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Inside the System, Outside the Law: Operating the Matatu Sector in Nairobi

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Abstract

This paper investigates the politics of public transportation in Nairobi by looking at the matatu sector. Focusing on the illegal Mungiki movement’s control of matatu routes, the paper provides an understanding of how the relationship between the state and the non-state plays out on the ground. The paper argues that the gaps in the state’s provision of services not only open up space for non-state interventions, but also invite mediation and brokerage between formal procedures and practical informal arrangements. It is argued that we can understand the ability to connect people and areas in the city—and how this helps make the city work—by looking at how everyday operations and practices constantly transgress notions of the formal and informal. This is best captured in the emic characterisation of the matatu sector as being inside the system, but outside the law.

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Notes

  1. Thomas Blom Hansen and Oscar Verkaaik argue for the important role of the taxi driver in postcolonial cities, as this ‘urban specialist’ connects different urban lifeworlds by crisscrossing the city and transgressing spatial, ethnic and class-based areas on a daily basis. Thus, the taxi driver is claimed to ‘know’ the city (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009, p. 21). This article focuses less on individual brokering in and across the city, and more on the role of the public transport sector as a collective and political force working in, on and across the city.

  2. The paper is based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork on the Mungiki movement in Nairobi between September 2008 and March 2010. Fieldwork involved socialising with and interviewing members of the Mungiki movement, observation at matatu stages and market places next to the stages and riding in matatus with members involved in the business.

  3. ‘Buying a police officer tea’ is the colloquial phrase in Kenya for small bribes. The Swahili phrase ‘kitu kidogo’ (something small) is also frequently used to describe bribing. Ninety-three percent of the police are reported to have demanded bribes in 2008 (Abrahamsen and Williams: 2011, p. 202)

  4. It is important to note that it is unknown whether the people operating the named vehicles are affiliated with the Mungiki movement. For similar examples of Matatu names, see Mungai’s 2010 article ‘hidden $ Centz’, the title being derived from the name of a matatu vehicle.

  5. Throughout the paper, I distinguish between Mungiki as an organisation and Mungiki members as individuals who are part of an organisation. See also footnote 22.

  6. My interlocutor mentioned Goldenberg and Grand Regency, two cases of multimillion Ksh corruption scandals, and the supposedly politically ordered raid on the Standard media group. Kenya is ranked no. 154 on the latest Transparency International corruption index, http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/#CountryResults (accessed 10 January 2012).

  7. Kwendo Opanga, Daily Nation, 29 January 2004, quoted in Mutongi (2006: 262). Mutongi cites several commentators and intellectuals on pp. 262–263, as does Mungai (2007).

  8. A recent documentary ‘The reluctant outlaw’ directed by Mike Healy and shown on Al Jazeera makes a similar point about corruption and crime. The main character, a matatu driver, states that the industry trains criminals and that if you fail to pay, you either end up in jail (at the hands of the police) or dead (by the hand of gangsters) http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2011/12/201112510241428663.html

  9. The fare of three 10-cent coins—‘mangotole ihatu’ in Swahili—was shortened in daily use and gives the industry its present name (Lee-Smith 1989: 286; cf., Mungai 2010: 353).

  10. MVOA (Matatu Vehicle Owners’ Association) was founded in 1979.

  11. In the early 1980s, only one third of matatu vehicles were assigned to a terminal (Lee-Smith 1989).

  12. MOA (Matatu Owners’ Association) was founded in 2003 as a substitute for the banned MVOA.

  13. See, for example, ‘Matatu Owners give nod to Mungiki sect’, The People Daily, 10 November 2001; ‘Gangs in Terminus takeover attempt’, The People Daily, 30 January 2002; ‘Mungiki groups end Matatu termini row’, The People Daily, 2 February 2002.

  14. More than 20 different vigilante groups, youth militias and criminal gangs were outlawed at the same time.

  15. The Matatu workers formed their own association (Matatu Workers’ Association) after 2002.

  16. On the evening of the protests, two human rights activist were shot dead. They had been central figures in collecting testimonies from relatives of victims of the extrajudicial killings. They had handed over their evidence to the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing on his visit to Kenya in February 2009.

  17. For a detailed account of the routes, roads and neighbourhoods blocked, see Rasmussen (2010c).

  18. For other examples of Mungiki matatu strikes paralysing Nairobi, see Anderson (2002: 538).

  19. According to human rights reports, about 1,000 members have been killed or have disappeared between 2006 and 2009 (Oscar Foundation (2007) ‘The killing fields’ and (2008) ‘Veil of impunity’; Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (2008) ‘Cry of blood’; UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-judicial Killings (2009) ‘Mission report from Kenya’).

  20. The spokesman, Njuguna Githau, was shot dead in the late afternoon of 5 November 2009 in a shop in downtown Nairobi. His murder is still unsolved.

