Post by Onyango Oloo on Jun 26, 2014 15:52:18 GMT 3
By Onyango Oloo, Thursday, June 26, 2014
The idiom "red herring" is used to refer to something that misleads or distracts from the relevant or important issue. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or characters towards a false conclusion. A red herring might be intentionally used, such as in mystery fiction or as part of a rhetorical strategy (e.g. in politics), or it could be inadvertently used during argumentation as a result of poor logic. The origin of the expression is not known. Conventional wisdom has long supposed it to be the use of a kipper (a strong-smelling smoked fish) to train hounds to follow a scent, or to divert them from the correct route when hunting; however, modern linguistic research suggests that the term was probably invented in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, referring to one occasion on which he had supposedly used a kipper to divert hounds from chasing a hare, and was never an actual practice of hunters. The phrase was later borrowed to provide a formal name for the logical fallacy and literary device.
Lamu Governor Issa Timamy was on Thursday taken to court under tight security from regular police and paramilitary General Service Unit (GSU) officers.
Mr Timamy was driven into the court precincts at around 12:40pm in a vehicle sandwiched between a police van and a pickup full of GSU officers.
The governor, who was accompanied by Lamu Woman Representative Shakila Abdalla, looked calm as he alighted from the vehicle before he was whisked away to the court’s basement cells.
He was taken before Mr Justice Martin Muya, who was informed that the governor had been arrested on Wednesday.
PARTY DEMANDS RELEASE
“The subject was arrested yesterday (Wednesday). We are before you to have him informed why he is here,” prosecuting counsel Alexander Muteti told the court.
One of Mr Timamy's lawyers, Paul Buti, who told the court that his client ought to know why he had been arrested, requested an adjournment to consult with the governor.
The governor was arrested Wednesday shortly after recording a statement in relation to the June 15 and 16 Mpeketoni attacks that left 60 people dead.
Earlier on Thursday, the United Democratic Front (UDF), the party the governor belongs to, protested over the manner in which he was arrested and his treatment while under police custody and demanded his release.
PACKED COURTROOM
Hundreds of Mr Timamy's supporters had arrived at the court as early as 9am as there had been no indication whether the governor would be brought to court.
“We shall stand with you, Mr Governor,” shouted one of the supporters as the governor was led to the basement cells.
The courtroom was packed to capacity as the Governor’s supporters struggled to find space in order to follow the proceedings.
Apart from Mr Buti, Mr Timamy, who is an advocate of the High Court, is also being represented by lawyers Isaac Onyango, Duncun Okoth and Hamza Adam.
Mombasa Senator Hassan Omar also arrived in court some minutes before the case was adjourned.
The matter resumes at 2:30pm Thursday.
SOURCE: www.nation.co.ke/news/-/1056/2362430/-/14xa9uv/-/index.html
From the Star newspaper:
LAMU Governor Issa Timamy has been charged in a Mombasa court with murder, forceful transfer of population and terrorism related charges.
The Lamu governor has not been allowed to take a a plea as today's proceedings continue. The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Keriako Tobiko has applied to remand Timamy for two weeks to complete investigation over the recent attacks in his county that left over 65 people dead.
The Lamu governor Thursday faced the brunt of the law as detectives accused him of coordinating the mass killings using gunmen from across the Kenyan border.
The DPP yesterday said Timamy was facing terrorism related charges following the killings in several Lamu villages that was initially believed to have been orchestrated by the Al shabaab but was later said to be ethnic clashes.
President Uhuru Kenyatta in a speech shortly after the killings blamed local politicians over the killings despite claims by the Al Shabaab in Somali that they were responsible.
Timamy was brought to the Mombasa court at about 12 noon in a convoy of five heavily armed police escort after spending several hours at both the port police station and the Lamu County CID headquarters on Wednesday.
Police said they would not prosecute him in Lamu where he enjoys massive support from his constituents and could disrupt any court proceeding held in Lamu.
Timany was arrested on Wednesday at CID headquarters in Lamu where he recorded a statement before he was transferred to Mombasa to face charges.
Senior CID officers were on Thursday analyzing contents of two mobile phones confiscated from him when he was arrested in Lamu.
The two mobile phones were handed over to crime prevention unit in CID at police headquarters in Mombasa.
Three lawyers representing him Paul Buti ,Dancan Odero and Adam Hamza said they confirmed that he had recorded a statement but they were still not certain on charges preferred against him.
Speaking to The Star at Port police in the morning, Buti said they were given restricted access to see him by CID officers who were still interrogating the governor.
"We cannot disclose the contents of the statement that might prejudice the matter that is yet to be brought to court. We expect them to arraign him in court this afternoon,” said Buti.
Mombasa senator Omar Hassan protested the governor's detention. Speaking after visiting him Hassan said the move is aimed at intimidating an elected governor. He said the state chose to ignore other avenue of the law of arresting him without detaining him in a police cell.
Hassan maintained that Timamy is innocent and he is being used as scapegoat to ascertain the President Uhuru Kenyatta statement that the attacks were politically and ethnically instigated.
Upon hearing about the arrest of
Lamu Governor Issa Timamy, I immediately got in touch with my civil society comrades in the archipelago to get first hand information from the ground itself. They were in a state of shock. The lawyer turned politician has well known reformist, human rights, democratic and humanitarian credentials. Since his election to the top county government post he has forged close and organic links with all sections of Lamu society. His running mate and current deputy is Eric Mugo, a member of Mpeketoni’s Gikuyu community. In the County Assembly, Governor Timamy has of necessity to adopt and follow an approach which goes even beyond bipartisanship since he himself is from the UDF party (autonomous of both Jubilee and CORD) and the county representatives are, respectively, Abbas Famau Nagi (United Democratic Forum) for Faza; Kiunga has Omar Mohamed Said Lali (Unity Party of Kenya); Basuba is represented by Mohamed Delo Nusura (Democratic Party); Azhar Ali Mbarak of ODM is the county rep for Shella; Mkomani has Ali Bakari Mohamed of the New Democrats; Abdu Kassim Ahmed (ODM) is the MCA for Hindi while Mkunumbi elected Paul Kimani Njuguna (Safina); James Njuguna Komu Janko (Alliance Party of Kenya) is the member for Hongwe; the ward of Witu opted for Athman Mohamed Amin (TNA)while the people of Bahari chose Anthony Njomo Maina of the Farmers Party.
At the national government level, Lamu is represented by two members of the National Assembly: Julius Ndegwa Kariuki, representing Lamu West on a KNC ticket and Shariff Athman Ali being the member for Lamu East on a UDF ticket.
The Senator for Lamu County is Abu Chiaba who vied on a TNA ticket while the Women's Representative is Shakila Abdalla from the Wiper Party.
A couple of days ago, Governor Timamy put out a full page ad in the national papers condoling with the victims and survivors of the Mpeketoni tragedy. He has gone personally to the scene to assess the situation and has rallied the community through elders, religious bodies, the youth and the women in a bid to forge a mult-ethnic united front against insecurity in Lamu County. At the time of his arrest he was in Nairobi for consultations with the national government over the crisis.
Observers in Lamu are perplexed as to the motivation behind Governor Timamy’s abrupt arrest since he is known as a unifying figure with level headed sober, urbane and moderate views. Certainly no one will remotely connect him with nefarious plots to ruthlessly cut down the very voters who made him Governor in the first place. One of the people who should immediately volunteer to be a character witness for the embattled Timamy should be Jubilee Cabinet Secretary Hon. Najib Balala, who back in the day, in the 1990s even before he became the Mayor of Mombasa worked closely with Issa Timamy in the Coast Chamber of Commerce and the tourist promotion circles.
Who is Issa Timamy and what motivated him to go for the gubernatorial position?
Here is a report carried in Mombasa Times blog when he resigned as Chairman of National Museums of Kenya:
He said he will initiate a multi sectoral approach to job creation as well as develop policies to address the challenges facing the people of Lamu.
“To the people of Lamu, I shall not shrink from this challenge and I shall not let you down. The energy, the devotion and the determination which we shall bring towards this goal will light our County and rejuvenate the hopes and aspirations of our people,” said Mr. Timamy.
He described Lamu as a county in dire straits which has suffered from mediocre leadership that has had no vision leading to the despondency of its people.
