The Outlook for Kenyan Politics in 2019

For Kenyans, 2018 begun on a knife edge. The final months of 2017 had been dominated by a dispute over the annulled August presidential election and the repeat in October. After President Uhuru Kenyatta was controversially sworn in for a second term in November, his rival, Raila Odinga promised to have a parallel inauguration ceremony, which after being put off twice, was slated for end of January.

Odinga finally took his oath as the “People’s President” on 30 January, unleashing a wave of government repression, including the shuttering for two weeks of private media stations who covered the event live, the arrest and illegal “deportation” of the self-styled “General” of the National Resistance Movement, Miguna Miguna, as well as the prosecution of Lawyer and MP, Tom Kajwang, for administering the oath. The stage was set for a continuing gargantuan struggle between the two Presidents for power and legitimacy – each had one and craved the other.

Yet as I write this, all that seems to have been nothing more than a bad dream. The Handshake of March 9 completely scrambled the political picture, yoking Kenyatta and Odinga together in a political deal that was reminiscent of other deals the latter had forged with the former’s predecessors whom he claimed had stolen the Presidency from him: Mwai Kibaki in 2008 and Daniel arap Moi in 1997.

The deal conspicuously left Kenyatta’s deputy and presumed successor, William Ruto, out in the cold and set up an interesting historical dynamic. Since independence 55 years ago, Kenya’s ethnically-charged politics have been dominated by the shifting alliances and conflicts between 3 of its 44 officially recognized communities: Odinga’s Luo, Kenyatta’s Kikuyu and Ruto’s Kalenjin. In 1963, the independence party, KANU, was essentially a coalition of Kikuyu and Luo, and the Kalenjin, led by Moi, were in the opposition. Within a year, the opposition party, KADU, had been folded into KANU. By the close of that decade, following a falling out between Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga (Uhuru’s and Raila’s dads), Moi was Vice President and it was the Luo’s turn to be cast out into the cold.

In 2002, a coalition of Luo and Kikuyu elites, led by Mwai Kibaki and the younger Odinga, took over from Moi, who had been in power for nearly a quarter of a century, following Jomo Kenyatta’s death in 1978. This however, was not to last. Kibaki and Raila fell out and the latter joined hands with Ruto, the new Kalenjin kingpin, to challenge for the presidency in the 2007 general election. That bungled election, and the violence it precipitated in early 2008 forced all three together in a Government of National Unity. In a repeat of what happened in the 60s, this was followed by another Kikuyu -Kalenjin alliance which swept to power in 2013 and retained it in 2017 with the Luo again left in opposition.

The Handshake has reshuffled those alliances again, and William Ruto is now very much of the defensive. The President’s renewed and seemingly vigorously prosecuted war on corruption, which kicked off with the hiring of a new Director of Public Prosecutions, Noordin Haji, and threats of lifestyle audits, has been seen by some as an attempt to clip his deputy’s wings. Given recent comments by the ruling Jubilee party vice chairman David Murathe, to the effect that Ruto should retire from politics when Kenyatta’s final term ends, and despite the President’s protestations of innocence, Ruto’s fate and ambition will be a defining issue for politics in 2019.

Similarly, Kenyatta will be under pressure in the coming year to begin to show tangible results in the corruption fight in the form of convictions. He has staked his legacy on the ability to bag the “big fish” – corrupt senior government officials - but so far, has only an empty net to show for it. The wheels of the Kenyan justice system grind very slowly indeed and it won’t be long before public confidence the DPP and the President begin to wane. They will need a few quick wins early in the year but it is unclear whether the courts will oblige. It is a problem of Kenyatta’s own making as in his rhetoric he has repeatedly emphasized convictions, rather than an actual reduction in the prevalence of corruption, as the measure of success. He has failed to articulate a comprehensive policy beyond prosecutions to seal the loopholes that provide opportunities for the pilfering of public funds. And now, he is trying to set up the judiciary to take the fall, suggesting in his Independence Day speech that judges were offering easy bail terms to suspects and deliberately slowing down cases. This will be an interesting and continuing flashpoint throughout the coming year.

A final theme to watch in 2019 will be the issue of the national debt and the increasing skepticism with which ordinary Kenyans view the country’s relations with the largest holder of that debt – China. At the end of 2018, debt repayments and IMF conditionalities for new loans, have seen taxes raised on basic commodities like petroleum. The President’s upbeat rhetoric on the performance of his signature project, the Standard Gauge Railway, is undermined by seemingly waning Chinese confidence in the project and reports, denied by both governments, that China may take over Mombasa port if Kenya failed to keep up its payments. With the government now reduced to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, 2019 is set to bring even tougher economic hardships for Kenyans than 2018.

Happy New Year!

To Eat Or Not To Eat: The Cost of Kenyan Politicians

Of all the revelations that have come out of the inquisitions into the fiasco that accompanied Kenyan authorities’ preparations for the Rio Olympics, perhaps none is as significant as the fact that nearly Sh2.2 million in tax payer money was used to book rooms aboard a cruise ship for use by President Uhuru Kenyatta.

A cruise ship. Sh2.2 million. Let that sink in.

The figure was part of a Sh5 million that was wasted on rooms for politicians and bureaucrats that were left unused while athletes and team officials were in some cases abandoned to fend for themselves. According to sprint coach John Anzrah, who was subsequently expelled from the Games after being caught using an athlete’s accreditation to access the dining area, he and fellow trainers “were taken to a residential three-bedroom house and dumped there by National Olympic Committee of Kenya officials without basic amenities including food.” All the while, cruise ship rooms for the President and five-star hotel accommodations for Parliamentary committee chairmen lay idle.

But enraging as this is, it should not be surprising. Not from a jet-setting President who prefers to watch a Formula One race while his citizens are massacred as happened in November 2014. Not from an administration which in its first month in office was already steeped in scandal over allegations that Deputy President William Ruto had spent Sh100 million in taxpayer money to hire a luxury jet. Not from a government that in 2006 started building a house for the Vice President initially budgeted at Sh179 million, whose cost had ballooned to Sh453 million by 2008 and which five years later apparently required a further Sh100 million in renovations before its first resident could move in. Especially not from a governing coalition that treats State House and its accoutrements as private property.

