Review of African Political Economy

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‘The first dragon to slay’: unpacking Kenya’s war on

drugs

Margarita Dimova

To cite this article: Margarita Dimova (2016) ‘The first dragon to slay’: unpacking
Kenya’s war on drugs, Review of African Political Economy, 43:148, 227-242, DOI:
10.1080/03056244.2016.1169165

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2016.1169165

Published online: 27 Jun 2016.

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 Review of African Political Economy, 2016
Vol. 43, No. 148, 227 –242, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2016.1169165

‘The first dragon to slay’: unpacking Kenya’s war on drugs

∗
Margarita Dimova

Centre for African Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK

Kenya faces the challenge of policing not only drug smuggling through its territory, but a
sprawling local market dominated by heroin. The government is enthusiastically
embracing the global ‘war on drugs’ discourse, propped by external actors’ assistance
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and insistence. Guided by these developments, this article analyses Kenya’s local war
on drugs using ethnographic material from immersive fieldwork in Nairobi and
Mombasa. The aim is to decode local political actors’ engagement in the international
drug control regime and its impact on everyday perceptions of Kenyan state authority.
As such, this article provides an alternative explanation of the mechanics of Kenyan
drug markets and the role some government officials play in (controlling) them.
Keywords: war on drugs; Kenya; heroin; crime; state; policing

[“Le premier dragon à tuer” : expliquer la lutte contre le trafic de drogues au Kenya.] Le
Kenya est face au défi de surveiller non seulement le trafic de drogue à travers son
territoire, mais aussi un marché local tentaculaire dominé par l’héroı̈ne. Le
gouvernement adopte avec enthousiasme le discours mondial de la « lutte contre le
trafic de drogues », soutenu par l’aide et l’insistance des intervenants extérieurs.
Guidé par ces développements, cet article analyse la lutte locale du Kenya contre le
trafic de drogues en utilisant du matériel ethnographique provenant d’un travail de
terrain en immersion à Nairobi et à Mombasa. L’objectif est de décoder l’engagement
des acteurs politiques locaux dans le régime international du contrôle des drogues et
son impact sur les perceptions quotidiennes de l’autorité de l’État Kenyan. En tant
que tel, cet article fournit une explication alternative des mécaniques des marchés
kényans de la drogue et du rôle que certains fonctionnaires jouent dans le contrôle de
ces mécaniques.
Mots-clés : lutte contre le trafic de drogues ; Kenya ; héroı̈ne ; surveillance policière

In an official letter from September 2011, US President Barack Obama announced sanctions
against seven individuals under the United States Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation
Act (Obama 2011). Among them, two Kenyan nationals – businesswoman Naima
Mohamed Nyakiniywa (Mama Leila) and Harun Mwau, former presidential candidate
and MP – were pronounced ‘designated foreign individuals’. This event marked
Kenya’s emergence as a key jurisdiction on the global war on drugs agenda.
International donors are now active in enhancing the Kenyan counter-narcotics
architecture, guided by the presumed interrelatedness of drug trafficking, transnational organ-
ised crime and terrorism. In an official statement from 10 December 2014, the chief of global

∗
Email: margarita.dimova@riskadvisory.net

# 2016 ROAPE Publications Ltd

 228 M. Dimova

enforcement at the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stated that the agency had
‘linked 22 of the 59 foreign terrorist organisations to drug trafficking’ (Soiles 2014, 1). He
noted that in response to this, the DEA had initiated a ‘containment strategy designed to
stem the flow of heroin entering East Africa’ (4). The US counter-narcotics agency now
has an operational Nairobi office, having announced its plans to open it as early as 2011.
The DEA has also set up its own ‘vetted unit’ within the Kenyan Anti-Narcotics Unit
(ANU), targeting high-profile drug smugglers (McConnell 2015). In November 2014, an
eight-month investigation by the DEA led to the arrest and subsequent indictment of two
of the sons of ‘drug lord’ Ibrahim Akasha by a New York court. Managed by the DEA,
the UK National Crime Agency and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC), this was the first such sting that included local cooperation in East Africa. The
head of the ANU described the investigation and subsequent arrest as a ‘collaborative
arrangement’ of which the region is likely to see more in future (Ibid.). The poster child of
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the ‘narco-state’ paradigm in Africa, Guinea-Bissau, saw a similar operation culminate in

