Why Chepkonga’s adventure with Waki report is ill-advised

The chair of the Legal Affairs Committee Samuel Chepkonga has filed a motion seeking to re-open the Waki Commission report on the 2007/2008 post-election violence.

I have picked two excerpts from the report, to make the point that Chepkonga’s new endeavour might be inadvisable. 

FIRST EXCERPT

On January 1, 2008 we were still fearful. We didn’t open our business … We owned the shop …

At about 3 pm that day, people came to my home … there was only my husband and me at home. My children had gone to visit their grandparents in Nyandarua. There were more than 10 people ... all men ... dressed in coats and they had smeared mud on their faces so you could not recognise them …They were armed. They had arrows, pangas and rungus … They were speaking in Kalenjin. They said “we have come to finish you …”

I started pleading with them. … They said I should keep quiet or they were going to kill me … they started attacking my husband. They were cutting him with pangas and piercing him with arrows ... They cut my husband on the neck with a panga and that made him fall to the ground …

There was another group of men who were looting my shop. I could see them from the door … carrying property from my shop, such as sugar, cooking fat and other goods.

A HORRIBLE ACT
I was wearing trousers with buttons at the waist. The men tore at my trousers ... There were about four of them ... They were arguing among themselves who was going to be first.

Then one said that if I escaped from the knife and arrows, I would die of Aids ... Some of them held my legs and some held my hands while they raped me.

When this was happening my husband and I were both still in the sitting room…The last time I had looked, it was like he was dead. He wasn’t moving.

One man raped me and then the second one and the third … It was either the second or the third man who said they were not able to get in me properly so they cut me ... it was the panga they were carrying that they used.

They cut my [private parts]. When I had my children, the doctor told me I had a narrow opening. Both my children were born by caesarean.

They continued raping me. It was when the fourth man was raping me that I went unconscious … I next remember – and it is vague – that a Kalenjin friend of ours called Joseph was there and he was pleading with the men.

He was asking them to be allowed to take the body of my husband and take me to hospital. The men started quarrelling with him ... They threatened to kill him …

(Having watched her husband being killed, the woman in this incident contracted HIV from the rape incident.)
SECOND EXCERPT
On Monday [January 28, 2008], I woke up … a workmate of mine, a Luhya, came to me … He told me that my brother, Eric Ouma Oyieko, had been killed while taking tea … I told the workmate that it could not have been my brother because when we were fleeing I passed by my brother’s house and I found a padlock. I knew he had also fled …

I boarded a Securicor car ... I left to see my brother … I found a crowd of people including policemen who were standing nearby ... They did not look bothered.

I found that his [private parts] had been cut off and placed in his mouth ... I found blood was still pouring out of his body and he was kicking as he was dying.

I talked to the policemen around and requested them to take my brother to the hospital ... The police told me … that I should not disturb them, that if I insisted I would end up like my brother and that it was not their work.

I decided to go back to Sher where we were seeking refuge. I walked to Sher because I did not have bus fare … By that time my brother had died … I informed my husband.

He asked me if I had taken my brother to the mortuary and I told him I hadn’t since I did not get any assistance from the police.

CLOBBERED TO DEATH
The following day, another workmate of mine informed me that my brother had not been moved to the mortuary and was still lying on the road … and that dogs were eating his private parts.

My brother was clobbered to death before he was mutilated. The people who did that to him were using spiked clubs. They had fixed nails on the club and as they hit his face the nails would pluck flesh from his body.

... It was then that I saw a Land-Rover full of policemen ... I boarded their vehicle and we went with them to where my brother’s body was ... dogs had eaten him just as I had been informed.

We took him to the mortuary. By then he was smelling badly and he had started rotting because his body had spent two days in the sun ...

I [later] learned that my brother was taking tea from his house when some Kikuyu told him that I and my husband had been killed. He left the tea and came to our shop to look for us ... when some people said, ‘there he is’.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

They were actually looking for my husband and when they could not find him they killed my brother.

My late brother was married. They had three children. [Minor’s name withheld] was present when his father was being clobbered and mutilated. He has since gone mad.

He keeps on saying, “baba wanakata kichwa yako, wanakata kitu chako…(Dad they are chopping off your head, they are chopping off your thing (private parts).”

Whatever its shortcomings, the Waki report is a record of the suffering of PEV victims and should not be trifled with.