No police or civilian official has been held to account for these crimes.
In a recent appearance before a parliamentary committee, Security Cabinet Secretary, Prof Kithure Kindiki, admitted to the disappearance of 132 youth and the killing of 42 during the Gen-Z protests.
These figures don’t tally with those reported by human rights organisations, including the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, which is a government body.
These organisations put the figures at 61 murdered, 67 forced disappearances, 361 injured, some of these permanently, and 674 arrested. But even the minister’s figures of 42 dead and 132 disappearances don’t minimise the crime his ministry and regime committed in trying to stop demonstrations of unarmed youth protesting incompetence, runaway thievery and punitive taxation.
To date, not a single policeman or those in the civilian chain of command have been brought to account for these egregious crimes.
But what added insult to these injuries and executions, was the minister’s cavalier attitude when answering the committee’s questions. At one point, I almost thought he was going to channel James Bond, the famed character in the spy movie franchise: My name is Kindiki, Kithure Kindiki.
When explaining the huge number of deaths, Mr Kindiki showed a creative side of himself. Some of the dead, he said, almost as if he was explaining a scene in a Grade B movie, were not executed by the police.
The intimation was that some of the dead were executed by their fellow protestors. The answer showed the contempt with which those in power hold ordinary citizens. At the very least, the minister should have shown contrition, fake as it may have been, on his own behalf and that of his police.
This supreme arrogance in the face of footage showing police mowing down youth armed only with cellphones and bottles of water, showed the deadly absurdity of our governance. Were the snipers Kindiki and his police stationed on rooftops, and who spewed the brains of youth on pavements, also protesters?
Then answering why police used such deadly force, the professor (seems like a misnomer to attach such an honorific to one who presided over such a deadly episode) engaged his creative side again.
The protesters, he said, in the attitude of one extremely proud of his patriotism and courage, wanted to overthrow the government. Oh, how deadly those water bottles can be! The cynical and facetious answer was reminiscent of Kanu’s tyrannical rule when so many innocent people were condemned to years in detention for “bringing into disrepute the good government of Kenya”.
Others suspected of being nonconformists would be tortured and jailed for trying to overthrow the “democratically elected government of Kenya”.
That our gruesome impersonator of James Bond could borrow a lying leaf from that period, proves the point yet again that we are still ruled by the same Kanu oligarchy that has misgoverned this country since 1963. Kibaki tried to write a new chapter. But even he could not shake off the decades-old rotten governance culture.