Maina Kiai: We are living in an age of protest
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Version 0 of 1. Maina Kiai is tired. It’s been a long year for the UN special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and he tells me he’s looking forward to the end of the year. Kiai has spent his life fighting injustice. From facing down repressive politicians in his home country of Kenya to touring the world to document human rights abuses. But the past 12 months have been almost too much for the veteran activist. 2015 has seen an almost unprecedented clampdown on civil society groups across the world. From the banning of western bodies in Russia, to the lengthy battle faced by Greenpeace in India, NGOs seem to be facing a fight for their very existence in many countries. At the same time, the level of unrest across the globe has been extraordinary: from the Central American spring in Honduras and Guatemala to the student demonstrations in South Africa. “We are living in an age of protest,” Kiai tells me, speaking on a crackly phone line from his office at the NGO InformAction in Nairobi, Kenya. “But it’s symptomatic of the fact that politicians, those in power, are failing and people are being forced to express themselves on the streets. People who are poor and marginalised use protest.” At the time of speaking, Kiai had just returned from Chile, which had been rocked by student protests over the summer. “There is a crisis of governance across the world. A disconnect between politicians and the people,” he says. “You can see that in the number of people who vote in developed countries. The link is that people are increasingly finding they don’t have any other option.” If someone is suffering, we all lose our dignity Repressive measures by governments in the developing world and in traditional autocratic states are typical territory for special rapporteurs, but Kiai also makes comments on the behaviour of governments in the west, although, with typical UN diplomacy, he is unwilling to call out politicians by name. Pressed on comments made in October by the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office that the UK no longer saw human rights “as a priority” in foreign policy and was instead focused on the “prosperity agenda”, Kiai says “it’s a crying shame”. But he’s happier talking in more general terms. “Protest is a safety valve for society,” he argues. “If it is not permitted, society can erupt into violence. We’ve seen that in autocratic regimes across the world.” Kiai began his journey into human rights work while studying at a boarding school in Kenya. Raised in an ordinary middle-class home, outside the capital, Kiai was shocked by the level of poverty that was suddenly all around him. The children with whom he shared his classroom were so poor they couldn’t afford school fees. He saw other classmates struggling to concentrate as they didn’t have enough to eat. “I came to see human rights as a tool,” he explains. “A means to address these issues. It’s a device to increase human dignity. If someone is suffering, we all lose our dignity.” But seeing “human rights as a tool” has got Kiai into trouble throughout his life. After violence swept through Kenya after the disputed 2007 election and left over 1,200 people dead, Kiai, then serving as chair of the Kenyan commission on human rights, was informed that the Kenyan police force had set out to “liquidate” him and several of his staff. Fearing for his life, he adopted a tactic of traveling in and out of Kenya to keep the assassins off-guard, eventually spending time at a Geneva based thinktank, using connections he had made during his time studying at Harvard and his period as director of Amnesty International’s Africa programme in the early noughties. Though it would have been tempting for him to remain abroad, Kiai, soon returned home to Nairobi. His working life is now spent splitting his time between his day job at InformAction, while also working for the UN. Remarkably, UN special rapporteurs are not paid for their work, with only their expenses paid for the travel, which in Kiai’s case involves traveling around the world, reporting on civil society across the globe. Reluctant to talk about his family or personal life due to unwanted attention that would bring from the authorities, Kiai, instead focuses on his work. He talks about human rights with the passion of a student activist and the intellect of a talented academic. He is “ashamed” by the growing sex abuse scandal gripping the UN. And “frustrated” by the lack of funding human rights work gets from the UN’s funding pool, just 3% of the overall budget, and warns that the relative poverty leaves the OHCHR open to influence from dictatorial regimes. On top of this, as the head of NGO based in Africa, he laments the fact that large western NGOs seem to hoover up most development funding. “I do think that large NGOs take up a lot of the development assistance aimed at civil society, which is generally way less than what goes to governments and government agencies, but it’s not that simple. You obviously can’t lump all ‘development assistance’ together. This aid covers a lot of things: health, education, food, care for refugees, training and capacity building, and of course human rights and democracy,” he says. “I’d argue we need to change our thinking entirely on this. Humanitarian types of aid are reactive – and certainly necessary. But it doesn’t get to the root of the problem, even when donors fund things like health and education. Often this money is being dumped into broken and corrupt systems, but donors keep dumping it.” Related: The unarmed civilians bringing peace to South Sudan Since returning to Kenya in 2011, the authorities have been reluctant to leave him alone in spite of, or perhaps because of, his status. In 2013, police came to the home of Kiai’s mother in a rural part of Kenya. An officer later told him they were acting on intelligence that he was being threatened, but he finds it hard to understand what the force gained by having heavily armed men turn an elderly woman’s home upside down for an afternoon. “My work starts with Kenya,” he says, the passion clear in his voice. This is what drives him. This is what keeps him going. “I have a very firm desire to see my country in a different place. Kenyans are ready and have the capacity to be in a totally different place. What’s holding us back is politicians, who are so obsessed with themselves they forget why they got involved in politics in the first place.” Come 2016, Kiai is sure to be back ensuring those politicians don’t get a moment’s peace. Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter. |