Reflections on S.K. Maina: The father of Kenya’s peace

Mourners who gathered at the Don Bosco Catholic Church in Nairobi for a requiem Mass for S.K. Maina, known to many simply as SK, were struck by one fact.

Although, as expected, many top government officials attended, notable was the number of Muslims packed in the church.

At a time when communal relations between Christians and Muslims, especially after the Garissa University College attack, have deteriorated significantly, it was inconceivable to many that a Muslim would be found in a church or a Christian in a mosque.

Who then was SK and why did his death bring Muslims and Christians together in the most unlikely of places?

In life, SK brought together people in conflict for decades. At the time of his death, his office was managing more than 200 peace committees at the sub-county, ward and village levels in Kenya’s conflict hotspots.

SK headed the National Steering Committee on Peace Building and Conflict Management, simply abbreviated NSC, which he built from scratch.

The NSC is a quietly efficient government inter-agency committee — the only one of its kind in Kenya — that brings together stakeholders to consolidate efforts geared towards peace building and conflict management within and on the borders of Kenya.

The NSC is largely uncelebrated yet Kenya cannot do without it. The committee works quietly behind the scenes through its early warning early response system to avert ethnic and religious conflicts. 
They do this through collecting, verifying and analysing data in a systematic manner and disseminating relevant information to government and national actors for response.

SK joined the public service in 1980 as a district officer. He served in Nyanza, northeastern and eastern Kenya. The urge to find a solution to the conflicts by ethnic communities and clans in northeastern Kenya drew him back, again and again like a moth to a light, to that region.

The history of northeastern Kenya, like other remote border regions, is one of neglect at the hands of successive authorities — first by the British colonialists. This left a massive security gap, with law enforcement agencies based hundreds of kilometres away.

Part of the solution came after a conflict between clans over water and livestock in 1993 that claimed 1,500 lives in Wajir.

A group of women in Wajir led by the then headteacher of a local school, Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, started a peace initiative shuttling between the warring parties. They drew their inspiration from the traditional dispute resolution mechanisms such as the Alfatah Council of Elders in Wajir.

The informal group ultimately became the Wajir Peace and Development Committee that brought together traditional leaders, government security officers, parliamentarians, civil servants and Muslim and Christian religious leaders.

This was the genesis of a much researched, celebrated and touted phenomenon that many Kenyans do not know originated locally, has been replicated in hundreds of countries and studied as best practice in conflict resolution worldwide — the District Peace Committee (DPC).

Dekha’s efforts were, however, inadequate. The NSC was established in 2001 to provide a national peace framework for both State and non-State actors to work together and avoid duplication.

However, to manage the wider conflict beyond Dekha’s district, the NSC needed to facilitate a bigger community peace agreement. This would take into account the fact that the “government” was too far away from northeastern Kenya.

The Modogashe Declaration of 2001, named after the town where it was formulated, is the most famous of the tens of agreements facilitated by the NSC that govern the north in places that law enforcement officers have trouble reaching.

The NSC put in a lot of effort until the reality of the post-election violence hit the rest of Kenya in 2008.

When former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Nairobi to solve our problems, some of the first people he consulted were Dekha and SK.

Through the efforts of SK and Dekha, the Kofi Annan Accord formalised the establishment of DPCs in Kenya.

In the run-up to the 2010 referendum on the constitution, the NSC, National Cohesion and Integration Commission, more than 500 NGOs under the PeaceNet Kenya umbrella and the United Nations Development Programme, came together to establish a platform for peace, dubbed Uwiano, with SK and myself as co-chairpersons.

Uwiano included online tools and features for tracking, reporting and retrieving evidence of hate speech, incitement and other forms of violence instigation in text, images, voice and video.

SK and I would often speak of the need to ensure that never again would a Kenyan say: “I knew the attackers were coming but I had no-one to tell who could take action.”.

When sadly, Dekha was involved in an accident that later took her life in 2011, it was SK and North Eastern PC James Ole Seriani who helped move her from Garissa to Nairobi.

SK was a man whose quiet, unassuming manner was driven by humanitarian values with the ultimate goal of preventing violent conflict and improving security.

These are the values that Head of Civil Service Joseph Kinyua, Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery and Principal Secretary Monica Juma talked about at Don Bosco Church.

The Muslims in the congregation knew he was a hero worth going to a church for.
The writer is a former commissioner of the National Cohesion and Integration Commission