Bloodbath in the city
4 cops, 6 thugs killed in shoot-out
By MAXWELL MASAVA
GUNMEN took over control of parts of Nairobi yesterday killing four police officers in what was feared could have been a well-orchestrated killing mission. Three other officers were injured and rushed to hospital in critical condition.
A stab in the country’s security shield, the death drama saw gun-wielding criminals eliminate a CID officer, an administrative policeman and a uniformed policeman in three separate incidents within a span of two hours.
But the officers immediately hit back with ferocity that saw six gangsters killed and a cache of firearms recovered, in the orgy that reminisced scenes of Wild West movies…
At Greenfields estate off Jogogo road, a lone police officer who was on undercover mission to investigate the movement of a stolen car ran into a gang of three men who sprayed him with bullets before escaping with his pistol…
But as the killing was being carried out in Greenfields, more drama was unfolding in Nairobi’s River Road area where a police mission to smash a criminal gang turned tragic with one of the officers being shot dead on the scene…
In a quick retaliation, the other group of officers gunned down all the three gangsters and recovered one AK 47 rifle, four pistols and several rounds of ammunition. The officer died while he was being rushed to hospital for treatment…
At Westlands, another group of gunmen were plotting a robbery at Barclays Bank next to Landmark Hotel where [an] unknown amount of money was stolen. An administration policeman who was part of the cash-on-transit escorting team was shot and killed. His two colleagues sustained serious bullet wounds after an exchange with the robbers.
Sources say another officer died while being rushed to hospital by his colleagues. A passerby caught in the middle of the shoot-out was also killed. A body of a gangster believed to have been shot during the bank raid was found dumped along Peponi road in Westlands a few hours later. Two more suspects were killed near City Park after they were trailed by police for more than two hours.
Police Spokesman Erick Kiraithe said police were aware of those planning to commit criminal activities across the country and warned that “criminals’ days were numbered and that they should expect a full force of the law.” He would not, however, rule out any possible link between yesterday’s killings to the current circulation of leaflets inciting members of the public against the government.
The killings in Nairobi came as police in Central province confirmed that they had arrested a suspect in connection with the circulation of leaflets in the province.
According to reports, the suspect was said to have confessed to having received money from unnamed people in Nairobi to circulate the leaflets which called on members of the public to arise and fight the current government.
The arrest comes in the wake of police investigations on the circulation of leaflets calling on people believed to be adherents of the outlawed Mungiki sect to arise and protect themselves from alleged government harassment and intimidation.
This was our up close and personal (The Barclay’s bank that was robbed was a quarter mile from our apartment, and we had used their ATM several times.) introduction to the clandestine and dreaded Mungiki. We had previously heard about killings in Central Kenya (including several beheadings) but hadn’t paid close attention. With events happening in our neighborhood, we became very attentive. We wanted to know who these Mungiki were and why they were doing these terrible things. To satisfy our curiosity, we began asking questions, but the answers we got weren’t always straightforward.
As with most aspects of the Mungiki story, their origins are shrouded in mystery. From most accounts we heard, the Mungiki began in the 1980s as either a self-defense force or political action group (depending on your sympathies) promoting the rights and protection of the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest tribe. Supposedly, they modeled themselves on the Mau Maus who led the rebellion against British colonialism in the 1950s. After some years of political action (perhaps peaceful or perhaps violent), the Mungiki morphed from their original form into more of a religious cult whose members wore dreadlocks and promoted traditional rituals such as female circumcision. During this period, the Mungiki seemed responsible for more fear than criminal action. However, in their next incarnation, the Mungiki abandoned any pretense of adhering to principle and became a dangerous, mafia-type gang. Migrating from central Kenya to Nairobi, the Mungiki established criminal enterprises, the most well-known of which were the protection racket and extortion of the matatu (public minibus) trade.
The Mungiki seemed to still have ties to politics and employed ethnic-based violence to influence elections. They seemed to be available to serve whatever politician would hire them. Rumors also swirled that the Mungiki had ties to the highest levels of government and bribed the police to minimize interference in Mungiki affairs. As with the original protection schemes of the Italian mafia, some people initially welcomed the intervention of the Mungiki. At least with one dominant gang, some people felt they weren’t in danger from multitudes of independent petty criminals or wars among lesser gangs. They knew who the boss was and felt safe as long as the appropriate tribute was paid.
