We are all wannabes for forgetting PEV victims

Mid-January is the cruelest time of year, long and dry and hard after the family merriment of X-Mas and the New Year festivities and the consequent paying of school fees. A boring time. But the January of 2008 was very different, do you remember? It was an interesting time, in the worst sense of the word ‘interesting’; the way it is meant when the Chinese curse a child by saying, ‘may you grow up to live in interesting times.’

Forget what has been going on at The Hague this week, that is a judicial process that I will not comment on, nor will we indulge in idle and uninformed speculation on whether our Post Election Violence (known as PEV, like the acronym of some random pesticide) was planned or spontaneous. The only thing we know is that 1,133 Kenyans, the official figure, lost their lives in the PEV.

And, quick, how many people have been convicted, or even charged, of killing them? I bet you have no idea, and that’s because those are so few even a one-armed man with some missing fingers can still count them on the fingers of that hand. But some ‘wannabe killers’ slew those a thousand plus dead. I call them ‘wannabe’ killers because, like the ghost workers of City Hall, these are phantom murderers.

In Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, they had about 50,000 people in prison being held for the killings. Using that ratio, for a thousand dead, we ought to have had at least fifty folks charged in our local courts for these slayings, eight years down the road, instead of merely following high legal dramas overseas. Because we suffer from national amnesia, and because I have this small book The Road to Eldoret, in which I meticulously recorded the daily goings - on of the PEV in 2008, let me give you a peek into the day to day activities during those days of ‘wannabe killers’ who were never legally apprehended.

January 15, 2008 (or as that section in the newspapers used to call it, ‘on this day eight years ago’).

The Tenth Parliament elects ODM’s Kenneth Marende as House Speaker. Former U.N. Secretary General Koffi Annan cancels his planned peace trip to Kenya, pleading the flu.

The day before, Roads’ Minister John Michuki had said in a press statement that ‘there is no problem in Kenya, and foreigners coming to Kenya are interfering with our sovereignty. We won the elections! We do not welcome Koffi Annan here.’

Ok, so Kenya hakuna matata – except the body count by mid-January is exactly five hundred dead.

January 16, 2008.

The Orange Democratic Movement calls for ‘mass protests.’ The Police Commissioner, a retired Army General called Brigadier Ali, vows to ‘crush all such rallies.’

January 17, 2008. Members of the ODM Pentagon are tear-gassed during a demonstration in the CBD’s Kenyatta Avenue. We can smell the tear gas ten floors up in our offices at the I&M building. More lethally, in Kisumu, police shoot four more ‘rioters’ dead, including a ten-year-old boy walking home from a school still foolish enough to open during this PEV. The ten-year-old lad’s name is Arina.

He will never grow up beyond ten, to be a teenager, to write silly love letters (or in this age, texts) to some giggling girl in high school, perhaps on this very day as I write this article with his name on it.

Yes, Arina would be sixteen now, having just joined Form Two last week, ready to learn and ready for mischief, the way we all were when we were young – and in Form Two.

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