The past one month has seen acting Inspector General of Police Gilbert Masengeli and other police bosses playing a cat and mouse game with courts, civil society groups and the media over three young men who went missing from Kitengela in Kajiado county.
The adage that old habits die hard comes to mind regarding the action or inaction of Masengeli and his team, in particular Director of Criminal Investigations Mohamed Amin as their dockets face scrutiny over continuing daylight abductions of Kenyans perceived to be critical of the Kenya Kwanza administration.
On Tuesday, Justice Lawrence Mugambi had to issue a summons to Masengeli to appear in court today in person after he defied three previous orders requiring him to explain the whereabouts of Kitengela activist Robert Bob Njagi and two brothers, Jamil Longton and Aslam Longton.
For a police boss, whose docket has in recentlyt been under public scrutiny over cases of impunity that range from abductions, extrajudicial killings and brutality against peaceful demonstrators to defying three court orders signals a dangerous trajectory for the rule of law.
Masengeli’s defiance is reminiscent of a similar move by former Nakuru county police commander Samuel Ndanyi, who sat and watched as goons invaded and took over Nakuru War Memorial Hospital.
In the Nakuru case, despite multiple court orders explicitly requiring Ndanyi and his officers to enforce the return of the hospital to its bona fide owners, the police simply remained defiant.
And as judges excused themselves from a case that pitted the hospital management against the Nakuru County government over the ownership of the facility, citing defiance by the officers to enforce their orders, police chiefs in Nairobi watched as they sat on their arms.
As Kenya’s chief enforcer of the law, Mesengeli should be the last person to defy orders from the basic foundation of the very law that he was put in office to enforce. If the Inspector General himself can openly defy a court order, what is expected from his junior officers?
Defiance of court orders by police officers has been on the rise, signalling a trend that puts the rule of law and the dignity of courts under threat.
The police boss and his team owe Kenyans an explicit explanation on recent abductions of citizens by people suspected to be officers from the DCI and the National Intelligence Service.
