 For more videos on People's Truggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we are joined by Booker Omole, the vice chairperson of the Communist Party of Kenya. And he is here to talk about the state repression that has been happening on the organization or the members of the organization over the past few days. The latest news on this front is that 12 activists, 12 members of the party who were detained on Wednesday, they went to court yesterday and the hearing has been postponed. So Booker is here to talk about why this has been happening and the larger structural reasons behind the protests that are being organized also. Thank you so much for talking to us. Booker, so my first question is regarding the recent protests itself. Detention of the activists took place last Wednesday, but we understand that this is part of a larger, this is happening in the context of a campaign that the Communist Party of Kenya along with trade unions have been organizing against the government's policies to do with the pandemic. So could you tell us a bit first about the kind of protests and movements, why were these movements being organized and what is the pro reason for the protests against the government that the party and the trade unions are taking up? Now the protests or the street demonstrations that are planned in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya has been going on now. This is its second week and it is a broad program by the Communist Party of Kenya and the workers union, particularly the entertainment and hospitality workers union. And this actually followed the latest presidential directive on the lockdown on COVID-19 and the union members together with the leadership of the Communist Party of Kenya did their analysis and we arrived on the conclusion that the president was handling the COVID-19 in a very unscientific way. In fact, most of the directives that he has put through are only copy and paste from mainly imperialist countries led by the United States and the Western allies and these were his directives and this is not just the first time he's doing that, it's the second time he has pronounced a lockdown without looking at the plight of the Kenyan workers in his address. So he locked out the country at least two weeks ago, complete lockdown and then he put up a curfew which was running almost between 8 p.m. to the following day at 6 p.m. and he did not accompany those lockdown directives with any scientific process. So we have we have been demanding that the president embraces the scientific way to address the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown should be accompanied by mass vaccination and mass testing of workers and this should not be limited to only the rich elite in our country because we have seen that after the lockdown the president and his billionaire class has been at the forefront in terms of taking videos and photographs of themselves taking vaccine but there is no such a process of vaccination of testing of the workers irregardless of their class element. Of course that confirms the biasness of the capitalist state that continues to dominate us that it is pro-the-rich minority. The second demand that we are putting forward by the workers union and the communist party of Kenya in leadership was we needed a counter-social policy to push on the workers and we were very clear from our demands that the workers will not die out of hunger for the rich to avoid dying of COVID so we were very clear that the president should encompass a counter-social policy to cushion the workers from dying of hunger and one of them one of the demands was suspension of all rents in affected counties because we are sure that the landlords will still have money in the bank to eat while the number of suicide rates have increased among the workers and even not suicide rates are dead from hunger and the second thing was to implement food subsidies because we can see the supermarkets are doubling up their prices during the lockdown the austerity measures the second layer of taxes on austerity measures that the government has implemented on the fuel levy is still eating on the working class so without any counter-social policies then it could only expect a confrontation with the masses of the Kenyan people then the third demand that we also highlighted to the government is that they have been using actually they have weaponized the pandemic they have used the COVID-19 to access a multinational loans from neoliberal institutions like World Bank and IMF and these these loans have not been fully disclosed to the Kenyan people so I demand that all the loans that are being negotiated under the critics of containing the COVID-19 we should have a full disclosure of those loans and a total freeze because we have seen that the the monies that have been accessed before have been only been used to cushion the mostly the the owners of businesses and with the hope that that money will trickle down to the workers and that has not happened and some of these businesses are owned by the president and his family himself like the the flower industries like the hotel industries and we are saying that he should freeze all that money that is being advanced to only the business class and try to come up with a scientific way to cushion the majority of the Kenyan people against you know the effects of the pandemic and finally the unions were demanding a total freeze on all political projects and the political projects we have one main political project that is being advanced by the current political class in Kenya and it is called the building bridges initiatives which is sucking almost billions of money from the taxes in the on the pretext that they are uniting the country based on you know choosing leaders from various tribes so those were our firm demands and that led us to the protest in the streets the first protest actually took place very successfully and it was well covered by the media within Nairobi the second protest also the convergence of the