Kenya could sink into irreversible anarchy under the Kenya Kwanza government. Menacing goons are becoming the order of the day.
Some members of these militias have come out to brag in the open, including on national television. They say that they are protecting the government. A young man captured on video that went viral in the ended week told the world, “We are going to protect President Ruto. We will not allow any group of youth to be used to cause anarchy in this country.”
It is not clear who else the youth is speaking for. However, he goes on to declare that they will on Wednesday, 25 June, launch what he calls “Youth for Ruto 2027 Movement.” The name has the ring of the “Youth for Kanu (YK) ’92 Movement,” which campaigned for Kanu and President Moi in the first multiparty elections after the removal of Section 2A in Kenya’s old Constitution.
President William Ruto was one of the members of YK ’92, among other sprightly and monied young people. They distinguished themselves with splashing of big money, believed to have had links with the sham Goldenberg exports that brought Kenya’s economy to its knees. It is not clear which entities of the Kenyan state, if any, are involved with this bold declaration, or if it is only opportunistic posturing by self-focused attention seekers. Whatever the case, this posturing represents the spirit of the day in Kenya’s resurgent militia and goon world. It could counter offensives that will throw the nation into an unstoppable spin. For, no one has the monopoly of mobilizing mobs. A bit of money and idle youth is all it takes.
You saw them on Tuesday, gamboling freely in the streets of Nairobi. They trundled side-by-side with uniformed police, in menacing buoyancy. The marauders carried brand-new wooden truncheons. They hobbled dramatically through the avenues and highways, casting around menacing looks, seeking for persons to lay their crude weapons upon. And if they got hold of a protester, they thrashed the hell out of him. Bored policemen trudged along, only looking on as the goony hirelings engaged in felony. The lawkeepers did nothing as these characters shattered showroom window glasses, broke into shops, and looted. The prowlers were clearly on a state protected mission, with the Kenya Police as their chaperons.
Mainstream media investigations later recorded some of the hirelings, confessing to having been recruited to disrupt public demonstrations against the slaying by the police, two weeks ago, of teacher and blogger, Albert Ojwang. The shocking killing has been associated with the notorious Nairobi Central Police Station, and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI). Also in the gunsight are high-ranking officers from Vigilance House, the Kenya Police headquarters.
To stifle popular protests, the Kenyan establishment is engaging idle youth for a fee. Their brief, according to the confessions, is to violently countermand demonstrators. This is a clever ploy. It generates the kind of disorder that leaves the business community in the central business district (CBD) disgusted with the demonstrators. Moreover, the demos are also tied up in a double-knot with the sentiments of the national political Opposition. They will share in the emerging disgrace and anger by the business community. President Ruto and his Kenya Kwanza establishment are expected to be the beneficiaries from the unhappy public backlash against the demos.
The bad news is that Kenya could be sinking into the slough of despond in the wake of this state-funded gangsterism. Governments have the responsibility to secure all spaces in their countries. Their brief includes use of legitimate force, to permitted levels of violence, whenever necessary, to restore order. There is cause for concern, therefore, when elements of the state begin drafting gangsters for violent use against lawful civilian activities.
From one perspective, this hiring and unleashing of goons upon the public is admission of failure by the state. Ideally, the state is expected to protect public demonstrations and pickets, both of which are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of Kenya (Article 37). But more significantly, it is a dangerous surrender by the state, to these amorphous groups.
There can be no telling what such groups will morph into, in the fullness of time. Is there the risk that they could overwhelm even those who hired them? What has been the experience elsewhere?
Haiti, where President Ruto has recently sent troops, is an astute case study. The dreaded Tonton Macoute mobs of Haiti were creations of the disgraced Duvalier family. Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) was a medical doctor and politician, who came to power in 1957. His ascendancy was at a troubled time, when the once super rich former French colony had gone through a series of quick successions in the presidency. Duvalier did not mince his words. He was going to " change this country.”
