Withering state & the logic of urban banditry
The nature, role and survival of the state as an entity remain at the core of political debate. Realists, system theorists and political economists as well as Marxists have at one point or another predicted its demise. While liberal reformers expected globalising capitalism to diminish the state's national and international roles, Marxists foretold not only the disutility of its violence once exploitation was ended, but also its disappearance.
A state's legitimacy rests on its fulfilling certain responsibilities such as security, the management of economic reproduction, the balancing of input and output roles and the construction of a national identity. Conversely, it is the increasing inability to deliver on these functions that diminishes the essence of stateness (Navari, 1991). Indeed in the global South, contemporary predictions of the state's demise are anchored in what is perceived as its increasing irrelevance given its diminishing capacity to rule and control the society. States are rooted in a trinity of variables: the idea of State; the institutional framework and the material base. Notwithstanding its abstraction, the idea of State is core to its legitimacy. Underlying its legitimacy are questions such as; what does the State intend or exist to do and what constitutes its political identity? For states grappling with deep-seated identity crises, the transformation of diverse ethnicities into a State-Nation is incumbent upon the evolution of a dominant ideology around which politics can be organised. Facilitating and reinforcing the idea of State is the capacity of leadership to build institutions and evolve programmes critical to socio-economic reproduction.
Institutions are core to this process. They include the executive, administrative and participative infrastructures. A weak idea of State engenders recourse to coercion and patronage by ruling elites in a bid to maintain order which eventually leads to state demise. This is a long durée process characterised by a decline in the state's institutional capacity to provision the society or to uphold the security of its citizens, paralysis in decision-making realms and social polarisation. If unchecked, the withering process engenders state collapse (Zartman, 1995). State withering is not the monopoly of a predatory leadership. It can also emerge in a context where a regime in a bid to co-opt certain social formations allows them to access and privatise certain common public goods. While state capacity in a wide range of formal activities diminishes, its affinity for illegalities and repressive violence increases. Underlying this is the instrumentalisation of violence and patronage in the manipulation of social forces to the advantage of power wielders. As Navari notes (1991:151), the state is in a position to choose which restraints it imposes and ‘the demand for new rules in a situation of social change increases both a state's substantive legislative rights and its political salience’.
In essence, it is the ruling elite's ability to act, manoeuvre and manipulate social formations against each other that enhances its freedom of choice in deciding who to back or displease. This fact is best understood when a conceptual distinction between the state and regime is attempted. A state is an organised aggregate of relatively permanent institutions of governance (Duval and Freeman, 1981:106), an instrument that serves the interests of certain social categories. Those who control its reins tend to make choices that highlight their interests and preferences. Its behaviour, and more so, that of the actors occupying its institutions, differentiates it from a regime. The latter refers to rules, principles, norms and modes of interaction between social groups and state organs, bringing into focus not only political relations between power wielders and social groups but also how these are continually re-composed or decomposed.
The neo-liberal agenda of economic liberalisation and privatisation is promoted both by internally marginalised aspirant entrepreneurs and international capitalist forces with the aim of facilitating State integration into the global capitalist system. Ideologically rationalised as a means to good governance, it seeks to widen the internal economic space for international capital investment and market penetration by undercutting the bargaining power of post-colonial economic nationalism. It insists that the state abandon protectionism and instead privatise public goods such as parastatals (often meaning their sale to foreign investors) and remove tariff barriers while opening up trade. The state is also called upon to remove ‘market distortions’ such as subsidies (to health and education sectors), price controls and restrictions on the movement of commodities. Once its bureaucratic baggage has been reduced, the state is reduced to a ‘watchman’ role of securing property rights, providing effective legal, judicial and regulatory systems, improving Civil Service efficiency and protecting the environment (World Bank, 1996:110-122).
Since the late 1980s structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) have been presented as an economically rational means to roll back pre-bendal politics while implanting democratisation. What is striking is the assumption that such a shrunken State can then play midwife to the birth of a productive African entrepreneurial class, capable of profiting from the play of ‘anonymous’ market forces. Yet it is the control of sources of accumulation that allows the state to shape social forces and relations of production, class formation and struggle. The fact that international capitalist forces are not homogeneous enables the regime to play off one external faction against the other while creating an internal space within which readjustments for regime consolidation and survival are undertaken. The nascent nature of the domestic private sector ensures that instead of distancing itself from the regime, it seeks to ensure its reproduction by appending itself to the regime; in the process it ends up giving the latter the opportunity to manipulate it. Bandit economies emerge out of illegal privatisation of public goods and the distribution of these to those deemed to be regime-friendly.
