Why The Constantly Blundering NSIS Is A Big Danger To Kenya Part 1

A country’s intelligence service should be its’ pride and everybody should be confident that the nation’s intelligence network is well able to take care of the beloved motherland’s national security.

While the dreaded predecessor of the NSIS, the Special branch, achieved a lot with very limited funding in those days, the relatively new NSIS has in its’ short history brought only plenty of shame and many are now doubting whether those running the outfit really know what they are doing.

In January this year, private armies and militias whom we are told were put in place before the ill-fated general elections caused unprecedented mayhem and thousands of Kenyans lost their lives as a result. Apparently the NSIS did not have a clue as to what was going on. Indeed while various commentators predicted chaos if the elections were rigged—including this blog, it seems that the folks at NSIS did not have a clue. And accordingly the NSIS advised the president that all was well.

But there are many other glaring errors of judgment on the side of the NSIS that have come to light that are very scary and would seem to suggest that Kenyans do not really have an effective national intelligence outfit in place. Just to give one more example, the role and behaviour of the director general of the NSIS in the election fiasco seems to suggest that this is a man who has very limited understanding of the country and its’ people (outside his own community) or views them through prejudiced lenses. If this is true then the country is in such grave danger that it would have been much better if we did not have any intelligence service at all in place. Heck some politician’s personal intelligence networks have proved to be hundreds of times more effective.

My own careful observation and encounter of little details in the operations of the NSIS especially on the World Wide Web and in what is widely referred to as new media has left me deeply embarrassed at the realization that those behind some of the actions have no idea what they are doing.

Let me first make it clear that the NSIS has NEVER been a threat to my personal safety (as some people who have written me emails seem to think) and my recent troubles had nothing to do with them. Rather the strategy they have adopted as far as this blog is concerned is one of carefully monitoring it and wherever possible doing everything to limit its’ influence from spreading further by discrediting stories and posts carried here. Nothing wrong with them doing their job, even as I do mine. However the manner in which some of their operatives have pursued this objective has mainly been laughable.

A few months ago, somebody mysteriously cloned this blog and came up with a blog called Kumekuchas.blogspot.com. Notice that the difference is the “s” at the end of Kumekucha. That person who would not have achieved the feat without going into a lot of trouble and some expense because they even copied the exact design and logo of Kumekucha at the time. The monitoring system I have in place enabled me to discover the site hours after it came up on the web. My first reaction was to assume that it was the work of some amateur with more money than sense, or an aggrieved person whom I had exposed in previous posts. My inquiries kept on pointing in a different direction. It took me quite some time to believe that the evidence was pointing where it was.

Now without wanting to lecture you or show off my limited knowledge on web publishing, the truth is that if you cloned the Daily Nation print edition or any other print publication, the impact would be considerable. However when you do the same online without even bothering to do any SEO (search engine optimization) for important keywords, then basically it is a waste of time and resources. Or to simplify matters even further you just need to ask yourself the question; how will you get traffic to the site?

Secondly serious efforts have also been made to constantly jeer at articles in this blog. These efforts have completely ignored one fact. And that is the level of intelligence of the people who read this blog. Even I have been constantly amazed at just how intelligent and knowledgeable most of our readers here are. They are hardly the kind of people you can spin a yarn to and get away with it. Of course the fact that a few of them (who mostly like to leave comments) are radical supporters—or is it hero-worshippers—of either of the principals in the grand coalition government can fool a casual observer into thinking otherwise. However I can tell you one little secret. The majority of silent readers most of whom do not leave any comments ever are not fools.

Still the persistent comments here by people who are convinced that all posts in this blog are trash and not worth reading and do not have any new information have left one simple but puzzling question on the minds of intelligent regular readers here. The question is; in the busy world we live in today why would somebody waste their valuable time writing comments all over the place to discredit Kumekucha? Why not just stop visiting the site and instead patronize other sites that offer more reliable and acceptable information to them? Why is it so important to repeatedly tell other readers that you will stop reading the blog and you continue t do this for 6 months or longer?

I leave you to ponder on that mystery as you await the second and final part of this article.

Don’t miss Part 2 of his article where I talk about the failed attempt that was made to halt Safaricom SMS services at the height of post election violence and why the Tanzanian intelligence service is second to none in Africa. Plus how tribal tensions within the NSIS have destroyed the effectiveness of the intelligence unit.

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