Police Service and Commission must stick to their lanes

The suspension of the recruitment of 10,000 police constables that was supposed to kick off on Friday, is the culmination of push and pull the National Police Service (NPS) and the National Police Service Commission (NPSC) have been having for some time this year.

The recruitment is just one of the issues that has strained relations between the two institutions following attempts by NPSC Secretariat to take charge of operational responsibilities from NPS.

Any attempt to wrest control of police functions under the guise of oversight reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the Commission’s structure.

What is clearly emerging as the root cause of the current standoff is NPSC’s Secretariat attempts to overreach its mandate. Already, the Attorney General has clarified that the Inspector General (IG) is the one legally mandated to administer police payroll.

The National Treasury has also rebuffed NPSC Secretariat attempts to take control of the personnel budget of NPS as it contradicts the Public Finance Management Act. The Constitution of Kenya 2010 is crystal clear on delineating roles to prevent the two institutions from overlapping roles.

Article 245 vests the IG with unequivocal command over the management of day-to-day functions including human resource deployment, logistics, and operations, and should not be interfered with. To do so would be to politicise a national security institution and risk eroding the command structure that holds the police service together.

On the other hand, Article 246 empowers the NPSC with human resource functions of civilian staff deployed to NPS, while exercising oversight to shield policing from political interference.

Yet, as MPs lamented last month, overlapping mandates have fueled this standoff, with NPSC encroaching on the IG’s operational turf, demanding veto power over budgets and processes that rightfully fall under his purview.

This overreach by NPSC secretariat doesn’t just flout the Constitution’s guardrails. It erodes the delicate equilibrium our constitutional framers envisioned. While NPSC’s oversight is indispensable, it must not morph into micromanagement that paralyses action by undermining the IG’s management mandate, as enshrined in the National Police Service Act.

We must return to the fundamentals which include the rule of law, institutional respect, and fidelity to the Constitution. The NPSC was never designed to be a platform for political theatrics. It was envisioned as a pillar of security sector reform, a role it cannot fulfill if it is continuously undermined from within and without. 

It is important for the NPSC Secretariat, therefore, to remember that they are staff member of the Commission, appointed by and accountable to the very commissioners it has been undermining. The Secretariat role is administrative and supportive, not operational or policy-setting.

For the sake of Kenya’s collective safety, the NPS and NPSC must realign to their lanes. Only then can both NPS and NPSC operate harmoniously, not in the shadow of discord, but in the light of unified resolve.

The writer is a Professor of Psychology and Expert in Governance and Leadership