Vandalising cables an economic crime

By Dominic Odipo

As the political bickering and infighting between the two wings of the Grand Coalition Government continue to escalate, are some of the other building blocks of the nation being relegated to the back burner?

Are we doing enough, for example, to restore and reinforce the ordinary Kenyan’s respect for law and order, especially respect for public property, without which a broad range of public services would necessarily disappear? Is our media emphasis on political news stories and analysis costing the Kenyan economy much more than we probably realise?

Let us take crime, especially vandalism and sabotage, as an example. In his "Varieties of Religious Experience", William James, the brilliant 19th Century American essayist, wrote of the criminal mind as follows:"

There is perhaps not one person whose criminal impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence of some other emotion to which his character is also potentially liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough."

Paraphrased, William James was saying that the criminal impulse in every person can usually be overpowered by other, counter-veiling emotions within that person, provided such other emotions are intensified sufficiently. The trick for any society is how to identify those counter-veiling emotions that can smother the criminal impulse in a particular person and then accurately determine the appropriate threshold of intensity.

A simple example from the Ministry of Information and Communications will help to illustrate this point. According to statistics from the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), Telkom Kenya, which is also a major shareholder in the Orange mobile service provider, is currently losing millions of shillings every year through the vandalism or sabotage of its underground and overland copper cables.

A target for thieves

The thieves are apparently stealing these cables to sell at very high returns in selective markets in Asia and the Middle East, while the saboteurs appear to be acting at the behest of Telkom or Orange’s competitors in the domestic market.

As Telkom is the only fixed line operator in Kenya, it has unwittingly become a special target for these thieves and saboteurs who can easily identify the location of the cables.

Because of these criminal activities, many of which rarely hit the media headlines, Telkom-Orange is losing millions of shillings in replacement and repair costs every year, not to mention the lost revenues. The country is losing millions more through lost business opportunities that directly follow from those calls which could have been made through these networks but were eventually aborted.

As a result, the national economy is being damaged or slowed down substantially by these thieves and saboteurs, since other companies like KPLC, the electric power distributor, are also being seriously affected by this selective vandalism.

If the criminal activities of these vandals and saboteurs so directly and retrogressively impact upon the national economy, shouldn’t such activities certainly qualify as economic crimes and be legally sanctioned as such? If not, why not?

If the Ministry of Information and Communications hopes to make any meaningful contribution in this regard, it must immediately draft a new amendment to our laws to be sent to Parliament which classify all such acts of theft and sabotage as economic crimes that can attract much harsher sentences and penalties.

The penalty for vandalising or sabotaging such cables or other similar equipment must be raised so high that only the very foolish or very courageous will ever contemplate committing such crimes.

The penalty must roughly be equal to the real losses that would accrue from the economic crime.

To fit this into the analysis by William James mentioned earlier, the other, counter-veiling emotion which we would be intensifying here is the fear of the very high penalties that vandalism and sabotage, now elevated to economic crimes, would generate.

While we are at it, we can carefully explore what other counter-veiling emotions we could activate to make it much harder for the criminally inclined to indulge in such acts of vandalism and sabotage.

It is important to emphasize, however, that this problem of vandalism and sabotage needs a much more wide-ranging and holistic approach. As we continually educate our people to understand and appreciate the real cost of such crimes to society as a whole, we must not lose sight of the root causes of the problem.

Our economy needs to provide alternative but wholly legal sources of income for the thousands of our youths who roam our streets and villages with nothing to do over whole months and years. The economy needs to create thousands of new jobs that can provide the incomes that vandalism and sabotage now provide for these youths.

If we can get these youths to see that vandalism and sabotage actually make it harder for the economy to provide those jobs they really need, we shall be half way there.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

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