Let’s face it, femicide has reached crisis proportions in Kenya. The recent slaying and mutilation of a mother and her two daughters is only the latest gruesome statistic.
It came on the heels of the discovery of women’s body parts in a quarry, and the murders of young women whose bodies were found in hotels.
Some of the murdered young women had been beheaded and dismembered. It’s as if the killers are not just interested in killing; they are also interested in doing it in the most horrific way possible. It’s an orgy of killing out there.
There are pernicious remnants of a culture that view women as objects which can be mistreated or disposed of as one may please.
This attitude is manifested in the rising cases of extreme domestic violence in which women are burned alive, chopped to death with machetes or shot.
A few years ago, self-appointed morality vigilantes roamed the streets of towns disrobing women they considered indecently dressed.
In an incident that provoked national outrage and shame, a woman driver was viciously physically and sexually attacked by boda boda riders.
It was all in a day’s work for the perpetrators of this crime. They thought that culture had given them a licence to humiliate and mete out violence on women.
The other factor fuelling these crimes against women is the sense of impunity. The perpetrators are confident that they will never get caught.
The other day, we were shocked to learn that the alleged perpetrator of the murder of the women whose body parts were discovered in a quarry had escaped from jail.
The escape happened in a country where the police spend inordinate effort and resources to brutalise peaceful demonstrators, or to mount surveillance on critics, or to plan and execute elaborate plans for abductions and forced disappearances.
This column has warned many times that the Narco states of Latin America were not cursed by God. They started out by ignoring criminality or , for political purposes, abetting it.
The criminal gangs became stronger and richer and began to bribe officials to look the other way as they ran a parallel extortionist and murderous government.
Eventually, there was not much distinction between officials and the gangs. One was almost the alter ego of the other. Today, dislodging criminal gangs is almost impossible.
Haiti criminal anarchy started the same way. Now desperate citizens of these countries are leaving in droves, heading to the United States and Canada.
The Kenya police must move with speed to arrest the growth of gangsterism before it becomes deeply entrenched in the national social fabric. The biggest obstacles are lack of political will, politicisation of the police, and corruption within the force and government.
We can start by improving the terms of service for the police, ceasing to use police to suppress critics of the regime, and dealing with corruption within the police force, within oversight bodies and within government.
Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.
