The Senate is still lost.

We solve our problems using statutory measures. We make laws to solve problems. That's just who we are, what we have been programmed to be. So it is no surprise that the Senate believes that it can fight the Shabaab, and other national security threats, using statutory measures. This is the genesis of the proposal to establish the National Security Emergency Service, which, minus the Commander-in-Chief, will essentially be a re-hash of the National Security Council. It is also one of the stupidest ideas ever conceived by the Senate, and that is saying something.

Kenya's problems have never been about the law, but its enforcement. The colonial government, which had a penchant for enacting patently racist laws, was always cherry-picking which of those laws it would enforce and which ones it would give the stink eye to. Dividing and conquering was so ingrained in the colonial government that it became an article of faith for post-independence Government of Kenya in its zeal to appear "civilised" and Anglicised like its colonial forebear. As a result, the government has enacted hundreds of laws but enforced them selectively. The result has been chaos, confusion and, every now and then, great crimes such as the Mpeketoni and Garissa massacres.

The Senate is living in a colonial utopia where to make laws is seen to be doing something in solving our challenges. I doubt very much the authors of this scheme have examined the statutory landscape or learned anything from it. We have a robust statutory regime when it comes to the security of the nation, and we still retain the death penalty for treason and waging war against Kenya. What we do not have is an effective enforcement ethos; we pick and choose which laws to enforce, against whom to enforce them and then we cry foul when elements of the Shabaab sneak past border guards and intelligence officers and murder with wild abandon.

The structure of of the securocracy does not need more rearranging-of-the-deckchairs-on-the-Titanic moments as the Senate is proposing. Throwing more money at the securocracy will not make it any better or effective either. Transparency and accountability are the only tools in the toolbox that we haven't tried. Securocrats are a law unto themselves, accountable to no one, with their operations remaining as clear as mud. Crucial documents that would explain how they make decisions, why they make certain decisions, and the outcomes of those decisions remain swaddled in secrecy, unavailable even to those who should know.

It is shocking that the Northern Frontier remains, in the Twenty-first Century, a punishment posting for the foot-soldiers in the war against the Shabaab, North Rift cattle-rustling bandits and Ethiopian and South Sudanese invaders. Instead of deploying seasoned, well-trained, well-equipped and highly motivated personnel to these zones, Vigilance House and its counterparts in the Directorate of Criminal Intelligence, the National Intelligence Service, the Immigration Department and the Kenya Defence Forces deploy raw recruits and personnel facing disciplinary proceedings, including for graft. How the proposed National Security Emergency Service will resolve this colonial culture remains a mystery that even the Senate is powerless to resolve.

To think outside the box, as is the Senate's intention, the Senate needs to know what the box confines. The Senate has no clue what is in the box. Nor does its counterpart, the National Security Council. It is why Parliament still falls back on statutory measures to fight wars. There isn't a nation in the world that has ever won a war using statutory measures. Look at the United States' war on drugs. Since 1972, the Drug Enforcement Administration has consumed more than five hundred billion dollars yet the cocaine market in the United States alone is worth one hundred billion dollars every year. "Tougher" laws and tougher sentencing guidelines have not won them this war. Neither, it seems, is the thirteen trillion dollars the US has poured into its global war on terror. Osama bin Laden may be dead and gone, but his poisonous legacy lives on.

If our Senate is determined to plow the same field that the mighty US government has plowed with such dismal results, perhaps Okoa Kenya is right to question the utility of that chamber. There is no reason for Kenyans to be saddled with a two-chamber parliament determined to dress up a pig in lipstick and tell us it is the next Victoria's Secret cover girl.