the arrest of the country’s former navy chief, José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, in April
2013 (Shaw 2015, 359).
Already notorious for its cultural and political insertion in crime and corruption (Branch
and Cheeseman 2009; Gimode 2001; Wrong 2010), Kenya now faces the challenge of poli-
cing not only drug smuggling through its territory, but a burgeoning local market. Domi-
nated by heroin (Beckerleg, Telfer, and Sadiq 2006), the local hard1 drug trade is seen as
a natural progression of the ‘cocaine crisis’ claimed to be ‘ruining West Africa’ (Perry
2012). Kenyan political leaders are enthusiastically embracing the intensified global
counter-narcotics discourse vis-à-vis the country and adopting their own staunch war on
drugs stance. Recent local and international attention to Kenya as a ‘traffickers’ haven’
(Allen 2006), or even Africa’s next ‘narco-state’ (O’Regan 2012), has introduced a new dis-
cursive plane on which the country’s fierce political competition unfolds. In one of the pio-
neering works on anti-narcotics law enforcement in sub-Saharan Africa, Klantschnig
demonstrated how in Nigeria such a ‘dominant official narrative of drug war’ can serve
as a smokescreen, obscuring much more critical political dynamics through a ‘social
crisis’ rhetoric (Klantschnig 2009, 536). On a more conceptual level, this resonates with
Roitman’s argument that a crisis narrative often serves as a ‘transcendental placeholder
in ostensible solutions’ to a particular problem (2014, 13).
In Kenya, the notion of a drugs crisis has been cleverly co-opted in electioneering strat-
egies. Shortly after entering office, for example, Mombasa’s current governor, Hassan Ali
Joho, said: ‘now that we have been empowered to forge our destinies as countries, the first
dragon to slay is that of illicit drug use’ (Joho 2013). Addressing this perceived threat is
likely to feature prominently in the lead-up to the upcoming elections in August 2017,
especially since it was included in the current government’s medium-term strategy that is
part of the Kenya Vision 2030 plan (The Presidency 2013).
Considering these current developments, this article analyses local responses to the
global war on drugs exigency using ethnographic material collected during immersive field-
work for eight months in 2012 and 2013. Fieldwork took place in multiple heroin distri-
bution and consumption locations – locally referred to as maskani – in Nairobi and
throughout the coast of Kenya. While based in Nairobi and Mombasa, I conducted a
total of 132 semi-structured interviews with two main populations: drug merchants and
law enforcers.2 Additional participant observation, official law enforcement site visits,
archival work, and critical media, police and court document analysis complemented the
interview data. The aim was to decode local actors’ engagement in the drug control
regime and its impact on everyday perceptions of formal authority, while providing an
 Review of African Political Economy 229

alternative explanation of the mechanics of local drug markets and the role political actors
and government officials play in controlling them. The ensuing analysis is presented in four
sections.
First, I re-evaluate the historical context in which Kenya’s drug trade has evolved, pin-
pointing inconsistencies in alarmist labelling of the country as an entrepôt along a new
‘African smack track’ (The Economist 2015a). Second, I examine the emergence of the
local war on drugs as an arena for politicking, offering ample space for the performance
of power and the rebuttal of corruption allegations. Building on this is an exploration of
how counter-narcotics policing influences and reinforces existing perceptions of the gov-
ernment’s capacity to exert control and ensure security. The final two sections offer a con-
ceptual and operational critique of the war on drugs in Kenya. The focus is on debunking
the state criminalisation myth by reviewing the dynamism of the contemporary illicit drug
trade in Kenya and the type of involvement high-ranking political figures are likely to have
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in it. Finally, I briefly outline two operational issues that undermine current counter-narco-
tics policing efforts in the country.

Contextualising the Kenyan heroin trade

While East Africa has been a transhipment destination for heroin from southwest Asia for
several decades, it was not until the late 2000s that the Kenyan coast became recognised as a
drug entrepôt (Allen 2006; Gastrow 2011; Traub 2010; Wright 2013). Subsequent inter-
national vigilance and policing promptly produced evidence of heavy trafficking across
the East African coast. On 26 April 2014, for example, a 29-nation combined naval task
force off Mombasa’s coast made ‘the largest ever seizure of heroin’ on the continent,
amounting to more than a tonne (Combined Maritime Forces 2014).
The few studies that examine these contemporary phenomena highlight as their cata-
lysts either Kenya’s well-developed infrastructure (Gastrow 2011), or the fact that the
state is (arbitrarily categorised as) ‘weak but functioning’ (Schuberth 2014, 59), providing
criminal entrepreneurs with an easy-to-navigate terrain. But Kenya’s emergence on the
global heroin trafficking map is the result of a complex confluence of factors including
its geographic position (McConkey and McErlean 2007); its role in colonial-era (illicit)
trade; and the transcontinental movements of a number of maritime ‘stowaways’ from
the 1970s onwards, which McCurdy and Kaduri also discuss in their briefing in this
issue. Critically, the role of global counter-narcotics policing in encouraging the emergence
of new drug-trafficking patterns is rarely mentioned, as is the importance of economic
migration patterns from East Africa to southern Asia, southern Europe and Latin America.
First, Kenyan and Tanzanian citizens have contributed significantly to the establishment
of a local heroin market. A former stowaway and heroin dealer from Mombasa described
how migration out of East Africa fostered transnational smuggling links with the region:

The first people that brought drugs to Kenya are from Tanzania. Most of them were stowaways,
they could not afford a ticket, but they used to sail on board of ships. [ . . . ] There was this kingpin
[ . . . ] in Peshawar, he used us, the black people, to sell. He said, ‘Here, take this to Copenhagen,
give me my money and then we can do business.’ And our problem was that we wanted a good
life, to return home and buy cars. [ . . . ] How did that market start? Say I came here with drugs.
You don’t know what it is, but you see me smoking, and you beg me, ‘Give me some to try,’
you don’t know the addiction [rate] is very high. [ . . . ] You smoke once, twice, three times,
the fourth time you are addicted, you are already addicts. [ . . . ] From where? Pakistan. By
whom? Freelancers, the stowaways. (Interview, Mombasa, January 2013)
 230 M. Dimova
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Figure 1. Main global trafficking flows of opiates. Image source: UNODC (2015).

