During the Covid-19 pandemic, the face mask was a symbol of protection and safety. Indeed, it was part of a range of life-saving paraphernalia known as personal protective equipment. 

In recent months, however, the mask has been weaponised by the police and goons alike to conceal their identities when committing crimes against humanity, especially during protests.

The result is that a simple invention, whose original aim was to save lives, has become a weapon to hide against the long arm of the law.

If anything, it has been refashioned into an unwitting accomplice in the commission of crimes against democracy, human rights and public interest. 

When goons attacked the Kenya Commission on Human Rights offices to scuttle a press conference by women on the eve of the Saba Saba protests, many of the attackers concealed their identities by wearing face masks.

What their action meant, in simple terms, is that they were conscious that they were committing criminal acts in an age of digital surveillance, and by so doing, they were seeking to shield themselves from prosecution and public opprobrium. 

Similarly, some police officers deployed to quell violence during the protests have also been wearing masks to conceal their identities, meaning that even by the time they were leaving their duty stations, they had either conceived the idea of killing protesters or had been given express instructions to do so under the cover of anonymity offered by masks. 

The most ironic happenstance was the killing of mask vendor Boniface Kariuki by a rogue police officer who had concealed his face behind one.

This was wrong at very many levels. First, the mask vendor was unarmed, so there was clearly no justification for the officer to shoot him.  

Secondly, he was facing away from the officer and had his back against a wall, yet the officer went ahead to shoot him in the back of the head.

In the end, a man who was selling masks to protesters seeking to shield themselves from the effects of tear gas was killed while doing his job, and, as a result, Kenya is worse off for that aberration. 

And to add insult to a festering injury, the vendor was killed by an officer whose primary responsibility was to protect lives and property.

The act, by itself, flew in the face of the Constitution and the social contract between the people and the government, through which the citizens gave up their right to self-defence and donated it to the State, only for it to abuse that trust that is the very foundation of modern society. 

It is criminal, to say the least, for looters – just as it is for police – to use face masks as a tool to evade justice and to provide cover for their heinous crimes against society and social order.

For me, the mask is a symbol of protection and personal safety. But we live in a society in which even innocent symbols have been sacrificed to perpetuate sacrilege and deployed to defeat public interest by rogue State and non-state actors.

And as we have seen in the recent past, the two are almost always on the same side in their conspiracy to roll back human rights gains and assault the principles that hold us together as a society, such as respect for the sanctity of life, property and symbols. 

It is saddening that something so ubiquitous as the face mask – invented to save lives – is now being used by police and criminal elements hellbent on killing their compatriots and destroying the property of innocent bystanders.

This just goes to show how low we have sunk as a nation. 

The writer is the editor-in-chief of The Nairobi Law Monthly and Nairobi Business Monthly