Africa News blog

Was white Kenyan aristocrat’s conviction fair?

It’s been almost three years since the son of the 5th Lord Delamere, Thomas Cholmondeley, first hopped down from a police  truck and entered into Kenya’s High Court to face murder charges  over the death of a local poacher on his estate.

Cholmondeley sat as impassively this week as he did that  first day in court as the judge convicted him of a lesser charge  of manslaughter.

Although the death  penalty is off the table, he still could face life in prison.

Will Kenyan police be brought to book?

A U.N. investigator has castigated Kenya’s police force for hundreds of alleged extra-judicial killings and called for both its chief and the Attorney General to be fired immediately.   In a scathing indictment of the east African country’s security forces, Philip Alston, the U.N. rapporteur on extradicial executions, said he had received overwhelming evidence during a 10-day tour of systematic, widespread regular and carefully planned killings by the police. He said they were “free to kill at will” and did so with impunity for motives ranging from private disputes to extortion, to shooting a suspect instead of making an arrest. “The Kenyan police are a law unto themselves and they kill often and with impunity, ” said Alston, a law professor from Australia. In a statement laced with angry sarcasm, he accused the police of failing to provide him with virtually any of the information he sought, including the number of officers in the force. He supported allegations that police had killed 500 suspected members of the notorious Mungiki crime gang in 2007 in an attempt to exterminate it and 400, mostly opposition, demonstrators during a post election crisis last year — as reported by an official inquiry. Army and police are also accused of torturing and killing at least 200 people in an offensive to suppress a rebel movement in western Kenya.   Alston demanded the immediate dismissal of Police Commissioner Hussein Ali but did not stop there. He said long-serving Attorney General Amos Wako, who he accused of consistently obstructing attempts to prosecute those in high positions for extrajudicial executions, must also go, calling him the embodiment of a system of impunity. Alston added that Kenya’s judicial system was bankrupt and another obstacle to achieving justice.  And he even attacked President Mwai Kibaki for remaining completely silent about impunity.   Alston’s condemnation was perhaps the most high profile and powerful in recent years but it follows numerous reports by human rights groups about extrajudicial killings by the police. Ali, an army general who has led the force for five years, has survived numerous other controversies.   The government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, who as a sideline produces a popular television cop squad drama, immediately rubbished Alston’s statement, saying he had not been in the country long enough to draw accurate conclusions. But Kenya’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Nation, noted in an editorial that this was a routine response from the government and the U.N. official’s report could not be dismissed so lightly, an opinion shared by the other big daily, the Standard. But the government appears set to ignore even such high profile criticism, as it has done with allegations against the police in the past.   The case also underlines the divisions within Kenya’s unwieldy Grand Coalition government, set up almost a year ago to end ethnic bloodletting after the disputed election that killed around 1,300 people. Alston was invited to carry out his investigation by this very government, although it is not clear who did so. He said Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Justice Minister Martha Karua had expressed concern about his report. Odinga was quoted in the Nation as saying: “We must act on the report. No one will be spared. I am not willing to compromise on this one.” He doesn’t seem to have spoken to Mutua.     But whatever Odinga says, nobody is holding their breath for a radical overhaul of the police despite wide public disgust over their tactics. A recent opinion poll showed that 70 percent of Kenyans surveyed felt the coalition government had achieved nothing since it was formed last April. Only 33 percent thought any political or business leader guilty of organising the election violence would ever be convicted. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who led mediation to end the crisis, warned that political manoeuvres delaying the establishment of a tribunal on the violence threatened the country’s stability.   Will Kenya ever tackle these fundamental problems? Will violent police ever be brought to book?

Tale of an African whistleblower

A new book on corruption in Kenya is considered so explosive there that copies are only being sold under the counter in Nairobi by some book sellers too nervous to display them openly.

“Within these pages, we stand eyeball to eyeball with corruption. The book is an ironclad tell-all that mercilessly bares all to the light,” said the local Sunday Nation newspaper in a review of Michela Wrong’s book. “It feels dangerous to just read, let alone write.”

Just published, “It’s Our Turn to Eat” tells the story of Kenyan anti-corruption whistleblower John Githongo, who uncovered details of one of the country’s biggest scandals, the $750 million Anglo Leasing affair involving inflated security contracts.

At the heart of the book is a portrayal of an ethnic clique intent on enriching itself and holding on to power – a picture familiar to many other African states.