If rivalry within the international capitalist system tends to engender anarchy at the international level, at the domestic level, it spawns violence. Exploitation of vulnerabilities and self-interest at individual and group levels and the convergence of these material factors with ruling elite interests spawn multiple identities and particularistic tendencies. The pursuit of these tendencies constitutes the foundation upon which tyranny is constructed and sustained. As Etienne La Boetie noted in 1548, every structure of tyranny is founded on the voluntary submission of hundreds or thousands of men and women. When a few opt to serve a tyrant in a bid to realise their immediate gains, this creates a structure of patronage from which perks filter to lower-level quislings who in turn expect gains for ‘little’ services. The second, third and fourth level of obedience is enabled to flourish only because the first exists. In the end, people are made to believe that they are compelled to obey. It does not require troops on horse-back, or companies afoot; it is not even arms that defend the tyrant, for force would not be available in the first place unless many were willing to obey and to voluntarily wield military power. The power of tyrants depends on voluntary servitude sustained by multiple ladders of tyranny – what De Jouvenal (1948) calls the State's ‘grammar of power’. Conversely tyranny and corruption can also come to an end consequent on the withdrawal of consent.
Mobilisation and contestations over economic spaces, and the resultant voluntary servitude, have the effect of engendering instrumentalised violence that tends to narrow associational space as variegated social groups turn against each other at the behest of the State. This process entails the rolling back of the logic of Stateness, especially the state's need to dominate the means of violence in society. Instead, various lumpen social formations are allowed to arm themselves. When the need to contain oppositional forces arises the regime appropriates and deploys this private violence. These regime marionettes are in turn rewarded through illegal access to common public goods. This mode of engagement not only conceals state complicity but also allows it to retain effective control of associational space away from the prying eyes of external forces.
In Kenya's case the foregoing behaviour can be best conceptualised as triple deviance; that is, the deviance of the state (manifested through its descent into and encouragement of illegalities); group deviance (illegalities committed by groups) and individual deviance (inclination to illegality by individuals). This collective social maladjustment sustains both state banditism and predatory violence. It equally engenders widespread violation of norms, a process that erodes trust while threatening the foundation of social life. Social life requires a degree of predictability based on people doing what is expected of them. Extensive non-conformity engenders social disorder, chaos, tensions and conflicts. It is equally expensive to the individual and society at large. Underlying this is the fact that it diverts resources such as security resources that could otherwise have been used elsewhere.
The foregoing forms the basis of my argument that externally driven pressure for economic liberalisation engendered the construction of a logic of voluntary servitude that entrenched regime longevity and more particularly, the de(re)composition of socio-economic and political spaces in Nairobi. This thesis is based on a study I undertook in Nairobi on modes of accumulation in the context of supposed political and economic liberalisation and the impact these had on politics of change in Kenya.2
Regime survival & the drift into collective social deviance
The decade of 1990 created near-revolutionary conditions that spawned atomisation and subjectivism in Kenya. IFI-imposed SAPs engendered hikes in food prices, a decline in real wages and redundancies. Reduced public expenditure in education spawned high dropout rates (three million by 2001) and many of these dropouts made the great trek from the rural into the urban frontier. There they constituted a pool of disaffected youth, open to recruitment by opposition parties seeking to maximise on the opening associational space and external support to acquire political power. Together, they evolved a culture of political revolt that emerged in the early 1990s.
Instead of spawning good governance, externally imposed political conditionalities laid the foundations for insecurities that would plague the state for more than a decade. Conversely, the consequences of economic liberalism were more ambiguous. It was not the nascent private sector but rather the regime that had the last word on who accessed expanding opportunities under privatisation (what I describe as SAP sites of accumulation) – this fact enhanced regime power. The regime responded to the situation accordingly, by minimising the adverse effects of conditionalities as it maximised on the favourable ones of liberalisation.
The regime undertook minimum constitutional amendments. In July 1992, it passed a Bill which compelled prospective winning candidates to the presidency to garner at least 25 per cent of the votes cast in five of the eight electoral provinces in addition to garnering the highest number of votes cast (Katumanga, 1998:31). At the informal level, it resorted to the appropriation of private violence (violence organised by criminal social formations) and the privatisation of public violence (which sometimes involved informalising security agents by having them operate without formal uniforms before deploying them undercover alongside vigilante groups to wreak violence on those deemed as enemies of the regime). The politically instigated ethnic violence that engulfed parts of the Rift Valley, Western and Nyanza provinces in 1992 (Ngunyi, 1996:203-4; Africa Watch, 1993) and in Likoni in 1997 should be seen in this perspective. The net effect was the containment of social formations opposed to the regime. Those displaced by this violence were unable to exercise their rights (see KHRC, 1997). Demonstrations or public rallies organised by civil society associations were quickly dispersed, seemingly by agents of private violence.
Those who became agents of the regime were rewarded according to their class status. Those from the higher middle class were established bandit companies through which funds were ferreted from the Central Bank. A prime example was the Goldenberg scandal in which more than KSh100 billion (US$769.2 million) was siphoned out of the Central Bank on false pretences. KSh4.5 billion (approximately US$57.7 million) of this cash was allegedly given to the then ruling political party, KANU, to facilitate the buying of political support in the 1992 election.3 By 2003, politicians and senior civil servants had set up their own modes of extraction from companies seeking to do business in Kenya. It is alleged that a contract worth KSh100 million would cost companies KSh7.5 million in bribes. In printing and publishing, companies were forced to part with an average of 11.5 per cent of the total contract sum; in textiles, garments and furniture 8.9 per cent; and in the metal sector 8.8 per cent (Kimuyu, 2004). Such modes of extraction culminate in the estimated KSh300 billion (US$3.75 billion) stashed outside the country by former power wielders (Daily Nation, 17 December 2003).