“Our key sectors have been neglected, limiting the opportunities of our people yet our county is endowed with enormous resources. Our people have lost hope, their dignity and sense of direction,” he observed in his speech.
He said Lamu has instead gained the dubious reputation of being a drug den where unemployment is rampant, poverty and inequality have increased, and land grabbing has been perfected into an art.
SOURCE: eugeneomiloomilo.blogspot.com/2012/09/issa-timamy-resigns-to-run-for-lamu.html
To get a glimpse at his political and professional CV:
Issa Abdalla Issa Timamy, 55, is a graduate of the University of Nairobi where he graduated with an honours degree in law before being admitted as an advocate of the High Court of Kenya in 1984.
He started his legal practice as a legal assistant at one of the country’s prestigious law firms, Kaplan & Stratton Advocates in 1984 where he served as a legal assistant up to 1988.
He then took up an appointment to serve at Sameer Africa Group then known as Firestone (EA) Ltd as Group Company Secretary, a position he held until 1996 when he established his own law firm, Timamy & Company Advocates in Mombasa.
He continued serving Sameer Group as Company Secretary until 2006 when he stepped aside but remained as a Board Director.
Mr. Timamy also sits on the boards of various companies including Sasini Limited, Eveready (EA) Ltd and First Assurance Company amongst others.
He has contributed greatly towards various development initiatives in the larger Coast region being a founder member of a number of scholarly, religious and professional bodies including the Muslim Civil Education Trust (MCET) Mombasa chapter, Citizen Forum Trust, Muslim Lawyers Association, Kenya Youth Business Trust (Mombasa board) and Muslim Professionals Trust.
He has also offered his time and experience for the benefit of the community through serving in various educational and humanitarian organizations including MEWA, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan secondary and technical school and Sheikh Zayed Children Welfare Centre.
In Lamu, he is the patron and adviser of the Lamu Education Foundation Trust and patron of Stone Town academy, the best performing primary school in the county.
Timamy has promised to name a running mate from Mpeketoni and will be teaming up with Hassan Albeity who is running for Lamu County Senator.
Many leaders who spoke at the ceremony thought Timamy's entry into politics was long overdue, expressing confidence that the Lamu governor's seat is, as of now, already taken by Timamy.
SOURCE: eugeneomiloomilo.blogspot.com/2012/09/issa-timamy-resigns-to-run-for-lamu.html
Since Issa Timamy is certainly NOT an Al Shabaab operative or a Made in Lamu Interhamwe Coordinator, we must conclude that there are some dastardly forces with access to the state determined to railroad the Lamu Governor.
To get a glimpse at what may really be at play, we have to look elsewhere.
Here is what Governor Timamy said at an official ceremony when the President, his deputy and the cabinet secretary for Lands visited Lamu in September 2013 to dish out title deeds:
Lamu Governor Issa Timamy said Provincial Administration officials — who are still apportioning individuals land at a fee — perpetuate illegal allocation of land.
“Some chiefs and the district officers continue to distribute land to outsiders regardless of the fact that there are real owners of the land,” said Timamy.
He also accused some senior government officials of grabbing land around the proposed Lamu port and asked the national government to consider revoking the titles.We at the county government are not going to allow this, some people were allocated 200,000 acres and others were given land running into thousands of acres,” said Timamy.
The Lamu governor said that his government would not recognise some of the land allocations that had been fraudulently done.
Before the Court of Appeal decision reinstating him as Governor came down, Issa Timamy was campaigning hard on some core issues close to his heart:
Because of the case in court, Mr Timamy has been strengthening his campaign teams, especially in the areas where he performed dismally in the March 4 polls. According to him, sections of Mpeketoni and Witu areas have been “poisoned” with propaganda that he intends to evict “settlers” from government schemes initiated in the 1970s.
“My rivals are using my hard stance against unprocedural grabbing of huge tracts of land to claim I am out to evict settlers, which is not the case,” he said.
(Daily Nation, Saturday November 16, 2013).
Issa Timamy did NOT vie as a CORD or Jubilee candidate.
That is a pointer to both his fierce sense of independence and popularity on the ground.
He obviously ruffled the feathers of powerful elite forces who would have preferred a more malleable and spineless politician ready to wheel and deal the rights and the aspirations of the Lamu people on the altar of expediency and personal aggrandizement.
If one examines the concerted attempt to dislodge Timamy from the governorship one will discern that it is simply not the usual efforts of a sore loser to petition him out of office.
Before the courts stepped in and restored him as Governor, Timamy himself had decried the cabal of elite interests who wanted him out of the way. Timamy, who is indigenous to Lamu, is seen by many as an ardent champion of the right of the people of Lamu to chart their own path to sustainable development. Of late he has been reaching out to civil society and other non-state actors to deal with gridlock within his own county executive committee and county assembly on a range of matters.
We should remember that the L in the LAPSSET project stands for Lamu and there are many rent seekers, speculators, private developers, tenderpreneurs and outright crooks angling to make zillions from the mega infrastructure project who would prefer someone other than Issa Timamy at the helm of the county government in Lamu.
If you go to the Save Lamu Coalition website you will get an inkling of the issues posed by the LAPSSET project:
www.savelamu.org/issues/lamu-port/
I therefore posit, the arrest and arraignment of Governor Timamy has more to do with money making intrigues involving well-connected corrupt and unscrupulous shadowy figures who have seized on the Mpeketoni, Mpomorokoni, Pangaoni and Witu incidents as a ruse, a red herring and excuse to carry out a bloodless coup de tat against a popularly elected and legally installed regional leader.
Timamy's incarceration may also signal the opening gambit at the national level of those red and water melon anti-constitutional schemers who have always wanted to overthrow the 2010 Constitution and take Kenyans back to the status quo ante of road side proclamations, crass tribalism, arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, kangaroo courts, criminalization of dissent, rule by fiat and entrenchment of Goldenberg/Anglo Leasing type shady tycoons.
What is patently clear to THIS Onyango Oloo is that the harassment of Issa Timamy is almost certain to unleash a huge popular backlash and uproar against whoever was hare brained enough to come up with such a silly poppycock plot.
The official Jubilee government response to the Mpeketoni tragedy bears tall the hallmarks of the bungling approach in the wake of similar terrorist outrages in Westgate and elsewhere.
In the first place, none other than President Uhuru Kenyatta openly admitted, in a televised address before the entire nation, that the authorities failed to act on crucial intelligence briefings warning of an impending attack in Lamu County.
Secondly, after the killings ensued, the collective state security apparatus simply refused to send police, paramilitary and military contingents to the scene of crime to quell and contain the situation and assist the victims and survivors.
Thirdly, it took the Interior Security cabinet secretary 20 hours to tell the Kenyan people what had actually transpired.
Fourthly, when the head of state finally showed up to address the nation after 40 hours, President Uhuru Kenyatta flatly denied that it was Al Shabaab who were behind the mayhem and murder- even after the terror outfit itself had officially claimed responsibility. Instead of sending a message of reassurance to the victims and a rallying cry for Kenyans to unite in repulsing further terrorist attacks, the President chose to play the most backward partisan politics employing putrid tribal cards and blaming his electoral rivals even before an official police investigation had been concluded, permanently thwarting those very investigations with his intemperate speculations over who was response and ensuring that anybody subsequently arrested had already been tried and convicted by the President via the media.
Fifthly, the fact that at least two other terrorist attacks were unleashed in the same area AFTER the initial tragedy was a clear message to the Kenyan regime that it was in a state of paralysis and confusion unable to fulfill one of its cardinal public mandates- offering protection to its own citizens.
Sixthly, the latest breaking story concerning the shocking arrest of the Lamu Governor and his imminent arraignment in court for complicity in the killings is a manifestation of a thoroughly confused, desperate and alienated national authority scrambling to look for convenient scapegoats to blame for its own incompetence.
Joseph Ole Lenku should have been fired immediately.
By now, NIS chief General Michael Gichangi should have resigned.
A coherent policy statement from the Jubilee government on a comprehensive plan to deal with the underlying historical, socio-economic and cultural factors- as detailed in the final TJRC report to cite just one source- should have been issued over a week ago.
