NYT รายงานหลังจากที่สหราชอาณาจักรออกมาเตือนว่าพบการแพร่ระบาดของไวรัสโคโรนาสายพันธุ์ใหม่ซึ่งแพร่กระจายอย่างรวดเร็วในลอนดอนและพื้นที่โดยรอบ ส่งผลให้รัฐบาลสหราชอาณาจักรต้องออกมาตรการล็อกดาวน์ที่เข้มงวดที่สุดนับตั้งแต่เดือนมีนาคม
Covid risks a lost generation amid India’s digital divide
InternationalDec 21. 2020A young student attends an online Thunkable Inc. coding class at her home in Mumbai on Oct. 24, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Dhiraj Singh.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Vrishti Beniwal
Dhiru, an Indian teenager who entered 10th grade this year, hasn’t attended even one day of class since the academic year began in April.
The school was closed for months amid the pandemic, but even since it reopened Dhiru’s mother Rekha Devi is afraid to send her son to class. Unlike some schools, Dhiru’s doesn’t offer online instruction — and even if it did, the family doesn’t own a computer or a smartphone to access the internet.
“The school is now saying, ‘Come and attend class,’ but we don’t want to take the risk,” said Rekha Devi, a domestic helper near New Delhi. “Unlike rich people, we don’t have the option of online classes. So we’ve started private tuition for him, but I’m not sure he’ll be able to pass the exams without any schooling this year.”
Plenty of Indians are facing a similar predicament: As many as 80% of Indian students couldn’t access online schooling during the lockdown, and many might not return to classrooms when they reopen, according to a recent study by Oxfam.
That’s just one example of how the pandemic has exacerbated the country’s digital divide — the gap between those with the means and knowledge to benefit from the internet, and those without — worsening already stark levels of inequality and weighing on economic growth. While the divide isn’t unique to India, it’s especially acute in a nation where more than half the population of 1.3 billion people is under 25 years old.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced lockdowns earlier this year, services from banking and schooling to medical consultations and job searches moved online, and in some cases remain there nine months later. Many companies see “work from home” as the new normal.
Before the pandemic, government researchers estimated India’s digital shift could unlock as much as $1 trillion of economic value over five years. But the crisis is spreading those benefits unevenly and widening socio-economic inequalities, with girls suffering more than boys and rural areas more affected than cities.
“The digital divide in India is an ongoing problem and the pandemic has definitely made it worse,” said Sumeysh Srivastava, a New Delhi-based internet-access researcher at Nyaaya, an open-access platform that provides simple and actionable legal information. “The government needs to ensure that all Indians are in position to benefit from digitization, otherwise we’re at risk of creating a new class of digitally poor citizens.”
India has the world’s second-largest pool of internet users, about 600 million, comprising more than 12% of all users globally. Yet half its population lacks internet access, and even if they can get online, only 20% of Indians know how to use digital services, according to government data.
Every 10% increase in India’s internet traffic delivers a 3.1% increase in per-capita gross domestic product, according to a 2018 report by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. But the benefits of those gains aren’t reaching everyone: Srivastava said government-run digital literacy programs cover 5% or less of the population, are focused only on rural areas and suffer from various design and implementation issues.
“The digital revolution has made services more tradable and enabled India to grow rapidly with a different growth model compared to China,” said Ejaz Ghani, a former economist at the World Bank. “But this is now being restrained by the digital divide.”
The launch of online job portals for laborers and e-passes to move around during the lockdown meant Indians who aren’t digitally literate could have lost out on livelihood opportunities.
The government said last week the pandemic “has necessitated delivery of stable and high-speed broadband internet services to an increasingly large number of subscribers in the country,” and allowed for public Wi-Fi networks to be established. That will create employment, boost small businesses’ income and raise GDP, the government said.
“Reducing the digital divide will be through increased investments in digital infrastructure,” Ghani said. “China has marched way ahead of India and closed the gap with the U.S. on the digital revolution. We have a long way to catch up.”
By The Washington Post · Christopher Rowland, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Jacob Bogage, Abha Bhattarai, Laura Reiley
Companies across America – from Amazon and Uber to railroads and meatpacking plants – are lobbying states and the federal government to prioritize their workers for early immunization against the coronavirus amid limited supplies of the vaccine.