In an attempt to detach unemployed urban youth from their 1992 alliances with the opposition, rewards were found, ranging from cash payments to the securing of access to spaces of socio-economic reproduction. The existential ‘illegality’ of urban lumpen elements, their precarious existence in informal habitations and livelihoods, could be manipulated to motivate them into compliance. If necessary, their economic reproduction sites or informal habitations could be destroyed or appropriated for politically compliant individuals who would then be free to dispose of the assets. Following violent eviction of previous tenants, the politically well-connected used their influence to have parastatals such as the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) or National Hospital Insurance Fund compelled to buy them in the name of acquiring assets. NSSF is said to have allocated KSh30 billion (US$384.6 million) over five years for acquisition of such plots. The new owners would subsequently resell, usually to rich Asian businessmen (The Standard, 2 November 2004). Conversely, in a bid to blunt opposition to the state, allocations of public land were granted to religious organisations, politicians, civil servants and foreign embassies.4 Kenya Airports Authority for instance, lost as much as 972.36 hectares of land distributed to private developers, who later set up illegal structures on flight paths posing a danger to aviation.5 The fact that the ruling elite used the state to undertake this process, enhanced its powers. It became the major source of potential accumulation.
Patronage might also mean access to sites of accumulation such as drug growing and trafficking. A classic example are the Canabis Sativa plantations allowed in the Mount Kenya forest whose produce was sold in Nairobi and illegally exported (Katumanga, 2001:269). By 2004 Kenya had become a major transit point for drug traffickers as manifested by the discovery of a cocaine haul worth six billion shillings at the Mombasa port in December 2004 (The Standard, 1 January 2005). Others were given licences to import contraband goods from South East Asia. By 2004, these were costing the state KSh40 billion annually (Financial Post, 15 November 2004). The diminishing capacity of law and order institutions (detailed below) had the effect of spawning other urban forms of predation such as motor vehicle theft and hijackings. The rise in crime has often been understood in terms of the ‘deviant sub-culture’ thesis, which attributes poverty and delinquency to individual failure (Lewis, 1978), whereas the 1990s deviance in Kenya was state-encouraged for politico-economic ends.
What seemed constant was the drift into bad governance characterised by lack of accountability, trust and authority. In 1997 the ruling elite of KANU had recaptured power with less than 30 per cent of the vote cast. It did not believe it was accountable to anybody. Instead of enhancing legitimate state penetration into society, an element critical to the evolution of social order, conflict management and resolution, the state was located at the centre of these conflicts. This crisis was exemplified in Nairobi.
Of self help, violence & differentiated bandit economies
Decades after independence, Nairobi remains a differentiated city. Unlike the simple citizen-subject racial dichotomy of the colonial period, in the 1990s the city was spatially divided not only in class terms but around both race and ethnic identities, especially among the urban poor who sometimes seemed to have merely relocated their villages into the city. New entrants from rural areas continued to flood into the city, their numbers augmented by refugees from collapsed states in the region (some estates like Eastleigh and Komarock were literally taken over by Somali, Ethiopian and Rwandese refugees). All sought survival in any way they deemed fit, in a city without any pretence to planned amenities and where corruption and outright incompetence abounded. By 2003, new slums such as Soweto, Mukuru kwa Njenga and Maili Kayaba had emerged. Together they housed two thirds of Nairobi's three million population. Those earning less than KSh15,000 found themselves in Dandora, Githurai, Zimmerman, Umoja II, Kayole, Mathare North, Ngong′ and other neighbourhoods.
City residents responded to poor governance, the lack of services and regime-led predation on public utility spaces in diverse ways. These ranged from self-help to more direct forms of engagement. Middle class groups often organised themselves into supportive networks that extracted additional ‘taxes’ from their members to pay for services such as security, garbage collection, street lights and road repairs which the local government no longer provided. In Karen-Langata, a ‘settler’ suburb (dominated by affluent whites), residents formed the Karen-Ngata Association in a bid to shield themselves (through legal means) from what they perceived as taxation without services or representation. These differentiated petty bourgeois responses were informed by perceptions of costs and benefits likely to accrue from any action undertaken and capacity to sustain the said action within the prevailing political context.
The urban lumpen element living in Nairobi's slums opted for limited direct resistance against forced dislocation of their abodes through mass demolitions. Poorly organised, ambushed in the night and overwhelmed by the naked violence of the state, their resistance tended to fizzle out as soon as it had begun. Unrestricted violence led to many deaths as was the case during the Muoroto demolitions of informal settlements near the city centre in the early 1990s. For most urban lumpen elements, direct resistance was a function of the fact that they had no fall-back position and everything to lose (c.f. Anderson, 2002).
