According to the officer, people wishing to cross into Kenya would sometimes pay large bribes to GSU officers.
“(GSU officers) get a lot of money even to bring in people, not just illegal items. To bring one person to Kenya, one gets sometimes even Sh100,000,” he said.
Corruption is also a problem at police stations located along the border. People who are detained are often set free without good reason, the GSU officer said.
“Even if by good luck we arrest them, once we take them there (to the station), we don’t know what happens, they are released,” he said.
“We have betrayers in GSU, [national] police and AP (Administration Police). Of course they are bribed,” he added.
Mutea Iringo, Principal Secretary at the Ministry of State for Interior and Coordination of National Government declined to comment specifically on whether his department should have invested earlier in improving border security.
But he told IWPR that in spite of last June’s tranche of security-sector funding, his office still did not have the funds to support an effective border control system. He said the security sector had a shortfall of Sh82 billion ($950 million), which was stopping it from buying much-needed modern technology.
“Inadequate capacities and resources have hindered the sector’s ability to adopt technological advancements,” Iringo said.
Nonetheless, Iringo said, the government has boosted border security measures in the aftermath of the Westgate attack, including by linking all crossing points on a single computer network. That allows officers to access entry and exit data from a central source in real time.
“We have stepped up measures to ensure that illegal aliens do not penetrate into the country,” Iringo told IWPR, adding that the next step was to be the installation of CCTV cameras at all border entry points.
According to Iringo, since the Westgate attack the government has also started computerising personal records to help eliminate fraud and corruption.
“To deal with crime effectively, the government has embarked on the process of digitising all security registries such as (crime log) books, birth certificates, identification cards, passports and work permits,” Iringo said.
Another practical challenge is how to police a long, porous and often unmarked border that runs through difficult terrain.
Ali Roba, the Governor of Mandera on Kenya’s border with Somalia, is particularly worried that in many places the boundary is unmarked, making it hard to tell where one country ends and the other begins.
Roba told IWPR that demarcating the border between Somalia and Kenya would help control the flow of human traffic.
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