Second, apart from the contribution of such local factors in the creation of Kenya’s heroin
market, a crucial exogenous force merits attention. The emphatically prohibitionist inter-
national approach to drug control, together with the heavy policing regime it mandates,
has led to the exploration and exploitation of new trafficking opportunities globally. Histori-
cally, two main routes – the Balkan and the Northern (see Figure 1) – have served as broad
smuggling itineraries to Western Europe and Russia (UNODC 2010, 109). As the war on
drugs coalesced with the war on terror (Balko 2014), new trafficking routes emerged to cir-
cumvent the heavy, often militarised surveillance of heroin transhipment out of Afghani-
stan. As the Northern and Balkan routes were actively targeted by global and national
containment programmes over the past two decades, in March 2014 the UNODC reported
that the substantial heroin seizures along the Balkan route ‘[o]ver the years’ had dropped
dramatically (UNODC 2014, 9). In 2012 ‘the 10 countries and areas that comprise
South-Eastern Europe seized less than 1 tonne of heroin, a 10-year low’ (Ibid.).
The disruption of these routes as a result of the global war on drugs led to the exploration
of alternative ones and the establishment of the East African coast as an alternative tranship-
ment option. Drug policy analysts attribute such consequences to the so-called ‘balloon
effect’ of supply-reduction policing initiatives (Friesendorft 2005; Greenfield and Paoli
2012; Mora 1996). As Greenfield and Paoli put it: ‘when squeezed or curbed in one location’,
drug production, trafficking and consumption would ‘bulge or re-emerge in another’ (2012,
7). It is therefore unsurprising that the East African coast has been gaining prominence as an
alternative route since the 1990s, if not earlier. But it was not until 2015 that the UNODC
categorised Kenya as an integral part of the newly coined term ‘Southern route’ (see
Figure 1), introduced for the first time in the organisation’s annual World Drug report.
The partial fragmentation of long-established heroin-trafficking routes, prompted by
ever-intensifying international control, not only made transhipment through East Africa
more lucrative, but also catalysed the relocation and diversification of international
 Review of African Political Economy 231

smuggling networks. Eastern European and Middle Eastern heroin distribution operations,
for example, are now known to operate in Kenya. In October 2013 a Lithuanian heroin
wholesale dealer was arrested in Mombasa (Ringa 2013), while in 2011 two Iranians
were arrested in possession of 196 kilograms of heroin disguised as dog food (NTV
Kenya 2011). Apart from geographically redirecting trafficking, the global war on drugs
provoked the internationalisation of previously more homogenous trafficking networks.
An increasing number of versatile international criminal entrepreneurs are operating on
Kenyan territory and cooperating with Kenyan citizens.3

Staging counter-narcotics policing

Similarly to their international counterparts, domestic counter-narcotics strategies do not
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take into account the realities of drug trade expansion in the region. Instead, they co-opt
the drug threat within broader political discourses that aim to reify state power through
law enforcement. In order to garner support and also exculpate their own allegedly
corrupt behaviour, Kenyan political leaders are feeding into popular ‘criminal obsessions’
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2006) with imposing anti-drugs stagecraft. The counter-narcotics
policing focus is thus shifted from informed to performative policing.
Across the world, the drugs prohibition regime has proven to be a powerful tool for
reframing and popularising other, unrelated policies. Indeed, in Kenya the war on drugs dis-
course has come to occupy a prominent place in politicking (Kibira 2013; Maina 2013;
O’Regan 2012). Just two weeks before the March 2013 elections, a Kenyan documentary
filmmaker based in Mombasa said that ‘if any campaigner or any aspiring politician is to
say “I’ll do ABCD to get rid of drugs,” I’m 100% sure he’d be voted in’ (Interview,
Mombasa, February 2013). Several months into his term in office, President Uhuru Kenya-
tta reiterated his commitment to waging a national war on drugs by making emotive public
declarations such as ‘we will deal with those selling drugs to our youth’ (Mutambo 2013). A
series of arrests and deportations followed, to be upstaged only by the violent crackdown on
suspected radicalised Islamists in 2014.

Kenyatta’s national war on drugs

Kenyatta’s use of the national war on drugs as a highly publicised political battlefield exem-
plifies Gupta’s arguments regarding the discursive construction of the state in public culture
(2006). The promise of combating the drug trade has clearly emerged as a functional strat-
egy for capturing citizens’ imaginations and addressing a long-standing perception of pol-
itical leadership as corrupt and criminalised. The theatrics of counter-narcotics can be
interpreted as the logical response to, or continuation of, the obsession with a highly crim-
inalised reality. They resonate with Comaroff and Comaroff’s supposition that ‘crime and
enforcement, as popular national fantasy, are endemic to the imaginary of modern state
power’ (2006, 279, emphasis in original text). For example, in July 2013, Secretary to
the Cabinet Francis Kimemia presented a hyperbolic description of law enforcers’
counter-narcotics initiatives:

