New NYS evokes memories of what has recently gone wrong

The unease surrounding the emergence of the National Youth Service as a key plank in the Uhuru Kenyatta administration should be understood in the context of the role of violence in political mobilisation.

The capacity to deploy private violence has long been a prominent feature of Kenyan political life, where most successful politicians tend to possess a capacity for violence.

During the Moi regime, Kanu established a youth wing which came to signify the ruling party’s capacity for violence — extorting money from the public, spying on and reporting political dissidents, and carrying out a one-sided version of law enforcement.

In addition, leading lights in Kanu maintained individualised violence outside the party. Thus, outfits like Jeshi la Mzee, Amachuma and Jeshi la Kang’ole, associated with individual politicians aligned to the party, thrived alongside the party youth wingers.

The public whipping of Dr Richard Leakey in 1995, at the time a member of the opposition party Safina, was a high point in Kanu’s violence whose other egregious acts included the pummelling of the Rev Timothy Njoya outside Parliament during the Saba Saba demo of 1997.

The story of Mungiki, the largest and most successful violence outfit, is traceable to Kanu’s promotion of violence as an accompaniment of politics.

The post-election violence brought renewed attention to the problem of militias as groups through which political violence is staged. A 2009 report on behalf of the Kenya National Dialogue process listed 16 “illegally armed groups existing as at December 2008”, among them Mungiki, Siafu, Kalenjin Land Defenders and Sabaot Land Defence Force.

In addition to private violence, the ability to turn state security agencies into private armies has existed and been a feature of the country’s politics. Kanu used state security agencies to commit private violence, including ethnic clashes in the Rift Valley in 1992 and 1997 and also at the Coast in 1997. The attack at Likoni police station — where 13 people, including six policemen, were killed and the station’s armoury emptied by the raiders — remains a stunning mark of state-sponsored crime during that period.

UNDERTAKE TRAINING

More recently, the evidence received by the Waki Commission showed that on December 23, four days before the fateful 2007 General Election, about 1,600 police officers were assembled at the Administration Police Training College at Embakasi to undertake training to act as agents for a political party during election polling.

The training was conducted by high ranking government officials, including the hierarchy of the Administration Police. The following day, these officers were deployed to Luo-Nyanza, a part of the country regarded as the political base of Raila Odinga, the main challenger to President Kibaki, and, therefore, the most hostile to the government.

According to the evidence, their role was to disrupt polling and, where possible, ensure that government supporters among the candidates and voters prevailed. But they never made it.

Alerted about the now plain-clothed officers coming to their area, villagers waylaid them, leading to fatalities. In any other place, the audacity that led to this misadventure would have attracted the sternest accountability.

The role of the Mungiki in the attacks in Naivasha, during the post-election violence, has never been disputed. The pre-trial brief made public by the ICC prosecutor in the Kenyatta case makes additional allegations that Mungiki worked alongside the formal security forces in committing violence in Naivasha, and that they were even furnished with uniform and weapons to disguise the fact that they were not police.

Official inertia in responding to the attacks in Naivasha, as if to give the attackers the space to operate, was a key feature.

In Kisumu and Kakamega, the Waki Commission found that police had responded with disproportionate force in quelling riots during the post-election violence, and that the fatalities experienced in the two places would have been minimised if the police had acted with more restraint.

How is this discussion linked to the goings-on at the NYS?

As the evidence shows, the country has a consistent history of ethnic violence in which political elite have deployed not only private groups but also state security agents acting as private militias. The central accusations against President Kenyatta at the ICC were tied to the role of Mungiki in the Naivasha violence.

When, against this history, the Kenyatta government starts the ill-explained mobilisation of young people into the new NYS, it evokes memories of what has recently gone wrong, and fears that this is another effort to create a reserve of security agents that can easily be deployed for private, political advantage, including violence.

In a country riven with ethnic violence, the President would need to be sensitive to how his actions are viewed, particularly by groups that are currently outside political power, which also happen to have been on the receiving end of the Naivasha violence. The failure to subject the NYS reforms to even the slightest amount of democratic oversight is worrying and takes away any confidence the reforms might have had.

What is happening at NYS has precedents in the region, including Uganda where President Museveni has recently launched mchaka mchaka, a paramilitary training which he says is “to protect Uganda from people waiting to grab it … mostly in this period as we are preparing for elections”.

There is also the troubled Burundi, where President Nkurunziza’s CNDD-FDD has mobilised a large party militia, Inbonerakure, which is at the heart of the country’s recent difficulties. Are these presidents learning from one another?

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