All Africa Games, Part 3

Even if we hadn't been taken for a ride by the architects (makes them sound like professionals) of the Anglo Leasing scandal (they are professional swindlers), the Kenya Police, now known as the National Police, and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, which was once known as the Criminal Investigations Department, would have had a forensics laboratory built for it. In this laboratory, this blogger's fevered imagination runs to, would be found boffins from all scientific backgrounds and they would have the capacity to identify forensic evidence collected by forensics collection teams from scenes of crime and link the forensic evidence to perpetrators or causes of crimes. And because of the forensic scientists, this blogger has absolutely no doubt, the National Police would have an eminently enviable record in Africa, perhaps the world even, in investigating and solving complex crimes.

However, the more pragmatic side of this blogger has come to certain predictable conclusions. These rely on a simple rule, though it is not necessarily simplistic: future action is determined by past behaviour. Civil servants - public servants in today's constitutional parlance - have had opportunities to make a good name for themselves and the Republic in the past. The 1987 All Africa Games were an opportunity for Kenya to shine on a continental scale. This nation was justifiably proud of its sporting tradition, especially in the long distance and middle distance races. What the Games will be remembered for, however, is the grift an American pulled on the whole country to get away with two hundred millions of our shillings.

That American gave the architects (there goes that word again) of the Goldenberg scandal the wings to not just fly, but soar. And today we have Anglo Leasing but no CID forensics laboratory, no police communications system, no postal corporation communications system, and no prisons communications system. (This blogger really doesn't believe that the Kenya Prisons Service needs a new or even an "advanced" communications system; its inmates seem to do very well with the one they currently have. It remains unknown how many billions these entrepreneurial inmates have made in the past decade.)

Which allows us to neatly segue into the fifteen-billion-shilling Safaricom-Interior Ministry deal to supply communications and surveillance equipment to the National Police. We have seen this movie before, haven't we? In the wake of the US embassy bombing in 1998, Anglo Leasing came to being - like a demon seed. The past year has seen an escalation of terror attacks and runaway violent crime and so the demands for the government to do something, anything, to stop the wave of terror. With Anglo Leasing, it was not about the overall price of the contract but specific provisions of the contracts that screwed us over. It is these provisions that allowed a man called Anura Perera to make like a bandit and another called Deepak Kamani to smile like the cat that swallowed the canary.

This blogger has no doubt that the Member for Tiaty (PNU) and the chairman of the National Assembly's House Committee on Administration and National Security is a conscientious elected representative, but he has not demonstrated that, especially when investigating the Westgate siege,  he can be trusted to follow the trail wherever it may lead when it comes to the Safaricom-Harambee House deal. If Kenyans had confidence that the MP was a gifted bloodhound, capable of sniffing out dodgy contractual clauses and holding the Interior Cabinet Secretary's feet to the fire, many would rest easy knowing that their concerns were being taken seriously. But after the Mpeketoni attacks where allegations that Safaricom's network was hacked and jammed, perhaps we are better off spending the fifteen billion on another armoured personnel carrier for the Commander-in-Chief.

Governments the world over use fear to get people to agree to all sorts of expensive boondoggles. This Safaricom-Harambee House white elephant is a humdinger - small enough to pass the appropriations committees, big enough for someone to buy an island in the South Pacific. Or the Bahamas. And because we do not have gifted defenders of the public interest - those charged with this duty are busily lining their pockets as fast as they can - Kenyans will continue to be felled by bombers, grenade throwers, gunmen and all manner of killers. This is mightily speculative, but there is no reason why ten years from now another multibillion shilling security system shouldn't be purchased on account of the deteriorating security situation while the Commander-in-Chief makes TV ads and the Interior Cabinet Secretary is mercilessly lampooned on social media. We seem to love sequels to movies that have the same script.