Kenya is in danger of becoming an African version of Honduras
The murder of Kabete MP George Muchai and the reaction of Kenya’s parliamentary leadership should make everyone very worried about the country’s future, for if this slide towards gangland is not halted urgently, then Kenya is in danger of becoming an African version of Honduras, where murderous gangs and assassins rule the roost, and life is “nasty, brutish and short.”
In that country, just as in Mexico to the north, the police, left to rot by the political leadership, gradually ceded ground to drug traffickers and other merchants of death. In parts of those two countries, mayors and police who refuse to toe the gangsters’ line are routinely gunned downed.
In rural towns, schoolchildren on their way to school step over bodies lying on the porches of their impoverished homes.
Townspeople find bloodied corpses of their loved ones lying in the potholed streets, in bushes or in shallow mass graves in their yards. Widows and orphans go about their lives, zombie-like, haunted by memories of indescribable horror.
Live or still pictures of people in these towns capture the weariness of a populace cowed by the ever present smell and sight of death. Violent crime in Latin American countries is now a major factor of emigration.
The audaciousness of Muchai’s slaying was staggering. He was gunned down in the Nairobi CBD, in an area guarded by armed police and with CCTV surveillance cameras, facts which his executioners must have known about. He had two armed bodyguards and he himself was armed.
Again, facts the assailants must have known. In view of these circumstances, one appreciates the magnitude of the vulnerability to violent crime of ordinary people who have no bodyguards or guns, and who live in unlit towns and villages with non-existent police presence.
This vulnerability is not hypothetical. Almost every day, business people in rural towns are murdered, and schoolchildren raped and killed. Every so often, villagers in central Kenya wake up to find decapitated heads on their gates.
In western Kenya, gangs move from village to village, leaving death and maiming in their wake. In other regions, rampaging cattle rustlers leave scores of people dead, including police officers dispatched to catch them.
All over Kenya, droves of people abandon their rural homes to rent houses in big towns.
Relocation to the big towns, however, is not a guarantee of safety, a fact gruesomely emphasised by the MP’s murder. There are carjackings at night. There are numerous cases of contract killings.
Babies are kidnapped for ransom. Gangs attack even in well-heeled estates with police patrols. There are daring daytime robberies of shops in the Nairobi CBD, captured by CCTV cameras. In the slums, police themselves are attacked and robbed of their guns.
Add to this countrywide criminal mayhem, the frequent terrorist attacks, and what you have is a national crisis screaming for an urgent national conversation.
Yet the solution to this crisis, as expressed by parliamentarians after the Muchai murder, points to a more fundamental crisis that afflicts the country, one that, if not addressed, will lead this country to self-destruction — a crisis of leadership.
Instead of calling for an audit of policing policies, practices and infrastructure, and demanding the removal of administrative and other obstacles to police reforms, our MPs and senators called for their own security to be beefed up!
Already, governors, MPs, senators, constitutional office holders and other wenyenchi are assigned police protection for their persons and their homes (safer neighbourhoods are those where a VIP lives!). Police commanders themselves have complained that VIP protection puts a strain on police personnel resources.
After the murder, the chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Security, the same fellow who denied, even in light of video evidence, that security forces had looted at Westgate, announced that his committee would check whether the costly security cameras in Nairobi were working.
Should he not have done this ages ago as a routine part of his job? A question that must form the basis of national introspection is: Why do we burden ourselves with this impossibly incompetent and narcissistic leadership?
Tee Ngugi is a political and social commentator based in Nairobi.