The flagrant abuse of public resources for the private comfort of politicians knows no limits. From the obscene wages we pay Members of Parliament to the even more obscene “retirement benefits” we are forced to fork out for politicians who may or may not have “retired”, Kenya has become a country where mali ya umma (public property) has been converted into mali ya kuuma (property for nibbling).

Even in death, politicians continue to take a chunk out of us. When visiting to condole with the family of the recently deceased former cabinet minister, William Ole Ntimama, President Kenyatta had no qualms about pledging public funds to offset funeral expenses for a multi-millionaire who had been implicated in corruption and in fanning ethnic violence which claimed the lives of thousands. In July 2008, he was even caught on camera in an unguarded moment apparently admitting responsibility for the killings of 600-1000 people and inviting then Chepalungu MP (now Bomet Governor) Isaac Ruto to "bring his people" for an all-out battle over the Mau Forest.

Similarly, the state funeral for former First Lady, Lucy Kibaki, illustrated just how cavalier the government is with our money. It came despite the fact that her husband, in his last year in office, had already awarded himself and his predecessor, Daniel Arap Moi, tens of millions of shillings in retirement benefits which, as of November last year, continued to be paid in violation of a court order declaring them unconstitutional.

As First Lady, a designation which appears nowhere in our laws, Mrs Kibaki was herself quietly paid an annual salary of Sh6 million a year, fuss only being kicked up when similar salaries were in 2008 proposed for the wives of then Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka and then Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Till today, it has never been made clear whether Margaret Kenyatta, or indeed any of the wives of the 47 County Governors, draw public salaries.

Even Cabinet Secretaries, who by law are not meant to be politicians, have gotten in on the act. Sports CS Hassan Wario’s antics in Rio aside, they apparently continue to draw a public salary of over Sh1 million a month even after they have been relieved of duty. An unnamed government source reportedly told the Daily Nation that this was “to cushion them from falling prey to enemies of the State”. But former Labour CS, Kazungu Kambi, when asked about whether he was still being paid pointed to what may be the real reason: “I’m a politician remember.”

In May, the immediate former Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission chief, Philip Kinisu declared that over Sh600 billion in public funds was stolen every year. 600 BILLION. If you spent Sh16 million a day, it would take you over a century to spend what the government loses to corruption in one year. Yet as crazy as that figure is, it does not include the many millions we are legally and routinely forced to cough up to keep our politicians and their families in the manner to which they have now become accustomed. All this at the cost of much needed schools, teachers, hospitals, medical equipment, infrastructure and, yes, even accommodation for athletes and their coaches at the Olympics.

Kenya's ICC Experience: Few Winners, Many Losers

Now that the remaining Kenyan cases at the International Criminal Court have been terminated (at least for now), there will undoubtedly be much debate on who the winners and losers are. 

President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, were already ahead on that score even before their cases collapsed. It is almost certain that without the ICC indictments they would not be in power today. Now, not only do they not need to worry about the Court for the foreseeable future, they also are, by virtue of their incumbency, in pole position for the next electoral contest in about 16 months’ time. 

However, the picture is not all rosy. The two have laid claim to a spurious exoneration, which conveniently ignores the fact that neither was acquitted. In fact, if one was to consider their oft-repeated desire to “clear their names”, one would have to conclude that they failed pretty badly. That both cases were stopped for a lack of evidence, with the ICC judges citing both the Kenyatta administration’s obstructive behavior and “the troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling”, will continue to cast a pall on the duos reputations.

One must also wonder what will become of their political union which was forged in the heat of the common ICC threat. Will it go the way of the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition, which begun to disintegrate shortly after its victory over the Moi regime? It remains to be seen whether the fruits of victory would be ashes in the Jubilee coalition’s mouth.

The Kenyan government is another entity claiming a dubious victory. “The court itself looking at the evidence and the law has arrived at a judicial decision which vindicates the position taken by the government,” declared Attorney-General Githu Muigai. The court’s citing of the the government for obstruction does not seem to perturb him in the least. Neither, apparently, does the September 2013 Sunday Nation claim to have established the existence of “a shadowy team hunting down witnesses”.  There has since been no evidence of the government doing anything to find and prosecute those involved.

Further, it will not be forgotten that the government expended public resources and much diplomatic capital proclaiming immunity for the Head of State despite the constitution clearly limiting such immunity. The embarrassing scenes of it playing both victim and bully at international fora will also not quickly fade from memory.

While the winners may be somewhat ambiguous, the losers are clear. The ICC has undoubtedly suffered a serious blow to its credibility. The incompetence of its prosecutor, the mud Kenya and her African allies have thrown, and its cruelly exposed impotence when facing a hostile government have all worked to tarnish the Court’s reputation.

The victims too have lost out on what may be the last opportunity to hold someone to account for their plight. The government’s decision to transform “a personal challenge” into what President Kenyatta this week described as “a nightmare for my nation”, coupled with the fact that to date only a handful of people have been prosecuted for the murder of over 1,300 Kenyans and the rape, mutilation and displacement of thousands more, shows that there is little political will to punish those responsible.

But perhaps the biggest loser will be Kenya itself. Elite fear of the ICC was one of the reasons why the last election had low levels of violence. Now as another polarizing poll looms, that fear is fast receding. And with the electoral system in shambles and the Supreme court reeling from corruption scandals, the country is right back where it started: another disputed poll could set the country alight. 

Even worse for both ordinary Kenyans who would bear the brunt and for the ICC, the court would not only not deter, but perhaps even incentivize political violence since it is now clear that taking power is the only guaranteed way to avoid its clutches.

Kenya's Flight From Theory

Gabriel Nderitu wants to fly. The 49 year old  amateur airplane builder from Othaya has become an annual fixture on our TV screens as he tries out yet another of his contraptions that stubbornly won’t get off the ground. By 2014, Gabriel had reportedly spent a million shillings on his frustrated passion. And though we can't help but admire his chutzpah and determination, it is curious that over a century after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, Gabriel, and several others like him across Kenya, are not soaring.

The answer probably has something to do with Kenya's peculiar approach to learning. With a conference underway in Nairobi to discuss the scrapping of the 8-4-4 system of education, there is a marked preference for “practical” as opposed to “book” learning. Opening the conference, Deputy President William Ruto railed against university classrooms that teach Vasco da Gama but not how to fix a lamp. One radio station tweeted: “Kenyans propose curriculum system that emphasizes on skills not theory & exams”.

