Columnists
Entrench emergency preparedness to protect critical economic infrastructure
Friday September 01 2023
Workers walking past one of the Kenya Petroleum Refinery Limited plants in Changamwe, Mombasa. FILE PHOTO | NMG
I recall in 1976 when President Idi Amin of Uganda threatened to annex parts of Kenya up to Naivasha, vowing that he could send his jet fighters all the way to Mombasa.
President Jomo Kenyatta immediately put Kenya on high-security alert and specifically ordered a round-the-clock police guard for the Mombasa refinery.
At the time, the refinery was the most critical energy infrastructure as all petroleum products were sourced from crude oil refining at the plant. The refinery has remained protected by police to date.
Currently, I judge electricity supply systems, ICT money systems, KPC pipeline, and Mombasa port to be the highest impact economic infrastructure.
As the power outage last week demonstrated, a prolonged outage of any of this infrastructure would greatly interrupt the entire national economy.
My second-tier grouping of critical infrastructure includes municipal water supply, international airports, main road arteries, and railways.
With the exception of ICT systems, all the above infrastructure is owned and managed by government institutions.
Each one of these institutions should undertake a situational risk analysis to determine and prepare to respond to potential causes of prolonged service outages, which will invariably include insecurity incidents, acts of nature, vandalism, internal sabotage, and above all significant equipment and systems failure.
Ignored periodic inspections and preventive maintenance are the main causes of equipment and systems failure, a common and serious management lapse often blamed on inadequate budgets, procurement procedures, compromised equipment standards, and personnel issues.
For its significant impact on the national economy, emergency response preparedness evaluation for critical infrastructure should indeed be a cabinet-level initiative cascaded through performance contracting to line Cabinet Secretaries, boards and management of critical infrastructure institutions.
An institutional culture of emergency preparedness and response at all levels should be a mandatory checklist requirement.
For a start, the power outage incident last week should be analysed for lessons learned to advise long-term solutions in critical infrastructure institutions.
We need to reassure our investors, businesses and transit neighbours of uninterrupted and secure services, especially in areas of logistics and energy services. Investors usually undertake their own risks and threats assessment prior to committing capital.
It should be remembered that the key reason Uganda opted out of the LAPSSET corridor routing for their crude oil exports was the absence of a security guarantee along that corridor, an issue which is still outstanding.
George Wachira, Petroleum consultant, [email protected]
