Daily Nation
Sunday April 21 2019
The Akasha brothers, Baktash and Ibrahim. The two face charges of drug trafficking in the US. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP
Instructively, the Akashas' case in the US has excited a public
convinced it is definitive in Kenya’s fight against hard drugs. And this
exhilaration is because American authorities earlier promised to swoop
down on Akashas’ accomplices — judges, police officers, politicians, and
many other public servants who aided or abetted the enterprise founded
by Ibrahim Akasha, the poster boy of drug trafficking in Kenya.
EASY TARGET
Yet
the possibility of Americans prosecuting the Akashas’ allies and
accomplices — and other top local drug lords — is almost zero. Or to put
it in another way, the chance that Kenyan drug kingpins and barons will
be spirited to America is remote — unless there is a radical shift in
politics in 2022. And if Americans attempt to come for the Akasha
collaborators, it won’t be a walk in the park.
It
will be extremely difficult for Kenya’s political establishment to
relinquish its benefactors to Americans. There are explanations for
this, apart from the fact that their international operations were
linked to the US. The Akashas were an easy target because they failed to
bankroll politics and, therefore, fell out of favour with power
brokers. Kenya wouldn’t have surrendered the Akashas to America had they
been controlling political power.
“After
(the patriarch’s) death, the family continued to traffic drugs, but
there was infighting, and (it) came under scrutiny as the face of
Kenya’s heroin trade. As a result, they began to lose political
protection, culminating in their extradition,” according to the report The Heroin Coast: A political Economy Along the Estern African Seaboard,
published in June 2018 by Enhancing Africa’s Response to Transnational
Organised Crime (ENACT) through funding by the European Union and
considered groundbreaking research into the heroin economy on the East
African coastline.
It’s instructive
to note that during Mwai Kibaki’s presidency, the Akasha crime kinship
went underground after it was overwhelmed by rival drug cartels
controlled by five top politicians at the time.
SLUSH FUNDS
To
buttress its fortunes against rivals such as the Akashas, one of the
cartels connected to elements at State House even imported the so-called
Artur brothers as hatchet men.
Two,
the newest drug lord is no longer the apolitical criminal or the
political lobbyist but the top politician, and if you like, the
government itself. The owners of the heroin and cocaine trade are those
who now control regional and national politics and business — and by
extension the two sets of government. They are firmly embedded in
politics and governance. So, how do you extradite the government? Or,
who will extradite the government?
During
the Akasha trial, the head of Kenya’s anti-narcotics unit, Salim Massa,
said in a sworn affidavit that the government “ordered the expulsions
of the Akashas on its own volition”. Instructively, Kenya had arrested
the Akasha brothers in 2014 yet, by the time they were extradited, they
had not been charged with drug trafficking.
While
it’s politically viable to hand over to foreign legal jurisdictions
fringe drug barons like the Akashas, it’s obviously imprudent to
surrender the political franchise. “Franchise” meaning the barons who
work for the benefit of the political establishment. According to ENACT,
“for decades now, the political patronage system (in Kenya) has been
influenced by money — cash that is needed to bribe, buy votes and
manipulate the political process … Political slush funds come from those
involved in transnational crime, including drug trafficking”.
PAPER TRAIL
The
modern Ibrahim Akasha isn’t the original morsel drug lord of the 1990s
who only dealt in the destructive merchandise because cleaning the
ill-gotten wealth wasn’t a hustle nor illegitimate, for laws against
money laundering were either absent or too lenient to deter the crime.
The new drug kingpin is a dollar billionaire controlling a matrix of
illicit business, not just drug trafficking.
What
we have is a big-time politician or influential business person who
handily combines drug trafficking with real estate, all forms of
trans-border smuggling, counterfeiting, poaching, and manipulation of
public procurement, and embracing it with legitimate business such as
banking or money lending, civil construction, clearing and forwarding,
and the service industry.
This is an
influential person able to covertly conjoin crime and legitimate
business, in an atmosphere of complacent and expedient politics whose
philosophy is that money buys political authority. Real business merely
facilitates illicit trade. Yet this diversification is not just to make
it possible for the drug lords to stay afloat during a slump in any of
their businesses. It is to circumvent the harsh banking regulations and
to avoid a financial paper trail.
Drug
trafficking is a hugely risky venture. But it is extremely profitable —
in fact more handy than Kenya’s newest cash cow, tenderpreneurship.
Unlike procurement manipulation, which often leaves a paper trail, the
evidence in drug trafficking is always the mule who is often sworn to
secrecy. The big fellow, the drug lord, will always survive as mules rot
in jails.
“One of the notable
evolutions in Kenya’s criminal economy is the increased integration of
drug networks and political office. Money derived from heroin and
cocaine has been used to fund multiple election campaigns, and drug
traffickers themselves have campaigned for political power funded by
drug money,” says the ENACT report — based on over 240 interviews in
Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. The report quotes a source
who quips, “They (Kenya drug lords) are no longer seeking to compromise
the political system … They are seeking to control the political
system”.
ELECTORAL CAMPAIGNS
The
current Uhuru Kenyatta succession politics has exposed an urgent need
by the political class to amass wealth to fund election campaigns. Thus
there has emerged ferocious individuals ready to compromise public
procurement to make political fortunes in a blatant mix of crime and
political power.
Against this
background, it becomes increasingly obvious that the government and/or
controllers of politics will unlikely relinquish their benefactors to
foreign lands like America. The goodwill will not be there. And this
partly explains why all major heroin and cocaine seizures have been at
the hand of external forces — in particular the Combined Marine Forces
that patrol the Indian Ocean against Somali pirates — and not Kenyan
authorities.
“In general, people we
spoke to were extremely cynical about the prospect for any major change,
including efforts towards dismantling Kenya’s illicit networks, as the
structural features that allow for the current situation show no signs
of changing.”
All told, Kenya’s
narco-industry is widespread, beyond the understanding of the common
person. It’s deeply entrenched in national politics and governance and
has thus become the first-choice playground for foreign networks under
the protection, or in the employ, of top Kenyans. That’s why the country
is eagerly awaiting the Director of Public Prosecutions to furnish
Parliament a list of Kenyan drug traffickers, as recently demanded by
Chief Whip Benjamin Washiali.
STOLEN ELECTIONS
As
stated earlier, the Akashas may be the prototype drug enterprise. But
the controllers of the trade are entrenched in the country’s governance
system. As long as they provide the requisite balance in this highly
ethnicised Kenyatta succession politics, the possibility that they will
be prosecuted — within and without Kenya — is remote. If anything, there
are Kenyans being sought by foreign or international legal
jurisdictions but the government has conveniently declined to play ball,
as it were.
The Akashas extradition
may have been alluring to the then political power brokers eager to
curry favour with the then just-elected President Donald Trump. A
leadership weighed down by the International Criminal Court indictments
and accused of benefiting from a stolen 2013 election was seeking
international legitimacy. This is no longer tenable in Jubilee’s second
and last term.
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