He asked politicians to stop politicizing the fight against corruption and hate speech.
“The elected leadership of Kenya is in the forefront of spearheading this potential destruction through reckless speeches, unless we take action all of us together we stand the very real risk off destroying this country,” Kaparo asserted.
He further blamed the National Treasury for sabotaging its efforts to monitor use of hate and inciting speech by politicians especially during the political campaign season.
Kaparo pleaded with the committee to use its power to help them get a re-allocation of the funds that they had applied which would have gone toward training over 8,000 police officers and Peace Committee Coordinators to purchase monitoring equipment and conduct training on how to monitor and curb use of the hate speech by politicians in all the 290 constituencies.
“What are the lessons we have learnt in the few months we have been going round the country? First is that the Kenyan people are very easy to incite to violence. Lesson two, Kenyans can listen to an honest intervention and they can easily change and come around and live together if there is good and honest peace brokering,” he told the House committee.
The NCIC had applied for Sh971 million but only got Sh311 million in the budget that was read by National Treasury CS Henry Rotich.
“The third lesson is that this nation does not invest in peace, it invests in hardware to quell riots and fights that is why organisation such NCIC, do not get the funding that they should. That is why it is very difficult to engage these committees that we have across the nation they are not facilitated at all but yet they do a very good job,” he said.
The NCIC also announced a raft of initiatives aimed at curbing dissemination of hate or inciting messages through media; this includes the signing of an MoU with the Editors Guild next week which will provide guidelines on the airing of inflammatory and hate speech.
The commission will also pen an agreement with mobile phone service provider Safaricom to have all bulk massaging approved by NCIC, before they are disseminated.
Kaparo however said he is concerned about the use of the social media apps such as WhatsApp in spreading offending message.
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