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.
The key priority of the leadership of such a movement has historically included ensuring growth, or a claim of growth, in the numbers of its adherents. Numbers give the movement the sense that they have an appealing message.
They also help to convince observers that the movement has numerical strength. Thus, at some point last year, Mungiki not only stepped up recruitment, they also inaccurately claimed that their following was spread across the country.
Second, the leadership has put in place curbs against internal rebellion or backsliding through a graduated and binding oath system that is enforced by the brutal murders of those who go against it. In other words, there is no life after Mungiki for members.
Thirdly, the Mungiki leadership has had to walk the tightrope between alternately pandering to and blackmailing the politicians under whose patronage they operate. The survival of the movement has depended on how well they have been able to camouflage its intentions. It is the role of this leadership that, perhaps, explains three successive phases in Mungiki's never-ending transformation that have seen the movement fragment and reconstitute itself in three waves.
In the first of these waves, Mungiki brought together youths of the groups dispossessed during the land clashes era. Their ostensible goal was cultural revival through the Kikuyu religion. This is what Wamue studied. But, as Kagwanja and Anderson show in their respective studies, the movement was driven by, or soon came to accommodate, a real concern about economic injustice. They started with the 1992 land clashes but broadened their scope to encompass many other human rights and social justice concerns.
There is no way to divorce this social question from the religious guise that Mungiki adopted. Religion acts as the glue that holds its youthful adherents together. It provides them with a set of rituals that they use to confirm their togetherness and validate their right to make certain demands.
In the second wave, however, the religious dimension shrank even though the overlay of ghastly rituals and brutal murders persisted. This time, the overt political interests of Mungiki dominated and their bandit approach to expressing their demands gained greater prominence.
Also, Mungiki assimilated and publicly expressed the complaints of the displaced Kikuyu in the Rift Valley who had one or other grievance against the Moi regime. These grievances dovetailed with the overall demands for social justice and economic betterment for the majority in Kenya who had faced the consequences of Moi's decades-old misrule.
MUNGIKI'S GENUINE complaints therefore meshed with valid national concerns about bad governance and economic mismanagement. Their struggle, at least rhetorically, also took up problems of landlessness, youth unemployment, urban decay and the inability of the government to provide basic services including infrastructure improvement, health provision, education and law and order.
It positioned itself as expressing the grievances of a generation whose dreams had been deferred. Unemployment and pent-up frustration became the lethal cocktail that fuelled the Mungiki menace.
Though Mungiki shared grievances with most Kenyan youth, it was distinguished in terms of its rituals, expressions, and its religious clothing. It expressed its message in exclusive ethnocentric terms. But does the economic crisis in Kenya affect only one ethnically constituted movement and not the youths of other ethnicities?
Why is it mainly Mungiki that is so aggrieved with the numerous challenges afflicting Kenyans? Why is it that, in addressing these issues, Mungiki seeks to criminally express its anger by looting, killing and maiming?
Indeed, the other element that distinguishes Mungiki in the second wave is its violent approach. But this should not be surprising since the movement was born and socialised in the state-sanctioned violence surrounding Kenya's democratisation process. The land clashes were a part of a larger story of growing predation and banditry by the state in which the rest of society was invited to participate in an orgy of looting.
This context explains how Mungiki youths joined the drift into collective social deviance characteristic of the 1990s. It will be recalled that this was an era in which vigilantism and the privatisation of violence became both entrenched and profitable with the involvement of politicians, who employed the services of private militia to intimidate their political adversaries and cripple individuals and groupings in the political opposition. The role of politicians also explains the impunity with which vigilante groups like Mungiki continue to attack innocent Kenyans.
The political patronage of this era opened a new dimension for Mungiki in which the movement cohabited with politicians of different political persuasions and constantly shifted their services according to how the political pendulum swung.
At one point, they challenged and condemned the Moi-led government for its political and economic failures. At another, they praised him and even offered to disband after they sought, and were granted, audience with him. At a public rally at which numerous Mungiki youth were paraded, Moi offered amnesty after many of the youth claimed to have defected from the movement.