We are mopping out local drug barons. The country’s security is key for this government and it
is clear from the approvals made by the Cabinet. [ . . . ] Special focus shall be given to the
remaining drug lords including their local counterparts, poachers, illicit brewers and agents
of terror. (Fortunate 2013)
 232 M. Dimova

This statement demonstrates how Kenya’s leaders, like their South African counterparts dis-
cussed by Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘devote considerable effort to staging illusory victories
over the dark forces of violence and disorder’ (2006, 274). A telling recent example was the
August 2014 public detonation of MV Al Noor – a carrier vessel containing 342.67 kilo-
grams of heroin seized by Kenyan law enforcers (Classic FM 105 2014). In August 2014
President Kenyatta went against a decision of the Mombasa High Court which had rejected
the state’s request to destroy the ship. The magistrates involved defended their position
claiming that the destruction of property other than the drugs themselves was due only
upon completion of the proceedings (Onsarigo, Mwawasi, and Wabala 2014). Despite
that, a televised destruction operation took place off the Mombasa coast and was personally
supervised by the president aboard a military helicopter.
Melodramatic crime containment operations aim to exhibit competence and power by
staging. As Sharma and Gupta argue, such public performances ‘assume an interface
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between actors and spectators’ – leaders and citizens in this case – and act as a communi-
cation channel between the two, constituting the ‘very core’ of state power (2006, 13).
These performances of authority can be gleaned in the increasingly violent and visible
police crackdowns on criminal activity throughout the country. From inadvertent shootings
of civilians while chasing drug peddlers in the Nigeria sub-section of the Mathare slum
(Ombati 2013), through ‘abusive roundup’ of Somali refugees en masse (Rajab 2014), to
summary shootings of ‘thugs’ caught red-handed (Ombati 2014), crime containment is
heavily publicised in an attempt to assert the state’s capacity to control and dominate.
Thus law enforcement becomes critical in shaping perceptions, expectations and inter-
actions with the state by political elites and everyday citizens alike.

Joho’s local war on drugs

Counter-narcotics policing in particular can be critical in political leaders’ assertion of
power. The 2013 raids on heroin-selling locations throughout Mombasa organised by
then newly elected governor Hassan Ali Joho furnish a useful example of this. As soon
as election results demonstrated Joho’s victory, before being formally sworn into office
he organised a local campaign against heroin distribution. It targeted key selling locations
such as the industrial district of Godown and the Mwembe Tayari market in downtown
Mombasa. Within days, after a series of raids, the usually vibrant Godown population of
drug dealers and users could not be found anywhere close to the defunct railway tracks
that delivered imported goods to storage units. Most of my interlocutors were in hiding
and I maintained contact with only two of them. Several days after the operation unfolded,
I interviewed one heroin merchant in the deserted space of the usually bustling Godown
area. According to him,

They [the police] came at about 4 pm, they put guards, dogs, they started arresting half of the
people [ . . . ] many got arrested, few managed to run away. [ . . . ] You know usually when they
come, one of their colleagues calls us.4 But that day no one called us. They came suddenly and
that’s why they could arrest people. [ . . . ] They burnt down the whole place, [ . . . ] so people
can’t sleep here. Then they came back at 10 pm and then the following day too. About five
times they came back. So people don’t stay here anymore. (Interview, Mombasa, April 2013)

Such exuberant performances of power influence popular perceptions of the ability of the
state to penetrate and control crime. They can feed into pre-existing notions of both state
capacity and corruption.
 Review of African Political Economy 233

Most heroin dealers whom I interviewed in Nairobi and Mombasa discussed the crime
containment function of the state in parallel with its perceived corruption. On the one hand,
they bemoaned crime containment initiatives such as Joho’s raid of Godown. On the other,
dealers attributed expanding local markets to the lack of will of political actors, otherwise
seen as capable of implementing effective policing measures. Interlocutors from different
populations insisted that only the Kenyan government was capable of managing heroin
flows within and through the country, providing hyperbolic accounts of the ability of gov-
ernment agents to exercise unilateral control on the transnational drug trade. Consider, for
example, the criticism levelled by a Mombasa heroin dealer in his late 20s:

Let me tell you something, the people who bring drugs [into the country] are the serikali5 [ . . . ]
It’s not citizens that bring this stuff because it’s very difficult to have this stuff enter our country,
Kenya. It’s very difficult. If it wasn’t for serikali, no one could bring this stuff. Because we, we
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don’t have heroin fields here in Kenya. Africans don’t have heroin fields. The heroin is coming
from Pakistan, ok? So before it reaches Africa, the government should be getting involved if it
ends up in Kenya. You understand what the difficulty is? It’s difficult for me and you to
smuggle this stuff. But if we had our friends – the senator or the MP – it would be easy to
smuggle it. (Interview, Mombasa, January 2013)

This statement is indicative of an understanding of the state and its officials as fully
equipped to be both complicit in transnational crime and the most effective antidote to it.
The implied omniscience and omnipotence resonate with an understanding of the postco-
lonial state as perfectly capable of performing its artificially assigned Weberian functions.
As a retired dealer from the resort town of Diani south of Mombasa said:

