Fear stalks Nairobi slum over Kenya vote impasse

Bloomberg

In a Nairobi slum named Lucky Summer, residents tell of being terrorized by men with dreadlocks wearing official Kenyan paramilitary uniforms who stalk the streets at night carrying machetes, clubs and guns. The troublemakers belong to the Mungiki, a criminal gang that played a key role in ethnic fighting that followed a contested 2007 vote and claimed at least 1,100 lives, according to more than a dozen people interviewed in the hodgepodge of dilapidated apartments and shanties in the northeast of the city. The predominantly ethnic Kikuyu group’s attacks on the opposition stronghold mark an ominous turn of events after last week’s disputed elections.
“I was in the house with my family and I heard screams after 11 p.m.,” Idah Mutembale, a 30-year-old mother of two, said in an Aug. 14 interview. “Then I heard gunshots. It’s Mungiki. They came to attack us. I am afraid. I want to move with my husband and my children from this place.”
While President Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, was declared the winner of the Aug. 8 vote, his Luo rival Raila Odinga has refused to accept the outcome and is set to announce his plan to challenge it on Wednesday. Clashes between security forces and supporters of Odinga’s five-party National Super Alliance have claimed 24 lives since the results were announced, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. The opposition says more than 100 people died.
The police say only 10 have been killed in Nairobi and most of them were “criminals” who were killed by officers who came under attack. They deny gangs have been deployed to quash opposition dissent. The government is still compiling information on the number of those killed during protests elsewhere
in the country, Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said
on Wednesday.
“Somebody is spreading propaganda to instill fear in our people that they will be attacked by Mungiki,” Japheth Koome, Nairobi’s police chief, told Nation TV. There have been “no attacks in Lucky Summer. We have officers deployed in all the areas. We have not called any member of the public to join us in managing the situation. We are equal to the task,” he said.
Originally established in the 1980s as a self-defense organization for the Kikuyu, the biggest of Kenya’s more than 40 ethnic groups, the Mungiki are a highly secretive organization and estimates of their numbers vary. The group was banned in 2002 as part of a crackdown on organized crime. In a report published in 2010, Jane’s Intelligence Review described it as Kenya’s largest criminal organization, specializing in extortion.