Murkomen lacks the wisdom to manage Interior security docket

If demonstrations must end up in the type and scale of destruction we saw on Wednesday last week, there is a need for a rethink. 

Ironically, they ended up hurting the very people whose petitions they were supposed to present. The losers were our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends and family. And the tragedy is that  compensation is unlikely to be forthcoming, given the circumstances. 

No matter the grievances, burning a court, several police stations, government buildings and vehicles, looting and raping women is taking it too far. It was a stupid thing to do because it's our taxes that will be used to rebuild and buy new cars. Moreover, the useful purposes these institutions serve will not be available for a while, and those who stand disadvantaged are the citizens. 

There is no need to belabour the fact that criminals take advantage of otherwise peaceful demonstrations to cause havoc, which was attested to by victims of last week's looting. The thugs do not wear badges, neither do they proclaim their intentions for the world to know. 

To beat them at their own game, the government must enact a law that designates specific areas, away from the Central Business District areas of urban centres, where demos can be held at minimal risk to businesses.

One of the surest ways to push a country to the edge of a precipice is to create an environment for criminal gangs  and goons-for-hire to thrive. Yet, as bad as the situation already is, excitable government functionaries throw the occasional spanner in the works. 

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Kipchumba Murkomen, for instance, has the most unenviable job in the county today, but rather than take a tactical retreat to consult and rethink his strategies, he has become combative and quarrelsome. He is wobbly, unwisely so, and prone to gaffes.

His claim that last week's demos were a coup is outrageous and designed to run away from reality, which the government must confront if it hopes to solve issues that give the dog a bad name and hang it. Coup plotters don't post bulletins on social media, nor do they notify police of their intent. For months, Gen Z proclaimed their intentions on social media, and the government was aware.

Extrajudicial killings

Murkomen's reference to a coup, which any state would counter by use of force, sought to invalidate public anger and legitimise extrajudicial killings. To attempt to hide behind "orders from above" to normalise police killings is injudicious. 

Murkomen's jejune assuredness that his being the Interior CS can shield trigger happy police officers from prosecution is symptomatic of intellectual myopia. He should do a little background check on individuals who once walked the African landscape like colossus, but wound up in ignominy: Mobutu Seseko, Idi Amin, Hosni Mubarak, Omar El Bashir and Larent Gbagbo.

His training as a lawyer fails him. The inference from his exhortation to police officers to use guns since they are not for decoration, promising to protect them, is that courts are inferior to the executive; that the executive has the last word. Little wonder then that court orders, in most cases, are treated as mere suggestions.

Police work is a vocation, not a sanctuary for the demented whose mental health is masked by the uniform they wear. Because of such individuals, to trust, or not to trust the police presents a difficult choice. Most police officers acquire the skunk personality immediately when they leave the Kiganjo Police Training College ready for deployment. 

What happens at Kiganjo? Why do otherwise humble and likeable men and women who get enrolled at Kiganjo come out bitter and so bestial they become the instruments of oppression? The curriculum at Kiganjo and the threshold for admission into the police service should be reviewed.

The widening chasm of mistrust between the police and the public is inimical to both. When the police become the enemy rather than the protector, the target, rather than the shield, we are slowly, but surely becoming an extension of the lawless jungle that Somalia descended into in the 1990s following the toppling of President Siad Barre.