After front-line health-care workers and elderly people in nursing homes and assisted-living centers are immunized, the government within two months or so is expected to begin shipping vaccine to communities across America for those it has designated as essential workers.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory group voted Sunday to recommend that grocery store workers, teachers, day-care staffers, adults over 75 and other front-line workers who cannot work remotely should be the next to get the coronavirus vaccine, followed later by another large batch of essential workers and elderly people. The recommendations guide state authorities in deciding who should have priority to receive limited doses of vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
The two groups of essential workers that the government is prioritizing comprises 87 million people, spanning dozens of industries and including many people of color and many earning low wages. And the task of setting the sequence of vaccinations within that sprawling, disparate population, verifying who is essential, and setting up equitable systems for access is triggering competition. The government’s list is so broad that it weather forecasters and operators of shooting ranges.
Adding to the uncertainty for business leaders is a patchwork process for emergency planning: All 50 states have the power to set their own priorities.
What is clear is that there won’t be enough doses to go around for months. Local officials in each state will have to make tough choices about which essential workers get their shots first.
“It almost feels like a wrestling match out there, where many interests want to make it clear that the people they represent have a lot of essential workers,” said Jonathan Slotkin, chief medical officer of Contigo Health, which leads partnerships between large, national employers and hospital systems. Companies are displaying a “voracious appetite” for vaccines for their workforces, he said.
Police, firefighters, public transit workers and teachers will be at the top of most state lists. But lower down the line, states have divergent views on who should get shots to reduce infections and get local economies back up and running.
Once the vaccine does begin to flow to essential workers, states will be working from the government’s master list of industry categories. State officials have said they will follow these guidelines for the most part, but they are not required to.
Some advocates and policy experts fear the competition for vaccines will favor the wealthiest companies with the strongest lobbying teams in state capitals. That could disadvantage smaller firms.
Individual gig workers who deliver food and vital supplies to households, but who are not as organized, also could get left out of the planning and off vaccination lists, advocates said.
Many delivery drivers are people of color. Members of minority groups are more prone to die of covid-19 because of historical disparities in health care. They also have been shown in polls to place less trust in vaccines because of those disparities, as well as unethical medical experiments on Black people.
“They are in fact bearing an enormous risk, the ones who are delivering to our homes,” said Dania Rajendra, who leads Athena, a coalition of social justice and labor groups that advocates on behalf of workers at Amazon from outside the company, which has 800,000 employees in the United States.
But large employers may be able to improve their place in line by helping embattled state governments, which have been starved of federal financial support to organize vaccination efforts. Companies are offering vaccination sites, logistical help and the ability to identify which workers qualify as essential.
The ride service companies Uber and Lyft, which consider their drivers independent contractors, not employees, are making their size and organization a key part of the appeal for prioritization.
“We believe Lyft can play a significant role in increasing access to the vaccine,” Lyft spokeswoman Julie Wood said. In a letter to all 50 state governors, Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said of the company’s drivers, “I want to ensure these individuals can receive immunizations quickly, easily and free, and I offer Uber’s assistance to you in making that a reality.”
Drivers themselves are eager to be prioritized. Aziz Bah, who drives for Lyft and Uber in New York and is an organizer for the Independent Drivers Guild, a labor union for drivers, said as ride-share drivers returned to work over the summer, they drove front-line medical workers to hospitals, allowing those workers to avoid mass transit.
“We are actually the front line to those front-line people because they rely on us to get to work,” he said.
The dilemmas are especially stark in lightly populated states like North Dakota, where nearly 60 percent of the population meets a federal classification for essential workers. Stephen Pickard, a former epidemiology field officer for the CDC in North Dakota who has been moderating the state’s vaccination ethics committee, said his email inbox is filling up with requests from organizations seeking to beat one another out for priority. Among them were messages from a railroad company and group homes for the disabled.
A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation this month found that 30 states were still developing their plans on how to prioritize vaccine after the front-line health care workers and elderly in residential facilities.
“It’s going to get a lot messier,” said Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at KFF. “That’s a huge group of people and choices will have to be made.”
Amazon, whose founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, was among the many companies that lobbied to be placed on a master list of essential workers compiled by a division of the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.
Initially, that list was used to decide what workers could be exempt from lockdown orders as governors and mayors ordered the general public to remain indoors and work from home. Now the list is being used to allocate scarce vaccines, a much more difficult proposition.