My opinion is that since those people, you know we call them administrative officers, you
know, so the administrative officers include the councillors, the policemen, include even the
topmost, our very excellence the president. Yeah, I think they have the power, they can say
today ‘We don’t want people who are selling drugs around, let them jail them at once and
they will all be there.’ (Interview, Diani, February 2013)

Most of the dealers I interviewed in both Mombasa and Nairobi shared his view. Accord-
ing to them, it was lack of will rather than expertise that prevented unnamed political
leaders from successfully eradicating the heroin trade in and through Kenya. Members
of other groups concurred. Among them was a security expert from Mombasa who
had previously worked at the city’s main port – Kilindini Harbour – who insisted that
senior government members controlled and shielded the operations of drug networks
with utmost precision, saying that ‘cartel operations’ were successful only when ‘under
the politicians’ armpit’ (interview, Mombasa, April 2013). Although such perceptions
are critical in constituting state power (Mitchell 2006, 170), they are based on a profound
misunderstanding of how criminal networks interact with the formal political
infrastructure.

Decoding the narco-state

The above-mentioned accounts conjure up panoptic imagery whereby the Kenyan state
and its agents are always able to detect illicit activities. The persistence of illicit drug traf-
ficking and distribution in Kenya is thus attributed to the polity’s and its political leader-
ship’s criminalisation, even though Kenyan law enforcement has a pronounced track
record of incompetence – from the prolonged September 2013 Westgate intervention
 234 M. Dimova

to the intelligence mismanagement that allowed the Garissa attack to take place in April
2015. The four-day siege of the popular Westgate mall in Nairobi resulted in 67 deaths
and public outrage over national security forces’ ‘failures’ (Sengupta 2013). A year and a
half later, the 15-hour siege at Garissa University left 147 dead, becoming the deadliest
terrorist attack in Kenya since the August 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi.
In reality, Kenyan government structures, and especially law enforcement agencies, do
not have the level of coordination and competence to either conduct or contain local heroin
trafficking and distribution. As already demonstrated, contemporary criminal networks are
subject to constant expansion, but also fragmentation. Illicit business alliances are pro-
nouncedly heterogeneous and volatile. No overarching structure oversees the wide array
of activities that take place. No monolithic elite circle is capable of managing the trans-
actions that transpire within these networks. There is no ample platform for high-ranking
political figures and their subordinates to meticulously coordinate the drug trade in
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Kenya and secure their perpetual involvement in it.

Criminalisation: the narco-state rhetoric

Nevertheless, the ‘criminalisation’ rhetoric, pioneered in the work of Bayart, Ellis, and
Hibou (1999, 22), still has sway over broad popular (The Economist 2015a, 2015b) and jur-
isdiction-specific academic debates (Schuberth 2014, 64). Such accounts almost uniformly
describe political elites throughout sub-Saharan Africa as driving state criminalisation. In
the late 1990s Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou termed African politicians ‘figures of the
shadows’ and ‘gate-keepers to the inner state’, who abuse their formal authority for personal
gains (1999, 22). Earlier, in his seminal review of political configurations throughout the
continent, Bayart had already posited that ‘unscrupulous politicians’ were ‘implicated in
various kinds of smuggling, including that of drugs’ (1993, 78). More recently, however,
Ellis and Shaw argued that while key political figures retain their central roles at the inter-
section of politics, business and crime, they are primarily interested in the kickbacks offered
by multinational companies, rather than collaboration with transnational criminal entrepre-
neurs (2015, 516).
Such inferences remain in the speculative realm, as conclusive evidence of high-ranking
political figures’ involvement in the illicit drug trade in Africa is difficult to obtain. There is
little to no formally corroborated information indicating the implication of specific office
holders in heroin transhipment or distribution through and within the territory of Kenya.
Most analyses of the intersection of criminal and political elites rely on proverbial allusions
to ‘big men’ and sensationalist investigative journalism.6 Yet, external attention and even
specific sanctions – as in the case of President Obama’s blacklisting of Mwau and Nyaki-
niywa – target (former) political figures as the key protagonists in the Kenyan drug trade.
This resonates with the ‘narco-state’ paradigm that has guided international responses to
the drug trade throughout the continent. In their analysis of one of the most prominent trans-
hipment ‘narco-states’ – Tajikistan – Paoli et al. conclude that political ‘leaders of the most
powerful trafficking groups occupy high-ranking government positions and misuse state
structures for their own illicit businesses’ (Paoli et al. 2007, 951). But in Kenya, leaders
of drug networks appear to liaise with, rather than occupy, state authority. When engaging
in illicit networks, high-ranking officials do not simply control a neat chain of command to
conduct their dealings. Rather than being the apex of a hierarchical pyramid, politicians
constitute a crucial connecting node in sets of overlapping networks. As Ellis and Shaw
argue, ‘the notion of “criminal capture” implies a set of relationships that is too simplistic
to represent what we believe to be occurring’ (2015, 513). The ‘vectors of criminalisation’,
 Review of African Political Economy 235

to borrow Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou’s term (1999, 18), are therefore much more lateral than a
top-down analysis of elites’ abuse of power would propose.

