Government mishandling anti-terrorism campaign

By Ababu Namwamba

Security is paramount. Absolutely. No doubt about that. In fact the primary duty of any government is to protect life and property of citizens.

This imperative is the chief reason why humanity through the ages tolerates the inconvenience of government. It is what informs the conventional truism that a government which cannot secure the lives and property of its people has no business, no authority of any shade, to reign over them.

Any measure taken by any government at any time in pursuit of this ultimately noble end should, ideally, be fully supported. And why not? After all, the State is a sum total of all of us, the aggregate of our individual actions and inactions.

But why, then, has the Jubilee administration’s anti-terror effort attracted so much disdain, even mistrust? Why are Kenyans not overly enthusiastic about this supposed “national security” project?

The answer, good people, simply is that the UhuRuto government is pursuing a noble agenda in the wrong way. The attitude is fascist. The approach is pernicious. The style oozes raw brutish impunity. And the tactics are so jumbled that you would be forgiven for believing that whoever invented the English words “incoherence”, “discordance,” “clueless” and “fiasco” could as well have been thinking about the Jubilee administration’s handling of the escalating insecurity in the country.

How else do you explain a situation where the President sings one tune while his honcho in Parliament belts out something quite different as leaders in the ruling coalition literally cannibalise each other in public?

Looking back to Westgate, one notices a chilling trend of a government worryingly at sea in matters security. Indeed, Westgate set a new record low as a super example on how not to conduct a security operation of any magnitude. The discordance and incoherence amongst the various security units, the fumbles and mumbles and tumbles in briefings, have all become stuff of legend.

That terribly botched rescue mission was so poorly deployed that it ended up exposing everyone involved to greater risk than that posed by the supposed terrorists. But if the “mission impossible” was so impossibly inept, the aftermath has been calamitous. The President promised a swift inquiry, which has never been. An attempted investigation by two Jubilee-led parliamentary committees ended in ignominy.

To date, no one seems to have the remotest clue of what exactly happened. Was it really a terrorist attack? How many terrorists were involved? Were they humans or aliens from Pluto? Were they liquidated or did they escape with the help of a UFO (unidentified flying object)? Who looted bare the mall’s rich stores as the owners lay dead in the rubble?

Fast-forward and mosques are raided in Mombasa by menacing commandos, sheikhs are shot dead Rambo-style, Eastleigh is placed under illegal curfew in Gestapo fashion, a whole ethnic community is inquisitioned in a manner reminiscent of the scandalous ethnic profiling in fascist Europe, and Kasarani stadium is turned into a Kenyan version of Nazi Germany’s sickening concentration camps. While the operations may be justifiable, the style, approach and tactics have been horrifying and an assault on every possible constitutional safeguard.

Yes, you cannot stop to reason with an armed terrorist. But the indiscriminate shoot-to-kill order removes every sense of restraint in those who wield instruments of violence, placing at risk many possibly innocent people, and makes a mockery of the overriding ends of the justice system. It is equally difficult to see how killing every suspicious character in sight could possibly aid intelligence gathering, which should be at the core of any long-term counter-terror effort.

And while searching premises and screening individuals are important measures in this war, can’t that be done in a less stone-age style? How do heavily armed commandos raid mosques wearing their heavy boots in total disregard of Islamic edict, and beat worshipers senseless in a manner that would make colonial goons green with envy?

Club-happy police officers break down doors in Eastleigh, roughly throwing out women and children, clubbing young men to a pulp, and stepping on the heads of hapless old men. Ethnic Somalis are routinely targeted singularly when there is evidence that terrorism has sucked in a hotchpotch of ethnicities, including Luhya, Luo and Caucasian whites. The hundreds of people incarcerated at Kasarani are reportedly being held in deplorable conditions, denied access to basics such as water, sanitary services and access to family members or even attorneys.

While these crass tactics may score some momentary gratification, they certainly will boomerang in the long run.

Ultimately, the government could become as much of a security threat as the nutheads who think nothing of firing bullets into skulls of infants and murdering helpless women in shrines of worship.