Why send soldiers to do what is basic, routine police work?

Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers arrive at the Westgate mall in Nairobi on September 22, 2013. PHOTO/FILE 

In Summary

• We are sending men who use anti-aircraft guns to combat Kalashnikovs. Isn’t that a farcical over-response?

By Waga Odongo
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President Uhuru Kenyatta has created a third command of the military to combat organised crime in Nairobi.  The group will be tasked with dealing with terrorism, drug trafficking and the proliferation of small arms.

Raychelle Omamo, the Defense Cabinet Secretary, says the new unit will deal with “issues that affect the territorial integrity of our country”, but I find it hard to imagine an issue where drug trafficking and small arms actually creates a problem with territorial integrity.

The terrorist attacks at the coast, which have been linked to separatist militia, have been low in both casualties and effect, and have been ably handled by the forceful ministrations of the police.

It is baffling why the government would want to outsource what should be routine police work to the military.

Is our military trained for close-quarters urban warfare? You cannot order in airpower when you are fighting small arms fire. You cannot use mortars against a civilian populace.

Small arms come from countries adjacent to ours, so why shouldn’t we tighten our borders? How will our military handle pistols and Kalashnikovs?

How, for example, will the military combat drug gangs? Drugs originate outside the country and are, therefore, best handled at points of entry.

 The army is usually segregated from society in their barracks due to the nature of their work. They are trained to have the mentality of occupiers who will not hesitate to fire on command. Their first resort to violence is usually the equivalent of the police’s last resort.

The army has its own rules, courts and command structure and training.  They are kept apart from civilians to stop any consanguinity that might interfere with their job.

The army does not work to prove guilt but is deployed to deal with the situation. Soldiers’ training is more intense and less concerned with casualties. Using the army to police a civilian population will require retraining them in how to keep the peace.

Soldiers are not meant to keep the peace; their job is to reflexively administer the death penalty on those who are deemed public enemies.  

Do you see soldiers carrying rungus? Do they even have handcuffs? I have never seen a soldier with a Kalashnikov; they all carry G3s, which are designed for the battlefield.

 

Such a gun would be a disaster at close quarters as the force of its projectiles means that many innocent bystanders are at risk. The police are meant to protect and serve, soldiers are brought in to kill and destroy. The army, unless handling a disaster, should not be deployed on Kenyan soil.

As for terrorism, we have the Anti- terrorism Police unit. Future battles with terrorists will almost certainly be fought in crowded urban areas because that is where people live.

There is little point in holding people hostage in a rural area; it does not have the same political effect. More people live in towns than in rural areas in the world and that is why urban warfare is important. The army trains for operations in openly hostile territory.

Our anti-terrorism police need to be well kitted, with armour, guns and protection.  They should also have cellphone jammers. In the footage of the Westgate attack, the suspects were seen using their mobile phones and conversing with their handlers through cellular networks.

That is how they were able to get real-time information concerning what was happening outside as well as pass information to their compatriots. Also, in Iraq, phones were used to detonate improvised explosive devices (IED) buried in the roads.

We need a capable team with modern communication equipment that will enable them to respond to the problem faced by terrorism.

When dealing with non-state actors, it is hard to defeat them by brute military force. The most powerful military in the world is having problems eradicating the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Terrorism is best handled by intelligence, immigration and good policing.

The government’s Nyumba Kumi idea is important in combating terrorism, even though it has been criticised as not being cutting edge enough.  Some have suggested that we should use data to crunch out the terrorists in our midst.

Well, 60 per cent of Nairobians live in what NGOs call peri-urban settlements. Many are unbanked and slums are growing at a rate that is hard to predict with certainty.

There are no addresses and names of tenants in these settlements and the churn rate could be high. So how do we generate geodata or any meaningful data from an area with such a high rate of variability?

Big data needs data and quite possibly, the only meaningful data you could get from the slums is the mobile phone usage statistics. In a rapidly changing environment, it becomes speculation.
The Nyumba Kumi initiative is a viable way to tackle this variability. Human detection still leads in the detection of terrorism. Prediction relies heavily on past events and terrorists are adapting to situations.

For terrorists, an urban siege of a hotel or a shopping mall makes the most sense. Bombing while devastating ends too quickly. Holding a mall hostage prolongs the agony. 

Hotel and mall infiltration is easy, guards are relatively unarmed and all you need to hold hostages is small arms. Armoured personnel carriers are useless in this situation, as are mortars.

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We are spending a lot on education, but just where is it all going?

There is an interesting chart in the Kenya National Bureau and Statistics Facts and Figures Presentation, 2012 (available on their website). It is a chart of the percentage allocated to education from the national budget, which seems to be going down.

Of course this could easily be diffused by recalling the fact that the budget has actually been going down, but that isn’t my point. How do we measure educational outcomes?

Is it enough to simply say that we are pouring money by the truckload into the education ministry and more children are going to school and claim to have sorted out the education system?

There have been annual reports of how children are failing to acquire basic numeracy and literacy skills in their formative years. The universality of education has been a good thing, but its efficacy is in question.

The government is spending a fortune on teachers and not enough on building schools. It could claim to increase spending on schools, but if the money ends up in paying teachers’ salaries, it will amount to nothing.

More money could just lead to fraud, waste and abuse. The money could be gummed up in bureaucracy and setting up workshops and not spent on the coalface of education. We need better management systems for the money we put in education.

Education is more about social outcomes and not how much money you sink into the venture. Good education saves money in the long run. It truly is an investment that pays back richly. We would not have to hire foreigners to design our roads or run our companies.

At a time when labour is increasingly more mobile and the borders are particularly porous to the highly skilled, the cost of not getting education right is for our country to be run by foreign technocrats.