Fare thee well, Chris Msando

What you need to know:

  • A year or so ago, a young lawyer and two other people also died in the line of duty. 
  • Chris’s deaths sends a chilling and distorted message to the ICT profession, that perhaps NOT doing your job is the right thing to do, since you get to stay alive.
  • He is the type of professional many progressive countries would pay an arm and a leg to retain.

As an ICT professional, Chris Msando’s death has, for the first time, brought to the fore the risks that various professions face in the line of duty.

Members of the military, the police and other security agencies do lose their lives in the line of duty.  While their deaths are not any less tragic and grievous, they sign up knowing from the word go that they could, and probably will, die in the line of duty.

Their profession has well-established traditions on how to prepare, encounter and accept death in the course of their operations.

Better still, they have support networks to assist in after-death events for the families that lose their beloved ones. Not so for the ICT profession, and definitely not so for Chris, who at the time of his death was the acting ICT director at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).

He must have woken up on Friday and gone to work like any other regular Kenyan.  In normal countries, ICT, legal, medical, media amongst other professionals would wake up, go to work without expecting to die in the line of duty.

Yet journalists have lost their lives in line of duty. A year or so ago, a young lawyer also died in the line of duty. 

In both cases, it is always shocking, but never quite hits home. I could only empathise, but could not connect professionally and personally with such tragic events.

Chris’s death was different. Not just because I knew him professionally, but because he is the first ICT professional to die because of the nature of his work.

Of course, police are still investigating and so I may be accused of speculation. However from my layman's analysis, if Chris was a typical farmer or a teacher somewhere in Kitale or Kirinyaga, he would most definitely be still alive today.

So to think he died because of his job may not be too far off the mark.

His death sent shivers down my spine.  For the first time in my life, I realised that ICT professionals could die because of their work. As a member of this newly endangered profession, it is not exactly a good feeling.

I mean, how did we really get to this level, in which one gets to die because of doing his or her job?

PEOPLE WITHOUT FINGERPRINTS

Chris’s deaths sends a chilling and distorted message to the ICT profession, that perhaps NOT doing your job is the right thing to do, since you get to stay alive.

Do we want to create a public service that avoids doing its job, simply because people want to get back home alive in the evening?

For the few months I knew Chris, I saw a dedicated, honest, passionate and principled public servant, one who believed that ICT systems could be deployed positively to effectively protect the integrity of elections.

He told anyone and everyone about the beauty and comprehensive nature of these systems.  He broke down the technology in its simplest form for Wanjiku to swallow and digest.

He explained how the biometrics would stop dead people from voting. He talked about multiple data centres to ensure that in the event servers collapsed, there would be automatic alternatives to resume the workload.

He would proudly explain that in the event a voter identifier kit failed, he had multiple voter identifier kits per constituency that could quickly be dropped in as replacements.

In case internet failed, the kit was linked to multiple telecommunications operators for redundancy, and where there was absolutely no internet they would use satellite alternatives.

Even where the law or regulations did not explicitly provide for it, he managed to introduce a workable ‘complementary system’ to deal with people without fingerprints  

ICT MARTYR

He proudly told a public audience that if you lacked biometrics, your national identify card would be used on the same voter identification kit, rather than against a manual register. 

In the unlikely event your National ID did not appear on the electronic voter register – he would say, sorry you are a ghost and you need to go back to the grave.

This is the Chris that the country decided to lose on the eve of a hotly contested election.  He is the type of professional many progressive countries would pay an arm and a leg to retain.

But not us. We are a country that prefers to cut his arm or leg as we dispose of him. How low, how tragic, and how cruel can we get?

Let his death not be in vain. He posthumously deserves those national awards that are randomly dished out to politicians who do not deserve them.

Chris is the first, and I pray that he becomes the last ICT martyr.

Sleep well my friend. I know from where you are, you are quickly automating the admission register for heaven, at least to make sure those who killed you do not get to cheat the system and sneak in.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @Jwalu