Full force of the law must be brought to bear on inciters among warring clans

Kenya may have first-rate highways and the strongest economy in the region, but our reputation stinks in East Africa because of tribal violence.

We stink worse when our top leadership displays this strange nonchalance towards matters of life and death. Only in Kenya will the Head of State continue working blissfully in his office and not bother to fly down to Tana River to condole with and reassure the victims of the latest orgy of bloodletting.

A particularly odd remark was made by Coast Regional Commissioner Samuel Kilele when asked why those involved in the initial killings in a village called Kau had not been arrested. “We can’t take a whole community to jail. Is it possible?”

Excuse me, must atrocities be forgiven because the perpetrators choose to cloak themselves in a tribe?

Assuming, as the regional commissioner was implying, that a whole community was guilty – whether Orma or Pokomo – that makes it all the more imperative that brutal sanctions be applied by the State.

You don’t have to jail them all if they can’t fit in our prisons. Still, there are ways the State can make them collectively understand that massacres and mayhem cannot be a way of life.

Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni used to have a no-nonsense policy of confiscating livestock from warmongering pastoralists until their own communities volunteered the wanted criminals to the State. Paul Kagame of Rwanda has an even more comprehensive scheme of “re-educating” genocidal murderers and their fellow tribesmen who protect them.

If all else fails, we pay the GSU to knock some sense into those chaps that are still living in the 19th century whilst the rest of the world has moved on to the 21st.

The tried and tested recourse of the government whenever these ethnic flare-ups occur is to organise “peace meetings”. I have nothing in particular against then. In some ways they can even be helpful.

However, my strongly felt view is that these meetings must not take place in a vacuum. There must be parallel and robust steps to punish perpetrators and make an example of them. Criminals will not change their ways because their tribesmen are holding friendly tete-a-tetes with their victims. They will only be forced to change their ways when subjected to the full force of the law.

The same Mr Kilele of the hand-wringing gesture had been busy, by his own account, of brokering “peace meetings” between the Orma and the Pokomo when the first stirrings of trouble emerged. He has now come to realise the simplistic folly of handling matters like this.

“Our approach was to have peace meetings between them. In the discussions they agreed to maintain peace [but] it seems everything entered in the right ear and went out the other ear,” he was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

Truth is, such so-called peace meetings tend to be a farce. The participants are never sincere. If the participants at the peace roundtables Mr Kilele convened had at the onset been shown a demonstration of the raw power of the State in punishing lawlessness, you can bet the lapse in hearing that the commissioner so deplored would not have occurred.

If politicians are behind the massacres, as they usually are, let’s not pussyfoot around in dragging them in. Jail them and whip them in the process. Internal Security minister Yusuf Hajji had a well-publicised meeting with MPs from affected areas on Thursday.

But other than issuing the predictable homilies about good neighbourliness, it is not clear if he is going to crack down ruthlessly on known inciters. Statecraft should not be turned into a Sunday school picnic.

If we accept that a good portion of our fellow citizens are stuck in 19th century mindsets of tribal warfare, arson and rape, then let us not deceive ourselves that the problems they pose for the rest of us can be addressed by our 21st century Constitution.

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