Samuel Kinuthia (name has been changed) lives in a closely knit neighborhood with his wife and two-year-old son in one of Nairobi’s slums. By day, Samuel carves out a meager living as a Matatu tout. By night, he robs people. As it turns out, he also knows a lot about guns and the illegal trade of firearms. I met Samuel through a friend because I wanted to see how easy it is to obtain a pistol in Nairobi and discover the parallels between this, the size of local market and gun-related crime. The linkages became undeniable.
On the way to meet Samuel, my friend guides us through a mesh work of roughshod timber and tin-hedged housing to a section of better looking one-storied buildings. The neighbors stare and remind us that we standout and are perhaps, not welcome. Samuel, who occupies a room on the first floor of one of the flats, scrutinizes me suspiciously before my companion appeases him and explains my mission. Initially, Samuel declines to sell me a gun directly, because it is very likely that he will need it in the near future. However, he accepts to hire out a Czech-made Ceska 40-caliber CZ75 series pistol at KES 2,000-a-day. He tells me that he also owns an AK 47 rifle, which he hires to other, more hardened criminals. He negotiates the rates for this machine gun based on the monetary worth of the mission.
As much as his business of illegal gunrunning is contributing to the ill fortune of others, he would say it is purely a matter of economics. Samuel makes between KES 300-600 a day (about KES 9,000-18,000 a month) from his work as a tout. He pays a house rent of KES 5,000 but he still has to support a wife and a kid, which costs him on average KES 12,000 per month. This doesn’t factor in clothing or medication or a hundred other necessities.
With survival as a constant worry, it is no wonder Samuel doesn’t mind the extra risk for an extra coin. Though he was reluctant to share his earnings from guns, it’s not hard to do the math. A US-made AK 47 rifle, like Samuel’s, costs just US$150 in Northern Kenya. Pistols cost about $80. An AK 47 can then retail for as much as KES 40,000 (US $ 468) in Nairobi and the pistol for about half as much. Even if Samuel isn’t earning 30-50K a month from leasing deadly weapons, his arsenal is worth KES 60,000. The bottom line is clear: Samuel easily makes double his tout income as a gun dealer and thief. The problem is, there are a lot of Samuels out there.
Despite many attempts to curb the influx of guns in Kenya, there are 40,000 guns in the hands of civilians according to “Guns inKenya: Facts, Figures and Firearm Law”, 2013 report by GunPolicy.org. Of these, only 5,000 are certified as ‘licensed’. The number of illegal guns could actually be much higher. Figures from the Kenya Police between 2008 and 2011 show 2009 highlighted as a particularly good time for illegal gun hauls—a year in which police recovered 114,527 firearms (obviously much higher than GunPolicy.org’s estimates).
It is undeniable that Nairobi’s stark socio-economic disparities have fuelled crime in the past decade, and as long as the gapwidens the problem won’t go away anytime soon. “All these buildings you see around town were not built of clean money,” Samuel argues in defense of his actions. “You have to risk to get something substantial,” he says.
Not one to live life by the gun and crime forever, Samuel has ambitions of, one day, building rental houses in his neighborhood. But if this is to happen, violence will certainly finance a portion of his dream. Former University of Nairobi lecturer, Kukubo Barasa, traces the genesis of small arms proliferation back to the end of the Cold War in 1989 as Soviet military stockpiles were emptied into unstable regions of the world; including most of Africa. “In this period,” he says, “major gun runners conducted massive illegal arms sales that escalated armed violence in Africa in the years 1989-1999.
On March 15th, 2000, the ‘Nairobi Declaration’ was signed by 10 neighboring countries to stem the devastating impact of small and light weapons (SALW) on the Great Lakes region, Horn of Africa and East African countries. “Kenya, and Nairobi for that matter, happens to occupy what I would call ‘an unfortunate geographical position’,” says Victor Lando, Senior Human Rights Officer and Legal Counsel, Kenya National Commission of Human Rights. “The challenges to be overcome regarding proliferation of small arms into the city start from the porous borders, especially in the northern parts of Kenya where neighboring countries have a long history of civil strife.”
According to Lando, the influx of guns is hard to curb, unless the government is prepared to make it a priority. “The problem is not in the laws, it is in the implementation,” he says. “The current ratio of police to civilians is very low, making it difficult to enforce laws. Moreover, the populations in city slums are so concentrated and faced by lack of opportunities. But people somehow have to survive so they engage in armed robbery.”
The statistics on gun deaths in Nairobi are scarce but figures from a report entitled “Firearm Injuries in Nairobi, Kenya: Who Pays the Price?” (Hugenberg F, Anjango WO, Mwita A, Opondo D.) give an insight into how people arevictims of shootings each month. At Kenyatta National Hospital alone, 120 patients where admitted with firearm injuries over a six month period in 2006; 94 were hit by “criminal fire”, five by “stray bullets from police and criminal shoot outs” and four shot under “unclear circumstances”. Only one case was documented as ‘accidental shooting’. For the remaining 10 cases, no information was available. Records for those killed by firearms are often missing, scant or disputed.
The only numbers for people killed by guns come from the Commission of Inquiry into the 2007/2008 Post-Election Violence (The Waki Report), which found that out of the 1,133 people who were killed, a third were killed by guns. Living by the gun is not without risk for the perpetrators, either. Samuel went out on the night of Saturday March 16th 2013 and he has not been seen or heard from since. My friend, the ex-convict, is unwilling to launch a search because of his past criminal record. Samuel’s wife is also apprehensive. It is now a matter of time and perhaps, statistics.
REPORT BY Maxwell Makari
