeit a non-executive one. Now he has again shaken hands with Uhuru. In all three instances, the ruling elite have understood one overriding logic: Raila is better off peeing outside from inside, rather than peeing inside from outside.”

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

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DOGS AND HAWKERS NOT ALLOWED: The brutal dictatorship of Nairobi’s predatory ‘kanjo’ askaris

By Dauti Kahura The Inspector General (IG) Joseph Boinnet’s recent pronouncement that the police had formed a special squad to deal with the Jubilee government’s critics confirmed what many believe to be a plot by the government to clamp down on opposition politics and what it considers to be individual “dissidents” and provocateurs.

The police’s daring move of snatching opposition National Super Alliance (NASA) MPs and supporters on highways and from their homes at the beginning of this year was preceded by the sensational episode when the secret police stalked and ambushed David Ndii late last year. The kidnapping of Ndii, NASA’s economic and strategic advisor, in a hotel lobby in the south coast of Kenya and his “midnight safari” from Mombasa to Nairobi and then straight to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) at Mazingira House off Kiambu Road – the successor to Nyati House’s operations – is a strategy that the government hopes to continue using to harass the opposition as it seeks to legitimise its contested rule.

Nyati House is an oblong-shaped, deathly grey, macabre building that has always been the site of eerie and mysterious police activities. It was a torture chamber reserved for Kenyans who differed with President Daniel arap Moi’s despotic rule. Nyayo House, a sister to Nyati House, also in central Nairobi, was the other torture dungeon. The five-floor, two-part symmetrical building, which is currently undergoing renovations, has always been unkempt and ghostly, with exit doors permanently shut with metal grills.

Ndii’s abduction and his 500km journey in the dead of the night on December 4, 2017, was a precursor to lawyer Miguna Miguna’s dawn kidnapping from his house in the suburbs of Nairobi and his eventual deportation to Canada. The suspension of passports of targeted NASA advisors and supporters that the Jubilee government categorises as consultants and politicians, is yet another tactic the Jubilee government is using to possibly scuttle and disorient a recalcitrant opposition. The kidnapping and transporting of state opponents by the secret police in the dead of the night is a method that was perfected by the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and apartheid South Africa.

The night journey

It is some minutes past 7.00pm on December 4, 2017, a breezy, cool Sunday. David Ndii is walking towards the lobby of Leopard Beach Hotel in Diani on Kenya’s south coast. Suddenly, he is accosted by two nondescript fellows who enquire from him whether he is David Ndii. It is evident from their inquiry that they are not sure of his identity. All the same, Ndii answers in the affirmative. They ask him to accompany them. His first instinct is to ask them, “Who has sent you?” To which the police officers answer, “DCI director Ndegwa Muhoro.”

The police officers plead with him to be cooperative and to just allow them to lead him to the unmarked waiting vehicles (in their minds, they are probably praying that he should not cause a scene that will interfere with their mission). Ndii hesitates momentarily – he was walking to the hotel reception with his daughter to pick his feature phone popularly known as mulika mwizi (literally translated as thief catcher) in the Kiswahili language. He turns towards the hotel room where his wife is. The officers follow him, but on second thoughts, he decides he should not let the police near his family and into his room. So he tells his daughter to tell her mum that there are some police officers who want to take him away.

See also: NYAYO HOUSE: Unravelling the Architecture and Aesthetics of Torture

Ndii has been at the south coast for three days. He came down from Nairobi to attend his wife’s nephew’s wedding. After the wedding on December 3, 2017, he decides to stay on with his family – after all, it was the holiday season and they could do with some beach holidaying. In hindsight, Ndii’s muses, “I should just have proceeded to the reception area. That way maybe I’d have made it difficult for the police to take me away.” He was charging his mulika mwizi because his smart phone had fallen into the swimming pool. When it rains…it pours. This was the smart phone that had all his contacts so he could not immediately call his friends to tell them what was happening to him.

Sandwiched between two police officers in the back seat of one of the vehicles, Ndii is calm, but his mind is racing with all manner of thoughts about what they are planning to do with him.

The police take him to two new Subaru Outbacks, and together they drive to Diani Police Station, which is a short drive away. While the two policemen are accosting him, five others are lurking under the cover of darkness at the hotel’s parking bay.

