Plight of the Jailed Abroad

On Friday, July 26, 2019 the Daily Nation carried a story dubbed ‘China hands Kenyan life sentence for drug trafficking’.

This was the sad tale of Simon Wambua Mbuvi’s arrest and conviction for drug smuggling. Simon joined 30 other Kenyans languishing in Chinese jail for various crimes, after a Chinese Court of Guangzhou found him guilty of trafficking 947.03 grammes of cocaine, concealed inside his stomach. Such is the sophisticated drug smuggling underworld, as modes of shipment, routes and markets continue to diversify.

Mbuvi, as fondly known in his neighborhood, was everything else but a drug trafficker. He was a seasoned entrepreneur in providing catering services. His friends knew him as an early bird on Sundays, in his local church, as he regularly occupied one of the front row seats. To all his clients who caught up with the story, it must have been a great shocker! Quite an absurdity to receive news that Mbuvi had been locked up for life in China, after he went missing for more than six months!

Was it blackmail by a scammer or a leap in the dark that motivated the 44-year-old man to swallow 79 capsules, for the prize of $2,050? The Daily Nation article says, it is either greed or naivety. But, such gullibility of a middle aged man points to a deeper challenge with economic or geopolitical undertones. Assuming it is Economic, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Especially providing for your family in harsh economic times. Mbuvi was a razor-sharp businessman. But, with dwindling business opportunities, desperation may have driven him to wade into unfamiliar waters, though drug trafficking was a stretch gone too far.

Geopolitical reasons are a no-brainer, considering the two countries mentioned in the newspaper title, ‘China jails Kenyan’. Kenya is probably a late entrant into the Chinese bandwagon (The Belt and Road Initiative) that spearheaded infrastructural development and investments across the globe. Immediately, Kenya faced East during President Kibaki’s era, the floodgates opened up not only to the Chinese market, but to their language, culture and all the trappings that come with neo-colonization. Beautiful and previously unimaginable infrastructural projects (i.e. major highways, residential and commercial units) have been undertaken in Kenya. All these under bilateral trade agreements that started Kenya’s borrowing spree, pushing its debt beyond 60% of the GDP, and consequently ballooning its public debt.

Kenyans have had to bear with the influx of Chinese machinery and products, laced with their culture and language. With English and Kiswahili as the official languages, and sign language closely following, who knows how close Chinese language is inching towards the blue badge! China’s business branding and brutality crossed the red tape in 2019, when some Chinese businessmen were deported in the emerging fierce trade wars with small traders at Gikomba market, the largest second hand clothes market in East Africa. Only the birds will tell if the creeping social problem of gambling in Kenya is an import from the renowned gambling city of Macau. Kenya’s recent banning and burning of the gambling outfits, point at Kenya clawing back on China’s grasp on its citizens. But, far too many people have been thrown under the bus, in accelerating development and transforming Kenya into a middle-income country by 2030.

Hellish nightmares of Kenyans stranded, either in China or with Chinese bosses in Kenya, leave an egg on the face of the crafters of Vision 2030. It brings to mind the biblical story of Israelites asking for a King, which angered the Prophet. In his outburst, Samuel warned that the King would reign over them and claim certain rights. The King would take over their sons and daughters (as his servants, soldiers, perfumers or cooks), their fields and vineyards and impose taxes on their grains and flocks. Once these take effect, Samuel prophesied that they will cry out for relief from the king they had chosen, but God wouldn’t answer. Such predicament reverberates a throwback statement that choices have consequences, made after Kenya’s 2013 elections, when US cautioned Kenya over its choice of the dynamic duo, H.E. Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, H.E. William Ruto.

As hushed conversations continue, who knows or cares how Mbuvi’s immediate family received the news of his incarceration? With their predicament, is life imprisonment the ideal punishment (if there’s such a word), for being caught with substance that is extremely harmful to society. Is such internment, productive or counter-productive? Prisons are set up for correction and rehabilitation of inmates. However, anecdotes from TV series like Prison Diaries™ and Banged Up Abroad™, and books like A Prison Diary (Jeffrey Archer, 2002) show no value-add to those serving jail term.

