TITLE: Secure
neighborhoods Kenya
A Brief Background
Insecurity has always been a
slippery affair that subsequent regimes have for a long time failed to address,
but only handle it with kid gloves and successfully fail to nip the vice at the
bud.
Murang’a County is located in
Central Kenya. Here, insecurity thrives.
Cases of motorcyclists losing
their motorbikes, and sadly their lives are a near daily occurrence in this
locality. Motorists are neither spared by a wave of robbery that has swept Murang’a
County over the last few years.
Vigilante groups and unlawful
formations continue to guard this area, for a fee, thus giving extortionist
gangs like the dreaded Mungiki gang, a field day as they collect what they call
“protection fees” from all and sundry, from the motorists, to motorbike taxis,
commonly referred to as bodaboda, to businessmen and to the impoverished
residents, despite police presence in the area.
As we take a walk into the lush
green and hilly landscape of Kamune village at the heart of Mathioya District, we
realize that the number of people has greatly reduced to just a few, and the
graves have soared in numbers, presumably bearing the remains of the young men
who lose their lives to robbery, many of whom are bodaboda operators.
At the Keni bus stop along the
Murang’a –Kiria-ini road dozens of bodaboda operators are whiling away waiting
for passengers, and on sighting us, they abandon whatever they are doing and
ambush us, offering to ferry us with
their bikes to wherever we wished to go, of course for a dime.
After the usual pleasantries we set out
to ask them about the security situation in the area, and in their place of
work. At this point, most of them are suddenly disinterested, and look at us
suspiciously. In this locality, we are told, no one dares talk about insecurity
fearing repercussions from the prime perpetrators of robbery and violence, The
Mungiki, who are said to lurk in the area.
We talk to them about the numerous
deaths that have been meted to bodaboda operators in the area, their
disappearance and how they are later discovered in thickets with parts of their
bodies chopped off their badly mutilated bodies,and that’s when they become
interested.
After some minutes the whole group
is now surrounding us and narrating to us chilling details of how that happened
to their colleagues, how they remained vulnerable to robberies. They live in
fear, we learn.
They tell us how the police tried
to ease the situation by providing emergency numbers in case they cited a suspect, or in case they
were in trouble, but years down the line, the problem persists.
There is need for a bottom to top
approach that will incorporate and revolve on the participation of the local community
that will reflect on the security situation of this part of the country.
Objectives
SENEKEN is a combination of
abbreviations derived from the words, Secure Neighborhoods Kenya, which is a crowd
sourcing platform that seeks to collect data from Murang’a residents for
several months, Say from October- December, and come up with a conclusive
report of how the bikes are stolen and the number of operators who are killed
as a result in given neighborhood.
For instance, x number of
operators go missing every month, and out of those y/100 meet their death
To achieve this all the bikes at
Keni stage will be fitted with Global Positioning System devices which will
communicate with a small SENEKEN nerve center .Monitors at the nerve center
will track the marked bikes on a 24/7 basis. Operators will then be given
numbers which they can call in case of any robbery.
A qualitative analysis of the
bodaboda s in the monitor list will be done after every month.
The analysis will give details of
where the stolen bikes are smuggled to , and the operators will be asked the
number plates of the bikes which have gone missing, after which the police will
liaise with Seneken to net the culprits.
This data will be invaluable to
journalists in the area who were greatly interested with this project.
The provincial administration and
the Police in area were also enthusiastic about the platform and vowed to work
with us.
The local community is the largest
beneficiary of this project since robbery will be wiped out of their
neighborhoods
Crowd sourcing tools
Several crowd sourcing tools have
been used by the police and the media, which included the use of an emergency
number provided to operators to alert police whenever they encountered thugs or
problems
Another tool used was the
community policing approach where police told locals to report cases of
violence but sadly, the two approaches failed to gain any fruits, in particular
was the second approach where locals feared repercussions if the perpetrators ever knew about them, including
the threat of death.
This was a major challenge that
made the two approaches fail.
To effectively deal with the
shortcoming, SENEKEN intends to use short message services, SMS where a
monitoring center for analyzing the SMSes will be set up.
The smses will be sent by the
operators in case a bike goes missing, after which the specific bike is put
under surveillance.
Safaricom, Airtel, Orange and Yu,
all mobile phone service subscribers, will provide a short number for SMSes
like 4040, which everyone will use to send the messages.
Expected results
After sometime, the number of
robberies will significantly go down after the capture of many robbers by the
police
The security situation in the area
will hugely improve
The Kenya police will be empowered
to act swiftly and precisely in case of any theft
Secure neighborhoods will emerge in
the country and people will set up business in the area
Resources needed
-Global positioning devices
-Computers an internet
-Office space complete with
stationery
-GPS mast
-Communication lines/wireless
phones to reach locals/police/stakeholders
If this project is a success, it
will roll to all other parts of the country, which experience similar
incidences of insecurity, and will therefore create a working partnership
between the police, the local population and the GPS technology to hammer the
last nails into the coffin bearing the remains of the vice, INSECURITY.
Editor’s note
This proposal was presented for
awards consideration at the The Big Picture Digital Journalism project for the
First Crowd sourced Journalism Awards for Africa.
It might not have won any awards but I just wis our politicians could use such approaches to make Kenya a better place to live in.
It might not have won any awards but I just wis our politicians could use such approaches to make Kenya a better place to live in.
Special thanks to Murang’a, Mathioya
residents for coming out and stating the problem, and to the Big Picture
project for inviting me for an awards dinner at the Fairview Hotel in Nairobi,
Kenya, where I learnt a lot in this new concept of crowd sourced journalism in
Kenya.www.facebook.com/amoxers
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