Kenya: Health minister condemns \'humiliating\' arrest

(SomaliNet) In an open complaint, 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\".

According to reports, the Kenyan minister 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.

Ngilu, who was a 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.
\"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 $20-million in \"severance pay\" packages ahead of the vote.

Under a new bill, the 222 MPs would receive 12,5 percent 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 percent of Kenyans were opposed to the severance package.

\"It\'s an insult to hard-working Kenyans. When will it end? Who will stand up to it?\" said Nairobi watchman Geoffrey Nyana.

The parliamentarians say they need the cash for travel to remote constituencies, and to cope with queues of supplicants.-Reuters