French lessons

Like a moving target, the story of Air France Flight AF463 is a testament to Harambee House's crisis management capabilities. What we know of AF463 until it made an emergency landing at Moi International Airport in Mombasa remains the same through all the iterations of the story: somewhere overt the Indian Ocean during what would have been an eleven-hour flight between Mauritius and France, a suspicious package was discovered in a lavatory. By all accounts the flight crew acquitted themselves well as they investigated the package, keeping the passengers calm and landing safely in Mombasa.

From there on things take on a touch of the farcical. After the plane landed and the passengers evacuated from it, Kenyan authorities called in the police and the Kenya Navy to remove the suspicious package from the plane. At first, the police stated that it is a bomb and that it had been safely detonated. Then they changed their story and stated that it had not been detonated, but had been disarmed. Then they changed their story once more and stated that it was not a bomb, but a carefully designed hoax meant to sow panic among the passengers and cause the plane to crash in the ocean. In any case, the police detained six passengers, including the one who discovered the suspicious package in alerted the flight crew, for interrogation.

The Air France CEO, in Paris, had a more measured response to the affair: he recognised and lauded the professionalism of the Boeing B-777 crew, and he reminded the world that since the Paris attacks, Air France has suffered a spate of hoaxes similar to this recent one. He promised that Air France would weather this one too and that it would continue working with its partners and airports' authorities wherever it flies to in order to make the flying experience on Air France a good one. Kenyan airport authorities and security bureaucrats could learn a thing or two from M. Frederic Gagey abou how to communicate information and what information to communicate.

Kenyans are used to the national security mindset of its securocrats; the French are just being introduced to it. While senior bureaucrats, including the Cabinet Secretary and the Principal Secretary, flew down to Mombasa to "take charge of things," they left behind a confused machinery at Harambee House that will not take action unless expressly directed by the Mombasa-bound securocrats. The confused social media posts that came forth from the Ministry and the National Police demonstrated that a habit of following orders down the chain of command blindly had left the secucocracy with men and women incapable of thinking innovatively, creatively or proactively. It coems through every time securocrats fail to agree on a message and its form.

I is something of an embarassment that Kenyans believe outside news sources more than they believe their own government, even when the man with the message is relatively trustworthy like Mr Nkaissery, the security minister. Online voodoo like the one practiced by the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit has one little to overhaul this legitimacy deficit. Until the institutions with the message wrench themselves from the pernicious colonial and post-colonial legacies, Mr Nkaissery will remain a relatively good man in a vile institution, and nothing he says will ring true for the Kenyans who believe that securocrats don't care two shits about the safety of the people, but obsess neurotically and psychotically about the security of the President. Air France just got a whiff of that.