It’s official. Cops murder with impunity. Uta-do?
On March 18, NTV reported police the shooting dead “two people who were in their custody but lying on the road with no visible signs of resistance”. The killings outside Pangani police station was recorded on a phone video that went viral on social media before NTV picked up the story.
“On Thursday night, a group of police officers, branded the “Pangani Six”, [who have] been accused by various human rights groups of being behind a spate of extrajudicial killings of suspects in the slums of Eastlands, Nairobi, arrested two suspected criminals that they claimed were part of a gang that had robbed a woman of her phone and earrings worth Sh100,000,” NTV crime reporter Brian Obuya recounted.
“Instead of taking them into custody as required by law, they made them lie down on the road before they pumped bullets into their bodies.”
The officers made a report that they challenged the suspects to surrender but they refused and shot at the cops, prompting a shootout.
“But the cell phone footage tells a different story,” Obuya said. “The video shows the two suspected robbers lying on the ground next to a white Toyota Probox surrounded by several officers. One of the officers then moves a short distance from the suspected thugs before firing two shots, killing both of them on the spot”.
It is a chillingly familiar story.
On Sunday, October 16, President William Ruto announced he had disbanded the police Special Service Unit to end the shame of Kenyans being killed and their bodies dumped in River Yala and other places.
“The acknowledgement by none other than the President of existence of killer squads within the police service should serve as a wake-up call for us to deal with this rot once and for all,” The Standard commented in an editorial on October 18 (p.14).
Wake-up call? The media has a notoriously poor record on police oversight. Most police coverage is shallow and never looks “beneath the rocks of official narratives”, as the investigative journalist and author Parselelo Ole Kantai puts it.
Until now, journalists have not told Kenyans who was behind the killings and dumping of numerous bodies in River Yala. That story was broken not by journalists but by civil society organisations. Other bodies have been found elsewhere, without explanation.
Activists routinely document cases of suspected extrajudicial killings by police and enforced disappearances. The media is usually content to reproduce such reports without undertaking independent investigations.
But it is not just police killings that expose media laxity and incompetency, or possibly complicity in conspiracies of silence.
In Vihiga, a county government audit revealed 48 ghost workers robbing the county of Sh2.2 million monthly. No journalist in that county had unearthed this scam. Why?
“The Vihiga County Public Service Board recommended further investigations as it further revealed that there could be as many as 1,097 more ghost workers earning a total of Sh33 million monthly,” the Daily Nation reported (October 19, p.21).
Could a good journo unmask these cheats and the entire diabolical system that protects and feeds them? And it is not just in Vihiga.
What about the widespread allegations of politicised prosecutions especially in the war against corruption? On October 19, The Standard splashed the headline, “Gachagua: Making of a dead case”. The story said:
“The Deputy President is a hair’s breadth away from freedom as the lead investigator drops a bombshell: He was pressured by his boss to hastily craft a case against the politician. As DPP Haji prepares to withdraw the case, hard questions on the state of the criminal justice system under the reign of the once acclaimed ‘dynamic duo’ begin to emerge”.
Lead DCI sleuth Kuria Obadiah has sworn an affidavit requesting that the Sh7.3 billion case against Gachagua be withdrawn. “He says based on the immense pressure from his director, his team was forced to make the recommendations that put Gachagua in the dock”, the paper reported.
What went on? What is the truth about this case? Or the others that have recently been withdrawn?
“Kinoti ‘lied’ over judge, top DCI cop confesses”. That was The Star splash for October 14-16. “A top detective has now disowned his former boss, accusing him of implicating Court of Appeal Judge Sankale Ole Kantai in the alleged murder of businessman Tob Cohen,” the report said.
Remember the explosive headlines following the arrest of Judge Sankale and his alleged ties to Cohen’s widow Sarah Wairimu? Senior Assistant Inspector General of Police and Director of Investigations Bureau at DCI John Gachomo swore an affidavit saying former boss Kinoti made him implicate the judge. Kisa na maana?
Why are journalists not unearthing these award-winning stories?
See you next week.
