When I was called last week to attend a public lecture by National Intelligence Service Director-General Noordin Haji, my first though was that I was being invited to deliver myself to the lion’s den.
I honoured the invite, nevertheless, and took advantage of the opportunity to remind Mr Haji that the last time I drove myself to what I thought would be a safe space, the Karen Police Station, I was violently abducted by State security goons .
It was an opportune time to point out to the spy chief the stark contradiction in a lecture dwelling at length on transformation of the service from the old preoccupation with regime survival to more genuine national security issues, while reality on the ground was very different.
I proffered that his intelligence officers were part of a notorious special squad responsible for abductions, torture, enforced disappearances, illegal confinement and extra-judicial executions since the Gen Z revolt of last June that shook President William Ruto’s government to the core.
Mr Haji’s woolly and evasive response was most unsatisfactory. Indeed, the issue of national security organs debasing themselves by acting as appendages of President Ruto’s political survival machinery were amplified when in an unprecedented intrusion, the Chief of the Defence Forces, General Charles Kahariri, used his turn at the podium to warn against the “Ruto Must Go” chants that are now common at many public gatherings.
It might at first glance have appeared as just an innocent restatement of the fact that those tired of President Ruto have constitutional mechanisms to remove him at the ballot. However, the timing and the context provides a frightening picture of the military and other security organs intruding into the political sphere, and specifically working to protect President Ruto from the people.
What Gen Kahariri, Mr Haji, Director of Criminal Investigations Mohammed Amin, and other top national security bosses seem incapable of understanding is that merely chanting “Ruto Must Go” is not a crime by any stretch of the imagination. Neither is it indicative of any plans to remove the President by unconstitutional means.
We have a progressive constitution with a very elaborate Bill of Rights that protects freedom of speech and expression, and secures our political rights, which include the freedom to seek the removal of an elected leader. The big mistake our security chiefs make is to equate political challenges facing the President to threats to national security.
They are talking big on their sacred mandate to secure the country against both internal and external threats, but seem stuck in the ossified mindset that the President is Kenya and Kenya is the President.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The President is just a temporary holder of the office he was entrusted with by the people. There were previous holders of the office, and there will be many more to come.
We have seen various regime defenders, including Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, come out to defend Gen Kahariri’s objectionable intrusion into politics. They have the right to express their views, but it is clear that they are approaching the matter from the absolutely false standpoint that the military boss is simply restating the constitutional mandate to protect the country from all threats.
It might be genuinely beyond their comprehension that the President and the country are two distinct entities. Their views might also be coloured by major doses of self-preservation instincts; for their own survival in the political sphere, as well as continued access to wealth and power, is firmly tied to President Ruto’s stay in office. He goes, they go too.
It is instructive that the legal notice allowing deployment of the Kenya Defence Forces to counter the Gen Z revolt is still in place. That was the first time in the history of independent Kenya that the military was called out to help crush civil protests, if we remove from that definition use of soldiers to crush the abortive 1982 military coup, or deployments to counter armed bandits and cattle-rustlers or secessionist and terrorist incursions.
While Gen Kahariri, Mr Haji and their ilk seem quite happy to misuse their regiments for regime survival, it is evident that they are failing in their national security mandates. They are crowing that Kenya has not had a serious terrorist attack since Dusit D2 complex in Nairobi was hit some six years ago, but glossing over the fact that we have surrendered nearly the entire north-eastern region and parts of the coast to Al-Shabaab terrorists.