"Theory" has become a dirty word. Yet it, or rather the lack of it, is perhaps the reason why Gabriel and his friends are staying grounded for now. It is also the reason why Kenyan dreams of economic and political success have yet to take fight. This was well illustrated last week in the reaction to an opinion piece by Dr David Ndii.

That the article made for uncomfortable reading is an understatement. Dr Ndii’s proposal that Kenya consider balkanising into ethnic statelets in the event of a post-election conflagration triggered by a “sham” 2017 poll, had many frothing at the mouth and calling for his arrest. It has also led to an earnest debate about what nationhood is and why Kenya has seemingly failed to propagate a successful national narrative.

Many of the explanations put forward lay the blame on ethnicity. “The tribe has eaten the nation,” Dr Ndii wrote. He Kenyan elite, he argues, has preferred a tribal discourse and spurned several opportunities to nurture a national one. He sees Kenyan tribes in an abusive relationship with one another and proposes dissolution of the marriage as a viable option. Other, while not going so far, still accept that the basic problem is one of tribe versus nation.

However, this is lazy thinking and the frameworks employed obscure rather than explain the true nature of our problems. For the Kenyan people are not in an abusive marriage with each other. They are in an abusive relationship with their governing elites. The underlying reality is one of a state created by the British to extract resources from the local population and feed them up to an elite few. This state, which preys on wananchi for the benefit of wenyenchi has not been fundamentally reformed since independence.

"Will the elite which has inherited power from the colonialists use that power to bring about the necessary social and economic changes or will they … become part of the Old Establishment?" the future President, Mwai Kibaki, asked in 1964.

History has shown that they chose the latter path. As noted by Professor Daniel Branch in his book Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, “elites have encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first and foremost by ethnicity, in order to crush demands for the redistribution of scarce resources.”

In using tribe as opposed to class to frame their analysis, Dr Ndii and many of his detractors fall into this trap. They fail to see that that the problem is not one of tribes robbing each other, but of a ravenous elite stealing from everybody else and hyping ethnicity to cover their tracks.

Far from wasting time, better theorising would lead to better solutions and learning from history is critical to not repeating past mistakes. Like Gabriel, if Kenya is to reach for the sky, it would do well to spend at least as much time thinking through theories of how things work as it does tinkering in the backyard.

Lying in State: Official Deception In The Jubilee Era

The reactions to the International Criminal Court’s Appeal Chamber’s ruling last week is a good example of the doublespeak that has come to characterize our politics. The Leader of the Majority in the National Assembly, Hon Aden Duale, who for the last two years has been advocating a Kenyan and African withdrawal from the Rome Statute, declared on Twitter that “civil societies and their financiers have been ashamed and the rule of law prevailed”. He even went further to say that “the 14th assembly of state parties resolution on #Rule68 has been upheld” and that the verdict had redeemed “the creditbility (sic) of ICC and respect of the Rome Statue.”

Now, it will come as no surprise to anyone that our political class lies. In its daily sermons, it swears fealty to the rule of law even as its members continue violate both the spirit and letter of it. Few will have forgotten the words of Nandi Hills MP, Alfred Keter, at a weighbridge station in Gilgil: “We are the ones making laws; when we want, we break them.”

But the Jubilee coalition has transformed public insincerity into an art form. And little showcases this better than its shifting stand with regard to the cases against the President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, at the Hague. Their deceptions have been behind the cases mutating from a “personal challenge” as candidate Kenyatta once called them, to a challenge to national sovereignty, which it isn’t, to an example of “race-hunting” on a continental scale, a bare-faced lie.

On local and international fora, the President and his minions have regaled us with tales of “a global standard” on Head of State immunity, conveniently ignoring the standard that our own constitution sets in Article 143 which unambiguously says in subsection 4: “The immunity of the President under this Article shall not extend to a crime for which the President may be prosecuted under any treaty to which Kenya is party and which prohibits such immunity.” The Rome Statute is just such a treaty.

The pattern of deception has inevitably filtered down to discourse on other local issues. “It begins with you” has become the catch-all phrase that absolves the government of any responsibility when it fails to do its job. When corruption flourishes and infects all arms of government, the proffered solutions are not to fix the systems that incentivize and reward such behaviour, and to punish the corrupt. Rather, we are treated to the fiction of a society-wide malaise which will be solved by teaching ethics classes to primary schoolkids.

Similarly, when the government fails in its duty to provide the public good of security, it attempts to socialize this failure and to blame everyone in society. The problem we are told, is that we don’t share information with the state. In reality, the fact that security forces had prior intelligence on local terror attacks does not seem to have made them any more effective in stopping them. Further, a senior police officer pointed to the real problem when he told the Nation: “There was never a review meeting on how we handled incidents”. As a result, the paper goes on to say, “the police service has basically learnt nothing from Westgate, Garissa, Mpeketoni and others.” Many will remember that the President’s promise of an inquiry into security failures surrounding the Westgate atrocity a has similarly failed to materialize, as has his vow to punish those responsible for the them.

A final example of the government’s mendacity is the paucity of public information on the El Adde attack. A month after the Al Shabaab terror group overran an African Union base manned by Kenyan troops in southern Somalia, we are yet to get definitive figures for how many soldiers we lost and how many were captured. Despite promises by CS Raychelle Omamo and the Chief of Defence Forces General Samson Mwathethe to provide a full account, we still only have rumours and unconfirmed reports that put the death toll at above 100, with some sources suggesting up to 130.

Meanwhile, at the funerals going on around the country, the government continues to “honor our fallen heroes” with bugles and gun salutes and flag-draped coffins. Yet the one thing that would truly honour their memory continues to stay hidden: a proper telling of how and why they died, and a learning of lessons have been learnt to ensure the same never happens to their comrades. The reason the authorities remain vague about the details is not to protect national security but rather the backsides of senior officers and officials.

While it may, in a limited number of extreme instances, be in the national interest to temporarily withhold information from the public, across the world it is clear that officials lie mostly to escape censure for mistakes and shortcomings. Just as has been the case with terror attacks on civilians inside Kenya, the silence over El Adde, for example, is intended to keep the Kenyan public, not the Al Shabaab (who already know the scale of the damage they inflicted) in the dark.

