CS Murkomen will soon need goons to protect his meetings

Interior Cabinet Security Kipchumba Murkomen, Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja and DIG Eliud Lagat after a meeting. [File, Standard]

It is tempting to think of Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen as cynical, or even sadistic. He is perhaps both. But far worse, he is simply naïve. He has not understood the magnitude of the office he occupies, and its implications for his country, beyond the current regime.

Allow me to speak as a seasoned scholar in armed conflict and peace studies. Let me tell you where Kenya is going under President William Ruto, and the agency of Murkomen.

The CS Interior has told Kenyans, “If you know that someone has organised goons in Homa Bay, and the police have told you that there are goons, why go there? Why don’t you just go home and plan for some other meeting some other day, when there will be no goons?”

Now this is beyond cynicism and sadism. It is pure naivete. The Kenyan State is not just normalising political gangsterism. It is creating an alternative centre in the legitimate exercise of violence.

In both domestic and international law, the State is the only entity that has legitimate exercise of violence. When the State begins sharing that legitimacy with other forces and entities, the country is on the outskirts of State collapse and failure.

This is what has begun happening in Kenya under the current regime. We are collapsing. The State does not fail overnight. It sinks inch by inch. Kenyans are familiar with the story of Haiti; having recently been embroiled in controversy about sending their police to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, to wrestle the Haiti portion of it from marauding gangsters. Haiti remains in the tight grip of hundreds of mobs.

 In the future, the world might ask whether Kenyans went there to help restore order, or to learn about organising goons for takeover over of State sovereignty.

For now, however, there are a number of useful lessons for the regime in power to consider. Goons in Kenya are steadily acquiring a capacity that should exclusively belong to the State. That is the capacity to decide when to be violent in the public space and to exercise legitimate violence.

The State is itself not allowed to use violence arbitrarily. State violence must be strictly within the norms of the law. In that regard, a lawful public rally such as the meetings the Opposition has been having, cannot be violently disrupted as is happening. Not by the police, and least by goons.

Second, once society accepts, like Murkomen recommends, that some places and meetings should be avoided “because the spaces are under goon control,” then monopoly of legal coercion is compromised.

The State is no longer in control. In its naivete, the State may imagine that it is using goons to contain the Opposition.

But, soon, the wild groups begin acquiring independent muscles. Power tycoons of sorts emerge from the groups. Or some outsiders take over. They begin acquiring their own resources and territory.

Next, the State finds that it cannot suppress them operationally. It is now time for the State itself to negotiate with them. The State finds the need to protect its meetings from goons it created. For, the goons’ loyalty is only to the gang, and to nobody else. Murkomen soon discovers that he needs goons to protect his own meetings, the police and army notwithstanding. If the State unleashes the police against the goons, a full-scale war erupts.

That was how the Tonton Macoute took over Haiti, and later splintered into hundreds of gangs. It was how Colombia, Venezuela, and Sudan fell to goons.

Colombia’s FARC evolved in the 1948-1958 decade. It remains a thorn in the flesh today. FARC funds itself through illegal taxation, kidnappings, drugs, and providing protection services. Venezuela’s “mega-gangs”, the “collectivos”, began about 2010. They thrive through the same methods.

Sudan’s Janjaweed began in Darfur as a State funded Arab gang against Black pastoralists. It has morphed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that have brought Sudan to its knees. It is resourced through illegal gold mining and smuggling, as well as foreign backing from regional allies, taxation, drugs, and all that.

The Kenyan State is naïve. Very naïve. It is playing with something worse than fire. President William Ruto must arrest this thing now, or else it will come back to eat him up.

For a start, a thorough shake-up in the Ministry of Interior is a must. Security should be placed in the hands of professionals, not fawning cronies and individuals who ride on other assets.

President William Ruto must learn to work with people who will look him in the eye and politely say, “No, Mister President.”

Dr Barrack Muluka is a strategic communications adviser