The war on terror must shift from mere rhetoric to more action

The shameful attack on innocent worshippers at a Likoni church has seen, for the umpteenth time, the re-introduction of the state of security in our beloved country in national discourse. Such attacks are not new. Shocking of all is the morbid fascination of the perpetrating psychopaths targeting unarmed civilians in the most brutal of fashions.

Joy in Jesus Church attackers borrowed a page from this playbook by opening fire with lethal intent on a congregation, inflicting injuries and fatalities on the spiritual gathering. A mother succumbed to her serious injuries while frantically trying to shield her baby from the hail of bullets who also had a bullet lodged in his head. The reprehensible savagery, indiscriminately unleashed was without doubt purposely engineered to kill as many people as possible. My hope and prayer alongside other Kenyans of good sense, is that the surviving victims of this outrage will recover soonest and that the masterminds currently at large or so it seems, shall be brought within the orbit of the law.

Let me state matters briefly. The September 21 WestGate terrorist acts were a murderous outrage; the public massacre of tens of innocent people. They were planned with a hatefully potent sense of visual symbolism: attacking a high-end edifice; a towering symbol of ascendancy, optimism, a free market economy...Everything really that Kenya stands for in the 21st century. I don't think it's an exaggeration or a function of a mysterious obsession with journalistic hyperbole to say that the attack had a shattering effect on this nation's sense of itself in the world. It is an attack whose legacy remains unresolved to date.