By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Colonial occupation and domination prospered by abducting and liquidating the most vocal Africans. Those whom it drove into exile were lucky. Sir Evelyn Baring invented the manual on this form of predation as governor of colonial Kenya for seven years until 1959. Six decades after independence, the man who rode to power in Nairobi two years ago by promising to make Kenya great again is unapologetically reprising Sir Evelyn’s manual minus the internment camps.
In June 2021, Abubakar Malami, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and Nigeria’s federal Attorney-General, announced with some relish that Nnamdi Kanu – self-proclaimed leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) – had been returned to Nigeria after being “intercepted” in an un-named location. Malami had initiated the prosecution of Mr. Kanu in 2015 for treason. In April 2017, the courts granted bail to Kanu. Five months later, he disappeared from public view after soldiers reportedly raided his country home in Abia State in South-East Nigeria leading to scores of fatalities. The following month, he was reportedly sighted in Jerusalem.
The circumstances of Mr. Kanu’s return to Nigeria in 2021 degenerated quickly from mystery to controversy. The International Criminal Police Organisation (INTERPOL), whom Nigeria initially credited with assistance in the “interception,” firmly denied any involvement in the operation.
When he announced the “interception” of Mr. Kanu, Attorney-General Malami claimed that it was accomplished by the “collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and security services.” In October 2022, however, Nigeria’s Court of Appeal found as a fact that Mr. Kanu “was in Kenya, was abducted therefrom and there were no extradition proceedings undertaken prior to his forcible abduction.”
Kenya unconvincingly denied involvement in the abduction. Very importantly, however, the Government of Kenya (GOK) offered no protest against what was clearly a spectacular violation of its sovereignty. The conclusion had to be that the GOK authorized Mr. Kanu’s abduction from its territory. Prior and subsequent conduct by the GOK provide ample evidence to support this.
On 2 February 2018, operatives of Kenya’s security services used explosives to gain entrance into the premises of former student leader and lawyer, Miguna Miguna, from where they abducted him into detention incommunicado. After several days of keeping him out of circulation, they drove Dr. Miguna to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, where they declared him a “prohibited immigrant” and deported him to Canada.
As a prominent student leader during the regime of President Daniel Arap Moi in the 1980s, Miguna was exiled to Canada. From there, he sought several times without success to renew his Kenyan nationality documents. Canada eventually granted him refugee status and he travelled initially under documentation provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees before eventually being forced to acquire Canadian nationality.
Upon returning to Kenya in 2007, Dr. Miguna enrolled as a lawyer, served as senior adviser to the Prime Minister and subsequently ran for high public office. It was not in dispute that both of his parents were Kenyans or that he was Kenyan by birth and by descent. In a decision on 14 December 2018, the High Court of Kenya found that the government of Kenya abducted and deported Dr. Miguna “despite court orders directing that he be produced in court” and lamented the fact that “it is inconceivable that the state can deport its own citizen to a second country without due regard to the constitution and the law.”
William Ruto was Kenya’s Vice-President when Mr. Kanu and Dr. Miguna were abducted. In 2022, he became president.
On 16 November 2024, leading Ugandan opposition politician, Dr. Kiiza Besigye, who was in Nairobi to attend the launch of a book by former Kenyan Justice Minister and senior lawyer, Martha Karua, disappeared. Five days later, he surfaced before a military tribunal in the custody of the Uganda Peoples Defence Force (UPDF) on fanciful charges of illegal possession of firearms. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, expressed shock at “the abduction of Ugandan opposition politician Kizza Besigye on 16 November 2024 in Kenya and his forcible return to Uganda.”
Dr. Besigye’s experience was not the first abduction of Ugandan opposition in Kenya. In July 2024, Kenya’s security services similarly snatched 36 members of Dr. Besigye’s Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) who were in the country for a meeting and expelled them to Uganda into the arms of the UPDF, who promptly charged them with “terrorism” before a military tribunal. The United Nations later expressed concern that President Museveni’s practice in Uganda of charging civilians before military tribunals was “in contravention of the country’s obligations under international human rights law.”
In October 2024, Kenyan authorities similarly abducted seven Turkish refugees and refouled them back to Turkey into the arms of the government that had exiled them.
In the period since the anti-Finance Bill protests in the country between June to December 2024, Kenya’s National Human Rights Commission has reported the abduction and disappearance of at least 82 persons. Some of the abducted have turned up dead. When young people in Nigeria protested two months after their colleagues in Kenya, the Nigerian government decided to borrow a leaf from President Ruto’s playbook.
Back in Nairobi, one of the victims of these abductions by the GOK was Leslie Muturi. His father, Justin Bedan Muturi, happens to be the Cabinet Secretary (Minister) for Public Service in the government President Ruto. Around June 22, 2024, Leslie Muturi was disappeared. At the time, his father, Justin, was the Attorney-General of Kenya and sat in the National Security Council with the Director of National Intelligence Service, Noordin Haji.
In the past week, Justin Muturi has narrated how his effort to locate his son took him through the entrails of the high command of Kenya’s deep state to the presence of his boss, President Ruto, who ordered Noordin Haji to release Leslie. Less than an hour thereafter., Leslie returned to his family.
Justin Muturi’s clinical account of what transpired in the disappearance of his son clearly establishes the culpability of Kenya’s president and security high command under him in resuscitating a culture of state-sponsored abductions redolent of the worst excesses of Sir Evelyn Baring’s colonial era abuses.
After denying culpability last November, President Ruto promised on 28 December 2024 to end the abductions, in effect admitting state complicity. Two days later, the continental human rights body of the African Union expressed “profound alarm over reports of abductions and enforced disappearances in Kenya.”
Less than a fortnight into the New Year, Tanzania’s leading independent journalist, Maria Sarungi Tsehai, survived an abduction from a shopping mall in Nairobi. Ms. Tsehai and her family have been exiled in Kenya for over four years. Maria was lucky. Two years earlier, Kenyan police officers murdered exiled Pakistani journalist, Arshad Sharif, in Nairobi. Despite a court order and appeals by the United Nations, his killers continue to escape accountability.
When they re-established the East African Community in 1999, the original partner states in East Africa – Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda – desired to advance transactional life and spaces in the region. Under current leadership, however, these states are now using regional integration to advance the expendability of African civic and transactional life. They are collaborating across inter-state borders to liquidate critics and perceived enemies and make their lives precarious.
It seems clear that these abductions in Kenya are taking place under the direct command of government or, even more frightening, have been outsourced to non-state actors acting under the authority and protection of the State. The latter may explain the intractable nature of the abductions and the inability of Ruto’s GOK to bring it under control despite the assurances of the President and the escalating diplomatic costs and investment runs.
This was hardly what Kenyans or the rest of Africa hoped for when the people chose President Ruto’s vision of a “hustler” nation over the other options on offer in Kenya’s 2022 presidential election. The only hustle presently taking place under his watch is the hustling of innocent citizens and visitors into enforced disappearance and exile. From the comfort of his grave, Sir Evelyn must feel exceedingly proud of William Ruto.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
