Immigration and national defense.

National defense - not national security - is a complex arrangement. One of its principal components is a coherent foreign policy and, its corollary, a coherent immigration policy. So it was rather startling to hear the Elgeyo Marakwet senator mention "immigration" on national TV in one of his longwinded and self-serving responses to the CORD #SabaSaba rally. Given that he was trying to show up CORD's Junet Mohamed (Suna East, ODM) it is understandable that Mr Murkomen was unable to elaborate on what exactly he though immigration reform would entail in the long war against al Shabaab attacks in Kenya, now in its seventh year.

I have alluded to the problems bedeviling our foreign policy before. It is time to re-examine our foreign policy in the context of immigration into Kenya. Kenya has always had immigrants, whether they were wazungus escaping harsh winters in the winters of their lives, or refugees fleeing death and famine from Somalia, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda or Congo.  There are many hardworking immigrants who have contributed positively to the economy of Kenya, whether as employers, managers, entrepreneurs, investors or workers. There are many who have enriched our universities and colleges with their outlook on key issues. 

Baba Moi's serikali is notable for the explosion in the eating pathogen. Every civil servant with an ounce of discretionary power took to Jomo Kenyatta dictum to eat where one was with avid earnestness and during Moi's twenty-four year ruinous rule, some of the fattest eaters were to be found in the Office of the President, State Department for Immigration. By the time the hapless Otieno Kajwang was coming along as waziri, we were no longer talking of the rot having set in, but the rot being the only thing that defined the Immigration Department and its counterpart, the Registrar of Persons.

Work permits, national identity cards, birth certificates, passports and refugee cards were all for sale for a price. It did not matter whether one was a génocidaire, a drugs smuggler, a poacher, a pederast, a murderer or an inveterate cheat; all one needed was the right connection with the right civil servant and Kenyan permanent residency or even citizenship could be had. Kenya has always been welcoming; corrupt civil servants have taken advantage of our hospitality to abet the perpetration of some of the worst crimes known to humanity.

The 1998 embassy bombing, the 2007 Kampala-bound bus grenade attack and the 2013 Westgate mall attack were all perpetrated by foreign nationals will genuine papers, so the scuttle-butt goes. These attacks would have been difficult to mount if these people would have had to be smuggled in, rather than the easy stroll across the border with papers purchased from a civil servant with the determination to follow in the lead set by Kenya's top political leadership.

Mr Murkomen might be the President's stalking horse regarding immigration reform; indeed it might be another of the Jubilee's red herrings designed to distract Kenyans from more pressing problems. But now that the subject has been broached, it behooves us to have a serious discussion of what it means to reform our immigration policy. Even the United States is realising that immigration is increasingly more of a commercial concern than just a purely security one. In Kenya this has been a reality since the Imperial British East Africa Company set up here. (And then went bankrupt.) This is an area that should be well suited to parliamentary examination. However, parliamentary committees are now loaded guns used to browbeat and extort Cabinet Secretaries, rather than the last bastion for serious thought and considered debate. How we thread this needle will determine whether we can begin the long process of defining our foreign policy and our immigration policy in the context of the defense of the nation.