Instead, a completely flabbergasted nation have been reduced to incredulous spectators witnessing the government bumble, stagger and stumble from one strategic and operational blunder to the next, seemingly fixated on fixing its perceived ethnic adversaries than healing the country in implementing lasting solutions to the flood of blood letting not just in Mpeketoni but Baringo, Wajir and other troubled areas of the country.
This stubborn ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach is likely to lead to further lost lives as insecurity escalates and impunity at the highest echelons gets entrenched.
Since the powers that be appear completely clueless on how to deal with insecurity, let me offer a few alternative approaches.
The first thing that the Uhuru led Jubilee regime should do is to abandon its myopic, paranoid chauvinist approach. When lives are at stake, it is simply irresponsible for the government to employ a scare mongering siege mentality which portrays members of a certain community as latter day Israelites, akin to contemporary Jews besieged by alleged ethnic foes. Nobody is profiling that particular tribe for annihilation. If there is a community being targeted and profiled in Kenya today, then it is the ethnic Somalis-both Kenyan and non-Kenyan- who are being arrested, harassed, extorted and interrogated at the Kasarani Concentration Camp and at various police stations. And it is the Jubilee regime which is OPENLY enthusiastically in charge of the illegal, unconstitutional screening process. Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka, Moses Wetangula and CORD are NOT working at the behest of Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda to cause chaos and anarchy in Kenya. Jubilee knows that and millions of Kenyans are simply too intelligent to swallow that ridiculous kindergarten canard.
The second thing that Jubilee should do is to go to the archives where they dumped the multi-volume Final Report of the TJRC and read it through again. In the context they should pay particular attention to the following excerpt from Volume II B of the report:
245. The Commission finds that there is a very close linkage between land injustices and ethnic violence in Kenya. More specifically, land related injustices are prominent factors that precipitate violence between and within ethnic tribes in Kenya.
246. The Commission finds that land-related injustices take many forms, including: illegal alienation and acquisition of individual and community land by public and private entities, illegal alienation of public land and trust lands, preferential treatment of members of specific ethnic groups in settlement schemes at the expense of the most deserving landless, forceful settlement of members of a community outside of their homelands, forceful evictions and the phenomenon of land grabbing, especially by government officials.
247. The Commission finds that land-related injustices started recognizably during the period of colonization at the coast by Arabs and, later, by the British both at the coast and in mainland Kenya. However, indigenous Kenyans expected the injustices to be fully addressed soon after independence but the first independence government failed to fully and genuinely address the problems.
248. The Commission finds that all post independence governments have failed to honestly and adequately address land-related injustices that started with colonialism.
249. The Commission finds that failure of both colonial and post-independence governments to address the problem of landlessness is the reason individuals and communities often resort to self-help measures, including violence.
250. The Commission finds that existing land-related injustices are sometimes taken advantage of or used to address other societal problems, especially political differences.
251. The Commission finds that although land-related injustices have affected virtually every part of Kenya, communities at the coast, especially the Mijikenda, the Taita and Pokomo have suffered the most and the longest.
252. The Commission finds that land-related injustices at the coast constitute one of the key reasons for underdevelopment in the area. Land-related injustices at the coast lie at the root of the emergence of the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC).
253. The Commission finds that the Provincial administration has pervasively and significantly perpetrated land-related injustices including forceful evictions of individuals and communities and land grabbing for personal gain, and should not at all participate in any efforts to redress land related problems in the new constitutional dispensation because of their lack of moral authority and support.
254. The Commission finds that the current constitutional dispensation, including the new constitutional body on land and related laws, provide a sound basis to fully address land-related injustices, including historical ones, but only if there is political will to so use these laws and institutions.
Recommendations:
The Commission recommends that the Ministry of Lands or other appropriate government authority immediately begins a process of surveying, demarcating and registering all remaining government lands, including those that were formerly owned or managed by local authorities, all protected wildlife areas and river banks, among other public lands.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission commences work with the Ministry of Lands and settlement to undertake adjudication and registration exercises at the coast and all other areas where the same has not been conducted. Measures shall be designed to revoke illegally obtained titles to and re-open all public beaches, beach access routes and fish landing beaches, especially at the coast.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission in furtherance of its mandate expedites the process of addressing and/or recovering all irregularly/illegally acquired land. Measures should be designed by the Ministry of Lands and settlement to encourage individuals and entities to surrender illegally acquired land.
The Commission recommends that the Ministry of Land in conjunction with the National Land Commission design and implement measures to revoke illegally obtained tittles and restore public easements.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission develops, maintains and regularly up dates a computerized inventory of all lands in Kenya, including private land that should be accessible to all Kenyans as required by law. Land registries country wide should be computerized and made easily accessible as required by the law.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission formulates and implement strict guidelines in terms of maximum acreage an individual or company can buy hold in respect of private land.
The third thing President Uhuru Kenyatta MUST do is to fire Joseph Ole Lenku and compel Michael Gichangi to step down immediately. The corollary to this is that Governor Issa Timamy of Lamu should be released and all charges against him withdrawn. His continued incarceration will further inflame regional passions and deepen the already deep resentment of millions of Kenyans against the Uhuru Kenyatta regime.
The fourth thing the Jubilee administration should do is remember that they are duty bound by their 2013 oath of office to honour, protect, defend and implement the constitution. Some people in government may not have got the memo, but since August 2010 Kenyans are living under a NEW CONSTITUTIONAL dispensation. We no longer have Special Branch Nyayo House torturers, Bernard Chunga prosecutors, Abdul Rauf kangaroo courts or Kamiti Maximum Prisons full of Willy Mutungas, Ngugi wa Thiong’os, Alamin Mazruis, Mwandawiro Mghangas and Onyango Oloos. Kariuki Chotara, Wilson Leitich, Hezekiah Oyugi, Mulu Mutisya, Stanley Oloitiptip and Shariff Nassir are DEAD and their boss Daniel Toroitich arap Moi is wallowing in political retirement. The NO side led by current Deputy President William Ruto LOST the referendum FOUR YEARS AGO. There are no KANU ZONES anymore. The days of “wachache wasiotosheka” and their so called “foreign masters” are behind us. We are supposed to be building a NEW Kenyan DEMOCRATIC STATE instead of reviving the worst vestiges of the notorious and discredited Kenyatta Moi KANU repressive police state.
The fifth thing for the Uhuruto regime to do is to embrace a HUMAN SECURITY mindset.
What is this concept, “human security”?
Well, I visited Wikipedia, one of my favourite sites when I am hunting for information I want at my finger tips:
Human security is an emerging paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities whose proponents challenge the traditional notion of national security by arguing that the proper referent for security should be the individual rather than the state. Human security holds that a people-centered view of security is necessary for national, regional and global stability.
The concept emerged from a post-Cold War, multi-disciplinary understanding of security involving a number of research fields, including development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report[1] is considered a milestone publication in the field of human security, with its argument that insuring "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" for all persons is the best path to tackle the problem of global insecurity.
Dr. Mahbub ul Haq first drew global attention to the concept of human security in the United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report and sought to influence the UN's 1995 World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen. The UNDP's 1994 Human Development Report's definition of human security argues that the scope of global security should be expanded to include threats in seven areas:
• Economic security — Economic security requires an assured basic income for individuals, usually from productive and remunerative work or, as a last resort, from a publicly financed safety net. In this sense, only about a quarter of the world’s people are presently economically secure. While the economic security problem may be more serious in developing countries, concern also arises in developed countries as well. Unemployment problems constitute an important factor underlying political tensions and ethnic violence.
• Food security — Food security requires that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to basic food. According to the United Nations, the overall availability of food is not a problem, rather the problem often is the poor distribution of food and a lack of purchasing power. In the past, food security problems have been dealt with at both national and global levels. However, their impacts are limited. According to UN, the key is to tackle the problems relating to access to assets, work and assured income (related to economic security).
• Health security — Health Security aims to guarantee a minimum protection from diseases and unhealthy lifestyles. In developing countries, the major causes of death traditionally were infectious and parasitic diseases, whereas in industrialized countries, the major killers were diseases of the circulatory system. Today, lifestyle-related chronic diseases are leading killers worldwide, with 80 percent of deaths from chronic diseases occurring in low- and middle-income countries.[7] According to the United Nations, in both developing and industrial countries, threats to health security are usually greater for poor people in rural areas, particularly children. This is due to malnutrition and insufficient access to health services, clean water and other basic necessities.
