Killing 24 persons in 21 days in one place while there are more people being executed similarly in other places puts Kenyans on notice that days of dictatorship and official terror are back.
There were days when a group of cops called Patrick Shaw, Joginder Singh Sokhi and their protégés would terrorise those leaving in the slums of Nairobi under the pretext of fighting crime. And while crime cannot and should not be tolerated, illegal and unconstitutional elimination of suspects should not be a substitute for legal and lawful eradication of crime.
Indeed, extrajudicial execution of suspects is itself a crime and can, therefore, never be a solution to insecurity. Extrajudicial killings are dictatorship or crime empowered to govern and must never be allowed because it terrorises the whole population under the cover of lawlessness, disguised as enforcing the law.
A government that permits such killings is a dictatorship that must never call itself democracy. There is no democracy that allows or excuses extrajudicial killings.
However, perpetration of extrajudicial killings is not new in Kenya. It is one political crime that the Second Liberation fought so hard to eradicate. And for some time, many believed Kenya had managed to eradicate the killings, only to discover we are wrong. They are in full swing.
Indeed, there are executions wherever there is one-party dictatorship or one-man dictatorship that we suffered for over 40 years. As Mwalimu Julius Nyerere said, there is a corpse of carcass wherever you see flies, vultures and hyenas. Equally, there is one-party or one-man dictatorship wherever you find police executing suspects or innocent people under the guise of fighting crime.
Remember even dictators know it is criminal and evil to perpetrate executions. When Charles Njonjo once gave police a shoot to kill order, when I challenged the order in parliament, President Daniel Moi withdrew the order calling it illegal and unconstitutional. He went ahead to note that even a President had no authority to issue it. Tragically, weeks later, Moi restored Njonjo’s order and police continued to perpetrate it.
Extrajudicial killings, therefore, have historical roots in Kenya, possibly in our system of lawlessness. After all, they are rooted in our class system, which has no regard for the lives of the poor who live in slums, therefore easy to get rid of, as a means of enforcing terror and dictatorship.
The return of extrajudicial killings is a political crime that politicians should condemn and never allow against the very young people who voted for them passionately believing they were putting their ethnic kingpins into power to protect and help them prosper. How wrong they are.
Unless you belong to one of our ruling dynasties, each one of us is a potential victim of extrajudicial killing and we should therefore take a stand against it. Any one who thinks he is safe because he is law-abiding is terribly mistaken. Extrajudicial killings are a mousetrap. It comes for you
tomorrow
and it comes for me
tomorrow. So as the Swahili proverb says, if you help to dig a deep pit outside your house with your silence, it is your child who will fall into it
tomorrow.
Unless we have decided to put aside the Second Liberation and restore dictatorship, our democracy must protect everybody and never allow executions, regardless of whom they are directed against. After all, real democracy is not for protecting the wealthy and the powerful but the poor and the weak.
And when the poor in slums threaten us with their poverty and hungry eyes, the solution to our fear is not their elimination. It is the eradication of their poverty and anger with the fastest possible development.