A long history of bad relations between police, student leaders

When Meru University student leader Evans Njoroge was shot dead by the police, he joined a list of student leaders who have died in controversial circumstances.

But despite the outrage over the killing in February, no action has  been taken, although the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (Ipoa) recommended that  the officer alleged to have shot the student in cold blood be prosecuted.

The quelling of protests at local universities by killing the leaders has a long history, dating back to the 1970s.

“The political apex of student activism was reached in the mid-1970s and lasted to the mid-1990s, by which point student action was more likely to be accompanied by demands for democratic reform. In Kenya, university students have been leaders of protest, activism and dissent, strikes and demonstrations. It may well be that Kenya would still be a dictatorship today, were it not for the orchestrated street demonstrations by University of Nairobi students in the period leading up to multiparty politics,” writes Mwangi Macharia in the Journal of Students Affairs in Africa.

KILLED

Exactly a week after Mr Njoroge was killed in Meru, about 50 people, gathered in a room at Pawa254 in Nairobi, the artists’ hub founded by activist Boniface Mwangi.

These people were not gathered because of Mr Njoroge, although they mentioned him a lot. They were here to eulogise two brave men — GPO Oulu and Oscar Kingara — who  had died  at the hands of a suspected police killer squad nine years earlier. It was the second annual GPO-Kingara memorial human rights lecture.

Long before Embakasi East MP Babu Owino became the byword for University of Nairobi student politics, there was GPO Oulu, a firebrand activist who was hard to ignore. His friends described him as brilliant, forward-thinking and passionate – a rebel who had the social muscle to whip up support for his cause, making him a threat  to the university administration. 

“In 2003, GPO was suspended for 1,000 days for protesting a fee increase. He led a group of students to break down the door where school administrators were discussing increasing school fees, arguing that students had the right to be present in such forums,” said a friend of GPO’s who declined to give his name.

REFORMS

Such was GPO’s style.  His tactics earned him a cult-like following around the university, with many seeing him as a revolutionary capable of bringing reforms to the university and beyond. 

Strict conditions

When GPO was readmitted in 2007, it was under strict conditions:  he could not vie for the Students’ Organisation of Nairobi University (Sonu) elections, nor could he address a gathering of more than five people at a time.

“But on the day he returned, GPO received a hero’s welcome. Students swarmed around him, thwarting the university’ s attempt  to isolate him. Many said that they would boycott the elections if he were not allowed to vie,” said our source.

But GPO did not run in the election. Instead, he devised ways  of undermining the university leadership without directly putting himself in the line of fire. He completed Bachelors in Mathematics and Economics  course in 2008 but was not allowed to graduate that year following claims by the  university  that  his marks in some core units were  missing.

SHOT DEAD

In March 2009, GPO and human rights activist Oscar Kingara — who some said had links with the Mungiki — were shot dead on State House Road by two men in dark suits suspected to be policemen. They were in Kingara’s old Mercedes Benz just a few metres from the University of Nairobi’s Hall 11.

GPO would later that year graduate posthumously, the mystery of his missing marks quietly swept under the carpet.

People close to the two say they  had dreams of starting a revolutionary movement led by the youth to fight for a truly democratic government.

At the time of their deaths, they  were documenting extra-judicial killings in the country. Their work was part of the evidence that  Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, relied on in his investigations into abuse of force by Kenya’s police service.

MURULI

Years earlier, in 1997, the body of Solomon Muruli, also a UoN student leader, was found burnt beyond recognition in his room at the Kikuyu campus, a week after he received death threats.  His death, and those of three others  killed months earlier, sparked massive protests by students, who railed against the state’s heavy handedness in silencing dissenting voices.

Sonu’s chequered history of prominence and dead leaders dates back to its  first chairman, Tito Adungosi, who was jailed for sedition following the failed coup of August 1, 1982. Just a day before he was to be released, he died in prison under mysterious circumstances. Some say he was poisoned.

You cannot talk about revolutionary student leaders without talking about Philomena Chelagat Mutai, who immediately after finishing university in 1974, became in the youngest female member of Parliament at 24. Those who knew Mutai describe her as a fiery critic of the government, famously taking on then Central Police Boss OJ Oswald for using excessive force against protesting students, protests that led to the closure of the university. She was kicked out of the university a number of times for causing trouble but managed to graduate.

FIGHTING SPIRIT

Her indomitable fighting spirit marked her tenure in Parliament, where she bravely took on President Jomo Kenyatta, and later Daniel Moi, her most notable battled being an attempting to secure land for  squatters in her constituency (Eldoret North) and criticising the government for failing to provide food for Kenyans during the  1982 famine. For the latter, she was forced into self-exile in Tanzania to escape a government attempt to arrest her on trumped-up charges of inflating mileage claims.

“Firebrand to the core, Miss Mutai was among the Seven Bearded Sisters, so nicknamed by then Attorney-General Charles Njonjo, who included her contemporary at the University of Nairobi and current Siaya Senator James Orengo,” wrote veteran journalist Dorothy Kweyu in this newspaper a few years ago.

Mutai’s died in 2013, having retreated  into a life of isolation.

But there are those who survived and live among us as emblems of Kenya’s opposition politics. Wafula Buke is one of them. He dedicated his life to being a perennial thorn in the side of the government but has lived to tell the tale.

DETAINED

Buke was the  shortest serving Sonu chairman. Just nine days after he won the election in 1987, he was arrested and detained  for five years on charges of spying for Libya, marking the end of  his formal education. He was 24 at the time. 

On top of arrests, beatings and even killings, the government also removed “dangerous” books from circulation.

Buke says he has seen student leaders metamorphose from principled individuals  to to self-serving  demagogues,  adding, “The current political climate of repression and fear, where the government is so brazenly corrupt and is intent on ruling with an iron fist will fire up the spirit of liberation among the young and we shall soon have a new crop of radical students.”