The High Price of Fighting for Freedom

By Max Lawson

When we lived in Kenya there was one young man, Tom (name changed), we became very friendly with as a family and have stayed in touch since moving back to the UK.

Earlier this year Tom, along with many thousands of others, went down to the city centre in Nairobi to join the protests against tax and price rises and the government of President Ruto. Now known as the ‘bread riots’, these were Tom’s first protests, something that was very common as in Kenya 75% of the population are under the age of 35.

He was part of a peaceful group chanting and singing. The street was lined with uniformed police with teargas and clubs, known by their Swahili name of Rungu.  A car approached them, unmarked, full of plain-clothed policemen with guns.

The next thing Tom knew, he blacked out.  He woke up some hours later in an emergency tent clinic set up by supportive well-wishers.  Some volunteering nurses and doctors had rescued him, and others injured, at significant risk to themselves.  He lost his phone and everything he had on him. They patched Tom up and kept him overnight and then he went home the next day.

But his wounds did not want to heal. Some days later Tom awoke to find his sheets covered in blood.  He went to the doctors for a scan that revealed he had three rubber bullets in his chest.

The police were picking up injured protesters in government hospitals and arresting them all over town, so Tom went to a private hospital instead. The doctors told him he needed to get the bullets out urgently but that they would need a clearance from the police before they could operate. 

He had to wait another week, using bribes, to get police clearance. Only the could he have the operation to remove the bullets.  To pay for his operation he had to raise money from well-wishers because he didn’t have health insurance, which would not have paid for such an operation anyway.

The operation appeared to go well, he only stayed one night, and then returned home.  Yet a couple of weeks later he felt a sharp pain in his chest once again. Something was not right. A further scan revealed he still had a foreign object of some sort in his chest.

A second operation was organised back at the same hospital.  This one did not go so well. Tom ended up in the Intensive Care Unit for a few days, each day costing him a significant amount of money. 

When a hospital becomes a prison

The hospital would only discharge him if settled the full bill then and there.  They moved Tom out of the ICU to a separate room where he had just a bed, and where it was very cold at night. The hospital literally imprisoned him there for days while he tried to raise the thousands of dollars that the hospital was demanding to release him.  Only when he was able to get the money together was he allowed to go free.

He suspects the first operation was not only botched, but that it was deliberately so, to ensure that he had to return. And that the second operation was botched too so that they could squeeze more money from him for his stay in the ICU.  These are not outlandish claims. Our research in Kenya, India and elsewhere shows that this is sadly all too likely, where private hospitals, often funded by development funds, including aid money from the World Bank and others, regularly prescribe unnecessary treatments and imprison patients until their bills are paid.

Searching for the Disappeared

Tom was in many ways lucky.  Aside from the large number of people killed at the protests themselves, the state has been systematically killing or kidnapping those who were involved, often never to be seen again. The Kenyan National Human Rights Commission says it is investigating 60 cases of so called ‘extra judicial killings’ and 71 cases of abductions and forced disappearances since the protest.  Tom himself has friends who were on the protests that he has never heard from since. Human Rights Watch has reported that some of those reported missing have been found in rivers, forests, abandoned quarries and mortuaries, showing signs of torture, with some having been mutilated and dismembered. 

I am disgusted and appalled at the brutality of the Kenyan state and of the Kenyan Police and security forces, and the raw force and total impunity that one finds just below the surface of this supposedly democratic government. A raw force that has a dark history in part in Kenya’s colonial past and the brutal treatment of the Mau Mau rebels in particular, that saw millions detained, and their systematic torture, abuse, forced labour and death.

I am also disgusted and appalled at the IMF and at the private creditors hiding behind them, in their comfortable well-appointed offices in London and Washington, who are happy to insist they are repaid at all costs. At her speech at the recent Annual Meetings, the Head of the IMF cited new research that the resistance to ‘reforms’ on the part of the public was driven in part by their ‘misperceptions and misunderstanding’. Basically, if only ordinary citizens properly understood the need for austerity and cuts to public spending, we could avoid protests and resistance.

I am also disgusted at a world that thinks that healthcare is something that should be profited from. That private hospitals that prey on the sick to bleed them, literally and metaphorically, are not only tolerated but supported and promoted by the World Bank and other international donors.

And I am in awe of the bravery of all those young Kenyan protesters like Tom, and of everyone now and throughout history who has stood up for a better world, at huge risk to themselves and their families.  I feel a huge responsibility to do whatever I can to support them and to never give up the fight, however dispiriting and dark the world seems.

When I asked Tom whether, given all that has happened, he would protest again.  He told me, without hesitation: ‘No I do not regret. If we had the protest tomorrow, I would go again. We are fighting for our lives.  We are fighting for a better Kenya.  If we don’t do it now, who else will?’

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Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

For more on the Kenya protests listen to our podcast interview with Grace Wendo, a Kenyan activist.

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