The Subaru Outback, just like its predecessor, the Peugeot 504 station wagon, is today the preferred get-away car of secret police covert operations. It is hardy, fast, powerful and a 4-wheel drive. The Peugeot 504 station wagons used in the 1980s and 1990s were all white in colour. Because the secret police used to be recruited from different police stations and regions, white was the identification code that allowed covert police to easily recognise each other. Other than white Peugeot 504 station wagons, the other covert vehicles the secret police used was white Land Rovers.

In Nairobi’s central business district, according to one police source, one out of every four Subaru Outbacks prowling the streets is a police car. They come in different shades, but the secret police prefer metallic grey and silver colours. At the Central Police Station on Harry Thuku Road, next to the University of Nairobi, you will find some parked there. It is here that the police keep on flipping their registration number plates depending on the nature and state of their undercover missions.

At Diani Police Station, the two police officers who had abducted Ndii from the hotel communicate with some “higher authorities” on what is to be their next move. After mobile phone consultations, they get back into the vehicles and head to Mombasa island. On their way to the Likoni Ferry, they pull aside several times to get instructions. They are constantly on their phones, talking to “higher authorities” who do not seem to have made up their minds what they want the police officers, who are seven in number, to do with Ndii.

Agitated and cursing, the police drive back to Diani Police Station and park outside. After they had driven away to Likoni, a crowd had gathered at the station demanding to know where the police had taken Ndii. The crowd was composed of the Leopard Beach Hotel’s subordinate staff. It occurs to Ndii that while at the hotel, the housekeepers, waiters, stewards and other workers had taken note of his stay at the hotel and had come to the station to support him. His wife was also at the station with opposition leader Raila Odinga’s daughter, Winnie. They demand to see Ndii.

Kandie unleashes a smartphone and proceeds to read from Tuko.co.ke, an online news website. Listening to Kandie read fake news purportedly about him and his “illegal activities” against the state, Ndii – who is visibly amused and aghast that he was tracked all the way to the coast on account of fake stories about him – tells Kandie, “There are four ways in which I communicate and engage with the public. I write a newspaper column, I conduct public speaking, I run a Twitter handle and I engage in TV interviews.”

The Officer Commanding the Police Station (OCS) threatens Mwende, Ndii’s wife, Winnie and the crowd, telling them they are “trespassing a police station”. This ridiculous statement shows that he did not expect a crowd to mill around his station so quickly and openly showing solidarity with a now well-known public figure. This whole rigmarole – of to-ing and fro-ing – takes two hours. Then they set off for Nairobi at about 10.00pm. The same ritual – of the vehicles pulling aside to receive conflicting instructions – commences yet again.

Sandwiched between two police officers in the back seat of one of the vehicles, Ndii is calm, but his mind is racing with all manner of thoughts about what they are planning to do with him. One of the thoughts that crosses his mind is: Could they possibly be planning to execute him, just like they had executed radical sheikhs from Mombasa who had been summarily assassinated a while back? He asks to be allowed to take a toilet break. They refuse.

One of the officers is carrying an AK47, which he places under the seat. This time they drive all the way to the ferry’s gangplank. At this time of the night there are few ferries, so they have to wait for one to make its return trip from the other end of the crossing. When they cross the ferry, they head to a Total petrol station in the city centre, where they refuel and check tyre pressure. It dawns on the police officers that they are set for a long journey – which apparently they had not planned or prepared for – because they loudly complain and grumble about it. “Shouldn’t they have forewarned us,” they seem to say.

They had barely passed through the Makupa Causeway when the police inside the vehicle carrying Ndii were already wondering loudly when they would arrive in Nairobi. They estimate that they will arrive in Nairobi around 7 the next morning They abruptly stop somewhere in the bush and tell Ndii that he can now relieve himself. It is pitch dark. They all come out, but Ndii finds this idea of stopping in the middle of nowhere in the dark night spooky and not amusing at all. When they had stopped to refuel at the petrol station he had asked to be allowed to go the toilet and but they had not let him.