In the end, this class differentiation of response fragmented oppositional social forces while reinforcing the regime. Resistance failed to evolve into solidarity, greater political participation or effective pressure for good governance. An agenda for far-reaching reforms would have necessitated organisational initiatives led by a radicalised leadership, an ideology and methods of engagement against the state such as seeking to gain control of the mainstream structures of governance. Instead, economic liberalisation, regime deviance, and an ever-expanding urban population with its contradictory responses of co-option, withdrawal, defiance and resistance, converged in transforming urban engagements and modes of socio-economic reproduction into congruence with the regime's logic. The net effect was the decomposition and re-composition of social space. Four cases of engagement between the state and social forces are now addressed to evidence the assertion that a ruling elite forced to liberalise will tend to prioritise its survival to the detriment of the state as an entity capable of provisioning society and enhancing its legitimacy.
Conflict, co-operation & pavement spaces for economic production
The defiance that characterised the 1990s combined with state deviance to erode the institutional capacity of a corrupt city council to enforce its own by-laws. Hordes of hawkers took advantage of this to conquer and occupy city alleyways, before subsequently descending on pavements running parallel to main streets such as Tom Mboya and Ronald Ngala Streets and Moi Avenue. By 2002 there were around 10,000 hawkers on the streets of Nairobi. This behaviour set in motion violent modes of production-based contestations. The first contestations pitted licensed (mainly Asian) traders against hawkers. The second pitted the hawkers against the city councillors seeking to eject them from the city. The third pitted hawkers against regime-friendly beneficiaries of illegal land allocations.
Yet situationally-defined alliances were also forged among these groups, rooted in their mutually reinforcing needs. For instance hawkers who sold second-hand clothes and electronic goods were provisioned by some Asian businessmen and regime-friendly actors engaged in illegal importations of the same. Trade in counterfeit goods cost the state around KSh40 billion annually in the 1990s (see the Financial Post, 15 November 2004). Women hawking vegetables on the other hand paid bribes to city askaris (local government police) in exchange for ‘permission’ to sell their fresh vegetables and fruits to city dwellers heading home from work.
Understanding their voting potential, the President occasionally seek to intervene on behalf of these petty traders, promising to allocate spaces for them, only to reallocate the same to his political cronies when it suited him. In so doing, he was able to play off one group against another and in the process gain short-term advantage over his opponents. The moment hawkers identified once again with the opposition, the regime would initiate ‘crack-downs’ resulting in violence and loss of property, precipitating those with already meagre livelihoods into poverty.
By 2002, hawkers had invaded Harambee Avenue (which houses the seat of Government). They eventually occupied Parliament Road, the famous Kenyatta Avenue and Koinange Street. Weakening state capacity to maintain order created what Durkheim (1964) calls anomie. Its net effect was a disorganised society and the existence of a situation where individuals lost any sense of shared values and norms. With the emerging discrepancy between culturally prescribed goals and legitimate (socially approved) means of obtaining them, more people drifted into deviance.
Hawker presence in the streets, for instance, constrained human circulation and spawned petty crime while negatively affecting retail trade (more so as hawkers sold similar items). Once in a while the City Council would engage them in disruptive and violent running battles. Whilst ruining the livelihoods of some, it reminded others of the value of social order. There was increasing pressure from businessmen in the Central Business District (CBD) and members of the public for a permanent solution to the hawker problem. Oppositional forces to the KANU government were able to capitalise on this discontent by promising to remove hawkers in the CBD, contain crime and offer a permanent space for established businesses and hawkers respectively, as well as free movement for members of the public. These promises became part of the platform of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), constituted after the bifurcation of KANU which in 2002 successfully ejected KANU from power.
By the time the Council was retaking its streets in 2003, the crime-infested Central Business District had been abandoned by Asian business in preference for more secure new and burgeoning shopping malls. A new crop of young merchants emerged from among the thousands of unemployed Kenyan college and school leavers. These new entrants rode in on the appeal of cheap South East Asian products and successfully took over hundreds of spaces in the abandoned CBD areas. The post-KANU administration has so far failed to create job opportunities for high school or graduate youth; hence they continue to invade the commercial realm, creating precarious petty ‘table shops’. This is a generational phenomenon, cutting across ethnicity.
‘Militia’ politics & the struggle for residential spaces
Edged on by the sheer need to survive, thousands of marginalised youths in Nairobi drifted into gangs, militant formations under labels such as Talibans, Baghdad boys, Jeshi la Mzee (the elder's battalion), Jeshi la Embakasi (the Embakasi battalion) and Mungiki, a millenarian group that derived its name from the word muingi (meaning masses in Kikuyu). These groups could be hired by politicians for around KSh250 (US$4) to unleash violence on their opponents. Jeshi la Mzee was used to beat up civil society activists such as the Reverend Timothy Njoya, whilst Jeshi la Embakasi was deployed in land disputes in Nairobi with the most notable incident being an invasion of the 818-acre piece of land that sits between Umoja II, Kayole and Komarock Estates in Nairobi. Some provided vigilante security in working class estates. What was notable about the operations of these groups was their mobilisation around ethnic identities within which class difference was obscured. Politicians sought to borrow their violence by playing down their own class interests and instead appealing to ethnic solidarity.