Apart from Moi, the other politicians who have been correctly or incorrectly associated with Mungiki are Uhuru Kenyatta, the late David Mwenje and George Nyanja. At one time, Mungiki condemned and mocked Uhuru, only to come out in full force in the run-up to the 2002 general election to support his candidature. At this point, the government allowed Mungiki, then a banned movement, to demonstrate in the street of Nairobi in his support. This they did while carrying machetes, clubs and other crude weapons.
Indeed, around this time Mungiki began to flex its muscle against the law enforcement agents in new ways. They did this with the blessing of President Moi, who held several meetings with Mungiki leaders at which he pleaded with them not to embrace Islam and to stop indulging in archaic rituals and practices. Mungiki's elders also requested the president to allow them to teach their children their culture (Kirira).
Moi consented, perhaps because he assumed that this was indeed their motive. Moi's main concern was with the terrorism stigma that had attached itself to Kenya in the obsessive US "war on terror." In offering to quit Islam, Mungiki leaders extracted a promise from Moi that the police would stop harassing the movement. To Mungiki, this was a blank cheque that they proceeded to encash with gusto, extending their tentacles into a number of sectors of public life suffering from state neglect.
In the first instance, they began to take control of most matatu transport routes in Nairobi and other towns in Central Province and sections of Rift Valley Province. The movement solidified the creation of cartels and protection rings on matatu routes they controlled. In return for protection, they demanded regular payments.
In city estates where crime and insecurity was on the rise, they formed vigilante groups of youth providing security and extracting rents. In many cases, they themselves became the source of insecurity in instances where targeted clients refused to comply with their demands. Residents within their areas had to pay protection fee and abide by the code imposed by the movement, or face "punishment."
In doing this, Mungiki competed with or complemented the activities of other vigilante groups like the Taliban, Baghdad Boys, Jeshi la Mzee and Jeshi la Embakasi. The competition between Mungiki and Taliban became particularly fierce, leading to a violent confrontation on March 3, 2002 that caused the death of 20 residents of Kariobangi North estate and the hospitalisation of 30 others.
At this point, the government slapped a ban on all vigilante groups including Mungiki and Taliban. But Mungiki's might had been established. Key political actors in both Moi and Kibaki regimes like Kihika Kimani, David Mwenje and Koigi wa Wamwere came out openly in support of the movement.
Government attempts to control Mungiki at this point proved to be too little too late. After ignoring the movement during its formative years, how possible was it to eliminate a more entrenched Mungiki? The government stood no chance of being taken seriously after the period of political cohabitation and when the police were already compromised by allegations that some had been recruited into the movement.
Indeed, while the influence of Taliban has significantly diminished following the ban, that of Mungiki has gradually increased and the movement has grown in visibility. The question of how Mungiki has survived political censure and police control is at the heart of the third wave of its transformation.
LEADERSHIP IS CENTRAL TO this third wave. Its leadership has grown into a political force keen to move from the shadow margins and have a say at the national stage. The movement has morphed into a bold player in Gikuyu politics.
Thus, not only does the leadership seem to have a pool to recruit from, it also seems to have an audience that pays attention to its rhetoric. As a result, it is not restricted simply to organising and running the movement, but has been cutting deals with the political elite, especially in Central Kenya.
This dimension of Mungiki is different because it illustrates the emergence of a class of Mungiki leadership exercising hegemony on adherents and employing ruthless force to ensure compliance in the rank and file.
Analysts of the movement treat it as though it were an embodiment of egalitarianism. On the contrary, the recent transformations within it have involved the emergence of a hierarchy of leadership that has graduated into a political class.
It is because of this class differentiation that Ndura Waruinge and others have sought elective political office, with Waruinge announcing his interest in the Lang'ata parliamentary seat in the run-up to the 2007 election before dropping out in favour of Stanley Livondo. But an enduring aspect of this leadership reality is the movement's desire to seek, keep and where necessary change political patronage.
