When Crimes were Simpler…

I was still very young. We woke up one morning to find our kitchen window wide open. It did not take a genius to figure out that we had been robbed. We went outside the house and sure enough, we found the evidence of the activity that took place the night before. From our window to the gate and beyond, we found a tract; not two like those made a bicycle, not wide like those made by a car; just one tract like that made by a wheelbarrow.

We followed it like breadcrumbs with the eagerness of cartoon characters believing that it would lead us to the perpetrators of this heinous crime. But no sooner had it reached the main road than it ended. The tarmac road was a street away and the few cars that roamed the roads then in addition to the human traffic had done a good job of wiping the tract away. We returned to our house, the entire neighbourhood kids behind us and we were eager to hear my mum’s assessment of the damage. This was after all her kitchen and my dad had probably never set foot in there . She said that her Sufurias including the one she had soaked because we had eaten Ugali the previous night, her frying pans, her spoons and basically every other utensil that was in the kitchen that night had been stolen including the ones holding the leftover food. The food went too.

The second time we were robbed was less dramatic but with the same wheelbarrow. My Dad with his blue second-hand Datsun was the victim. He woke up in the morning and on starting his car realized that the battery was missing. These bastards had come at night, popped the hood of the car open, took the battery and put it in the wheelbarrow and wheeled it away.  My dad was stark raving mad. Over the next few weeks or months, for security he had an electric wire connected to the body of the car just in case those thieving bastards came back. We had not heard of alarms in those days, not even on TV.

Our last experience with thieves was a wrong call. There we were, sleeping; me and my bro on one bed in the other room and my mum and the twins (then very young) in the other. My dad had not yet come home because he used the car for a few hours every night as a taxi to supplement his monthly income. Suddenly in the dead of the night, we heard the loudest pounding on the door as if in a frantic effort to break it down. My mum SCREAMED! The louder the pounding got, the more deafening her screams became. But unlike tradition, nobody showed nor showed any signing of coming to help. Eventually, these guys identified themselves as cops and cursed my mum over and over because of her screams. I was under the bed at the time. They announced they were looking for thieves (which my mum had mistaken them for – I WONDER WHY?) A lady with four young kids was not enough to convince them to leave her alone; she had to go borrow money from the neighbours to bribe them to leave. She had already given them all she had and they were not satisfied.

So effectively, the third time we were robbed, it was by the cops. Corruption did not start yesterday.

But that was it. Over the years, people who had been caught stealing were killed. Many had passed through our estate as they ran towards the slum area adjacent to the park. We usually followed the mob and found the alleged thieves either being stoned, being burnt, or already dead. We never knew what they stole, where they stole, or whom they stole from. And dead men don’t talk. Rumours however abound with people telling their versions of the story. But it was never nothing more than a purse, clothes from the line, a bicycle etc. There were these two who had stolen mattresses and on being caught, were tied in between the mattresses and lit up. They died a very painful death.

But that was then. A robbery mission for thieves involved going to steal without raising any alarm. Stealth mode was their modus operandi and simple things the objects of their desires.

But increasingly over the years, crime changed. Crime was no longer about stealth but about force. The balls that the police had back then to slam our door in the dead of the night had now transferred to criminals. They came to steal with big stones to knock door downs, machetes to threaten to harm or harm the occupants and came in large numbers so as to carry as much as possible. Whereas we had grown in an estate with wooden doors, wire mesh grills, where fences were imaginary or wooden or natural (thorny trees); new building that came up were built had with wooden doors but reinforced with an outer metal door, metal window grills, and high-rise brick fences topped up with broken glasses. Force was being met with force.

Still it was not enough. Where people were resourceful, criminals were creative. They no longer used brute force to make their way into a house but rather came equipped. They came with padlock cutters which were also used to also cut the window grills, some came with oxygen tanks to burn through the grills and metal doors, and there was a case where these bastards carried a grenade just to force open a door. Money now became the difference between safety from robberies and being victims. Those with money hired the best security agencies whose numbers had now surged. They also had electric wires surrounding their fences and well fed big-ass dogs guarding their homes. And just in case, they had a gun in the house and bodyguards with them the rest of the time.

But criminals got guns too. Safety was no longer a priority in our homes alone but everywhere else too. What was being stolen was now not just in the homes. The game had changed. There was money in the bank, money being ferried to the bank, value of the car, jewels, phones, laptops etc and this is what the target became. Carjacking increased, muggings became rampant, ngeta became a noun, and crime had evolved yet again. The victims had to become creative. We bought cheap phones, used plastic money, carried laptops in paper bags (kando ya nyanya na kitungu) and made every other effort to make ourselves least likely to be potential targets. But now crime became personal. When these thieving bastards find you with a cheap phone, they have the audacity to insult you and break the phone and encourage you to buy phones worth stealing. They find you with a debit or credit card and force you at gun point to withdraw everything and max-out your credit card.