Underlying these formations in some cases are the ownership of land and houses in low class settlements. In a settlement like Kibera, with a population of more than 700,000 for instance, houses are mainly owned by Nubians and Kikuyu, yet the majority of the tenants are Luo, Luhya and Kamba. Conflicts emerged following attempts by the regime to construct a new power base to cement a national alliance between KANU and the Raila Odinga-led National Development Party (NDP). In a Harambee meeting (public exhortation and fundraising), held in Kibera on 31 of October 2001 and presided over by the then President, Daniel arap Moi, the District Commissioner was instructed to have local rents reduced by 50 per cent – a move designed to appeal to the ethnic solidarity of those most likely to support the new alliance (Daily Nation, 1 November 2001). The decision met stiff resistance from the private landlords who were then set upon by the Talibans – a predominantly Luo militia. Armed with whips, stones, rungus (knobkerries) and machetes, the Talibans invaded Kibera (Daily Nation, 6 March 2002). By the time the violence was contained, many had lost their lives, women had been raped and property destroyed (The People, 27 November 2001). Poverty, unemployment and lack of political consciousness have engendered a situation where the political entrepreneurs can instrumentalise ethnicity to mobilise political constituencies.
Kariobangi (another sprawling informal settlement) was ‘ruled’ by Mungiki. Ideologically it appeals to the broadly marginalised of Kenyan society, even to ‘the public’ (Githongo: East African, 15 November 2000). Mungiki advocates a return to cultural values, the right to land and opposition to neo-colonial control of Kenya's economy. Its spread in the 1990s can be attributed to the uprooting of the Kikuyu masses from the Rift Valley, parts of Ole Nguruoine, Elburgon, Subukia, Laikipia and Nyahururu following widespread clashes over land. It began its career in opposition to the regime, while assuring its members′ livelihood through provision of security in estates inhabited by lowly-paid workers such as Kariobangi North, Kahawa West and Dandora (Daily Nation, 3 April 2001).
In the mid-1990s, Mungiki's leaders claimed to have an enrolled membership of between 3.5 to 4 million people, with branches across the country. With each member paying KSh3 per month, it claimed to raise as much as KSh4.5 million per month (US$58,000) in subscriptions. In March 2002, Mungiki murdered 23 people and injured 31 others in the sprawling slums in Kariobangi North when 500 of them took revenge on the Taliban for the murder of two of their members (BBC, 4 March 2002).
To the extent that Mungiki was perceived to be aligned to the opposition, it was often confronted by state security. But by late 2002, the regime's relation with Mungiki was transformed from one of confrontation to overt tolerance. This change was apparently informed by Mungiki's decision to back the regime's new presidential candidate, Uhuru Kenyatta. Subsequently they were allowed to take over certain transport routes (a fact that allowed them to raise cash which they used to pay their adherents), hold public processions and threaten opposition opponents with impunity.
The transport spaces
Transport spaces stand out as one of the most contested realms in Kenya. Contestations revolve around the matatu – cheap private minibuses and taxicabs competitively plying for business. An informal transport system, the matatu industry was estimated in 1993 to employ 80,000 people directly countrywide, and an equivalent number indirectly. Its activities were said to earn the economy an estimated KSh60 billion, with KSh1.9 billion reaped in taxes (Economic Survey, 1993).
Liberalisation of the Kenyan economy in the 1990s animated not only growth in this industry but also struggles for its soul. Two factors underlay its growth: a relaxation on the import of second-hand cars (mainly Urvan Nissans and Toyotas) which were immediately converted into matatus; and the importation of vehicle chassis which enabled faster assembly of minibuses (christened manyangas). The availability of these vehicles expanded accumulation for owners, their drivers, traffic police, and thousands of urban youth hardened by opposition politics who worked on these vehicles as touts. Profits in the industry were predicated on extortion. Vehicle owners expected to receive up to KSh7,000 a day from the drivers working their manyangas whilst drivers and touts took home an average of KSh1,500 and 1,000 per day respectively (Daily Nation, 17 July 1996). There was also protection money, extorted by poorly-remunerated and highly demoralised police officers from both the owners and the touts lest they were arrested for frivolous reasons. This led to the arbitrary raising of commuter costs. The involvement of some police officers as owners as well as extortionists seemed to encourage the bandit logic among touts, providing a visa for violence and disregard for the law.
