By Brian Obuya
In 2015, I had just moved to the Moi University Nairobi campus at Bazaar Plaza along Moi Avenue.
To settle in the city as a student, I made a few phone calls to friends and former high school mates. Within no time, we were renting some hostel along the muddy paths of Kirinyaga road.
During the day, it was a struggle with mechanics and buzzing sounds of welders and nauseating smell of paint. At night, however, it was all quiet, lonely and dangerous.
My roommate, Marieta, was quite the man. He was wise (other friends like Kitela disagree) and strategic. It was not just his height that made him stand out, his name too is a mouthful – Heppenstal Marieta. I have never heard of that name anywhere else. The guy is now a marketing manager somewhere around Village market and he no longer picks my calls.
Before my Tecno Spark 12 was violently stolen and yours truly beaten black and blue at knife-point, Marieta had warned me against using the small path that is Nyati Lane.
Nyati lane is a dirty path that is safe during the day and deadly at night. It connects to Charles Rubia road to the North and Kirinyaga road to the south.
“Na usijaribu kutumia hiyo chuom, utainuliwa juu juu,” Marieta warned me. You see, I did not listen to Marieta because many years ago I was a well-built boy, I used to go to the gym until I stopped in 2017. It was a lot of work yet ‘we will be given new bodies in heaven.’
The other reason I ignored Marietta’s advice is because we pay taxes for police to maintain law and order and they should do their job. That is what we all imagine.
But today I have a different opinion.
You are definitely wondering why I am not addressing the title of this piece. Here we are.
It is not enough to call for protests in the streets, lamenting about “the killing of women,” which we have now christened “femicide”
The danger of isolating the killing of women from that of men, is that it creates room for men to defend themselves and for women to justify their stand.
It becomes a battle of genders and that way we lose sight of the bigger picture. This are just murders, like any other and must be dealt with as such.
One of the ways of curbing these killings is to teach ourselves to be careful. I know they (toxic feminists) won’t like that because according to them “it’s blaming the victim” but it is a fact.
We can talk to potential victims because we know them, but we cannot address the killers we don’t know.
You cannot teach bad people good behavior; a bad person is a bad person – but you can teach innocent people to stay away from bad people!
When Marieta warned me about Nyati lane, I did not listen. I had a reason not to listen. It’s true we pay taxes and the state owes us security – but in the end I was robbed violently at knife-point by four mean-looking young men.
Most of us, will always lock the windows in public transport vehicles before we start using our phones or picking calls. We never leave the responsibility of security to the police.
In short, we bear some responsibility of sorts over our own decisions and actions.
It was more shocking to see the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) putting up a post on “Ending Femicide.”
Mr. Amin even went ahead to form a “special Unit” to deal with the crime. The only problem I have with the DCI’s latest move is that Amin and team formalized a crime that does not even exist.
Be it as it may, murder has no gender and we should never fight this crime on gender lines. I am saying gender lines because, I heard, during the protests, chants of “teach your boys, teach your boys, teach your boys.”
These chants suggested that it was men killing women – yet in some cases the perpetrators are not known and therefore if we open this debate to be an argument between men and women – it will be “noisy, messy and with casualties”
The DCI is guided by the Penal Code, which does not recognize femicide. The DCI has fallen into the trap of paid advocacy by civil society organizations to generate funds by attracting donors – this is not only sad, but it is immoral.
I call it paid advocacy; after all someone paid for those banners, those posters and T-shirts and those influencers, musicians and actors – you know them. Would they do these things for free? Maybe.
One of the posters read, “Being a woman should not be a death sentence.” This clearly showed that even those taking part in the protest are less informed. This poster attempted to say that these victims were killed because they were women! That is not true. So many other women are alive today – no one has killed them.
Towards the end, don’t get me wrong. No one deserves to be killed especially not at the hands of another person. It does not matter who they are, where they were and what they were doing. Even then, we cannot control killers because we don’t know them but we can talk to potential victims – because they are our friends and relatives.
Dear DCI, don’t fall for the bait – expedite these investigations without tearing our confidence into a gender-based discussion.
Brian Obuya is an Investigative journalist with NTV.
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