By Gab Oguda
I have seen members of my linguistic community insult Raila Odinga after the Miguna Miguna airport drama.
I will make this short.
March 18, 1968; at the peak of the Vietnam war, a huge protest rally is organized by the British anti-Vietnam War activists in Trafalgar Square, in London. It is going to be the mother of all protests. The British Police are well briefed of the amount of fire in the belly of those protesters, they are asked if they are ready for the heat and they respond by assuring the British public that they have everything under control and there is no cause for alarm.
They were dead wrong.
An upwards of 8,000 protesters, mostly young agitated Britons, turned up along Grosvenor Square to deliver a petition to the US Embassy in London with the message for America to withdraw troops in Vietnam with immediate effect; and just when the police thought the crowd would disperse after delivering a protest letter to the US Embassy officials, the protests took a deadly turn. The crowd refused to leave the US Embassy premises until their letter is replied to.
It’s a deadly standoff which requires a simple act of provocation. The touch-paper is officially lit by a protester who pokes one of the cops, and a fierce battle between demonstrators and riot police was well and truly on. Protesters hurled mud, stones, firecrackers and smoke bombs at the US Embassy building, a section of the fence is even uprooted by the irate mob; police on horse-backs respond with charges. It’s a scene from a horror movie and the British public is stunned by the things they watched on their black and white television.
At the time the mayhem was dying down, more than 200 demonstrators, most of them ring-leaders, are arrested and locked up. The protesters promised to come back a second time for the mother of all protests that October. If the first demonstration was anything to go by, the second protest was going to bring down the government of Harold Wilson. It sent panic all over Downing Street.
The guys at Scotland Yard, the headquarters of British Metropolitan Police, are summoned to a crisis meeting. They cannot believe their spy network had not seen through this level of organization and took the blame for putting the British Police on the back-foot during the deadly protests. They promise the UK public that nothing of that sort will happen again, and they get straight down to work.
Conrad Hepworth Dixon, a former Royal Marine with a degree from Oxford University, is recruited into the Scotland Yard and immediately assigned to head the Special Branch – an elite unit in the British Police responsible for gathering intelligence, mostly of political or sensitive nature protecting the state from threats of subversion. Dixon is asked by his superiors what ideas he has to forestall a second protect, the ebullient commander tells his bosses from across the room; “Give me 1 million pounds and 10 men, and I will deal with the problem for you.”
He needed to say no more, he got exactly what he asked for. He straight-on set up a covert surveillance unit within the Special Branch, working from an unmarked building in South London – the handful of detectives are chosen from the Scotland Yard’s specialist units, and given access to all records of potential mayhem instigators.
Dixon’s plan is very simple. That if you want to crack down on political anarchy you have to immerse yourself into the life of a protester and crack him down from within. His covert unit hires undercover agents willing to transform themselves into protesters and live their lives with fake identities for several years. They are trained to live and act like a protester. For the whole time they were undercover they would never wear a uniform or set foot in a police station, unless, of course, they were dragged in, kicking, screaming and handcuffed, in character as a protester.
They would be equipped with false ID documents, grown their hair long, and melt into the milieu of radical politics, emerging to feed back intelligence on any gathering conspiracy. They had a code-name, the Special Demonstration Squad, or SDS. Their role is to infiltrate political gatherings, act like one of the agitated masses airing their views and planning how they would bring down the government. Each covert detective is given a Casio G-Shock wristwatch, modified at a cost of 7,000 British pounds per watch, with the capabilities to record voices from a 100m audio-range and transmit the recordings in real time to the Special Branch command center in an unmarked building in South London.
The plan works like magic. The second protest which was billed as the protest that would bring down the Harold Wilson government was no more than a grasshopper’s fart; and when one section of the demonstration again attempted to break the police cordon around the embassy, they were without success.
The SDS had already infiltrated the gathering and sowed seeds of pessimism in the demonstrators it was nothing more than a mere tongue lash. As for the Molotov cocktails that the demonstrators had come with to the gathering ready to start an explosion of violent protests, the seed of discord had already been planted by the covert SDS that one of the demonstrators willingly walked up to the police line and delivered three milk bottles containing petrol and a piece of rag and handed them over to the police.
When it became certain that no one was willing to come forward and light another touch-paper to begin the second round of mayhem, thousands of protesters came and marched, listened to speeches in Hyde Park and the quietly went home. The revolution having been successfully neutralized by government, by turning the protest movement against themselves.
The Jubilee government is many things, but stupid is not one of them. They slept through the deadly protests that day Raila Odinga returned from the United States, and their government could have easily been toppled by that act of the police unpreparedness. Only a fool would imagine Jubilee would sleep through another round of violent uprising by the opposition when they could avoid it.
Keep playing into the hands of government operatives infiltrating your social media networks and dictating the tempo of public discourse. These guys are toasting to their level of brilliance every evening when they retreat for stock-taking and you are all over here slaughtering one another because of a handshake you know nothing about.
Musalia Mudavadi was right; that demons come in the form of humans to sell you a make-believe story that you will be Kenya’s next president. Only to realize it was a hoax, after you have already promised your tribe manna from heaven immediately you assume office.
You have been played. All of you.
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