masses and the workers took place but then the police cracked down on the demonstrators and this was we were very clear that the COVID-19 cannot be used to suspend economic social and political rights of the Kenyan masses so we are not going to accept to you know to stay at home you know and just be anxious waiting to die and not go to you know to convey the the the information because we have the right in our country now to assemble and express our own ideas and communicate to the people we are putting power to effect the policies that could cushion the poor people and the workers so after the crackdown of the demonstration six of our members were arrested during the demonstration process actually in the middle of addressing a press conference and then we called off and we relocated back to the our headquarters communist party of Kenya headquarters and in under one hour the kenya police raided our headquarters again and arrested under arrested 12 workers in our party headquarters and with they did not have any saturation they did not have any court orders to to raid our offices and in that way we protested again against these heinous actions under the presidential directive that that should come to an end of course at the moment the six comrades that were arrested in Nairobi during the protest were actually prosecuted and find as they were fined about 3000 shillings each under the public act the public health act and they were told that they have gone against the presidential directive to contain the COVID-19 virus so that that was settled and they are free the second group of comrades that were arrested from our party headquarters were detained in Kilelesio police station which is next to our offices just a few meters from our offices and they were detained without being you know told why they were being detained and these took place for about eight hours and they were released in the evening of you know of their arrest and again once they were released on a police bond they were expected to go to court you know after two days which they went yesterday to court unfortunately when they were in court there were no charges pressed against them and they were only called to come back on Monday to face you know to face undisclosed charges and and all this is just a way to intimidate you know the the masses and intimidate the communist party of Kenya from organizing you know many actions against the unpeople policies that is being driven by the new colonial jubilee administration that we have in Kenya today absolutely and this context just wanted to get some more background information on the policies of the government itself you mentioned how the government has been working over the past year through the pandemic the kind of policies it has pursued but could you also tell us a bit about the larger framework of the Huru Kenyatta government as well and its links to say the imperialist powers you're talking about the the government of the day and even the so-called main opposition leaders have now joined hands because they are working on their own interest and the interest is mainly of the Kompadu bourgeoisie actually they are even so weak to oppress the Kenyan people that they have to form alliances of oppression with their you know with their class initiatives in the west but if we have to look at Huru Kenyatta's policies when it when Huru Kenyatta started his reign he he actually posed as progressing he even called himself a pan-africanist and all these were lies because he was facing you know charges at at international criminal court and since the communist party of Kenya had taken a very firm stand that ICC is an imperialist outfit and do not you know venture they should not venture in the internal affairs of the Kenyan people so for a moment the president embraced the communist party of Kenya for for his own selfish reason to try and advance you know the so-called pan-africanism agenda even in his speech during the swearing in he mentioned that he will offer the people of Palestine land here to build their to build their embassy he said that he will be glad to meet the Cuban administration and he mentioned all sorts of things but this was a clever way to try and you know pitch himself as a progressive president but in actual sense President Huru Kenyatta comes from the layer of the the rich elite from our country remember his father Jomo was one of the sellouts that after independence that became our president so immediately after the ICC charges against the president was uplifted and he was sure that he was free he went back to you know to pursue neoliberal policies and we could see him embracing Tony Blair with his friends in in the Britain and having a homemade with the Queen and trying to embrace the United States of America for the first time even inviting Barack Obama to come to our country so in that way we have seen his foreign policy was driven only by opportunism because of his conditions that he has been facing but he has confirmed in the last six years that he is indeed only an imperialist puppet that is driving the neoliberal agenda you know to to actually impoverish the Kenyan people more and some of these policies that he has pursued in the in in the past is very manipulative because he's trying to get more loans from the east and west and trying to manipulate the other and we can see that the county is sinking in debt and he has not delivered any single policy even the ones that are entrenched in the Kenyan constitution that regards to the social rights of the workers because after the constitutional reform in our country we were very clear that we need right to food we need right to work with dignity that we need not just a minimum wage as as as entrenched but we need a living wage and even though those aspects or progressive elements of our constitutions are there the president Uru Kanyata has not implemented any acts or laws through the parliament to actually make sure that such are implemented otherwise his government has been has only proven to