Kenya ‘Justice’ Often Done With a Club, Not a Gavel

NAIROBI, Kenya —  A thief who snatches a woman’s purse is doused with kerosene and set afire. A carjacker is forced to the roadside by an angry mob and strung up on a rusty iron gate.

Vigilantism is sweeping Kenya as desperate slum dwellers--overwhelmed by crime and frustrated by the inaction of police they perceive as corrupt and indifferent--feel compelled to take the law into their own hands.

Mob justice isn’t a uniquely Kenyan phenomenon. But it happens almost daily in this East African nation, where the government of President Daniel Arap Moi is under fire for failing to fight graft and apathy from the attorney general’s office down to the lowly beat cop.

Grisly accounts of lynchings and immolations fill the newspapers in Nairobi.

In one of dozens of vigilante acts in February, three suspected thieves in the Kibera slums just outside the capital were ambushed by a mob that beat them to death and burned their bodies in the street.

The slum residents said the men had terrorized them for weeks and authorities had done nothing to stop it. Criminals often are able to bribe their way out of jail and back onto the streets within minutes of their arrest, the vigilantes said.

“What is going on here? How can thugs roam this place as if there is no security in place?” said Fred Oeri, whose 85-year-old grandmother was roughed up by thieves who looted her home and stole her two goats.

Though mob justice usually happens in the heat of the moment, police say there are organized vigilante groups that hold court in parking lots and secluded forests, wielding clubs instead of gavels.

Authorities say such groups are no better than the criminals they punish and warn that reports of mob torture are rising. But some people credit vigilantes--called sungu sungu, Swahili for safari ants--with eliminating cattle rustling in some areas.

With their credibility at an all-time low, police can do little more than appeal to the public to stop playing judge, jury and executioner.

“We cannot afford to have a public that does not allow justice to run its course,” said Simon Kipkania, a police commander in Nairobi.

Many Kenyans agree. “You’re not guilty until you’ve been convicted by a court of law,” said Benson Wamumbe, a souvenir dealer. “It could happen to me--somebody could make a mistake and I’d never get a chance to prove my innocence.”

But others, convinced that justice delayed is justice denied, have lost patience with the police.

Officers themselves have been targeted by angry people seeking summary justice. Recently three policemen in the southwestern Gucha district had to fire their guns into the air to escape a mob.

Police officers, who are poorly paid, routinely solicit bribes from motorists and arrested suspects. Despite repeated government promises to police the ranks, many officers continue to be implicated in robberies, either by participating directly or by renting their weapons and uniforms to gangs.

“The police have no incentive to deal with conflict,” said Dr. Frank Njenga, a Nairobi psychiatrist who monitors mob justice. “And because of all the crime, people don’t feel they have a duty to one another. There’s so much anger and frustration, it takes only a little spark to make it burst into flame.”

Kenya’s criminal justice system is not completely inept, handing down tough sentences for those it does manage to try and convict.

Death sentences for violent armed robbery are not unusual, although Kenya hasn’t executed anyone in years. Rape can be punishable by a severe caning followed by decades in prison.

But trust that the system will act swiftly and consistently against criminal suspects is weak, and mob justice remains an almost daily occurrence.