Mugabe Were, a freshman parliamentarian, could have been one of the keys to unlocking Kenya’s crisis, but on Tuesday he was shot dead in his driveway.
Were, 39, was an opposition politician who had resisted his party’s often belligerent talk. He had married a woman of another ethnic group, built a footbridge in a slum with his own money and sponsored teenage mothers to go to college. As Kenya slid into chaos this past month after a disputed election, he shuttled between leaders of different ethnic groups and was actually organizing a peace march the night before he died.
“Whoever did this,” said Elizabeth Mwangi, a friend, “has killed the dreams of many.”
The details of his death are still sketchy, but the killing appears to have been not a robbery but an intended hit.
The news of his killing spread fast and violently, with opposition supporters rioting across Nairobi, the capital, intensifying the clashes of the past weeks.
In the widespread troubles that have erupted in the country since the election in December, Kenyans are now literally ripping their country apart, uprooting miles of railroad tracks, chopping down telephone poles, burning government offices and looting schools.
Militias from opposing ethnic groups are battling in several towns, and Kenyan army helicopters fired rubber bullets at crowds Tuesday to disperse them. There have been reports of forced circumcisions and beheadings.
The economy is paralyzed; more than 800 people have been killed.
According to Were’s guard and family members, he had just pulled up to his gate around midnight and was waiting in his car for the gate to open when another car drew alongside him.
“I heard a beep,” said Were’s wife, Agnes. “And then two loud shots. I ran out and saw my husband bleeding and people were yelling to me, ‘He’s still breathing, he’s still breathing.’ But when I got him to the hospital, he was dead.”
Were, whose campaign posters show him smiling with street children, had been shot in the heart and in the eye.
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His guard said two men dragged him out of the car, shot him and drove off, without taking a thing. Family members said he had been followed by suspicious cars several weeks before.
Opposition supporters immediately deemed the killing a political assassination, intended to intimidate Kenya’s opposition movement, which is challenging the election in December that Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, narrowly won. Police say they are ruling nothing out.
A huge crowd formed in front of Were’s house Tuesday and built roadblocks of burning tires and heavy stones. It was the first time rioters had reached an affluent neighborhood in Nairobi, and it was not just youth from the slums who were taking part. Bespectacled men in suits lit fires in the street.
“This is how we express our outrage,” said Evans Muremi, a social worker, who stacked burning tires while wearing a jacket and tie.