Growing insecurity in what was once an island of peace
What can we living in Kenya do but write our wills and hope the state steps up, writes
PERHAPS it’s fitting that I am writing about the growing insecurity in Kenya, which the world first became aware of through the Westgate massacre, while I am in Ghana. It was in Westgate, after all — during the Storymoja Literary Festival — that renowned Ghanaian writer Kofi Awoonor’s life was ended.
On that Saturday in September 2013, there was a lot of confusion. I was at the festival, less than 20 minutes’ walking distance from Westgate, when I got a phone call from my friend Jack warning me to stay away from the mall.
There was no television where we were, so my partner and I took to Twitter to find out what was happening. The then inspector-general of police, David Kimaiyo, tweeted that a robbery was in progress. He warned residents to keep away from the mall and said the police had everything under control.
We now know that things were far from under control. When the siege ended three days later, 67 people had died.
My Kenyan friends had always believed that “Kenya is an island of peace in a region of insecurity”. Westgate changed that. We all hoped that the security cluster had learnt from that incident.
As I tried to explain to my then eight-year-old son — as my partner and I stood in long queues in Uhuru Park to donate blood because that was all we seemed able to do, and as friends tweeted and Facebooked #WeAreOne — we hoped this would be the last time we had killings of this magnitude.
Since then, there have been the Mpeketoni attacks, in June last year, when more than 60 people died as gunmen massacred mainly Christians. Then there were the Mandera killings in December, when passengers on a bus bound for Nairobi were slaughtered.
This was followed by the shooting of a parliamentarian, execution-style, in the early hours one morning in Nairobi.
The inspector-general and the cabinet secretary for the interior “resigned”. #KOT (Kenyans on Twitter) celebrated. A new inspector-general and cabinet secretary for the interior were appointed, the latter a military man. It appeared that the president was showing his toughness. We dared to hope.
Then, on Thursday April 2, the killing of students at Garissa University College happened.
I learnt about it through a frantic call from my mother in Australia. “Are you all OK?” she asked in a panicky voice at six in the morning. She had woken me. I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Put on the television. Is anyone hurt, is everyone OK?” I put on the television. It was still breaking news. I reassured my mother that we were OK.
In those first minutes, as I watched the news in our Nairobi flat, it seemed very far removed from my partner, son and me. MALL ATTACK: A soldier carries a child to safety as security forces hunt the gunmen who went on a shooting spree at Westgate shopping centre in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi in September 2013 We live a six-hour drive away from Garissa, a town closer to Somalia than to us.
As the siege continued, however, the panic increased among us. What was taking so long? Where was the specially trained Recce Squad, which should be the first on the scene of an attack of this magnitude?
News reports now tell us that the Recce Squad managed to get to the university on the same day. It made short work of the rescue and managed to free some of the students and shoot four of the terrorists in less than 30 minutes.
But the death toll was higher than Westgate and Mpeketoni, and almost as high as the total of Westgate, Mpeketoni and Mandera combined.
The terrorists, one of whom studied with a young friend of mine at the University of Nairobi law school, allegedly separated students according to NOT ISLAM: In the Eastleigh neighbourhood of Nairobi this week, a man participates in protests by Muslims against the Garissa university attack their faith, Muslim or Christian. Those who failed to say the Islamic creed were shot.
In Eastleigh in Nairobi, Muslims marched, holding banners reading “Al-Shabab Are Not Moslem”, “#147 is Not Just a Number” or simply, “Garissa”.
On Tuesday, I went for lunch with Jack. We talked about insecurity. We asked countless questions about Garissa.
Why did the Recce Squad have to come all the way from Nairobi? Shouldn’t there be a Recce Squad in all 47 counties? Do politicians, with their tight security, care about regular people?
Could there have been a better response to the Garissa attacks from the security heavyweights? A quicker response?
We had no answers. What my partner and I did, though, was set an appointment with Jack, who is a lawyer, to write our wills on my return from Ghana.
And at home that evening, we sat with our son and taught him to say, “la ilaha illa-llah, muhammadun rasulu-llah” (There is no god but God, Mohammed is the messenger of God).
In a way it felt as though we were disrespecting our Muslim friends and their faith by learning to say the Shahada, because we are agnostics.
But the events at Garissa and before tell us that knowing this may just be what saves our lives if we ever happen to be in a siege.
Wanner is a South African journalist and novelist based in Kenya