Kenya Stockholm Blog

The campaigns to disband and send the corrupt IEBC Commissioners home has cost Cord supporters and the country at large it’s first martyr. Barely three days after patriots buried Jacob Juma whose life was taken away due to his anti-corruption crusade, Bernard Ngatia, another patriot who participated in the anti-IEBC protests yesterday, has succumbed to injuries he sustained after he was brutalized by riot police.

Comrade Ngatia’s brutalization happened live on TV. He was seen being chased by a riot police officer before he fell down after which two police officers began to physically assault him. With his death, another funeral will be happening at Nduberi in Kiambu county where he comes from.

Images of the officer who murdered Ngatia are available while evidence of his murder was documented on Camera. This evidence will never be erased from the Internet and the expectation is that once Jubilee loses power in 2017, all criminals whose acts of criminality are currently being documented, together with their bosses who sent them to kill Kenyans, will be made to account. The President, the Vice president, the Police Commissioner, the Commanding Officers, the foot soldiers together with any other criminal will be brought before the law to answer for their crimes.

Despite Ngatia’s brutal death, and despite the difficulties surrounding the current struggle to take away power from thieves and murderers in Kenya, the struggle for a free and liberated Kenya must continue. Bernard Ngatia and Jacob Juma’s lives are just the latest lives to have been lost unnecessarily because of dictatorship and authoritarianism of a corrupt and thieving regime which was rigged to power through the very IEBC the Cord campaigners are seeking to remove from Office.

Most likely, there will be more lives which will be taken away by merchants of death in the cause of struggle. But, this is a struggle that must continue because it is a just struggle. It must be won because it is a struggle by a deprived and oppressed people who are either living lives of misery or starving to death as thieves in power enrich themselves through corruption. When their theft of public funds is questioned, they dispatch death squads to assassinate their perceived enemies or they rig elections through their compromised election officials to return to power so that they can continue stealing, year in year out. Can this be allowed to continue?

Today, Bernard Ngatia’s life has been taken away by these thieves and murderers. Tomorrow, it may be your life or my life. But for how long will these acts of murder of innocent Kenyans struggling for a better Kenya continue?

As patriots prepare to send Bernard Ngatia to an early grave, and as those left in struggle contemplate on who is next, Kenyans struggling against this regime ought to remember that Freedom has a price. In the case of Kenya, we thought that the country doesn’t have to go into yet another episode of blood shed after Kenyans removed former Dictator Daniel arap Moi from power, promulgated a New Constitution, created the IEBC and created the Supreme Court. Moi has not been made to pay for his crimes of theft and murder of thousands of Kenyans during his 24 years of tyranny, Uhuru Kenyatta’s regime has raped the Constitution, IEBC has been compromised and the Supreme Court is an apparatus of the ruling class.

Despite these reforms, which were paid for in flesh and blood, we left the old tyrannical system intact. Today, it has come to haunt us for we have the so called young and youthful leaders who have turned the State machine against their people. They are using it to tear-gas protesters, maim, murder and assassinate perceived opponents with impunity. Today, Bernard Ngatia is gone. But the struggle he fought for must continue. The IEBC he fought against and which he wanted disbanded and Commissioners sent home, must surely go!

Okoth Osewe  

THE MURDER ON CAMERA