Kenya might find it extremely difficult to forestall large scale terrorist acts unless the National Intelligence Service (NIS) moves fast to up its game, insiders warn.
They say one year since the country grieved over the death of at least 67 people in the Westgate Mall massacre, security agencies are in dire need of upping their game in the fight against terrorism.
In particular, they cite the lacklustre NIS, claiming its work quality is not corresponding to the huge amount of resources it controls. This financial year, the Service was allocated more than Sh14 billion, which is usually never accounted for. Overwhelmingly, it is argued that its subpar performance is as a result of NIS being politicised, with its focus shifting from internal and external aggression to “imagined enemies”, mainly political opponents.
Nyati House insiders say while officers have relentlessly worked hard to ensure they come up with cutting-edge, and timely intelligence on the country’s security environment, their diligence go unrewarded. “Our operations have been nose-diving since Michael Gichangi took over the leadership of the Service from Wilson Boinett eight years ago,” said a source. “Mr Gichangi was out of touch with NIS. He came in with a military swagger, putting himself in an executive spot.”
Unlike his predecessor, it is observed that Mr Gichangi was not an initiator. “Directors feared him. They even never understood him. As such, there existed a big gulf between the Director General and his directors.”
But even with Mr Gichangi’s imminent departure from Service, NIS officers who spoke to this paper in confidence say their morale has been affected by the non-review of their salaries.
They say despite a commission tasked with revising their pays finishing its work a year ago, no change has been witnessed in their “heavily committed” payslips. “Some officers have now opted to doing non-intelligence work to pay up their banks loans. This is because we had anticipated a pay hike of between Sh20, 000 and Sh50, 000.”
Mr Gichangi’s successor Philip Kameru’s (pictured) most crucial assignment could be to take the Service back to the “old culture of passion for work.” As it is today, senior officers say the young, energetic graduates are not keen at serving the nation, but to earn.
“The qualities of briefs are low and hardly comprehensible. The briefs also lack coherence. You send these young officers out there for assignment and what you get back is nil. Unless embedded with seniors, they do not show commitment at work.”
The trend has been blamed on the new trend of hiring in the Service, where the sons and daughters of who-is-who in the society are hired. “You cannot properly manage an officer who you pretty well know is a son of a cabinet secretary or a daughter of a principal secretary. This is a problem that has compromised our approach to work. It could be worse in the next 10 years when senior bosses retire.”
A Nairobi-based security expert said if Mr Kameru is to match Boinnet’s work ethic, he should reverse the Service to the days of spot-talenting.
In a roadmap NIS could use to effectively counter terrorism in Kenya, Richard Tutah, an Israel-trained Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism expert says the new director must first recognise that the security environment in “very” dynamic. In this case, the Service must upscale itself to the realities of time when terrorists’ weapons and communication systems are sophisticated. However, Mr Tutah argues that the country’s intelligence agency has a lot of “peculiarities and pathologies”, which affect its operations.
“It is only NIS that has no power to act or undertake an operation in the world. The Service plays only an advisory role, commonly referred to as the national intelligence estimates,” said Mr Tutah. Yet its peers, such as the CIA, FBI, Mossad, KGB, among others enjoy this clout.
The second peculiarity, the expert says, is that Kenya is the only democracy in the world that relies on one source of intelligence. He argues that developed economies have embraced pluralism in intelligence. Britain has M15 and M16 while Israel has four intelligence gathering units: Shin Bet, Mossad, Military intelligence (Aman) and the ministry of foreign affairs research. Perhaps this explains why before the Westgate Mall attack, Israel had already known about the impending raid.
By depending on only the NIS, Kenya risks low-quality and compromised information. “Intelligence can be compromised at the collection, analysis or dissemination level,” he said. “To minimise such chances, the new intelligence boss must encourage market place of ideas at the analysis stage. Alternatively, he could come up with what is known as the Red Team, whose thinking are extreme, to discourage group thinking.”
Meanwhile, sources at NIS indicate that Mr Kameru is set to promote a number of officers, as well as increase their salaries. This, according to the source, is a work-in-progress that could be actualised by Deecember. “He seems determined to kill the stinky legacy his predecessor left behind,” said the source.
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