Tana River is gushing with blood. Over 100 killed in the most macabre circumstances in three bouts of madness in a month. Children are among those killed, and their only ‘crime’ that took them to early grave is being seen to be tomorrow’s warriors.
Also killed are hapless women and old men, entrapped in their homes by gun-wielding raiders – whose mission is to ring them in their homesteads so that the hatchet men can strike those fleeing their burst of gunfire at the doorstep.
In free Kenya, the raiders in one incident chopped at least 300 heads of cattle to death, not only as an insult to the targeted community whose treasure are the animals they keep, but also an act of impoverishment because the cattle kraal is their lifeline and literally their bank account.
In free Kenya, a people are banished from their homes in cyclic attacks. When news crew visited homesteads that were the other day teeming with humanity and laughter, they were abandoned huts; some of them burnt out and destroyed.
In free Kenya, which thumbs its chest as an icon of democracy and an island of peace in a region that often degenerates into chaos in the hands of bloodthirsty, roguish, and thieving tribal kings and corrupt leadership, human blood flows alongside Kenya’s longest and most treasured river.
That it is not the first time this is happening is an insult to our claim to a high sense of patriotism and nationhood. It is an indictment of our Kenyan hood, and confirmation we either do not care to stop the killings or just plain indifference.
Angels of Death
For it can’t be that we have forgotten that only ten years ago, the angels of death struck again in Tana River Delta, and when sanity was restored, over 200 were dead.
The question we need to ask, and should prick our collective consciences as a nation is, are we incapable of protecting our people, and are we that clueless of impending attacks?
Can’t our intelligence pick up the signs of coming trouble, and help stem the killings? Or is it that the National Security Intelligence Service is too busy tapping phones, tracking politicians, and monitoring who is saying what in the run-up to elections, to notice other threats to national security?
In this financial year alone the intelligence budget went up to Sh13 billion. Surely must this resource not be used to monitor what is happening even in the remotest corners of Kenya however peripheral?
Or have we, as a country, forgotten the counsel by Martin Luther King that, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’?
How do we expect to maintain peace in the rest of the country if we can’t contain merchants of death in Tana who apportion the same value they reserve for flies on the wall on innocent children?
The net effect of this neglect and apathy would surely embolden other terror and tribal gangs. They would, from the way security agencies have behaved on the Tana case, conclude the Government is drowning in apathy, clueless, or even bound by the ropes of I-don’t-care attitude.
It beats common sense that a country so robust like Kenya, with one of the most respected security force, whose prowess is being seen and revered by the world in the war against Al Shabaab militia inside Somalia, cannot detect and stop the movement of a rag-tag militia in the burning sands of Tana.
It defies logic that the Government with its network of intelligence, and the radar of Provincial Administration, which pans deep and wide, right up to the sub-location and village, through the chieftaincy and village elder-hood, cannot stop these atrocities.
Something just does not add up. For how else can you explain the fact that the entire chain of the Government administration and national security organ can be caught flatfooted, and not for once, but twice, and most outrageously even after a curfew is declared.
The fact that the killings recurred after the President’s strong statement a fortnight ago when this madness reared its ugly head means his statement isn’t taken seriously, even as the Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces.
Even the predictable and unconvincing and ineffective removal of junior police offices as usual sunk low. Why? Because it is not about the performance of one individual, it is the entire system and chain of command.
There are many things to be done in the long term to relax the dependence of pastoralists and agrarian communities such as Pokomo, Orma, Somali, Pokot, and Somali on purely limited pasture land, and water points. This would entail education, irrigation and other economic activities that would lessen the war over watering points and riverbanks.
Punitive Action
The Government must bring to book the perpetrators of the Tana massacres, for it is in punitive action against them that future similar aggressions, which are already taking the shape of international crimes, would be deterred. If they go scot-free as they might, given the precedence, then we can be sure the vicious bloody circle would escalate.
Parliament, which voted for the deployment of the military to battle the terror gang in Tana River County, must in addition also strive to expose the link between the killings and destabilisation to alleged plans to disenfranchise some of the communities through displacement ahead of the March 4 General Election.
Parliament must then pressurise the Government to take action against the inciters however high up in the public sector or social ladder they may be. For, if as they say, one refugee is too many, so indeed one death, leave alone the 110 reported, is too much and should worry. Indeed, Kenya in the international media is being cast as a country teeming with primitive and warring tribal groups, which is not the case.
We must also ask ourselves why at a time we are at war in a foreign nation and facing internal security threats such as that posed by the Mombasa Republican Council and Al Shabaab; we do not as of yet have a substantive Minister for Internal Security and Provincial Administration, and Permanent Secretary.
We do not even have a substantive Head of the Civil Service. Could this indicate just how lopsided our priorities are on national security?
Kenyans must be told where the attackers came from, where they disappear to after the killings, and who they are, and why they seem, inside a free country, to have a chain of command and operate above the law?
Apart from completing the stalled police reforms, which could have partly shaped professional operation of the security units to the extent it too suffered casualties in Tana even before firing a bullet; we must also audit the competence of the top security officers.
That is what a functioning government with a President and Prime minister who care does. The Government after all exists to guarantee the security of our lives, property, and collective freedoms. It is not worth the name when it fails, not once but many times, on this score.
No compromises
That is where we are today: The Government of President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, with the Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka, isn’t worth the name, no matter their assurances and threats.
What Kenyans want to see is action; war on crime from the streets of Nairobi to the enclaves of Mandera, the caves of Mount Elgon, and even the manyattas of Tana. It is that simple yet that hard for there should be no compromises. Kenyans demand no less from you, the Commander-in-Chief, Mr President.