Politics is often described as a dirty game. “One must know how to colour one’s actions and to be a great liar and deceiver” wrote Machiavelli of the successful ruler, adding that "men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived."  In a Machiavellian world, where public officials are only concerned with the acquisition and perpetuation of their power, it may be permissible to routinely mislead the citizenry. However, the sovereign is also urged to “not deviate from the good, if that is possible”. Ethics and moral behaviour are thus not entirely outside the purview of politics, even in a dictatorship. And they take on an even more important role when it comes to democracies, where citizens require accurate and sufficient information in order to hold public officials to account.

However, nowadays politicians and public officials also routinely lie, and the public has come to expect that they will do so. This expectation, in turn leads to a debilitating cynicism about the political process and a resignation to the inevitability of deception. When the lies are not just expected but acceptable, when they no longer arouse outrage and when national policies can be built around them, then societies are treading on very dangerous ground. The disastrous 2003 US invasion of Iraq, one of whose consequences is the rise of ISIS, is but one recent example of the havoc deception can wreak.

So when we permit Interior Cabinet Secretary, Gen Joseph Nkaissery, to get away with declaring public scrutiny of his ministry’s questionable spending a threat to national security; or the President to escape censure for inciting mobs into destroying private property via an illegal directive against alcohol; when patently unconstitutional laws are used to punish legal conduct and expression that those in power do not like; then we are putting our liberties, our democracy, our very lives and prosperity in great peril.

The words and sentiments streaming out of the mouths of our public officials should mean something. And the people behind them should be held to account.  We do not pay them to lie and mislead us or to treat us like children who can’t handle the truth. Or worse, to subvert the constitution, the very thing that limits the power they can wield over our lives.

So as we snigger and make fun of the antics of Hon Duale and his friends over the ICC, we should be very careful lest we wake up and find that the joke is on us.

Are Kenyans Ready For The Coming Storm?

"Show me a man's friends, and I'll tell you who he is," said American essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. And this week, the Jubilee administration has shown us who its friends are. 

“Civil society, media and leaders from across our political social spectrum have come together and made their views known and in the hearts of every Kenyan we know that we must win this war [on corruption]” declared President Uhuru Kenyatta when welcoming Pope Francis on his maiden visit to Africa. At The Hague and in New York, however, his minions were using very different language.

At the former, the government, with the support of the entire political establishment, was engaged in an effort to get the Assembly of Parties to the Rome Statute to dictate to the International Criminal Court how it is to interpret the rules of evidence. The fuss was brought on by the Court’s decision to apply rule 68, which allows for the consideration of recanted testimony, to the cases facing Deputy President William Ruto and journalist Joshua Sang.

Setting aside for a moment the merits of the government’s argument that it was assured this wouldn’t happen (for which there appears some justification) and that the use of recanted testimony is inherently unjust (much more dubious), the fact is that this issue is still under active consideration by the court, the accused having appealed the decision of the Trial Chamber. Like the dictators of Kenya’s past, the government wanted to decree the outcome of that appeal.

Now, Kenya’s famously vocal civil society wasn’t about to let this travesty happen without a fight. So, it too sent a team to make representations to the ASP. They were seemingly quite effective as very soon the government side, which was spending over Ksh 100 million in public money on what President Kenyatta in 2013 assured us was “a personal challenge”, slipped back into its old habits of demonization and delegitimization. Talk of “evil society” and threats to brand legitimate Kenyan NGOs as “foreign agents” suddenly resurfaced.

However, this time the regime went a little further. In what has to be an all-time low for Kenyan diplomacy, at the United Nations General Assembly the government teamed up with the likes of North Korea, Myanmar, Iran and Sudan in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to shoot down a UN resolution recognising and protecting the role of human rights defenders. Kenya was among only 14 countries, the vast majority of them brutal dictatorships, to vote against the resolution. It was a thinly disguised attempt to scare local human rights activists, and perhaps to punish them for their opposition to the Uhuru administration’s agenda at the ASP.

By rejecting a resolution adopted by two-thirds of Member States and that calls for accountability for attacks on human rights defenders and their families as well as urging states to release defenders who have been arbitrarily detained, the Uhuru regime has once again let its mask of civility slip. The pretense of tolerance, of fidelity to the constitution and the rule of law had already been badly undermined by unending corruption scandals and the government’s own penchant for scapegoating entire communities, dissenters, media and civil society under the guise of fighting terrorism. But its fangs are only truly bared when it comes to the cases before the ICC.

The government has only ever been interested in getting these cases lifted, not injustice. That much is clear to anyone who cares to look. Its indifference to (and likely collusion in) the disappearance, intimidation and bribery of witnesses as well as its sustained campaign to delegitimize the Court proves as much. Anyone who stands in the way is fair game. Thus it is the civil society groups that were at the forefront of the demands for accountability for the 2008 post-election violence have borne the brunt of the government’s assault.

It is to their eternal credit that the likes of Africog’s Gladwell Otieno have refused to be cowed in the face of this onslaught. However, it is undeniable that the space for dissenting opinion is rapidly shrinking. The vote at the UN, coupled with the recent arrest of journalists for daring to report on queries by the Auditor-General into suspicious procurement at the Interior Ministry as well as the President’s assertion that any media reporting on corruption allegations would be required to provide evidence of the same, illustrate the government’s determination and increasingly brazen attempts to roll back the freedoms guaranteed by the 2010 constitution as well as to crush any prospects for accountability, not only for the deaths, injuries, rapes and displacement of 2008, but also for the continuing looting that impoverishes Kenya.

And given the crowd that their government is now running with, Kenyans would be prudent to prepare for the coming storm.

Evolution of Jubilee

A Time to Remember

"Time heals all wounds" is a proverb I have never been particularly comfortable with. It is one of those sayings that is laden with a supposedly profound but somehow elusive truth. Like having your cake and eating it, which we do all the time. It's elusive because time by itself actually rarely seems to heal. Exes remain irreconcilable and vendettas continue long after memories have faded and the original slights are forgotten. Hot wars cool down, cold wars heat up, but the mere passing of the ages rarely seems to reconcile, to turn enemies into friends.

