For a General who had made a career out of being tough, Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery’s body language was conspicuously slack as he stood to address political leaders from pastoralist communities at Keekorock Lodge in Narok on a hot Valentine’s Day afternoon in 2015.
After years of several failed attempts to restore sanity and peace in the north by mopping up all illegal firearms, the government had decided to change tack. Following days of negotiations between leaders at the lodge and no solution in sight on how to deal with insecurity, General Nkaissery suddenly came up with a deal.
“We want to register all the guns. If you don’t register a gun, that will be an illegal gun. Later on we will be able to know how many guns are in civilian hands in this country. That way if your community misbehaves we will come and take away those firearms,” he said.
When his time to speak came, Deputy President William Ruto, who sat pensively as the General outlined his new measures, had an ace up his sleeve that would be the silver bullet to the illegal arms menace.
“Even as we support what Nkaiserry is doing we must have alternative means of livelihood,” said the DP before CS Nkaissery added, “We want to make cattle rustling a capital offence.”
In the months that followed, Dr Ruto and General Nkaissery hit the ground running, traversing several counties and meeting pastoralist communities in the presence of local administration starting with Katila Ward in Turkana County.
Those who offered to register their arms were allowed to keep them and were promised a maintenance fee by the government, besides being closely monitored so as not to engage in acts of violence.
Maj-Gen (rtd) Joseph Nkaissery as Interior Cabinet Secretary in 2015. ROBERT NGUGI | NATION
It must have been a weird scenario for CS Nkaissery. Thirty years earlier, as a major in the army, Mr Nkaissery led Operation Nyundo, which was supposed to forcibly disarm the Pokot and Karamajong through a joint military exercise between Kenya and Uganda. Unlike the peaceful gun registration of 2015, Major Nkaissery in 1984 opted for a crude tactic.
“Using helicopters, we gathered all the cattle and goats and told the locals ‘We were not brought here to herd your cows for you so bring the guns and we’ll give you your cows’,” he said in an interview with K24 soon after he was named to the Cabinet in 2014.
In the three months between February 22 and May 22, 1984, the government is said to have killed more than 20,000 head of cattle in West Pokot and murdered thousands of people in the disarmament that is popularly known as the Lotirir Massacre. It is to date the most brutal disarmament exercise ever carried out in post-independence Kenya.
It is also a classic example of how a state can go to great lengths to disarm a heavily militarised society and still fail to solve the problem. To date, it is not known how many guns are in illegal hands but various statistics show that civilians outnumber the government several times over on gun ownership.
“This problem should not just worry us in the (police) service but all Kenyans. You cannot just have all those guns in civilian hands,” warns Police Inspector General Hillary Mutyambai.
Hillary Mutyambai, Inspector General of Police. SILA KIPLAGAT | NATION
Deputy President William Ruto had a feel of this on February 23, 2017 in Bartabwa, Baringo North, when he attended a peace rally after the shooting-to-death of a two-year-old baby who was among nine people killed in a week of violence.
“I have ordered police officers to shoot anyone stealing livestock and found with an illegal firearm," he thundered, minutes before the meeting was disrupted by a volley of gunfire a short distance from where he stood.
Ng’orora Location chief Thomas Chebor had been gunned down by armed bandits while on his way to Chekokel to recover stolen livestock.
On October 9 this year, armed bandits from Turkana attacked and killed two herders at Lamerock in Samburu County. Area residents told the Nation that the stolen cows passed just outside the Kachola GSU camp on their way to Suguta but the officers did nothing.
A day after the incident, we arrived at the Baragoi Police Station to find dozens of officers who had been brought in for reinforcement in a show of might meant to recover the more than 400 animals. A number of the officers told us that they were unwilling to undertake the operation.
“None of the commanders knows what lies ahead and all this is to make the public think that we are doing something. We are still in pursuit of the animals and the criminals and we will get them one way or the other,” he said. Two days before the Lamerock attack, bandits assailed a police station in Kibish, 983km away in Turkana County on the common border of Kenya, South Sudan and Ethiopia. The Nation had, just hours before the attack, managed to get rare access into the dangerous region.
“The sad reality is that young people from this region grow up using guns. If the government is serious about disarming the people, it would not only have to disarm everybody fairly but also protect them from neighbouring communities and provide alternative livelihoods,” says Fr Alex Capone of Lobur Mission in Turkana.
After the heavy-handed Lotirir Massacre, no government has been able to completely eliminate illegal guns in the restive north. Government officials say the situation is bad, but it is what it is.
“Bad press hinders us from doing forcible disarmament. Every time we do a disarmament you will hear that we raped women and stole livestock. The last time we tried that we left after two days,” says North Rift regional commander George Natembeya.
In 2005, the government launched Operation Dumisha Amani with a view to integrating development with disarmament.
The two-stage exercise began with communities in Turkana, West Pokot, Marakwet, Samburu, East Baringo, Laikipia East and Trans Nzoia being encouraged to surrender their guns. This was followed by Operation Okota, where police and the military took the remaining arms by force. Some 2,298 firearms and 4,418 rounds of ammunition were recovered.
“The programme began as an ad hoc process with no rooting in a written disarmament policy and locally it was seen as a top-down process,” ‘Lessons from the Frontier’, a study on the failures of the process by security think tank Safer World, said later.
“The programme also left communities in some places such as Samburu more vulnerable to attacks. This is because the Samburu were the most cooperative in surrendering their arms, while their neighbours are believed to have mostly handed in non-serviceable weapons,” said the study.
In 2008, following heightened insecurity in the Mt Elgon region courtesy of the Sabaot Land Defence Force that had been formed to agitate for land under the Chepyuk settlement scheme, the government launched Operation Okoa Maisha. By then over 600 people had been killed.
The operation was launched in concurrence with another one in Mandera dubbed Operation Okoa Maisha. Amid heavy criticism for using the military, the government managed to net only 151 firearms and 2,355 rounds of ammunition.
After the two exercises, the government launched Operation Dumisha Amani II, which led to the recovery of 1,201 firearms and 1,665 rounds of ammunition. Dumisha Amani II marked the end of large-scale and highly publicised disarmament exercises.
Meanwhile, the communities in the north that have easy access to weapons from the unstable South Sudan, insecure southern Ethiopia and Somalia continue to heavily arm themselves. In 2010, the Kibaki administration estimated that the country’s pastoralists had spent a staggering Sh1.1 billion to arm themselves in a period of just 10 years based on the number of firearms recovered from them.
On November 15, 2016, the government set ablaze more than 5,250 firearms seized at a field in Ngong in order to send a message that the circulation of illegal weapons would not be tolerated. The rifles were so many that they were arranged in three stacks, each about 15 feet high.
Then in December of last year, Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i cancelled General Nkaissery’s approach to recovery of illegal firearms and ordered all licensed gun owners to undergo vetting.
Out of the 13,805 registered firearm holders, 9,398 were vetted while 4,407 did not turn up by the end of the deadline.
The disarmament exercise, which is still ongoing among the KPR, is a success, according to the government, but the results are shocking.
“What shocked us from the number of firearms we have been able to collect so far is that those people had the capacity to stage a revolution if we did not act,” says Police Inspector General Hillary Mutyambai.
