That Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro was arrested for whatever crime is not the subject of this article. However I hasten to add that if he has been arrested for causing a breach of the peace, others who were perceived by those who watched the incident to have done the same, should also be arrested.
I will also not dwell on the desecration of a holy shrine as the Catholic bishop of the Murang'a Archdiocese has already stopped fundraisers by politicians in his churches.
The ideal position should be that politicians are never, ever allowed to address church congregants inside the shrines and any donation should be quietly handed over. But then politicians use churches as vote hunting grounds and unfortunately, the appetite for quick cash is as present in the clergy as it is in us ordinary mortals.
My beef with the police is not the arrest of Nyoro, but the manner in which they sought to cause that arrest on Sunday night.
After the Murang’a fundraiser and attendant scuffle, the Kiharu MP travelled to Nairobi and participated in the weekly TV political talk show, Kiririmbi.
Immediately the programme was over at around nine in the evening, we were shown pictures of plain and uniformed police officers and their vehicles outside the media house offices. They had come to arrest the MP.
Nyoro is a member of Parliament and if what we saw was anything to go by, he did not commit a felony. Common sense would therefore dictate that the police should have summoned him to make a statement and if they had evidence then they would have booked him and later charged him in court.
Trying to drag him out of a TV station at night in the full glare of cameras is either playing PR or taking us back to the bad old days of Kanu dictatorship when MPs were even arrested within Parliament.
While a return of the 1980s and 1990s in dealing with political opponents would send chills down the spines of many, of late we have also witnessed a police force and a DPP that is hungry for media attention, resulting in night and weekend arrests of prominent Kenyans under the glare of cameras.
Most of these arrests are done on Friday, ensuring that the victims spend the weekend in custody before being accorded bail hearings the following Monday.
Some Kenyans feel this is unnecessary and simply meant to cut these people to size. Many are the times that the media have been invited to witness the might of the police as they wait in their numbers outside the gates of the powerful, just about to be brought down.
The worrying thing though is the accusation by some politicians, including those who were with Nyoro, that the Interior CS and PS, and other government functionaries were persecuting politicians allied to Deputy President William Ruto. They also alleged that some leaders in the Kieleweke faction were threatening their colleagues with arrests.
If these allegations are true, one would wonder like Senator Kipchumba Murkomen wondered, “What Kenya are we living in?”
And if it’s true that the Kiharu MP was on Monday night arrested at a cathedral in Murang’a, this would also be very worrying. It springs to fore, that déjà vu feeling.
A scuffle like the one that took place in Kiharu with politicians and their cronies snatching microphones and pushing each other around is commonplace and one sees nothing special about the Murang’a incident apart from the fact that it happened in church and only one of the combatants is being pursued. That the church has taken action to avoid a repeat should be enough.
As the same politicians are fond of reminding us, let’s not ‘roll back’ our constitutional gains and let’s be very wary of the creeping back of the dreaded Kanu days.
