Police and Thieves in the Street

Having had breakfast with the Prime Minister last week, this week was dinner with the President. I do move in high circles. The next day, we were 'allowed' to leave at 4pm because of the work function the night before. I headed out around 4.20 to see a bunch of people running down the street and yelling, clearly upset about something. Asking the guard what was going on, he told me it was the hawkers, they were being dispersed by the police. Our office is basically on a dividing line in the city, between the part it's ok to walk in, and the part where it's really not ok. The hawkers had been chased from the cheaper, bustling, slightly more dangerous area into ours.

I shrugged and walked towards my car. At this point, the hawkers came running back up the street towards us, shouting and throwing stones and bottles, presumably towards the police but we couldn't really see them. Suddenly, a series of shots rang out to our left (I later found out they were from plain-clothes police), and everybody RAN. I think one of the golden rules of living in Africa is if everybody around you starts screaming and running in one direction, you scream and run in that direction too. So we all dived back into the building, a few more shots were fired, and eventually it all quieted down and people started to wander off. I got back in my car and drove home, telling anybody who'd listen that I'd just been 'shot at'.

The police in Kenya terrify me. They have a very rigid 'shoot first and ask questions later' policy, have basically no oversight and their only roles seem to be shooting people and extracting bribes, which they multitask with impressive dexterity. Every day, in the newspaper, there will be a story of someone shot by police "on suspicion of robbery", or a gang shot in the back as they ran away. A few weeks ago, there was a story about some policemen who were alerted to two men vandalising a telecoms tower in the middle of the night. The police arrived at the tower, saw the vandals and shot them both. A man came running over to them shouting; he was pushed down to the ground at gunpoint until he managed to inform the police that the two 'vandals' they had just killed were in fact engineers from the telecoms company fixing the tower. Oops.

They're also a pain driving round at night. I'm frequently stopped at police roadblocks while they look for any excuse to make a fuss and try to get some cash. At a recent work seminar we were informed that there are now only 5 'permanent' roadblocks left in Nairobi. The rest are impromptu. They just seem to be impromptu in the same place every day. Which means that every time I go out I have to plan my journey around where I know the roadblocks are in order to avoid them.

The roadblocks aren't just a nuisance, they also have a serious impact on the country's development. Apparently, it's quicker to ship a container from Singapore to the port of Mombasa than it is to transport the same container from Mombasa to Nairobi. The number of roadblocks is consistently cited as a main barrier to trade and growth in the region. I'll raise it with the President the next time we have dinner.

I would also appreciate it if they could stop shooting at me.