Is military intervention a solution to escalating lawlessness across Kenya?

KDF troops at Marigat in Baringo County on November 03, 2014. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA |  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

• The creeping militarisation under the Uhuru-Ruto regime is all too evident.
• I believe that the security situation in northern Kenya, the north-eastern, and now coast is completely unacceptable for any modern state.

By MACHARIA GAITHO
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The hack in me is conditioned to taking a jaundiced view of anything and everything.

The official spin on grave matters will always be received with a healthy degree of scepticism.

My antenna has been on high alert with the criminal failures in our national security systems.

I am just waiting for some nabobs in the security establishment to come up with that tired and hackneyed finger-pointing on the massacre of two dozen policemen in the Baringo-Turkana-West Pokot conflict theatre and the bizarre raid on the Nyali Kenya Army barracks by some desperadoes armed only with pangas and knives.

Do not be surprised if somebody high up calls a press conference to claim that the conflicts across three-quarters of Kenya are fuelled by Western countries jealous of Kenya’s peace, progress, and development.

We will be told that the International Criminal Court is working with the political opposition to sabotage the government of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto and that, of course, NGOs and the media are funded and working at the behest of foreign masters to fuel conflict.

We have already been told not too long ago that all the insecurity attributed to Al-Shabaab should actually be blamed on the opposition and foreign agents, so nothing is impossible.

The problem is that the more the government comes out with all the tired propaganda, the more I begin to think that perhaps all these attacks and killings are the work of a system determined to create diversions.

The tactics of the Nyayo era where any challenge to misrule was invariably blamed on “traitors” and “foreign masters” seem to be back in full swing.

I honestly would not put it beyond some of the ham-fisted security operatives to manufacturer a crisis every so often as a means of rallying support for the government.

CREEPING MILITARISATION

Sometimes it seems that someone is deliberately creating the environment where the regular forces of law and order are deemed incapable so the military must be deployed across wider and wider swatches of the country.

With the military in charge, it often follows that civil liberties and constitutional protections to life, liberty, and justice are suspended, as has widely been seen wherever the army has been called out on security operations.

This may look like a nightmare scenario, but the creeping militarisation under the Uhuru-Ruto regime is all too evident.

What I cannot quite put a finger on is whether the military is being called to put out fires in emergency situations where civil authority has genuinely failed or whether those fires are lit to provide the pretext for intervention on that scale.

I believe that the security situation in northern Kenya, the north-eastern region, and now coast is completely unacceptable for any modern state.

Kenya is joining the ranks of failed states when well over half the country is not under the control of the security forces.

Unless the sternest action is taken, what we might see as localised and clan and ethnic conflicts will escalate into full-blown insurgencies that will surely dismember the country.

The government has always had the manpower and resources to stem the slow and steady upsurge of traditional conflicts into something much more serious, but for some reason has preferred to divert its attentions elsewhere, as in ensuring obscene wealth for the ruling class.

Now it wants to act after the horse has bolted, but we must wonder whether the latest security crackdowns will meet with the same ignoble failures of the past.

I do not have much hope because the fellows responsible for the criminal security failures are the same discredited lot now tasked with containing the situation.

The entire security apparatus, starting with the head, is rotten and cannot be relied on to deliver.

*****

I was on Nation FM’s "State of the Nation" last week when I ventured that unless opposition leader Raila Odinga did away with the “Men-in-Black” phenomena, he would remain tainted and incapable of projecting himself as a tolerant, democratic leader.

Shortly afterwards a group of thugs assaulted and frog-marched the party’s executive director out of an ODM Parliamentary Group meeting.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com. @MachariaGaitho