Monday, April 21, 2014

We must play our proper roles.

It is a strange thing to witness the floundering national security apparatus going about the business of finding terrorists and their sympathisers in the full glare of the print, broadcast and social media. It is unusual for the people to have the full facts about security operations; they are usually secret. The security apparatus in Kenya is unaccustomed from communicating effectively. The optics, as US politicians would put it, are not good. The images of police on night raids in Somali-dominant neighbourhoods are a slap in the face of the liberal chatteratti in Nairobi. The response from police spokespersons and "unnamed" sources in the Interior Ministry have been blithe and unseemly.

Some of the statistics are frightening. Since 2011, there have been 84 terrorist attacks. Scores of Kenyans, both Muslim and Christian, have been murdered, scores more have been maimed, perhaps for life. The problem, we are told, is because of al Shabaab whose ranks are populated by undocumented men and women who walk among us, disguised as members of the citizenry. They possess genuine and counterfeit documents of identity including national IDs, passports and driver's licences. They operate bank accounts in our institutions of banking and own real estate in posh and not-so-posh locales. Some work in the public service. Some attend our institutions of learning. Some are our matatu drivers; others sell us the counterfeit DVDs we avidly devour because we cannot patronise the IMAXX on Mama Ngina Street.

Operation: Usalama Watch is what we have because the security apparatus we have will take a decade to reform, retrain and re-equip. The President cannot do more. Kenyans demand change. Today. They do not care for  the financial or legal constraints that hamper efforts to keep them safe. They only care that they are unable to walk home in confidence that they will not face a mad terrorist hell-bent in being the centre of the attention of 72 virgins in paradise.

For two generations, Kenyans have refused to take part in the making of key decisions, leaving it all in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. Kenyans have been persuaded for decades by politicians and bureaucrats that corruption and corrupt acts are the magic bullets to advancement in life. President Kenyatta has, not to put too fine a point to it, an insidious plan to change the shape of things. Huduma Centres are brilliant; the removal of a middle man from the process of obtaining simple, but critical, public services is a disruptor to the corruption process that many Kenyans have become resigned to. The decision to go ahead with a biometric national ID system will eliminate strangers among us because no one will hide from the national digital database. As a tool to identify terrorists and their sympathisers it will be, in military terms, a "force multiplier." If you can be identified, then you must toe the legal line.

The risk, as always, is that the National Executive may use the national database to identify "enemies of the people" who are a political threat and not a security threat. The database may be used to corral philosophical nay-sayers and harass the civil society industry for doing their work. These are baby steps Kenya is taking. It will take time for all the things that are supposed to work to work. It is too soon to say with certainty that we are wrong or we are right. It will take vigilance, both of terrorists and the government, for the system we want to take shape. It is time Kenyans got off the bench and did their part.

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