The matatu drivers felt differently. They received no benefit from being forced to make daily extortion payments to Mungiki members. In most cases, they felt powerless to resist, but during our time in Nairobi, the matatu drivers staged a strike hoping to get the government to take action against the extortionists. The matatu drivers’ strike crippled Nairobi transportation for a day and kicked off one of the numerous battles in the Mungiki wars of 2007. Several outspoken matatu drivers and local Mungiki leaders were killed in a series of back and forth reprisals. Some were killed in particularly horrific ways, such as being trapped inside as their houses were burned around them.
A few weeks later, two police officers were shot and killed in the Mathare slum in Nairobi. The next night, the police stormed Mathare looking for the culprits (presumably Mungiki) who had killed the officers, as well as Mungiki members who had been implicated in a string of beheadings. The police killed twenty-two and arrested over one hundred during extended gun battles. In the meantime, the beheadings continued and so did the police crackdown. After the incident in Mathare, it was rare to hear of anyone being arrested, but the killings on both sides continued. By the end of June, the combined death toll was over fifty. Speculation continued about the Mungiki’s aim to destabilize the country before the upcoming presidential elections.
For weeks, there seemed to be battles going back and forth between police and the Mungiki. The Mungiki would kill some low-level politicians or police officers, anyone representing the government, often in horrific ways. Then the police would stage a large raid on supposed Mungiki compounds and rarely took prisoners. Politicians would make pronouncements and citizens expressed increasing outrage. For a while, the police seemed to be initiating most of the battles, and then it all seemed to stop. It just wasn’t in the news anymore. There was a lot of speculation on what had happened, but apparently, nobody really knew or was willing to say. The predominant story was that the president had become enraged with the lawless killings and had forcefully ordered his security forces to fix the problem. The speculation was that at this point, any political allies of the Mungiki could no longer protect them and the police got free rein to go after them using whatever force and tactics they felt necessary. It wasn’t until many months later that any information surfaced, but when it did, the speculation was essentially confirmed.
Nov 8th, NAIROBI
From The Economist print edition
Who is to blame for a spate of execution-style killings?
SINCE the summer, 454 bodies have been dumped in mortuaries, mainly in or around Nairobi, the capital, most of them shot in the back of the head. They had all been killed by “state security agents”—at least, that was the extraordinary claim made this week in a report by Kenya’s official human-rights commission. The police, it added, had shown little interest in investigating the deaths and had obstructed the commission’s work.
The report seems to confirm rumours that the interior ministry organised an undercover squad to hunt down and kill members of the Mungiki sect, a Kikuyu gang that has terrorised central Kenya on and off for years, not least by decapitating its victims. Mungiki foot-soldiers have also been used by politicians to rough up opposition supporters, but a killing spree earlier this year was a step too far. In June the government ordered a crackdown. Many Mungiki leaders have since disappeared.
The head of the police, Hussein Ali, denies any wrongdoing. Where, he asks, is the evidence? The report, he says, showed the “level to which the human rights commission had degenerated”; the dead were killed in car crashes or in gang violence.
Kenyan police, he insists, do not engage in crime. But some think one reason war was declared on the Mungiki was because they were muscling in on police earnings from bus touts and others in poorer bits of Nairobi. A grave allegation in the report is that some of those killed paid hefty bribes to the police to be let out of prison after a round-up of suspected Mungiki, only to vanish later.
There are calls for an independent inquiry. Many feel sorry for the police, who have lost 15 officers to the Mungiki this year alone. But Mr. Ali’s denials fail to answer the main charges: why the lack of a proper investigation, why the execution-style of the killing, and why so many dead?
Another question is what part, if any, the killings will play in next month’s general and presidential elections. A crackdown on the Mungiki, whose origins lie in Kikuyu folklore, may placate some of those who complain that the Kikuyus, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, have been hogging economic and political power. But the sheer scale of the killings makes everyone feel queasy.
I felt queasy too, but conflicted. How should a developing country, with limited resources, deal with a pervasive criminal element? Whether it’s Kenya or a Latin American country fighting drug cartels, what should they do? It seems obvious that they can’t afford to take the U.S. approach of gathering detailed evidence on each individual criminal to prove his guilt in a court of law, beyond reasonable doubt, allowing challenges to the admissibility of evidence and subsequent appeals of any guilty verdicts. I think the U.S. justice system is wonderful for us, and I’m glad that it protects the rights of the accused. But it is very expensive, time consuming, and would be entirely ineffective for developing countries. They just don’t have the resources to take this approach and protect the rights of probable criminals. On the other end of the spectrum, legitimate governments cannot just adopt the tactics of the criminals and engage in all-out war on questionable members of its society. Where is the right balance? Kenya seemed to have stepped over the line with all of the killings, but order had been reestablished in many communities and citizens no longer felt threatened. I don’t know where the line should be drawn, but I’m sure it will remain thin and gray. This dilemma provided just one more lesson in our ongoing education into the challenges of developing countries.
