Our police force has featured continuously as the most corrupt institution in all years yet we continue involving them in areas where they are prone to engaging in more corruption. We need to disengage police with business activity since all they do is raise cost of doing business in kenya and leave them exclusively to handle security. These areas include but are not limited to;
- Road Traffic management – Currently, road traffic management and policing is carried out by the police traffic department headed by a traffic commandant who is under the Inspector General of Police. This set up was inherited from the colonial days and over the years it has proved not to work. Corruption is rife right from the traffic cops on the roads to the IG via the commandant. Indeed being posted to the traffic police department is a very lucrative and competitive assignment. To counter this, I propose a complete overhaul of the system. And this is:
Disband the traffic police department. They have totally failed over the years. Leave this mandate to NTSA which should be run professionally by the CEO answerable to the CS transport, the President and of cause parliament. No security of tenure here. If you dont perform face the sack. They should handle everything that the traffic department handles currently including enforcement, handling of accidents and issue of abstracts, vehicle inspections, prosecution of offenders and licensing. They will forward offenders to police ONLY for locking up as per the law. Performance measure to include number of accidents per month/annum, number of unroadworthy vehicles and unlicensed drivers on the roads, prosecution rate of offenders etc. To measure their performance they should be subject to audit by the auditor general who will conduct sample based audits of all these parameters and issue a report.
For those who are familiar with auditing you know that audit does not only deal with matters financial. There is audit of systems, controls and processes. The auditor general’s office should be expanded to include a department of road traffic management audit. They should operate like traffic police by stopping vehicles and inspecting them for compliance to traffic rules especially in regard to vehicle inspection and insurance, drivers/operators license, weight and capacity, roadworthiness, routes and saccos etc. However, theirs is not to arrest or prosecute but only to take note and document non compliance. This will now form the basis of their report on the effectiveness of NTSA.
Therefore, while NTSA will be the enforcer of the traffic act, the auditor general will be their check while the executive and parliament will be their boss to hire and fire them based on their performance.
Currently, although road transport is one of the biggest element of today’s economies, its safety and compliance mandate has been conveniently hidden under a mere department in the police and therefore makes it difficult to make someone accountable for the messes in this crucial sector. Furthermore the traffic police are also the jury and executioner themselves. To hold someone accountable, then ideally we should sack the CS transport, CS internal security who is the boss of the IG, then the IG (who has security of tenure) and who is the boss of the traffic commandant and finally to the traffic commandant and his juniors. This is an impossible process and so everyone hides under the other.
- Weight bridges – Currently gazette weighbridges are manned by traffic police. This has always been a den of corruption. As stipulated above, the problem is the police. My proposed solution is as follows;
Privatize the management of weighbridges to private companies with stringent operational targets and expensive penalties to these companies in case of non performance. These weighbridges should give certificates and seals to weighed vehicles. Again, NTSA through their enforcement arm should have mobile weighbridges which they set up randomly to check for compliance by checking actual weight against the certificates and legal weight limits. Non compliant operators are prosecuted and a report also sent to the auditor general. A third check would be the random sampling by the auditor general’s officers to ascertain compliance of both NTSA and the private companies manning the gazetted weighbridges. A report from the auditor general would indicate whether these two are doing their job. Remember the auditor general will not have powers to arrest or prosecute. Therefore he will not be in a position to be given bribes by operators as all he does is note their mistakes, document them and let them carry on.
- Liquor licensing and other businesses – Today in order to get a liquor license especially to operate a retail business in many counties you require a clearance by the nearest police station boss in form of a signature and stamp in a report concerning the location and security of the premises. Those of you who have been in this business know that this is a mere formality as what really happens is that money changes hands and you get the clearance. In other words it’s just an opportunity for the OCS or OCPD to ‘eat’.
Furthermore, the police are also the enforcers of opening and closing hours of establishments and it is the bribes paid to the police that determine the flexibility of time in which you operate and not the license parameters.
In other businesses like money courier and banking, the police are privately hired at the expense of the public to provide dedicated security to individuals and businesses rather than secure the tax payer who actually pays them. Also, official hire rates are way underrated as a lot of bribes have to be paid to police bosses to make officers ‘available’ for hire.
It is my opinion that the role of police in these businesses has not been helpful and as pointed in 1 and 2 above, alternative ways of conducting these roles should be sought to remove police who only increase cost of doing business in Kenya. What we lack are adequate checks and balances.
All in all, one point that stands out is the underutilization of the office of the auditor general. This office is so crucial that if you look at all the top performing companies in the world you will notice that they all have a vibrant audit department which keeps all the other departments on their toes by giving reports to management on their performance. It’s time we run government like a company.
Police corruption will only end if we relieved them of all the unnecessary ‘duties’ bestowed upon them and which they’ve conveniently turned into money making ventures, and left them to concentrate on their CORE MANDATE of securing the public and of course pay and equip them well.
[ATTACH=full]34563[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]34564[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]34565[/ATTACH]