In both interviews and informal conversations with protection professionals, they have often referred to acts of “opportunism” by defenders. The propensity of beneficiaries of the system to “take advantage of the protection system”, in fact, was highlighted as one of the biggest problems that protection professionals have to face.
Attempts to take advantage of the system took a range of forms, according to these actors. On the lowest end of the scale, protection professionals would complain that defenders from the grassroots were falsifying receipts to claim more money than they had spent, or otherwise try and access small monetary rewards in those instances when they would carry out field assignments on behalf of protection organisations by, for example, claiming that they spent more money than was possible on phone calls which would then enable them to ask for more to be sent to them for other expenses (Interview with protection professional, 21 august 2014). On the higher end of the scale, the biggest concern was defenders’ exaggeration of risks that they faced or outright invention of risks, in order to access the benefits that came with being covered by the protection programme.
Across the board, when these incidents were mentioned in my interviews or more informal conversations, they were framed as instances of opportunism (most often, though not always, by grassroots defenders, who would seek to take advantage of the system for economic reasons). The language used in a few instances was particularly strong as an indicator of protection actors’ moral opprobrium for such attitudes. In one of my interviews, a former protection professional referred to defenders attempting to appropriating the system for material rewards as “economic barracudas wanting to capitalise on the system” (Interview with protection
professional). In a different interview, another protection professional referred to these efforts as attempts to “milk” the organisation of money (Interview with protection professional).
Without meaning to detract from the gravity of abusing the protection system,
nevertheless, framing appropriation as “opportunism” locates the responsibility for these acts solely in the camp of those who seek to take advantage of the system, and, in the process, it obliterates the need to examine the root-causes of this phenomenon, and in particular whether these might require a more nuanced and critical understanding of how the protection system operates. This is the case even when protection professionals admit that many of those who abuse the system are driven to do so by poverty. A human rights professional (also involved in the protection of defenders) told me during a one on one informal conversation:
“Because they are poor and there is little facilitation, they think this is a way to make a few dollars, is to abuse the system. I also am threatened because of this report, [protection professional] keeps saying that I should go, but I told him I did not reach a certain threshold, but if it was someone else they would already be in Sweden.” (Ichim, personal fieldnotes)
However, this statement ignores the very different positions from which protection
professionals111 and grassroots defenders interact with the protection regime, and the resulting
difference in their perception of the material rewards associated with the system. As I mentioned in the Introduction to this thesis, the institutional architecture for the protection of defenders focuses on three main components: capacity-building, advocacy, and protection. “Protection” here refers to direct support measures extended to defenders at risk: these include support for medical bills when injury is incurred as a result of human rights work, legal aid in situations where charges are being brought as a result of human rights work (for participation in peaceful protests, for example), and relocation. Relocation is generally regarded as a last resort measure, both because of the impact on defenders and their ability to carry out their work, and the costs attached to it. For example, when the Coalition relocates a defender, they will pay for
accommodation, children’s school fees if the family is also relocated, and a stipend of 20000 ksh
(about £150) a month for expenses112. Or, these benefits are often much higher than what
defenders from the grassroots otherwise earn113 - the stipend for a month alone can be the
equivalent of 7 months’ rent for someone living and working in an informal settlement. While precarious living standards cannot justify attempts to access these benefits when not at risk, nevertheless, at the very least they can help contextualize (if not explain) them, especially when considered alongside the expectation that defenders will work voluntarily and out of “passion”, even as they see that their professional peers will get paid for their work114.
