The state exists to protect the most vulnerable

Societies get judged by how they treat their most vulnerable. And on this measure, our society falls short. Consider the story of Zipporah Muteti of Makueni County.

According to news reports, on May 29, 2024 Ms Muteti was locked in a cell with her 18-month-old baby.

She alleges that the arrest was over a dispute with a fellow trader she had advanced goods worth Sh1,465.

The trader allegedly vowed to teach her a lesson using friendly police officers. Once in the cell, the police ignored Muteti’s pleas when it became clear that her baby was unwell.

The baby died in the cell, after which the police released her and allegedly tried to keep off the books the fact that they had jailed her with a sick child.

This tragic story captures so much of the sickness that ails our society. There is the notion that the state and its capacity for violence exist for hire by the well-connected towards whimsical ends.

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There is the lack (or ignorance) of administrative-bureaucratic procedural justice – a mother and child can be jailed without due process.

You also see the lack of any sense of proportionality – was Sh1,465 worth the life of a child?

And then there is the blinding inter-personal cruelty (undoubtedly aggravated by gender) that led officers to allegedly ignore Ms Muteti’s desperate calls for help until her baby died.

From cases like Ms Muteti’s, the casual destruction of livelihoods we have witnessed in Nairobi’s informal settlements, to the abandonment of Kenyans in the North Rift to insecurity, the government routinely displays its sheer lack of care for the most vulnerable among us.

Often it seems like cruelty is the point. The complete lack of care for the vulnerable is reflected throughout our political economy.

For example, as we debate the Finance Bill, most Kenyans are apprehensive about the government’s extractive rapaciousness not because of the redistributive implications of government spending on the less fortunate, but due to fears of theft of our taxes by the political class.

In other words, the state exists not to provide public goods and services and take care of the vulnerable, but to pamper the political class.

It is therefore not surprising that the same political class does not care about the vulnerable among us. They are mere statistics. But it should not be so. Ms Muteti’s baby was not a mere statistic. 

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University