There was cut-throat competition, even wars fought over routes and terminal points among these new petty capitalists. Nairobi has a total of 100 matatu routes. Cartels emerged to monopolise routes and launch a booming business by setting high entry barriers for their use. Vehicle owners paid an average of KSh20,000-50,000 (depending on potential return) to have their vehicles ply certain routes, as well as an average KSh300 per day to various route-manning cartels. They also paid parking fees of KSh250 to the city council, and there was KSh20 to be paid by the owner every time the vehicle left a given estate with passengers (The Standard, 21 November 2003, p.13).
Enlivening the matatu subculture was the blaring hip hop music played with impunity in these vehicles, transforming them into moving discos in total disregard of the tastes of their clients. Clad in baggy trousers and American baseball caps, the khat-chewing matatu touts were easily identified by their foul language, disregard for passenger safety and rudeness towards their clients. They would arbitrarily raise the fares or stop the vehicles in the middle of roads in total contempt of traffic rules and regulations.
By the mid-1990s, vigilante groups like Mungiki and Kamjeshi entered into this fray. Given the high returns in the matatu industry, its profits could be converted with ease to financing the tools of violence. The control of matatu routes became a battleground as Mungiki and Kamjeshi began fighting for physical occupation of the routes and termini: ‘between July and September 2001 about 15 people were hacked to death consequent to engagements between Mungiki and Kamjeshi gangs over control of Dandora route’ (Daily Nation, 20 February 2002).
By November 2001, Mungiki had taken over the Kayole, Babadogo and Kikuyu routes while the Transport Licensing Board sat on the fence and failed to support the Matatu Welfare Association's (MWA) demand that they keep out. MWA is the successor of the Matatu Vehicle Owners Association (MVOA) which had been banned by the Moi regime in 1980. The Government in most cases remained a bystander as these pro-opposition groups fought for supremacy, the police seemingly unable to contain their activities (The Standard, 5 November 2001). To the extent that the violence involved opposition-linked groups, the regime was disinclined to intercede. Yet it would selectively rush to intervene whenever the conflict threatened the interests of regime-friendly interests.
Later the inability of the Government to demonstrate its monopoly over violence for the common good saw Mungiki successfully take over fifteen out of one hundred routes in Nairobi. This coincided with their new modes of collaboration with the regime in late 2002. It was not until 2004 that a serious attempt was made by the new NARC government to bring order in the transport sector. This entailed the imposition of new rules that limited the numbers of passengers that could be ferried by vehicles and the compulsory fitting of seat belts. They also attempted to remove the self-imposed stage managers. After a brief resistance by various gangs, the rules were operationalised. Mungiki went underground, only to re-emerge in January and February of 2003 with the killing of several people in Nakuru and security officers in Nairobi's Dandora area.
Lumpen banditry
The 1990s saw increased forms of banditry with roots among urban lumpen elements. Their audacious behaviour was shadowed by the diminishing institutional capacity of the police force. Constraints on government recurrent expenditure imposed by the IMF and the World Bank had the net effect of freezing not only salaries of security forces but also their complements. By 1996, there were 30,000 police officers compared to a population of about 30 million, translating into one police office for every 1,000 Kenyans. By 2002 it had grown to 1:1400. Worse still, the security forces suffered from lack of infrastructure and institutional capacity, poor leadership and corruption in recruitment, promotion and operational matters. Poor pay combined with favouritism to engender demoralisation and lethargy in the force. This was reflected in the absence of adequate supervision with respect to gun handling, to the extent that some began hiring out their guns to others for robbery and other criminal activities.
In the late 1990s the state created the National Intelligence Service. The core of this service was recruited from the best cells of the police force. Little effort was made to retrain and improve the welfare of those who remained. Young graduate recruits to the police force ended up frustrated due to poor pay and lack of promotion opportunities. As the frontiers for primitive accumulation increased, the security forces jumped on the bandwagon. Many doubled up by extorting bribes and collaborating with bandits. Special units created to combat crime became a source of the same. Some police officers went to the extent of leaking operational plans (The People Daily, 13 October 2004). Before long, security frameworks become fragile, lacking effectiveness and legitimacy. State institutions were engaged in what Crawford Young calls ‘self-cannibalisation’. Citizens experienced state rule as simple predation instead of protection (Young, 1997:2).
By 2004, the very survival of urban economic activities had come under serious threat from lumpen banditry, exacerbated by the collapsing formal economy and the influx of small arms. One of the more recent developments is the hijacking of vehicles and robbery of their passengers, including matatus. Drivers have been shot, conductors and passengers robbed of their money, cell phones and other personal effects. In some extreme cases passengers and drivers have been robbed, assaulted and stripped naked. Women have also been subjected to rape ordeals.6
In a survey7 on incidents of matatu hijacking carried out in Nairobi and its suburbs between 7 and 19 June 2004, 46 or 25.5 per cent confirmed having experienced hijacking incidents during the year. Routes with high rates of hijacking tend to have certain characteristics. These include density of population (and by inference daily rates of collection) and the availability of accessible escape routes for thugs. These routes are also characterised by poorly lit pick-up points from which thugs can access the vehicles.