be corrupt in the sense that after the covid pandemic there is a big story in Kenya about the covid 19 billionaires where his billionaire class you know took several monies through you know fake tendering processes and those tender fake tendering processes unfortunately most of the the companies that even participated in those tenders were owned by his members of the family so in terms of both domestic and foreign policy the jubilee administration under the leadership of President Uru Kanyata has only confirmed the policies of a new colonial capitalist system that is being you know used by the imperialist powers abroad absolutely and we can finally one last question like although there's been a very strong tradition of leftist opposition I understand that the communist party of Kenya was registered only this year and that was due to some very reactionary laws that were prevailing in Kenya for the longest time so could you maybe take us through these laws and also what is the current state of the party the kind of movements it's organizing in its plans as well you arrived and in fact the communist party of Kenya is a product of the struggle of the Kenyan masses it was not given to us and that is why we are saying we will defend its existence for many years during dictator Moe then in 1990s we operated only underground and we could not come out to do our activities in a very overt way but the Kenyan people were determined to struggle to make sure that the progressive ideas actually see the light of the day and our our our our work today is to ensure that no no actually no progressive policies that that we have won over the past is reversed by this administration because we know that we paid very heavy price to have the communist party of Kenya accepted in the Kenyan in the Kenyan context in fact we have very many martyrs that were martyred in the streets of Nairobi that their blood will never go in vain just for you know a criminal government to try to reverse the fights of the people so in actual sense that happened for in the in the entire 1990s and in 1997 even though we did very minimal activities overtly we were only able to do it under the name social democratic party of Kenya but we were never reformist we have never been reformist we are a clear Marxist and Leninist party but in those circumstances of those bourgeois legal illegalities and legalities we were not able to do our work overtly now it came to 2010 when we fought for the new constitution and the Kenyan masses won and in fact we take a lot of pride in that constitutional even though communist party of Kenya do not see their struggle ending with constitutionalism but we are very clear that there are certain you know benefits for the masses within the 2010 constitution including you know freedom of thought just like the one we have an assembly and association and organization of the communist party anyway after that of course our party was not just attacked openly but they decided to implement imperialist or capitalist stages among our ranks and that also delayed the process of us evolving to become a communist party of Kenya so it was only last year in January that we triumphed through both street protest and judicial activism to ensure that we change our name to reflect who we are from the social democratic party of Kenya to communist party of Kenya so we were not surprised by Mr Kenyatta's regime you know storming and our offices because we know the character of the state that he runs and we know that now that the economic situation in Kenya is getting worse and the communist party of Kenya is moving from strength to strength then we know that his fears are alive because we are threatening his positions of privilege he only embraced us because he thought we were weak but as we continue to capture the mind of the Kenyan working class and expand our ranks among the masses he has continued to be a man intimidated and living in fear and in fact we are only can expect worse reactions from him in the coming days because he has no options you know to protect the Kenyan poor people so instead of actually starting policies to cushion them he has opted to even buying the opposition remember Mr Odinga who forms one of the biggest you know bourgeois political parties that pretended to be antagonistic with the jubilee administration is now both and is with Mr Kenyatta and they are driving anti-people policies and they are driving politics of divisional tribalism in our country and even two months ago before this crackdown there was an attempt in the parliament to try and ban class trouble and we came back very clearly warning the state that the class trouble is a moment of history and there is no way any bourgeois legality is going to limit us from advancing our only strategy which is the class struggle because Kenya is itself a class society we are divided in the house and have notes we are we are divided in the property and property and the property less and even we have seen that even the judicial system favors only the people with money the police harassment is only you know against the poor people the the rich people are not facing the same difficulties so the whole talk of unity in a class society of course those are people that you know they have ideas of the old society the old talk of unity between the rich and the poor without the rich you know without the poor killing the riches you know it's just a dream of the current status quo so we are determined to advance this problem even more militantly and we hope that we are only asking the masses to be firmly with us as we continue to show them that we are honest and we are driving the agenda that will you know move us from a neoliberal capitalist system so that we oversee a revolution and start building our country towards socialism so those are my remarks comrade and I look forward to interacting with you all thank you so much booker for talking to us that's all we have time for today keep watching 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