Dealing With Mungiki the Raila Way

Soon after he was sworn in as the country’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga extended a hand of friendship to the dreaded Mungiki by inviting them to a peace talk and describing them as “ndugu zetu” – our brothers and sisters! To many who have yet to understand Raila’s mastery of political tactics, his friendly attitude towards the feared terror gang was mystifying because the terrorists have killed more Luos than any other group of Kenyans since the mess of the presidential elections of last year.

Before Raila joined the Government the security forces believed in eliminating Mungiki through guns and bullets or the use of force which has been proved wrong by history time after time. If the forceful or the most powerful had their way Americans would not have lost the Korean War, neither would they have ended up the losers in Vietnam or the Bay of Pigs.

Today it is quite obvious that the use of force is not providing an answer in Iraq. Yet the approach by Raila is not new at all. It is centuries old. It was the great Chinese thinker, Sun Tzu, who said, more than two thousand years ago, that the supreme act of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. That is what Raila is trying to do without using a single bullet .So far the Mungiki’s urban guerrilla tactics have been very successful because the Government has chosen to confront them physically and make the gangsters not only go underground but use the most heinous methods to establish their presence and invincibility .No matter what the State does to reassure the people about their safety, the Mungiki seem to be able to strike their targets at any place and time they want without the knowledge of the police.

Whatever the authorities say about the gangster organization, obeying or disobeying their orders in certain areas where they have established a foothold is a matter of life and death. So when they want all the shops closed in Muranga, the shops are indeed closed. When they want to extract some money from matatu owners, money does indeed exchange hands. When John Michuki was in charge of the security and ordered the people to disobey the Mungiki, they chose to disobey him instead. Whether we like it or not the Mungiki are a power to reckon with. This is so particularly in the Central Province and in some urban areas where the majority of the inhabitants come from around Mount Kenya. They all shake in their boots when they hear the word Mungiki.

No matter what we say about the Mungiki, they seem to enforce their own moral laws among the Kikuyu people very much the same way the Mau Mau did more than half a century ago. Their commanders on the ground are mysterious and so are their methods of spreading, inexplicable. But their discipline is just as visible as the end results of their bloody deeds are shockingly conspicuous. The method used by Raila to penetrate them could probably demystify the organization’s ability to mobilize so many people and make them blindly follow orders that compel them to engage in dangerous activities without any fear of death.

As a militia, Mungiki was obviously used in Nakuru and Naivasha to stop the advancing Kalenjins from slaughtering Kikuyus soon after the disastrous presidential elections results were announced last year. Whoever hired the Mungiki at that time must have been both rich and powerful. This means some very important personalities from the Mount Kenya areas, who are around Mwai Kibaki’s inner circles, know the leadership of the Mungiki very well. The unconfirmed story is that the gangsters have not been paid for the job they did in Nakuru and Naivasha, hence the extended revolt.

If Raila was to hold talks with the Mungiki, the cat would be out of the bag very soon. And if it was also true that the Mungiki were hired to perpetuate the Kikuyu domination after the 2007 general election, why would whoever hired them refuse to pay them now? Could it be that whoever hired them to terrorize Naivasha and Nakuru in 2007 wants the gangsters to spread the same terror now that the Kikuyu domination seems to be threatened by the formation of a coalition Government?

There are no easy answers to these questions but one thing is sure to happen – Raila’s efforts to build bridges with the Mungiki will be frustrated by some people very powerful within the new coalition, which leads me to pose the next most obvious questions: How united are these people in the coalition Government ? Are there some them who are out to wreck it from within? Time alone will tell.

Before Raila took the Prime Minister’s oath, the security authorities had requested the media not to give the Mungiki widespread publicity. Whereas it is true that all terrorists desperately depend on publicity, the adage “when it bleeds, it leads” would lose its meaning in Kenyan journalism if journalists were to sweep the Mungiki story under the carpet. The fact that Raila is now in the same journalistic radarscope as the Mungiki means the story is likely to dominate front pages for a long time to come.

The days when the Government could police the media and force them into an unholy secrecy and total blackout of the most vital events in the country, are long gone. So the Mungiki story will still be with us despite attempts to muzzle the media. No one in the media today will allow anyone, however powerful, to veto any story, particularly the juicy one about Raila and the Mungiki. Obviously there will be many in the Government who will be up in arms against Raila’s suggestion to talk to the Mungiki. Any attempt to keep Raila and the Mungiki apart, however, arouses intense suspicion that someone would like to hide the truth, particularly when the terror gang leadership is willing to talk about their Naivasha and Nakuru assignments.

The desired objectives of the Mungiki differ from those of the security forces. The former want to be paid for the duty they performed and the later want to silence them in order to protect someone powerful who is about to be exposed by both the terror gang and Raila. The security forces’ heavy-handedness around the Pentagon House when the Mungiki were about to present a memorandum to the Prime Minister is a major indicator of the degree to which the Gema henchmen are prepared to use force to silence the aggrieved Mungiki leaders and keep the public in total darkness about the bloodbath of Naivasha and Nakuru.

On paper, the Prime Minister has powers to supervise the Minister for Security and Provincial Administration, George Saitoti and the Police Commissioner and order both of them to leave the Mungiki members alone when they seek to have an audience with him. On the other hand, Saitoti would like to show the Gema community publicly that he can stubbornly disobey and defy the Prime Minister and get away with it. What Saitoti, as the Minister in charge of security, is actually doing is to test the waters to find out whether Raila has really got the backing of the President and the powers to order him around.

If Raila wants to talk with the Mungiki leadership there is actually nothing to stop him. Unlike Saitoti, who can be fired by Mwai Kibaki at any time, Raila can, in fact, do as he pleases and get away with it. Short of a vote of no confidence by Parliament, no one can fire him. And the Parliament does not dare take such a risky step which is likely to dissolve the coalition Government and probably send everyone back to the people with the most disastrous result for Saitoti, rather than for Raila. If the people of Kenya are given a chance to elect members of Parliament all over again they would probably get rid of all the chauvinistic arrogance exhibited by the Gema leadership of the old guards in the Central Province, which Saitoti represents, though his constituency is in the Rift Valley.

The idea from the Prime Minister to have a dialogue with the Mungiki will easily be accepted by most people in Kenya because the concept of dialogue has now also been accepted by most wananchi as it seems to work. Raila is only extending the dialogue offer to the Mungiki because the people believe in it even if the one with Mungiki is bound to take place amid appalling atrocities by their members. The terrorists have succeeded in getting their propaganda into the mass media. Secret talks with the Prime Minister are guaranteed to silence them and bring about lasting peace to our beloved country.