The killing in Kibera, Nairobi, of Carliton Maina is now part of the year-end report for 2018. Maina was reportedly killed when he encountered police on night patrol while walking home with friends after watching a football match. Unusually, the police leadership has acknowledged the killing and asked for an investigation. Available information suggests that Maina met his death in similar circumstances as an increasingly large number of young people in poor neighbourhoods, whom the police now routinely kill on allegations that they are well-known criminals. Unlike those so many others, Maina was reportedly a high-achieving student, who studied for an engineering degree course at Leeds University in the United Kingdom.
Because police killing is now so rampant, it has become part of Kenya’s violent landscape, and hardly provokes official reaction and only the most fleeting media attention. It seems that it is Maina’s extraordinary academic achievements, gained despite the crushing poverty in which he still lived, that have made his killing stand out, prompting police reaction.
The original problem is that Kenya has long accepted police killing as a legitimate method of law enforcement. In majority of cases where police kill, the personal stories of their victims are part of the profile of poverty and are, therefore, unremarkable. The public has come to assume that there are good reasons when police kill. In the circumstances, life goes on after each killing with not even the pretence of an independent investigation. Unlike the killing of the poor, the killing of people with middle class promise usually elicits a level of public outrage. The irony, however, is that becomes possible to kill innocent people only because police are allowed to kill the so-called criminals.
With police violence now so diffuse, and with the choice of their methods now designed to conceal their involvement by making killings to resemble ordinary crime, it is difficult to verify the full extent of police violence. What seems clear, though, is that police violence is ever finding new levels of severity, and is now some of the highest in the world.
It is necessary to link this seemingly ordinary police violence with the country’s high politics. Ahead of the elections last year, police were involved in a long season of preparations, a large part of which constituted a display of newly-acquired capabilities for violence as a means of public order policing. The height of the display was the revelation that body bags had been sent to Kisumu, an opposition stronghold, where police expected they would be needed. What was astounding about these macabre revelations is that they were volunteered by the police, surely part of a campaign of official terror. While, previously, police violence could be explained as a mistake, the revelation about body bags confirmed the adoption of a new policy to kill for political reasons.
Commended police
Thus political protest, like violent crime, had joined the list of “crimes” that qualified for instant police killing. Although several organisations, including the official Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, have since independently reported on police violence during the elections, there has been no movement towards accountability. On the contrary, President Kenyatta twice commended the police for diligently performing their duties during the polls.
Because police violence is now an ingrained part of the country’s electoral politics, it is difficult for the political authorities to restrain the police on whom they also rely for their own survival. Also, the fact that police can get away with killing one category of alleged offenders makes it easier for them to add other categories of offenders whom they can kill without worrying about the consequences.
In his speech on Jamhuri Day, President Kenyatta spoke about the intolerable anxiety that elections bring every five years. In certain neighbourhoods, police violence is a part of that anxiety. Although the political establishment has used violence as part of its electoral strategy since the re-introduction of multi-party politics in 1991, care was always taken to conceal their involvement, with a view to establishing deniability. What is remarkable about 2017 is that the establishment far from creating deniability of its reliance on violence for political ends, the establishment instead marketed its electoral capabilities on promises of police violence. The police that were part of an electoral strategy are now also killing people like Maina.
Intriguingly, the president’s observations on elections were inconclusive and failed to suggest solutions. This was probably an indication of difficulties around this subject, including lack of consensus on the exact nature of the problem, leave alone possible solution. Official violence, whether against alleged violent criminals or political dissenters, is a failure of political accountability. In this regard, the tragic killing of Maina last week, and the killings in Kisumu and other places, are linked and form a central part of a national conversation that Kenya must have next year.
- The writer is the Executive Director at KHRC. [email protected]
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