‘The first dragon to slay’: unpacking Kenya’s war on drugs

Abstract

Kenya faces the challenge of policing not only drug smuggling through its territory, but a sprawling local market dominated by heroin. The government is enthusiastically embracing the global ‘war on drugs’ discourse, propped by external actors’ assistance and insistence. Guided by these developments, this article analyses Kenya’s local war on drugs using ethnographic material from immersive fieldwork in Nairobi and Mombasa. The aim is to decode local political actors’ engagement in the international drug control regime and its impact on everyday perceptions of Kenyan state authority. As such, this article provides an alternative explanation of the mechanics of Kenyan drug markets and the role some government officials play in (controlling) them.

Parental Influence on Drug and Substance Abuse Among Secondary School Students in Kinango Sub-County, Kenya

“…Kenya is one of the developing countries in Africa that has lately been experiencing rapid increase in production, distribution and consumption of multiple drugs of dependence (Syvertsen et al, 2016); (David M. Ndetei Abuse (1994: Athens, 2000; (Beckerleg, 2006). A heroin haul estimated to be worth 25 billion shillings seized by the Australian Navy off the Kenya Coast, is by far the biggest found in Africa (Dimova, 2016). In his determination to fight drug abuse, the president of the republic of Kenya, Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta ordered the blowing up of a ship carrying 373.8kg of heroin worth1.3 billion shillings off Mombasa (Syvertsen et al, 2016).…”