Families agonising over loved ones killed, missing

Sheryl Adhiambo Anyumba, a Kenya Medical Training College (KMTC) student, would have graduated this year were it not for a bullet that killed her instantly.

Ms Adhiambo was not protesting; she was not armed; she was not among the goons who were wreaking havoc around her home as trash collectors engaged each other.

But a single act of kindness and obedience of helping her mother, who sells fish at Ngei, Huruma in Nairobi County, was the only crime that a rogue police officer who aimed and fired at her saw, judged her, and condemned her.

As the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNHCR) announced yesterday that it would pay millions of shillings in compensation, her father, Jared Anyumba, was in court seeking justice, which he argued had been denied since February 7.

Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU) executive director Grace Wangechi said that despite the Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA) recommending charges against those who were involved, and the file being with the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP), the IG has never attempted to even reach out to her family or seek compensation for anyone who may have been illegally killed by officers on duty.

Joseph Ouma Wasonga, the family lawyer, urged the court to have Chief Justice Martha Koome empanel a bench of an uneven number of judges to determine the IG’s administrative responsibility in such scenarios.

Former Law Society of Kenya (LSK) President Nelson Havi holds a similar view to Wangechi’s.

He averred that although the government needs to compensate persons whose rights and freedoms are violated, someone in the ranks ought to be criminally held culpable for deaths as a demonstration of full reparations.

“Fundamentally, where is the personal responsibility of the governmental officers who are responsible, the person who gave an order to leave police stations to go and attack, the person who gave an order to shoot to kill,” said Havi.

He said there can never be reparation without admission of responsibility.

Former Attorney General Justin Muturi said that the framework does not exclude the possibility of being spared from seeking further judicial redress.

“I think this is so much about the politics of the broad-based, the 10-point agenda but more importantly, I want to know what mechanisms have been put in place to ensure fairness,” Muturi told The Standard.

Even as he sought to scrutinise the report, Muturi wondered why the payment was being made from the Office of the President.

“Is it an admission by the government that it is its agencies that committed those atrocities? If so, then somebody must be held accountable,” he said.

Lawyer Levi Munyeri argued that the compensation was a political gimmick. According to him, the first step ought to have been arresting the killers or officers who maimed Kenyans. Instead, he claimed that the move was to conceal a crime by buying the victims’ silence.

“Compensation should follow substantive justice. It is a grave injustice to purport to compensate victims when the killers are still occupying the streets. It is unclear, and we will pursue avenues of filing compensation claims for individual victims of police brutality over and above what they are being awarded by the panel,” said Munyeri.

The disappearance of people that has ultimately seen families search for their kin for months is also addressed through compensation.

Among those who are yet to be accounted for is security analyst and ex-military officer Mwenda Mbijiwe, who reportedly disappeared in 2021 and, despite years of intensive search, his whereabouts remain unknown.

Another victim is Bogonko Bosire, a journalist and blogger who was known for his fearless Jackal News blog and coverage of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Kenyan cases filed there.

He is reported to have vanished from the streets of Nairobi in September 2013, days after the Westgate Mall terror attack. Before his disappearance, he had publicly expressed fear for his life, telling a senator he was being trailed by two armed men.

Businessman Dafton Mutunga Mwitiki is said to have disappeared under unclear circumstances. Mwitiki, who was a celebrated marksman and a licensed gun owner, was also a fixture at the National Gun Owners Association (NGOA).

According to family members and associates, Mwitiki left for his normal engagements but never returned home. His Land Rover Discovery was later found abandoned near a coffee plantation in Juja. Efforts by relatives, friends, and investigators to trace his whereabouts yielded little.

According to Muturi, the figure of Sh2 billion is not in the current budget, which is ending on June 30.

“There is no money for compensation. I hope again, the Office of the President or Interior is not going to use Article 223 to say that it is an unforeseen emergency because there is no money for it in the current Budget, including the last supplementary,” Muturi stated.

“They are just trying to hoodwink people”, he added.