A total of KSh576,350 (US$7389) and 398 mobile phones valued at KSh1,173,000 (US$15,038) were expropriated at gunpoint in these hijackings. The total value of assets stolen in the course of the 46 reported incidents of matatu-jacking amounted to KSh2,168,350 (US$27,799.4). If this survey were projected to the total number of matatus in Nairobi, this would translate to approximately 2,550 matatus hijacked annually. The value of this economy thus translates to approximately KSh120 million for the six months period and approximately 240 million (equivalent to US$3 million) per year. The actual cost of the bandit economy is a function of the estimated cost of lost assets plus value gained by bandits after resale.
Those operating in this highway bandit economy are basically young unemployed lumpen elements for which it reaps returns far greater than employment. Their victims are equally Kenyans of lesser means who rely on public transport. On average, poor Kenyans live on less than a dollar per day. It is the poor who end up paying more for services/goods due to the increased costs of living engendered by thuggery. For instance, on Routes 32/42 (Dandora), and 19/61 (Kayole, Komarock), matatus tend to hike their fares by 25 per cent from 8 p.m. as a premium for the risk to owners and franchisees of hijacking. The effects of the bandit economy continue to marginalise the already disadvantaged poor. Given this state of affairs, and the dangers of matatu transport, many are forced to trek long distances to work.
Given the magnitude of losses, it is worth speculating how this money could better have been spent. The actual value of this capital could have facilitated the tarmac of 10 kilometres of road, or upgraded 32 kilometres of murram road. Such a road could facilitate peasant access to markets. In a bid to respond to highway banditry, matatu proprietors have had to purchase security screening handsets. Those without them often drive their vehicles to police stations for body searches. Most matatus now avoid picking up passengers en route at night. The net effect of all this is loss in earnings as well as anxiety and insecurity when travelling that continue to impact negatively on the formal economy. In a bid to combat this mode of banditry, the new police commissioner, General Hussein Ali, has set up a new police unit to deal with banditry in matatus. There has also been an increase in the number of roadblocks and motor vehicle inspections aimed at flushing out gun-carrying bandits.8
Bourgeois banditry
Nairobi has also been experiencing high levels of predation on personal vehicles. While urban lumpen youth are again at the core of this urban banditry, they are here basically puppets of organised syndicates. The godfathers seem to be individuals involved in ‘respectable’ businesses that act as fronts to camouflage their real activities. Those involved are alleged to include renowned industrialists and businessmen.9
Like the matatu banditry this mode is also characterised by high levels of impunity that have seen motorists who hesitate to hand over their vehicles killed. In the early 1980s it was only parked vehicles that were stolen; currently one is as likely to lose one's vehicle while driving it. An interesting phenomenon of the current thefts is the apparent organised and powerful networks that lie behind them and that make the one-man ‘jobs’ of the 1980s pale into insignificance. While the latter were basically focused on the city centre, the current predatory activities are web-organised to serve regional bandit markets. During the four year period from 2000 to 2004 the scale and value of this trade has increased dramatically.
Of the total of 2,300 vehicles stolen in 2000, only 693 cars were recovered representing an average recovery rate of 30 per cent. At an estimated value of KSh500,000 each (US$6,250), 1,607 vehicles unrecovered had a staggering total value of KSh803,500,000 (US$10,043,000).
By 2004, the situation had worsened. For instance, in the first five months of 2004, a total of 1,127 vehicles had already been recorded stolen; another 857 cars had been reported hijacked. The law enforcement agencies had so far recovered 513 vehicles, representing a recovery rate of 45.5 per cent. Net stolen vehicles for the period under review were 614 units. At an estimated value of KSh500,000 each (US$6,250), 614 un-recovered vehicles are worth a total of KSh307,000,000 (US$3,837,500).
Between 2000 and 2003, the total value of the vehicles stolen was over KSh3 billion (US$38.6 million). Aside from vehicle theft, examination of figures given by a local daily (The Standard, 1 October 2004) notes that there was a total of 2,349 cases of reported carjacking up to October 2004. The cars were snatched from motorists in a total of 1,061 cases while in 797 cases motorists and/or passengers were robbed. In 491 incidents, there were attempts to steal a parked car; 45 per cent (1,091) of the vehicles were recovered in that period. Ninety per cent of the vehicles recovered had been used by criminals as getaway cars. Musa Yego of the special crimes prevention unit notes that 70 per cent of incidents occur in upper class estates in Nairobi. The level of sophistication of the process is discernible by the tactics deployed. Reconnaissance is undertaken on the victims and on ambush spots. The most popular points are black spots: busy roundabouts, T-junctions, pothole points, feeder roads and gates.
It takes an average of one day to plan and steal a vehicle, another day to either dismantle it prior to selling the spare parts or arranging to have new but fake papers, new number plates and the respray needed to drive the car across the border. Stolen cars are driven across the border using what are referred to as ‘panya routes’ (unofficial ‘rat’ routes). This is how the vehicle of Kenya's Chief of General Staff was ‘siphoned’ out of the country into a local garage at Singa in Tanzania after his wife and escort had been carjacked (12 October 2004).