Facilitation: the case of Harun Mwau

The conjunction of lateral and vertical connections between different actors introduces an
important facilitating dimension to the relationship between alleged drug ‘kingpins’ and
high-ranking government officials. As Shaw argues in an earlier study on West African
drug networks in South Africa, there are no ‘clear lines of command (starting from a “god-
father” figure at the apex of the criminal organisation)’ (2002). Multi-millionaire and former
MP Harun Mwau’s case provides an apt illustration.
Mwau started his career as a police officer. Between 2007 and 2011 he served as MP for
the Kilome Constituency, as well as assistant minister of transportation. Previously, in 1997
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he was appointed by President Daniel arap Moi as the first director of the now defunct
Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority (Grignon and Rutten 2001, 585). More recently, he
has re-entered politics – vying for the Makueni Constituency senatorship in the 2013 elec-
tions, and actively supporting current Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero in his bid to run for a
second term in 2017 (Mwangi 2015). Mwau is also a prominent Kenyan businessperson
and financier with ventures including an inland container depot, an electronics import –
export company and shares held through proxy holders in Kenya’s biggest supermarket
chain, Nakumatt (Hoover 2006b). Mwau’s ‘humble beginnings’ did not hold him back
from joining ‘the league of the wealthiest people’ in Kenya (Kenya Citizen TV 2011).
According to Forbes magazine, his net worth cannot be accurately confirmed, but is esti-
mated to be £450 million (Nsehe 2014).
Although Mwau is consistently mentioned in domestic and international debates as one
of the most visible beneficiaries of Kenya’s narcotics trade, his diversified legitimate cor-
porate interests are likely to constitute the main source of his wealth. Harun International
Ltd, his electronics import – export company, for example, is ‘the largest supplier of house-
hold electronics’ in Kenya (Kenya Citizen TV 2011). Nakumatt, too, has exhibited robust
financial performance (Manson 2015).
The most concrete evidence of Mwau’s criminal undertakings is a 2006 investigation
into Charterhouse Bank. A leaked US embassy cable from Nairobi stated that ‘a group
of major companies partly owned by notorious businessman John Mwau and [then] MP
William Kabogo’ had perpetrated financial crimes amounting to ‘billions of shillings of
tax evasion and money laundering through Charterhouse Bank’ (Hoover 2006b). On 23
June 2006 the Central Bank of Kenya placed the bank under statutory management. The
ensuing investigation singled out money laundering and tax evasion as the main wrong-
doing the bank had perpetrated (Hansard 2006). The aforementioned embassy cable
noted that Mwau specifically had ‘evaded about KES 43 billion [£290 million] in taxes’.
It referred to only one alleged drug-specific transaction – a KES 10 million (£68,000)
deposit into a Nakumatt account from Pepe Clearing House (Hoover 2006b). Charterhouse
Bank was never prosecuted even though investigations into its fraudulent activities were
completed. As such, it is difficult to establish categorically what type of criminal
conduct Mwau was involved in. However, available information indicates it is much
more likely to have been tax evasion and impropriety in his legitimate business operations,
one of which is the Pepe Clearing House.
The Pepe Clearing House, which operates an inland container depot near Nairobi, is
renowned for its efficiency in clearing goods within 48 hours. In a 2001 parliamentary dis-
cussion on the matter, the then Kibwezi MP, Onesmus Mboko, stated,
 236 M. Dimova

Pepe Clearing House is the most efficient inland container depot in this country and the Min-
ister will agree with me. The goods that are cleared through Pepe Clearing House reach owners
within the next 48 hours. The Customs and Excise Department gets taxes effectively and the
returns are filed in the KRA [Kenya Revenue Authority] every day. (Hansard 2001)

Such unprecedented efficiency is most likely aided by informal manoeuvring – as another

leaked US embassy cable from Nairobi states, Mwau has ‘formidable political influence at
State House and essentially unlimited financial resources’ (Hoover 2006a).
Further, rather than using his inland depot exclusively to traffic illicit goods, Mwau
appears to have focused on mobilising his political network to use it as a profitable legit-
imate business known for speed of delivery. In 2004 the Pepe inland container depot reap-
peared in the public space – the facility was ubiquitously referenced during the
investigation of the 2004 one-tonne cocaine seizure (Murimi and Ogutu 2005). Although
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NACADA issued an official statement claiming that ‘the authority is not aware of any
cocaine seized in 2004 from Pepe Inland Port’ (Teyie 2014) and a 2011 interim report
on the drug-trafficking investigation into Mwau by the commissioner of police reached a
similar conclusion, speculation abounded (Gastrow 2011). Commenting on this, the chief
criminal reporter at one of the most popular daily newspapers in Kenya said that Mwau is:

Not involved per se, but even according to Obama, he just gives passes, he enables. He is rich
because he owns Nakumatt [ . . ., and] supplies Samsung locally. But since he’s been black-
listed, he has been going mad. He can’t go to Europe, he can’t go to the US. [ . . . ] Nowadays
he doesn’t fly out. He controls a lot in terms of economy, he bankrolls those politicians. (Inter-
view, Nairobi, November 2012)

