Godwin Murunga
12 May 2008
opinion
Nairobi — KENYANS WOKE UP ON MONday, April 14, to reports of simultaneous criminal attacks on ordinary citizens in several towns in Central Province, Rift Valley Province and in some estates in Nairobi.
Staged by the outlawed Mungiki sect, these attacks began barely hours after President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga announced the new grand coalition Cabinet. The Mungiki violence continued for three days.
On April 17, in an apparent response to Mr Odinga's plea to the movement to stop the violence and join talks with the government, the jailed Mungiki leader, Maina Njenga, issued an order from the Naivasha Maximum Security Prison to his followers to stop the violence immediately.
Much of the violence ceased soon after this order. Towns in Central Province like Murang'a, Kiambu, Nyahururu, Maragua, Othaya, and Karatina as well as specific areas in Nairobi that had been shut down following threats from Mungiki came to life again as people reopened their businesses and vehicles resumed their normal routines.
To many Kenyans, the nature of these most recent Mungiki attacks was puzzling. Many wondered aloud how it was possible for the movement to attack in several places simultaneously and on such a scale without the intelligence services warning of it and the police taking preventive action. But, in fact, these attacks illustrate the extent to which the movement has grown in scale, muscle, sophistication and audacity; a development that is extremely unsettling.
If police reports are to be believed, Mungiki "timed" its attacks three hours in advance of when police intelligence expected them to happen. They wrong-footed the law enforcement agencies. The spectacle of the police playing catch-up to Mungiki must have worried many Kenyans.
More spectacular still was the new-found confidence of the Mungiki leadership. They called a press briefing on April 14 where the executive director, Joe Waiganjo and co-ordinator, Njuguna Gitau Njuguna, of a rebounding Mungiki-ish Kenya National Youth Alliance articulated their cause as anchored in struggle against social injustice and also called-in to counter what police spokesman Eric Kiraithe had just stated on a live television broadcast.
The police, on their part, went on a threat-issuing spree accompanied by feeble assurances to Kenyans that the police were in "total control." Their threats proved hollow. Weeks after the attacks happened, no arrests have been made, making the police appear more and more ineffective.
It seems therefore that in all their recent activities, Mungiki have escalated their confrontation with Kenyans and the police. First, they have demonstrated that contrary to police claims of having eliminated the movement through the Kwekwe Squad, they are still alive and well and a match for the police. Second, they have began to consistently use petrol bombs, guns and grenades instead of their usual crude weapons against innocent civilians.
Finally, though their attempt to enlarge the frontier of their violence to the Rift Valley town of Eldoret was thwarted by the combined force of local residents and the police, the fact that they even considered such an extension should be a warning to the whole country that they are dealing with a lethal and daring movement.
All this has implications at the intellectual level. It seems clear that our understanding of Mungiki is limited and is also constantly being wrong footed by the movement. There are several notable studies of Mungiki published in English. Those by Grace Wamue and Margaret Gecaga of Kenyatta University, Peter Kagwanja of the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, David Anderson of Oxford University, and Mutuma Ruteree of the Kenya Human Rights Institute stand out clearly.
Wamue's was among the very first studies of the movement. She uncritically celebrated Mungiki's religiousity at a time when the movement was quickly morphing into criminality. Granted that much of her research was conducted at a moment when the movement depicted itself largely in Kikuyu religious revivalist terms, intellectual scepticism should have warned her to be less adoring of the movement.
The most informative of this set of studies is Kagwanja's initial publication titled "Facing Mount Kenya or Facing Mecca?" published in the London-based journal African Affairs. The thrust of this study is however diluted by a subsequent piece Kagwanja published, titled "Power to Uhuru," in the same journal, which puts forward the idea that Mungiki violence is intelligible when conceptualised within a peculiar African primitivity. One also wonders what Kagwanja means by insisting that Mungiki violence constitutes a "re-traditionalisation of society."
This notion of re-traditionalisation is borrowed from Africanists of the Patrick Chabal, Jean-Pascal Daloz and Stephen Ellis school. Ellis was editor of African Affairs when Kagwanja published the two pieces. Ellis is known for his proposal for a new trusteeship for failed African states in a piece titled "How to Rebuild Africa" published in 2005 in the US-based journal Foreign Affairs.
Trusteeship is a pseudonym for recolonisation. Though Ellis frames his argument as if it stemmed from his empathy with African people who have to live with proliferating violence in "failed African states" (Ellis's case study was Liberia), it is clear that he has little respect for African nationalism.
IN OTHER WORDS, RETRADITIONalisation of society implies a Afropessimist reading of violence in Africa which, as the title of Chabal and Daloz's book insinuated, boils down to the idea that "Africa works" through "the instrumentalisation of disorder," an argument that does not differ from Western journalistic claims of Africa as "the hopeless continent" as the Economist of May 13, 2000 put it.
Second, Kagwanja's argument is locked within a Moi-centric frame. He seems to make the argument that, yes, Mungiki may be violent, but blame it all on Moi.
The frequency with which Mungiki has acted with impunity in the post-Moi context fully challenges this Moi-centrism. This is why David Anderson's contribution is useful in so far as it emphasises the decaying urban context in which vigilantism arose and from which the Mungiki menace proliferated.
Yet, this context is just a piece of the larger puzzle that needs to be paired with other pieces to make Mungiki's story more intelligible and policy less defective. In particular, the way Mungiki alternates between the urban and rural contexts should very much be a part of this story.
Musambayi Katumanga of the University of Nairobi has urged the need to understand the urban banditry of such movements against the political and economic context of Kenya's recent history; a history that has intensified urban decay and encouraged social exclusion; a history in which the economy is doing well but the people are doing badly.
The most important point to make is that like every other movement, Mungiki has evolved in response to changing economic and political realities. In a study of Sierra Leone, Ibrahim Abdullah and others have warned that the continent must pay greater attention to the "frustrated energies of the lumpen revolutionaries who are asking a poignant question about how the nation is being governed... moving onto the centre stage in the historical process as opposed to being marginal..."
There is no doubt that Mungiki exhibits similar frustrated energies and is asking questions about how the nation is governed. But its ethnically specific response to a non-ethnically generalised problem undermines any claims to revolutionary credentials for the movement.
In the process of raising its questions, Mungiki has acquired new characteristics and dropped previous ones, thereby making itself less traceable and controllable. It has strategically withdrawn and re-emerged, it has fragmented into many Mungikis and reunited to better adapt to new realities. This behaviour is important in understanding the staying power of Mungiki.
It is the task of its leadership to ensure the movement survives state reprisals and societal censure. Mungiki's leadership has not come in for any serious analysis even as it has been working to gain an edge over other forces in society.
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