Mission shift?

You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave. ~ The Eagles, Hotel California

According to some, the decade that Mwai Kibaki presided over was largely peaceful; the extreme violence of 2007/2008 was an aberration. We would love to perpetuate this myth because Mwai Kibaki was largely seen as a peaceable, laid back potentate, willing to give his ministers a free hand to administer his government with little supervision. That is the rose-tinted-glasses view of the naive and the the whitewashers of history, because Mwai Kibaki's reign was bloody setting the stage for the 2007/2008 violence.

Uhuru Kenyatta has his share of headaches, but they will not be sorted out if he is determined to tread the same path that Mwai Kibaki trod between 2003 and 2012. Where Mwai Kibaki directed his ministers of internal security to destroy the Mungiki by any means necessary, Uhuru Kenyatta seems to have directed them to destroy the Shabaab by any meas necessary too. Under Mr Kibaki, the Minister of State in the Office of the President in Charge of Internal Security and Provincial Administration became the avenging angel set to right the wrongs of runaway crime. The Kenya Police Force and its covert units were implicated in so many extra-judicial murders of Mungikis that even the United Nations couldn't ignore the river of blood.

Uhuru Kenyatta has directed his Cabinet Secretaries for Interior and Co-ordination of National Government to deal with the terrorists threat. Both have pursued a strategy similar to Mwai Kibaki's, save for the rampant assassination of suspected threats. What they have done is to focus their attention on Kenyan citizens with cultural and ethnic links to Somalia. At one time thousands were rounded up and detained under hostile conditions at a national stadium. Thousands were deported from Kenya. How many remain under surveillance or are still being harassed remains unclear. What is clear, in the wake of the Garissa Massacre, is that the steady-as-she-goes strategy is not bearing fruit. Now that we are doubling down on the strategy with United States' support should worry us all.

The dedication of so much public safety and national security resources to the destruction of a foreign enemy has diverted significant attention from the problems in our trouble spots in the upper and hostile reaches of the Rift Valley. The seemingly intractable enmity among the Turkana, Pokot, Borana and Samburu keeps claiming lives, both civilian and uniformed. The proliferation of sophisticated small arms adds fuel to this blaze. A new strategy is called for. A paradigm shift is needed. But this is the Government of Kenya. When it makes a decision to pursue a course of action, it will do so come hell or high water. To paraphrase The Eagles, it seems that once the Government of Kenya checked into this particular hotel, it can never leave.