BY Thomas Chemelil
The Generation Z protests exposed the darker side of an ill-equiped Kenya Police Service that has been left behind technologically by a tech-savvy generation that employed unconventional tech-backed tactics to overwhelm a police force that is generally clue-less and ill-equiped for modern policing.
I will dwell on the glaring ineffectiveness of the force. One, it was clear that the police force in Kenya is ill-equipped to handle matters like online mobilization. That thousands of youth could mobilize themselves to tragic consequences using Twitter is purely the work of a genious. We cannot, however, say this of our police officers who seem allergic to technology. Many a time during the protests, the force was caught napping on the job leading to the unprecedented invasion of parliament.
The second most glaring challenge was the use of outdated crowd management techniques by our forces. What on earth were military tanks doing on our streets against sixteen-year olds? Methinks that drone technology to monitor crowd movements would have been more appropriate. We should even think, at this age and time, on how our officers could use drones to deliver teargas cannisters to disperse crowds!
I see the same mistake being committed by our troops in Haiti. It cannot be overemphasized how the hoods in the capital city of Haiti are invested by marauding gangs who may not hesitate to throw in a fight against our forces. Equipping them with surveillamce drones may be handy. There are indications that the gangs in Haiti could be using drones to monitor Kenyan boots on the ground.
This takes me to the next challenge exposed by the Gen Zs in the streets of Nairobi: command. It was evident that there were command challenges during the riots as the forces either seemed clueless or ill-prepared. The invasion of our hallowed parliament serves to illustrate this. The question remains' how did the rioters manage to rewrite history by invading such a holy place? Did our commanders not foresee this coming?
My assessment points to two possible conclusions: either there was deliberate sabotage from within or intelligence failure.
It was equally clear that poor command and the lack of actionable intelligence made the boots on the ground got left-footed. There seems to have been a wrong assuption tjat the Generation Z protestors would be peaceful. Nobody foresaw the infiltration of the protests by criminal elements!
I want to believe that the President saw this gaps which made him to deploy KDF to "assist" the "overwhelmed" police units. Me and you know that our Police Officers are better than this. We never saw the Fanya Fujo Uone guys, the dreaded Red Berets, on the ground.
Those charged with our security apparatus should not fail the nation when we need them most. Peaceful protest should be allowed and criminal infiltrators flushed out. We still believe our police officers can do this.
Unti this happens, the tech-savvy Generation Zs will continue to beat our police officers who use the archaic "rungu and run" method. We must modernize our intelligence gathering systems in view of aligning it with new emerging technologies and equip our offices with modern surveillance tools for effective policing.