When Mwai Kibaki became Kenya’s third president little more than a year ago, a Gallup International survey found that the country’s people were the ”most optimistic” in the world. Euphoria had greeted Kibaki’s victory over the autocratic Daniel arap Moi, who had ruled the country with an iron fist since Jomo Kenyatta’s death in 1978.
But the elation has faded.
”If they took that survey now, the result would be very different. The fairy tale is over,” said Sunny Bindra, one of the country’s leading commentators.
Kenyans are finding that their joyous, defiant pre-election cry of ”Yote yawezakana bila Moi” is ringing true: anything, indeed, is possible now that Moi is gone — including a crime wave, the scale and intensity of which is shocking the country out of its post-election bliss.
The newspapers are filled with death and funeral notices; faded photographs of people who have been murdered smile from the pages, which carry a daily dose of horror: articles describing vicious rapes, fatal armed robberies, violent assaults. Security experts are for the first time offering a course titled ”How to survive a carjacking”.
The list of atrocities lengthens by the day, while the politicians in Parliament debate the ”resurgence” of a democratic Kenya.
On the streets, there is frustration at what the people perceive as a lack of leadership in the fractured National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) government.
”What’s the point of democracy when we are all dying? The criminals rule our lives,” said Elias Mbugua outside his food stall in Nairobi’s crime-ravaged Eastleigh estate.
It was the ordeal suffered by the former president’s nephew, Gideon Moi, that first got the country talking.
”I thought, ‘If the criminals can do this to a man as big and powerful as Moi, what will they do to us common people?”’ said Dominic Njoroge, a taxi driver.
Recently, a gang broke into Gideon Moi’s house in Nairobi’s upmarket Karen suburb. The robbers tied him and his young son up and forced them to lie face-down on the floor.
”They were extremely brutal. They would kick us hard in the head with their heavy boots and lift up our heads to violently punch us directly in the eyes,” Moi recalled. ”They threatened to kill my son but I pleaded with them and prayed to God for them to spare his life.”
The Moi family has relinquished political rule, but it remains one of the most powerful institutions in Kenya.
”They are seen as ‘untouchables’ and for this thing to happen to Gideon Moi … well, it really shocked the whole country,” said Stephen Muiruri, crime reporter for The Nation newspaper. ”It made people think: ‘We are all under threat; no one is safe.’ Fear is thick in the air of Kenya.”
The public perception is that the attacks on Moi and other prominent personalities would never have happened under the previous regime.
”Hey, if [Daniel arap] Moi was still president, the rogues would never have dared harming such important people. Moi would have hunted these criminals down and slaughtered them.” said Simon Kirwa, a flower seller in Nairobi’s Westlands suburb.
As the Moi incident proved, crime is no longer confined to the country’s township slums as it mostly was in the recent past. Now, the new targets are MPs, businessmen and high court judges in the leafy suburbs.
But it’s not only the rich who are suffering under the crime scourge. Baby rape, a crime previously unheard of in Kenya, is making its horrific appearance.
A public outcry followed the recent murder of two-year-old Milka Wanjiku. Her body was found in a bush at Kiambu, central Kenya, her mouth caked in blood and filled with soil: ”to stop her from screaming” according to the police. Baby Milka had been strangled and gang-raped; three used condoms were found near her broken body.
The outcry after the girl’s brutal death was intensified by the government’s release of a statement insisting that crime wasn’t increasing; that it was ”normal”.
”There’s this real feeling that Kibaki is a nice guy, but politically, he’s weak. Whereas the criminals feared Moi and his police thugs, they are simply not afraid of Kibaki and see today’s Kenya police as toothless incompetents, only good for taking bribes,” one of the country’s top lawyers told the Mail & Guardian.
Kibaki, however, is trying desperately to transform Kenya from the police state it once was into a country with respect for human rights. A Bill has been passed declaring torture illegal. Soon, the Kenya Police Force will change its name to that of the Kenya Police Service.
The president has raised police salaries to boost his officers’ morale. He has formed special 24-hour anti-crime units. He has sacked his police commissioner who, in a moment that resulted in stunned disbelief throughout Kenya, stated that Nairobi’s streets were safe to walk at night.
But Kenyans aren’t convinced by Kibaki’s ”reforms”. They simply do not trust the police, who they regard as inefficient, corrupt and criminals themselves.
Said Muiruri: ”Some crooked officers are themselves involved in violent crime. Sometimes they even hire [out] their guns to criminals.
”Unlike in other countries, there is no independent body in Kenya to investigate the police. They commit crimes knowing that their colleagues will cover them up.”
Yet even the police in Kenya do not trust their fellow officers: when they raided the home of a prominent businessman suspected of running a crime syndicate, they made use of officers based outside Nairobi. When asked for an explanation, a spokesperson for police headquarters said that the police in the capital had been ”compromised”.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the Narc government is wracked by infighting and power struggles; many in Kenya regard the so-called ”coalition” as politically immature and unable to win — or even fight — a war on crime.
”It beggars belief that the government still seems unable to give this [crime] issue the importance it deserves. We really don’t need any police statistics to realise that we live in … a war zone … when nearly everyone you know has been affected by violent crime, you know we’re in deep trouble,” said Bindra.
Today in Kenya, as in South Africa, people gather around braais and bar counters to chat casually about the latest crime to affect them personally.
Security Minister Chris Murungaru continues to blame the upsurge in violent crime on the fact that criminals have easy access to all manner of weapons. Kenya is surrounded by the war zones of southern Sudan, northern Uganda, Somalia and the lawless southern plains of Ethiopia — areas frequented by gunrunners, where it is possible to exchange a few bulls for an AK-47.
But Kenyans themselves are not bothered about where the guns are coming from, nor about who is committing the crime, they just want it to end.
”I don’t care if it’s Osama bin Laden,” said Mohamed Asen, a survivor of a hijacking. ”It must just stop. Immediately. Otherwise this so-called ‘miracle’ [Kenya’s transition from Moi to Kibaki] will become a curse and Kenya will cry again.”
But for many, at gravesides and bloody murder scenes across the country, the weeping has already begun.