Jukwaa la Usalama was too much ado about nothing

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen addresses the Press after meeting at the Kisumu County Commissioner's office, on September 18, 2025. [Michael Mute, Standard]

Last year, the Ministry of Interior rolled out an initiative they called Jukwaa la Usalama, a public engagement initiative that they claimed was to strengthen security and service delivery. They held forums presented as a mechanism for increasing community involvement in national security.

Their report said the initiative was also a platform to evaluate the performance of the Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) in relation to security and administration. It culminated in an elaborate event at the State House.

The glamorous report, replete with colourful photographs, offered yet another illustration of a policy context in which form takes precedence over substance. Beyond the political objectives of regaining control of the public square in the aftermath of the 2024 Gen Z uprising, it remains difficult to identify the tangible value generated by this initiative.

It highlights issues such as the abuse of administrative power, which fuels mistrust between citizens and the state, as well as competition among security agencies, problems that are neither new nor particularly insightful to the Kenyan public.

Even worse, there are no novel interventions that are proposed, meaning that the public resources that have been deployed have all but gone to waste.

The report, like many of its predecessors, relies on assumptions and unsubstantiated claims that risk stigmatising entire segments of the population.

Assertions linking boda boda operators to serious crimes such as murder are presented without clear evidence, a troubling approach given that credible evidence should already have resulted in arrests and prosecutions rather than vague insinuations in a policy document.

The report is also troubling in its treatment of public land encroachment. It notes, for example, that prison land in Trans Nzoia has been reduced from over 3,000 acres to less than 283 acres. However, it offers no real engagement with the issue, including the recovery plan, if any, or any measures to hold those responsible to account.

Some proposals to deal with the identified challenges are themselves suspicious and problematic. For instance, the report acknowledges severe prison overcrowding, with facilities designed for 30,000 inmates currently holding more than 62,000. For sure, this is a crucial issue that needs to be addressed.

However, instead of interrogating systemic issues such as the criminalisation of poverty or failures within the justice system, which have been widely documented before, we see the idea of the privatisation of prisons being broached. How do we make such a big leap without first addressing the most proximate issues? One can smell the prioritisation of the economic interests of some actors over genuine structural reform.

There are, however, a few potentially meaningful proposals in the report. One such recommendation is the decentralisation of government forensic services to all counties to expedite the analysis of evidence. Even so, the report provides no clarity on how such an initiative would be operationalised, leaving its practical impact uncertain.

The exercise produced little that could not have been drawn from existing reports and failed to meaningfully advance the difficult but necessary work of reforming Kenya’s security sector and criminal justice system. It therefore stands as yet another wasted opportunity, as it were, too much ado about nothing.

-A political scientist and criminologist