Here comes the whirlwind.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.
Hosea viii: 7

It is not every day that over 40 policemen are expertly ambushed and mowed down by gunfire in the dead of night as they pursue brigands making away with livestock. It is not every day that the government stands impotent in the face of escalating provocations. It is not every day that the loud silence of our armies of human rights organisations stand mute as families lose breadwinners and protectors at the hands of the scum of the universe. It is not every day that a nation shrugs its shoulders after the commission of a heinous crime and goes about its business as if dead police were not someone's parent, sibling, spouse or child. We continue to place the welfare of our police on the back-burner; our obsession is with the election of one or more of "our people". We continue to turn a blind eye to their depredations because we blame them for their venality without accepting that we force them to be venal. We have sown the wind; when the whirlwind comes, we will have no one to blame but the face in the mirror.

The escalation of the attacks on security forces has been disguised by common violent crime incidents. When the police were first deployed to the Tana Delta, no expected them to be ambushed, though they were. No expected the "riots" in Kisumu to include co-ordinated attacks on police stations and the holding of police officers hostage for brief periods. Everyone assumed that the cattle-rustling incidents in Samburu would be resolved as they usually are—by the deployment of contingent of regular police, a disarmament exercise that lasts a week and the recovery of some of the stolen animals. No one expected a sophisticated ambush, including the use of special tactics such as long-distance sniper attacks. But it was the savagery of the attackers that calls for pause. If they were capable of mounting such an ambush, why did they do it in the first place? They had made away with the livestock; their pursuers were not good enough; they could have gotten away. Why did they choose to murder the police, just as police were murdered in the Tana Delta?

Isn't it time we started considering whether Kenya is being primed for great violence in 2013? These escalating attacks on the police may just be a way of testing their training, tactics and response capability in the face of these continued extreme provocations. Someone surely must have considered that the units that would be deployed to respond touch whole-scale slaughter of law enforcement officers would be the general Service Unit and the Rapid Deployment Unit of the Administration Police. Are the people behind the violence against the police testing the response of these two elite units? If so why? They must also be testing the capacity of the National Intelligence Service to anticipate such incidents and its capacity to gather intelligence to head them off. Is the poor police response an indication of intelligence gaps in the nation or incompetence at the NIS? The continued murder of police should scare the living daylights out of every Kenyan.