Left seated inside the vehicle as the officers oversee the servicing of the vehicles, an eerie thought crosses Ndii’s mind: If only they could allow me to go to the toilet, I could find a way to melt into the street. The city streets of Mombasa are lively at night and there a lots of people milling about. The policeman who was in charge of the AK47 that he had placed under the seat pulls it from there and hands it over to the other policeman guarding Ndii. Instinctively, he asks Ndii: “Do you have a firearm?” “No, I have never owned a gun,” Ndii tells him.

After refuelling, they drive like crazy. Ndii wonders if they are on a suicide mission. “Is this their plan to kill me?” he thinks to himself. “Let me belt up”, he says to one of his captors as they overtake and overlap the multiple 24-wheel trucks plying the busy highway. They are driving like obsessed mad men. They stop at Mariakani to buy snacks for themselves. They ask him whether he wants anything. He declines. It seems that these policemen were plucked from their homes, not having eaten supper, and not fully briefed on the nature of the mission they were supposed to undertake. They were unaware and unprepared for a long journey in the middle of the night.

For the first time since they went for him at the hotel, they engage him in a conversation. “Are you worried?” one of the policemen asks him. “We have no intention of harming you,” he hopes to reassure Ndii. What could they be up to with all this banter? “I don’t know who sent you,” Ndii answers him. The conversation does not go far. They drive dangerously the whole night. When they reach Mombasa Road in Nairobi, they take the northern corridor, which passes the North Airport Road and the Embakasi garrison and that crosses Kangundo Road through Ruai onto Ruiru railway line and then links with the Thika superhighway to connect with the Eastern bypass that starts at the Kiambu-Ruiru Road.

After they had dealt with their agenda of the day, Ruto turned to complaining about Ndii, lamenting how Ndii was feeding NASA luminaries with the political theory of “grabbing power”. His grouse was a regurgitation of the standard Jubilee Party cabal’s conventional thinking on Raila Odinga: “Raila is a ‘good man’, but has been captured by hardliners” – chief among them, one David Ndii.

Caught in the traffic snarl-up, the policemen buy a newspaper from the roving vendors. It is The Standard. On the front page, there is a mugshot of Ndii. They tune into the radio and the news is all about Ndii’s abduction. The police now turn to examine Ndii properly. They obviously did not know who he is. “Who is Ayub Ndii”, one of the policemen asks him. Ayub is actually Ndii’s uncle. In proper Kikuyu parlance, Ayub would be referred to in the English language as “younger father”.

Avoiding the superhighway, the police drive through the back roads behind the sprawling Mathare North slum. They are headed to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations DCI. When they reach there, Ndii is taken straight up the stairs to an office. The first thing he asks is, “Why am I here?” to a junior officer. “Can I have a phone?” The junior officer shrugs off his request – he is possibly as clueless as Ndii about why he has been brought here. “I am here to keep you company,” says the policeman nonchalantly. Another junior cop shows up and joins Ndii in the sparsely furnished office. He offers Ndii tea. Ndii refuses the offer. The two policemen are obviously Akamba because they converse in the Kamba language while keeping Ndii company, pending further instructions. Ndii is kept at the DCI for several hours.

Then the real police honcho shows up. He is the Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), somebody called arap Kandie. The office that Ndii is being kept in is the Serious Crime Office (SCO). Kandie pompously announces that he is the head of SCO. “Am I under arrest?” Ndii immediately asks him. Kandie mumbles some unintelligible answer. He appears not to know why Ndii has been referred to his office. “We need to interrogate your crime,” he tells Ndii. “The last time I was under this kind of situation, it was 30 years ago, I hope we are not going back there?” Ndii tells Kandie.

“Trouble shooters”

In 1987, Ndii was a third year economics student at the University of Nairobi’s main campus. It was a time when there was a crackdown on university students. President Daniel arap Moi had unleashed his secret police to hound the students, who he deemed were in cahoots with political dissidents opposed to his dictatorial regime.

Ndii spent two weeks at the Nyayo House bunkers, where he was tortured and thoroughly interrogated. That was the same year that Miguna Miguna was arrested by the same secret police, and later forced into exile, first to Tanzania, where he stayed for three months, then further south to Swaziland, and eventually to Toronto, Canada, after a six-month sojourn in the southern African state.