Mwau’s links to the formal hierarchical structures of the state, key business ventures and
decentralised criminal formations put him in a unique facilitator position. While wealthy,
politically connected individuals like him might not necessarily control drug smuggling
and distribution operations, they can provide criminal entrepreneurs with protection, assist-
ance and useful contacts, in addition to running a successful legitimate business. Thus,
instead of coordinating large-scale drug-trafficking operations, prominent figures like
Mwau are more likely to act as facilitators, profitably using their nodal positions in the
enmeshed networks of business, politics and crime.
Such an inference suggests that members of the political elite in Kenya, popularly per-
ceived as criminalised, might simply collect facilitation fees rather than organising the very
operations of heroin smuggling and distribution in the country. Such an inference is not
meant to soft-pedal the potential involvement of political figures in illicit drug trafficking.
Neither does it imply that the heroin trade in Kenya is managed externally, without the par-
ticipation of high-level local operators. Indeed, fieldwork findings identified numerous
entrepreneurs who run drug courier operations out of Nairobi and other regional hubs.
However, such ventures are rarely of the kind that entails multi-tonne smuggling of the
type encountered on dhows off the East African coast. It is therefore important to recognise
the diversity of drug-trafficking organisations and operators, as well as the fact that they are
not by default run by political figures. This is in line with the idea that the drug market is far
more dynamic than is often assumed (Europol 2013), mainly because a wide range of entre-
preneurs are drawn by the opportunity and the favourable risk-return calculus.
These factors underpin the creation of trafficking networks that resemble heterogeneous
assemblages more closely than ‘homogenous social bloc[s]’ whose actors’ undertakings are
smoothly coordinated (Bayart 1993, 161). Deleuze and Guattari make a critical conceptual
note that an assemblage ‘necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections’ (2004,
 Review of African Political Economy 237

8). As drugs transhipment in Kenya, Africa and further afield is increasingly carried out
through new means and routes, assistance from political figures can become even
redundant.

Diagnosing some operational issues

Apart from the conceptual weaknesses and dissimulating stagecraft tactics outlined so far,
Kenya’s war on drugs is plagued by two more concrete operational issues that further thwart
its rationale. First, investigative work and subsequent findings are transmitted across highly
fragmented communication channels. Not only does this result in skewed data that ossify
existing misconceptions, but it can mislead operations on the ground. Second, when it
comes to law enforcement activities, a host of relevant bodies operate with significant jur-
isdictional overlap in a climate conducive to counterproductive competition. These inade-
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quacies are mutually reinforcing and highlight a fallacy inherent in the very raison d’être of
counter-narcotics policing not just in Kenya, but throughout the world – that a government
can fully contain illicit drug flows. In the Kenyan case, they also evince that local law enfor-
cement agencies possess much less capacity than ambitiously performed and convention-
ally considered.
As part of fieldwork, I attempted to retrieve raw data from the ANU. What proved to be
a difficult-to-obtain copy of the unit’s latest annual crime trend report at the time (for the
year 2012) contained a slew of inconsistencies and statistical inaccuracies. According to
the Jomo Kenyatta Airport ANU office in Nairobi’s annual seizures report covering the
same period, there were four heroin seizures in 2012; one in 2011 and three in 2010.
The general ANU report, which was supposed to collate data from all ANU offices through-
out the country, stated that at all of Kenya’s airports there were fewer heroin seizures than
Jomo Kenyatta Airport alone had declared: two in 2012, one in 2011 and in 2010, again
only two. Despite the relatively few recorded seizures concerned, the ANU headquarters
failed to correctly incorporate data from one of its geographically closest and best-equipped
offices. This bureaucratic incompetence and indifference, symptomatic of broken com-
munication chains even within the ANU, leave little potential for effectively investigating
complex transnational drug-trafficking operations.
This is further complicated by long, ensnarled communication chains, to which another
border ANU officer referred:

My work is now to inform the next boss, who is the DCIO [Divisional Criminal Investigation
Officer], OCPD [Officer Commanding Police Division] and the head of ANU. And now the
head of ANU inform the director of CID [Criminal Investigation Department]. And the director
now, the director is supposed to inform the commissioner. [ . . . ] You might want to write some-
thing from here, you put it in your report, you forward it to the next boss, what he’s going to
forward [from] there, you don’t know. [ . . . ] There is a lot of bureaucracy. [ . . . ] The working
system in Nairobi and the working system here are totally different. But it is the same unit, but
you see . . . (Interview, anonymised location, December 2012)

In the context of this communication muddle, it is easier to understand why the law enfor-
cement strategies of different police agencies – ANU, Administration Police (AP) and other
units – often clash. A senior ANU officer explained the resulting complication of their
operations as follows:

The GSU [General Service Unit, the paramilitary branch of the Kenyan police] and AP are all
police officers with different mandates. The AP – they are our agents. The inspector general is
now in charge for the AP and the regular police for the first time. There are two deputies of his
 238 M. Dimova

for the separate branches. [ . . . ] But those deputies can go in different directions and can inter-
pret orders differently [ . . . ] it is parallel law enforcement and duplication of security. (Inter-
view, Mombasa, March 2013)

