Boondoggles and bombs.

Something was detonated fourteen floors down from where I was working this afternoon. We all heard the explosion - a deep rumble that caused the walls to thrum, the windows to rattle and the four secretaries I could see to dive under their work stations. I was in the middle of deciding whether regulation 22 of the Value Added Tax Regulations, 2014 (draft) required a "shall" or a "may", so I didn't pay the Loud Noise any mind. I'm not trying to puff myself up; I am not brave, but really I didn't notice that I was in danger until it was quite too late.

When I eventually yanked myself away from my beloved Value Added Tax Regulations, 2014 (draft), I saw what I believe has become a common sight; hundreds of Kenyans thronging curiously around the site of the detonation, the police looking increasingly frazzled and the opportunist with his bag of goodies out to make a fast buck. I wondered whether the police appreciated that these days very powerful explosives come in very small packages and whoever had decided to leave that little gem outside Treasury might have wanted to wipe out the gung-ho "bomb squad" that set off the damn thing in the first place. I was rather surprised, though, that David Mole Kimaiyo did not wander down from his steel and concrete encased tower fifty metres from the scene to find out what his boys were up to.

Among some of my hosts erupted an animated discussion of the effectiveness of CCTV cameras in stopping criminals and terrorists in their tracks. In their vivid expositions, if there had been CCTV cameras, and if these cameras were positions around a sensitive building such as the National Treasury, and if they were working, and if they were manned, then the man or woman who decided to leave the suspicious package outside the National Treasury's southern wall would have been seen, and the police would have been alerted, they would have swung into action and nabbed the miscreant before he or she got away. Let us pause and consider that even along Harambee Avenue, speed is not something that characterises the police even if they are coming to your rescue out of Vigilance House, exactly twenty-five metres from the scene of the detonation.

Do not forget for a minute that the United States and the United Kingdom have hundreds of thousands of cameras watching sensitive places, yet even in the United States where "national security" is an obsession, deranged gunmen, every now and then, seem to run amok even in military camps. The casualties are usually fellow armed men. The cameras were useless to stop the gunmen. And this is in a nation with highly trained policemen. Kenya doe not have highly trained policemen, except the ones dedicated to keeping nabobs, nawabs, mandarins, apparats and the like from being blown to kingdom come by some crazy bomber. CCTVs will be completely worthless in stopping crime, let alone investigating it.

The CCTV contract is a massive, billion-shilling boondoggle. It will, as our beloved Jubilee has become used to, degenerate into an accusation-and-counteraccusation slug-fest before Safaricom quietly backs out of the whole thing and pretends it never happened. The Commander-in-Chief will never mention it again. One of the malcontents of the United Republican Party will make much noise about it in a bid to make a name for himself. Kenyans will move on. And for a few days or a few weeks, political theatre will paper over the fact that we do not have a credible national disaster-preparedness policy that has the acceptance and support of the people. One day again (do not forget 15 August, 1998) there will be a suspicious package and it will be a bomb and it will be detonated and many Kenyans will be murdered.