Why Kenyans Should Rethink Their Hiring Policy

Boniface Mwangi is looking for a job. It may have come as no surprise when, during the launch of his book two weeks ago, he declared he would be running for a Parliamentary seat. But that doesn’t mean we should welcome it with open arms.

Over the last few months we have been treated to similar announcements by journalists, clergy and civil society activists. And it is all depressingly reminiscent of 2002 and the dash for elected positions under the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition banner. And, in the euphoria of giving Daniel Arap Moi the finger, we did not think twice about the future effect of decapitating the organisations that had been instrumental in delivering that moment.

Well, that future was not long in coming. Very soon after the Kibaki administration, packed rafters with “good guys” -the same ones who had told Moi, in the famous words of Kiraitu Murungi, to tend his goats and “watch how a country should be governed” took over the old habits of looting and state-sponsored violence resurfaced. This time, though, the culprits were our former heroes. “Anglo Leasing was ‘us’ – our people”, Mr Murungi would later admit.

The “eating” was all the worse since these were the same people who had formerly stood up to the Nyayo regime and whose rapture into government had hollowed out the civil society and religious organisations that were so critical in holding it to account. So today, as tales of grand corruption fill the headlines, we should reflect upon the experience of 15 years ago and look to keep our “good guys” in the positions where they serve us best and where they can keep government on a short leash.

Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed is also looking for a job. The government has proposed her as the next head of the African Union Commission and is spending millions of our tax shillings to lobby heads of state across the continent to give it to her. But she is already contracted to represent and lobby for our common interests abroad and has instead spent most of her time instead protecting the interests of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto.

Despite the clear stipulation in the constitution that “the President may be prosecuted under any treaty to which Kenya is party and which prohibits such immunity”, which the Treaty of Rome does, Secretary Mohamed racked up frequent flyer miles and staked Kenya’s international prestige and interests on a shameful effort to pressure the International Criminal Court into dropping the crimes against humanity charges facing the duo.

Yet she has been conspicuously quiet on the plight of ordinary Kenyans unfairly banged up abroad. Currently, next door in South Sudan four Kenyans have been sentenced to life imprisonment following sham proceedings in which no specific accusations of wrongdoing were levelled against them. Efforts to get Secretary Mohamed to intervene and raise the issue with the South Sudanese government have borne little fruit, despite her frequent travels to Juba to shore up the peace process there and the clear leverage Kenya has over the Juba elite.

Andrew Franklin is also in search of employment. Along with around 750 Kenyans, the former US marine who has been living and working in Kenya for over three decades, applied for consideration as either Chair or Member of a reconstituted Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Two weeks ago, the selection panel announced it had shortlisted five out of fourteen applicants for Chairperson and another 31 for Members. Mr Franklin did not make either cut. That, in itself, is not troubling. What is worrying is the opaqueness with which the shortlists were developed.

Since last Friday, when the selection panel announced it was suspending the interviews for Chairperson after questions were raised about the suitability of the shortlisted candidates, there has been disturbingly little querying either in the media or by civil society of criteria used to exclude 720 people from the process of public scrutiny. It does not seem to raise eyebrows when the five applicants whose credentials have been put in doubt are still listed among those slated to be interviewed as potential Commissioners beginning this Saturday. That the panel itself has offered no information on this gives rise to suspicions of underhand dealings and political interference in the process. Given our past experience with the consequences of messing with the credibility of electoral bodies, it should give all of us pause for thought.

These three examples evince our dangerously cavalier approach to distributing public positions. Beyond individual desire, the rest of us who get a say in who actually gets hired must think much more strategically about the sort of system we want to govern our affairs. While it is doubtlessly important that we need good people running government, it is perhaps even more so that we have them outside of it. 

And even within government, we have seen the folly of giving one political party all the reins of power. The so-called Tyranny of Numbers today militates against Parliament serving as an effective check on Executive excess. In the prevailing environment, where loyalty to party leaders trumps loyalty to country, and where nominally independent don't act as such, it is better to have divided government with one party controlling the Presidency and the other Parliament. While not guaranteeing good governance, that at least offers the possibility of limiting the damage they can do. 

In similar vein, it is even more critical that we not allow the state to poach our best and brightest from the only other institutions that can hold it to account. For the sake of the country, Boniface Mwangi and others like him should keep doing the jobs they already have. Which is not only to ensure Amina Mohamed and her government colleagues start doing theirs before we spend tax shillings to get them employed elsewhere, but that the likes of Andrew Franklin and 720 Kenyans are accorded a fair hearing for the public jobs they have applied for.

