In Defense of the Death Penalty

The execution of Saddam Hussein and two of his former henchmen has brought to the fore the issue of the death penalty. Over at tHiNkeR's rOoM, M has passionately argued that corporal punishment not only serves no purpose, but reduces society to the level of the criminals it is executing. Confronted with arguments for the deterrent value of the death penalty, M rails against the injustice of punishing people for crimes they re yet to commit.

On this issue, I would respectfully (and with a measure of trepidation, given his satirical abilities) disagree with him. Let us consider his statement that killing inmates reduces us to their level. 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 the 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.

M's objection to the deterrent value of capital punishment is similarly flawed. All form of punishment is geared to achieving three goals: compensation, rehabilitation and deterrence. We jail thieves so as:
1) to get some sort of compensatory justice in that they got what was coming to them;
2) to attempt within the prison system, to rehabilitate them by showing them the error of their ways and hopefully giving them a socially acceptable alternative course of action; and
3) to deter him and other would-be criminals by promising similar treatment (in the famous words of Vioja Mahakamani, ili iwe funzo kwa wengine wenye tabia kama hiyo).

The deterrence value of punishment (capital or otherwise) is an important safeguard for society. And it does involve an element of (to paraphrase M) punishing someone for sins both he and others are yet to commit. However, by engaging in criminal activity, one does forfeit one's rights and society can then rightfully proceed to impose sanction.

To my mind, the death penalty is only acceptable if it achieves deterrence. Compensatory justice is too much like revenge to suit my taste and it is obvious that no rehabilitation (at least in this world) is offered by the gallows. If, however, executing criminals saves the life of innocents by deterring murders etc. then I think the immoral position would be to spare them (the criminals). The question thus becomes: Does capital punishment deter murder? Empirical evidence would suggest that it does. Countries that are not shy about executions such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China have dramatically low incidences of crime. As J. Edgar Hoover once put it, swift and sure punishment is the best way to deter crime. Imagine if everyone who committed murder instantaneously dropped down dead himself. It would then be safe to assume that very few murders would be committed. Since this does not happen, then we need to do the next best thing: quickly put to death anyone duly convicted of the crime.

Some raise 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.

The Empire Strikes Back

Last week's decision by President Mwai Kibaki to tear up the 1997 IPPG "Gentleman's Agreement" is the latest blast from a new wind of change sweeping Africa. Throughout the continent, the former champions of democratic and transparent government, the very people who were expected to usher in Africa's Century, are sadly changing into a familiar form -the Big Man. Kibaki now joins Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, Nigeria's Obasanjo and Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi who have discarded the democratic rule book in a bid to extend their tenures and eradicate dissent.

For a while, I thought Kenya would prove immune to this. After all, our 2002 elections were hailed far and wide as an example to the rest of the continent. Even when Kibaki reneged on promises not to interfere with talks on a new constitution, failed to punish corruption within his Cabinet and kept silent as his wife and government goons intimidated the media, I always thought that he would not be so rash as to try and take away that which, above all else, we had fought so hard for -our right to replace him in a free and fair election.

In hindsight, this was naive. Why should Kenya be different from Ethiopia or Uganda? On this Animal Farm, democracy is locked in a continuing struggle against the darker impulses of dictatorship and we should never have imagined that with the election of NARC, we had earned five years of respite from that conflict. But we did. After we expelled Daniel "Mr. Jones" Moi, we happily acquiesced in the death of Old Major, the civil society that had been the vehicle for change when the politicians failed us. We celebrated when the leading lights of this disparate band of organisations were co-opted into government. Now when, like Napoleon and Squealer, the pigs turn against us and seek to rewrite the rules on the barn wall, we find that we cannot distinguish between them and the KANU dictators.

So what to do? The nightmare of the last 5 years should teach us all one important lesson: we cannot afford to rely on the goodwill of anyone who wants to be President. We must always keep up our guard against the return of the Big Man. And though the political class will seek to present this as a fait accompli, we need to show them (Kibaki and the other pigs in both NARC-K and ODM) that our freedoms are not to be trifled with. We need to send out this message loud and clear by voting him out in such numbers that all the Electoral Commissioners in the world could not reverse it. And we need to revive civil society organisations such as the NCEC. Popular support for these would serve notice to the next State House tenant that we intend to keep him on a very short leash.

GWOT comes to Somalia

It has been a long while since I wrote a post and so much has happened in the meantime. In Somalia, Ethiopian forces have made short shrift of the much vaunted Union of Islamic Courts. In less than two weeks, the courts have been routed from many of the towns they formerly controlled and what remains of their forces is now trapped on the southern tip of the country. The noose around them is tightening as the Ethiopians advance from the north, the Kenyan border to the south and west remains closed and American warships cut off any eastward escape to the sea.

The parallels with the second Gulf War are rather unsettling. As was the case with Iraqi army, many of the armed men whose allegiance lay with the Courts simply vanished in the face of Ethipoia’s overwhelming force. Now Al-Qa'ida's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri is calling for “Muslim brethren everywhere to respond to the call for jihad in Somalia” employing “ambushes, mines, raids, and martyrdom-seeking (suicide) campaigns”. Right on cue, today brought news of American air strikes against elements of the ICU fleeing Mogadishu. As usual, US policy seems peculiarly designed to create the maximum number of terrorists.

If there was one place where America was helpful by its military absence, Somalia was it. For as long as no American forces were seen to take part in the fighting, the task force off the Somali coast notwithstanding, it would have been difficult for Al-Qaida to turn Somalia into a cause célèbre for jihadists around the world. However, by launching these air strikes, instead of waiting for the Ethiopians to finish the job, the US may have just provided the fuel for another Iraq-type “insurgency”. I suspect that many jihadists, whose goal in life seems to be to die fighting the “Great Satan”, will now be attracted by the new opportunities to do so in Somalia. It is these foreign fanatics who have the funding, expertise and will to create havoc on such a scale that the last 15 years would seem a paragon of peace and order. This conflict, which has previously been cast as a purely African affair, is in danger of becoming another front in the disastrous War on Terror. And it is Africans who would shoulder the awful burden of such an eventuality.

The air strikes also work to undermine the Transitional Federal Government by leaving it open to accusations of being a US puppet. While it is common knowledge that the US provided diplomatic cover for the Ethiopian action, the TFG itself has not so far been described as an American imposition. Considering the last US foray into Somalia, such a charge could prove fatal to President Abdullahi Yusuf’s ambitions of exerting his authority over the whole of Somalia.

Also this week, an interesting story from the UK about the furore raised over the decision by a former Education Secretary to take her kid out of public schooling and into private school. The merits of that particular case notwithstanding, I generally consider it hypocritical for those who manage education and health systems to turn to the private sector for the same services for themselves and their families. Such a disdain of the fruits of their own handiwork hardly inspires confidence. But don’t look to our Kenyan backbenchers or the opposition to make an issue of it. They are too busy lining their own pockets to care about public services.