Colonia-era National Security.

I could kick myself. That is the thing about hindsight. If it was possible to kick one's butt, we could hardly ever sit down. All I had to do was ignore my parents and my teachers and concentrate instead on getting out of school at the earliest opportunity for a lesson in street economics. And because whether I attended school or not would not affect my near eidetic memory, all those tense years in catechism class would pay off, Victor-Kanyari-style. Obviously, that option can no longer be exercised because I sat for my KSCE without putting my parent's academic chops to shame. I should have, though.

That would have opened up the world of national security. Julius Karangi and David Kimaiyo are not interested in the best of the best; they would have been pretty excited if I brought them my C-, with an impressive D in maths, D in any of the sciences, D in social studies but gentleman's Cs in English and Swahili. After all when "communicating" with other Kenyans, passable English and Swahili would be de rigeur. Depending on the more accommodating of the two, I would have climbed up the ranks until I got stuck somewhere in the lucrative, modest money-making middle. I'd be too junior for the muckety mucks to notice, but senior enough to command my own men.

Godmen. Police. Soldiers on deployment. I think it is only union bosses left who haven't yet brought infamy upon their houses regarding sensitive matters. Victor Kanyari is the ghost of Christmas past for the whole church. The police are a law unto themselves and it is why they sneer snidely every time some civil rights industrialist goes on the warpath about graft in the ranks and human rights abuses. The army, on the other hand, is beloved - so long as it is kicking in doors or setting manyattas alight Over There. Now that Kapedo and its environs are receiving the attention that Mt Elgon did a few years ago, many Kenyans are cheering on their soldiers in the fight against banditry. If a few livestock animals get in the way, a few shop windows are smashed, a few houses set ablaze, and a few women are left weeping bitterly for the television cameras, it is a small price to pay to teach those bandits a lesson.

We were silent when traditional policing failed the peoples of Mt Elgon and the army was deployed there. The Independent Medico-Legal Unit visited Mt Elgon and recorded abuses on a scale not seen since the Wagallah Massacre two decades earlier. We may disagree about the inanity of the politics among the cattle-rustlers among the Turkana, the Ilchamus, the Pokot, the Samburu and the police, but by simply cheering on the rapine by the Kenya Defence Forces because it is not us at the receiving end of the "disarmament operation", but the more these operations become regular, the more they will become common in traditionally "secure" areas. 

The reason why families liquidate their holdings in order to buy a recruitment into the police or the defence forces has none to do with desire to serve the nation, but the opportunities to secure families' futures for generations to come. By the time the dreaded spy chief Kanyottu died, he was akin to a colonial-era landowner for all the land he owned and became the subject of vicious battles among his heirs. Former Chief of General Staff the late Gen Mulinge practically owned much of Kathiani. That is the lesson hundreds of thousands of Kenyans have drawn from our security services since independence. It is why the legitimacy of police deployments in bandit-prone areas is low, and why even the deployment of the army when the police fail is not a panacea.

Policing is in the shitter and domestic deployments of the army are about as welcome as skunk spray. Police reforms are meaningless if the founding principles of policing in Kenya remain unchanged. Since the Shifta Wars and the Wagallah Massacre, the army's legitimacy is only high when it is on short overseas deployments, especially on peacekeeping missions for the United Nations. But domestic deployments have always led to gross abuses which the supine profit-driven media houses have only been too happy to ignore for ever fatter favours from the powers-that-be. Kapedo will end badly. We will never find out. The police will never be reformed. And the army will remain a darling of the people - so long as it deals with Those People and not us.