Noordin Haji is a man with a white goatee, a man who never smiles — at least not in public — and the man who everyone will watch next year as he attempts to unmask cartels and convict the masterminds.
As the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Haji knows that the collective eye of the nation is on him. It is a bit scary for him, because he likes to keep to himself.
As an intelligence officer, he was your common man on the streets, but, as the DPP, he can’t hide beneath the cloak of anonymity.
Even in his new office, Mr Haji prefers to keep himself out of the way of power brokers and influence peddlers. He only socialises with his family and is careful with whom he interacts to avoid accusations of not being impartial.
“I have made it clear that nobody comes to talk to me about work,” he says. “If you come to the office you’ll encounter a rigorous process before seeing me or my deputy.”
When he entered office some nine months ago, the Malindi-born son of Garissa Senator Yusuf Haji brought back some zeal to an office that had lost glamour over the years, thanks to a cold-war between this office and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
A man whose background is with national intelligence, Mr Haji believes that the country has the capacity to conclude graft cases within months, just like election cases. “If we have decided that graft is a national issue that needs to be tackled, I think we need more resources to make sure graft cases are expeditiously dealt with, both by the ODPP and the Judiciary,” he says.
And this is a conversation he intends to have with the Judiciary in the coming year “to see how best we can expedite the graft cases in the shortest time possible”.
But will Noordin Haji manage to rescue the country from graft cartels the way he was rescued from Westgate after Al-Shabaab guerrillas invaded the Nairobi mall in 2013, killing 67 people and injuring many?