While Mungiki's leadership has actively sought out politicians for patronage, they have also matured enough to begin thinking about strategy and the public image of the movement. The emergence of KNYA seems designed to play this public relations role. This development has also recently been accompanied by the hijacking of the language of rights in an attempt to obscure well-documented atrocities and legitimise their actions.
Through these new strategies, they have brought to the table social and economic demands. This constitutes the tougher part of dealing with Mungiki. How do you deal with a movement that articulates social justice issues by effectively deploying the language of rights and providing evidence that the political system and especially the police have been unfair and unjust to it?
Therefore, Mungiki's relationship with Kenya's political leadership is by far the most critical explanation of its seeming invincibility. There is some evidence that the national intelligence services know about Mungiki activities and constantly inform the law enforcement agencies.
Yet Mungiki has operated with impunity, at times in complete disregard of the presence of law enforcement officers, at times by killing or maiming policemen and chiefs the way they did in September 2000 during a prayer meeting at Kianjai Village in Muranga District. At times by attacking police stations like they did in early 2002 in Muranga and Nyahururu and at other times as if they simply meant to prove the irrelevance of the police force.
Their behaviour makes sense only by underscoring, as have many observers, that the movement enjoys protection of political forces that are strong enough to halt concerted police reprisals against the movement.
By patronising Mungiki, the political elite bestow power and promise on the movement. By dallying with specific powerful politicians, the movement, and especially its leaders, feel, experience and begin to express that power of association. In this context, it is immaterial whether a particular politician is thought, wrongly or correctly, to be a sponsor of Mungiki. All that Mungiki needs is a perception of association with valued politicians.
This perception gives credibility to the movement. Its leaders also gain associative credit and resulting power. This is the point that Moi did not heed when he was dialoguing with them. It is the point that Uhuru Kenyatta missed when Mungiki demonstrated in the streets supporting his candidature. It is what Kihika Kimani and Koigi wa Wamwere did not think through when they made friendly gestures to the movement.
In a nutshell, the staying power of Mungiki is not mysterious and neither is it magical. There are three elements that give Mungiki staying power. The first, discussed above, is its association with politicians; the second is the dire economic situation in the country during and especially after the Moi regime, and the last is the tenacity of Mungiki's adherents.
Some analysts have explained the anger of Mungiki as reflecting the declining economic fortunes in the country. The key problem arising from the decline is the growing unemployment among the youth. This has created a huge pool of possible Mungiki recruits who are excluded from lawful means of earning a livelihood by impossible commodity prices, underemployment and inefficient service provision. These problems account for the entrenchment of the bandit economy discussed by Katumanga.
But these economic issues affect Kenyans across the board. Why then is the response to such a countrywide crisis taken as peculiar to an ethnocentric movement? What makes Mungiki unique to this story of national misery? Why the violence from Mungiki when everyone else is challenging the state in other legal ways?
Economic malaise alone does not explain the staying power of Mungiki. The movement's uniqueness rests in its peculiar use of the bandit economy to profit itself; and like any other business, sustainability is important to making more profits. The staying power must be located in the opportunities that a bandit economy creates for the emergence of self-sustaining, profitable crime-based enterprises.
The bandit economy offers a niche for informal groupings like Mungiki who make their livelihood from it even as they complain of harassment and injustices from the state. While for some vigilante groups this niche was of short-lived value as they were simply edged out by competing groups, for Mungiki the niche grew into a sustainable source of profitable, though criminal, livelihoods. The legality or illegality of the movement is therefore very low on their list of priorities.
The more the police failed in the formative years of Mungiki to clip its wings and the more the City Council failed to secure transport routes, the more it allowed room for Mungiki to claim to provide a service to people in exchange for rents.
Kenyans need to confront the reality that the crisis years in the country have helped Mungiki evolve into self-sustaining enterprises that benefit from political patronage and from economic problems spawned by bad political leadership.
Most Kenyans who suffer the consequences of economic collapse suffer doubly when Mungiki uses this collapse to extract rent, kill or maim. Only those like Mungiki able to take advantage of such situations are the winners in the final analysis.
