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National Police Service and the Kenya Prisons Service will recruit specialist cadets.  

Unlike before, the skills-based recruitment, will ensure that directorates and sections are headed by officers with the requisite professional and training background, and not just based on the rank.

As a result, all heads of departments who are set to retire will be replaced by officers specially trained in those fields, in a new approach that seeks to adopt professionalism in the security sector.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i yesterday said the government seeks to modernise the capacity of correctional services by training officers on leadership and management courses.

“We want to train the officers so that when they come out and we give them correctional institutions to manage, they understand what to do, having studied quite a number of things such as law, human rights and philosophy of our correctional services,” he said.

Speaking yesterday during the official opening of 161 cadet officers’ initial 13-months rigorous training course in Ruiru, Kiambu County, the CS noted that the security sector has continued to suffer serious challenges due to ill preparation of officers handed various leadership responsibilities.

“We have been having challenges because those officers given responsibilities have not been prepared well to be leaders.

They get young officers who have various challenges and who need to be mentored and instead of mentoring and guiding them, they either abandon them to their own designs and in that process, we lose young officers,” he said.

The initiative which will be executed on a multiagency basis that will see the graduate cadets interact with officers in various government investigative departments especially those that deal with crimes such as drug trafficking.