Matiang’i illusion of power shielding real forces behind police brutality
Acting Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang'i addresses reporters after a security meeting at Mombasa County Commissioner's office on September 14, 2017. He loves the limelight and can get overzealous. PHOTO | KEVIN ODIT | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- His short stint as acting Interior CS has thrust him into the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
- Learning at two nursery schools in Kisumu has been disrupted after police threw tear gas at the children.
A picture, they say, speaks more than a thousand words.
There are these ones taken on August 14, 2017 that I keep studying on the office desktop computer to try to understand the recent mutilation of election laws in Parliament and the cases of police shooting civilians in the streets and tear-gassing kindergarten school children in parts of the country.
In one of his first public appearances after being declared the winner of the controversial August 8 election by the electoral commission, President Uhuru Kenyatta emerges presumably from a briefing in his office at Harambee House in Nairobi, flanked by acting Interior Minister Fred Matiang’i to his right and Aden Duale, the National Assembly Majority Leader, to his left.
POWER
In one picture, the President appears to make a hand gesture to Dr Matiang’i to keep pace with him, and the minister’s face immediately radiates with a smile.
The three of them are captured in yet another picture standing in a tight circle, having an intimate discussion.
Depending on who you ask, you are likely to get all manner of interpretations of those scenes from the grounds of Harambee House.
What is unmistakable is the illusion of power those exclusive moments with Kenya’s power prince gave Dr Matiang’i and Mr Duale.
EXAM CHEATING
The Garissa Town MP has not been one to hide his exaggerated sense of power.
If you watch the local political drama consistently, you probably understand how the notion of being “third in command” has turned him into such a thrilling entertainer in parliamentary debates or at political rallies.
Dr Matiang’i, who raised his public profile fighting examination cheating as the no-nonsense Education Cabinet Secretary, does not have Mr Duale’s talent for political mischief making.
DISSENT
But he, too, loves the limelight and can get overzealous – which makes him just the right person the power men in a repressive regime need to suppress dissent and deflect attention from themselves.
His short stint as acting Interior Cabinet Secretary, following the death of Joseph Nkaissery, has thrust him into the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
A police terror campaign in the wake of the disputed presidential election has left over 40 people dead and many more injured in Nairobi, Kisumu, Migori, Homa Bay and Siaya.
POLICE BRUTALITY
The victims include a six-month-old baby in Kisumu and a nine-year-old girl shot dead while playing with her colleagues in the balcony of their flat in Nairobi’s Mathare area.
Learning at two nursery schools in Kisumu has been disrupted after police threw tear gas at the children.
Despite the problem having everything to do with the ethnicisation of the leadership of Kenya’s security agencies, Dr Matiang’i, a relative outsider, has taken much of the flak from the opposition and civil society.
Sadly, the illusion of power doesn’t allow him to admit he is not in charge.
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