Why goon scandal won’t hurt Sonko’s political fortunes

For close to two weeks, we have witnessed ballyhoo in the media about the April 30 humiliation of the former Nairobi Central Business District Association chairman Timothy Muriuki at the hands of goons allegedly associated with Nairobi governor Mike Mbuvi Sonko, popularly known as just Sonko (Sheng for “Mister Moneybags,” in appreciation of his philanthropy and handouts to the poor). 

What horrifies our elite media is that Mr Muriuki was roughed up, not in the kind of seedy River Road hotels I frequent, where bedbugs openly dance to naughty mugithi lyrics, but at the upscale Hotel Boulevard for harbouring what the assailants deemed to be anti-Sonko sentiments. 

Mr Mbuvi has since disowned the goons and declared Mr Muriuki a bosom buddy he wouldn’t send thugs to. But it’s an open secret that the hooligans operate from the precincts of City Hall. The attack was meant to boost Sonko’s standing among his cohort of politicians, who value such tactics. 

VIOLENCE

Through violence orchestrated to be a graphic national media spectacle, the pro-Sonko forces have delivered their powerful message about the fungibility of our lives. We are so dispensable to them, we can be beaten up and dragged literally through mud like dogs at their bosses’ drunken whims.  

I hope I’m not inviting goons to my already dogged life by saying this, but I’m lucky not to have crossed paths with them as frequently as most residents of Nairobi do on a daily basis. Apart from a few “normal” muggings, the only time I’ve come face to face with such thugs was during a campus fracas in the late 1990s when Jeshi La Mzee, an outfit claiming to be serving the then powerful Nairobi politician Fred Gumo, came to the University of Nairobi on a State House assignment to serve us some arbitrary whipping for one reason or the other.

The goons, obviously on drugs and armed with crude weapons, chased us around campus for hours, next to the Central Police Station, like Tippu Tip’s slave raiders in a remote Tabora woodland. Fortunately for me, the boys’ commander of the day, the dreaded “Karl Marx” (the late Christopher Owiro, 1977-2013), was a personal friend of mine. 

CLOBBERED

When it came to my turn to be clobbered, “Karl Marx” ordered his platoon to leave “that dog” alone, and they proceeded to unleash terror on everyone else.  Bless the man from Koranda. Like many people on an important State House assignment, he could have pretended he didn’t know me and watched as I learnt my lesson on campus that day.

To confess, because I’m naturally blessed with a scary face and protuberant bloodshot eyes, I have toyed with the idea of becoming a goon for hire myself, attracted to the profession by easy money, swigs of alcohol, sniffs of drugs, and closeness to the crooks in power, whom my dog Sigmund calls “TOP” (thugs on pot). But whenever I’m about to sign up to serve our TOP leaders, I remember one thing: That such felons for hire are always ordered killed by the very bosses who send them on criminal assignments, and their killers also killed later, in a vicious circle of crime and cover-up.

Indeed, Mr Muriuki’s five alleged attackers have rushed to court to seek protection, claiming that they could be eliminated by the police or deported to an unknown destination.

GANGS

In a democracy, Sonko would by now be packing his crates of cognac from County Hall for at least allowing gangs to thrive under his nose. But he should sit pretty, take another swig of his favourite drink, belch rudely, and hurl vulgarities at all of us. This is Kenya. After all, he embodies the values and character of his higher-ups at the very top. Swig. Puff.

Sonko doesn’t need to even issue the sort of fake apologies we are getting from national politicians at the top (not Sigmund’s “top”), who are tendering to us cryptic regrets for some abstract wrongs they’ve supposedly done against us that they aren’t naming or owning up to.

The apologies are expressed with the conditional “if I have” because the utterers don’t believe they have wronged anybody; they seem to have forgotten that it was on their orders that, for example, the six-month-old Baby Pendo was killed in the August post-election police violence.

 The much-vaunted Chapter Six of the Constitution, which spells out the minimum levels of integrity we should expect in a public office holder, is not worth the paper it’s written on. It’s just beautiful prose like a tale from the good old Abunuwasi or some hallucinatory paragraphs from Shaaban bin Robert’s Kusadikika. Puff.

ASSAULT

 If there were a modicum of justice in this dystopian mess we call our beloved country, most of Kenya’s so-called leaders would be rotting in prison as mass murderers, conmen, and land grabbers. An equal number of them would be in rehab for smoking too much marijuana. And you can go tell them it’s my dog Sigmund who said that.

To be sure, the incident come in the wake of an assault in front of the media and the police of a female polls official by a supporter of Mathira MP Rigathi Gachagua for showing disrespect to “Mhechimiwa” (the honourable). The ruckus had all the hallmarks of impunity and gender violence plaguing the rest of Kenya. 

IMPUNITY

What gets my goat is that we don’t have a viable alternative to the current lords of impunity. If it’s the Nairobi Business Community (a euphemism for that other group I’m a life member of) to offer alternative leadership to Sonko’s, you can be sure there’s no hope of leaving barbarism behind us any time soon. Pinch. Sniff. Thaai.

It is equally unfortunate that our society has no room for upright leaders any more, as tribal tin-gods, with our full support, angle for power and the control of public coffers in internecine gang wars. We have been systematically conditioned to admire what we see in the scumbags we call leaders, especially drug lords, drunkards, and pimps. As a result, what we have in Kenya today is an irreversible crookocracy—a government of crooks by crooks for crooks. Puff. Swig.

  Prof Mwangi teaches at Northwestern University, USA. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @evanmwangi.