Forcibly confining and denying inmates a variety of freedoms is placing them on the throes of hell and purgatory. Ex-convicts from Communist States narrate terrifying stories of being subjected to iron chains, solitary confinement, all manner of deprivation, and bizarre measures that Narcissists use to test the resilience of man. In 2010, Robert Rother an overly ambitious German was imprisoned for eight years in a Chinese prison, for financial fraud. He deeply regrets his love-cum-business affair with Zheng Li, a lawyer from an affluent Shanghai family. Danny Cancian from New Zealand, in what was supposed to be a business trip in 2009 instead became a four-year stint in a Chinese jail after a restaurant fistfight that took a lethal turn. After Danny’s release, his wife Amanda tells how she disposed off their estate to buy back his freedom!

Not all prisons experiences have been lethal. For example Richard Wurmbrand, a Jewish missionary in Romania was jailed for 14 years. His book ‘Sermons in Solitary Confinement (1969)’, tells horrible tales in the hands of Communist Romania, where he spent three years alone in a cell thirty feet below ground, never seeing any natural light or another man, except for the guards who beat and tortured him. Similarly, Viktor E. Frankl suffered the wrath of holocaust, under the Nazis in Germany and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). However, both Richard and Victor chose to find meaning in their sufferings and moved forward with renewed hope. But not all people are cut from the same rock!

Mbuvi’s family wasn’t a target in the illicit drug trade, but his incarceration will forever haunt them. Possibly, their standard of living and social status will plummet, as they adjust to the sudden fate of having a husband, father and brother serving jail term in a foreign land. As Mbuvi cools his heels in a Guandong prison (or Dongguan where most foreigners are imprisoned), he is gazing at the prospects of being a modern day slave-machine to a prison factory, being brain-fried by the controversial electric shocks applied by guards to inmates in the spirit of torture and forced labour. All the while, the assembling model cars, luggage locks, earphones for airlines, inductors or whatever labour is outsourced to Chinese prison industries. Could it be that prisons are a multibillion-dollar industry, all about work and nothing rehabilitation?

As he was stripped his passport and it is handed back to Kenyan authorities, his birth name will be replaced by an inmate number and a Chinese name. So you wonder, ‘what is in a name’? Unless he succeeds in convincing the prison guards that he has a verifiable chronic medical condition, he will be sharing an overcrowded cellblock, stung with the stench of sweating men and the odors from toilet holes. Such brutality does not account for the fact that Mbuvi was a fist-time traveller to the Communist China. Feeding on rice with boiled vegetables, plus chicken feet or head if lucky, will be strange diet considering his staple meal in Kenya may have been Ugali with Sukumawiki.

With no treaty between Kenya and China to exchange prisoners, Mbuvi’s fate hangs in the balance of Kenya’s bilateral relationship with China. In his experience, Robert Rother tells that Embassy relations between two countries are what matters to a prisoner’s life in China. In a media interview upon his release in 2018, he said that Africans and Vietnamese are low down in the hierarchy as the Chinese, in getting humane treatment in prison, if at all there is some form of ranking prison treatment.

Dreams are valid, but not when our adventures turn into hellish nightmares in foreign soil. This is considering the fate of tens of Kenyans who pursued the Chinese Dream, but are now wasting away in jail. Mbuvi is but a miniscule of individuals whose economic turns and gambles took a twist that will forever change their outlook and those closely related to him. Robert was lucky to complete jail term and upon release was young enough, at 36 years to start a new lease of life, though he paid dearly for his life lesson. For Mbuvi at 44 years, his curve ball has just been tossed in the air and only time will tell how things turn out. If lessons from ex-convicts like Robert and Danny reach him, he might apply good behavior and hard work as a way of reducing his prison sentence and perchance earn himself an early release. Otherwise, he might be staring at suicide, STIs or respiratory tract infections, the main killers in jail.

All said and done, individuals must take responsibility for their own lives, but governments can cushion their citizens against such tragic maladies. We all don’t have to eat shit to know what it tastes like, using Robert’s words. Or like Danny, who upon release and deportation was slapped with a five-year ban from visiting China, but responded, this time not with a fistfight, but with harshness, “You might as well make it 500 years, because I am never setting foot back in China again.”

Views expressed in this article are my own

Joseph N. Mungai is inspired by people’s life experiences. Do you have a intriguing life story and need a ghost writer? Email: j.mungai@hotmail.co.uk