But what time does is dull memories. And today, less than 6 months after an election that was remarkable for the fear it inspired, Kenyans memories today are notably dulled. Senses are dulled too. We have breathed our sigh of relief and want to move forward. The cases at the ICC are, however, a discomfiting shout from a past we had hoped was dead and buried. Talk of the horrors of Kiambaa, the Facebook pictures of charred and bleeding bodies, are all recalling our forgotten fear.

It is important that we face this fear and that will require the courage and the integrity to do the work of remembering and confessing and resolving and reconciling and forgiving and deterring. A recognition that healing will not come from forgetting. All that will offer is a little temporary ceasefire, a chance to re-arm and sharpen more machetes in preparation for the next round of bloodletting. For while it remains hidden, the fear does not abate. It only festers, rotting away our national soul. Unattended, and Kenya will be a ticking time bomb waiting for the almost inevitable falling out -given our history- between Messrs Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto and the all too common realignments of political and ethnic alliances that leads to the exhuming of buried hatchets and rediscovery of "historical grievances".

We have been here before. After independence, the political classes who had been collaborating with the colonial state appropriated the struggles of the landless. They cast Jomo Kenyatta as the victim. Slowly, all but the most heinous atrocities were edited out along with their victims. And even the ones we were allowed to remember were only trotted out during Jamhuri day ad then promptly forgotten. As a result, the colonial state remained, only with blacks at the helm. And the abuse and dispossession and neglect continued. And the hostilities and fear grew. Trying to forget, to forge ahead, to build the nation, brought little relief. 5 years ago, these unresolved issues were the tinder set alight by the untrammeled ambition and warmongering of the political class.

Many of those same problems remain today. but the state and its mandarins are engaged in a whitewashing exercise. To remove the most visible manifestations of the fear while doing nothing about its causes. So we resettle IDPs without sorting out why they were displaced in the first place. First the President, and then Parliament, seek to gerrymander the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation report to "improve" the testimony of 40,000 Kenyans who have been victims of and witnesses to the atrocities and theft and abuse visited upon Kenyans by their leaders and government. Foreign Secretary, Amina Mohammed goes on TV to say truth commissions should have "nothing to do with justice" and tribalism is not such a bad thing. Despite the fact during the campaigns, candidate Kenyatta had declared that the ICC was "a personal problem" and had nothing to do with the election, his government is pulling out all the stops to get the cases lifted arguing the exact opposite.

All this is part of a campaign to convince us to forget. To tell us that the events of half a decade ago were not as significant as they appeared. There wasn't much harm done. So the victims and their stories are today carefully and systematically edited out of the narratives of the violence. The dead have no one to speak for them. Our permanent representative at the UN, Macharia Kamau, today has the gumption to suggest that the 650,000 IDPs in fact got a great deal out of the 2007/8 post-election violence. After all, most were squatters before. They came out "way ahead". The raped, the scarred, the mutilated remain faceless. They don't matter, they are all lying witnesses. Nothing happened. We have reconciled. Accept and move on. It is Uhuru, Ruto and, to a lesser extent, Sang who are the real victims. Let's pray for them. The real outrage, we are told, is the court case, the attack on impunity, not the killing, raping, hacking, shooting and burning.

Yet the fear remains. We must resist the attempt to rewrite history, to lull us to sleep, to avoid the work of reconciliation. We must not take the easy road of forgetting. If we do, that terror will be nourished by the knowledge that we are all a part of this conspiracy. And we will continue to build the nation during the day and sharpen our machetes by night. For while time may not heal all wounds, it eventually will wound all heels.

Personal Challenge: Cartooning Post-Election Kenya

Dear Cartoonist,

As you know, Kenya in March underwent its first elections since the disastrous aftermath of the 2007 polls. These were conducted under a new constitution and on the ballot were two politicians indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in relation to their alleged role in the conflagration that followed the previous polls. Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto joined together to form the Jubilee Coalition and have now been elected President and Deputy President of Kenya respectively. The elections, while generally peaceful, were not without controversy with the outcome having to be decided by the country's fledgling Supreme Court. 

Ever since the election, the Kenyan Government has been on a so far unsuccessful crusade to get the ICC charges against its two top leaders, which Uhuru Kenyatta had famously called a "Personal Challenge" during the campaign, dropped. In this effort, it has been rebuffed by the UN Security Council and embraced by the African Union. Despite pre-election threats of isolation, the indicted President has visited with UK premier David Cameron (though away from No. 10 and without the customary photo-op). Coupled with the aggressive campaign by his government, the Kenyan situation is now seen as the greatest threat to the legitimacy -and even existence- of the ICC.

Other casualties of the March elections include Kenyan civil society organisations whom the winning Jubilee coalition sought to paint as stooges of the imperialist West both during and after the election, and the Kenyan media which has been accused of forsaking its traditional vocal watchdog stance and turning a blind eye to malfeasance in the name of preserving the peace.

To further complicate the picture, the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission has recently released its report which covers government massacres, rapes and other atrocities against its citizens, illegal land grabs, corruption and larceny. It names over 400 individuals, including Messrs Uhuru and Ruto, and many of their allies and rivals.

The Association of East African Cartoonists is organising an international cartoon exhibition on these and other aspects of the aftermath of the Kenyan Elections. The theme is  "Personal Challenge: Cartooning Post-Election Kenya". The exhibition is open to both professional and amateur cartoonists.

To participate, please send your entries to:

katuni@gmail.com

All entries should be in JPEG format with a resolution of at least 300DPI and should be received by 21 June 2013.

Thanks and I look forward to receiving your works.

A Tribute To GADO

Red Letter Day

The Law Is an Ass and MPigs Want Some.

Wasn't the Political Parties Act 2007 intended to prevent exactly this kind of nonsense? From my reading of the Act, the only thing saving William Ruto and Co. is the inane wording of the Act, which requires an MP to vacate his seat if he publicly advocates for the "formation" of another political party but not if he publicly (though not formally) joins an existing one.

Still, it is undeniable that he and his ilk are contravening the spirit, if not the letter of the act. They are making a farce of the constitutional declaration of Kenya as a multi-party democractic state when they continue to treat political parties as nothing more than vehicles for individual power pursuits, devoid of any ideological content, and easily discarded when inconvenient.

