Ngilu: Arrest was humiliating
2007-08-05 18:06
Nairobi - Kenya's health minister and highest-ranking female politician, Charity Ngilu, said on Sunday her brief detention by police last week for freeing an arrested activist was a deliberate "humiliation".
Ngilu was held twice on Thursday and Friday, then freed on a
court order, in chaotic scenes linked to a week of protests over
a controversial move by Kenyan members of parliament to give
themselves a massive pay rise.
The flamboyant one-time presidential candidate had forced
her way into Nairobi's central police station to rescue
protester Ann Njogu, whom Ngilu said was being roughed up by
officers.
"I have myself been subjected to police brutality, so I know what that person, Ann Njogu, was undergoing. I took her to
hospital. Was that a crime?" Ngilu said in an interview with Kenya's Sunday Nation newspaper.
Fiery champion of women's rights
"I was not asking for special treatment, but I think they took it too far. They did not have to subject me to that kind of humiliation. Somebody just wanted to exhibit crude, raw power."
Internal Security Minister John Michuki, who runs the
police, has not commented.
A fiery champion of women's rights, Ngilu is a political
heavyweight whom the opposition hope to lure away from President
Mwai Kibaki's administration before a December election.
Analysts say her brush with the law may hasten that,
particularly if police carry out a threat to press charges for
helping a suspect escape custody.
The detention of such a high-profile figure took attention
away from several days of demonstrations by civil rights groups
against the plan to grant Kenyan MPs more than $20m in
"severance pay" packages ahead of the vote.
Under a new bill, the 222 MPs would receive 12.5% of
their annual earnings, backdated to January 2003.
Having voted themselves a four-fold salary rise as the first
order of business in the new parliament in 2003, the legislators
are already some of the world's best-paid.
A typical Kenyan legislator already earns about $12 000 a month, including allowances, compared to $250 for a teacher.
A Sunday Nation opinion poll found that 92.4% of
Kenyans were opposed to the severance package.
The parliamentarians say they need the cash for travelling to
remote constituencies and to cope with queues of supplicants.