Sink or Swim, Mr President?

Clearly the Governor of the County of Nairobi City does not have the muscle. It is time to appeal to a higher authority. Mtukufu Rais (allow me a measure of oily unctuousness; you must be used to it by now), when are you going to erase the whiff of siege mentality that seems to be engulfing your nascent administration?

The residents of the City of Nairobi are tired of being treated with such extreme hostility and suspicion by both the national government and the quick-fingered county government. The most visible elements of the suspicion and hostility are the spectacular land-grabs that both governments have perpetrated in the name of keeping nabobs, mandarins and party apparatchiks safe from the people who pay the taxes and vote in the elections that keep the nabobs, mandarins and party apparatchiks in truffle all year round.

In Nairobi, public bodies seem to see all Nairobi residents, regardless of the extremity of the suspicion and hostility, as potential gunmen, bombers or God knows what kind of crack military-trained assault team. In a period when you are trying to create the impression that the government is not the enemy of the people, the kilometres of steel--and-concrete fences and armies of ill-trained, ill-mannered private security askaris create the impression that your rhetoric is only that: rhetoric; it has a snowball's chance in hell of being converted into reality.

Mr President, the most paranoid nation on God's Green Earth is the United States of America and despite their quite extreme precautions to preempt their fears, it remains a nation whose federal government is the victim of one attack after another. I do not intend to argue that if the mighty United States cannot defend itself, Kenya does not have a chance to do so. What I intend to argue is that because they are so paranoid and because they have made such extreme efforts to protect themselves they will forever be victims of terror, terrorism and the occasional mad, bad man with a gun. Kenya should not follow in the foolish footsteps of the country many refer to as the Great Satan. Neither should we follow in the footsteps of the United States' poodle, the United Kingdom, whose paranoid lock-step mirroring of the United States has invited foreign extremists to lay siege to its institutions of government, though of a lesser intensity.

Now, I am well aware of the social schisms that make it seem as if we are at each others' throats. It is therefore, imperative that you demonstrate to your people, that is, Kenyans, that we have nothing to fear from the one institution that is supposed to unite as all. The national government does not need to hide behind high fences, rungu-wielding askaris or phalanxes of gun-toting praetorian guards. It speaks volumes about the deep suspicion and hostility with which you and your government treat us that you will not allow us to have an unrestricted view of your buildings or your mandarins because there is a (slight) fear that we may feel an overwhelming need to be disagreeable with them.

Some fathers teach their sons how to swim by tossing them into the deep end during their son's first swimming lesson: sink or swim seems to be a mantra that sometimes fails, but it tends to concentrate the mind. Your government has become complacent, comfortable behind its barriers, askaris and guns. It refuses to take the issue of public safety seriously because all your mandarins know that by the time al Shabaab-types make it past the first barrier they will be faced by a wall of very hot lead. If you truly want you government to meet the objective of keeping your people safe from the kind of violence that is now stalking South Sudan or the Central African Republic, not to mention Somalia and Rwanda, take away their comfort zone. Tear down the steel-and-concrete fences and barriers; dismiss the askaris standing idiotically at the doors. Ask your mandarins to find another way to keep themselves and your people safe. If they are unable to do so your people will not lament (too loudly) to see them tarmacking for new jobs after you give them the steel toe and send them on their way.