• Environmental security — Environmental security aims to protect people from the short- and long-term ravages of nature, man-made threats in nature, and deterioration of the natural environment. In developing countries, lack of access to clean water resources is one of the greatest environmental threats. In industrial countries, one of the major threats is air pollution. Global warming, caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, is another environmental security issue.
• Personal security — Personal security aims to protect people from physical violence, whether from the state or external states, from violent individuals and sub-state actors, from domestic abuse, or from predatory adults. For many people, the greatest source of anxiety is crime, particularly violent crime.
• Community security — Community security aims to protect people from the loss of traditional relationships and values and from sectarian and ethnic violence. Traditional communities, particularly minority ethnic groups are often threatened. About half of the world’s states have experienced some inter-ethnic strife. The United Nations declared 1993 the Year of Indigenous People to highlight the continuing vulnerability of the 300 million aboriginal people in 70 countries as they face a widening spiral of violence.
• Political security — Political security is concerned with whether people live in a society that honors their basic human rights. According to a survey conducted by Amnesty International, political repression, systematic torture, ill treatment or disappearance was still practised in 110 countries. Human rights violations are most frequent during periods of political unrest. Along with repressing individuals and groups, governments may try to exercise control over ideas and information.
Do I support CORD in its strident demands for a “national dialogue”?
Well, up to a point.
Let us begin with some basic definitions.
What is a dialogue?
This is what dictionary.com tells us:
di•a•logue
[dahy-uh-lawg, -log]
noun
1. conversation between two or more persons.
2. the conversation between characters in a novel, drama, etc.
3. an exchange of ideas or opinions on a particular issue, especially a political or religious issue, with a view to reaching an amicable agreement or settlement.
4. a literary work in the form of a conversation: a dialogue of Plato.
verb (used without object), di•a•logued, di•a•logu•ing.
5. to carry on a dialogue; converse.
6. to discuss areas of disagreement frankly in order to resolve them.
In our Kenyan context, "national dialogue" only makes sense to me if it incorporates the idea of a NATIONAL CONVERSATION which is way beyond CORD and Jubilee.
We have more FIFTY POLITICAL PARTIES.
We have thousands of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, African traditional and other religious organizations.
Women are represented by a host of organizations. So are professionals and the jua kali artisans.
Can we leave out the Saccos and Chamas?
There are thousands of NGOs, CBOs, CSOs and other NSAs (non state actors).
Our many public and private universities with their own associations.
In terms of trade unions, apart from COTU and PUSETU, there is UASU and an alphabet soup of other unions.
How about the sports federations?
I have not even mentioned the national umbrella of herbalists and traditional healers not to speak of the fledgling association of night runers.
Even if they were to agree to all converge at Uhuru Park there simply won't be enough room for all of these social, economic, cultural and political forces.
What am I saying?
Onyango Oloo is saying that to initiate and convene a national dialogue process, CORD leaders have to be a lot more imaginative.
It is way beyond jostling for a microphone at the Tononoka Grounds to screech at Aden Duale.
We can learn from history.
Recent South African history to be more exact.
In the twilight days of unlamented apartheid, the racists under De Klerk sought out Nelson Mandela and his ANC, SACP, COSATU and other anti-apartheid allies after ignoring and shunning them for decades.
But CODESA process (please look it up for once I beg you dear reader!) got under way it eventually became very complex with all kinds of internal contradictions within the broad ANC/SACP/COSATU umbrella.
Jeremy Cronin, a former political prisoner has chronicled it in a vintage interview conducted by an Irish activist and sympathizer of the South African struggle. Today Cronin is the Deputy Secretary General of the Communist Party, editor of the African Communist journal, a Member of Parliament, a high ranking member of the ANC's NEC and the Deputy Minister for Public Works. Here is what he recalls:
There were already the signs of all of what I'm talking about present prior to 1994, in the multi-party negotiations period and I wrote about it at the time in a piece which John Saul refers to, which I think I called "The Boat, the Tap and the Leipzig Way". I was trying to typify/characterise what I thought were three different views about the mass mobilisation, popular involvement in this period of negotiations.
The position in the ANC, which I characterised as the boat position, was: don't rock the boat. Basically the royal road to democracy, to achieving our strategic objectives, was negotiations and nothing should be done to rock the boat in that process and, if we mobilised people in the midst of the negotiations, the apartheid regime would walk away or unleash its own mobilisation of one kind or another, the dirty war and so forth. So don't rock the boat. That was coming through from very senior quarters in the ANC, some of those elements in the ANC who were taking that position in the early 1990s, are very powerful inside the ANC at present.
The second position, which I characterised as the tap, was the attitude of: mass mobilisation is important, at particular moments, so it has to be turned on and off. In my view, Mandela typified that perspective. He had an understanding and an experience from the 50s, his own experience from the 1950s, of mass mobilisation being very much at the heart of the revitalisation of the ANC. As a youth leader in the late 1940s, it led a revolt of the activists against a rather moribund, middle-class ANC leadership at the time and that had spearheaded a decade on ANC revitalisation, of strikes, of stay-aways, of boycotts, many of the tactics of mobilisation which became so central in the 1980s again. So you had a feel and an understanding of that, but tended in my view to have a somewhat mechanical attitude to popular participation.
The third position at the time we called the Leipzig way, in the light of events in Leipzig, was that sustained and continued popular pressure was critical for the negotiations itself. Far from undermining the negotiations, it would serve two purposes. It was critical in exchanging the balance of forces in the negotiations process itself. We used to say at the time, obviously I was a leipziger, that what transpires in the negotiations was as the result of the balances of forces outside of the negotiating chamber.
And that wasn't a static reality. The regime,the apartheid regime at the time, understood that very well and was unleashing a very brutal, low-intensity warfare strategy against us, the assassination of key cadres, including Chris Hani But that was just one of the thousands of key cadres. It wasn't the negotiators, I was one of them, we weren't particularly targeted, it was the critical organisational link between the organisers and the massed ranks, which was our one strength at the time, but were being targeted for assassination. Then also the general unleashing of violence: random, terrorist violence against trains, taxi-ranks, schools, townships and so forth, to sow confusion and demoralisation and so on and basically to knock away the link between the ANC leadership and its one strength. We needed to mount, not our own counter-terror, but we needed to mobilise mass forces partly to defend ourselves in the face of this so that, and this was critical, so that they were themselves part and parcel of the negotiation process.
I would say that none of those 3 schools of thought within the ANC had a clear-cut hegemony over the process within the ANC itself. It was a contested perspective and there was mutual suspicion. The don’t-rock-the-boaters thought that many of us were endangering the negotiations process and delaying it with some of those strategies. We really felt that they were not understanding what we were up against. So there were waves of significant mobilisation in that period. I think that those waves were critical in actually bringing about eventually the negotiations and the relatively favourable outcome to those negotiations.
After the Hani assassination, there was a major mobilisation wave that occurred then in a response. That was clearly critical. Within three weeks of his assassination, the final outcome to the negotiations was then settled and the elections then happened in exactly one year and three weeks after his assassination. It was mass mobilisation that did it. What was interesting was that in the course of the mobilisation, the response to Hani's assassination was: we must go and kill whites and what are we negotiating for? The ANC was able to inject political leadership into that to say: no, the assassins want you to say that. We have got to now demand the immediate implementation of the process leading up to elections. We were well able to do that.
In doing that and also getting mobilised massed forces to take up the national negotiating demands, we began to find they were also taking up their own local negotiating demands. So they would take up the demand for one-person, one-vote elections and so forth, for a unitary dispensation and so on, but at the same time in their mobilisation they would raise issues around non-access to the local town hall for meetings or the treatment that the white police were meting out to the people in the township in this particular police station and so on. They began to find that for once, their counterparts, the white mayor or the white police commander or local white business (for example, there were boycotts of shops in this process) began to negotiate with them, something that they hadn’t particularly found before.
So in my opinion it’s very important to understand what happened in the 1990s, but to hold onto that as an understanding for the future: that the negotiations themselves were mass-based and there were local-level negotiations happening. The transformation of South Africa wasn’t just the product of two wise men, a DeKlerk and a Mandela, shaking hands on a deal and having the farsightedness to understand that South Africa.
I could go on and on and on, offering my take on what Cronin meant, but I will pause here.
