Poor Refugees Make For Convenient Scapegoats

One would be forgiven for thinking the Kenyan government has something against sheltering the poor. The last two weeks have displayed some reflexive, ill-advised and even callous decision making that has left hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable citizens facing the prospect of enduring nights out in the cold and refugees being pressed back into the arms of the very oppressors they had fled from in the first place.

Last week, I noted that on his visit to the site of the collapsed building in Huruma where at least 50 people died, President Uhuru Kenyatta did not appear overly concerned about the fate of the many who would be rendered homeless by his order that all Nairobi residents living in unsafe buildings be evicted. By his administration’s own count, more than half of the city’s buildings were unsafe, the vast majority in poor areas.

Then came another decision seemingly out of the blue. The Dadaab refugee camp in the remote northern part of the country has been ordered to empty by November, the hundreds of thousands of refugees living there to be forcibly repatriated, most to still warring Somalia. This not only violates Kenya’s obligations under international law, but also rubbishes an arrangement with the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees for voluntary repatriation of Somali refugees. But more than that, like with the poor in Nairobi, government’s treatment of refugees exposes a callous disregard for their humanity and welfare.

It has long been clear that the poor in Kenya have been considered to be little more than sources for elite plunder, foot soldiers for elite battles and excuses for elite failures. The foreign poor have been especially badly treated by the state - relegated to the margins of society; confined in remote camps; robbed and raped by both state officials and bandits (who are many times one and the same); and then scapegoated for the government’s own security failures.

In an article published in the UK explaining the decision to close the camps, Interior Secretary Joseph Ole Nkaisserry says it was prompted by national security concerns, and especially the threat posed by Al Shabaab terrorists whom, the government claims, used the camps to plan and execute attacks like the September 2013 Westgate Mall atrocity. Of course, the Secretary was not concerned with inconveniences like facts and history.

Perhaps there is a good reason why the piece was published abroad. Many back home will remember that the though the government never provided any tangible evidence linking Dadaab to Westgate, this did not stop it demonizing refugees as security threats. Further, many will recall Operation Usalama Watch in April 2014 which was little more than officially sanctioned pillage of the sort residents in the North East are unfortunately familiar, cloaked in the language of counter-terrorism.

Even more importantly, many will remember the government’s shambolic response to Westgate and other subsequent attacks, the many failures to act on intelligence to stop the attacks and the failure to institute promised public inquiries into them. Many will remember that it was easier to blame the refugees rather than look at the real causes and failures leading to the atrocities.

Of course this did not stop Gen Nkaissery doubling down on his accusations. In an address to the local press a few days later, he accused the refugees of everything from gun running to wildlife poaching. Again, little evidence was offered for the claims. It was another blatant attempt to blame the refugees for the government’s own shortcomings. For example, despite the photogenic bonfires with which it likes to declare its commitment to wildlife conservation, the government’s actual record in this area is far from inspiring.

This same dynamic is present in the response to Huruma and in the implication that poor families move into decrepit buildings out of choice. The idea of evictions, and now of giving those displaced by the collapse tiny amounts to help them move on, implies there is somewhere for them to go. Yet as Kwame Owino of the Institute for Economic Affairs noted in November 2014, what is commonly seen as a housing problem is actually an income and employment problem.  He says that in a country in which poverty is pervasive, “a cheap house will necessarily be a bad house.”

Of course the reasons for poor incomes and high land and construction costs are to be found squarely within the policies pursued by the government as well as the interests it has prioritized. But, as with refugees, it is easier to blame the poor.

The Kenyan Roulette

Once, when I was young boy, one of my numerous uncles, a policeman by trade, came calling. He had with him a rifle and he set it down in the corner of the room. I couldn’t take my eyes of it as he and my dad chatted away. Its presence in the room was both terrifying and comforting. Terrifying because of what it could do. Comforting because, at least in my childish imagination, it would be doing it on my behalf, wielded by people on my side against those who would do me harm.

As I have grown older and hopefully wiser, I have come to see that the state’s capacity for violence is rarely comforting, that the state rarely wields its violence on my behalf. Rarely does it carry guns into homes to protect the people within. Neither is it a source of comfort to encounter them in the streets.

Though we like to tout ourselves as exceptional, as an island of peace, Kenya is actually a very violent place, where the language of violence is routinely used to mediate relationships, between parents and their children, teachers and their students, the men and their women, the rich and the poor, the state and its subjects Security and peace seem to have become the passwords to a system of exclusion that means at any time any of us could be at the receiving end even as we declare we have peace and security. On the receiving end, in fact, to preserve peace and security.

Violence has become normalized, acceptable, desirable even. It has become a way to build the nation by constantly defining ourselves in terms of opposition to one another. Kenyanness is constantly recreated  by acts of violence. Thus it becomes the height of patriotism to call for a war with Uganda over a tiny piece of rock in Lake Victoria. And unpatriotic to question the actions of the government in Somalia or in a shopping mall in Nairobi.

In the aftermath of the Westgate attacks, Kenya will again be redefined by the violence we will mete out against those we have othered. Today it is the Muslims, the refugees, the Somalis, and the Somalians. There will be little outrage when doors in Eastleigh are kicked down and people in Garissa are hauled away and some village in Somalia is leveled the name of fighting terrorism. Just as when it’s the turn of civil society activists and ICC witnesses to be threatened or hunted down in the name of preserving a tenuous peace. Before them, the Kikuyu, the Luo, the the Kalenjin the Oromo, the Sabaots, the Pokot, the Turkana, the Whites, the Indians. Everyone gets their turn on the Kenyan Roulette.

In this Republic of Fear, there is little need for justice, or values, or rights. Only someone on whom to focus our ferocity, and with whose body and dignity to establish our claim to togetherness. We constantly terrorize and dehumanize. It is a place where the victims of that violence are told to accept and move on. Where cops laugh at women reporting rape. Where a senior public official can tell the hundreds of thousands displaced by the 2007/8 post-election violence that they came out “way ahead” and face no opprobrium. It is a place where we fight, not to end oppression, but for our turn to be the oppressors, our turn to eat.

The republic is defined by the very violence we say we want to end but yet celebrate. Where the fear, adorned in the language of civility, is what unites. Where we are one because, not despite, our terror of one another. A place where reconciliation becomes a euphemism for “until next time.” A place where economic growth need not generate good jobs nor end poverty, where the purveyors of violence take what they want, when they want. Where we dare not question official truths lest we are ourselved othered.

I suppose we are not unique. It is in the nature of states to be violent. They are after all the product of exclusion. Parceling out the world according to arbitrary imaginary lines drawn on maps by men of power can only create communities where the state is allowed to decide who is a human being and who is not and where we can legitimately have otherwise obscene arguments over who deserves dignity and who doesn’t. Where humanity is accessed and indeed defined by things like citizenship and passports and IDs, the state gets to certify your very existence and can declare you a non-person.

The malevolent power, represented by the menacing presence of that gun in the corner of the room, can only offer a temporary comfort, an illusory safety, a false peace. True comfort will only come with true community, when we embrace our humanity and refuse to be defined by the logic of the state, by the logic of othering, the logic of fear. When we are one with all, not just with those who look like us or speak like us or believe what we do. Otherwise, we'll just have to take our chances on the roulette.