NAIROBI: Power and wisdom rarely live in the same house. The report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence is an expose of how low the human being can sink, if he should be left unchecked by the strictures of social order.
The 529-page report, also known as the Waki Report, reads like a vision from hell. It is a capsule of tales of murder, arson, rape and unbridled man’s inhumanity against man — the darkness of the human soul laid bare. Women are gang-raped in front of their children. Some woman’s private part is opened up with a machete. This is meant to give the rapists easier access into that space. A man’s private anatomy is sliced off in its entirety, in front of his children. The eldest, a five-year-old, gets deranged. Long after his father is dead, the boy is still talking to him. He is asking, “Daddy, why have they cut off your thing? What will you be using to susu?”
These are tragic things. They are ugly. They are things you want to wish away. Yet it is true that they happened. Children were burnt alive in church. People’s throats were slit open as their relatives watched. Men were circumcised with broken bottles. Sticks and sundry objects were thrust into private apertures in women’s bodies. You will read these and worse in the Waki Report. That is why Kenya has featured before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Now a section of Parliament wants the report to be investigated. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing? It would seem, listening to the political class, that Kenyans have forgotten where they were in 2008. In the words of Kofi Annan, who led the peace process, the country was on the brink of disaster. Could Kenya be headed the same way? Could a fresh look at the Waki Report be the antidote that could slow the tide towards imminent disaster?
The report speaks for itself on methodological issues and challenges (pages 1 – 18). It will be of profound interest to see how Parliament challenges the methodology, if it goes ahead to reopen the matter. Suffice it to say, however, that findings were unnerving, both on systemic failures and on the role of the political class in the violence. Security agencies failed to anticipate, prepare for, and contain the violence. Political octane against some political leaders and their tribes was high, ahead of the elections.
You get the feeling that Kenya is entering yet another explosive political season, with the potential of violent eruptions. George Orwell teaches us in the volume Nineteen-Eighty-Four that it is possible to cultivate and incubate tragic violence against an individual and all that is associated with him, or her. In exercising vile passions against the imagined Immanuel Goldstein, the citizens of Oceania in Nineteen-Eighty-Four hold into dreadful hatred everything that he represents.
The current war cries against CORD leader Raila Odinga at charged ethnic-based “prayers” are ominous and degenerative. They are the sorts of things that metamorphose into vendetta against a whole tribe. In the event that the worst happens against Deputy President William Ruto at the ICC, ordinary folk from his tribe could easily turn against their neighbours from Raila’s tribe, in proxy “retaliation.” For they have been told that he was the one “who fixed” their man before the ICC.
Kenya is at a messy crossroads with the DP’s case. If the ICC finds him guilty and decides to jail him, Kenya is damned. The nation would have to reckon with the wider relevance of the ongoing “prayer rallies.” But it would not just be Raila’s tribe to pay. The tribe perceived to have “committed the original sin” against the DP and his tribe would also face the music. It would be a resumption of the disrupted agenda of January 2008.
On the other hand what does an acquittal portend? My crystal ball shows celebration and euphoria. I see pomp and razzmatazz, wild orgies of people telling others, “You see? Your wicked designs have been defeated.” But I also see the birth of dangerous buttressing of impunity. Election violence will be the order of the day. After all nobody gets punished. I see profound abandoning of caution and strengthening of the culture of ethnic militias. I see victims taking the law in their hands. All this “because nobody can do anything to you, let us fight it out. Who can touch us?”
What then is the way out? Does Kenya need negotiated solution that returns the nation together, while also addressing the victims’ plight? Would it be desirable, perhaps, that we never get to know whether the DP was really guilty or innocent? Does Kenya need to ask herself whether it is fair that William Ruto and Joshua Sang alone should bear the cross of the madness of a whole nation?
Secondly, do we need to reflect on the wisdom of disrupting the relative peace that the two previously mutually hostile communities — Kikuyu and Kalenjin — have found? Rather than have the ICC return the country to violent ethnic engagement, is it possible to build on the gains made this far? And is the partnership between the two communities genuine, or are they engaged in a cat and mouse game; a horse and horse-rider partnership?
If they are sincere about saving the DP, Jubilee leaders need to consider a change of tack. The present posturing can only place the country on a fresh war alert and the DP into deeper trouble with the ICC, regardless of who the protagonists could be in another wave of violence. Jubilee may need to contemplate engaging CORD in a more conversational and respectful manner, devoid of claims about who “fixed” whom. I suspect that the DP has thought about these things. He has perhaps concluded that if he must carry the cross of the whole country, he might as well go down with the country, like the Biblical Samson. For it is difficult to see what he would gain from the so-called “prayer” rallies. The only thing these rallies suggest is that the DP is capable of mobilising the tribe around himself, for whatever end. That is a dangerous message to send to the ICC — a court that gathers evidence in season and out of season.
Opening up the Waki Report, will meanwhile put at risk even the solidarity that URP and TNA imagine they have built. If you have seen a leaked version of the names said to be in the Waki envelope, you understand. If only some of the people presently spoiling for full disclosure could see this list — both in TNA and URP — they would think again. Meanwhile Kenya is sitting very badly. If the present political agitation continues, the country could burn yet again. Are there any elders left out there, to speak to the people who exercise power in this country?
