Security officers at the scene of an Al-Shabaab terrorist attack in
Mandera in which 28 people were killed. PHOTO | MANASE OTSIALO | NATION
MEDIA GROUP
In a normal and civilised country, the reflex reaction at any
time of any major emergency or grave threat to national security is for
all to put aside petty differences and selfish pursuits to stand
together as one against a common enemy.
In Kenya,
however, we are not a normal, civilised, progressive, forward-looking,
rational people. From the political leadership down to the unthinking
masses, we descend into blame games, primitive ethnic-laced insults,
denials and refusal to take responsibility, hate speech, and the general
behaviour that demonstrates that we learnt nothing from the 2007-2008
bouts of ethnic-political violence that nearly saw us plunge headlong
into the cauldron.
Recent security incidents, the
latest being the Mandera bus massacre, should have forced us to pause
for serious reflection on what is wrong with our national security
establishment and how best we can fix it.
The priority
should have been to ensure that never in the future are we under
collective danger from terrorists, bandits, secessionists, cattle
rustlers, criminal gangs, ethnic militias, and all manner of dangerous
renegades.
PETULANT SPEECH
Instead
of coming together, united as one nation and one people to confront
threats to all of us, we prefer to withdraw into our ethnic and
political cocoons to throw brickbats at one another.
The
violent language evident on social media from both ordinary citizens
defending their ethnic leaders and the official and unofficial Twitter
and Facebook terrorists at the service of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s
Jubilee regime and opposition leader Raila Odinga’s Cord coalition is
truly frightening.
President Kenyatta’s petulant speech
after his Abu Dhabi sojourn — suggesting that Kenyans should take care
of their own security and not expect government intervention all the
time, blaming the victims of terrorism, child rapists, and the national
sexual sport of stripping women in public — was a new low in his
presidency.
OPPOSITION BANKRUPT OF IDEAS
But
the opposition reaction did not catch the moral high ground either. The
barrage of insults directed at the President from what should have been
a solemn occasion, the burial of Senator Otieno Kajwang’, exposed an
opposition as bankrupt of ideas as the government is.
Clearly,
the opposition is more interested in making political capital out of
the blood of the innocents losing their lives because of the
government’s criminal mismanagement of the security sector.
This
should be the time for those in government to first admit that they
have failed to protect Kenyans. Only then can they resolve to fix the
security machinery.
It is also the time for those
leading the opposition to offer practical prescriptions on how we can
best get out of the rut instead of just repeating those tired old
mantras demanding the President’s resignation or threatening
impeachment.
It is increasingly clear that both the
Jubilee government and the Cord opposition are more interested in
fighting over the carrion, both behaving like vultures or hyenas
fighting for position over the bodies of those slaughtered by Al-Shabaab
and all the other aforementioned malcontents.
SACRED RESPONSIBILITIES
Both
will happily unleash their most foul-mouthed politicians and brain-dead
official spokesmen and social media warriors to hurl virtual fire and
brimstone at each other from the political soapbox of social media
sphere, completely ignoring the fact that they are doing nothing for the
hapless victims of endemic insecurity.
As Kenyans, of
course, we get the leaders we deserve. We ignore reason, logic, and
common sense to vote for thieves and scoundrels just because they claim
to represent our ethnic interest, but in reality are only out to feather
their own nests.
To that extent, I agree with
President Kenyatta that we must, as citizens, take care of our own
security. We will do that when we eject the non-performers and elect
leaders who will live up to their sacred responsibilities.
But
since the 2017 elections are rather far away and Al-Shabaab is on my
doorstep now, I am asking Inspector-General of Police David Kimaiyo to
allow me a small arsenal for self-protection since I am not among the
privileged few who rate personal police guards at my expense. I could do
with a Glock semi-automatic, a .357 Magnum, an M16 rifle and
military-grade body armour
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