While the power of rank in the formal, hierarchical structures of Kenya’s police force goes a
long way in exerting pressure and dictating outcomes, information flows remain erratic. In
such a configuration of law enforcement, conjectures about colleagues’ dealings create an
environment of competition and distrust, where everyone is suspicious of everyone else for
having more access to lucrative professional targets, and – potentially – even better oppor-
tunities for collecting bribes. As a result, the duplication and overlap of policing achieve
little beyond the blood-and-thunder performance of authority, which, regardless of its futi-
lity, delivers important messages to the Kenyan citizens.
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Conclusion
Such messages about the government’s capabilities, transmitted through counter-narcotics
policing, can condition the type of expectations citizens have from their leaders. As such,
this article does not present simply a critique of the Kenyan war on drugs from an operational
perspective, but an attempt to understand its impetus, logic and repercussions. In doing so, the
role of political figures in (containing) the heroin trade is also reconsidered. Like their
counterparts in other polities that have embraced forceful drug prohibition regimes,
Kenyan political leaders perform the war on drugs in order to shore up their image. The
public validates such pursuits gripped by paranoia and hyperbolic accounts of crime propa-
gation. Even the very people who are involved in the drug trade in Nairobi and Mombasa buy
into this narrative, interpreting it through their own understandings of elites’ corruption and
criminalisation. In a paradoxical twist, widely held perceptions of corruption come to the
rescue of equally widely held beliefs in government capacity.
Such beliefs lead Kenyans away from a detached critique of their government’s broader
policing capabilities and towards a more manageable grievance format – that of the ‘drug
lord’ members of the ruling elite. Recognising this, canny politicians artfully employ the
crisis narrative to shift attention away from more pressing issues or even their own impro-
priety. A locally led war on drugs thus offers a whole new set of smokescreens and discur-
sive planes through which to manipulate public perceptions and to bolster donors’
confidence. It also offers donors and external actors propitious grounds for pursuing the
global war on drugs agenda and voicing their broader demands on African states.
This article, therefore, did not just present a critique of current Kenyan politics and law
enforcement, but placed the local war on drugs in the context of globalised containment
regimes. The heavy policing of illicit drugs mandated by these regimes runs in a bizarre
parallel to increasingly unleashed global market forces. As data on seizures balloon
owing to intensified transnational policing, misconceptions about the real parameters of
the drug trade within and through Kenya, and Africa more generally, abound. In the mean-
time, evidence-based approaches to some of the more pressing negative effects of the
expanding local heroin market – including serious public health and human-trafficking
matters – remain neglected.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr Phil Clark, Prof. Laleh Khalili, Dr Igor Rogelja, Gareth Lloyd, and my co-
editors for this special issue, as well as the peer reviewers for their comments. This work was sup-
ported by a SOAS fieldwork grant.
 Review of African Political Economy 239

Note on contributor
Dr Margarita Dimova obtained her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she
was a senior teaching fellow and a graduate teaching assistant between 2013 and 2015. Dr Dimova is
now an associate at Risk Advisory Group, specialising in political and integrity risk in sub-Saharan
Africa.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. Although the soft/hard drug dichotomy can be inaccurate and misleading, the term ‘hard’ in this
context is used to exclude drugs more popular than heroin, such as cannabis and khat.
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2. A previously commissioned ethnographic study on crime and vigilantism patterns in one of

Nairobi’s slums – Mathare, also known as a heroin distribution hub – inspired my 2012–
2013 fieldwork. To secure initial access I relied on my pre-existing contacts in Mathare. Two
of them were retired heroin dealers and agreed to vouchsafe for me, so that I could build
rapport with their former colleagues. Crucial for my subsequent independent sampling
decisions was the fact that I had gained confidence in my conversational skills in Kiswahili.
I relied on daily immersive presence in research sites in order to engage the dealers operating
in these locations. In Mombasa, I had no such initial points of contact and relied on introduc-
tions snowballing from arrangements made during my relocation to the city. As the local
market is bigger, and selling and consumption locations are much less concealed, I was
able to enter my first research site within two weeks of moving to the city. For arranging
interviews with law enforcers I pursued a bureaucratic channel. A senior official at the
Kenyan Anti-Narcotics Unit (ANU) assisted me in organising a series of interviews and
site visits throughout the country. I also interviewed stakeholders from other populations
including: leaders of local anti-drugs vigilante groups; representatives of private rehabilitation
centres; officials from government agencies such as the National Authority for the Campaign
Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse (NACADA) and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund;
and informal economy entrepreneurs serving my main research sites. Apart from detailed
interview transcripts, the resulting data contained over two hundred pages of field notes
and logs of informal discussions.
3. The dynamics of heroin smuggling for local and international consumption exhibit certain differ-
ences. Although tentative causal links can be made between the two, since the drug’s introduction
to the region, smuggling through Kenya as a transit zone and local distribution networks have had
divergent paths of development. The introduction of small quantities of heroin to the local market
by stowaways was roughly concurrent to the establishment of a large consignment corridor
through East Africa. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to suggest that the two processes have
much causal linkage.
4. A call is usually made by an officer who regularly receives bribes from various dealers in order to
provide them with protection and information on upcoming raids.
5. Kiswahili for ‘government’, also meaning ‘state’, but also used to refer to individual government
officials and on-the-ground police officers.
6. Consider, for example, the sweeping success of the Jicho Pevu investigative series whose popu-
larity rose dramatically after an episode on the big 2004 cocaine seizure.

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