The company sent a letter Wednesday to the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, asking that its workers be placed in line “at the earliest appropriate time.”
In response to a question from The Post, Amazon said it would be also be asking state officials to prioritize delivery drivers and contract workers.
“Our view is that our essential workers and those that work outside the house for us at fulfillment centers and Whole Foods stores and as delivery drivers are all part of that essential supply chain that helps tens of millions of other people stay home,” Steve Hartell, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, said in an interview.
Warehouse Workers for Justice, a Chicago-based rights group that is often critical of Amazon’s labor practices, is calling on public officials to give priority to warehouse workers like those at Amazon. The group said warehousing and manufacturing sites account for the second-largest concentration of covid-19 infections in Illinois behind long-term care facilities, but outpacing restaurants, bars, schools and social gatherings. About 85 percent of the state’s 650,000 temporary workers, the group said, are Black and Hispanic.
“We believe there is a correlation to high infections in these workplaces that then spread to Black and brown communities,” Tommy Carden, an organizer for the group, said in a statement. “If we want to address covid-19 transmission in these communities, we need to vaccinate where people work, which includes the temp workers.”
Officials in Midwestern and Great Plains states said they were being lobbied especially hard by railway companies and other transit groups. A spokeswoman for the BNSF Railway Company, the largest freight railroad network in North America, said the company was working with allies in the transportation industry to ensure early access to the vaccine for its employees.
A collection of organizations representing freight, rail, port and waterway infrastructure sent a letter this month to the top members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, noting the sacrifices of these workers, who are unable to work from home, while also warning of their critical role in the “continued viability of our domestic supply chain.”
A health official in Texas, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal communications, said the state is being lobbied by groups that “run the gamut,” from dentists and optometrists to federal judges and power plant workers.
Corrections officers are seeking priority, the person said, as are convenience store employees. The rice industry is making a pitch for agriculture workers. Someone associated with Southwest Airlines had recently reached out seeking clarity about the place of airline workers. And private schoolteachers were pushing to make sure they were classed together with public employees.
Among finance sector workers, the American Bankers Association is urging the government to prioritize bank tellers and managers who interact with the public.
Floor traders at the New York Stock Exchange, who mingle in the common space, are likely to receive some later level of prioritization, but they want to be sure higher-priority workers facing greater infection risks go first, said Philip Quartuccio, managing director and head of global trading, for investment firm ThinkEquity.
“There’s 500 to 1,000 people on the floor of the exchange,” he said. “I suspect they will be in line at some point before the general population.”
NYSE President Stacey Cunningham said on CNBC on Dec. 11 that financial workers are prepared to wait their turn: “We’re not looking to jump any queue with respect to vaccines.”
After spending months over the spring and summer trying to justify essential worker designations that allowed factory workers to go back on the job, manufacturing industry trade groups say most states now recognize their workforce for priority vaccinations.
“Phase 1B, which includes the term ‘essential workers,’ is a fairly broad bucket,” Robyn Boerstling, the National Association of Manufacturers’ vice president of infrastructure, innovation and human resources, said in an interview. “And we just really wanted to make sure that governors really had the tools and awareness that manufacturing is an essential industry.”
But manufacturers in some states are bracing for a longer wait before their workers receive the injections. Pennsylvania includes the “critical manufacturing” sector in its Phase 1B, but industry representatives there say the state’s playbook is not clear which subsectors that will cover.
“We’re in limbo,” Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association President David N. Taylor said. “And I hope that there’s a recognition of the critical role that manufacturing plays in standing up the rest of the economy.”
Michigan, home base for the auto industry, is still wrestling with the question of where to prioritize manufacturing. Ford announced in November that it ordered a dozen ultracold freezers to store coronavirus vaccines for its workforce – among the most aggressive responses by any company. But the automaker said it didn’t actually know when those freezers would be filled.
The freezers, said Ford spokeswoman Kelli Felker, were part of the company’s early effort to explore “how best to provide a vaccination program to our employees, which will vary among our global locations.”
“Our initial emphasis is on essential workers at our manufacturing plants, warehouses, workplace-dependent employees and employees who are required to travel,” Felker said in a statement.
The scramble is twofold for many of the country’s supermarket and grocery chains, which are racing to sign agreements with the federal government to distribute coronavirus vaccines to the public, while also lobbying for their front-line employees to be given priority for those vaccines.