The Mungiki drama just added to all of the other safety issues that one could worry about, but like the rest, it never touched us personally. We were not directly involved and highly unlikely to be directly impacted—nor are the vast majority of visitors to Kenya or Africa. When we returned to the US, I read in the newspaper about gang murders in Oakland, California, just across the bay from Silicon Valley. Then a TechnoServe colleague was mugged in Washington DC. Several weeks later a good friend told me about her daughter having her purse forcibly stolen in San Francisco. Bad things and risks are everywhere. Whether in the US or Africa, people just need to understand the situation and potential risk, take protective action where required, and then get comfortable with taking some chances for the trade-off of a wonderful experience.
TIA, but Some Things Work Quite Well;
And Africans Can Be Very Resourceful
For those who haven’t seen the movie Blood Diamonds, TIA stands for “This Is Africa.” In the movie, the male hero, Leonardo di Caprio, who has grown up in Africa, uses TIA to inform the naive female journalist that things don’t work the same way in Africa as they do in the developed world. It’s sort of like Dorothy turning to Toto and saying, “Did you think you were still in Kansas?” In our journey, we encountered many versions of the same saying including, “Welcome to Africa,” “Welcome to Swaziland,” “Welcome to Uganda,” and the French version “C’est l’Afrique.” All of these were used at various times to explain why some process, equipment, or piece of infrastructure didn’t work as might be expected in the developed world. These phrases were often spoken with a shrug of the shoulders, a tone of resignation, and the unstated but implied question of, “Did you really expect it to be any different?” They were also spoken only to newcomers or visitors who have come to Africa with their unrealistic Western expectations of how things should work. The locals are never surprised. They know what to expect.
I never got comfortable with TIA and never developed a standard approach to dealing with it. I couldn’t consistently resolve my inner conflict, and maybe that was okay. Maybe a situational approach was appropriate, but it always made me uncomfortable. At times, I would become internally infuriated at things that didn’t work properly such as unashamedly poor customer services, bad infrastructure, shoddy products, etc. I knew that the whole acceptance of TIA in society had to change if the economy were to advance. On the other hand, I knew that the people I was dealing with directly had little or no power to makes things different, and that when I complained, I sounded like an elitist outsider who had no real understanding of reality. In work situations where I had some influence, I tried to coach and cajole people to fight the system of complacency and to make positive change. However, outside of work, I often just figuratively threw up my hands, tried not to get too upset, and as much as possible, went along with the flow.
Despite the prevalence of TIA, we were surprised numerous times when things in Africa worked quite well. At other times we were amazed at the resourcefulness of Africans in overcoming barriers and challenges. For example:
When Wendy first arrived in Kenya, I was shocked to see her being pushed out of the baggage area in a wheelchair. When she got to me, she explained that after I left the United States, she had hurt her ankle. She had gone to the doctor at Stanford University Health Center, and they had done an x-ray. The report came back that there was no sign of a break, so she must have sprained her ankle. Wendy explained that it continued to be quite painful, even with just walking. During one airport layover, she had to rush between terminals with a heavy carry-on, and she had really strained herself. Her ankle throbbed throughout the flight, so when she arrived in Nairobi, she requested a wheelchair.
Over the following weeks, she was able to walk, but her ankle still hurt, and she couldn’t do any strenuous activity. After more than a month, she finally saw a local doctor and explained what had happened. He ordered a CAT scan of her ankle, and the results came back that afternoon. She had a nondisplaced fracture of the fibula. The fracture was healing so there was nothing special to be done, but at least she knew the real story and didn’t have to feel that she was just being a wimp. As an aside, the bill for the doctor visit and the CAT scan came to about $120 in total. I’m sure the charges for similar services in the United States would be more than ten times that amount.
Wendy got a copy of her diagnosis and sent it back to the doctors at Stanford. They sent back a very defensive letter explaining how nondisplaced fractures are very hard to detect initially but can be more easily seen after calcium is built up during healing, etc. I’m sure all of that is true, but it was quite amusing that her ankle problem was correctly diagnosed in Africa after having been missed at one of the premier medical institutions in the United States.
