This is not 24.

Militarising policing in Kenya's forgotten bits is not the answer to the Shabaab Question, the Land Question or the Referendum Headache. The entire Northern Frontier is essentially one big Kenya Defence Forces theatre of war. Nairobi is getting its very own military unit whose mandate remains remarkably murky. The National Government approved the deployment of military units in "key highways" but we still have no idea how they decided which highways are "key" and which ones are not.

Perhaps this is the changing face of policing in Kenya after the slow-puncturing of the place of the National Intelligence Service in keeping Kenyans' safe. Militarising civilian intelligence gathering has made every solution to a public safety problem a military solution. The army is a broad sword; the police should be the scalpel. In Kenya, the police is more like a sledgehammer and every problem it encounters is a Big Nail That Must Be Hammered. In that environment, the subtlety of intelligence-gathering, analysis, and interpretation are lost to the men and women at Vigilance House and, lately, Jogoo House.

John Michuki is mostly responsible for the conversion of the police into a quasi-military force. He built up both the Administration Police and the General Service Unit to more than twice their size. The Administration Police got military-style combat equipment; the GSU expanded to a size that was too big for it to be used as a special tactics police unit. The role of the APs also changed; they were no longer used as the main element of support for the Provincial Administration but they started playing a key role in policing, further eroding the idea of the police as a purely civilian institution.

We have now come full circle, especially so in the last year. After Westgate, when it became apparent that the regular police had few specially trained units who could respond in force and at speed, the decision to simply give the job to the military seemed an obvious one. It is as if the people making decisions made this decision from watching episodes of 24! Many of the them are under the mistaken idea that force of arms alone is sufficient to pacify the nation, bring down violent crime and terrorism, and keep the civilian population safe. What they have done, instead, is to water down the military's mandate from the defence of the homeland from external military threats to that of corralling the civilian population for the purpose of the continuation of the State.

Every time militaries have been engaged in policing of restive civilian populations, such as is happening in the Northern Frontier and the Coast, they have inevitably gotten involved in politics and then they have inevitably decided that they are better disciplined and capable of running things. Militarising policing will have very bad long term outcomes. Even if there is never a military coup against the civilian government, the risks of swatting political mosquitoes with army sledgehammers only will continue to grow. Words like treason will be bandied about. Privacy will be eroded like water against a stone. Public safety will be forgotten. National security will dominate the conversation. Eventually we will have a war of our own here in our homeland. And it will be against the army, not a foreign invader.