That excerpt is Raila Odinga's and CORD's reading assignment.
The idiom "red herring" is used to refer to something that misleads or distracts from the relevant or important issue. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or characters towards a false conclusion. A red herring might be intentionally used, such as in mystery fiction or as part of a rhetorical strategy (e.g. in politics), or it could be inadvertently used during argumentation as a result of poor logic. The origin of the expression is not known. Conventional wisdom has long supposed it to be the use of a kipper (a strong-smelling smoked fish) to train hounds to follow a scent, or to divert them from the correct route when hunting; however, modern linguistic research suggests that the term was probably invented in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, referring to one occasion on which he had supposedly used a kipper to divert hounds from chasing a hare, and was never an actual practice of hunters. The phrase was later borrowed to provide a formal name for the logical fallacy and literary device.
Lamu Governor Issa Timamy was on Thursday taken to court under tight security from regular police and paramilitary General Service Unit (GSU) officers.
Mr Timamy was driven into the court precincts at around 12:40pm in a vehicle sandwiched between a police van and a pickup full of GSU officers.
The governor, who was accompanied by Lamu Woman Representative Shakila Abdalla, looked calm as he alighted from the vehicle before he was whisked away to the court’s basement cells.
He was taken before Mr Justice Martin Muya, who was informed that the governor had been arrested on Wednesday.
PARTY DEMANDS RELEASE
“The subject was arrested yesterday (Wednesday). We are before you to have him informed why he is here,” prosecuting counsel Alexander Muteti told the court.
One of Mr Timamy's lawyers, Paul Buti, who told the court that his client ought to know why he had been arrested, requested an adjournment to consult with the governor.
The governor was arrested Wednesday shortly after recording a statement in relation to the June 15 and 16 Mpeketoni attacks that left 60 people dead.
Earlier on Thursday, the United Democratic Front (UDF), the party the governor belongs to, protested over the manner in which he was arrested and his treatment while under police custody and demanded his release.
PACKED COURTROOM
Hundreds of Mr Timamy's supporters had arrived at the court as early as 9am as there had been no indication whether the governor would be brought to court.
“We shall stand with you, Mr Governor,” shouted one of the supporters as the governor was led to the basement cells.
The courtroom was packed to capacity as the Governor’s supporters struggled to find space in order to follow the proceedings.
Apart from Mr Buti, Mr Timamy, who is an advocate of the High Court, is also being represented by lawyers Isaac Onyango, Duncun Okoth and Hamza Adam.
Mombasa Senator Hassan Omar also arrived in court some minutes before the case was adjourned.
The matter resumes at 2:30pm Thursday.
SOURCE: www.nation.co.ke/news/-/1056/2362430/-/14xa9uv/-/index.html
From the Star newspaper:
LAMU Governor Issa Timamy has been charged in a Mombasa court with murder, forceful transfer of population and terrorism related charges.
The Lamu governor has not been allowed to take a a plea as today's proceedings continue. The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Keriako Tobiko has applied to remand Timamy for two weeks to complete investigation over the recent attacks in his county that left over 65 people dead.
The Lamu governor Thursday faced the brunt of the law as detectives accused him of coordinating the mass killings using gunmen from across the Kenyan border.
The DPP yesterday said Timamy was facing terrorism related charges following the killings in several Lamu villages that was initially believed to have been orchestrated by the Al shabaab but was later said to be ethnic clashes.
President Uhuru Kenyatta in a speech shortly after the killings blamed local politicians over the killings despite claims by the Al Shabaab in Somali that they were responsible.
Timamy was brought to the Mombasa court at about 12 noon in a convoy of five heavily armed police escort after spending several hours at both the port police station and the Lamu County CID headquarters on Wednesday.
Police said they would not prosecute him in Lamu where he enjoys massive support from his constituents and could disrupt any court proceeding held in Lamu.
Timany was arrested on Wednesday at CID headquarters in Lamu where he recorded a statement before he was transferred to Mombasa to face charges.
Senior CID officers were on Thursday analyzing contents of two mobile phones confiscated from him when he was arrested in Lamu.
The two mobile phones were handed over to crime prevention unit in CID at police headquarters in Mombasa.
Three lawyers representing him Paul Buti ,Dancan Odero and Adam Hamza said they confirmed that he had recorded a statement but they were still not certain on charges preferred against him.
Speaking to The Star at Port police in the morning, Buti said they were given restricted access to see him by CID officers who were still interrogating the governor.
"We cannot disclose the contents of the statement that might prejudice the matter that is yet to be brought to court. We expect them to arraign him in court this afternoon,” said Buti.
Mombasa senator Omar Hassan protested the governor's detention. Speaking after visiting him Hassan said the move is aimed at intimidating an elected governor. He said the state chose to ignore other avenue of the law of arresting him without detaining him in a police cell.
Hassan maintained that Timamy is innocent and he is being used as scapegoat to ascertain the President Uhuru Kenyatta statement that the attacks were politically and ethnically instigated.
Upon hearing about the arrest of
Lamu Governor Issa Timamy, I immediately got in touch with my civil society comrades in the archipelago to get first hand information from the ground itself. They were in a state of shock. The lawyer turned politician has well known reformist, human rights, democratic and humanitarian credentials. Since his election to the top county government post he has forged close and organic links with all sections of Lamu society. His running mate and current deputy is Eric Mugo, a member of Mpeketoni’s Gikuyu community. In the County Assembly, Governor Timamy has of necessity to adopt and follow an approach which goes even beyond bipartisanship since he himself is from the UDF party (autonomous of both Jubilee and CORD) and the county representatives are, respectively, Abbas Famau Nagi (United Democratic Forum) for Faza; Kiunga has Omar Mohamed Said Lali (Unity Party of Kenya); Basuba is represented by Mohamed Delo Nusura (Democratic Party); Azhar Ali Mbarak of ODM is the county rep for Shella; Mkomani has Ali Bakari Mohamed of the New Democrats; Abdu Kassim Ahmed (ODM) is the MCA for Hindi while Mkunumbi elected Paul Kimani Njuguna (Safina); James Njuguna Komu Janko (Alliance Party of Kenya) is the member for Hongwe; the ward of Witu opted for Athman Mohamed Amin (TNA)while the people of Bahari chose Anthony Njomo Maina of the Farmers Party.
At the national government level, Lamu is represented by two members of the National Assembly: Julius Ndegwa Kariuki, representing Lamu West on a KNC ticket and Shariff Athman Ali being the member for Lamu East on a UDF ticket.
The Senator for Lamu County is Abu Chiaba who vied on a TNA ticket while the Women's Representative is Shakila Abdalla from the Wiper Party.
A couple of days ago, Governor Timamy put out a full page ad in the national papers condoling with the victims and survivors of the Mpeketoni tragedy. He has gone personally to the scene to assess the situation and has rallied the community through elders, religious bodies, the youth and the women in a bid to forge a mult-ethnic united front against insecurity in Lamu County. At the time of his arrest he was in Nairobi for consultations with the national government over the crisis.
Observers in Lamu are perplexed as to the motivation behind Governor Timamy’s abrupt arrest since he is known as a unifying figure with level headed sober, urbane and moderate views. Certainly no one will remotely connect him with nefarious plots to ruthlessly cut down the very voters who made him Governor in the first place. One of the people who should immediately volunteer to be a character witness for the embattled Timamy should be Jubilee Cabinet Secretary Hon. Najib Balala, who back in the day, in the 1990s even before he became the Mayor of Mombasa worked closely with Issa Timamy in the Coast Chamber of Commerce and the tourist promotion circles.
Who is Issa Timamy and what motivated him to go for the gubernatorial position?
Here is a report carried in Mombasa Times blog when he resigned as Chairman of National Museums of Kenya:
He said he will initiate a multi sectoral approach to job creation as well as develop policies to address the challenges facing the people of Lamu.
“To the people of Lamu, I shall not shrink from this challenge and I shall not let you down. The energy, the devotion and the determination which we shall bring towards this goal will light our County and rejuvenate the hopes and aspirations of our people,” said Mr. Timamy.
He described Lamu as a county in dire straits which has suffered from mediocre leadership that has had no vision leading to the despondency of its people.
“Our key sectors have been neglected, limiting the opportunities of our people yet our county is endowed with enormous resources. Our people have lost hope, their dignity and sense of direction,” he observed in his speech.