In my honest opinion, our legislators are just proving the truth of Millie Odhiambo's claim that 15 per cent of her colleagues are gay. I mean, what do you expect when MPs have the integrity of Kamiti inmates and the law happens to be ass? In fact, 15% is probably a gross underestimation.

I Quit This Bitch!

On my way to work today, I had an epiphany. As I sat in one of the unending traffic jams that have become part of the daily ritual of trying to get to work, fuming as matatus "overlapped" the queue, it occurred to me that it wasn't they who were the stupid ones.

The rule of law, whether we're talking about the highway code, commercial law or criminal statutes, assumes a universal application. So, when I accept to religiously abide by it when others consider it only as a guideline, to be discarded whenever it is convenient to do so, then it is I who is refusing to see the reality as it truly is.

This notion was reinforced when I finally got to my office and read in the papers that Rift Valley MPs were planning to ditch the National Accord in a bid to replace Raila Odinga as the Prime Minister with William Ruto. According to The Standard, the plot is an attempt to shield Ruto from potentially facing charges at the International Criminal Court relating to the 2008 post-election violence. "If it means repealing the Accord, then we will act and move with speed to replace the PM, ," the paper quotes the chairman of the Rift Valley Parliamentary Group, Dr. Julius Kones, as saying.

Putting aside for one minute the questionable wisdom of the move (after all, Omar al-Bashir's position as President of Sudan didn't save him from similar indictments), the statements simply emphasize the fact that there is one law for some and another for the rest. Just like the enlightened matatu drivers, our politicians believe that the rules do not apply to them and can be discarded whenever one of them gets into trouble.

Our whole system of governance aids and abets this logic. So when Cabinet Ministers are forced out of office after being caught with their hands in the till, the government creates a new taxonomy in which those who "step aside" are allowed to keep their fat salaries and allowances without actually having to work for them. That, they tell us, is how we will win the war on corruption!

I now believe that it is the ordinary, hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding Kenyan who is stupid. We agree to faithfully pay our taxes, even celebrating when the government exceeds its revenue collection targets, while those who actually pass our tax laws do not feel obliged to live under the same regime. We pay salaries to policemen and civil servants and then agree to supplement these with bribes. We accept that the leaders of the same government supposed to ensure roads are properly built to cater for the booming numbers of vehicles and that traffic rules are obeyed, should not themselves be inconvenienced when they fail to do their jobs. We allow them to provide our children with a failing education system -at our expense, naturally- while they take their kids to private schools and elite universities in the West. We acquiesce when they tell us all is well with our public hospitals but they fly abroad at the slightest sign of illness.

We are the fools when we insist on believing that a new constitution will somehow magically apply the law to them. Our politicians, like our matatu drivers, are not Kenyans. The fact is, Kenya is their creation, not ours. Its policies, rules and laws only apply to Kenyans, the wananchi (the people of the nation), not to the wenye nchi (those who own the nation). They are designed to perpetuate the power and wealth of the latter, to transfer resources and dignity from the former. It explains why none of our systems work, for the wenye nchi have no interest in us spending our money on ourselves. It is why no one goes to jail when they steal maize while a third of the country is starving, why no one is punished when people are sold contaminated food and when public funds go missing. It is the sole reason that the fate of 6 of them is of more import than the deaths of 1,500 Kenyans.

I, for one, am tired of this charade we call Kenya. I am tired of countless commissions that only produce paper; of a Parliament that only represents itself. I am tired of the cycle of prosecutions that produce no convictions and reforms that generate no change. I am tired of being poor and having to work hard to fund the excesses of a wealthy few. I am tired of carrying a leadership, a state, a country, that is nothing more than a parasitic infection.

I am tired of being a Kenyan. I am tired of being stupid.

In 2008, after being treated like crap for years, Inetta the Mood-Setter, a part-time DJ in the US, refused to take it anymore. Her parting words to the radio station, delivered live on air: "I QUIT THIS BITCH!"

So do I.

It's His Turn To Eat

Six Cases Please

Grand Vizier Ruto

Let Them Eat Maize?

Last year, Kenya experienced the worst food crisis in her history, more than 10 million facing the prospect of starvation. In a letter to the IMF in May 2009, Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and central bank Governor Njuguna Ndungu blamed it all on three “shocks” namely the post-election violence in early 2008 which impacted negatively on key sectors of our economy such as tourism, manufacturing, transport and agriculture, resulting in a year-on-year decline in real GDP of 1 percent in the first quarter of 2008; record high fuel and fertilizer prices; and the failure of the short rains in October-November 2008, resulting in a sharp decline in domestic food supplies, particularly, maize. They of course left out the one factor which is perhaps the most significant of all.

For while it is true that Kenya is prone to drought, it is equally true that famines are rarely caused by a deficit of rain. In his book Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya, Robert Bates shows that Kenya suffered 16 major droughts between 1889 and 1984 which averages out at one every 6 years. He also notes that relatively few of these resulted in famine. According to Mr. Bates, of all the factors that turn a drought into a famine, only one is under human control: public policy and political institutions. Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen put it more bluntly in his book Development as Freedom: “…no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy – be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in post independence India, or Botswana or Zimbabwe.” And, after the events of 2008, Kenya was hardly a paragon of democracy.

The writing was on the wall as early as 2007 when the short rains failed. By February 2008, the country only had a stock of about 20 million bags of maize, enough to last till September. It was clear to government technocrats that maize needed to be imported by August to bridge the shortfall till the critical North Rift crop was harvested in late 2008. So they recommended to the political leadership the same solution that had been successfully implemented in 2004 when the country faced a similar crisis: a duty waiver to allow the private sector to import the needed grain.

However, for reasons that would perhaps become clear in the light of ensuing events, the politicians, at the very first meeting of the Grand Coalition Cabinet, opted for a novel and utterly untested approach. Under the Subsidized Maize Scheme, they would have the National Cereals and Produce Board, a parastatal company, import the maize and sell it, at subsidized cost, to millers who would then pass the savings on to the consuming public. This despite the fact that no national registry of millers existed, the NCPB having been stripped of this function in 2006, and that there was no way of ensuring that millers didn’t pocket the subsidy themselves. Carried out in two phases, it would involve the sale of grain from the country’s Strategic Grain Reserve as well as importation to top up stocks.