Like Kenya’s William Ruto, Duvalier talked not of “transforming this country,” but of “changing” it. He stamped down his foot and ruled with an iron fist, through a mixture of police force, voodoo, personality-cult, and self-mysticism. Then came the Macoute mobs, some of them wearing elements of the spiritual possession of sorcerers.
The Tonton Macoute, created in 1959, were initially an undercover entity. They abducted and disappeared people. They tortured and often killed innocent victims, throughout Papa Doc’s 13-year despotic rule. Eventually, the brutal merchants of terror and assassination morphed into law unto themselves. Almost seven decades later, Haiti resonates with gangsterism whose roots are in the Macoute. Last year, President Ruto controversially sent a detachment from the Kenya Police Service, as part of the effort to wrestle the Caribbean country from gangsters. It is ironic that Kenya sends its police to manage gangsters on an island over 12,000 kilometers away, yet the Kenya Government pours armed gangsters into its own streets. To boot, it dispatches the police to chaperon the hoodlums.
The Kenya Kwanza government has not taken any lessons from Haiti, where the mobs remain indomitable. Wrestling the island from the gangsters is a very tall order, easier said than done. The solid gangster resistance that has met the combined police entity of Guatemala, Jamaica and Kenya should give lessons to Kenya, on the foolish wisdom of nurturing gangs.
State-owned goons will soon go out of control. Not even the original owner will manage them. They lack the discipline of formal trained police, military and paramilitary cadres. The formal cadres know their lanes. They know how to keep to those lanes and what is expected of them there. Hoodlums don’t. They soon occupy all spaces, everywhere, and trample on everyone. Sometimes the royal owner of the gangs may have to run away, when push comes to shove.
That was what happened to Jean Claude Duvalier (aka Baby Doc). Having succeeded his father as President in 1971, Baby Doc reigned until 1986, when popular pressure forced him to flee the country, with hundreds of millions of dollars looted from the national treasury. While the pressure was mostly from fed up Haiti citizens, led by the cleric Jean Bertrand Aristides, gangs now established everywhere in the country, played their role too. Baby Doc fled from the people and from the gangsters that his father passed on to him, as part of his heritage and legacy.
In their most daring phase, Haiti’s Macoute declared themselves a political party! It is recalled that the country set aside 29 July as a national day to celebrate this notorious gang. And in July 1985, Macoute went on a shooting rampage, in the capital city, Port-Au-Prince, as part of the celebrations. History records that they killed dozens of people. Now, this is the kind of havoc Kenya Kwanza is meddling with. It is not clear where the Raila Odinga faction in the twin broad-based government stands in all this. Regardless, history teaches us that the Kenyan state is cuddling delicate external parts of a monster that, if allowed to mature, will eat up everyone, the state included.
But how do these goony groups come to the centre stage? Gangster rule is different from rule of the mob, or ochlocracy, as it is also known. Ochlocracy is restricted to control by the common multitudes of citizenry, as in revolutions that lack the necessary leadership that could restore calm and order, after the old establishment is toppled. Gangster rule organizes itself in specific physical areas of control. Each zone has its own gang with lead-gangsters and gang rules. Sometimes intra-gang rivalries emerge, over leadership, leading to splits and new gangs.
They thrive best in collapsing and collapsed states. The gangs are themselves, often, at once drivers and catalysts of such collapse. Africa has seen them in many countries – in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Chad, and Somalia, and in the Central African Republic, among others. They loot, rape, and pillage. They kill.
The paradox is that the doors to this sorry state of affairs have been opened to these marauders by the formal state. Such may be a regime that is increasingly losing popular support, and yet it craves to remain in power, regardless of what the people want. It is likely to be a felonious regime, whose leaders have committed crimes against the nation. They fear leaving power, lest they should face the law. As the legal and constitutional instruments of the state are unlikely to guarantee felonious rulers continued stay in office, they turn to goons to keep them in power.
