Who came up with the baloney of a civilian heading the police?

Some time last year I had the temerity to walk up to an administration policeman and ask him a question. You see, to policemen, interrogations are a one-way affair and they are always on the inquisitor’s side.

I asked him what type of gun he was carrying. He had in his hands some form of machine gun that I had never seen any other policeman carrying. I always see them with G3s and Stalin’s gun, the Kalashnikov.

He laughed and asked: “Hujawahi kuona kama hii?” (Haven’t you ever seen one that looks like this?)
I said yes.

He asked: “Oh, hii haifanani na zile nyinyi hutumia kawaida eh?” (Oh, this one does not look like the ones you and your ilk use, eh?)

I panicked. I had gone from questioner to the interrogated. Tables had turned. I immediately apologised for my impertinent question and tried to leave.

He was, after all, an administration policeman with all the complexes that the job of being a second-tier policeman carries. If he had shot me before turning the gun on himself — as is the custom — they would have rummaged through his wallet and presumably found a passport photo of his girlfriend and pronounced it ‘a love triangle’. It always is.

After interrogating me — during which time I also had to produce my national ID card — I left scared but unharmed, perhaps only needing an immediate change of underwear.

But I was struck by two important things from the encounter. First is the fact that APs do not have name tags, so there was no way of knowing whether he really was a member of the second-division police force.

And the gun, being different from all others I had seen members of the police and the AP possess, also made me wonder whether he really was a cop or not.

The second thing I realised is the innate sense of moral superiority possessed by members of the police force. See, policemen are different from you and me. Their jobs might, at some point in the future, involve killing members of their own species.

Most people don’t understand how hard it is to kill a fellow human being. Majority of people, even when faced with a life-threatening situation where it is kill or be killed, will not kill.

Most soldiers in battlefield in the past used to fire in the air and deliberately miss. Some of the kills in the past were as a result of heavy artillery fire where the explosion is uncontrolled.

Firing rates for WW 1 and WW2 were about 15 and 25 per cent, according to Gwynne Dyer in his book War. Most soldiers didn’t fire at the enemy. Only about two per cent of men are out and out psychopaths with a desire to kill fellow human beings.

Today’s military uses psychological methods such as both operant and classical conditioning to ensure that their forces can kill on command. They also (controversially) get their recruits when they are young. The only person stupid enough to be convinced that war is an aspirational is somebody straight from high school.

Of course much older men can be — and have been — trained to fight, but late teens are preferred.

Not only are the young economically unproductive, they are also expendable since most have no dependants, and are, perhaps due to naivety, the only people that can be convinced that killing is a good thing.

The police, and to an even greater extent the military, go out of their way to create a distinct identity from the civilian population. All the trinkets, drapery, titles and uniforms are to convince you that you are different from the ovine civilian population.

They make you march in formation despite the fact that formations have not been of any real use to any armed force in over 150 years. The point of all these drills is to establish a hierarchy and make you understand that you are a member of an illustrious organisation.

I’m sure the first thing they do when you check into Kiganjo is take away all possessions from your civilian life and give you same-looking overalls. In the police and the army we are dealing with groups of men and women who are deliberately conditioned to believe that they somehow exist on a higher plane than common civilians.

A sense of legitimacy

For you to follow a command that puts your life at risk or which puts you in the position of killing someone, you need, above all, to feel a sense of legitimacy of the order. Legitimacy helps diffuse responsibility. The person giving the command should stand in high stead in your books. The easiest way to ensure legitimacy is to make sure that he knows what pressures you face while doing the job.

So would you, as an officer presumably steeped in a culture of honour and with a proud history of the institution whose uniform you wear, risk your life on the order of someone who knows absolutely nothing about assessment of risk, someone who has never been on the beat? I wouldn’t.

The easiest way to get people to follow your orders is for them to have complete confidence in your judgment. How are you sure that it is the right decision? What’s his experience on the matter? Does he know what the business end of an AK 47 looks like?

The police have made their service a cliquish and insular world with rules and regulations to follow. For an organisation that goes so far out of its way to distance itself from civilians to be headed by one of them is ludicrous.

PowerPoint police chief

The police have already complained of how demoralising it is about having someone who eventually will be plucked from the incestuous worlds of civil society and government commissions to be their boss, the Inspector General.

A sort of theory-based, PowerPoint police chief. Someone who will have to have a personal translator during meetings because he doesn’t know the in-force lingo and has a suit instead of a proper uniform. Heck, he doesn’t even have proper boots!

The policemen will feel, and rightly so, that they are lions led by lambs. To be precise, lions led by a civil society slice of mutton. Even if we employ a police boss who is a civilian and decide to train him, what shall we do during the interregnum as he is taught the correct way to hoist a suspect by his belt when he is under arrest?

The reason my question at the beginning concerning the nature of the gun pricked the AP was that I was a civilian trying to understand their world, which I am not privy to. Let the police have one of their own leading them.

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I expect ideologies from Miguna, not the times he spent in bed with hyenas

I think Miguna has real concerns about his treatment at the hands of Premier Raila Odinga and his henchmen.

His dismissal was both casual and unfair and has amounted to a betrayal by a close confidante.

But it is sad to see a politician’s game warden turn around and become his poacher. What will his book about his service at the PM’s office say?

I wonder whether it will reveal any private conversations, because, in my book, it is wrong to divulge conversations held in confidence. Doing so is the habit of dejected and dishonorable politicians and a gross betrayal of the trust of people you once considered friends and colleagues.

Pretending that the move to divulge sensitive information is in the public interest only serves to twist the knife because he was hired as a private advisor. The publication of Miguna’s tome will add very little to the public understanding of the workings of the PM’s Office.

The timing and the accompanied media onslaught carried by the good man portrays the book as an attempt to become the epitaph of the PM’s 2012 ambitions. It intimates a sense of urgency motivated by the need to settle scores. And, above all, I am disinclined to believe him.

Obviously the writer is going to try to justify himself and his actions while still in office and paint his colleagues in the worst light possible. It will be a sort of whitewash where he will paint himself as a beacon of sense guided by unflinching principle and moral rectitude while surrounded by jackals.

The book will be a L’espirit d’escalier’s Parthian shot, delivered while the matter is still red hot to him but aimed at targets who have already moved onwards and upwards.

So, would you rather drill a hole in your skull or read the book? Either way you will get a high-pitched whine ringing in your ears and a migraine afterwards — that is, if his media interviews are anything to go by.

As for me, hand me the drill and some aspirin.

Because he comes across as a very intelligent and honourable man, Miguna should tell us more about the ideas he has, not the time he spent dancing with hyenas.

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