Rising insecurity requires professional attention, not politics

By now, most people with a smartphone have seen the videos of brazen daylight muggings of pedestrians and extortion of motorists in Nairobi. Often, the incidents take place for a while, with total impunity. Police never rush to the scene.

The muggers and robbers then get to casually walk or drive away. The impunity we see among thieving public officials has been decentralised to the lowest levels. Ominously, the problem of insecurity is not limited to urban areas. In most rural areas Kenyans now live terrified of organised criminals who steal cattle, household items, in addition to other forms of petty theft and robberies.

There, too, the organised nature of those involved and the fact that they get away with it despite being known suggests either collusion or complete abdication of duties by public officials in the security sector.

Protecting life and property are the most important functions of any state. Most of what we do in modern society is downstream of these basic guarantees. It follows that states that fail to meet citizens’ expectations on security (at least to a reasonable degree) quickly lose legitimacy.

Eventually, enough people begin to perceive those in charge as being so incompetent or morally bankrupt that they are not even bothered to protect life and property. And once legitimacy is lost, it is hard to get it back.

Given that we are within a year of the next elections, it is easy to politicise insecurity. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Elections are a mechanism for providing feedback to incumbents, and so the political process should facilitate a litigation of incumbents’ security record.

However, it is also important to realise that when it comes to insecurity, politics can only get us so far. This is because the underlying drivers are structural and cumulative, and so not squarely accountable to whoever has been in charge over the last four years. The current administration’s fault is that they appear to have completely abandoned any professional approach to everyday insecurity, instead preferring politicisation and evasion.

Those who study security likely have economic and sociological explanations for the uptick in crime – most probably touching on high unemployment rates, poor policing, breakdown of social bonds and interpersonal trust, as well the active promotion of criminality by our leaders (otherwise known as goonism).

While the immediate focus ought to be on crime prevention and enforcement, in the long run policy must try to address the structural roots of criminality.

The prescription here is intentional, obvious and boring. That is competent government is boring, and involves working hard every day to figure out how to make marginal improvements here and there, while maintaining the steady state.

Unfortunately, as a country we are addicted to governance by reforms. We prefer to change the name of the police, or their uniforms to doing the boring mundane work of data collection, legal surveillance, enforcement of the laws, and a good faith attempt to adhere to the Constitution while at it.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University