A friend working in a post-conflict situation entertained us thoroughly over the holiday. She works for a United Nations mission in an African country – let’s call Kajamhuri – and follows the rule of law sessions of that mission. Her stories of what is happening there had us in fits. Here are a few examples:

The American consultant tasked with re-compiling Kajamhuri’s penal code walked off with it when he was done, claiming he now had copyright over it and wouldn’t release it unless he was paid for his intellectual labour.

The ministry responsible for the prisons ran out of money for food and came up with the innovative solution of releasing the prisoners, with the exception of those in the capital, to go home for lunch and return to be tucked in at night behind bars. Apparently, they do return, the prisons essentially serving as convenient bed and breakfasts where housing is short.

The American government repatriated a number of Kajamhuri citizens who had served time in the United States for various offences ranging from petty theft to rape to murder. The government decided they needed re-orientation before being released into society, so detained them in the southeast of the country – but gave them the keys to their detention centre, which again served basically as a bed and breakfast. Leaving them free to descend upon the local population.

Given their celebrity detainee status (having returned from the US after all, all gangster-like and tattooed to boot), they soon wreaked havoc with local females’ hearts, married and unmarried, and spend far too much time in the local bars, generally creating chaos. The result? No less than the Kajamhuri president had to beg the US not to repatriate a second lot of celebrity detainees.

There are not enough jobs for the ex-combatants in the civil war that wrecked the country. The president has refused to allow private security contractors into Kajamhuri. So the ex-combatants troop in numbers into the neighbouring country, awaiting the weekly arrival of the plane from Iraq. Iraq? Yes, Blackwater, American private security contractors, is using ex-combatants from the region (notorious for their brutally unconventional warfare – think chopping off of various body parts) to fulfil their contracts in Iraq. Blackwater, of course, was recently all in the news for the killings of Iraqi civilians. No wonder.

A functionary is arrested for trying to walk onto an aeroplane with a briefcase full of external money intended for direct budget support. There is no great public reaction – everybody does it and he just apparently failed to pay the necessary ‘facilitation fee’ to the officials he had to get past to board the plane with the briefcase full of cash.

Like I said, we laughed. But somewhat despairingly. Because beyond the laughter is the obvious. How hard it is to re-construct even a semblance of normalcy following a war. How easy it is to consign Africa as a whole to the rubbish bin if one has worked in a place like that...

The conditions that sent that country to civil war pertain here. And let’s not fool ourselves – if a civil war begins in Kenya, all Kofi Annan’s horses and Kofi Annan’s men will not be able to put us back together again.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared in The East African.
* L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.