Kenya's Politics Of Crises and Forgetting

Earlier this week, on the eve of Madaraka Day, history paid Kenya another visit. Online photos of CORD principals, Raila Odinga and Moses Wetangula in a jovial meeting with President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, at State House, Nairobi caused a bit of a stir. But it shouldn’t have. As I explained last week, we have been here before.

Political crises have been a near-constant feature of Kenya’s post-colonial history, and especially since the agitation for electoral and constitutional reform began in the 1980s. Politicians have perfected the art of taking the country to the brink of the abyss of violence and anarchy and pulling back at the last minute.  It is a callous calculation, where violence and death are used as negotiating tools. If, as Carl von Clausewitz asserted, “war is the continuation of politics by other means” in Kenya, crises and bloodshed signal not a breakdown of the political process, but how it is inaugurated.

The script is always the same: Opposition demands talks on reform or a redress of grievance. The government refuses. Demagogues on both sides polarize public opinion, mostly along ethnic lines. With few options, the opposition appeals to the street to force the government to give in. The street demonstrations are met with police violence and after enough Kenyans have bled and died, the government gives in and agrees to talks.

This is politics reduced to a staring contest, where the goal is not to avoid crises but to ignite them. It is a politics that is managed via crisis, in which Kenyan citizens are not the end, but as the means of contestation. It is a politics obsessed with the problems and welfare of politicians, not so much those of the people who are reduced to pawns in a game of elites.

There is no true animosity between the main protagonists, despite the hateful rhetoric employed to galvanize their supporters. In the end, the politicians remain friends and business colleagues and country club mates. The politics they have created and perfected eschews permanence and commitment, whether to principles, policies, friends or enemies. The only defining characteristic is ambition.

Of necessity, in rejecting permanence, it also rejects history. Who, after all, wants to be reminded of their hypocrisies? Or that their current BFF was the declared mortal enemy of all Kenyans in the last election cycle? In kowtowing to the politicians, Kenyan media also reflects much of this aversion to history and context. Political events and crises thus seem to spring out of nowhere, without history or context, and just as quickly disappear into nothingness without actual resolution once the politicians have gotten together to rearrange their seats at the table.

This is what is happening with the current dispute over the fate of the IEBC commissioners. Despite the fiasco witnessed in the 2013 election, there has been little discussion about it in the last three years. Neither the opposition nor the government have shown much interest in addressing the failures witnessed during the election or the problems highlighted by the subsequent petitions filed against the 2013 results, especially the petitions against the Presidential poll. Now, with just over a year to the election, precipitating a crisis appears the only means our politicians can imagine to address the issue.

Historical amnesia is apparent in the way they have proposed to drive the talks forward. Apparently, a deal has been reached in which each side will nominate five people to a 10-member committee, composed solely of Parliamentarians, to conduct the talks. This would be little more than a resurrection of the 1997 Inter Parties Parliamentary Group process which, as I discussed last week, then President Daniel Arap Moi used to blunt the push for reform by excluding all other interested players, especially those from civil society.

So today, as the country breathes a sigh of relief, the politicians have put yet another one over us. Once again they have successfully gotten us to bleed over their problems and ignore our own. No wonder they seemed so giddy at their State House get-together.

Of Police Brutality And Imperfect Victims

It was, by any measure, a vicious assault. At least 15 people were hospitalized following Monday’s attack on protestors and bystanders by police during demonstrations meant to press for the ouster of the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission officials. The scenes beamed around the world of citizens being chased down, clobbered and left to lick their wounds in the street, were a throwback to an era many had assumed was behind us.

Public attention has focused on the particularly brutal beating meted out to Boniface Manono and the image of his crumpled form lying on its side, his body in the street, his head resting on the kerb and menaced by a police officer’s raised boot, has become iconic.

Mr Manono is far from an ideal victim. His story about how he supposedly stumbled on the protest doesn’t appear to gel with the pictures being flashed around social media. What appears to be a stone in his back pocket as he endures police kicks and clubs hints at a more complicated picture than those who would wish to paint a vista of clearly defined villains and victims might wish.

But it is precisely because he is not perfect that we need to pay attention. This is not to endorse any violent or illegal behavior on his part, but to assert a simple truth: the law protects everyone or it protects no one.

In his famous play, A man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt penned a dialogue between a dialogue between Sir Thomas More and his daughter's suitor, William Roper in which the former argues for giving the Devil the benefit of law. “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” he asks the young Roper. “I'd cut down every law in England to do that!” comes the reply. “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” counters Moore. “Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.”

It is for our own safety’s sake that it should not matter whether or not Mr Manono was an innocent bystander or a violent criminal. The idea that the actions of the policemen assaulting him would be any more acceptable if he were a thug should be an anathema to all. For if we allow the police to ignore the law, to cut it down to get after the Devil, we will one day wake up to find that they are ignoring all manner of law in places we had little imagined. After all, the laws we have put in place exist as much to protect us from criminals as from abuse by public officials and officers of the terrible power we bestow upon them.

Similarly, online contestations over whether Mr Manono is a fake stand-in for the supposedly deceased real victim of the battering miss the point, as do the official protestations that he did not die. While the fate of the victim is undoubtedly important, it has no bearing on the legality of the police action and does not render the assault any less atrocious. And the despicable politicizing of the incident threatens to introduce a new and dangerous standard for public assessment of police conduct: did the victim die?

All this distracts from the real issue we should be coming to grips with which is the failure of security sector reforms undertaken thus far to transform the National Police Service from what the 2009 Report of the National Task Force On Police Reforms, better known as the Ransley Report, described as “a punitive citizen containment squad” into a modern institution that lives up to the motto of “Utumishi Kwa Wote”.

Reforms undertaken to date have largely been cosmetic, and haven’t addressed the culture of impunity and cruelty bred by over a century of being the enforcers of a corrupt and thieving political elite. In these circumstances, providing the police with better equipment, as the government has done, just makes them more effective oppressors of the very people they are meant to serve.