The last significant form of insecurity that the South Sudanese community of Kakuma faced was institutionalised harassment by the local Kenyan police force. Throughout Kenya, the arrest and detention of refugees was frequently arbitrary, typically based on their
ethnicity, their marginalised status in Kenya, and lack of ability to protect themselves from Kenyan authority figures. The men and women who had been victims of police harassment were typically the refugees who had been living in Kenya for decades rather than victims of the most recent civil war. Although there were protection officers employed by the UNHCR and other aid organisations to help refugees in such circumstances, access to these officers was extremely difficult. Most people in the community had lost their faith in the protection system and found ways to utilise transnational remittances and other community resources to pay steep police bribes.
My first experience with discrimination by the Kenyan police was when I first arrived in Nairobi in November 2017. I had arranged to meet James, who was my first introduction to Kakuma, and his friend Mark in the city and they agreed to show me around. While walking through the bustling crowds of central Nairobi, James’ arm was grabbed by one of the many armed police officers stationed throughout downtown. The two spoke angrily in Swahili for a minute until finally James was able to rip his arm away and walk off. As the police officer tried to do the same thing to Mark, he quickly disappeared into the crowd, catching up with James and I a few minutes later.
As we sat down for lunch, I asked James what the police officer wanted. James claimed that “he was asking for my travel documents. I refused to give them to him because I knew that they would not matter.” According to James, Mark and he were immediately recognised as non-Kenyan due to their dark skin, tribal scarring on their foreheads, and missing front teeth, a traditional coming of age practice among the Dinka. James argued that “he knew we were refugees, and thought he could take some money from us as a bribe. In Kenya, we are not like you. Even though we are also foreigners, we do not have a
government to protect us.” Both James and Mark were part of the original Lost Boy community and had been living in Kenya as refugees since 1992, occasionally returning
home to South Sudan. They both told me that their travel documents were worthless when shown to a Kenyan police officer. Money was their only true protection, a resource that the majority of the South Sudanese refugees in Kakuma lacked.
Over the next nine months in Kakuma, I was forced to deal with the police on several occasions. In the attempt to get my friends and neighbours out of jail for their arbitrary arrests, I spoke to the local police chief, the refugee camp manager, the local magistrate, the Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK), and several UNHCR protection officers. On one occasion, I helped facilitate the negotiation and payment of a bribe for a group of youth leaders who were arrested, ironically, for holding a workshop on peace and reconciliation without the permission of the camp manager. When asked about their experience with the police, my participants who were familiar with the corruption of Kakuma’s police force argued that money for bribes was their only protection. Without financial resources, they risked continued detention and possible deportation back to South Sudan. Kakuma’s police preyed on the inability of refugees to protect themselves, utilising fear and punishment to solicit easy money.
My key informant for Kakuma’s Nuer population was Paul, a pastor and active community leader. On two occasions, Paul had asked me to help him get members of his community out of jail. In both instances, the victims had been detained for crimes they had clearly not committed, and were threatened with expulsion from the camp or prosecution unless they could pay a large bribe to the police officers who arrested them.
The first time Paul had asked for my help he explained that an issue had come up concerning his neighbour who he had identified as his family, and as an elder it was his responsibility to mediate discussions. The day prior his neighbour was approached by the local police accusing him of being in possession of a phone that was stolen from a man in Nairobi two years previously. According to the police, the person who stole this phone had
beaten its owner into a coma from which he had only recently woken up. This reopened case led them to the streets of Kakuma. According to many of his local community members, this man named Andrew, who was a 32-year-old primary school teacher, had not left Kakuma since 1998 and had bought the phone off of a street vendor in Kakuma Town.
The police gave Andrew 48-hours to pay them a bribe of $200 USD (£155 GBP) or they would arrest and send him for trial in Nairobi. Even though Andrew, Paul, and their entire community knew that he was innocent, no one thought that it was worth the risk to go to trial. As refugees in Kenya for decades, they were well aware of the discrimination that he would face along the way, and argued that there was no guarantee he would receive a fair trial. The consequences for failing to give in to the police’s demand for a bribe meant that he would potentially be separated from his family for years, unable to earn an income, and possibly be deported back to South Sudan where, as a Nuer, his life might be at risk.
Although the UNHCR has protection officers to deal with situations just like this, in order to access them, refugees needed to wait in an extremely long line in the blazing hot sun outside an UNHCR field post office for hours, or have a special gate pass to get past the security guards into the UNHCR compound. Neither of these options ensured that you would see a protection officer or that they would be capable of intervening. Issues with the police are intentionally made to be time-critical, with immediate deportation threatened unless someone in power intervenes or the victims are willing to pay a bribe, so quick action is paramount. Although I did help Paul access a protection officer before Andrew was taken from Kakuma, his family had long since lost confidence that the UNHCR or the Kenyan legal system would protect them from harassment. Andrew and Paul’s community pulled together resources, both transnationally from family members abroad and locally from friends and neighbours, to pay the bribe demanded by the police. Andrew was then released without question.
