Photo: Brian Ngugi/IPS Politics is a paranoid business even at the best of times. And the politics of presidential security and well being involve more paranoid paradigms, the world over, than entire mental health institutions in any one nation put together.
The visit of the United States President to any country outside his own national borders, for instance, involves security arrangements that his hosts never forget, including intrusive interruptions of the digital communications of entire populaces and the cutting down of ancient trees on the airport road.
And yet no President of the United States has ever been harmed outside that country, much less killed. The Americans kill their own presidents within their own borders - four so far - including the truly extraordinary case of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) 50 years ago on November 22 1963.
Presidential security and wellbeing are a very large part of what is known as the National Security State in all countries. As the time for President Uhuru's date with The Hague looms ever nearer, there will be much agonising in Kenyan protocol and security circles about the shape the case might take once it begins in earnest.
There will also be legitimate worries about his own physical safety for the duration of his personal appearances in court. He is, after all, a frontline commander-in-chief of the American-led war on terror, with his forces engaging al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab in hostilities on the militia's own soil across the border in Somalia as, well as deep inside Kenya itself.
What's more, chief ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda of the Gambia has given every impression that she has more than a few nasty surprises up her sleeve for Uhuru.
On top of maintaining a steady drumbeat of a narrative accusing the defence of massive interference with witnesses, the prosecutor and her associates have hinted heavily at possessing conclusive damning evidence of an electronic nature, including satellite images.
On the question of witness intimidation, the New York Times commented on July 19, 2013, after three witnesses quit the case, "For the witnesses this situation is unheard-of: you have a sitting president who controls the army, the police, the secret police", said an international lawyer closely following the trial who considered the matter too delicate to speak on the record. "How could witnesses believe they can be safe?"
The NY Times quickly followed up this observation with an equally trenchant one from the defence: "A lawyer for Kenyatta vehemently denied all accusations of witness tampering or intimidation on the part of the defense.
'There is not a single scrap of evidence accepted by the judges that President Kenyatta has interfered with witnesses', Steven Kay, a lawyer for Mr Kenyatta in his case before The Hague, said in an e-mailed response to questions. 'The comments are made as part of a strategy to hide a weak case'."
Kay also observed in his email to the NY Times that the defence has "evidence of the bulk of the witnesses being supplied by political opponents". So far, so giving-as-good-as-you-get.
But there is deep concern in both President Uhuru's innermost circles and those of Deputy President William Ruto that a nasty digital surprise or two awaits each man in court at The Hague once the cases begin in earnest.
And the fear is not necessarily so much that digital damning evidence exists in any one place but what prosecutorial spin, interpretation and nuance could be put on it.
To add to the general atmosphere of paranoia, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has warned President Uhuru that there are plans afoot at The Hague to seriously embarrass and inconvenience him.
President Museveni is an old hand in matters of international intrigue - and a veteran survivor. In this era of digital communications surveillance, any adverse thing is possible.
And the watchers and listeners are not always necessarily secret agents and other cloak-and-dagger types. For instance, unbeknownst to the vast majority of Kenyans, a project of world-famous Harvard University, in conjunction with a Kenyan mobile communications provider, secretly tracked the physical movements of 15 million Kenyan mobile phone subscribers for a whole year in the aftermath of the post-election violence post-election violence.
This was virtually the entire complement of the provider's subscriber base at the time (2008-2009). And the subscribers, who included VIPs, members of the disciplined forces (including the Intelligence agencies), and Kenyans of all other walks of life, including schoolchildren, were neither alerted nor consulted.
Speaking on BBC World Service FM radio's Newsday programme early on Wednesday, June 26, 2013, a controller of the Harvard Kenyan mobile monitoring experiment assured reporters that the massive data mining collected on all of the providers subscribers that year was "anonymised" for analysis purposes.
The project involved epidemiologists at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Kenya Medical Research Institute and Wellcome Trust Research tracking outbreaks of malaria and cholera by tracking all of the Kenyan providers' subscribers for 12 months.
On April 24, Business Intelligence magazine of Johannesburg, South Africa, in a remarkable report headlined 'Big data tracks disease spread', quoting the MIT Technology Review, described HSPH's massive data mining of the Kenyan mobile subscribers in the following detailed manner:
"Calls and texts from Kenya's nearly 15 million mobile phone users, across nearly 12,000 cell towers, were mapped, providing data on users leaving their primary settlements, where they went, and how long their journeys lasted. The data allows researchers to estimate the probability that an individual is carrying a disease, to establish which areas are the most common sources of disease, and to make note of which areas diseased individuals return to most frequently".
Reporting on the same research on October 12, 2012, on its website, the Wellcome Trust was even more detailed, citing not round figures but exact numbers:
"Between June 2008 and June 2009, the researchers mapped every call or text made by each of 14,816, 521 Kenyan mobile phone subscribers to one of 11,920 cell towers located in 692 different settlements. Every time an individual left his or her primary settlement, the destination and duration of each journey was calculated".
Both Business Intelligence and the Wellcome Trust announced the same findings of this extraordinary survey. The Wellcome Trust said:
"The results show that malaria in Kenya principally originates from the Lake Victoria region and is carried to other parts of the country, especially eastwards towards Nairobi, according to [the] HSPH report".
In a country as politically polarized and paranoid as Kenya, many millions who have never contracted malaria (and never will, because they take every precaution not to), will look at the Harvard project and procedure and will treat it with the greatest suspicion. And, to a man and a woman, they are likely to be the Jubilee Coalition supporters and voters of President Uhuru and Deputy President Ruto.
Many other millions, the voters and supporters of Cord and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga and former Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka, will defend the Harvard/mobile provider project to the hilt.
Indeed, they will be seriously gratified that such secretively intrusive digital monitoring actually exists and was deployed so massively in Kenya.
In Cord's calculation, this can only mean one thing: if well-meaning medical researchers at the great Harvard University can capture every mobile call, every SMS and every physical movement of every Kenyan with a mobile phone, from wadosi to raia, from karao to wakora, for a whole year, how much more can't the investigators of the Western spy agencies and the ICC do? And in the case of the foreign spooks and investigators, there would be no "anonymisation" of data, would there?
But this is a double-edged sword. If any agency was indeed monitoring Kenya on a massive, Total Information Awareness scale during the post-election violence itself, or has subsequently retrieved the content of such random but comprehensive digital surveillance, it could well have the effect of netting even more public figures, on all sides of the political divide. Who remembers what, exactly, they said, texted and where they went, when and why during the violence.
Meanwhile, in the Jubilee camp, it will be instantly and massively suspiciously recalled that in early May this year, two other Harvard-related researchers, who had undertaken another survey of Kenyans, on yet another unsolicited and unheralded very special project, produced a highly controversial report on the outcome of the March 4 Presidential election.
At a presentation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, exit poll analysts James Long, a Harvard University visiting professor, and Prof Clark Gibson of the University of California at San Diego, claimed that their research showed that neither Uhuru Kenyatta (now President) nor Raila Odinga achieved a 50 per cent vote in the Presidential poll.
By the time Deputy President Ruto and President Uhuru separately enter the dock at The Hague, the atmosphere of political paranoia in Kenya will be palpable.
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