The right partnership.

This blogger dares you to find any intelligent Kenyan who believes the National Police Service or the National Police Service Commission are intelligent or professional. This blogger dares you to classify the Administration Police as the cutting-edge in national security or public safety. Individual units, such as the Criminal Investigations Department and the General Service Unit (and its Recce Squad) have received deserved plaudits, but by an large, Kenyans view their police and police commission with undisguised loathing.

For this reason, millions of Kenyans greeted the attempted explanations by the Inspector-general with derision and hurtful mockery. The Inspector-General has been to a real school and obtained real degrees to boot. It is whispered in certain quarters that he is a doctoral candidate in one of Kenya's finer institutions of higher learning. At one point in his illustrious career, he headed the brutally, scarily effective GSU Presidential Escort Unit. You would not know this to listen to his ham-fisted atempts at setting the story straight about Westgate, narcotics trafficking in Kenya, high-profile murders, or anytjhing to do with the security mess at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Nor can you trust that his spokespersons will do a better communications job; other than the colourful Eric Kiraithe and the eloquent Charles Owino, these characters have cemented the impression in Kenyans' minds that any relationship that the National Police Service has with the English language (or Swahili, for the purists among us) is purely accidental.

This blogger has argued in the past that until the mandate of national policing shifts from national security to public safety, we will never have the police service that we deserve but the police force that we universally loath (and deride.) With the mulish determination to see everything in national security hues, just like the United States federal government, the people are a threat, to be corralled and controlled. The people cannot be trusted to do the right thing; they are to be feared as undeclared fifth columnists of foreign powers or transnational criminal networks. It is for this reason that draconian laws that treat even public officers like a threat are yet to be repealed  a decade after the Second Liberation war was declared won by the leading luminaries of the National Rainbow Coalition. Instead, even more draconian laws have been enacted, dozens of Kenyans have been renditioned to parts unknown, and the civic space necessary for democratic discourse has slowly been occupied by the oppressively mighty presence of the Government.

A change of focus from national security to public safety will see both objectives of a secure Government and a safe public achieved. The elements of national security truly charged with ensuring the continuity of government would find the field clear for them to go after enemies of the nation, whether or not these are synonymous with enemies of the government. The police, on the other hand, would develop new partnerships with county governments and municipal authorities to provide for a safe environment for Kenyans and visitors alike to engage in an activity the Government would encourage: the creation of wealth.

A partnership, for example, between the Nairobi City County government and the National Police Service would identify that the key drivers of violent crime are interconnected: poor traffic management, poor civic facilities; corruption among the police and City Fathers alike. A functioning partnership between the two institutions would ensure that street lights work; drains and sewers function; potholes are urban legends; physical plans are enforced (and complied with) without favour; and the corrupt in the public service are hounded out of the system and jailed. The spectre of an inarticulate Inspector-General as the laughingstock of the nation would be a thing of the past. The image of a bombastic but ineffective Governor would be banished to the ash-heap of history. More importantly, the people would have faith again in the institutions of government. That is the key; until our faith in government is restored, it will invite contempt, ridicule and ill-will.