The tendency to see appropriation as opportunism and the related assumption about who is at fault is part of a broader trend among protection professionals to cast grassroots defenders as “the problem” when seeking to explain those aspects of the protection system that do not work as they were intended to. In a paradigmatic interview with a protection professional, they repeatedly highlighted the fact that many defenders do not understand the mandate of their organization to ensure a safe and secure environment for defenders, thinking instead that it should “ensure that HRDs have salaries, and work, and are socially and economically good thanks to the [protection organisation]” (Interview with protection professional). Repeatedly throughout the interview, defenders’ expectations that the protection system should also address socio-economic claims was identified solely as a challenge in the work of this organisation, rather than as a claim that needed to be considered on its own terms. The solution, in turn, lay in “forums and
conversations” to make defenders “understand”. When they did understand, “the relationship between [the organisation] and defenders became so much better; but for those who have refused
to understand, it becomes very difficult” (idem, my emphasis). The notion of carrying out forums
112 When defenders are relocated within the East Africa region or internationally, that sum will be larger. I have not
been able gather data about exact amounts since this is not a topic that protection professionals will easily speak about, but it is very likely that these sums will vary from one organisation to another. Moreover, within the Kenyan context these sums have varied over time. Before protection in Kenya became institutionalised and it was practiced on a more ad-hoc basis, the sums were even larger than those that are disbursed at the moment. In a 2016 piece entitled Safe House, the author, a former student activist at the University of Nairobi, who had to go underground and eventually flee to Uganda with the help of a Kenyan human rights organisation in the wake of JP Oulu and Kingara’s murders in 2009, recounts his experience of being relocated. Among others, he mentions that his stipend at the time was 300 USD a month, and that, while in Nairobi, he was put in a safe house in Kilimani, a one bedroom flat whose rent was a whooping $1200 a month (Amuke, 2016). (The author has confirmed in an informal
conversation that these details are correct.)
113 See back Chapter 5, pg 120.
114 To put this in perspective 20000 KSH is about a fifth of the monthly salary for professionals at the lower end of
the pay-scale at the larger Kenyan organisations, and it can be a tenth at the higher end of the scale (head of programme or department for example), or even a thirtieth in exceptional cases.
and having conversations to publicise/clarify the organisation’s mandate is built on the
assumption that defenders’ insistence on socio-economic claims is based on a misunderstanding of the system. Equally, it is built on the assumption that the system is designed with the correct ideas in mind, irrespective of whether these correspond or not to beneficiaries’ own notions of what the protection system’s priorities should be. As a result, when defenders insist on making socio-economic claims after these conversations have taken place, this is portrayed as a “refusal” to understand, a gesture that continues the pattern of seeing defenders as the problem.
Ironically, at least in part, this attitude can be traced back to how the “human rights defenders” concept is currently constructed and employed in the discourse. Specifically, the construction of the concept around the idea of virtue and high moral standards results in the widespread assumption that being a human rights defender and seeking monetary rewards as a result of that status are incompatible phenomena115. In other words, the human rights defenders
concept and its emphasis on moral character, and the interpretation of acts of appropriation strictly through a moral (rather than social) lens are two sides of the same coin. For example, in one of my interviews, a human rights practitioner who is also involved in protection through his organisation’s broader mandate, told me:
“So, also [there are] people who take human rights work as a form of, I don’t want to say rent-seeking, you know, opportunists, when you are doing human rights work there is this immunity, you can be protected, you can go to Europe. Us, when we started it was passion, we were in the streets (…). It was not about money, it was about our country – the realization of rights. But now you have people who call themselves, you know they are brokers, yeah?, they are not genuine, they are not bona fide, which has become a big problem.” (Interview with professional defender)
This juxtaposition of money and passion, as antithetical and mutually exclusive terms was a recurring theme in interviews with protection professionals. In a different interview in which the problem of “opportunism” came up repeatedly, I asked my interviewee, a former protection
115 Importantly, this is not limited to aspects of “opportunism”, but encompasses the broader idea of engaging in
professional, if he had any suggestions for how opportunism, as a limitation of institutionalised protection (highlighted as such by him earlier in our conversation) can be addressed. His response was:
“In recruitment, people should look for courage and passion, and for
someone's track record” (Interview with protection professional, 22 October 2014).
The assumption in invoking passion was that its presence would preclude the impulse to try and take advantage of the system, since the two are considered to be incompatible. This is a sign of how, internally, the desire for financial gain is often seen by protection professionals as the sign of “moral deficiency” (Harrell-Bond et al., 1992: 211), incongruous with the status of being a human rights defender. At the same time, even as conceptualising the term human rights defender along high moral standards justifies protection professionals’ resistance to the
redistribution of resources, this simultaneously limits their ability to reflect critically on their own positionality as relatively well-paid staff, and the implications of this for others’ aspiration for the same. Combined, these two factors serve to maintain the inflexibility of the current power hierarchy within the protection system. This is especially evident in a dynamic of trusteeship enacted through the implementation of certain types of measures that aim to prevent
opportunism.