Mungiki's language of defending the rights of the unemployed youth represents a reaction to valid grievances but also a cover for the crimes it commits, an attempt to bestow legitimacy on its unacceptable activities.
That everyone else is struggling against the same illegitimate state in more legitimate ways underscores that Mungiki's lawless approach is wrong. Recently, they have invoked Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha to describe their activities. To be sure, this language of rights effectively draws from real problems in society. But it cannot be ignored that while the movement talks about rights, it also survives by abusing the rights of many others that it is responsible for killing, maiming and mutilating.
The criminal element of Mungiki and the "legitimacy" of its calls for greater inclusion currently co-exist in a relationship that should make all Kenyans uneasy. Mungiki has a right to assert certain human rights and right-thinking Kenyans ought to support that cause.
While there is no good reason for the extrajudicial killings allegedly perpetrated by the police, Mungiki has also been abusing the rights of others with impunity. Since public censure has grown tremendously, the movement has morphed into the KNYA, the group that Njuguna spoke for when they launched the simultaneous attacks on that fateful Monday. There is no doubt that the insistence on their rights and justice is a public relations exercise meant to flag the movement's complaints against the state while hiding its own culpability.
The fact that politicians in Kenya seem to have failed to perceive Mungiki's strategy is perhaps the most worrying thing of all. The worry should be greatest among Central Province politicians.
For a start, Mungiki's rhetoric since the end of Moi's rule has been more inward than outward looking. They harp on the promises Gikuyu politicians made to them in the days when Kanu was the enemy.
They feel left out and misused.
They have also focused greater attention on historical injustices and the failed promises of the Independence struggle, the rise to positions of power of those they perceive as "home guards" and the approval these so-called home guards seem to receive in the Kibaki government.
Mungiki seems intent on sending home a message by terrorising communities in Central Province and ensuring that silence regarding the movement reigns. In this case, Mungiki is holding an entire people to ransom.
THE RECENT POST-ELECTION chaos in the country further illustrated the extent to which the elite in Mungiki-prone areas have failed to heed the lesson. During the crisis, some businessmen and politicians from the Mt Kenya region invited Mungiki to protect the community from the Kalenjin Warriors in the Rift Valley. Mungiki took up this invitation with alacrity. It was at the centre of retributive attacks in Nakuru and Naivasha.
Unfortunately, then, these politicians still treat Mungiki as a reserve battalion in Kenyan politics, a force that can be called up and disbanded at their whims. They miss the fact that the movement feels strongly entitled to participation in Kenyan politics on its own terms.
Unlike the Kalenjin Warriors, who are organised within a traditional leadership hierarchy under the alleged control of Kalenjin elders (not necessarily politicians), Mungiki's leadership hierarchy is independent of and operates without due regards to the control of Gikuyu elders or politicians. As such, the movement cannot be controlled in the manner of some other militia groups.
Second, during the Kibaki presidency, the common denominator for Mungiki has been attacks on communities in Central Province. Though Mungiki's grievances are often directed at the Gikuyu elite, the violence always targets local communities, who have become pawns in a terrorist game they do not fully understand. When Mungiki has no mission to execute on behalf of its patrons, it invariably returns to visit terror at home.
The fact of ethnicity makes it difficult to export Mungiki beyond Gikuyu-speaking areas. This means that when the movement has grievances, it tends to vent its anger against local communities among whom it operates.
This is why the chief targets of merciless Mungiki violence in 2007 were local communities within Central Province. The movement uses violence to instil fear, ensure compliance to its demands and send messages to the Gikuyu political leadership.
The movement has left no doubt in recent times that they have unresolved problems with selected people within the Kibaki regime with whom they associate historical injustices relating to land and whom they blame for the extrajudicial police killing of members of the movement.
Indeed, their complaints against some politicians have given the movement the legitimacy to speak about their rights. This complaint would not strike a chord had the government handled the movement differently.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Last week, we neglected to mention that Shalini Gidoomal's Life of Brian first appeared in the literary magazine Kwani?
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