In wester Kenya, there have been indiscriminate killings especially in Busia county which were blamed on politicians and political rivalry in the reagion. In the Tana delta region, communities were ighting each other supposedly over grazing land and our kin from the Mount Elgon region are victims of cattle rustling incidences. These are just to mention a few instances.
Of course there are those that don't make it to the headlines for limit of space. What have we to say about the growing intolerance against law enforcers in the country. At South B Nairobi, a police officer was shot dead by fleeing gangsters after he demanded to know why they were overlapping in traffic. At Mandera town, gunmen sprayed a police post with bullets killing two officers and four civillians.
It's even sad to note that some of the law enforcers actually collaborate with these same criminals making the security situtation in the country even harder to contain. We've gotten used to raids on shops, muggings, gang-rapists (of Dandora), murders and the list grows.
Police officers who should be the symbol of security in our society are fleeing their role and are slowly becoming a sign of insecurity, panic.
This is one major failure of past governments and administration systems in which individuals with selfish intrests were appointed to lead governmental departments not on their abilities but purely on ethnic and corrupt grounds. In the quest to selctively empower their tribes and kin, past leaders made inefficient appointments by which we have lived to regret and, will have to bear with the consequences for a real long time.
The past administrations did not invest enough in national development but instead focussed public revenue to developing certain parts of the country leading to massive inequality. This has spurred uncontainable rural to urban migration as our youth seek jobs. The story is obvious, these jobs are never there hence our energetic and potentially productive and capable young men and women are lured into crime with the hope of making ends meet.
Crime is committed by hopeless youth who have nothing to hope for. Kenya is a fertile ground for recruitment of terrorists and insurgents.
We've had governments that extremely micromanaged every aspect of an individuals life. Taxpayers money was wasted on recruitment of unneccessary spies instead of routing it to development. This was notably during the dark days of the KANU regime.
Knowledgable and innovative leaders as including Dr. Robert Ouko and J.M. Kariuki were assasinated since the ruling cadre believed they posed a threat to their power. Who knows what these leaders could have come up with? Who knows how much they could have contributed to the development of the Kenyan economy.
Right now, recruiting more police officers to contain the rising insecurity in the country is futile. A half baked idea. We have youth who would do anything for money. They will even walk right into a bullet and not mind. What's more, the more police you recruit, the more criminals you are getting into the force. And some of the most powerful criminals, especially drug-lords, are either in government or have links to high ranking officers within the government. The real criminals are up there. What you are doing down here is killing the errand boys and they soon get new replacements to contitnue serving in the position of the departed.
The future does not look any brighter anyway with our current situation. With massive unemployment and a population that is becoming restless by the day, we can only expect crime to get worse.
We should work at empowering the youth to make honest living. That way, we will make great leaps in crime control in our country.
www.doitadigital.com