Whose Welfare Are Police Reforms Improving?

It is a routine many of us engage in everyday. We wake up, take a shower, dress, have some breakfast, shove the laptop into a bag and head off to work. We probably never imagine that this might actually land us in jail. Yet this is exactly what happened to Julio Otieno, who heads Sauti Ya Mtaa, a journalism hub based in Nairobi’s Kariobangi South. As he strolled to his office, Julio was accosted by policemen and required to produce a receipt for the laptop he was carrying. After failing to do so, he was arrested and locked up for handling suspected stolen goods. When his colleagues heard about it, they headed to the Kariobangi South Police post to try and secure his release.

They refused to pay the Kshs 5,000 cash bail demanded by the police and one of them, Willis Adika, contacted the well-known activist, Boniface Mwangi, who is also the team leader at Pawa 254, under which Sauti Ya Mtaa operates. When the police caught wind of the fact that Boniface had put out a tweet about the affair, they arrested Willis. Last Wednesday, after spending a night in jail, both were arraigned in the Makadara law courts, one charged with handling stolen property and the other with misuse of licensed telecommunications equipment.

These are far from isolated events. The Kariobangi police post is housed in a single tin shack half of which is partitioned into a holding cell. Julio and Willis were held there with 11 other men, many of whom had little idea why they had been arrested. When I visited there the night of the arrests, the police openly admitted that they were overwhelmed by crime in the area and had resorted to arbitrarily arresting any young men they came across and booking them as muggers. I would wager that much the same thing is happening in police stations across the country.

Many will remember the illegal and arbitrary detentions and deportations carried out last April primarily targeting members of the Somali community in the Eastleigh surburb of the capital. “The operation was not conducted in compliance with the law, respect for the rule of law, democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms,” declared the Independent Policing Oversight Authority.

In July of 2013, the case of, “Liz” in Busia sparked global outrage after three men suspected of being part of a group that brutally gang raped the 16-year-old and dumped her, unconscious and battered, down a pit latrine, were ordered to cut grass outside the Tingolo Administration Police Camp as punishment. Though one has since been re-arrested and is currently on trial, it is indicative that little has been heard regarding the culpability of the police officers.

The above are just snippets of how far divorced Kenya police are from the interests of the people they are supposed to protect and the laws they are meant to uphold. The fact is, our police operate more as agents of illegal extraction of revenue than defenders of justice and order. 

Yet when Kenyans speak of police reforms, it is rarely with the objective of overhauling the entire system and its raison d’etre which is little changed from the colonial days. The government in particular appears incapable of conceiving reform as going beyond providing better amenities and benefits as well as more money and equipment to police officers.

Take police housing, for example. Every so often, we are inundated by media stories of the incredibly atrocious living conditions our policemen and their families are forced to endure. Every so often, government promises to build more and better housing for them. But few ask why we are barracking police in the first place. During colonial times, it made sense for an illegitimate administration to keep its local agents separate from the community they regarded as an enemy. According to the 2009 Report of the National Task Force On Police Reforms, better known as the Ransley Report, “serving primarily as a tool of the colonialists’ right from the start, the early Kenya Police force has been described as 'a punitive citizen containment squad'”. So why does the practice continue more than half a century after independence?

The answer to that question lies in the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission which observed that Kenya had not fundamentally reformed the colonial state. It, and its rationale endure to today. The state is parasitic and extractive, the government focused, like its colonial counterpart, on protecting the interests of a wealthy and influential elite by subjugating those of the natives. As the Ransley Report, many of whose recommendations remain unimplemented, notes: “As Kenya moved to self-rule, it had the same police units, the same police structures and many of the same police officers in place. This made it inevitable that the culture of supporting the regime in power would be perpetuated and carried over into the new post–independence era.”

So our police don’t care about justice because they, like their colonial counterparts, were not set up to deliver it. They care about protecting the wenyenchi not the wananchi. It is why they see no contradiction in the idea of fighting crime by prosecuting a journalist for stealing his own laptop.

If we aspire towards a police service that responds to the needs of citizens, we must first dismantle the thinking which set it up in the first place. It is not simply about tinkering at the administrative edges, and the much needed improvements in officers' salaries and benefits as the government is doing, but also, more importantly, fundamentally uprooting the existing ethos of the organisation, the belief that it exists to serve the few and police the many. 

