Laws should target safety for all, not the political security of those in power

I would not be surprised if a poll demonstrated substantial support for State gagging of the media, license to kill for the police, and general curbs on civil and political rights.

The supporters might argue that harsh laws are the answer to the upsurge in terrorism, banditry and violent crime. We have many Kenyans who will willingly subject themselves to a dictatorial and oppressive regime if that is what it will take to guarantee their own safety and security.

What they do not realise is that they probably suffer the Stockholm syndrome. That is the psychological condition where people in a captive state develop affection or sympathy for those keeping them in bondage.

The best known victim of Stockholm syndrome was Patty Hearst, socialite and heiress of the American media baron, William Randolph Hearst.

In 1974, Ms Hearst was kidnapped by a militant group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, only to start making public statements in support of the group. She was arrested after taking part in a bank robbery with her captors and served nearly two years in jail before earning presidential clemency.

EMOTIONAL BOND
The actual condition took its name from an earlier bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973. The robbers kept four employees of the bank hostage for nearly a week, but on release they had formed a paradoxical emotional bond with their captors.

Perhaps that is the syndrome that might make a rape victim fall for her assailant or make citizens submissive and sympathetic to an oppressive regime.

The other day I tracked Facebook and Twitter comments after someone posted a photograph of an alleged criminal being shot dead by police at point-blank range while prone on the tarmac on Kimathi Street. Most comments were in support of extrajudicial executions of such nature.

Around the same period, I posted a comment on Facebook, taking issue with the Al Jazeera TV documentary on police death squads targeting radical Islamist clerics and other suspected sponsors of jihadist terrorism at the Coast.

While I did not doubt that the Kenya Police and other security agencies were running extermination squads sanctioned at the highest levels of government, I was deeply suspicious of the very dodgy evidence presented by Al Jazeera.

COUNTERING TERRORISM
Anyway, the story here is about the reactions. Many were appalled that I might question the Al Jazeera version, and accused me of being a supporter of illegal death squads and the Jubilee government. Oh, and my name betrayed me.

An equal number were aghast that in exposing the death squads, Al Jazeera had exposed its own sympathies for Al-Shabaab and jihadist terror groups across Africa and the Middle East.

The interesting point was that this group was not denying the existence of official hit squads, but argued that that was the way to counter terrorism.

It is this mindset that would wholeheartedly support the oppressive security laws presently under discussion. For many, it is not just that the government must have adequate teeth in the war against terror, but that the Jubilee regime must have adequate instruments against its opponents.

Opponents here does not refer to Al-Shabaab, bandits or cattle rustlers, but the political opposition, the independent media, NGOs, and any other pesky grouping that does not blindly follow the dictates of a regime made out of Nyayo Error DNA.

WAR ON TERRORISM
No right-thinking Kenyan would oppose measures aimed at beefing up the war on terrorism. However, national security is about security for all, not political security for President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto.

It is instructive that the Security Laws (Amendment) Bill was largely drafted by Jubilee operatives, whose primary motivation is not the war against terrorism, but securing more oppressive instruments for the ruling regime.

The Bill does not seem to have the input of any professional and conscientious lawyer despite the surfeit in government of those fellows who call themselves Learned Friends, such as Attorney-General Githu Muigai, Solicitor-General Njee Muturi and presidential adviser on legal and constitutional matters Abdikadir Mohammed.

It is a sad day when important legislation to aid the war on terrorism is reduced to cheap politics.