City slum where gangs spread terror to keep law

Kisumu Ndogo area in the lower reaches of Nairobi's Kibera slum can be dingy, grim and dangerous.

But on this sultry evening I find myself stuck with a bunch of youths in the name of vigilantes in my unsavoury mission to get to the bottom of their activities.

The gang members are fully armed. Some members of the vigilante calling itself Mchwa or Kombe Kombe are brandishing firearms and other crude weapons and are ready to strike.

A rival vigilante group had just murdered a young man from the area on suspicion of being a thief and the gang is out to avenge his death.

"The boy was innocent," claims the group’s leader known only as "Rambo". "He had just left his aunt’s house to go and sleep in a nearby house when they cornered and murdered him in cold blood. Now they must pay," he charges.

Other sources say the boy was a victim of mistaken identity after he walked into the path of the vigilantes while chasing down a suspected thief.

The air around the illicit brew den where we are holed up is thick with tension as the clock strikes midnight. Very soon the gang would descend into Katwekera village in Olympic area to the East of the sprawling Kibera slum where the rival group operates.

Shaking experience

I was only allowed to attend because I posed as a distant cousin to an influential gang member and offered to buy booze the whole time.

Although I do not stay long enough to witness the carnage and bloodbath, the whole experience left me quite shaken.

Luckily the rival gang they were to confront did not show up saving the slum a bloodbath. But those familiar with the operations of the vigilante group, which is believed to be an offshoot of the Taliban gang, say this is just another day in their daily operations in the slum.

An illicit liquor peddler in the slum appears quite unperturbed by the gang’s display of defiance.

She has encountered several other criminal gangs prowling the slum, including Taliban, Siafu and Mungiki.

But what confounds her is how the gangs obtain weapons including pistols and assault rifles.

Mchwa was formed by some members of Taliban, another gang operating in the slum, after persistent leadership wrangles within the group.

The gang survives by extorting from businesses in a section of the slum and from residents under the guise of providing security.

It presents itself as a vigilante group with authority to do community policing.

"We usually engage the boys to maintain law and order because often we are short in supply of legitimate security personnel," says an administrator in Kibera whose identity cannot be revealed because he is not authorised to comment on such issues.

But the Government rejected the local administrator’s assertion that it is using vigilantes to maintain law and order.

Deputy Police Spokesman Charles Owino Wahong’o said vigilantes are outlawed adding that the gangs are not allowed to possess any weapons.

"People tend to confuse community policing and vigilantes. However, they are very far apart," Wahongo says.

He explains that community policing involves a community policing committee that assesses and discusses security issues in an area with the local Officer Commanding Police Station (OCS) before the latter reports to police headquarters for necessary action to be taken.

"Community policing is about partnership between the police and public where the public volunteer information upon which the police acts," Wahong’o explains. He says it is erroneous for people to assume that matters of security can be handed to the Provincial Administration.

"I do not want to get into the politics of provincial administration, but when it comes to matters of security it becomes the sole responsibility of the agency that is charged with maintain security," he says. Wahong’o notes that vigilantes are not allowed to carry weapons maintaining that only law enforcement agencies are allowed to be armed.

He notes that previously, the force used to give out firearms to untrained individuals called police reservists adding that that unit has since been scrapped in many parts of the country.

"We realised that anyone could buy themselves a gun and then claim that they were police reservists. That is why the police scrapped the unit in 2008 leaving a few remnants in eastern and north eastern parts of the country," he says.

Guns for sale

The use of firearms by criminal gangs has risen to alarmingly high levels during the past decade a trend blamed on easy availability of small arms, mostly pistols and assault rifles among criminals.

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report in 2002 on the proliferation of small arms in Kenya found that some weapons had originated from places as far away as China and the United States.

Most arms had circulated through war zones in neighbouring countries before making their way to Kenya’s illegal gun market.

The report also observed that the spread of sophisticated weapons among communities had intensified conflict and blurred the line between longstanding ethnic divisions that had traditionally manifested in cattle rustling and political violence.

The conflicts in the Horn of Africa, especially in Somalia and the Great Lakes region, contributes to the influx of firearms into Kenya.

In Nairobi, underworld sources say an illegal pistol would sell for about Sh10,000 or less. Larger weapons such as AK-47s, which are not readily available from shadowy dealers in the city’s backstreets and estates would cost more.

But the spiralling arms influx into Kenya heralds a new dimension to crime especially in big cities like Nairobi where criminal gangs prowl city estates with impunity.

The criminals do not need to buy or even own the guns as a new illegal weapon leasing trade catches up in Nairobi.

A security source in Nairobi revealed that the weapons could easily be rented out for a fee, mostly by crime lords and drug barons.

Other sources claim errant police officers are also major sources of illegal firearms. They offer for hire guns recovered from criminals.

"Masonko hutupatia nare tukiwa na mission ama pengine gava (barons rent out firearms to us whenever we have a mission or police officers once in a while)," Rambo confides amid a puff of bhang smoke.

Taming the gangs

Even after the Government operationalised a law to tackle organised crime and gazetted a list of criminal gangs which are banned, back in places like Kibera, the vigilantes are alive and kicking. The residents have been forced to learn to live with them.

One factor driving the vigilante menace in the slum, observers say, is the stratified nature of the slum and the socio-economic and political issues affecting the slum.

"The problem of vigilantes has existed for along time in Kibera, but issues surrounding the formation were exacerbated by the 2007 post election violence," says Japheth Opondo a community worker.

"Every village in the slum is now coalescing around a certain gang or vigilante. They are the ones who collect rent for landlords and provide security," he adds.

Opondo observes that most residents report crime to the same vigilantes instead of reporting to a police station, a chief’s camp or even a village elder.

"The community around here is so detached to security agencies they have surrendered to the illegal gangs.

In certain circumstances the communities are even compelled to pay protection feea, ostensibly to shield themselves from raids by rival vigilantes from other areas of the slum," he notes.

Commuter transport operators have also complained of being incessantly taxed by the vigilantes for operating in the area.

"We are often forced to part with Sh300 to be allowed to ply the route to Kibera. Those who refuse are subjected to harassment and even kicked out," said a matatu tout who identified himself only as Mwangi.

The slum residents’ only hope is that the new law that targets organised crime will rid them of the terror gangs in the area.