He said Lamu has instead gained the dubious reputation of being a drug den where unemployment is rampant, poverty and inequality have increased, and land grabbing has been perfected into an art.
SOURCE: eugeneomiloomilo.blogspot.com/2012/09/issa-timamy-resigns-to-run-for-lamu.html
To get a glimpse at his political and professional CV:
Issa Abdalla Issa Timamy, 55, is a graduate of the University of Nairobi where he graduated with an honours degree in law before being admitted as an advocate of the High Court of Kenya in 1984.
He started his legal practice as a legal assistant at one of the country’s prestigious law firms, Kaplan & Stratton Advocates in 1984 where he served as a legal assistant up to 1988.
He then took up an appointment to serve at Sameer Africa Group then known as Firestone (EA) Ltd as Group Company Secretary, a position he held until 1996 when he established his own law firm, Timamy & Company Advocates in Mombasa.
He continued serving Sameer Group as Company Secretary until 2006 when he stepped aside but remained as a Board Director.
Mr. Timamy also sits on the boards of various companies including Sasini Limited, Eveready (EA) Ltd and First Assurance Company amongst others.
He has contributed greatly towards various development initiatives in the larger Coast region being a founder member of a number of scholarly, religious and professional bodies including the Muslim Civil Education Trust (MCET) Mombasa chapter, Citizen Forum Trust, Muslim Lawyers Association, Kenya Youth Business Trust (Mombasa board) and Muslim Professionals Trust.
He has also offered his time and experience for the benefit of the community through serving in various educational and humanitarian organizations including MEWA, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan secondary and technical school and Sheikh Zayed Children Welfare Centre.
In Lamu, he is the patron and adviser of the Lamu Education Foundation Trust and patron of Stone Town academy, the best performing primary school in the county.
Timamy has promised to name a running mate from Mpeketoni and will be teaming up with Hassan Albeity who is running for Lamu County Senator.
Many leaders who spoke at the ceremony thought Timamy's entry into politics was long overdue, expressing confidence that the Lamu governor's seat is, as of now, already taken by Timamy.
SOURCE: eugeneomiloomilo.blogspot.com/2012/09/issa-timamy-resigns-to-run-for-lamu.html
Since Issa Timamy is certainly NOT an Al Shabaab operative or a Made in Lamu Interhamwe Coordinator, we must conclude that there are some dastardly forces with access to the state determined to railroad the Lamu Governor.
To get a glimpse at what may really be at play, we have to look elsewhere.
Here is what Governor Timamy said at an official ceremony when the President, his deputy and the cabinet secretary for Lands visited Lamu in September 2013 to dish out title deeds:
Lamu Governor Issa Timamy said Provincial Administration officials — who are still apportioning individuals land at a fee — perpetuate illegal allocation of land.
“Some chiefs and the district officers continue to distribute land to outsiders regardless of the fact that there are real owners of the land,” said Timamy.
He also accused some senior government officials of grabbing land around the proposed Lamu port and asked the national government to consider revoking the titles.We at the county government are not going to allow this, some people were allocated 200,000 acres and others were given land running into thousands of acres,” said Timamy.
The Lamu governor said that his government would not recognise some of the land allocations that had been fraudulently done.
Before the Court of Appeal decision reinstating him as Governor came down, Issa Timamy was campaigning hard on some core issues close to his heart:
Because of the case in court, Mr Timamy has been strengthening his campaign teams, especially in the areas where he performed dismally in the March 4 polls. According to him, sections of Mpeketoni and Witu areas have been “poisoned” with propaganda that he intends to evict “settlers” from government schemes initiated in the 1970s.
“My rivals are using my hard stance against unprocedural grabbing of huge tracts of land to claim I am out to evict settlers, which is not the case,” he said.
(Daily Nation, Saturday November 16, 2013).
Issa Timamy did NOT vie as a CORD or Jubilee candidate.
That is a pointer to both his fierce sense of independence and popularity on the ground.
He obviously ruffled the feathers of powerful elite forces who would have preferred a more malleable and spineless politician ready to wheel and deal the rights and the aspirations of the Lamu people on the altar of expediency and personal aggrandizement.
If one examines the concerted attempt to dislodge Timamy from the governorship one will discern that it is simply not the usual efforts of a sore loser to petition him out of office.
Before the courts stepped in and restored him as Governor, Timamy himself had decried the cabal of elite interests who wanted him out of the way. Timamy, who is indigenous to Lamu, is seen by many as an ardent champion of the right of the people of Lamu to chart their own path to sustainable development. Of late he has been reaching out to civil society and other non-state actors to deal with gridlock within his own county executive committee and county assembly on a range of matters.
We should remember that the L in the LAPSSET project stands for Lamu and there are many rent seekers, speculators, private developers, tenderpreneurs and outright crooks angling to make zillions from the mega infrastructure project who would prefer someone other than Issa Timamy at the helm of the county government in Lamu.
If you go to the Save Lamu Coalition website you will get an inkling of the issues posed by the LAPSSET project:
www.savelamu.org/issues/lamu-port/
I therefore posit, the arrest and arraignment of Governor Timamy has more to do with money making intrigues involving well-connected corrupt and unscrupulous shadowy figures who have seized on the Mpeketoni, Mpomorokoni, Pangaoni and Witu incidents as a ruse, a red herring and excuse to carry out a bloodless coup de tat against a popularly elected and legally installed regional leader.
Timamy's incarceration may also signal the opening gambit at the national level of those red and water melon anti-constitutional schemers who have always wanted to overthrow the 2010 Constitution and take Kenyans back to the status quo ante of road side proclamations, crass tribalism, arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, kangaroo courts, criminalization of dissent, rule by fiat and entrenchment of Goldenberg/Anglo Leasing type shady tycoons.
What is patently clear to THIS Onyango Oloo is that the harassment of Issa Timamy is almost certain to unleash a huge popular backlash and uproar against whoever was hare brained enough to come up with such a silly poppycock plot.
The official Jubilee government response to the Mpeketoni tragedy bears tall the hallmarks of the bungling approach in the wake of similar terrorist outrages in Westgate and elsewhere.
In the first place, none other than President Uhuru Kenyatta openly admitted, in a televised address before the entire nation, that the authorities failed to act on crucial intelligence briefings warning of an impending attack in Lamu County.
Secondly, after the killings ensued, the collective state security apparatus simply refused to send police, paramilitary and military contingents to the scene of crime to quell and contain the situation and assist the victims and survivors.
Thirdly, it took the Interior Security cabinet secretary 20 hours to tell the Kenyan people what had actually transpired.
Fourthly, when the head of state finally showed up to address the nation after 40 hours, President Uhuru Kenyatta flatly denied that it was Al Shabaab who were behind the mayhem and murder- even after the terror outfit itself had officially claimed responsibility. Instead of sending a message of reassurance to the victims and a rallying cry for Kenyans to unite in repulsing further terrorist attacks, the President chose to play the most backward partisan politics employing putrid tribal cards and blaming his electoral rivals even before an official police investigation had been concluded, permanently thwarting those very investigations with his intemperate speculations over who was response and ensuring that anybody subsequently arrested had already been tried and convicted by the President via the media.
Fifthly, the fact that at least two other terrorist attacks were unleashed in the same area AFTER the initial tragedy was a clear message to the Kenyan regime that it was in a state of paralysis and confusion unable to fulfill one of its cardinal public mandates- offering protection to its own citizens.
Sixthly, the latest breaking story concerning the shocking arrest of the Lamu Governor and his imminent arraignment in court for complicity in the killings is a manifestation of a thoroughly confused, desperate and alienated national authority scrambling to look for convenient scapegoats to blame for its own incompetence.
Joseph Ole Lenku should have been fired immediately.
By now, NIS chief General Michael Gichangi should have resigned.
A coherent policy statement from the Jubilee government on a comprehensive plan to deal with the underlying historical, socio-economic and cultural factors- as detailed in the final TJRC report to cite just one source- should have been issued over a week ago.
Instead, a completely flabbergasted nation have been reduced to incredulous spectators witnessing the government bumble, stagger and stumble from one strategic and operational blunder to the next, seemingly fixated on fixing its perceived ethnic adversaries than healing the country in implementing lasting solutions to the flood of blood letting not just in Mpeketoni but Baringo, Wajir and other troubled areas of the country.
