Living by the gun, dying by the gun

It was the Indian spiritual and political leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who said that an eye for eye leaves the whole world blind.

But in Nairobi’s slums, the principle of “an eye for eye,” or lex talionis, is an understatement. Everyone suspected of any crime is hunted and gunned down.

They are gunned down, but they don’t die. At least their spirit doesn’t. Instead, it enters a new crop of youths, and the new “soldiers” become even more charged, oblivious of the fate that befell their predecessors.

It is like the Lernaean Hydra in Greek mythology that grew two new heads where one was chopped off.

And the vicious circle of killing continues. The police, in their regal training, shoot first and aim later. No questions are asked. In fact, few other people ask questions. Such killings are hushed up, and, in effect, normalised.

This leaves the new initiates even more bitter and their methods colder. They kill out of spite. After all, they will also die — by a gun. So they live by one.

“These young ones are even more dangerous,” says Ken, one of the few young people from Mathare who abandoned crime, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“They will tell you to leave them alone and remind you that it is their turn, you had yours. Telling them crime does not pay is akin to insulting them.”

SOCIAL TIES
Their parents are broke, their homes broken. The food is minimal, the health care non-existent. And as far as schooling goes, their goal is to sit the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE).

Most of them come from single-parent homes, the rest from dysfunctional families.

Their neighbours are drug addicts and wife-batterers; their friends thugs and drug addicts. Their street corners house gun traders and drug peddlers.

Their childhood is bereft of love, their adulthood of work. They are stuck in what the late rapper, Tupac Shakur, whose life and music exemplified their lives, described as a “misery of poverty”.

The harsh environment has smelted them into criminals. The theory of social disorganisation explains why there is more crime in the slums of Kiambiu than in the neighbouring Buru Buru.

You see, crime is not randomly distributed across neighbourhoods. Instead, it is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control.

The police strike them down as soon as the slums churn them out. Unfortunately, besides the fact that the spate of killings is futile, most of it is also illegal.

While the extrajudicial killing of members of the outlawed Mungiki sect has been well documented by the Kenya National Human Rights Commission (KNHRC), little has been said about the hundreds of suspected criminals that are killed every year by the police.

THEY WANTED KATITU
A 2013 report by KNHRC noted that there were “hundreds of Kenyans killed in cold blood by police officers”, and that “cases of police killing defenceless people often went without being investigated, eroding the already low public confidence in the force”.

The killing in Kwale earlier this years of a 14 year-old girl named Kwekwe Mwandaza might never have irked the authorities, had it not been reported so exhaustively in the media.

Initial police reports suggested that the girl might have died of a heart attack, but these were discounted by a postmortem examination of the girl’s exhumed body, which revealed that Kwekwe had died from gunshot wounds.

On the other hand, the arrest of Police Constable Titus Musili, popularly known as Katitu by the residents of Githurai 45 for allegedly shooting dead two suspected criminals — Kenneth Kimani and Oscar Muchoki — spurred the residents of Githurai into taking to the streets and blocking the busy Nairobi-Thika highway.

They wanted Katitu, the man they praised for curbing crime in their neighbourhood, set free. But they were oblivious of the law, and in particular the Constitution.

For starters, they were not the ones to decide whether or not Katitu was innocent. The Constitution stipulates that everyone has “the right to life” and that this “life shall not be taken away intentionally, unless otherwise authorised by the Constitution or any other law”. Katitu, therefore, had to justify his actions before a court of law.

The Police Act highlights some of the instances when a police can use force, not kill. These include when “a person who is in lawful custody and is charged and convicted is escaping or attempting to escape”.

USING FORCE
Force can also be used when a person attempts to prevent “the lawful arrest of himself or of any other person”.

The extrajudicial killings are happening, not only at the expense of addressing the underlying factors that lure some of the victims into crime, but also at the expense of such constitutional stipulations of a suspect’s right to have his or her dispute resolved by the application of law decided in a fair public hearing before a court, or that one is “presumed innocent until the contrary is proved.

In the ghetto, the law begins and ends with a shoot-to-kill order. Mama Fatuma Ali lost her two sons one fine morning in 2010.

Her sons had left home as they did every day after having their breakfast, but they never returned. She believes they are both dead. And then, last year, her cousin, with whom she had lived since his childhood, disappeared for three days.

“After the three days, a neighbour called and told me that the boy’s body was at the mortuary,” she says, fighting back tears. “He had never had any run-ins with the law, except once, when he had been accused of being an Al-Shabaab recruit.”

Fatuma thinks his killing was connected to this accusation. “It is the anti-terror police who killed him. But the boy was not an Al-Shabaab, that much I am sure.”

But there is some hope. Some of these youths, having realised the vanity of crime, have decided to turn over a new leaf.

The Mathare Vijana Development Organisation, for instance, is a self-help group in Mathare slums that brings together 25 youths who turned their backs on crime after seeing how their colleagues, especially the older ones, were being gunned down.

REFORMED YOUTH
Today, these youths have a number of income-generating activities, which include garbage collection, livestock and poultry rearing, video shows, and vending water. The earnings they get from these activities are not sufficient, but they are not complaining.

A few of them find the going tough, though. For instance, on the day this writer paid them a visit, one of them had just been gunned down. He had given up on the arduous process of making wealth legally.

The Sh200 in a day that they make is not sufficient for people who have been exposed to instant gratification.

However, the community around does not think they have reformed. They think that their projects are just but smoke screens.

As a result, says the group’s chairman, John Maina Ng’ang’a, they get no support from the society. Except for a few funds from well-wishers, they generally fund themselves, and are still frequently harassed and raided by the police.

Accessing the Uwezo Fund, they say, is difficult. They find the application process too bureaucratic. Moreover, there is the issue of good conduct, which employers insist on.

“When someone gets out of jail, the fingerprints that he left with the police still haunt him. So even after you have done a technical course and would like to get employed, you are told that you can’t get the job because you have a criminal record,” says Kennedy Ochieng’.

He continues: “The community needs to understand that we have changed. Look, we are even giving back to society. There are days when we do clean up for the community and once in a while, we also give free water.”