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VIP guarding tactics another way elites lord it over us

VIP guarding tactics another way elites lord it over us
An unmarked police vehicle. PHOTO/Print

One evening earlier this week, a lone SUV, presumably carrying a VIP, zipped up Harry Thuku Road from the Norfolk hotel in Nairobi sandwiched by two police Subaru station wagons with blaring sirens.

The drivers deliberately turned the wrong way into traffic on the east-bound lanes of University Way, pushing some vehicles off the road to clear the way for the beast and the kahuna inside.

It seemed like an unnecessarily risky manoeuvre. Did protecting an individual truly require this brazen law-breaking on a busy city street? The drivers, who I imagine know Nairobi streets like the backs of their hands, should have turned left (the only turn allowed at that intersection) and made their way through the Globe Roundabout to get to the west-bound stretch of University Way.

Or they could have used Kijabe Street. Yes, it would have taken a bit longer but they would have made less drama and drawn less attention to themselves and avoided startling other road users.

This episode reminded me of a similar scene from a few days earlier. I was among a bunch of pedestrians trying to make our way from Parliament Road past the Senate to City Hall Way around noon on Sunday when three police officers (among several standing guard on Parliament Road) aggressively motioned to us not to move any farther.

We couldn’t immediately understand why, but we were in government square and I imagined anything was possible.

Soon enough, we found out why. Three speeding SUVs shot out of a heavily guarded, gated driveway behind Sheria House and vanished in the direction of Basilica, engines groaning under heavy gas-pedal pressure. Another VIP being ferried somewhere, I sighed.

Other citizens minding their own business in Nairobi have described similar experiences of what they saw as needlessly aggressive security personnel using domineering tactics to protect VIPs.

A lot of what happens in such cases makes little sense to those of us outside the guarding enterprise. What’s the point of the drama? In the Harry Thuku incident, for example, it was dark and no one would have noticed that the Subarus were escorting a VIP if the drivers hadn’t deliberately blundered the navigation in their quest to get to their destination quickly.

When I poked around later for more information about VIP protection, I learned that a lot of what we see is just the visible part of what’s a many-layered system. What comes across to us as “drama” apparently has tactical purposes. Swift personnel movements and aggressive police postures are designed to prevent “potential attack angles and maintain a secure perimeter”.

Force itself serves as a deterrent. No VIP or their protector wants to be a sitting duck for potential attackers, hence the quick vehicle manoeuvres and the road clearing that ends up annoying the rest of us. If you ever wondered about the multiple vehicles and personnel that accompany a VIP, the answer is that these “create redundancy in case one element is compromised”.

Which is fine, but has anyone ever bothered to ask about the impact of all this on the public? We are resigned at this point to the reality that disruptions to our daily lives are bound to occur when VIPs pass through or come to visit where we live or work.

But aggression of the kind we witness from security personnel frequently in Nairobi and the closing off of entire sections of the city for days to pedestrians because some event involving political grandees is taking place create resentment and hostility, and may even violate citizens’ rights.

Not long ago, many of us would not have cared a pin about what VIPs and those employed to protect them did on our roads. The drama might even have been entertaining for some, with walkers stopping on sidewalks to gawk at VIP convoys as they cruised along. Maybe we are more sensitive now to the behaviour of security personnel because of the events that followed last year’s youth-led street protests.

We are tired of being lorded over by the ruling ‘elites’ and reflexively reject any actions that restrict our enjoyment of public spaces.

— The writer is a Sub-Editor with People Daily

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