It’s not always that a sub-clan is confronted with glaring challenges from their neighbours, in a tragic combination of hatred based on political competition and scramble for resources. But that is the reality facing the Geylible sub-clan of the Degodia clan in Wajir West, Wajir County.
Nothing can appropriately explain the barbaric, degrading and inhuman subjection of the Geylible by their numerically superior neighbours in a blatant campaign to frustrate them.
This politically-motivated treatment has been recorded and brought to the attention of successive regimes numerous times.
It has even attracted the attention of the international community who commissioned a study published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations in 2006, entitled; “Access to water, pastoral resource management and pastoralists’ livelihood,” which unearthed horrendous narrations of the genesis and development of the unending pogrom against the Geylible people by the Reer-Mahmoud. Early this year, strong and powerful letters were addressed to the North Eastern Regional Coordinator, detailing injustices committed on the Geylible people by neighbours.
The response was a defeaning and contemptuous silence. Strangely enough, the provincial administration has exhibited mixed signals, ranging from cold disinterest, infectious lethargy, to extreme hostility to the Geylible. Nobody understands why.
On October 26, 2018 the Geylible community elders of Garab Bisik location in Garseqoftu Division released a detailed document which made an urgent appeal for intervention by local, national and international authorities.
They’re still waiting for any iota of concern from their government and the world. The appeal too, fell on deaf ears.
The latest attempt to draw national and world attention came on November 1, 2018 vide a letter from Garane and Somane advocates to prosecute their case before the powers that be, and through Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i. To date, Dr Matiang’i hasn’t communicate an official position.
The difficulty facing this community is a poisonous mix of deep-seated historical acrimony, and localised sub-clan rivalries, which exploded and assumed political dimensions when the Geylible supported the Kanu candidate against that of the ODM-leaning Reer-Mahmoud in the 2017 elections.
This irritated the Reer-Mahmoud sub-clan’s hitherto unquestionable hegemony over the local political dispensation, and access to the scarce resources including pasture and water.
Constitutional provisions
The gruesome manner in which the Geylible people have been mistreated also runs directly against the provisions of our 2010 Constitution.
Article 29 (f) prohibits the treatment or punishment of anybody in a cruel, inhuman or degrading manner. Article 43 buttresses the right of every person to attain and enjoy the highest levels of all imaginable and possible economic and social rights.
All the above constitutional provisions have been violated by the complex combination of Reer-Mahmoud warriors, together with a complicit provincial administration, and direct superintendence of the sitting MP for Wajir west constituency.
Coincidentally, the current MP also sits in National Assembly Committee on National Security, Defence and Foreign Relations.
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He has failed to use his membership in this strategic and powerful House Committee to ensure the rule of law is upheld in the county. Innocent Geylible chiefs have been harassed, arrested and mistreated for crimes outside their jurisdictions.
The Geylible people have suffered the greatest human rights violations, including disappearances, displacements, torture, arson and arbitrary arrests and detentions. In the first week of November alone, a pregnant woman, a 15-year-old boy and a secondary school student (all Geylible), were killed, and no action has been taken. Kenyans and the international community must bring to an end these injustices to end the suffering of innocent people.
- The writer is the interim Wajir County KANU chairman and former aspirant.
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