America's Embassy Guards In Kenya Are Being Paid A Dollar An Hour

U.S. Embassy Nairobi, Kenya. Photo US State Department

America Is Paying Its Embassy Guards in Kenya a Dollar an Hour -- John Reed, Killer Apps/Foreign Policy

Nairobi sits in one of the world's tougher neighborhoods - that's clear from the recent attack on the Westgate mall. But the security contractor hired by the State Department to keep Americans there safe may not exactly be world-class. The company protecting the U.S. embassy in Nairobi pays its guards as little as a dollar per hour. In fact, those guards were so poorly compensated by their employer, KK Security, that last summer they went on strike.

Who and how America defends its diplomatic posts has become an enormous issue in the year since the assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. The local guard force hired by the American government to protect the place fled during the fighting. And those guards were paid $4 per hour -- about four times what their counterparts in Kenya are getting.

And while Nairobi is booming economically, it can still be an extremely dangerous place. Western governments have warned of the high risk of terrorist attacks in Kenya for more than a year prior to last weekend's terrorist assault on a Nairobi shopping mall. It was an incident in Kenya by which most Americans first learned of al Qaeda after the organization bombed the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998.

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My Comment: Being a guard protecting the U.S. embassy in Nairobi is incredibly dangerous .... after all .... who can forget this.