What followed was a 6 month free for all as everyone from elected officials to professionals within the civil service scrambled for a piece of the action. Former Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics, John Githongo describes it as “cannibalistic corruption,” as the very people entrusted with safeguarding the lives of 10 million starving Kenyans literally snatched the food from their mouths. And by the time they were done, not only was there no subsidized maize, but the price of the commodity had doubled pushing it even further out of reach.
The consequences were devastating. By January 2009, fully a quarter of the population was starving and, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), over a fifth of children under age five were malnourished. That month, the government declared a National Disaster, reversed course and waived duty on imported maize, the course originally recommended by its technocrats.

As food prices rose, so did public pressure for an accounting. A forensic audit of the scheme by PriceWaterhouse Coopers revealed the extent of the rot and more importantly, linked it back to the original decision. Companies in which government officials, including Cabinet Ministers, had interests were either allocated maize despite not being millers, or received lucrative contracts related to the industry. MPs admitted to buying maize from the NCPB as well as writing letters requesting for allocations to individuals known to them, according to Githongo a clear violation of the Public Officer Ethics Act. An insurance company in which the Minister for Agriculture held shares was awarded a tender to supply gunny bags. In fact, almost a third of the subsidized maize allocated from the country’s strategic grain reserve was sold to “traders” posing as millers, who then passed it on to the real millers, in return for “facilitation payments.”

Additionally, maize was imported at more than double the price paid to local farmers, raising queries about the manner it was sourced. A parliamentary committee report recommended investigations of “the personal assistant to Prime Minister, the Prime Minister’s family, the son and associates” with regard to the importation of maize. The total cost of the scam to Kenya’s starving taxpayers is expected to exceed Kshs. 2 billion. Despite all this, an investigation by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission was unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing

Makes one wonder: Did the Cabinet plan it all from the very beginning? This is what PwC calls the “big picture question –whether the whole exercise was from the outset designed to fail and to provide a means for considerable financial exploitation at the expense of the state.” Though the auditors are reluctant to give a definitive answer, it is hard not to reach that conclusion given the history of corrupt deals. According to Githongo, it would hardly be the first time scoundrels have created a crisis and then sought to benefit from it. He points to the power rationing scheme of 1999 which he attributes to the emptying of hydroelectric dams supposedly to clear out siltation. The consequent loss of generating capacity (since the dams take time to refill, especially when the rains fail) led to crippling power cuts necessitating the introduction of expensive private power suppliers, many with connections to the very people who precipitated the crisis.

The fact is the maize scheme was abused from its inception. It was adopted against the grain of expert advice, and provided numerous opportunities for rewarding dishonesty and theft. Most damningly, it appears that none of its political instigators will pay a price for it. What are the odds of such a deviously fortuitous set of circumstances occurring by chance?

Ssssssssilly Seasssssssson

Commuting Justice? Why We Need The Death Penalty

In what Prof. William A. Schabas of the Irish Centre for Human Rights described as “very likely the largest commutation of death sentences in modern history”, the President of Kenya in early August announced that all death row inmates would not be executed and that their sentences would be commuted to life imprisonment. This move elicited a rare cacophony of praise from both local and international commentators, organizations and governments. In his statement, Kibaki explained that he was acting to relieve the over 4000 inmates’ “mental anguish, suffering, psychological trauma, and anxiety”. Of course, nothing was said about the suffering that this, as well as other moves to abolish the death penalty, is likely to cause in the society as large.

While capital punishment has existed in almost all civilizations, across the world it is increasingly falling out of favour. According to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, Currently, more than half the world’s states have taken steps towards total or de facto abolition of the death penalty and apply life imprisonment for the most serious crimes. And less than half of the countries retaining the death penalty actually execute prisoners. In Africa, 11 countries, including Rwanda and South Africa have banned state sanctioned executions. And even those that haven’t are remarkably queasy about the whole affair. Tanzania has not executed anyone since 1994. Uganda, despite President Yoweri Museveni’s declaration that “we shall shoot anybody who kills a human being” has neither shot nor hanged anyone in a decade. In Kenya, while an average of 750 people are sentenced to death each year, none has been sent to the gallows since 1987.

Ever since it came to power, the Kibaki administration has sought to abolish the death penalty is spite of the overwhelming public support for it. In January 2003, two weeks into Kibaki’s first term, then Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister, Kiraitu Murungi, revealed plans to abolish capital punishment in the country by the middle of the year. A month later his boss ordered the freeing of 28 prisoners on death row and commuted the sentences of 195 others. Presiding over their release, then Vice President, Moody Awori, announced his intention to introduce a Bill in Parliament to abolish the death penalty, prompting the then Commissioner of Prisons, Abraham Kamakil, to declare his longing “for the day Parliament will remove the death penalty from our Constitution.”The sentence was still in the books when, in June 2005, Kiraitu again declared that the government was “committed to abolishing the death penalty”. It is a position which enjoys considerable cross-party support. The ODM’s William Ruto, has called the death penalty a "vengeful" sentence that served no helpful purpose and party secretary Prof. Anyang’ Nyongo has declared that "the death penalty is not a deterrent and should be abolished." Despite this seeming consensus, in August 2007 Parliament defeated a Motion, moved by Kasipul-Kabondo MP, Mr Paddy Ahenda, seeking to do exactly that.

In its Position Paper on the Abolition of the Death Penalty, the KNCHR lists its objections to capital punishment: the death penalty is the ultimate violation of human rights. It is a violation of the fundamental right to life, which the Government has pledged to protect under the Constitution and other international human rights instruments that it has ratified. Similarly, the death penalty amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which contravenes provisions of section 74(1) of the Constitution, the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

To support its position, the Commission advances several arguments. However, most of them dissolve when applied to other forms of punishment. For example, it declares that “the hallmark of a civilised society is arguably the acknowledgement of human worth and dignity at the core of which is the principle of the sanctity of life, which should be most protected under all circumstances.” The suggestion here is that those who favor the death penalty have a less than total regard for value of human life. Nothing could be further from the truth. More than 130 years ago, the eminent philosopher John Stuart Mill spoke eloquently on the issue before the English Parliament: "Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself."