SSP Kandie grouses over the fact that people like Ndii are “trouble shooters” and their only agenda is to cause “chaos and disaffection” among “peace loving Kenyans.” Why is he constantly attacking the government, he wonders aloud – loud enough to solicit a rebuttal from Ndii. He asks Ndii about the Larry Madowo NTV talk show in which he had participated several days ago. “I will not discuss political theory with you,” Ndii replies to Kandie.

Kandie unleashes a smart phone and proceeds to read from Tuko.co.ke, an online news website. Listening to Kandie read fake news purportedly about him and his “illegal activities” against the state, Ndii – who is visibly amused and aghast that he was tracked all the way to the coast on account of fake stories about him – tells Kandie, “There are four ways in which I communicate and engage with the public. I write a newspaper column, I conduct public speaking, I run a Twitter handle and I engage in TV interviews.”

At that point, Kandie asks his four junior officers – two had tagged along him to join the other two – to leave. Among the officers is a Mr. Cheruiyot and a Kamba deputy SSP. Kandie then produces a statement and asks Ndii to sign it, stating that it is for his own “protective custody”. Ndii declines to sign it. Instead, he writes his own statement, now detailing the four ways he engages with the public and how he goes about making his political pronouncements.

As he engages with Kandie over whether to sign the statement, several of Ndii’s friends and political activists are now gathered at the DCI precincts, demanding for his release. Among them are lawyers James Orengo and Edwin Sifuna. Having not eaten for more than 18 hours, Ndii asks his lawyers to bring him coffee from Java Café. At 2.30pm the police say the charge sheet is ready. So, accompanied by Orengo and Sifuna, and not by the police, Ndii is driven to the Milimani High Court.

Cheruiyot is the designated case officer and so accompanies Ndii to court. The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Keriako Tobiko – who has since been appointed the Cabinet Secretary for Environment – is not ready to charge Ndii until the police present his office with what he is being charged with. The lawyers are frantic; if they do not move with haste, the police may find an excuse to lock Ndii in for the night because it is already past 4.00pm and there is no charge preferred against him. They then all head to Pangani Police Station to get a police bond. The case officer asks Ndii how much he wants to pay for his bond. The lawyers give an arbitrary figure of Ksh10,000 and Cheruiyot says KSh10,000 it is. Ndii is escorted by a convoy of ten vehicles and just before 5.00pm he gets his bond. The bond says that he should report to DCI on December 11, 2017.

The derisive characterisation of Raila as a “good man” by Jubilee Party carpetbaggers is a well-oiled narrative, deliberately and systematically propagated by the architects of the theory that forming a coalition government is one way of assuaging Raila’s electoral losses, fully knowing that these losses were politically engineered through electoral malpractices.

Ndii reports to the DCI on December 11 and rewrites his statement. The police in their characteristic prevarication and procrastination claim that they are still not done with their investigations, therefore the DPP cannot commence any prosecution against Ndii. He is again asked to report to DCI on December 28, 2017. No word on his presumed “illegal state activities”, or any clue as to when the police investigations will be complete. He again reports to DCI soon after new year’s day in January. “No instructions still from the DPP”. Days later, the DPP is moved from his job. “This thing has become a circus,” Ndii concludes, and from then henceforth, he will wait to hear from the new DPP on his case.

“A good man”

Ndii realises that the plan to fix him was well-orchestrated, but poorly executed. From the officers who abducted him, to the interrogating officers, it appeared to be a combined Kalenjin-Kikuyu affair, apart from the Kamba rookie officers who were asked to keep him company. The ethnicisation of the harassment of key opposition figures has now been taken to the apolitical police force: the police officers who are now sent to pick up and intimidate opposition figures are carefully selected to convey a deliberate ethnic supremacy of brutal and naked force as a counter-measure to an equally and deliberate ethnicisation of the opposition politics by the government.

A couple of weeks before Ndii was trailed all the way to the south coast and picked from the supposedly safe confines of a five-star beach hotel, a Jubilee Party politician allegedly had a meeting with Deputy President William Samoei Ruto. After they had dealt with their agenda of the day, Ruto turned to complaining about Ndii, lamenting how Ndii was feeding NASA luminaries with the political theory of “grabbing power”. His grouse was a regurgitation of the standard Jubilee Party cabal’s conventional thinking on Raila Odinga: “Raila is a ‘good man’, but has been captured by hardliners” – chief among them, one David Ndii.