From personal, crime became brutal and inhumane. People no longer just lost they property, they lost more. They no longer just steal from you now. The hijackings were never complete without a dead driver or a raped woman and increasingly men too. Now they also cut private parts off. The Mungiki tortured and then cut the heads of their victims off. And with human life seemingly worth less today than ever before, killers for hire has become a thriving business in Kenya. Kidnappings for ransom in now the fad among the criminal fraternity and given all these, I am scared what will happen next.  I talked to mum the other day and she told me of a case in a Nairobi estate where kids sent to the shops are drugged, molested and left for dead. I missed the story on TV but honestly, when we can turn against our own children like this; haven’t we reached the end of the line?

What happened to the days when crimes were simple? When you would wait until I was asleep to steal my shirt from the line. What is happening to our society?

A wife cannot trust his husband with their daughter; a mother cannot trust her brother or even father with her daughters; you cannot trust your neighbour with your kids; a man cannot trust his wife with the pin number; a parent does not trust the teachers with his/her children; the owner does not trust the watchman with the property; a father is not sure whether these kids are his; and everyone in society is potentially a threat to the next person in any number of ways. Just in the last month, a maid stabbed her employer to death, a young mother threw her just born infant from the balcony, a head teacher was ejected from school by parents for raping their daughters, a kidnapped Sudanese child was brutally murdered because the ransom was not paid, and KES 33 million shillings was stolen through a collusion of cops and robbers.

Can we take all these in our stride and if we can, I wonder what will shock us enough to stop, think, and wish for the days when crimes were simpler.

Here’s How! Lessons for the Kenyan Police Force.

I simply cannot let the police get away with the excuse that they have not been able to do their jobs simply because the Civil Society will not let them get away with extra judicial killings. I have seen accusation after accusation being cast at the Civil Society simply because they cannot let the police get away with state sanctioned murder; even if it is of the dreaded and murderous Mungiki sect. The point that seems to be lost to most people who have come on board to peddle this excuse on behalf of the police is the fact that once the police become executioners, it won’t end with the elimination of the Mungiki sect. It will only be the beginning and we will all fall prey. So I ask you not to let anybody rationalize any murder, judicial, extrajudicial, mob justice or otherwise etc. Those are the classic signs of Societal moral fibre decay.

Further, the police are acting as if the only way to deal with this sect is through execution of its members. They formed the “elite” KweKwe (weed) squad to go around eliminating the sect members. They executed suspected members of this dreaded sect in an effort to weed them out of society and as a result, the Civil Society came out shouting. The way the police have gone about tackling these devils of men is all wrong and in fact counterproductive. While the Human Rights activists are putting forward a genuine case that is of Human Rights concern, the Mungiki have hitched a right on this to make themselves out as the victim. The police have come out as the protagonists simply because they do not know any better than playing into the hands of this sect that is a pest that has learnt to hitch a ride on any idea that might make them look as the victims, and even, God forbid, good.

Last week, the sect members came under attack from the very public that they were fleecing money from; and 15 of their members were killed. It was vividly clear that this sect will not let that pass and in less than a week, they came back with a vengeance and killed 29 members of the public who had dared stand up to them. I guess that like me, you are wondering where the police were. Well, I would have expected that in anticipation of the retaliation, the police would have beefed up security in the area which would have prevented the whole things from happening in the first place. But they did not and only showed up the next day to carry the bodies of the dead to the mortuary. And as if that is not shameful in itself, they came with politicians and were armed to the tooth, (when it was of no use.)

I will start by saying that the excuses by the Police Commissioner simply will not fly. He expects to murder Mungiki suspects and walk away with it; but I won’t let him because his men will not know when or how to stop well after they wipe out the sect members. And that scares me and it should scare you too because we would be the next victims. This man is complaining because nobody is letting him kill without due regard to the due process of the law. I will however expose the underbelly of what is wrong with his institution, his men, and also his methods. And the reason I simply cannot stand for any attack against the Civil Society because of their condemnation of such killings is because such state sanctioned killings will make killers of cops who might start seeking ransom from families of arrested people (which has allegedly started) otherwise, your kin sleep with fishes.” They might effectively replace the sect since what the sect have works.

This is my two cent worth logic on how to deal with this sect;

Be Smart About It…

If I were the Police Commissioner, I would be smarter about elimination this sect and I have the brains to explain how.

First, I would form the KweKwe squad, just as he did, but with less brawn and more brain. I am talking about a small elite team of distinguished officers whose sole task would be to bringing to an end this organized crime. And clearly set out in the teams Terms of Reference would be a structure of how things will be play out.

