Attacks on cars in full daylight, thefts, bank robberies: a wave of violence has struck the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, claiming more than 50 victims in the last three months, among whom two Americans and well known personalities of the local scientific world. But what seemed to be a fresh outbreak of activity in the gangs that control the city might be revealed as a much more worrisome phenomenon. In view of the elections in November, the gangs may have been engaged by some politicians who ask for “a hand” during the electoral campaign in exchange for immunity for crimes committed.

Criminality. Theft and violence have never been foreign to the city, known in the 70s by the word play of “Nairobbery.”  But the fact that during the last months attacks on drivers of cars have also become more frequent during the day, and that they often end with the death of  the victim, is striking. To pay the reckoning, among others, an American missionary and his daughter, killed some weeks ago. Bank robberies and home burglaries have also increased, to the point that Kenya is on the list of countries considered dangerous by the American Department of State. “A paranoid decision,” comments the spokesman of the police, Gideon Kibunjah, reached by telephone, “given that in the month of January we have registered an increase in violence of one per cent while in February the situation has returned to normal. Kenya is a safe country, not a paradise for gangsters.” A little more than usual, then, according to the line of the authorities. But public opinion doesn’t seem to think about it in the same way.

Collusions. “The problem of violence is growing very much,” the journalist Kennedy Ablao Oluoch, correspondent of Panapress, declares by telephone, “and the diplomatic residents in Nairobi are aware of it. For this reason they are putting pressure on the government.” “Yesterday, for the second time in a week, a gang armed with AK-47s erupted into an elementary school,” aggravating the situation even more, says Dennis Onyango, director of the daily Eastandard. “Those responsible, however, have remained unpunished—because there is a well-founded suspicion that they enjoy the protection of very high level politicians.” The present situation, nine months from the elections, resembles that of the first Kenyan republic of the 1970s when President Daniel Arap Moi was accused of financing electoral campaigns with money procured from crime. “Some candidates have already established contact with the gangs,” continues Onyango, “and in exchange for immunity for the bands ask for a part of the income for the electoral campaign and help in intimidating their opponents.    

Arms. The bond between politics and criminality in Kenya seems tighter than foreseen in  that the government profited in the periodic amnesties, thinking to alleviate crowding in the prisons by freeing some of the most dangerous gang leaders. “The police don’t have control over the names of who is amnestied,” Onyango reveals. “In this way it is very easy for criminal leaders to pay for their liberty through bundles of cash and mix themselves in the middle of the other prisoners leaving. The last time more than a thousand prisoners were released, among whom some important men on the local crime scene.” Contributing to the wave of violence there has also been a (at one time unthinkable) availability of high caliber arms. The authorities believe that the major part of the assault rifles that end up in the hands of gangs come from Somalia. “Given the Somali civil war, hundreds of people attempt to cross our bonder every day,” confirms Kibunjah, “and many are armed. Notwithstanding the closure of border posts, to monitor the entire border is not easy, also because many immigrants hide in the forests during the day and cross the border in darkness.” However, this is a version that Onyango doesn’t believe: “The excuse of arms has been used for too long; it’s time to understand that the problem is in our own house.”