It’s time to be magnanimous in enforcing the law

Last week’s expedition into Eastleigh, where the government rounded up a reported 4,000 suspicious individuals, who were then moved into a stadium for screening, is the most daring urban security operation since 1982, when loyalist soldiers who had crushed an attempted coup embarked on a house-to-house operation in the affected neighbourhood to flush out the vanquished coup makers.

It is too early to tell what the long term consequences of this operation will be. The government hopes that it will herald a new era of urban security, particularly in the troubled Eastleigh district, where there has been a concentration of terrorist attacks since Kenya’s military incursion into Somalia in 2010.

By all indications, the Eastleigh security operation enjoys popular support, perhaps because the public considers it proportionate to an increasingly difficult urban security setting, and also to years of unchecked illegal migration from Somalia to Kenya, with which forms of terrorism are now associated.

At the political level, support for the Eastleigh operation is mixed, and while the mainstream of the Jubilee Coalition has supported the action, a section of the coalition, led by Majority National Assembly Leader Aden Duale, considers the situation as constituting harassment on ethnic and religious grounds.

What should people make of the Eastleigh operation?

The authorities have tolerated years of illegal migratory activities from Somalia into Kenya and the Eastleigh neighbourhood has become a major host for some of the illegal immigrants.

Other forms of criminality now ride on the Eastleigh situation and, for example, the then Permanent Secretary for Internal Security, Mr Francis Kimemia, announced a task force that was supposed to verify claims that the proceeds of piracy were responsible for a Somali takeover of the property market in that neighbourhood. It is not known whether the task force ever materialised or what its findings were.

The thriving economy in Eastleigh is partly supported by forms of racketeering, including tax evasion and underground money changing.

Secondly, law enforcement is known to have established corrupt rent-seeking opportunities in the area which, in exchange for bribes, are prepared to overlook illegal immigration. Indeed, the Eastleigh operation itself had claims of corruption, that some of those arrested in the swoop were released unconditionally after paying bribes.

Going forward, and as is already widely acknowledged, a degree of integrity in law enforcement will be necessary, or the country will remain unable to discharge the most basic law enforcement responsibilities, leave alone against the complex acts of terrorism.

The second issue is the manner in which the government chose to respond to the problems that Eastleigh represents. It has been reported that as part of the operation, ethnic Somalis, a visible minority, were required to prove that they were Kenyans using a number of tests, some of them inherently subjective.

CONTEXT

When, in 2012, the former MP for Embakasi, Ferdinand Waititu, proposed that Maasai people be expelled from Kayole because they were associated with rising crime in the area, he received universal condemnation, including by the TNA leadership, which publicly disowned the politician even though he was important for the party, at a time of looming elections.

An example from the recesses of Kenyan history has also been mobilised to provide context to the Eastleigh situation: During the State of Emergency in 1952, members of the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru communities, suspected to be Mau Mau terrorists, were rounded up and placed in concentration camps.

The Eastleigh operation is similar to the Waititu incident and the British colonial practices before that. Even Duale, a strong supporter of the group in power, has found himself defending the principles that the Eastleigh incident threatens, although his position is probably only motivated by primordial concern for his ethnic community.

So what should be the way forward now? The answer to this question can be found in one of Aesop’s fables.

According to the fable, a contest for supremacy emerged between the sun and the wind, with each claiming that it was the greatest. The two then agreed that the greater element would be the one that made a man that was walking on the road to remove his coat and rest under a tree.

The wind went first, sending a blast of cold, violent air in the man’s direction, which only made him fasten onto his coat and walk faster along his way. The wind gave up, and it was the turn of the sun to try and make the man remove his coat. The sun shone invitingly and the man came out to bask. Before long he was sweating, removed his coat and sat under a tree.

“Look at that!” cried the sun. “Because I turned the warmth of my rays upon him, the man has come to a halt, taking off his cloak and seeking shelter under a tree. That proves I am the most powerful!”

Kenya has yet to embrace the lesson of how much law enforcement that is based on magnanimity can achieve, and how injurious the opposite of that can be.

Further, Kenya’s new Constitution means that the country has chosen the difficult path of discipline under a system of rights and due process. Under that system, all law enforcement action must be founded on evidence.

Last week’s expedition is an act of mass punishment against the Somali community, reminiscent of the Wagalla massacre against the same community, and Kenya’s colonial history. It has no place in Kenya’s new constitutional order.

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