A President, or Prime Minister, who has no confidence in winning the next election, for instance, will begin marginalizing the established police and the military. He will instead arm goons, and bank his survival on them. He may also establish a special secret elite military or police squad. The elite squad works with goons, to overrun everybody, including the military proper, and the police. They fear them, just like the rest of the country is afraid of them.
As the Kenyan state warms up to the idea of working with goons, it must wake up to these chilling realities. Does Kenya Kwanza wish to make the country a lawless drug paradise? Colombia in South America, for example, has smarted under the weight of drug gangs since the 1960s. Gangsters compete for control of drug trade in the country and region. The competition has flowered into what is called the Columbian War, involving the government, paramilitary entities, and brazen gangsters. The war has been on for as long as Kenya has been independent. Interventions by the United States and major European governments have had little impact, if any. That is what a country gets when the government begins meddling with gangsters.
Mexican gangs are another ball game altogether. They occupy all spaces, including government, prisons, and foreign countries. They began in the United States, among Hispanic prisoners in the 1950s. The objective was to protect Hispanic inmates from race-based bashing by other groups. From smuggling little stuff into prisons, they grew into beasts that now control the multi-billion drug trade that has become a menace in the entire region. Competition among the various gangs has invariably led to unending violence.
Social science scholars agree that in failed states, gang rule stands in the gap. It occupies space in official disorder. In a 2023 study titled “Understanding and countering criminal governance,” Chris Blattman, Gustavo Duncan, and Benjamin Lessing attempted to understand the power of criminal groups. They established that state governance and criminal governance often support each other. However, the state must first fail, before the gangs come in. For, part of the assignments that the state has is to check gangster activities. The state will, therefore, allow gangs to thrive only because it has failed. Is the William Ruto state in Kenya admitting failure?
If the Kenyan state does not own the gangs that have been prowling in Nairobi and parts of the Mt. Kenya region, then citizens expect it to contain them. That they have not been contained, accordingly, speaks either to failure and defeat or, in converse, to ownership of the gangs. Either way, the state stands condemned. In either case, Parliament is expected to intervene, to save the country, by removing the failed regime and giving the people the chance to replace it with a more responsible one.
Growing up in Nairobi’s Eastlands in the 1960s and in the ‘70s, this writer learned that everyone is potentially a member of a gang. Gangs come up for self-preservation in threatening environments. The threat could be absence of opportunities or the authorities. It only takes a self-mystifying individual who can mete out both pain and reward, and the group of people are ready to be commanded, as a gang. Members expect reward and fear pain. These are the two sentiments that mould gang loyalty and energy. Entry of the state into that space can be messy. Very soon, the gang commander begins dictating to the state, too.
Gangsters sell fear. They collect rent and provide protection, both against themselves and against other gangs. There are no limits to the kind of punishment they can dish out, to members and outsiders alike. Whoever has come out with the idea of deploying goons in Kenya has dialed a bad number. Regardless of whether the origins are in City Hall, Nairobi, as we are hearing, or elsewhere in higher places, it needs to be nipped in the ugly bud.
Impeccable sources have it that the planning took place in the environs of Nairobi’s affluent Muthaiga, at an exclusive hotel that is accessed only through special permissions and clearance. The idea is to create a brutal hybrid force that is not responsible to the Inspector General of Police. It comprises elements of the police, with the rest being civilian goons. Their assignment is to scare the hell out of Kenyans ahead of the 2027 elections, when the gangsters’ terror capacity is expected to be in full blossom. The force should then be deployed to give the present regime another five years, hence the clarion call of “Kumi Bila Break.”
Because of the need to spread fear, a masked individual who passes for a policeman shoots a harmless unarmed hawker at point blank. The message is not intended for the hawker, who, in any event, is left for dead. It is directed at the Gen-Zs who intend to come out on Wednesday, 25 June, to remember those who perished in June last year. Kenya Kwanza is telling them to keep off the streets, or to face cold-blooded hired killers. Yet, these goons shall eventually eat everyone, including the grandmaster.