Grocery, warehouse and supply chain workers have been hit hard by covid-19-related deaths and infections during the pandemic. They have risked exposure for as little as a temporary pay bump of $2 an hour and “bonuses” that are disproportionate to the record profits their companies have raked in during the public health crisis. Many food and retail workers do not receive paid sick leave or health insurance.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 1.3 million employees at chains such as Kroger and Albertsons, is urging the CDC to vaccinate grocery, meatpacking and food processing workers “immediately after health-care workers.”
At least 350 of its members – including 109 grocery employees and 128 meatpacking workers – have died and thousands have been infected by the virus since March, according to the union.
Mark Lauritsen, director of the UFCW’s food processing and meat packing division, toured a Smithfield Foods meat-processing facility in Denison, Iowa, on Tuesday. The plant is the largest employer in Denison, he said, and almost all of the town’s 8,400 residents are connected to it in some way.
“Food supply chain workers didn’t have the luxury of working from home for three months,” Lauritsen said.
“You have to remember what our members went through in March, April and May. It was as deadly as anything in the meatpacking industry’s history,” he said. “Thousands were sick, hundreds died. Members saw their co-workers getting sick.”
Walmart, the country’s largest private employer, is preparing to distribute the vaccines to employees and customers. It is adding freezers and supplying dry ice to its 5,000 pharmacies to make sure they can properly store doses once they arrive, Tom Van Gilder, the company’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.
But, Van Gilder stressed, the company “will not have any say in who can receive the vaccine.” It will defer to states to determine when customers and employees are eligible, he said. Company representatives did not respond to questions about whether Walmart was pushing state and federal officials to give their workers priority.
A blueprint for survival by the National Restaurant Association calls for their prioritizing testing and vaccine distribution for food supply chain employees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ November employment report showed that restaurants and bars lost 17,400 jobs last month and are still down over 2.1 million jobs since the start of the pandemic, far more than any other industry.
Nabeel Alamgir, chief executive of digital ordering start-up Lunchbox, says the government recognizes the health value of ghost kitchens – eateries designed for meal delivery only, without dining rooms. They keep people from congregating in restaurants. But the chefs and drivers need to be vaccinated, he said.
“People who work in ghost kitchens and food delivery are in so much contact with people, traveling from building to building,” Alamgir said. “They come to our doorstep and into our homes.”
Some business are not obviously essential to providing basic goods, emergency services, or heat and light, but are essential to the functioning of local economies. Tourism is a prime example. It is not on the government’s list of essential operations, but in Florida, interest is especially keen in a return to normal to restore jobs and tourist revenue.
Two lobbyists in Florida, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment based on private conversations, said they expect the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association to push for hotels in particular and said Disney would also exert significant influence.
“They are the Supernova in Tallahassee,” one of the lobbyists said, referring to the Orlando branch of the entertainment complex.
A third lobbyist, who specializes in tourism clients and is close to Disney in Florida, said the company was taking more of a “wait and see” approach, seeking clarity from the state about its plans. A spokeswoman for Disney’s theme park division, Stephanie Corzett, declined to comment.
The theme-park industry has been pummeled by the coronavirus. Disney, the country’s largest operator, lost more than $3 billion from April through September in its typically highly profitable parks division. California’s Disneyland has remained closed through the nine months of the pandemic, while Florida attractions have been open only since the summer, at reduced capacity.
“Vaccines would certainly help Disney with hiring or rehiring – a lot of their cast members are worried about covid and they need to be able to get all their top people back,” said Scott Smith, who teaches hospitality management at the University of South Carolina. “But I don’t see it making much of a difference to their traffic. The biggest reasons people aren’t coming to the parks is because they’re scared of getting covid from other guests, or because they’re cutting back in a recession.”
Smith said that given the financial stakes he believed there would be little backlash if the workers were vaccinated early.
“Unless there’s a real elbowing to the front of the line, I don’t think you would hear more than mild grumbling,” he said. “People in Central Florida understand what Disney means to the economy.”
Ashley Chambers, a spokeswoman for the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, said the group has “not specifically sought prioritization of our industry members in Florida as we know the focus right now is on those most vulnerable at at-risk for exposure, including health-care workers and our large senior population.”
One of the Florida lobbyists also said he expected athletic teams to seek special treatment, having seen the National Basketball Association establish a protective bubble to prevent infection in Florida for the end of its regular season and playoffs. Entertainment had considerable purchase in early decision-making about essential infrastructure, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis justified his decision to give World Wrestling Entertainment that classification by saying people were “starved for content.”