This stubborn ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach is likely to lead to further lost lives as insecurity escalates and impunity at the highest echelons gets entrenched.
Since the powers that be appear completely clueless on how to deal with insecurity, let me offer a few alternative approaches.
The first thing that the Uhuru led Jubilee regime should do is to abandon its myopic, paranoid chauvinist approach. When lives are at stake, it is simply irresponsible for the government to employ a scare mongering siege mentality which portrays members of a certain community as latter day Israelites, akin to contemporary Jews besieged by alleged ethnic foes. Nobody is profiling that particular tribe for annihilation. If there is a community being targeted and profiled in Kenya today, then it is the ethnic Somalis-both Kenyan and non-Kenyan- who are being arrested, harassed, extorted and interrogated at the Kasarani Concentration Camp and at various police stations. And it is the Jubilee regime which is OPENLY enthusiastically in charge of the illegal, unconstitutional screening process. Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka, Moses Wetangula and CORD are NOT working at the behest of Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda to cause chaos and anarchy in Kenya. Jubilee knows that and millions of Kenyans are simply too intelligent to swallow that ridiculous kindergarten canard.
The second thing that Jubilee should do is to go to the archives where they dumped the multi-volume Final Report of the TJRC and read it through again. In the context they should pay particular attention to the following excerpt from Volume II B of the report:
245. The Commission finds that there is a very close linkage between land injustices and ethnic violence in Kenya. More specifically, land related injustices are prominent factors that precipitate violence between and within ethnic tribes in Kenya.
246. The Commission finds that land-related injustices take many forms, including: illegal alienation and acquisition of individual and community land by public and private entities, illegal alienation of public land and trust lands, preferential treatment of members of specific ethnic groups in settlement schemes at the expense of the most deserving landless, forceful settlement of members of a community outside of their homelands, forceful evictions and the phenomenon of land grabbing, especially by government officials.
247. The Commission finds that land-related injustices started recognizably during the period of colonization at the coast by Arabs and, later, by the British both at the coast and in mainland Kenya. However, indigenous Kenyans expected the injustices to be fully addressed soon after independence but the first independence government failed to fully and genuinely address the problems.
248. The Commission finds that all post independence governments have failed to honestly and adequately address land-related injustices that started with colonialism.
249. The Commission finds that failure of both colonial and post-independence governments to address the problem of landlessness is the reason individuals and communities often resort to self-help measures, including violence.
250. The Commission finds that existing land-related injustices are sometimes taken advantage of or used to address other societal problems, especially political differences.
251. The Commission finds that although land-related injustices have affected virtually every part of Kenya, communities at the coast, especially the Mijikenda, the Taita and Pokomo have suffered the most and the longest.
252. The Commission finds that land-related injustices at the coast constitute one of the key reasons for underdevelopment in the area. Land-related injustices at the coast lie at the root of the emergence of the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC).
253. The Commission finds that the Provincial administration has pervasively and significantly perpetrated land-related injustices including forceful evictions of individuals and communities and land grabbing for personal gain, and should not at all participate in any efforts to redress land related problems in the new constitutional dispensation because of their lack of moral authority and support.
254. The Commission finds that the current constitutional dispensation, including the new constitutional body on land and related laws, provide a sound basis to fully address land-related injustices, including historical ones, but only if there is political will to so use these laws and institutions.
Recommendations:
The Commission recommends that the Ministry of Lands or other appropriate government authority immediately begins a process of surveying, demarcating and registering all remaining government lands, including those that were formerly owned or managed by local authorities, all protected wildlife areas and river banks, among other public lands.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission commences work with the Ministry of Lands and settlement to undertake adjudication and registration exercises at the coast and all other areas where the same has not been conducted. Measures shall be designed to revoke illegally obtained titles to and re-open all public beaches, beach access routes and fish landing beaches, especially at the coast.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission in furtherance of its mandate expedites the process of addressing and/or recovering all irregularly/illegally acquired land. Measures should be designed by the Ministry of Lands and settlement to encourage individuals and entities to surrender illegally acquired land.
The Commission recommends that the Ministry of Land in conjunction with the National Land Commission design and implement measures to revoke illegally obtained tittles and restore public easements.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission develops, maintains and regularly up dates a computerized inventory of all lands in Kenya, including private land that should be accessible to all Kenyans as required by law. Land registries country wide should be computerized and made easily accessible as required by the law.
The Commission recommends that the National Land Commission formulates and implement strict guidelines in terms of maximum acreage an individual or company can buy hold in respect of private land.
The third thing President Uhuru Kenyatta MUST do is to fire Joseph Ole Lenku and compel Michael Gichangi to step down immediately. The corollary to this is that Governor Issa Timamy of Lamu should be released and all charges against him withdrawn. His continued incarceration will further inflame regional passions and deepen the already deep resentment of millions of Kenyans against the Uhuru Kenyatta regime.
The fourth thing the Jubilee administration should do is remember that they are duty bound by their 2013 oath of office to honour, protect, defend and implement the constitution. Some people in government may not have got the memo, but since August 2010 Kenyans are living under a NEW CONSTITUTIONAL dispensation. We no longer have Special Branch Nyayo House torturers, Bernard Chunga prosecutors, Abdul Rauf kangaroo courts or Kamiti Maximum Prisons full of Willy Mutungas, Ngugi wa Thiong’os, Alamin Mazruis, Mwandawiro Mghangas and Onyango Oloos. Kariuki Chotara, Wilson Leitich, Hezekiah Oyugi, Mulu Mutisya, Stanley Oloitiptip and Shariff Nassir are DEAD and their boss Daniel Toroitich arap Moi is wallowing in political retirement. The NO side led by current Deputy President William Ruto LOST the referendum FOUR YEARS AGO. There are no KANU ZONES anymore. The days of “wachache wasiotosheka” and their so called “foreign masters” are behind us. We are supposed to be building a NEW Kenyan DEMOCRATIC STATE instead of reviving the worst vestiges of the notorious and discredited Kenyatta Moi KANU repressive police state.
The fifth thing for the Uhuruto regime to do is to embrace a HUMAN SECURITY mindset.
What is this concept, “human security”?
Well, I visited Wikipedia, one of my favourite sites when I am hunting for information I want at my finger tips:
Human security is an emerging paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities whose proponents challenge the traditional notion of national security by arguing that the proper referent for security should be the individual rather than the state. Human security holds that a people-centered view of security is necessary for national, regional and global stability.
The concept emerged from a post-Cold War, multi-disciplinary understanding of security involving a number of research fields, including development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report[1] is considered a milestone publication in the field of human security, with its argument that insuring "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" for all persons is the best path to tackle the problem of global insecurity.
Dr. Mahbub ul Haq first drew global attention to the concept of human security in the United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report and sought to influence the UN's 1995 World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen. The UNDP's 1994 Human Development Report's definition of human security argues that the scope of global security should be expanded to include threats in seven areas:
• Economic security — Economic security requires an assured basic income for individuals, usually from productive and remunerative work or, as a last resort, from a publicly financed safety net. In this sense, only about a quarter of the world’s people are presently economically secure. While the economic security problem may be more serious in developing countries, concern also arises in developed countries as well. Unemployment problems constitute an important factor underlying political tensions and ethnic violence.
• Food security — Food security requires that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to basic food. According to the United Nations, the overall availability of food is not a problem, rather the problem often is the poor distribution of food and a lack of purchasing power. In the past, food security problems have been dealt with at both national and global levels. However, their impacts are limited. According to UN, the key is to tackle the problems relating to access to assets, work and assured income (related to economic security).
• Health security — Health Security aims to guarantee a minimum protection from diseases and unhealthy lifestyles. In developing countries, the major causes of death traditionally were infectious and parasitic diseases, whereas in industrialized countries, the major killers were diseases of the circulatory system. Today, lifestyle-related chronic diseases are leading killers worldwide, with 80 percent of deaths from chronic diseases occurring in low- and middle-income countries.[7] According to the United Nations, in both developing and industrial countries, threats to health security are usually greater for poor people in rural areas, particularly children. This is due to malnutrition and insufficient access to health services, clean water and other basic necessities.