Contrary to what the Jubilee Party elites would like Kenyans to believe, the talk of forming another coalition government has always been the ruling party’s idea. This idea is today being pushed publicly by one Peter Karanja, the Secretary General of the National Christian Council of Kenya (NCCK), the umbrella body that groups together Protestant churches. Karanja’s argument, which is the base logic of Jubilee Party hawks, is that if the post of Prime Minister is created by amending the constitution or otherwise, Raila will calm down, and this will in effect also calm down his supporters and all shall live happily ever after.

The Jubilee Party fraternity’s characterisation of Raila as a “good man” masks their real intentions. After the successful signing of the Peace Accord, which was reached after the post-elective violence (PEV) of December 2007/8 on February 28, 2008, I sat down with an influential Central Kenya politician in an exclusive Nairobi golf club to review the new political arrangement. “Let me tell you, we (Kikuyu political cabal) found the perfect formula for dealing with these Luos. Invite them to join the government by creating for them a pompous office, provide some chase cars and security detail (which you can always withdraw and return at will), as you keep a tight leash on them. Give them some budget to entertain themselves. In the process, they will soon be caught up in the corruption dragnet. This will disarm them, so every time they raise their voice on state scandals, you quietly remind them of the ‘living in a glass house’ aphorism.”

The Jubilee Party barons also cynically refer to Raila as a “good man” because they believe he is “tamable”. When in 2008 he agreed to form a coalition government with Mwai Kibaki, the Kikuyu political elite sighed with great relief, but later boasted among themselves of how they were the masters of political chicanery. “We outsmarted our chief political nemesis. I suspect we are going to rule this country for a very long, long time,” said the bragging politician.

So, early on when Ndii was identified as a “hardliner” by the Jubilee Party mandarins, they sought to isolate Raila from him, or if you may, Ndii from Raila – a scheme that does not seem to be working. Alongside, Ndii, they also sought to profile lawyer Norman Magaya, another NASA advisor and presumed “hardliner”. Convinced that the much-taunted swearing-in of Raila Odinga was going to take place on December 12, 2017, on Jamhuri (Independence) Day, the Jubilee Party elites began toying with the idea of scuttling the move by taming Ndii days before the event took place. That is why, when the police bonded him on December 5, 2017, they asked him to report to DCI on December 11, the eve of the swearing-in ceremony, in the belief that they would be disorganising and handicapping the arrangement.

The crux of the matter is that for the first time the government is having to play catch-up with an increasingly cheeky and unpredictable opposition. The speed and turn of political events have ensured that the government cannot second-guess what the opposition is really up to. Yes, the Jubilee Party “won” the election on October 26, 2017, but four months later, the government, even after having announced the cabinet, does not seem to have found its gravitas. Its best laid plans seem not to have taken root and those plans seem to be getting continuously disrupted.

In this era of social media and smartphones, the police can no longer handle “government dissidents” the way they did twenty years ago. Add to this a progressive constitution and you have a government that is groping in the dark and resorting to knee-jerk reactions, not really knowing what to do. It is patently clear, the “arrest” of Ndii and the deportation of Miguna Miguna were not well- thought out moves. The first priority of totalitarian regimes all over the world is complete control of the flow of information – when they realise this is a futile exercise, they resort to intimidation and underhand tactics.

Fred Matiang’i, the Cabinet Secretary for Internal Security, sounded ridiculous when he sought to explain to a section of the media that the government had not ordered a media shutdown, and why some TV stations had been closed. He said that the government had exposed a scheme by the opposition to cause a bloodbath in the guise of swearing-in Raila Odinga, “The People’s President”, at Uhuru Park. The well-attended ceremony – better attended than President Uhuru’s swearing at Moi International Sports Centre on November 28, 2017 – comprised a great multitude of people from all walks of life. Hence, the switching off of the NTV and KTN TV stations’ signals for ten days and Citizen TV for even longer, was an attempt at foreclosure by the government, a move that was reminiscent of the dark days of President Moi’s tyrannical rule.

Ndii’s “midnight safari” is, therefore, a metaphor for a dark state and a regime that is desperately looking for legitimacy.

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.