Yes, I'm strapped. Don't worry about it.

An unsettling number of buildings in downtown Nairobi employ guards with metal-detecting wands who give you the once-over before you can enter. (I know that's supposed to make me feel safer inside the building, but as Chris Rock said, "what about all those [individuals] waiting outside with guns? They know you ain't got one.")

 

More unsettling is the fact that most of these guards don't really seem to understand the purpose of the metal detector. Every time I walk into the Barclays Plaza building next to my office, I get wanded, and it always goes off. The first time this happened, I went to take my keys and cell phone out of my pockets, but the guard had already moved on to the guy behind me. He didn't seem to care that I might be carrying. Soon I got the routine - walk up, get the wand, listen for two loud beeps to ensure the batteries are working, then proceed inside with your semiautomatic weapon.

 

I doubt anyone is going to go postal inside the Barclays Plaza building - although it's one of the busiest commercial blocks in town and houses a major Kenya Airways office, so perhaps I shouldn't be so sure. But as I went through the metal-detector charade for the hundredth time this afternoon, it reminded me of the warning issued last week by the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi of "extremist elements" targeting public places in Kenya and Ethiopia. (This was supposed to have something to do with new threats from the Islamic hardliners now running Somalia, but a lot of Somalia-watchers in Kenya didn't give it a lot of credence - some thought it was a bit of fear-mongering to "radicalize" the Islamists.)

 

Whatever the impetus for the warning, there are days when it's easy to remember that downtown Nairobi was the site of a terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy only a few short years ago. Despite the presence of known radicals inside the country, porous borders and the bad neighborhood Kenya lives in, the government hasn't done anything to convince its residents or the outside world that it's serious about extremist violence.

 

Seeing this takes just one trip to the domestic airport, where planes and passengers come and go with seemingly no oversight. Last month, when I flew back from a trip to the Somalia border, I wore a purposeful look and marched from the airplane to my waiting taxi in two minutes flat.

 

It's easy enough to feel secure in this country if you're a rich person living behind high walls and electric fences with 24-hour armed guards. But if you pay even a little attention, that feeling doesn't extend very far.