Iron bar hit men, failed states and the Mafia

A few days ago I bumped into a friend who a few years earlier, lost a brother to Kampala’s marauding iron-bar hit men.  

He told the tale of how the case went cold with police investigations yielding nothing and the suspects walking free as if nothing had happened. 

Naturally, his eyes and facial expression betrayed a bitterness that was palpable which is understandably so.

It is his conclusive remark that caught my attention more than anything else.

“It is high time we organised ourselves into groups with arms to kill these criminals before they finish all of us because the police are now too weak to do anything.”

On the face of it this looks like the spontaneous thinking of any rational mind situated in the midst of Uganda’s crime and insecurity predicament.

Looked at it deeper, this is the perilous type of thinking forced on society when the state is in the process of failing.

The responsibility of the state; from the executive with the revered and feared instruments of coercion (the army and the police) to the legislature and the judiciary is to provide and protect the citizens in all ways.

To achieve this, the State is specially empowered in so many ways which may include denying one their freedom and even right to life.

It is usually guided by the law for the purpose of checking and balancing to minimise the abuse of power.  

So when the citizens usurp the responsibility of the state to protect society, by extension they take over these powers.

The trouble is that there are hardly any provisions for the citizens to adequately use such power without abusing it.

Power by its very nature is susceptible to being abused if it is not under the pressure of constant checks and balances.

Elsewhere it is called mob action. Bad as it sounds, mob action is not the worst part of the citizen taking over aspects of State power.

In the sphere of mob action it is unthinkable to have any such limitations. Things can only get worse.

When one looks at the history of the Italian Mafia or the drug cartels in Mexico or Colombia’s Medellin cartel, it all started with poor hopeless people in mostly the slums and less privileged areas, defending themselves after the state went missing.

When these mob leaders tasted the liquorice of power they enjoyed it so much that they moved a little deeper into the water.

If, for instance, the mob killed all the suspected thieves in a village and it became peaceful and safe, next they hired out their ‘enforcement’ services but this time for a fee.

Thus mob justice becomes a source of employment, sustenance and survival.

That is how hit men rose up for hire to settle things as basic as relationships gone bad.

They would be available to murder the man who ‘stole’ another’s wife or girlfriend.

As the money started rolling in they even created opportunities for themselves by bullying society and holding it at ransom.

There are many places in Italy where business owners pay ‘protection money’ to the Mafia so that their premises are not sabotaged by vandalism which the Mafia will do if the money is not paid.

As the money started rolling in thick and fast, the organized criminals then invaded sacred territory like the legislature and sponsored candidates for seats in the august house.

These ones are there ostensibly to lobby and put in a good word for the gangs.

From there it is to the Judiciary where they kill, kidnap and blackmail to get the ‘correct’ judgments in cases of their interest.

Next they target the Executive. A former Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi was named many times in matters linked to the Mafia.

As organised criminals expand their financial muscle, so does their operational territory.

Acting like Robin Hood, they get involved in corporate social responsibility to patronise people by being heavily involved in spaces where the state is seriously wanting or is totally absent, especially in areas of social services.

That is how you end up with hordes being treated for ailments and getting an education or food, clothing, shelter and water, courtesy of organized criminals.

With time all facets of society including the police, medical workers, shamba boys, house maids, teachers, bank tellers, prison guards, priests, civil servants etc. have a link with the organized criminals and lack the moral authority to condemn them. 

They sympathize with their cause to the extent of giving them information and hiding them from the law and the state, which failed them.

They become heroes and are viewed as messiahs without whom the people would be dead.  

In the world of dirty real politics one should be alive to the fact that they at times do the dirty bidding of the very state they intend to replace and which fights to liquidate them too.

Pablo Escobar perfected this art and hid in plain sight in Medellin where he had created a welfare state from the proceeds of his international drug dealing network.

So huge was it that it had military gangs capable of taking on the national army and winning.

Not even the mighty US government could easily trace him for the drugs and money laundering he supposedly sponsored in America.

By the time of his death, after years of expensive operations to hunt him down,  Escobar and his cartel like the Mafia in Italy and the drug dealers in Mexico had killed thousands upon thousands.

They had wreaked havoc by instilling fear in whoever stood in their way to run their gangs. But society had a soft spot for him for he had bettered the State.

The interesting book, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden, documents that when Escobar was finally captured and killed, the people cursed the state and sent him off like a film star with huge wailing numbers in attendance.

If one only got to know of Escobar at his death, they would miss out the fact that such people are the children of the State gone bad.

They are the rogue side of the State looked at in another way.

Nicholas Sengoba
Plainly speaking