Are they really modern security services, Mr Gaitho?

That modern and well-funded security services are so often made fools of by a handful of Al-Shabaab gunmen or a ragtag bunch of cattle rustlers and bandits speaks volumes. ~ Macharia Gaitho, Daily Nation.

The Kenya Defence Forces, the National Intelligence Service and the National Police Service exist, as institutions, in the twenty-first century but to consider them "modern security services" is a step too far, especially when their cultures and sensibilities harken back to colonial Kenya - the age of the askari and the Special Branch goon. It is not the tools at their disposal or the training they undergo that make them modern; it is how they see themselves in the firmament of national security and public safety.

Jomo Kenyatta, Baba Moi and Mwai Kibaki were old school colonial taskmasters, though Mwai Kibaki disguised it well. In the employment and deployment of the security services, all three had the same priorities: preserve the "State", meaning their sometimes tenuous grip on power; protect the "State", meaning arrest, detain and otherwise destroy every opposition voice; and promote the interests of the "State" which happened to happily align with their bank account and real estate portfolios.

Jomo Kenyatta had no reason to deploy the army to quell rebellions in Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan or Somalia; he had his own Shifta War to prosecute back home. Neither did Baba Moi; after the foolish 1982 attempt to unseat him, he constitutionally formalised a situation that had prevailed since 1969 - and jailed every opposition leader his security services could lay their hands on. Mwai Kibaki, after setting the security services on the Mungiki had to find something for them to do and as it happens the Shabaab presented him with just such an opportunity. So he sent them to Somalia and we have paid a heavy price for it since then.

Proud as we are of our soldiers, they are not made to fight wars. The lately departed Chief of Defence Forces set an excellent example for his officers - his corpulence is being emulated up and down the ranks. Across the East African region, Museveni and Kagame, former guerrilla fighters both, maintain a trim figure while our general staff looks like it is living in the last days of the Roman Empire. Modern? Pull the other one, Mr Gaitho.

The shape that our security services are used to is the shape where their heels are on our necks, we are silent, and they can eat all the pork they can find. The petty larceny by soldiers during the Westgate Mall was not an anomaly but the norm. With the colonial mindset that prevails in the National Security Council and the upper echelons of the securocracy, the people are a threat to the security services and not partners in securing the country or protecting the people.