On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 3:25 PM, ndungu stephen <ndungustephen@gmail.com> wrote:
This is a narration by one caught by city council askaris - and his advise for those who may be caught by the same hippies.
This comes in light of the new by-laws, that have taken power to "cough" away from the citizens, and given dark sith powers to city council.
This is what happens when the least competent authority is given the highest powers. Except it to get worse since many businesses have vacated from the city centre -- so primary revenue streams (both formal and informal) for the council are going to come out of arbitrary fines. Some years back I was arrested for throwing a match-stick into a city council dustbin on kenyatta avenue. Back then smoking was legal but throwing a match-stick in a bin was characterized as a "fire hazard". The city council chap wanted a bribe, I refused, and I got loaded into this famous, aforementioned city council paddy-wagon / pickup. As you describe, this pickup went around town for the next couple of hours seemingly arresting people at random : hot-dog seller, scratch-card hawker, "idler" (just some guy sitting on a bench), a uni-student for littering ...and a while later (around 8pm) , prostitutes. The one thing they all had in common was that none of them could afford to pay the bribe (ksh 200 if you looked broke, ksh 1000 if you looked "decent"). Very soon the van was full, and people had to sit on top of each other. The guy from the council would periodically come around to the back insisting that I should pay him the bribe, because the people in the pickup werent "decent", and I looked kinda "decent". Finally, I took out my wallet and gave him the business card of a certain police official who was rather well known at that time (not that I knew him in anyway). I told him that the guy in the business card was gonna pay him the bribe, I would just have to call him. This got the council guys worried, and they asked me where I worked, I told them I worked for the nation media group (which was of course untrue) ... and they immediately kicked me out of the pickup and left in a hurry. I dont know what happened to the other arrested people after that, but what struck me most was that they seemed to take it very casually (except for the uni-student who tried to protest and shout) -- it seemed to me that these people were being arrested everyday, and they had simply given up.