European countries – and some beyond the continent – are restricting travel from the United Kingdom amid mounting fears over an infectious new strain of the novel coronavirus first detected in England.
Austria, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands announced bans Sunday, with others expected to follow. Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have also temporarily suspended flights departing from or arriving in the United Kingdom.
British officials have reported that a mutation of the virus appears to speed its transmission, and they have imposed restrictions on 18 million people in London and across southern England.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC on Sunday that “the new variant is out of control.”
The new strain also has been found in Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands, the BBC reported. Italy’s Health Ministry confirmed Sunday night that scientists had detected the U.K. mutation in a person who returned to Italy from Britain “in the last few days.” The ministry’s statement said that the person and close contacts were in isolation.
Germany planned to ban all air traffic from Britain late Sunday and review the ban on Dec. 31, the German Embassy in London announced. Irish Transport Minister Eamon Ryan said his nation will impose 48-hour restrictions on flights and ferries from Britain starting Monday and review the regulations Tuesday. “There is an exception for goods traffic and essential supply chain workers,” he told Virgin Media News.
Not so in France. That country’s 48-hour travel ban, which was scheduled to start Monday, included nearly all shipments of freight as well, a stricter measure than that imposed during the first wave of travel restrictions in the spring and one that was sure to cause chaos in Britain as trucks destined for France snarled on roads.
The ban is on all travel of people – “including those related to the transport of goods, by road, air, sea or rail from the United Kingdom,” the office of the French prime minister said in a statement. Only unaccompanied freight – truck trailers that are loaded onto ferries without drivers – will be allowed to continue to pass through.
The passage from Britain to France is one of the most important transport corridors in Europe, which means that food and other time-sensitive cargo may end up rotting on the side of British roads in the coming days. In a bit of dark irony, the transportation snarl is exactly what was warned if Britain cuts its last ties with the European Union on Dec. 31 without a trade deal in hand. That “no-deal” Brexit remains a risk, but the chaos may have come a few days early. The French government said that French nationals in Britain hoping to come home for Christmas may still be able to do so once the ban is lifted, and that they should get tested for the coronavirus so they can have a better chance of returning later this week.
The Netherlands was among the first to ban flights from the United Kingdom starting Sunday until at least the end of the year. Dutch health officials raised the alarm after they detected a coronavirus case with the same British strand. Belgium on Sunday ordered a 24-hour ban on flights and trains to and from the United Kingdom.
In Germany, a government spokeswoman confirmed Sunday evening that the country intends to “restrict travel options between Germany and Great Britain, as well as South Africa.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel spoke Sunday to discuss “the latest development on virus variant and the measures related to it,” according to an E.U. official. The European Union has scheduled a crisis meeting for Monday morning to discuss the mutation.
Greece issued new rules requiring a seven-day quarantine for travelers from the United Kingdom, rather than the current three-day period, The Associated Press reported. Bulgaria also announced a ban on U.K. travelers through January, Reuters reported.
The new mutation , or variant, has significantly faster transmission rates, though experts said it does not appear to be more lethal or vaccine-resistant.
“While it seems to be more easily transmissible, we do not have evidence yet that this is a more deadly virus to an individual who acquires it,” Vivek Murthy, the Biden administration’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general, told ABC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “There’s no reason to believe that the vaccines that have been developed will not be effective against this virus, as well.”
He added: “The bottom line is if you’re at home and you’re hearing this news, it does not change what we do in terms of precautions as individuals that can reduce the spread of this virus.”
Cases have spiked in Britain. Public Health England on Sunday announced 35,928 new cases; last Sunday, the figure was 18,447. Health officials said the sharp increase was of serious concern, but it was too early to know whether it was linked to the new variant. As cases mounted, Britain on Saturday announced increased pandemic restrictions, reversing earlier hopes for a more relaxed holiday period.
The news has suddenly left travelers from the United Kingdom scrambling to return home as rules change fast. Israel on Sunday afternoon announced a new ban on passengers from the United Kingdom, Denmark, and South Africa, citing fears of the new strain. In a Twitter post Sunday night, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, noting the uptick in British infections because of the mutation, said Turkey was temporarily suspending flights to the United Kingdom. Flights were also being suspended between Turkey and Denmark, the Netherlands and South Africa, he said, but it was not clear whether those suspensions were related to the new virus strain. Saudi Arabia also announced a suspension of international flights for at least the coming week.