Out of the 10,993 vehicles stolen in the four and a half years in review, 8,129 units were taken at gun point representing 74 per cent of the vehicles stolen. The implication here is that a motorist is at three times the risk of being robbed of the vehicle than when the same is parked. An owner-occupied vehicle is likely to be in good shape and with fuel. In any case, one can also threaten the victim for the cash needed for petrol. More importantly, parked vehicles are likely to be under surveillance.
Insecurity & the economic base
Between 1999 and 2002, a total of 140 foreign investors pulled out of Kenya, citing corruption, poor infrastructure, bureaucratic bottlenecks and the increased crime rate (East African, 10-16/ 2002, Habitat–ITGD.EA 2001). Direct foreign investment dropped from KSh26 billion to KSh22 billion between 1996 and 1998. It has been estimated that the bandit economy averaged KSh1.5 billion (US$19.2 million) and KSh6.2 billion (US$79.5 million) annually for vehicle theft and hijacking and predation on forests respectively between 1990 and 1998, whilst government corruption averaged KSh127.4 billion between 1990 and 1999 (Ngunyi, 1999). The Kenyan regime literally sustained a bandit economy that ran parallel to the weak formal economy. There were some key beneficiaries of crime rates such as the owners of security firms. The top 20 security companies earned KSh20 billion (US$250m) in 1999. A conservative estimate of a 10 per cent increase would put their earnings at KSh32 billion (US$400m) today. More of these firms continue to mushroom, whilst security guards are among the most poorly paid and hardly earn enough to send their children to school.
Coupled with an increasing sense of insecurity at the personal level, Kenya's economic recovery and by inference people's standards of living, will continue to be undermined. Local industrialists and multinational corporations represented in the Eastern African Association point to crime as their second main concern after poor telecommunication infrastructure. Of the 100 companies sampled, insecurity scored 87.8 per cent compared to communication at 90 per cent. The UN Habitat & Intermediate Technology Development Group-East Africa (Habitat & ITDG-EA, 2001) survey carried out in March-June 2001 indicated that 40 per cent of Nairobians had been victims of robberies, and 22 per cent had been victims of theft at least once in 2000; 18 per cent claimed to have been physically assaulted. Most respondents intimated that they had been victims in broad daylight (East African, 16 October 2002; Habitat–ITGD.EA 2001).
It is notable that increases in crime have the net effect of creating a siege mentality that has seen Kenyans leave their places of work very early, in the process generating heavy traffic jams which in turn erode productive time. Most are afraid of accessing cash machines for fear of being attacked, a factor that has led to plans by the Kenya Bankers′ Association to install closed circuit surveillance cameras along Nairobi's main streets.
Shopping complexes in Nairobi like the Village Market and Sarit Centre have invested heavily in security (Kariuki, 2005:4). Village Market spends an average of KSh500,000 (US$6,250) per month on 24-hour patrols and security gadgets. Alongside this are insurance premiums which have also increased by between 5 to 10 per cent annually. Sarit Centre incurs a security bill of KSh800,000 (US$10,000) per month. The cost of hiring regular police patrols has also gone up from KSh200 (US$2.5) to KSh1,000 (US$12.5) per day. More critical is the increasing despondency amongst business elements that the state cannot guarantee their rights to property, a factor that constrains commitment to hard work and encourages the drift towards informal economies as the cheap way out of a marginalising formal economy. Informalisation is boosted every time they purchase cheap goods which are probably stolen. Conversely the criminals operate with an increasing sense of impunity.
Nairobi remains a city under constant de(re)composition. It continues to be characterised by vicious struggles over spaces for socio-economic reproduction. The exclusivist logic of the formal political economy ensures that thousands in the slums (especially hawkers and self-employed artisans, unemployed youth and women) remain marginalised. There is an informality that characterises socio-economic reproduction in the city which follows from the weakening capacity of a state under siege from global forces for liberalisation and privatisation. The net consequence is a drift towards urban banditry. It is this informal economy that may explain the survival of Kenya despite aid embargoes from IFIs and the poor physical and communication infrastructure and diminished institutional capacity to guarantee law and order.
To extricate the city from the morass in which it finds itself, there is the need to reestablish a governance realm within the state as a whole. This calls for a developmental state to grapple with questions of access to means of production and enhanced state penetration in the society and provision of education services to stem the supply side of candidates for crime. The increasing rate of crime will not be contained without a concerted attempt to resolve the crisis of more than four million young Kenyans ejected out of the formal system by the IMF/World Bank-driven logic of a minimalist state. A national youth service under the military that can help build infrastructure, housing units, and schools and in the process enhance skills at one level or opportunities to return to school at another is one way out. The foregoing is an argument for state-building animated by internal dynamics and needs, rather than externally driven neo-liberal projects that call for a watchman State. Externally imposed liberalisation and privatisation do not midwife a democratic, secure or harmonious society; they initiate the distribution of spoils as desperate means to retain power.