Piece by: LINDWE DANFLOW

16 January 2023

• He termed the military involvement in the 2007 general elections as lethargic and the resolve to avoid state collapse, not bold enough.

Retired 3-star General Humphrey Njoroge in his memoir Promises to Keep and Miles To Go has said that there was indecisiveness during the 2007-08 post-election violence.

He said that delays in making decisions "can encourage state collapse and the internal displacement of people."

The General said former President Mwai Kibaki was allowed to declare a state of emergency for 14 days, according to article 58 of the constitution.

" When the curfew was declared in parts of Rift Valley and Nakuru and the military deployed, the chaos was arrested. This principle existed and was known but was not applied in time," the General said.

The President is allowed to declare a state of emergency where the state is threatened by war, invasion and general insurrection like tribal clashes, anarchy and breakdown of law and order that civic authority is unable to contain.

He claimed that the military got involved in the highly divisive 2007 general elections where chaos and anarchy broke out after the announcement of the presidential results in December 2007.

"In the ethnic conflicts that followed, over 1500 people died, above the war threshold of 1300 which marks state collapse," he said.

The General said that the chaos escalated because it took a long time to deploy the military.

"The President, Parliament and the Defence Council were in inertia, wondering what the outcome would be if the military was deployed," he said.

He said the issue that was particularly being debated was whether the opposition and the international community might have interpreted military deployment as the 'winning party was using the military to remain in power -misuse of the military.'

"The incumbent regime feared several things. It feared that if it used the military, the international community would think it had done so to sustain itself in power. It also feared how the deployment would affect military cohesion and discipline and lead to its disintegration into tribal loyalties, leaving the chain of command in disarray," the General said.

The General said that the principle that should have guided the Defence Council was the secondary military role to aid civic authorities who are the police.

"This would have involved for example a show of force flag march pre-deployment in the hot spots in Kisumu, Nairobi, Mombasa and Nakuru in exercise mode," he said.

The General said that when the military was deployed for route clearance and protection of IDPs and properties, anarchy stopped.

"The reason was that the military was better armed, impartial and deployed only for the time required to stop the anarchy."

He termed the military involvement in the 2007 general elections as lethargic and the resolve to avoid state collapse, not bold enough.

Lastly, the regime, the General said, was uncertain about and feared the emergence of new alliances in the period based on tribal politics.

"Bearing these fears and apprehension in mind, military was belatedly deployed in March 2008 to clear roads and communication, transport post-election violence victims' to safe areas and to some extent protect enclaves that had emerged out from the violent districts," the General said.