Arguing against “the retributive eye-for-an-eye delivery of justice”, the KNCHR avers that “The use of (the) death penalty only lowers the standards of government to the mentality of the murderer itself; it only demonstrates that the government is not different from the murderer. We do not punish rape with rape, or burn down the house of an arsonist. We should not, therefore, punish the murderer with death.” If this argument were to be taken to its logical conclusion, then all forms of sanction would be declared immoral as all involve the denial of some fundamental right (life, liberty and property) which some criminal has previously denied to his victims. Prison terms, fines and community service require that we curtail the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms. Surely, abolishing all forms of punishment would be unlikely to deliver a society safe from crime. Secondly, to state that we cannot demand an-eye-for-an-eye recompense is to put the criminal himself in the position of determining what can or cannot be done to him. Since we do not wish to be like thieves, then society cannot take for itself a thief's hard earned property through a system of fines. The very act of thieving would thus deprive society of resort to this kind of punishment and kidnapping would automatically outlaw jail sentences. The criminals would be the new legislators.

The KHCHR believes that the death penalty does not address the victim’s pain and the suffering endured by the victim’s family since “whoever was murdered has no way of knowing and appreciating the punishment meted upon the offender.” This is a curious position to take considering that in the aftermath of the 2008 post-election violence and in answer to call for a general amnesty, the very same Commission declared its firm belief that “accountability for those accused of committing serious human rights violations…is a fundamental aspect of victims' rights to justice.” So which is which? Does the KNCHR believe that the dead have no right to justice?

The KNCHR’s objections to the application of the death sentence are similarly flawed. Take, for example, the sophistic argument that “enforcement of the death penalty amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment of the condemned person... In a de facto abolitionist state like Kenya, a person always lives in anxiety with the reality of death hanging over his or her head from the moment of sentencing.” What the Commission is really saying is that it is the failure to carry out death sentences that results in the prisoners’ (to quote Kibaki) “mental anguish, suffering, psychological trauma, and anxiety.”

Dealing with a similar situation, the Uganda Supreme Court in January ordered that all death sentences be carried out within three years. However instead of recommending that we abandon the de facto moratorium on executions, the KNCHR prefers that death sentences are commuted to life imprisonment. Are they seriously asking us to believe that this a morally superior alternative? Amnesty International, in a report titled Prisons: Deaths due to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions, declared that “prison conditions in Kenya are worse than in other African countries.” And this is how Wikipedia describes the situation in Kamiti Maximum Prison:

There is still no reliable water supply, with over 200 prisoners hauling buckets of water around daily. The inmates working in the ‘industry’ section are paid only 10 cents (kenya shilling) per day, as per the outdated 1940s legislation which rules the organisation. Within the prison, condemned "G" block is famed for its particularly brutal lifestyle, characterised by predatory sodomy and mobile phone confidence tricksters. The prison was built for 1400 prisoners, and it now houses over 3600 in conditions of unbelievable squalor… The authorities have banned any supplemental food…and malnutrition and ulcers have become far more prevalent.

Imprisoning someone for life under such conditions is surely “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment.” In fact, the Tanzanian Court of Appeal, when considering the constitutionality of capital punishment in the case Republic v Mbushuu, quoted Paul Sieghart’s 1983 article in The International Law of Human Rights: “As human rights can only attach to living beings, one might expect the right to life itself to be in some sense primary, since none of the other rights would have any value or utility without it. But the international instruments do not infact accord it any formal primacy. International human rights law assigns a higher value to the quality of living as a process than to the existence of life as a state….the law tends to regard acute or prolonged suffering (at all events in cases where it is inflicted by others, and so it is potentially avoidable) as a greater evil than death, which is ultimately unavoidable for everyone.” From the human rights perspective, therefore, life imprisonment under the conditions prevailing in our prisons is a worse, not better, alternative to capital punishment.

The KNCHR paper also raises objections around the fallibility of our criminal justice systems and the irreversibility of death. The fear here is that we are bound to execute a few innocents. Again these objections dissolve when applied to other forms of punishment. If we insisted on an absolute measure of guilt (as opposed to the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard), then we would have no criminal justice system. And all punishments are inherently irreversible anyway. You cannot give back the years and opportunities that are denied someone who is wrongfully jailed or fined.

Concerning the deterrent value of capital punishment, the paper states: “There has been no proven correlation between the death penalty and deterrence of crimes and countries that still maintain the death penalty in their statutes have not seen a downturn in crime. A survey conducted by the UN in 1998 and later updated in 2002 found no correlation between the

death penalty and homicide rates. According to the study, the hypothesis that capital punishment deters crime to a greater extent than does the application of the supposedly lesser punishment of life imprisonment is flawed. In Kenya, for instance, the fact that death sentences are handed down has not deterred commission of crimes for which such sentences are implemented. The key to deterrence is not to apply the death penalty but to increase the likelihood of detection of crime, arrest and conviction.”

However, even here the KNCHR fails to see the wood for the trees. The fact is one would not expect studies to show a deterrent effect if executions are not carried out. The results of study conducted by Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Paul H. Rubin of Emory University and Joanna M. Shepherd of Clemson University suggested that capital punishment when actually employed has a strong deterrent effect; each execution prevents, on average, 18 murders. Another study by H. Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado at Denver and R. Kaj Gittings of Cornell University looked at all death sentences handed out in the United States between 1977 and 1997 and matched that with state-level criminal activity in the relevant time frame. Their results show that each additional execution decreases homicides by about five. More worryingly, each additional commutation increases homicides by the same amount, while an additional removal from death row generates one additional murder.

While the Kenya situation obviously differs from that in the US, we all have to be concerned about the possibility that by commuting the more 4000 death sentences to life imprisonment, President Kibaki may well have signed the death warrants of up to 20,000 innocents. As Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule state in their paper Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs: “If the current evidence is even roughly correct, then a refusal to impose capital punishment will effectively condemn numerous innocent people to death. States that choose life imprisonment, when they might choose capital punishment, are ensuring the deaths of a large number of innocent people.” Surely, the first obligation of every government is the protection of its citizens. As John McAdams of Marquette University’s Department of Political Science puts it, "If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call."

Not Seeing The Mau for Trees