Reforms should be about more than helping the police service do its job better. They should also be about changing what police officers understand that job to be. They should target the welfare, not just of policemen and policewomen, but also that of the civilians they are sworn to serve. They must seek to move the police away from the embrace of the powerful and towards that of people like Julio and Willis.

When Media Become Lapdogs Rather Than Watchdogs

A little over a week has passed since police stormed the Musa Mosque in Mombasa, and killed up to 9 people whom they accused of participating in a "jihadist convention." Nearly 130 others, including children were arrested -58 have since been released- and the rest charged with offences under Kenya’s terrorism act. The police claim to have recovered terror training materials and information indicating plans to attack an "unspecified target."

I think there is a lot that is disconcerting about how this story is being told and the assumptions that have been made. There is little questioning of the government narrative. The media appears to have already made up its mind about what happened and has entirely ignored alternative versions of what happened.

Some things just don't seem to gel with the “official truth”. To begin with, this was no secret meeting. The media has reported that the convention was openly advertised on posters pasted across town and on social media postings and that the authorities were well aware of it. There is also considerable confusion over who called the meeting and what exactly was to be discussed.  The Standard reported there were lectures “on various topics justifying jihad, claiming conspiracies against Muslims and exhorting the faithful to prepare for ishtishhaad (life of sacrifice)”. However, Sheikh Abdallah Kheir, an imam and lecturer of sociology at Kenyatta University, told the press the meeting had been advertised merely as a religious lecture. Some of those who claimed to have been there also seemed unaware they were attending a "jihadist convention."

Further, it is unclear whether the meeting had been prohibited (which would raise fundamental issues surrounding the legality of any such a ban, and the impact on constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms of assembly and speech -issues that the press has not bothered to address.) The press reported that "authorities in Mombasa" had said they "would not allow it to take place." But these "authorities" do not appear to have made any effort to inform the organizers that their meeting had been disallowed. Though in the aftermath of the raid, the Mombasa County Police Commander was quoted as saying: "'we' had issued a warning that we will not allow such a meeting because it was illegal," other reports indicated that the Mombasa County Security Committee made no attempt to stop it "anticipating that known hardcore jihadists would attend it." In fact, "attending an illegal meeting" does not appear to be one of the charges levelled in court in relation with the incident.

As I write this, the government has reportedly arrested three persons  in the capital, Nairobi, after police broke up a citizens' protest they had themselves cleared. The demonstration, led by the activist Boniface Mwangi and the widely respected Rev Timothy Njoya, was supposedly outlawed by the shadowy National Security Advisory Council which accused the US Agency for International Development of plotting to topple the government by financing demonstrations. Again, as the press has dutifully parroted the government's ridiculous allegations and ignored the constitutional issues, no one asks why it appears that the authorities once again appear to have made no effort to inform organizers that their event was “banned” or which law gave them the power to do so.

Going back to Mombasa, I am also greatly concerned at the terms employed in the coverage, much of which mirrors the distorted and lazy international reporting on seemingly all matters Muslim. The press has branded the meeting an "outlawed jihadist convention" and taken to calling those arrested (and, it would seem, pretty much any collection of young men at the coast) "militants" or "radicalized youth". We hear of "jihadist" flags and banners (apparently any black cloth with Arabic-looking script) and everyday household items, including scissors, a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, described as "weapons".  There's a disturbing vagueness about what is meant by radicalization. Who gets to decide who is a "radical preacher", which youngsters have been "radicalized", and what a nice "moderate" Muslim looks and sound like?

A few days after the Masjid Musa raid, a mob in Kisumu defaced and forced the removal of a monument put up to commemorate a century of Sikh presence in Kenya's third-largest city. In the days leading up to the destruction of the statue, Christian preachers were openly inciting their followers claiming the structure was "satanic" and attributing weather phenomena to its erection. Despite this, no one called for regulation of sermons in Kisumu, the shutting down of “radical preachers” in favor of “moderate Christians” or characterized the violent youths as “militant” or “radicalized”.

It is clear that the government has for a long time been uncomfortable with rising political consciousness at the coast and elsewhere. Its standard response however has been one of demonization while continuing to ignore the underlying grievances. Its dealings with civil society critiques or the Mombasa Republican Council, for example, demonstrate this clearly enough.

While there may be areas of legitimate security concerns, such as recruitment into terror outfits like Al Shabaab and possible terror plots, this does not give authorities carte blanche to ignore constitutional limits and to deny fundamental freedoms. The constitution exists primarily to constrain the power of government, not the rights of citizens. Thus we really should be worried when government sets itself up as the public censor, purports to ban speech and speakers it does not like and uses "national security" as an excuse to close down the space for political expression and protests.

