Some photos are memorable, maybe because they are iconic or they have a beautiful background, they are of beautiful people, or of scenic places or stunning objects. They are the photos of thousand words. Then there are photos that do not have any of those qualities and are so mundane that they need words to tell the stories of a thousand words carry as they very significant either to the photographer or to the subject.
This is one of those, a "lest we forget" photo.
Recently Facebook brought this photo up on my timeline. It was a memory from 17 years ago. This was me17 years ago. I was stuck at home in Nairobi not able to travel to my work station in Kisii, (a small town in western Kenya) because of post- election violence. We had no idea of the extent of the violence, initially only referred to as "tribal skirmishes" or "land clashes". What began initially on 30 Dec 2007 as a spontaneous isolated protest over stolen elections quickly escalated to a full scale widespread violence which left over 1100 people dead and another approximately 350,000 people internally displaced, with a few (2000) crossing the border into Uganda as refugees.
The international media framed the situation as dire, lamenting that the country that had been an island of peace where refugees from the neighboring countries ran to was now producing refugees. Our phones were jammed with SMSes being delivered hours later. The minister for Information, Broadcasting & Communication at the time reasoned that this was deliberately and also banned live broadcasting arguing that a little delay of the reports would help to de-escalate the violence. It is then that it became clear that these were no ordinary protests. Something more sinister was afoot.
The new year rolled on but I don't think that year anyone was saying Happy New Year to anyone, because it wasn't happy.When it appeared that the violence was subsiding, the Nairobi office cleared us to travel in a convoy to Kisii. But this was just the lull before a storm. All looked good until we got to Bomet, and that's when we started seeing roadblocks, power lines pulled down, burned out tires. Further down the road at a small border town called Chepilat, we started seeing burned out buildings, deserted villages and people gathered in small groups, some wielding machetes and rungus (clubs). Our white flag displaying our organization's logo patched on the vehicles in the convoy gave us some sense of security, although elsewhere humanitarian workers have been known to be kidnapped or killed. So we were grateful to God to have passed through with only occasional stops at checkpoints.
Kisii was an anomaly. Everywhere else, there seemed to be chaos with daily updates of escalating violence, but Kisii was peaceful, albeit rather uneasily. We had already been informed earlier that lorry loads of internally displaced persons were arriving into the town with manny of them having been injured and that our work had shifted from the Malaria, HIV & TB prevention and control to emergency response and relief. We interacted with people who had fled violence in nearby towns like Oyugis and others who had come from as far as Eldoret, Nandi Hills, Homa Bay and Kakamega.
Their stories were dire. There were children who had been separated from their families, some people had arrived with injuries that needed urgent medical attention. I remember this woman who had a 3-month old baby and was desperate to feed him and keep him alive yet her only source of food for him would gravely risk his life. Since the protocol is either exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months or no breastfeeding at all to minimize the risk of mother-to child transmission, being caught up in conflicts where one has to flee. Being on the run and internally displaced was a double whammy for this mother, who on one hand was HIV positive and had not been breastfeeding her child. Unfortunately, having no access to food when she was on the run, she was forced to breastfeed him putting him at risk of contracting HIV associated with mixed feeding. There were people who had witnessed vile things happen to members of their family such as sexual violence and murder. We remember the horror story of people who were burned to death when the church they had sought refuge in was set ablaze.
At some point a few of us were summoned to Nairobi for a quick emergency response training. The HQ in London in conjuction with the Nairobi Regional Office arranged for an ECHO flight (European Commission's humanitarian air service) to Nairobi because by this time it was apparent that the violence wasn't really relenting, especially after the scenes we had witnessed on our first trip to Kisii. There were roadblocks everywhere and if you were from the wrong tribe, you could easily be killed. It was also the time in the news we saw reports of a man who had lost 13 members of his family including wife and children, he escaping with severe burns when their home had been attacked by members of an opposing tribe. The ECHO flight was expensive but a God-sent solution during this crisis. The plane landed on a small airstrip in a small nearby town. We were in Nairobi in no time.
On our return trip, we first flew to Kisumu to drop off a colleague there. The Kisumu-Kisii flight is the shortest flight I've ever taken. It was like take-off and landing in a blink of an eye. We were joined by a few other colleagues, one of whom had no clue that the country was in trouble because he was deep in the bundus in Nyahururu, and according to them, it was celebration time over there because their preferred presidential candidate had won.
The outcome of that election was bewildering to say the least. As the vote counting and tallying was under way on the night of 29 December 2007, Raila Odinga had been reportedly winning by 370,000 votes with 90 percent of the constituencies reporting. That night we went to bed thinking we would have a new president but the next day when we woke up, it was ultimately announced that he had lost to the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, by 200,000 votes. Just 200, 000 votes. Mr. Odinga immediately rejected the results and his supporters took to the streets and all hell broke loose. Asked about who won the elections, the chair of the Electoral Commission of Kenya would later say that he didn't know.
Since then a lot has happened. Part of the agreements to restore peace included the constitution review process that led to a referendum and promulgation of a new constitution in August 2010, the Constitution of Kenya 2010. With all the effort that was put into ensuring violence of such magnitude doesn't happen again, by addressing the underlying issues, we seem not to have made much progress.
Impunity is running amok with every effort to seek justice and to deter future repeats of these human rights violations and abuses either thwarted or completely weakened. There were commissions upon commissions such as the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC), whose report was watered down. A watered down electoral law that weakened the aspirations of Kenyans on the Chapter Six of the Constitution which espoused Leadership and Integrity for all State officers. No wonder we have a National Assembly that has gone rogue, the opposition joining the ruling party to create a super majority that allows the passing of unconstitutional bad laws. The violent repression of the June 2024 protests against the draconian tax laws and and disappearance of young government critics coupled with the abductions of visiting opposition leaders from other countries continue to have a chilling effect reminiscent of the dark Moi era when political dissidents were arrested, held incommunicado, and tortured. There was no freedom of expression, assembly, association, thought and the democratic space was seriously narrowed.
It is a reminder that every vote counts, but even more importantly, the credibility of elections depends on the integrity of the election management body, in Kenya that would be the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission(IEBC), which somehow now is in limbo.
We're in another cusp of a constitutional crisis without a functional electoral management body, which by now should have started working on streamlining the electoral processes in the election cycle, so we avoid last minute rushed preparations with many loopholes for cheating and ambiguous
Worse, now, there are loud whispers of amending the constitution to remove presidential term limits. This is a dangerous trajectory in an era where we have seen the return of violent repression of freedom of expression amongst other civil and political rights in the country.
This is a memory I didn't want but Facebook brought up the photo.
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