A tale of two Kenyans

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 9:43 AM

One was Simon Matheri, whom we were led to believe was the gangster of gangsters. The Capo di tutti Capi of the Nairobi underworld. He was notorious for holding whole communities in terror seemingly untouchable by the authorities until he was gunned down by the police outside a flat in the early hours of one cold February morning. Kenyans rejoiced.

Even as whispers started about the police operation, Kenyans rejoiced. Apparently Matheri had surrendered once he realised he was surrounded; apparently he was interrogated for over half an hour after he surrendered; apparently then he was shot in the back of the head after this interrogation. So what, Kenyans rejoiced. FM stations were overwhelmed with caller after caller voicing loud support for the police action. “Pulling a Matheri” (shooting criminals as soon as they are captured) even entered local slang to join “pulling a Githongo” (secretly recording a person talking to you and later releasing the tapes). It didn’t matter the police did not reveal what he had alleged told them. It didn’t matter the illogic that a guy a year out of the maximum security Kamiti prison was able to assemble a criminal operation like has never been seen in Kenya before with no help at all. It didn’t matter that apparently the police had know his whereabouts for months but never moved against him. It didn’t matter the stories that Matheri had protection from some powerful indvidiuals. He was dead, that was all that mattered. He lived by the sword, he died by the sword, that was all that mattered.

The second Kenyan was Benson Mwangi Waraga, a tailor working in a building on River Road. Mr Waraga was among 17 people rounded up at Githaku Building after a gun battle between police and gangsters on Thursday last week. 10 hours later his family found his body at city mortuary with gunshot wounds to the neck and to the leg. His family want to know how a man who was arrested in the afternoon and taken to Kamukunji police station ended up at the mortuary dead.

What clouds the issue further is that on that same Thursday three police officers lost their lives as they were gunned down by criminals in Nairobi. Now if there is one thing that is guaranteed to boil the blood of any police force in the world it is when one of their own is gunned down. From New York to Nairobi, a cop gets killed in the line of duty, somebody somewhere is going to pay. I remember reading a story a couple of years ago when some bank robbers gunned down a police officer late at night as they escaped into Mathare, one of Nairobi’s oldest “informal settlements”. The police reaction was on another level. The cops practically woke up THE ENTIRE PLACE going door to door in a show of force and sending a message that no one kills a cop and gets away with it. Imagine that, waking up an entire slum.

Back to Waranga, the police do not deny they shot him, they claim that he was shot as he tried to escape when he was leading them to a large weapons dump where gangsters hid their weapons after the attack on police.

Now concerned people are asking many questions; why would one criminal surrounded by cops try to escape when it meant certain death? Why would the police move in on a weapons dump in the middle of the night? Even more fundamentally, Waranga was with four colleagues in the tailoring shop at the time of the shootings and they were released with out charge. How is it he is a criminal guilty of killing cops but those with him at the time of the shooting are completely innocent? etc etc.

Who knows maybe he was a criminal? Who knows maybe he was leading them to a weapons dump in the middle of the night? Who knows perhaps he was killed trying to escape? WHO KNOWS?

Every society has its laws and every society has procedures by which it is determined whether or not those laws were broken. In Kenya, as in much of the world, we have settled upon a judicial system through which the process of law takes places. This process determines if you are innocent or guilty. Actually the process determines if you are guilty. Innocent until proven guilty.

As the judicial process is the means by which we have agreed as a country to adhere to then this must be followed in all cases or else you get dangerous ambiguity as the law enforcement officers take matters into their own hands and become the law and indeed above the law. If we applaud and rejoice when they shoot a criminal mastermind instead of taking him to court then we are quickly going to fall down a slippery slope. It is because of all the “who knows” that we have a judicial system together with its procedure and processes to determine cases like this.

Waranga could have been an innocent slaughtered in cold blood by the police in their quest to get vengeance for their fallen colleagues, or he may have been a dangerous crime lord, even more dangerous than Matheri. But if you agree with me that at the very least Waranga should have had his day in court, then you should also agree that Matheri had that right as well.

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