Insecurity somewhere is insecurity everywhere, so goes the adage. And for a developing country like Kenya, insecurity is a national concern that is addressed at the highest levels of Government.

With this in mind, yesterday’s destruction of 2,545 guns at Uhuru Gardens to underline Government’s efforts to discourage the public from keeping illegal firearms was welcome relief. Apart from the symbolism, the burning brought a sigh of relief that something was being done to ensure we sleep soundly.

Media is replete with stories of carjackings by increasingly younger armed thugs, poachers targeting endangered rhino and elephant herds, pastoralists shooting it out over water and pasture, daytime executions and gun-toting sea pirates.

As a permanent measure, Kenya joined several regional governments to tackle the menace . With the setting up of the Regional Centre on Small Arms and Light Weapons (Recsa) — an intergovernmental authority charged with the responsibility of co-ordinating the collective efforts in the Great Lakes Region, the Horn of Africa and bordering states to stem the tide of small arms and light weapons.

Recsa’s 13 Member States, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania signed a covenant as the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region in 2008.

They mandated Recsa to implement small arms mopping up programmes to include Zambia, Angola and Central African Republic. The Nairobi Protocol came to life after the signing of the Nairobi Declaration to co-ordinate the joint efforts to address arms trafficking across their borders. The Declaration was signed on March 15, 2000, by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and representatives of the governments of the member states.

This proved pivotal because, in this region, no country is an island. It must co-operate with neighbours lest merchants of death skip from one country to another and return to peddle their deadly wares.

Kenya is a case in point. Guns in the wrong hands push the development agenda out of joint. For instance, two types of gun terror exist. The largely urban-based one is spread over major towns and has forced locals to literally wall themselves in their compounds as well as feed a growing private security business niche.

Overriding concern

Foreign investors would consider levels of taxation and ease of setting up shop here, but their overriding concern is safety of their staff and machinery. It is often the deciding factor when making the decision to invest.

Kenya’s case is all the more unique, because it houses the UN’s environment arm, several embassies, Western and Asian companies and a large expatriate community.

In rural gun-crime, the vast arid and semi-arid lands are home to pastoralist communities living in conditions that are from a throw-back to another era. They routinely raid villages to steal livestock, or to avenge earlier attacks with equal ferocity. Unfortunately, they also border unstable states from which access to guns is child’s play.

This, combined with statistics showing that gunrunners and cattle rustlers spent Sh1.1 billion in buying the destroyed guns and more than 50,000 bullets, which were recovered in the past year alone is a no-brainer that insecurity is a clear and present danger to the economy.

Obviously, Kenyans are finding themselves staring at the wrong end of a gun barrel. The integrated approach to uplift the economic status of communities that wield guns like others do the walking stick and collaborating with the public through community policing and voluntary disarmament is the way to go.

Let the burning of recovered arms be a an enduring tradition. And let the Internal Security minister make good the oft-repeated pledge to criminalise gun possession through more punitive sentencing.

Words alone don’t seem to have the desired deterrent if legislation remains weak.