By Jerry Okungu
January 19, 2010
No, those were not Muslims that rioted in Nairobi for eight good hours last Friday. They were not even Kenyan Somalis that went to Jamia Mosque armed with dangerous weapons and Al Shabab flags to taunt Kenyans. Those were foreign radicals, rebels without a cause that came to Kenya to spread the culture of violence that they have perfected in that lawless Mogadishu.
Talking to many friends including my Somali friends, I got this impression that no sane person could condone, let alone support the senseless demonstration in support of an illegal alien, himself a confessed hate preacher that no country including his own country of birth wants to associate with. That is why Kenyans are yet to come to terms with the likes of some Kenyan born Muslims that masquerade as human rights activists and preachers that have gone on record to threaten the government following the Friday aftermath.
I am for all that crap called the right to association, assembly, and worship and even demonstrate for a cause. And I have taken part in many demonstrations in my life right from my university days. What I do know about demonstrations is that they are never the same. More often than not, they take a violent turn based on divergent socialization between law enforcers and demonstrators.
Whenever civilians decide to demonstrate for whatever reason, the government sees ill intentions in such demos. The first reaction in most cases is to either deny such groups the permit to hold their demo or break it by force if the order is defied.
It is therefore an accepted fact that anyone joining a demo, whether it is university students, lecturers’ body or teachers union, faces the risk of personal bodily harm or even death. You therefore cannot hold an illegal demo, turn violent and even shoot at the police and expect to be compensated for a lost leg, arm or even life. It is the risk one must be prepared to bear once one has decided to join a civil strife.
What happened in Nairobi was a shame to the people of Kenya and an embarrassment to the government. The security organs let Kenyans down big time. It was impossible to believe that just a handful of youths could paralyze Nairobi’s Central Business District for eight good hours without the police dispersing the crowd. It was even comical to see the police resorting to throwing stones at the rioters instead of using teargas, water cannons and good old rungus that Kenyatta era GSUs used to use on us during our university days.
Let us face it; Nairobi is East Africa’s most important commercial city. The whole region depends on it. International agencies depend on it even to reach lawless Somalia. Disrupting its operations and allowing terrorist insurgents to infiltrate it is an act of recklessness of the highest order. It is the kind of negligence that many governments have been punished for over and over in recent history.
A few discussions with Nairobi residents is revealing. Theories abound if such an incident had occurred in the centre of Kampala, Addis Ababa or Kigali. More importantly, can one imagine a group of Christian fundamentalists holding a demonstration in Tripoli, Baghdad or even lawless Mogadishu! For starters, Christians would not even think of demonstrating in Mogadishu because that would be suicide. There would be a massacre at the hands of religious zealots.
However, if the Nairobi incident occurred in the center of Kampala, Addis Ababa or Kigali, that area would have been cordoned off within a radius of one kilometer and a military operation would have taken place with dire consequences for the demonstrators. More importantly, the Jamia Mosque would today be a security area or worse still; the mosque would have been brought down.
All these ugly developments did not take place because this is Kenya where we value peace and human rights issues and only demonstrate when an n alien priest is arrested. In this country, the Al Shabab militias can kidnap our nuns, take our military vehicles into Somalia but we will never either demonstrate or threaten Somalis with dire consequences.
In this country, we behave as if the only people who matter are a certain tribe and a certain religion. Others can go to hell. In this country, a civilian militant like an Al Shabab militant or a Mungiki thug can kill a policeman. When it happens, we the so called human rights activists will never raise a finger or a voice. However, when some deranged priest smuggles himself on our shores, then all hell breaks loose.,
In Kenya, our citizens working in Arab countries have no rights. A poor girl can be thrown from the top floor, break her limbs and the remains brought to Nairobi without a protest either from our human rights activists or the government.
What are we showing the rest of East Africans with this open tolerance for violent groups that we don’t need? Why are we allowing terrorists, radicals and fundamentalists to buy property with abandon using illicit money? Aren’t we courting disaster in broad day light?
In many countries, the Nairobi incident would have seen heads rolling if not a whole government coming down. But this is Kenya. Nothing moves us here, not even a senseless death of a good policeman!
jerryokungu@gmail.com
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