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| NEWS > 09 March 2006 |
Other related articles:
Police bad behaviour on wane,
A WOMAN escaped a drink-driving charge after two male police officers turned a blind eye to her breath test results when she agreed to perform a sexual act on one of them in the back of her car, the annual NSW Ombudsman report reveals.
The report said the Ombudsman received almost 3000 formal complaints about the NSW Police Force last year, almost 500 fewer than last year. Most were about police misconduct, inadequate investigations and excessive use of force.
Forty-nine officers were charged with 136 offences in the past year, 13 fewer than the year before, and 24 were sacke... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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Kenya Times - Kenya
09 March 2006
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Choosing the path of truth com
When the Commissioner of Police Hussein Ali arrived in the country from the Seychelles after the police raid on Standard and Kenya Television media houses, he was expected to own up to the raid, by virtue of his position as the head of the police force whether he had been part of the plot or not. But he did not.
Instead he demonstrated that as a government officer he had an obligation to discharge his services to the people guided foremost by his moral principles and loyalty to the public and the country.
Thousands of civil servants, fearing contradicting their bosses and consequences of the civil service rule of insurbordination, have owned up to mistakes otherwise committed by their bosses or even juniors. Such public servants have suffered irreparable losses including loss of careers, personal integrity and standing in society.
The current Commissioner of Police by disowning the raid on the media brings to the civil service an admirable example that will henceforth be a precedent to guide many public servants ready to serve with honesty and integrity. These are the new civil servants that will form the backbone of the ongoing reforms in the civil service.
The operations of Kenya’s civil service, whose rules also inform the operations of the police force, still largely contain vestiges of colonial doctrines in structure and spirit. In fact our civil service has remained resistant to the principles of new public service administration now in vogue the world all over.
Perhaps it is the combination of new discipline in the armed forces and the need to operate a more reformed police force that Major-General Ali has decided to choose the path of truth and morality even if it means the loss of his lucrative job and power as Commissioner of Police.
An officer desperately looking for the support of the members of the public to roll out his community policing project would not of course accept to be part of a plot against the people and the media.
Most civil servants are reluctant to implement Martin Luther King Junior’s cardinal rule that one would rather disobey wrong laws and suffer consequences than obey them. The history of Kenya’s civil service is replete with cases of how blind discharge of wrong directives have cost the country a fortune through maladministration.
This is precisely why the Commissioner of Police is now being humiliated for the simple fact that he has declined to endorse the wrong decisions by others in the name of state security.
Integrity should be the guiding principle for all civil servants. They must not act like robots but have the ability to identify the bad from the good and the wrong from the right. Who would ever want to hire a servant that chooses to do harm to his master to please one two or three individuals?
The Commissioner of Police therefore brings some freshness in the management of our public affairs. We do not say this because he appears not to agree with the raid on the media house but because he has chosen to search his conscience and put his job in jeorpady for not covering somebody else’s designs against public interest.
Last year a senior civil servant ordered for the sacking of hundreds of civil servants for demanding a pay rise. Some of the dismissal letters were written in a manner that would inform anybody with rudimentary education that some of the permanent secretaries in this country are a let down. No wonder that some of them have found themselves appending signatures on documents that have terminated their careers.
Some of the sacking letters, particularly for employees in the Ministry of Immigration and Registration, claimed that the suspended government employees had been sacked for staying away from their offices for two hours! Is this how a modern civil service operates. In which modern government can a public servant be sacked for being out of his office for two hours?
The ongoing contradictions within the police force is just the tip of an iceberg of how rotten and unrefined the public service is. And these are the weaknesses that are exploited by the civil service abusers.
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