By Vincent Obadha
When a section of Kenyans declared on social media platforms they would protest the murder of Albert Ojwang, little did they know they would be met with brute and illegal force not only from the police but also from goons hired to stop the protest.
Mr Ojwang met his death at the hands of police officers who arrested him in Homa Bay over a tweet.
As peacefuljustice for Ojwang!”protesters went about their business, they were overwhelmed by hired dirty and heavily armed goons who walked side by side with the police and harassed the protestors who were armed with placards, Kenyan flags and your random whistle.
The goons, who were reportedly paid between Ksh.500 and Ksh.2000 each, landed in the Nairobi Central Business District chanting“Hatutakubali maandamano hii town! (We won’t allow protests in this town) and would charge at the protestors with their sticks, whips and some wielding machetes.
All the while, police ignored them even when they decided to break into shops, rob innocent Kenyans caught up in the melee. So much for protecting the city.
The protestors stood their ground and even managed to corner a few goons whom they beat to a pulp and let them go and share the news with their criminal peers.
This is nothing new in Kenya. Small-minded politicians have always resorted to hiring goons to show strength or instil fear in their opponents. Politics attracts gang activities like a magnet to iron.
Gang activities are not strange in Kenya, but increasingly worrying
Kenya is no stranger to gangs or organised goons who have, over time, made life unbearable for many citizens right across the country.
In any case, the kind of gang activities the country is witnessing now would make the current gang members terrorising protestors in Nairobi CBD look like poor amateurs as compared to more vicious gangs such as Mungiki, Taliban, Kamjesh, Chinkororo, Gaza, Confirm Gang and Mombasa Panga Boys, among many others.
But they never start big, they start small, five members, three there and before long, they grow into an unmanageable gang that causes havoc for years.
Gang-ism emerges in response to social, political, and economic inequalities and the dissatisfactions they engender.
The big gangs in Kenya have always engaged in violent theft, violence on hire, extortion, and protection rackets, particularly in urban informal settlements.
Gangs often thrive where there is poor politics, extreme poverty, unemployment, and inadequate state services such as policing.
The socio-political fabric in Kenya contains the perfect recipe conducive to the presence of gangs. The country is stalked by poor and divisive politics, endemic unemployment, malignant corruption, huge social disparities between the rich and the poor, and marginalisation due to either social class or ethnicity.
Therefore, gangs continue to pose a gross long-term threat to the social and political fabric of Kenya. Strangely, under the Prevention of Organised Crime Act of 2010, all gang-like activities remain banned under the law, but the reality is that many of the old school gangs still have remnants, while fledgling gangs are also on the prowl.
Kenya's political history has been rife with the culture of hiring gangs or goons. They are normally youthful and from economically deprived neighbourhoods.
Even when it has meant going the extra mile to ferry gangs from distant places, politicians have always ferried the gangs to needed venues to “write” political statements.
Haiti's gang problem needs to be a wake-up call to Kenya
What Kenyans might not know is that we may be closely following a path followed by Haiti years back; it might look like an unlikely comparison, but when one lays their bed, they lie on it.
Currently, the Kenya Police is holed up in Haiti, as part of a multi-national force, in an attempt to restore peace and normalcy to the tiny Island nation but despite facing gigantic setbacks there, they are still trudging on.
Lawyer, writer and political analyst Saitabao Ole Kanchory perfectly summed up this situation on X when he tweeted; "A good time to remind the world that Kenya police is protecting Haitians from criminal gangs while attacking Kenyans using criminal gangs."
Owing to this, most Kenyans have a good idea of where Haiti is on the map. It is nowhere near Africa, but it is largely populated by descendants of former slaves taken from Africa to the Caribbean by the French to help provide free labour, but later revolted to create a state of their own.
Haiti's gang landscape has deep roots, which came to prominence during the rule of Papa Doc Duvalier (Haitian president from 1957 until he diedin 1971) utilised a vigilante group called the Tonton Macoutes to intimidate and control parts of the Haitian population that did not agree with him.
The group began as a rural vigilante or gang created to bolster support for the regime in the countryside. However, it evolved into a brutal instrument of repression, intimidation, and torture, before it evolved further to delve into serious criminal operations such as the elimination of his political opponents.
The presence of gangs thus evolved in Haiti from the Tonton Macoutes of Papa Doc Duvalier's regime to the complex, politically motivated, armed groups of today.
Although the Tonton Macoutes were a state-sponsored vigilante used for political repression, Haiti’s contemporary gangs are more diverse, linked to political actors who utilise crime and violence to bankroll their existence.
Gangs in Haiti today are a more complex mix of political actors, criminal enterprises, and community-based groups, all operating in a context of ongoing political and social instability.
Gangs used and dumped in Kenya over time
Many gangs in Kenya have been used and dumped by politicians when their usefulness is exhausted.
From Mungiki, Jeshi la Mzee, Taliban, Chinkororo, Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF) and many others all found space and relevance when politicians had dirty work to be done.
Mostly, such occasions have occurred during or immediately after the general elections, but the short-term usefulness has always meant that once dumped and forgotten by the political class, they dabble in criminal activities for money through extortion and outright robbery.
In the case of the SDLF, the army was sent in to wipe them out. The end has always been the same for all local gangs: a life of crime, deplorable squalor in poverty and early deaths for most of the gang members.
Factors that enable gangs to form and flourish
Research reveals that poverty, unemployment, lack of economic activities, and discrimination drive young people to join gangs for economic survival and to find a sense of belonging.
As politicians continue to use gangs for political mobilisation and violence, communities find themselves slowly wedged in a space where no one can talk for fear of reprisals from the same gangs acting at the behest of the politicians.
The neglect of certain regions and settlements, coupled with inadequate provision of basic public goods and services, leads to a void that gangs would immediately exploit.
As a society, Kenyans know that the existence of gangs has consequences such as heightened criminal activities such as theft, extortion, murder and wanton violence.
Gangs remain a source of disruption to community norms and development. The presence of gangs erodes trust, encourages human rights abuses and undermines public trust in law enforcement and the state in general.
Kenya’s political class should stop exploiting the hapless youth in gangs as a quick fix to their political ends, but should instead lay out a deliberate plan to bring Kenya’s youth back from sliding into a gang abyss.
The root causes of gang existence are poverty, unemployment, lack of economic activities and inequality. Robust, practical and inclusive strategies should be laid out to tackle these negative grounds conclusively.
The government should also roll out thorough engagement with all sectors of communities where gang activities are already in place to ensure they address real and not perceived concerns of the affected areas.
Improving the scope and quality of state policing would go a long way towards achieving this end. The government should ensure the reintegration of former gang members into useful cogs of society.
This, just as happens with deliberate rehabilitation of drug addicts, should involve professional programs to rehabilitate and reintegrate former gang members into society.
If the political class, which is charged with policy making and implementation, do not see this as an important and urgent move today, tomorrow might be too late.
To quote writer, journalist, researcher and editor Rasna Warah, "I said it before and am saying it again, one day someone will look at Kenya and say, here lies the ruins of a country destroyed by greed."
