President Uhuru Kenyatta (right), and his deputy William Ruto last week during the Kenya Private Sector Alliance Presidential Roundtable meeting. He ordered police recruits to report for training, going against an existing court order. (https://www.facebook.com/myuhurukenyatta?fref=ts)
I was dismayed by President Uhuru Kenyatta’s order to the Inspector General of Police to ensure that the recruits whose enrolment was pending because of a court order promptly report for training at the Kenya Police College. The president was responding to the latest terror attack in Garissa University College, which left 148 people dead and another 70 injured. The president justified his action by blaming the insecurity in the country on a shortage of police officers. His assumption is that if there were more police officers in the country, Garissa would not have happened. Last year immediately after the police recruitment process was over, I spoke to a young man who narrated to me his experience during the recruitment process. He told me that he went through the whole process and passed successfully. At the final stage where he was supposed to be given the acceptance letter, the officer in charge asked him if he had Ksh. 200,000. The young man, who works in a barber shop in Eastlands did not have that kind of money. He was told that everyone else was paying that. “Sorry, we cannot give you the letter,” was the callous answer he was given. He left the place devastated. His dream had been shattered, not because he had not qualified but because he was poor and could not afford to bribe recruiting officers. It is because of such anomalies that the court nullified the whole recruitment process and ordered for a fresh recruitment. The court was simply saying that it cannot justify a fraudulent and corrupt process, however noble the intention of the government. Just recently, during his State of the Nation address, the president came out with a list of people suspected to have been involved in corruption. He asked them to step aside and allow for investigations to take place. The president announced that no one was a sacred cow in the war against corruption, not even himself. It is very hypocritical of the President to be asking people suspected of corruption to step aside while protecting others who were also accused of practising corruption. It does not augur well for the rule of law for the President to be seen disregarding a court order. The President is passing a very wrong message, that if you feel the law is inconveniencing you, you can as well disregard it and go ahead to do what you want to do. Whereas extra-ordinary times, like the terrorism situation, calls for extra-ordinary measures, the Garissa deaths do not warrant the kind of action the President is taking. I don’t agree that Garissa happened because of a lack of security manpower. For me, Garissa happened, just like Westgate, because of lapses in security response to attacks by terrorists. The Garissa attack started in the early hours of last Thursday morning and the General Service Unit’s Recce squad arrived on the scene 11 hours later. Can we blame shortage of police officers on this kind of slow response? The court did not forbid the government to do the recruitment again. One would expect the government to take that route in order to restore the confidence of the public in the police service. The President’s action seem to lend credence to the accusation that the current regime, like previous ones, used the recruitment process to reward cronies and areas that voted for it, and thus, would not like to start the process again, in a fair and transparent manner. The question that one may ask is, does the President believe or not that the earlier recruitment process was biased? When issuing the order to violate the court order, the President was indeed angry like many Kenyans, yet anger should not be used to commit an illegality that supports the very corruption that he has vowed to fight. Corruption is bleeding the country to death and the President should not be the one derailing the fight against the vice. He should allow the law to take its course, however inconvenient it is to him. After all, the law is an ass, to all.
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