Hopes for justice are fading after police killed at least 20 Kenyans while enforcing coronavirus rules
InternationalDec 21. 2020A mural in memory of Yassin Moyo, a 13-year-old boy who was shot by a police officer enforcing a coronavirus curfew in Nairobi. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
By The Washington Post · Max Bearak, Rael Ombuor
NAIROBI – On the evening of March 27, when the pandemic was new and full of terrifying unknowns, Francis Otieno switched on the news. What he saw is now seared into his mind.
Live video showed police officers beating women who were waiting for a ferry ahead of the first night of a nationwide curfew – imposed out of concern for public health – that hasn’t been lifted since. Otieno has spent all of his 23 years in Nairobi’s ghettos and said he understood the message behind the officers’ blows: We will not hesitate to kill you if you don’t comply.
The night after that, 20 minutes past the 7 p.m. curfew, police caught his 18-year-old brother, Ibrahim Onyango, and beat his face into an unrecognizable pulp. He crawled home and bled to death by morning.
“I called him earlier that night and said, ‘If they can beat women like that, they will kill you, Ibra,’ ” Otieno recalled recently. “That’s the last thing I ever said to him.”
Onyango’s killing was the first of at least 20 by Kenyan police while they enforced curfew and other coronavirus-related rules such as mandatory mask-wearing. The government’s police oversight authority said 20 had been killed. It also documented 73 severe assaults, some sexual in nature.
That count doesn’t include Onyango, whose death was never formally registered because his family sees such little hope in Kenya’s justice system for it to be worth the effort and because of the potential for further retribution. It’s indicative of what human rights groups say is likely a much higher, but hidden, toll.
Others died because of the curfew and accompanying police brutality in indirect ways that also went largely undocumented. Mothers giving birth, for instance, often couldn’t find transport to clinics as taxi drivers feared police beatings.
A spokesman for the police force, Charles Owino, didn’t deny the pandemic-era police killings but said officers weren’t out to do harm, and “if a policeman did such a thing, it’s a simple thing, make a report.”
Even if making a report could be the first step toward justice for his brother, Otieno was unswayed.
“Every day in these streets we see criminals walk free, cops and robbers, even cops who are robbers,” he said. “We want justice. But where would we even start to look for it?”
Francis Otieno stands outside his house in a Nairobi ghetto. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
Since the inception of Kenya’s police oversight body in 2011, only eight officers have been convicted of crimes, less than 1 percent of the cases it has pursued. According to Amnesty International, more than 740 Kenyans have been killed by police since 2007, including 130 already this year. A national survey in 2018 found that most Kenyans believed the biggest risk to their lives was violence by police.
Most of the pandemic-related killings occurred between late March and May. Only one case has been brought to trial: the killing of Yassin Moyo, a 13-year-old boy who was shot while sitting on his balcony with his mother, allegedly by officer Duncan Ndiema, who was enforcing curfew two days after Onyango died.
Moyo’s age and obvious innocence propelled public outrage, and numerous human rights groups, as well as the government’s police oversight body, took up the case.
But even with support, the trial has barely moved forward. Because of the pandemic, nearly all court sessions happen online, which has added to an already massive backlog of cases. Ndiema is free after paying a bail of around $9,000 – a huge amount for a poorly paid constable – that his lawyer said was paid in part by colleagues and others.
Like Otieno, Yassin’s father, Hussein Moyo Molte, came up in Nairobi’s vast expanse of slums, home to more than 2.5 million people, and knows how the system is stacked against people like him.
“The longer this case takes, the less chance of justice,” he said. “We have 10 witnesses, but with enough time, they will be killed, they will disappear, they will go quiet. That’s how it works: slow it down until the case falls apart.”
Ndiema’s lawyer, Danstan Omari, said he thought the trial would start in 2022 at the earliest.
“Cases from five years ago have not even been given a date. In that time, judges can also be transferred or retire and delay further,” he said in a phone interview.
And even then, Omari said, his defense strategy on Ndiema’s behalf is one that is sure to be hugely time-consuming, and puts the ability to stall or control the outcome of the case more firmly in the police force’s hands.
