Mwizi

November 15
Patrick isn’t sure if he might have signed some man’s death warrant because he tried to steal his phone yesterday. He was going to his matatu stop near Kangemi, where he lives and was hanging out joking around with some of the matatu drivers because he knows them and felt a hand reach in his pocket. He grabbed the hand and turned to look at the guy who twisted away. This has happened to me a few times too where I felt someone try to reach in my pocket or bag and as soon as I saw them and turned they laughed as if it were a joke and backed off. The man had gotten Patrick’s wallet partly out of his pocket but didn’t take it and then Patrick realized his phone was gone and pointed to the guy out of the crowd to the other matatu drivers he was with. They all set out after him through this crowd of people and finally caught up to him. In the meantime, another of the matatu drivers had found Patrick’s phone on the ground, the guy must have dropped it, so nothing was stolen from him. Still the group was pursuing this thief to beat him up, as is so commonplace in Kenya whenever a crime is committed in public. The mob mentality becomes so hot as soon as someone yells “mwizi!”-thief. The man was thrown out into the middle of the crowd that had formed and all these guys started kicking and hitting this guy. Patrick came into the middle and said “hey, I got all my stuff back, everything’s ok, stop” and he pulled the guy up off the ground, but the crowd just kept beating him up. One of the guys told Patrick that he should just get out of there because there wasn’t anything he could do. Patrick didn’t know what else to do and left. He tried to tell the people to stop beating up this guy and they wouldn’t. Today when he was telling the story before class, Fred, our poli sci professor said probably if Patrick hadn’t gotten his stuff back they would have killed this guy. A lot of times the mob will even burn a thief to death right there on the spot. It’s good that as soon as you realize you’ve been robbed people are really helpful to help you find the thief and not let them get away, the same way they did when I found out my camera had been stolen, but it’s so scary what happens when they actually do catch them. It makes me a little bit glad that my camera actually did get stolen and I didn’t find the person took it, because I don’t want to know what could have happened. As Patrick said, “I wanted my phone back, but really, is that worth a man’s life?”

People always talk about the need for security in this country, and it’s true, security is a big issue. But a country doesn’t build security by building more walls and barbed wire fences and hiring more Maasai warriors as their guards and getting more guard dogs. (The Maasai tribe have a really strong history as warriors) The reason for all this insecurity is because of the huge huge gaps between the rich and the poor here. Over half the people that live in Nairobi live in the slums like Kibera-that’s over 2 million people living in shacks made of sheet metal with no sanitation, electricity or roads. And yet the Kenyan parliament is among the highest paid government officials of any in the world-they get paid more than US politicians despite the widespread poverty. Less than 30% of the population have access to electricity, about 40% no access to clean water. If the country worked to build its domestic economy and create jobs for people-there are so many trained people here without jobs-unemployment is 25% nationally-this would do so much more to solve the internal security issues. Then you wouldn’t see barbed wire and glass glued to the tops of fences absolutely everywhere you go. Then people wouldn’t have to literally lock themselves from the outside in each night-outside walls and guards, inside gates, house doors and windows, gate to the upstairs, and finally the bedroom door. My house doesn’t lock this way each night, but some of the other students’ houses do. I’m merely protected by a giant wall with barbed wire fence, a night guard and a locked door.

This is why the political situation here, although I’m very interested in it, is very frustrating to me, because ultimately Kenya’s future and ability to further its development really lies with its leaders and so far it’s leaders haven’t done nearly enough in my mind to further Kenya’s situation and have instead acted very opportunistically and selfishly to build their own power and make more money for themselves and their small enclave of rich and loyal supporters. I don’t really like any of the candidates running for president, and I’m not really sure who I’d support. At this point, my mind is starting to change over to Kibaki, who is the current president running for reelection, because although he’s been involved in corrupt business, he also has helped the country move forward in a number of ways. And I’m not really sure what Raila would do with the presidency, it’s a little scary, because the president has so much unchecked power here, so it’s a really big deal who it is. We need a Kenyan Nelson Mandela who actually cares about the country and helping the people improve their situations. And we need a new Constitution that puts checks and balances on political power-not the one we currently have that was written by the British-Raila says he’ll do that within 3 months of the election if he wins, but honestly, all the candidates are literally promising the world to the Kenyan citizens, I don’t know how many of them will actually happen