AFRICANEWS

KENYA

Students Shot Dead

Barely three days after a Human Rights report described Kenya as "a law lacking society...a country in which the people have no faith in the justice system, a country in crisis..." Kenyan riot police shot dead three university students.

Festus okong'o Etaba, a first-year student at Kenya's Egerton University, Njoro in the Rift valley province, was shot dead by police last December 17 after disagreements erupted between students and the university administration. The bone of contention was the university's inability to refund a trifle Kshs. 504, (about US.$ 8,) owed to the students following a shortened semester.

Yet even before the country could come to terms with the startling news from Egerton, policemen shot dead two more students, Kenneth Makokha Mutabi and Eric Kamundi, the following day at Kenyatta University campus, twenty kilometres outside Nairobi city.

In both incidents, the vice-chancellors of the two Universities themselves beleaguered political appointees, offered weird explanations, since dismissed by observers as the usual hog-wash, by a bunch of notorious "political professors."

But it was Professor Japheth Kiptoon, the Vice-chancellor at Egerton who offered the weirdest excuse for the historic cold-blooded murder at his doorstep. In a full page advertisement, (it costs upwards of US$. 1,800 ), Professor Kiptoon had the temerity to suggest that the unregistered Safina political party was behind the student disturbances.

Safina is fronted by renown wildlife conservationist Richard Leakey and opposition politicians Paul Muite and Muturi Kigano. Kiptoon's view has, however, been dismissed by all-except his boss- President Daniel Arap Moi.

At the Kenyatta campus, the notoriety of Professor George Eshiwani came to the surface clearly when he told reporters after the grisly murders that took place within the purview of his office that he never called in the police.

Visitors to the Kenyatta campus often undergo humiliating screening procedures and must disclose to "guards" at the main gate where they are from and who they want to see.

Observers of the Kenyan universities' scene trace Eshiwani's paranoia to the 1994 University Lecturers strike. He virtually left the police to run the campus, often disrupting peaceful lecturers' meetings, instigating unlawful arrests and rendering this university out of bounds except to his sycophants.

"It was an example his colleagues at Egerton and Nairobi emulated swiftly," points out sacked Universities Academic Union leader, Dr Korwa Adar. In a matter of weeks they had managed to brake the strike at Egerton and Kenyatta, using a motley of state sponsored manipulations, and especially economic strangulation of Lecturers.

Mass sackings and court trials for alleged incitement of students saw the campuses gradually re-open. The demand for a Universities Academic Staff Union was completely refused by the government and since then whether the Universities have recovered their esteem remains a muffled moot point.

Yet the recent acts of murder on the campuses have brought in an angle that could easily spell more tragedy if government politicians and the political vice-chancellors persist in their present direction. For one, professor Eshiwani himself told reporters that the police defied him when he ordered them out of the campus. He also admitted that the students were engaged in a peaceful demonstration in sympathy with the slain colleague at Egerton, rendering the African Rights report released in London almost prophetic in its declaration that the majority of Kenyans.."have no protection against violence by the police".

The incident became the second grim reminder in a week suggesting that the policemen would no longer listen to vice-chancellors who want to escape from their administrative incompetence by relying on brute force commandeered from the state's coercive apparatus.

A week before the murders at the Kenyatta and Egerton campuses took place, the University of Nairobi, Kenya's premier higher learning institution, had its own share of tango lasting more than a week. At the Kikuyu campus just outside Nairobi, students boycotted classes for two weeks and held peaceful demonstrations following information that police had sneaked into the halls of residence and kidnapped an outspoken student leader, Solomon Muruli, a third year student.

He was later found abandoned at an isolated church-yard in the neighbouring Kiambu district, now famed for incessant brutal gang raids on homes. Muruli told reporters that he had been kidnapped, blindfolded, tortured and forced to drink a strange liquid which left him completely unconscious. He had to be admitted at the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi.

In the meantime, President Moi moved fast to relieve Police Commissioner, Shadrack Kiruki, of his portfolio, but great damage had already been done.

"The long and short of it is that Kenyan policemen are sending new signals to campus administrators" said one don University of Nairobi, adding, "I will not be too surprised if in the next tango of riots, police actually shoot and a kill somebody very senior, a vice-chancellor, a professor or something like that."

A political sociologist at the University of Nairobi, Dr. Casper Odegi Awuondo added his voice, stating that "since the police have their own teething problems at the force, their use of lethal ammunition on un-armed students is telling that it is the way of protest by junior officers who are normally ordered to do the dirty jobs. If people, anybody has eyes this is the time to see before it really gets out of hand."

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