“Our position is that the bullet that shot the child is a bullet that came from a different police station. We want an inventory of guns from that police station,” he said. “We have demanded the ballistic report, but we have not received it yet.”
A woman walks through the dump site where Ibrahim Onyango, Francis’s brother, worked before he was killed in March. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
The lack of closure will prolong Yassin’s family’s pain, which lives right below the surface of an otherwise happy family.
On a recent day at home, Molte sat in his living room, the walls of which Yassin, a flamboyant kid who loved to dress up and strut about, had half-finished decorating with stickers, stars and butterflies. He jovially talked about his and his wife’s business selling shaved ice and little cakes, and played with his son Mukhtar, who is just 2, the youngest of their remaining six children. But at the first mention of Yassin, tears sprang to his eyes.
“Our youngest children still don’t understand,” he said. “They ask me, ‘Daddy, when is Yassin coming home from the hospital?’ “
Their three-story house is haunted by Yassin’s absence – the bunk bed that isn’t shared anymore, the end of the family’s nightly chats on the balcony where he was shot, the older sister who shared his birthday week and never wants to celebrate again.
That Yassin’s case is the best – or only – chance at justice for any of the families of those killed during enforcement of coronavirus restrictions has reinforced a disillusionment among activists working toward police reform. Many said that it bore the hallmarks of other cases that were eventually thrown out.
“What we have is a system that allows the police to investigate themselves,” said Peter Kiama, the director of the Independent Medico-Legal Unit, a collective of doctors and lawyers that support human rights causes. “So the police will execute an individual either in custody or during arrest, and they are the ones to pick up the body, take it to the morgue, and then call the medical experts to examine the body after they have already compromised the scene of crime.”
Hussein Moyo Molte talks to his three young children outside their home in Nairobi. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
In 2017, Kenya passed a law that should have created an independent forensic unit, but Kiama said it was never implemented, and his organization is the only one in the country that provides that service.
Other activists offered long lists of other challenges. No witness protection. No funding for human rights work. No safety for human rights activists who are routinely harassed. No sense of solidarity with the poor from more well-off Kenyans. No political will to reform a police force hollowed out by poor training, poor leadership and poor salaries.
“If you’ve worked a dozen cases and nothing has happened, you get discouraged,” said Gacheke Gachihi, who co-founded the Mathare Social Justice Center, a community outreach organization in one of Nairobi’s biggest slums. Instead of convictions, she said, usually the best outcome is still an unjust one: The officer gets transferred to another post.
“If you transfer them, you transfer impunity,” Kiama said. “What we do in this country is transfer impunity from one place to another, and we postpone dealing with the problem. We are living in denial that we have institutionalized police violence.”
With little recourse, both Otieno and Molte voiced desperation. Otieno, unable to hold back his tears, said his decision to let justice for his brother slip away made him feel “like this life was useless.”
Molte dreamed of taking matters into his own hands.
“But even if I met Duncan Ndiema and killed him myself, it wouldn’t bring Yassin back,” he said, his face again wet with tears.
โมเดลที่สิงคโปร์ใช้ในการรับมือกับการระบาดของโควิด-19 จากกลุ่มแรงงานต่างด้าว
งบประมาณกระทรวงกลาโหมญี่ปุ่นเพิ่มขึ้นเป็นปีที่ 7 ติดต่อกัน ทะลุ 5 ล้านล้านเยน
นักวิเคราะห์เผยท่าเรือแห่งใหม่ของจีนบนทะเลจีนใต้อาจสร้างเพื่อรองรับเรือบรรทุกเครื่องบินรุ่นใหม่
เมื่อไวรัสโคโรนามีการกลายพันธุ์แล้วจะส่งผลกระทบต่อประสิทธิภาพของวัคซีนหรือไม่
พบเชื้อไวรัสโคโรนาสายพันธุ์ใหม่กลายพันธุ์ในสหราชอาณาจักร แพร่ระบาดเร็วขึ้น 70%
หลายประเทศออกมาตรการระงับการเดินทางจากสหราชอาณาจักรหลังพบเชื้อไวรัสสายพันธุ์ใหม่
A young student attends an online Thunkable Inc. coding class at her home in Mumbai on Oct. 24, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Dhiraj Singh. 
A mural in memory of Yassin Moyo, a 13-year-old boy who was shot by a police officer enforcing a coronavirus curfew in Nairobi. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa 
