Nature of the beast.

Tigers are magnificent animals. Their magnificence makes them desirable to the types of people who have everything and want something more. There are many narco-traffickers, dictators, showbiz types and "artists" who keep tigers as pets. Tigers are not pets. They are predators. They are hunters. They do not purr with satisfaction when petted by their owners; their tigritude lurks within them until one day it bursts forth and the tigers do what tigers do: hunt. Even tigers raised from when they were cubs eventually become hunters, predatory killers. That is the nature of the beast.

In the 1980s, before "cost-sharing" and "structural adjustment programmes", when the Kenya Bus Service provided exactly that - a service - before Nairobians discovered gated "communities" or built private citadels surrounded by high, apparently impregnable walls, topped up with razor wire and electric fences, and secured by "private" security, before all that, crime was not organised in any sense. Thieves and housebreakers might have belonged to gangs, but the gangs were not political voices to be feared or co-opted.

Something strange happened when Daniel Toroitich arap Moi directed the repeal of section 2A of the former Constitution. Something no one truly understood until 2007. What started out as the bare flicker of an idea in the "youth wings" of political parties and pressure groups, germinated into an idea whose time had well and truly come. Between 1991 and 2007, in tandem with the realisation that the government could barely pay its bills, political violence was organised around gangs that became organised criminal syndicates. Youth wings were cast aside; gangs became the preferred method of political zoning and political enforcement.

The idea was as cute as a tiger cub; the aftermath of its implementation is proof that tigers will eventually turn on you. In the 1997 general election, everyone worth his salt had a militia. It was the only way to guarantee that a vote would be relatively honest. These militia did not just fade away once the elections came to an end; they became permanent fixtures on the political landscape. To support themselves while their patron was away in Nairobi "representing the people," these militia provided "services" that the government no longer provided. Some were better at service delivery than others. The strong are in existence today; the weak have been destroyed, cast away on the ash-heap of bad ideas.

When the serious historians write the history of the Mungiki, they will be writing the history of the KANU theory of political survival, a theory put in practice that perpetuated a dead party's hold on power for twenty years after the bell had tolled for it. An assessment of the impacts of the KANU Way will reveal the insidious tentacles between organised criminal outfits such as the Mungiki, political parties, faith-based organisations, ethnic violence, land hunger and grand corruption. If "youth wings" had remained purely political institutions, politicians had not been lured to the attractions of unaccountable militia in political enforcement, and if the government had not tacitly and actively endorsed this madness, 2015 would not be witnessing alleged leaders of a pan-national quasi-religious organised criminal organisation summoning pressmen to their presence to deny any links with the massacres that took place in 2007/2008.