  21. Mungiki’s story of how members have been recruited from the matatu sector into the movement echoes a central point from qualitative studies of gangs around the world: namely, that gangs are best understood if they are not viewed as entities separate from the rest of society, but approached rather as people within certain groupings with relations and lives outside the group and engaged in a variety of activities with little or no direct relation to the group (cf., Jensen 2008, p. 88; Hagedorn 2008).

  22. One of Mungiki’s former leaders, Ndura Waruinge, claimed that Mungiki not only provided security at the matatu stages, but also ensured the smooth running of the routes (Turner and Brownhill 2001, p. 35).

  23. Interview with the MOA national coordinator, Albert Karakacha, and national vice chairman, Stephen Murunga, 25 March 2009.

  24. Some examples of newspaper accounts of the fees for operating matatus are: ‘More leaflets in Muranga’, Standard, 8 June 2007; ‘Traffic snarl up as Mungiki men demand levies’, The People Daily, 5 December 2007; ‘Mungiki tax system for business, use of roads’, Standard, 19 May 2009; ‘Why Mungiki will not relent in pursuing cash from matatus’, Nation,14 October 2009; ‘Extortion gangs demand more’, Nation, 16 May 2010; ‘The costly mess that the Matatu industry is’, Standard, 17 July 2010. Thanks to Katja Koch for filing and cataloguing the bundles of newspaper clippings on Mungiki.

  25. Two Mungiki members working the nightshift as parking guards in Nairobi’s Eastlands tell me that guards get Ksh 3,000 per night for looking after 25 matatu vehicles. There are five guards working the shift, and they pay Ksh 1,000 to the owner of the parking lot before sharing the rest among themselves. Usually, each of them works three nights a week.

  26. Other media and academic sources quote slightly different amounts for the fees. Examples are Katumanga (2005, p. 514) and Kagwanja (2005, pp. 68–69).

  27. According to the route manager, there is a daily parking fee to the NCC of Ksh 150 plus some annual route allocation fees. MOA assists the matatu owners in their negotiations with Nairobi City Council (NCC) and the Transport Licensing Board.

  28. I owe great thanks to my field assistant, anthropologist Wangui Kimari, for conducting additional interviews on the role of women in Mungiki to support my own material from conversations with female members. In addition to the donations, female members benefited from Mungiki’s control of the matatu routes by having access to transport for their goods and farm products to and from the market (see Brownhill and Turner 2004, p. 103).

  29. After an unresolved break-in at the Standard media group, which had run a series of critical articles on Michuki and his political allies, Michuki is quoted as saying ‘when you rattle a snake, you must be prepared to be bitten’, which led to speculation that he was involved in planning the raid. BBC News, 3 March 2006.

  30. BBC News, 23 March 2005, ‘Fury at Kenya shoot to kill order’.

  31. For an elaboration of how Mungiki uses the narratives of such alleged meetings to gain political leverage, see Rasmussen (2010b).

  32. Public secret is something publicly known, but which cannot easily be spoken of in public (Taussig 1999: 2).

  33. Shortly after submitting the first draft of this paper, John Michuki died of a heart attack at the age of 80. At his death, Mungiki leaders said that Michuki might have ‘stepped on their toes’ in ordering the crackdown on the movement, but that they forgave him. Despite this polite language, Mungiki leaders insisted that they still expected justice for the extrajudicial killings committed during Michuki’s tenure as minister of internal security (Daily Nation, 22 February 2012). In the Standard’s eulogy of Michuki, he is described as brutal and ruthless towards Mungiki (Standard, 21 February 2012; Ombati and Njagi).

  34. For an analysis of Mungiki’s Mau Mau heritage, see (Forthcoming) Rasmussen.

  35. ‘Police alert over Mungiki threat’, Standard, 30 March 2009; ‘Matatu drivers, conductors issue strike notice’, Standard, 2 April 2009; ‘Hundreds stranded as Matatu operators strike’, Standard, 7 April 2009.

  36. Both Maupeu (2002) and Anderson (2002) argue that local vigilante groups in the poor areas of Nairobi may have been more powerful security operators on a local level than the Kenyan state. Maina Kiai, then chairman of Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights, has argued along similar lines (‘Providing security is State’s duty, not Mungiki’, Nation, 20 April 2008).

  37. In their work on law and disorder in postcolonial societies, Jean and John Comaroff suggest that law and organised lawlessness coexist: in fact, they are conditions for each other’s existence (2006).

  38. Since the conclusion of fieldwork, a number of infrastructural projects have been initiated in Nairobi with the aim of improving the road capacity and connectivity of the city.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Steffen Jensen, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, Maya Mynster Chistensen, the guest editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism of the paper. The financial support of the Danish Research Council for Communication and Culture (FKK) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Rasmussen, J. Inside the System, Outside the Law: Operating the Matatu Sector in Nairobi. Urban Forum 23, 415–432 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-012-9171-z

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