Organized crime will never be broken down by killings the foot soldiers, as the police have done. There has to be a system in place that is working on how to systematically collapse this sect all the while ensuring the chances of it rising again are slim to none. Does killing some machete wielding, disillusioned, drug overdosed, worker drone idiot help? No! Not one bit. That is merely being ignorant to the bigger picture.

The systematic approach would be this…

I would have my lean team of smart men draw several columns on a white board with each bearing the following titles.

1. Financiers;

2. Key Leaders;

3. The Organizational Structure;

4. The Hierarchy of Leadership and everybody who heads each;

5. And the Beneficiaries.

I would then expect these officers to use their intelligence gathering skills to put names, places, structures etc. adjacent to each of the above. I would then expect them to put pictures, papers, tapes, recordings etc. to each item that comes up on the white board. This things is not time bound but whatever the time spent, the following will be clear once this is done:

1. We would know who the financiers are; be they from the business community, politicians, police, and where their needs meet.

2. We would know who the leaders of the sect are, from the head honcho to the street vendor who collects money from Matatu’s.

3. We would know how they make decisions and more importantly whose word is final. We would know the channels of communication, and tap them for more juice.

4. We would understand the hierarchy, which like the analysis of physical structures will help us understand which pillars, if taken out will make the whole thing come crushing down.

5. We would know who the beneficiaries are, and since most are politicians, this would let us know who to avoid talking to since they might collapse the whole investigations to protect their asses. We would better yet understand whether there is sufficient goodwill (political or otherwise) to bring this group down.

Armed with this information, we would have the power. And the rest would be taking all the above out. I am not talking about killing here, but that will always be on the table given the inclination of these people to go down shooting. I mean that in a well planned, well coordinated and synchronized attack, we would go in and arrest each of the above mentioned groups of people, which will effectively collapse the core of this sect. This will be a smaller number and hence very much possible to arrest as I have mentioned above. After taking these people out, the remaining bits and pieces of the sect will crumble and fall or implode as they seek to find among themselves who to lead them. Either way, they will be in a more vulnerable position and the police can now easily go around collecting them.

This last point is important and deserves a paragraph of its own.

When the public sees that the key leaders, financiers, beneficiaries, and “branch” leaders of the sect have been arrested, they will come out and stand up to those remaining dissidents who may want to continue the sect’s operations of collecting where they did not sow. I look forward to the day that these guys show up to collect and people say no, followed up with, “What you gon do about it?”

Would this work? Most probably! I however invite those with intelligence training to tell me and those who follow this blog what might not work, and how to make it work. Be useful in wiping out this pest of a sect. And if you feel inclined to curse me for whatever reason (it is expected ), do that keeping in mind that I helping an Institution and by extension government or is that the other way round, that seems incapable of doing anything right or even doing anything at all. If they were doing their job, I would be studying CFA as opposed to typing what these idiots are paid to think.

Back to Books now… I have a small exam tomorrow (and the MAJOR CFA in June) something that has cost me quite a lot but which I finally get to put behind me. Wish me luck, but save most of it for this country.

Kenyans! The Killing season is here… (get away with murder.)

26 people were massacred last night. They were lured out at 2.am in the morning by a neighbours burning house. Unknown to them, the occupants of the house were dead and burning with the house, and that the Mungiki sect members who had killed the occupants lay in wait for those who responded. The Mungiki then pounced on those who responded and hacked 26 to death with machetes and axes. As I write this, I have just witnessed the dead and the living in that village; the dead were dead, bloody, and scattered all over the place (bringing to mind the Rwandan Genocide) and from how things looked, these people died the most painful deaths. The living were scared to the bone, crying, and mourning, and looked hopeless.

Over the past week, members from this very village had ganged up and killed 15 suspected Mungiki members. They went round, dragged these members from their houses, and killed them in the most ruthless of ways. Some were hacked to death and the rest were burned. As I watched this unfold, I was too aware of what would unfold next. One, I understood that the police were doing nothing, and that more deaths were in the offing. Two, I knew that the Mungiki retaliation was a matter of when and not if, and given their killing expertise and the impunity that they have enjoyed lately, I feared that they would kill by the dozen. They did, and those mourning are bound to regroup after burials, and the cycle of violence will continue.

I wrote “it is a time to kill or get killed” a while back, and one person insulted me and accused me of complaining too much. I had written about the way murder is becoming the easiest crime to get away with in Kenya but people did not want to hear any of it. Another comment on the same blog post but republished by Storymoja Africa said that I was a bit radical (though he understood where I was coming from.) But I now dare tell you that the all the extrajudicial deaths around the country, not just by the police but also by mob justices, the Mungiki, robbers etc. were leading to this moment, the killing season. Yes, the killing season is here and for how long is now the question.