A month later Paul called me one afternoon and asked if I could help him find someone to get a young woman named Rebecca get out of jail. I first met her at the Kakuma police station where she and her three-month old baby were being detained. According to Rebecca, the police came to her doorstep in search of her husband. They were given orders to arrest him and repatriate him back to South Sudan because he had recently criticised the South Sudanese government in a Facebook post. Since her husband was currently in Nairobi, the police arrested her and her baby for his “crime.” The police had demanded from her family a bribe of $2000 USD (£1540 GBP) to release her and her baby.
Although Paul and I did not manage to find a UNHCR protection officer, we did use my gate pass to get an audience with the Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK), an
organisation funded by the Kenyan government to protect refugees. We sat down with a RCK representative as they recorded Paul's account of the event. They said they would look into it, but most likely they would not be able to prevent Rebecca’s deportation for her husband’s crimes against the South Sudanese government. Neither the UNHCR nor the RCK
intervened, in this case, to protect Rebecca from her arbitrary detainment and potential deportation to South Sudan that risked her and her baby’s lives.
Eventually, Rebecca’s family and community were able to negotiate the police bribe down to $250 USD (£192 GBP). Luckily she had a brother in Ethiopia and a sister in
Australia; together they were able to raise the money, send it to Rebecca’s mother in Kakuma and release her from her jail cell. After being imprisoned for three days, both Rebecca and her infant daughter suffered from malaria and were forced to ask her community for more money to pay for their treatment.
Based on my experience among Kakuma’s South Sudanese population, harassment by the police was fuelled by multiple factors, the most important of which was this community’s marginalised status in Kenya and their extreme poverty. Although all refugees in Kakuma
were subjected to the often arbitrary will of the Kenyan police, by being the poorest refugee population in the camp, the South Sudanese suffered the harshest consequences from an enforcement system that demanded money in exchange for their safety. Protection officials who were supposed to deter refugee mistreatment were incredibly difficult to access, and their ability to intervene was limited. Although harassment by the police was much less common than food insecurity or medical emergencies, it often demanded larger sums of money from refugees and their family members, and needed to be acted upon urgently. In all the examples of arrest that I became involved in and that my participants told me about, remittances from family and friends abroad were used to pay bribes to the police.
7.4 Conclusion
Each of the three forms of insecurity discussed in this chapter were by-products of the failure of the refugee system to promote the welfare of Kakuma’s inhabitants, a reality that was intensified by the extreme poverty of its South Sudanese population. These various forms of insecurity were institutionalised into the refugee system and affected every family represented in this study. In the case of Kakuma’s South Sudanese population, insecurity was a consequence of their economic and social marginalisation in a country where they have almost no rights to protect them or ability to provide for their families.
Although my participants all reported an almost constant state of physical insecurity, they each utilised a variety of survival techniques dependent on their social networks and limited economic resources. Within this community, the maintenance of strong social relationships, both transnationally and locally, was central to each individual and family’s ability to endure each day. Under these conditions, remittances sent to the members of
Kakuma’s South Sudanese community were critical to maintain some semblance of economic stability in an environment which preyed on its poorest inhabitants. In the case of this
population, remittances meant the difference between whether or not a family would eat that week, and whether they would be able to access the medical treatment to cure life-threatening conditions, or to avoid harassment by the Kenyan police. As suggested by Vargas-Silva (2017) and Van Hear and Cohen (2017), remittances acted as a lifeline for the receiving members of this diaspora currently living in Kakuma, often meaning the difference between life and death for the participants in this study and their family, friends, and neighbours.
In the case of this community, remittance recipients were almost completely incapable of developing their livelihoods through the utilisation of their transnational
resources because of their institutionalised economic and social marginalisation. As discussed in the next chapter, although remittances could rarely be used for recipients’ livelihood
development in the present, the investment in education was the exception to this trend and often emphasised as crucial. I found that the dichotomy between the inability of remittance recipients to escape their refugeeness, that is their marginalised social and economic status in Kenya, and their investment in the next generation created a sense of hopelessness in the present but also a belief in a hopeful future. Although none of my participants in Kakuma had more than $100 USD (£75 GBP) in savings, and were therefore constantly worried about future expenses, virtually all strongly believed that their and their children’s education would lead to social and economic security in the future.