Unfortunately, our press, more lapdog than watchdog, has largely failed to question the motives and (mis)deeds of the people in power. As we have seen before, it is ever happier cozying up to them and helping to delegitimize their opponents. Like the mob in Kisumu, it is quick to desecrate and deface, and slow to think and question.

Back To The Future

Every once in a while, just when you think you've figured them out, Kenyans can surprise you and give you an almighty kick up the backside. Yesterday was one of those days. And it was an almighty welcome kick.

Those who've been following this blog over the last few months will have been treated to fulminations on the fear and apathy of our nation in the face of monumental iniquity by those in government. I have held forth and pontificated on the myopia, incompetence and laziness of our journalists and the demise of our civil society. I believe much of that still to be true. However, on the streets of Nairobi, I think we may have witnessed the stirrings of a nation starting to awaken from a deep slumber.

For over ten years now, our famously greedy parliamentarians have been used to hiking their pay at will, and ignoring the loud protests made in press conferences held in five-star hotels. No more. Today the fight was moved away from sanitized conference rooms and back into the streets where we had taught the KANU government a thing or two about people power 2 decades ago. And that fact is more significant than a straightforward struggle over MP salaries.

Yesterday was all about going back to the future. It was exciting to see the campaigners old mixing it up with the new upstarts. Having lived through the mass action of the 90s, to see Rev. Timothy Njoya, Maina Kiai, Davinder Lamba and Yash Pal Ghai once more marching through the streets of Nairobi  in support of a new generation of activists led by the likes of Boniface Mwangi and Okiya Omtata brought a lump to my throat. After Boniface shamed us on Labour Day, here was the old guard stepping in to teach the new dog some old tricks of the trade. But the young puppy showed that he too had some aces up his sleeve.

There were also glimpses of the old alliances that had been so effective in pushing the reform agenda. Churchmen, activists and, belatedly, media. Even the police seemed determined to recreate the nineties atmosphere, charging at the unarmed and peaceful protesters with their rungus and tear gas and water cannon.

There are, however, crucial differences. This was not a mass protest against the government. It was, in fact, just a few hundred demonstrators advocating the government line against an intransigent Parliament. Secondly, one of the main pillars of that old alliance was missing -the opportunistic opposition politicians. It is they in the 90s who mobilized the people. Many, however, have since either been co-opted into the lootocracy or are still licking their wounds following defeat at the polls. Further, we were not fighting to get a new constitution, but to defend the new one we have from gerrymandering MPigs.

Still, the moment was significant. For the first time since the election, a group of people publicly and loudly refused to "accept and move on." For once, they refused the logic that it was better to keep the peace even when they were being screwed. They drew a line in the tarmac and stood by it. The moment was also significant because for once, the government let its mask of civility slip. The reaction we saw on TV was far removed from the polished and rehearsed State House presentations. It was the raw brutality that lies behind that facade. This was a government unleashed from the strictures imposed by media consultants intent on winning elections.

With a core of determined, bloodied but now blooded, activists and a government that may have overplayed its hand, the scene my be set for a rather quick end to the Uhuru's administration's honeymoon. Of course, there is still some ways to go. The people still need to be won over. Those who voted for President Uhuru will need to be convinced that they can hold the government to account without betraying their communities or being humiliated. Those who didn't, and particularly those who weren't entirely convinced that he won fairly, will also need to be convinced that continuing to participate in the process is still worth it.

The activists will need to make allies out of progressive politicians both within and without the legislature. To do so the activists must begin to articulate an agenda, one that might conceivably form a platform for a future electoral run. Finally, they will need to partner with the media. Here, they will be faced with persons just like themselves, newbies with limited experience of the 90s struggle and whose careers have been made in a relatively open era for the press. Most journalists today seem inclined, strange as it may seem, to give officialdom the benefit of the doubt, to be wowed by its propaganda. They will need to be shown the bigger picture, pointed in certain directions, brought up to speed on the issues and pressed into digging deeper.

All that will take time. In the meantime, if yesterday's protest proves to inaugurate a season of more intense questioning of official conduct and policy, then the protesters will have achieved a much greater victory than simply expressing public displeasure at the thieving ways of legislators. They will have given the nation the beginnings of a real voice and a real boot. If I were Uhuru, I'd be watching my backside.