President William Ruto’s public apology for the wrongs committed against Gen Z protestors is an important acknowledgement that his regime is guilty of horrific human rights abuses.
However, a vague and generalised apology is worthless unless accompanied by a true and accurate disclosure of all the abductions, illegal confinements, torture, enforced disappearances and murders.
With that, also, must come the sacking, arrest and prosecution of all officers in his government who have betrayed their oath of office by turning State security organs into criminal organisations that terrorise innocent citizens.
The President should go beyond the verbal acknowledgement and formally reverse the established policy of denials, stonewalling and cover-ups. He should release a list of all the victims of unlawful actions by the security agencies. We need to see names, dates of abduction and release, where they were held, the identities of those killed, and those still missing and presumed dead.
That is the only way official numbers, which many believe are understated, can be reconciled against data released by human rights lobby groups.
Acknowledgement of wrongdoing
Neither can he call on the Independent Policing Oversight Authority or the Commission on Administrative Justice, both of which have been toothless bulldogs when it comes to investigating excesses in the crackdown on dissent since the GenZ uprising of June last year.
What is required is an independent and impartial probe, which can only work effectively if the heads of the DCI, NIS and all their officers in the secretive special squads charged with the wave of abductions are suspended from office pending investigations and prosecution.
The Cabinet ministers responsible for the security docket during the period of abductions, and those who followed and continued the policy of rights abuses and violation of the constitution, should also be removed from office and made to face the law.
If acknowledgement of wrongdoing and apology is the first step towards healing, reconciliation and forgiveness, it must come with a full accounting of what took place. It must also not come across as reluctant or aired just in response to foreigners. It is noteworthy that President Ruto’s apology at the National Prayer Breakfast last Wednesday was prompted by visiting American preacher Rickey Bolden.
It came across as half-hearted: “To our children, if there has been any misstep on our part, we apologise.” There are no ifs and buts to this one. That rider suggests a search for excuses, a lack of commitment or a desire to avoid responsibility, rather than steps towards definitive action. That Kenyans were brutalised by the police for exercising their constitutional right to protest oppressive taxation is a fact.
End human rights violations
President Ruto previously acknowledged, in a roundabout way, guilt over crimes against the youth. Prompted by the visiting King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who urged respect for the rights of citizens, the President responded that all those detained had been freed and reunited with their families. The statement in March was rubbished by human rights activists, who accused the President of ignoring unresolved issues of the dead and the missing. But it was at least an implicit confession that the security agencies had indeed held people who were never taken to court.
The President rode to office on the pledge to end human rights violations, particularly abductions, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial executions. His government disbanded the police killer squads established under his predecessor, Uhuru Kenyatta, and had more than a dozen officers in court facing murder charges.
The problem is that he replaced disbanded squads with his own, even more lethal ones, carrying on exactly the same kind of crimes against dissenting voices.
If President Ruto is true to his word, he must not only apologise in word, but also in deed. The officers responsible for what he is apologising for must individually be called to account, as must those higher up in the chain of command who take political responsibility. Anything less than that is meaningless.
Meanwhile, the President also extended apologies to Uganda and Tanzania, allegedly for wrongs committed by Kenyans against those neighbouring countries. That was nonsense. He should have demanded apologies from the two countries for mistreating Kenyans who committed absolutely no wrongs in wishing to witness trials of opposition politicians facing trumped-up charges.