• Environmental security — Environmental security aims to protect people from the short- and long-term ravages of nature, man-made threats in nature, and deterioration of the natural environment. In developing countries, lack of access to clean water resources is one of the greatest environmental threats. In industrial countries, one of the major threats is air pollution. Global warming, caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, is another environmental security issue.
• Personal security — Personal security aims to protect people from physical violence, whether from the state or external states, from violent individuals and sub-state actors, from domestic abuse, or from predatory adults. For many people, the greatest source of anxiety is crime, particularly violent crime.
• Community security — Community security aims to protect people from the loss of traditional relationships and values and from sectarian and ethnic violence. Traditional communities, particularly minority ethnic groups are often threatened. About half of the world’s states have experienced some inter-ethnic strife. The United Nations declared 1993 the Year of Indigenous People to highlight the continuing vulnerability of the 300 million aboriginal people in 70 countries as they face a widening spiral of violence.
• Political security — Political security is concerned with whether people live in a society that honors their basic human rights. According to a survey conducted by Amnesty International, political repression, systematic torture, ill treatment or disappearance was still practised in 110 countries. Human rights violations are most frequent during periods of political unrest. Along with repressing individuals and groups, governments may try to exercise control over ideas and information.
Do I support CORD in its strident demands for a “national dialogue”?
Well, up to a point.
Let us begin with some basic definitions.
What is a dialogue?
This is what dictionary.com tells us:
di•a•logue
[dahy-uh-lawg, -log]
noun
1. conversation between two or more persons.
2. the conversation between characters in a novel, drama, etc.
3. an exchange of ideas or opinions on a particular issue, especially a political or religious issue, with a view to reaching an amicable agreement or settlement.
4. a literary work in the form of a conversation: a dialogue of Plato.
verb (used without object), di•a•logued, di•a•logu•ing.
5. to carry on a dialogue; converse.
6. to discuss areas of disagreement frankly in order to resolve them.
In our Kenyan context, "national dialogue" only makes sense to me if it incorporates the idea of a NATIONAL CONVERSATION which is way beyond CORD and Jubilee.
We have more FIFTY POLITICAL PARTIES.
We have thousands of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, African traditional and other religious organizations.
Women are represented by a host of organizations. So are professionals and the jua kali artisans.
Can we leave out the Saccos and Chamas?
There are thousands of NGOs, CBOs, CSOs and other NSAs (non state actors).
Our many public and private universities with their own associations.
In terms of trade unions, apart from COTU and PUSETU, there is UASU and an alphabet soup of other unions.
How about the sports federations?
I have not even mentioned the national umbrella of herbalists and traditional healers not to speak of the fledgling association of night runers.
Even if they were to agree to all converge at Uhuru Park there simply won't be enough room for all of these social, economic, cultural and political forces.
What am I saying?
Onyango Oloo is saying that to initiate and convene a national dialogue process, CORD leaders have to be a lot more imaginative.
It is way beyond jostling for a microphone at the Tononoka Grounds to screech at Aden Duale.
We can learn from history.
Recent South African history to be more exact.
In the twilight days of unlamented apartheid, the racists under De Klerk sought out Nelson Mandela and his ANC, SACP, COSATU and other anti-apartheid allies after ignoring and shunning them for decades.
But CODESA process (please look it up for once I beg you dear reader!) got under way it eventually became very complex with all kinds of internal contradictions within the broad ANC/SACP/COSATU umbrella.
Jeremy Cronin, a former political prisoner has chronicled it in a vintage interview conducted by an Irish activist and sympathizer of the South African struggle. Today Cronin is the Deputy Secretary General of the Communist Party, editor of the African Communist journal, a Member of Parliament, a high ranking member of the ANC's NEC and the Deputy Minister for Public Works. Here is what he recalls:
There were already the signs of all of what I'm talking about present prior to 1994, in the multi-party negotiations period and I wrote about it at the time in a piece which John Saul refers to, which I think I called "The Boat, the Tap and the Leipzig Way". I was trying to typify/characterise what I thought were three different views about the mass mobilisation, popular involvement in this period of negotiations.
The position in the ANC, which I characterised as the boat position, was: don't rock the boat. Basically the royal road to democracy, to achieving our strategic objectives, was negotiations and nothing should be done to rock the boat in that process and, if we mobilised people in the midst of the negotiations, the apartheid regime would walk away or unleash its own mobilisation of one kind or another, the dirty war and so forth. So don't rock the boat. That was coming through from very senior quarters in the ANC, some of those elements in the ANC who were taking that position in the early 1990s, are very powerful inside the ANC at present.
The second position, which I characterised as the tap, was the attitude of: mass mobilisation is important, at particular moments, so it has to be turned on and off. In my view, Mandela typified that perspective. He had an understanding and an experience from the 50s, his own experience from the 1950s, of mass mobilisation being very much at the heart of the revitalisation of the ANC. As a youth leader in the late 1940s, it led a revolt of the activists against a rather moribund, middle-class ANC leadership at the time and that had spearheaded a decade on ANC revitalisation, of strikes, of stay-aways, of boycotts, many of the tactics of mobilisation which became so central in the 1980s again. So you had a feel and an understanding of that, but tended in my view to have a somewhat mechanical attitude to popular participation.
The third position at the time we called the Leipzig way, in the light of events in Leipzig, was that sustained and continued popular pressure was critical for the negotiations itself. Far from undermining the negotiations, it would serve two purposes. It was critical in exchanging the balance of forces in the negotiations process itself. We used to say at the time, obviously I was a leipziger, that what transpires in the negotiations was as the result of the balances of forces outside of the negotiating chamber.
And that wasn't a static reality. The regime,the apartheid regime at the time, understood that very well and was unleashing a very brutal, low-intensity warfare strategy against us, the assassination of key cadres, including Chris Hani But that was just one of the thousands of key cadres. It wasn't the negotiators, I was one of them, we weren't particularly targeted, it was the critical organisational link between the organisers and the massed ranks, which was our one strength at the time, but were being targeted for assassination. Then also the general unleashing of violence: random, terrorist violence against trains, taxi-ranks, schools, townships and so forth, to sow confusion and demoralisation and so on and basically to knock away the link between the ANC leadership and its one strength. We needed to mount, not our own counter-terror, but we needed to mobilise mass forces partly to defend ourselves in the face of this so that, and this was critical, so that they were themselves part and parcel of the negotiation process.
I would say that none of those 3 schools of thought within the ANC had a clear-cut hegemony over the process within the ANC itself. It was a contested perspective and there was mutual suspicion. The don’t-rock-the-boaters thought that many of us were endangering the negotiations process and delaying it with some of those strategies. We really felt that they were not understanding what we were up against. So there were waves of significant mobilisation in that period. I think that those waves were critical in actually bringing about eventually the negotiations and the relatively favourable outcome to those negotiations.
After the Hani assassination, there was a major mobilisation wave that occurred then in a response. That was clearly critical. Within three weeks of his assassination, the final outcome to the negotiations was then settled and the elections then happened in exactly one year and three weeks after his assassination. It was mass mobilisation that did it. What was interesting was that in the course of the mobilisation, the response to Hani's assassination was: we must go and kill whites and what are we negotiating for? The ANC was able to inject political leadership into that to say: no, the assassins want you to say that. We have got to now demand the immediate implementation of the process leading up to elections. We were well able to do that.
In doing that and also getting mobilised massed forces to take up the national negotiating demands, we began to find they were also taking up their own local negotiating demands. So they would take up the demand for one-person, one-vote elections and so forth, for a unitary dispensation and so on, but at the same time in their mobilisation they would raise issues around non-access to the local town hall for meetings or the treatment that the white police were meting out to the people in the township in this particular police station and so on. They began to find that for once, their counterparts, the white mayor or the white police commander or local white business (for example, there were boycotts of shops in this process) began to negotiate with them, something that they hadn’t particularly found before.
So in my opinion it’s very important to understand what happened in the 1990s, but to hold onto that as an understanding for the future: that the negotiations themselves were mass-based and there were local-level negotiations happening. The transformation of South Africa wasn’t just the product of two wise men, a DeKlerk and a Mandela, shaking hands on a deal and having the farsightedness to understand that South Africa.
I could go on and on and on, offering my take on what Cronin meant, but I will pause here.
That excerpt is Raila Odinga's and CORD's reading assignment.