It's time to consider partial devolution of security

This week Mandera Governor Ali Roba gave a chilling account of the state of insecurity in the county. More than 90 people have died in the last few months following attacks by al-Shabaab.

The governor insists some of these attacks could have been thwarted if the County Commissioner, Alex ole Nkoyo, took his job seriously.

The case of insecurity in Mandera raises important questions about the structure of our security apparatus. As I have argued before, it is important to understand lapses in the Government’s inability to provide security in the countryside in light of the changes we made to the Provincial Administration in 2010.

Before that the Provincial Administration – running from the Office of the President to the Sub-Chief – was the still frame of the Kenyan state. It is true that under the old system Chiefs and District Commissioners earned notoriety for acting like little gods in their fiefdoms. But they did so in the name of the state, and in so doing allowed Nairobi to have a sense of control out in the countryside.

We changed all that with the new Constitution. However, the problem is that didn’t come up with good alternatives. When it comes to security, the one lesson framers of the Constitution missed is that for law enforcement agencies to do a good job, their supervision must be submitted to the democratic test.

In other words, the command structure of the security services should be as closely aligned to electoral structures as possible. Police officers in the counties must be made as democratically accountable as possible. That is the only way we shall be able to avoid situations like what Roba described in Mandera whereby the County Commissioner exhibited exceptional nonchalance as Kenyans were being slaughtered by terrorists.

What we have now is a mismatch in which the national government in Nairobi runs all matters to do with security. Governors out in the counties have very little input. Furthermore, many of our County Commissioners are busy fighting governors over status, instead of coordinating their security operations with the county bosses.

This is unfortunate. Instead of constantly re-litigating the role of County Commissioners and their status vis-à-vis governors, it is high time we accepted that the latter are the highest-ranking public officials in the counties.

The president should make this abundantly clear to the men and women that he has posted to the counties. In addition, Vigilance House should consider possible amendments to create security structures in the counties that are primarily accountable to governors.

Now many Kenyans get cagey when asked to consider a decentralised police system. There is often tangible fear that if we devolve security functions governors might give into the many centrifugal forces that exist in Kenya and destroy the national project. For this reason only a minority of us ever consider seriously the idea of breaking up the Police Service and giving cities, towns, and counties more say in local law enforcement.

But while these fears may be justified, they should not foreclose on possible middle-ground arrangements that may help better address insecurity in the country. The fact of the matter is that local leaders know their respective jurisdictions best. We should therefore consider either the creation of County Police Services, or subject a section of the police units deployed to the counties to direct supervision by governors.

This is not a particularly revolutionary idea. All over the world many countries have devolved security structures. Cities, counties, and States in the US have their own police services. The central government runs the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By subjecting the sub-national security services to direct citizen supervision by the ballot box, issues related to crime and security in the US are often a key plank in election campaigns.

Again, we may have legitimate reasons to fear total devolution of the security question. But there are alternatives in the middle-ground between total devolution and total monopoly by Nairobi.

The president and Vigilance House are not accountable to the people of Mandera. How many people had to die before Kimaiyo and Lenku got fired? Do we know why? What would governors in Turkana, Lamu, Mandera, or Nairobi had done if they had control over the appointment of some of their counties’ security chiefs?

Our government likes to talk about innovation and new thinking. Unfortunately, they often only think about this in terms of shiny new things related to the latest technology. The reality, however, is that what we need to get Kenya safe and growing fast are not glitzy things, but good old fashioned serious thinking about boring things like security, housing, water and sanitation, and the like. These are the areas where we need to be innovating.