40 people have died in the past week and in two adjacent villages alone and here is what happened.

The Mungiki sect set up shop in this village as they have in many other villages in Central Kenya and some parts of Nairobi and even in Nakuru. After setting up their operations in this village, they started charging “taxes,” (protection money) which is in effect protecting you from them since those who fail to pay are beheaded. People were being charged daily fees just for living in ones house among other ridiculous charges. People can only be oppressed for so long, and as Booker T. Washington once said, “a man will only ride on your back if it is bent.” The men in these villages, having ran out of patience with the sect and the police too who had failed to protect them from this sect, decided to take matters into their own hands. They searched for members of this sect and butchered them in broad daylight. And as I earlier stated, retaliations from this dreaded sect was only a matter time.

If I were the police, I would have anticipated these retaliations and would have gone ahead to take measures to mitigate them. I would have requested for more police patrols in the area and even brought in help from other stations if capacity was the issue. I would imposed a curfew if need be, and I assure you that 26 people would not have been butchered under my watch. And here is the thing, when people are being hacked with machetes, they scream, and I do not get how the police can miss that. If I were the police, I should have in the first place known that the Mungiki were running a parallel Government in this village and would have prevented this eventual catastrophe that is bound to travel across the country. If I were the police, I would be smarter about eliminating the Mungiki sect once and for all, which to me means removing those who fund it, those who organize its operations across the country, and later, as the chips fall, the foot soldiers. Merely looking for any suspected Mungiki adherent in the streets and executing them in the woods only adds insult to injury, and makes it difficult for the few good cops who are trying to do things eight to do their jobs.

But I am not the police, and the police did not do any of the above, and as a result, 40 people are dead. The police have failed.

I wrote last year at the cycle that propagates crime in this country Impunity in Kenya and which has led desperate people to be murderers. You see, and as I wrote then, when people who ought to be arrested are let loose because they bribed the arresting cops, the community uses mob justice to deal with them. When people are convicted and later on make escape plans in cohorts with warders, for a fee, the community uses mob justice to weed these convicts out. When the police arrest someone they believe to be guilty but he either pays the Judiciary and walks or walks on a technicality, the police find executing of these suspects a more effective way of administering justice. When the same police and warders do not earn enough in a month to even feed their children, all the above become acceptable, for that extra fee, money that will enable a man feel like a father to his kids and as a husband to his wives. Some even abandoned police work completely to go into better paying jobs, robbery, kidnapping for ransom, assassins for hire etc.

You would think I am talking about Somalia, but I am talking about Kenya. That is the extent of failure in our systems and the chaos and anarchy that naturally follows has already started.

People would not organize themselves to kill the Mungiki sect members if the police were doing their jobs, and the Government protecting its people. People would not be subjected to double taxation – to both the Government and to the Mungiki sect if we indeed had a functioning government. But the government is acting as if this thing cannot be curbed. Those in charge are talking in ways that suggest that this thing is beyond them to curb. And that is the dilemma that one faces when the very sect you financed for political mileage needs to be brought to book. The sect just as well as you actually know that neither has the moral authority to check the other for neither are holier than thou. That is what I believe to be the reason that this sect has gained so much prominence in the country. And with that, I feel I can assertively ask; are these the kind of jobs that the President promised Kenyans since this group has grown exponentially after he came to power?

And now that the Internal Security Minister is talking tough and heading to the place where the massacre took place, I am reminded of the phrase we used to say in campus when playing rugby – “shining after the whistle.” We used this to refer to those players who produced their best moves after the final whistle was blown, when it helped nobody. And our cops and the internal security Minister are masters of shining after the whistle, when the dead are getting ready to be buried.

Even as I leave you to ponder on the above, death is in the air. 15 sect members were killed, and the sect retaliated by killing 26 villagers. And I am positive that the remaining villages are now planning another counter attack on the sect, with greater casualties. And as with all wars, this is bound to escalate. Those killed are miles away from where I am typing from, but even so, emulating Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemoller, a German protestant pastor who wrote the timeless words below while imprisoned by the Hitler regime, I must write this blog and all the disturbing content herein for as he then wrote,

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Now put that in future tense. It is only a matter of time before Mungiki demand to Govern the country. They have already come for those in central province and every other place that they have set up base, and I dare rise and speak for them so that there can be someone to speak for me too when they come for me. And I will be damned if I do not speak out against it and against the cops and politicians who have never understood the sanctity of human lives. These guys are growing in number and are running villages and towns like Government. Where is the Government? Who is the Government?