We are told that, as Githongo’s investigation deepens, the circle of suspects widens to include many senior officials, members of the Kikuyu tribe, Kenya’s biggest, to which Githongo and President Mwai Kibaki belong. When he made his findings public in 2006, Githongo was vilified by critics for betraying his tribe in exposing “Africa’s Watergate”.

“The title of the book is an appeal Githongo’s colleagues made to him: ‘It’s our turn to eat, John. Don’t rock the boat’,” said former British envoy, Edward Clay, who once equated the Kenyan government’s tolerance of grand corruption to vomiting on the shoes of the donors who provide aid. “For the corrupters it is a sweat provoker,” he said at the book’s launch in London.

Wrong’s book is being serialised in Kenya’s biggest newspapers, The Nation and The Standard, at a time when the government is again tainted by scandal.

Kenya’s traffic – a daily adventure

The ancient truck labouring up the hill followed by a long queue of vehicles looked like a typical Kenyan scene — except for the legs protruding from under the bonnet. A Mafia hit? No, the legs were moving. Then I realised the bonnet was jammed slightly open and the man was adjusting some fault to keep the engine running while the truck proceeded.

Even for Kenya this was bizarre, but only slightly more unusual than the daily chaos on the roads, where almost anything goes; from enormous potholes capable of cracking the axle of normal cars, to abandoned or broken down trucks, to the swarms of battered, unroadworthy and brightly decorated matatu minibuses, driven by people whose brains appear to have been removed. A colleague recently saw a matatu swing across three lanes of traffic to smash into an unsuspecting car for no apparent reason. Matatus are the only available transport for many Kenyans but climbing into one is a daily and possibly terminal gamble. They are notorious for terrible accidents, often when smashing into oncoming trucks while overtaking on bends or hills. Matatus, like other vehicles, including huge trucks, often travel without lights at night. Matatus break down frequently, leaving a group of disconsolate passengers beside the road while the driver and tout (who takes the fares) try to change a wheel or mend the engine, creating another hazardous obstruction. Combined with the entirely selfish habits of other Kenyan drivers who think nothing of jamming a junction to get a slight advantage over other traffic, the minibuses cause the daily commute to frequently turn into a frustrating calvary with jams that last for hours. All this is made worse by regulations requiring drivers involved in an accident, even a minor shunt, to desist from moving their cars until the police arrive – which can be many hours.

The traffic police often seem only tangentially interested in the chaos, standing on the verge watching as cars, trucks and buses become increasingly interlocked in flagrant disregard for the law and traffic lights. Sorting out the mess seems important to only a few of them. That is perhaps because their main activity, according to most Kenyans, is to extort bribes to supplement their meagre wages. Their favourite victims are matatus and trucks who are allowed to pass, on payment of small bribes. Traffic experts say the delay caused by police roadblocks can add a day to the journey from Mombasa port through central Kenya to Uganda and neighbouring countries.

Like all criminal activity, this extortion of bribes increases at certain predictable times. On a recent one-hour drive to the lakeside town of Naivasha, northwest of Nairobi, I had to concentrate hard to avoid being stopped in one of at least eight police roadblocks. “Of course, it is Christmas, they need money,” said one Kenyan friend.

Elections also cause the roadblocks to sprout like mushrooms as politicians push police to raise money for their campaigns.

Before Kenya’s bloody election at the end of last year I was stopped at a roadblock, again on the road to Naivasha. Without even the usual desultory attempt to accuse me of some imagined misdemeanour, the policeman shoved his hand through the window and said only: “Two thousand shillings ($25)”. I protested and after much bargaining offered 1,000 as a compromise. “Oh no,” the policeman replied. “My boss says I have to get two thousand from everybody today.”

from Global News Journal:

Fighting graft in Africa. Or not.

 A little while back, we asked who is and isn’t fighting corruption effectively in Africa. This week, a number of examples bring us back to the subject.

In Tanzania, two former ministers have been charged with flouting procurement rules over the award of a tender for auditing gold mining back in 2002. The pair, who deny wrongdoing, served in the government of President Jakaya Kikwete’s predecessor Benjamin Mkapa. One of them also served under Kikwete himself.

Tanzania’s pledge to fight corruption is under close donor scrutiny and given the level of aid that Tanzania gets - more than one tenth of GDP by 2005 figures - it has little choice but to show willing. There have been doubts in the past, however, about how serious the government really was about going after the most senior and the best connected.