Many In High Office Aren’t So Powerful

In the early months of the Grand Coalition Government (early 2008) the Kalenjin community was considered to have staged a grand return to the corridors of power. For in the general election five years earlier (2002) the community, following the lead of the outgoing president, Daniel arap Moi, had cast their lot with presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta – who was then buried in a landslide by candidate Mwai Kibaki.

Thus ended a 24 year period during which there had always been two or three members of the Kalenjin community counted among the most powerful people in the land. Starting off with President Moi himself, of course; but there were plenty of others acknowledged as wielding real power, known to the public as “the Rift Valley Mafia”. The 2002 election ended all this But come 2008, everything changed. True we had a very large cabinet.

But then you had in this cabinet the likes of former Head of the Civil Service, Sally Kosgey; the former State House Comptroller, Franklin Bett; the veteran politician Henry Kosgey; and the forceful and energetic William Ruto. These four represented an impressive cadre of top Kalenjin leadership.

And it seemed that the Kalenjin had adequate representation on the high table of Kenyan politics, where the crucial decisions are made. This however did not stop the Prime Minister of the time, Raila Odinga – who had benefited massively from the Kalenjin community’s votes in the 2007 election – from leading the effort to evict members of that very community from the Mau forest where they had been settled during the Moi era. Most of those who owned land in the previously-forested Mau hillsides, were not only in possession of valid title deeds; but in many cases had purchased this land from the original beneficiary of state generosity.

The loss of their land, through a brutal process whose spearhead was a man who had all voted for just months earlier, was something that the Mau forest evictees – and indeed most Kalenjin voters – neither forgave nor forgot. And in the 2013 election, they sent Raila a strong message to this effect. And yet everyone knew all along that unless the evictions were carried out, there would be catastrophic environmental consequences, as much for the Maasai living downstream of the rivers flowing from the Mau; as for Kenyan and Tanzanian tourism in the Mara-Serengeti plains.

Well, viewed in purely electoral terms, the ongoing anti-terrorist initiative named Operation Usalama Watch, which has focused mainly on residential zones favoured by the Kenyan Somali community, bears many similarities to what happened to the Kalenjin in 2008. Particularly in the clear manifestation that having plenty of “your own people” in high office, does not really empower a community in any serious way. The Inspector-General of the police, and various government spokesmen, can say what they like. But some of us know a campaign of harassment and victimization when we see one.

We know it when we see collective punishment for the sins of individuals. And that is exactly what the Kenyan ethnic Somalis have been subjected to in past weeks. In the course of this operation, there have been thousands of ethnic Somalis – fully Kenyan citizens – who nonetheless have been selectively stopped in the streets; their ID cards have been dismissed as forgeries; and they have then been subjected to humiliating “screening” which some writers have compared to what happened in Nairobi about 60 years ago, during the colonial-era ‘Operation Anvil’ when every male adult Kikuyu in Nairobi was taken off the streets and subjected to “screening” to see if he might be a Mau Mau recruit.

The similarity between what is happening to Kenya’s ethnic Somalis now, and what happened to Kalenjins in 2008, lies in that the governing Jubilee Alliance was previously considered to have “empowered” the Somali community to an exceptional degree. With two ethnic Somali cabinet secretaries serving in a cabinet of just 22, and various others serving in key public office, there were those who believed that the long-marginalized Kenyan Somali community had at last “arrived”.

And yet we now find that there is nothing these presumably high-powered individuals can do to prevent the humiliation of “their own”. Most Kenyans, weary of the repeated savage attacks launched by Al-Shabaab terrorists, no longer care what methods are being used to put an end to this horror. And the only voices raised against Operation Usalama Watch are those of media commentators, religious leaders, and human rights activists.