Not many people noticed, but during the countdown to midnight on December 31, 2016, the New Year was delayed by one second.
Ahmed Ibrahim added an extra second to our clocks, which he is occasionally compelled to do to keep our clocks in sync.
Ahmed is the only man in Eastern Africa with such powers. He is the region's official timekeeper and Custodian of the Second, one of the smallest units of time. Of course, there are also nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds.
He carefully follows the rotation of the earth and may add an extra second either on June 30 or December 31.
Usually, the last second in every minute is 59 but on December 31, 2016, for exactly one second, the time was 23:59:60.
"To the common man, this adds no value, but to sensitive industries, it's crucial," Ahmed says. He now operates from Nairobi's South C Estate.
Such tweaks are essential for things like running the internet and GPS.
Ahmed, 43, is the head of the time and frequency laboratory, a highly guarded facility at the Kenya Bureau of Standards in South C.
"We are the custodians of the second and the hertz in Eastern Africa," he says.
He is in charge of the most accurate clock in the region.
Ahmed explains there is no single master clock for the world for reference.
Instead, the most accurate time in the world, known as the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), is derived from the average time of about 400 atomic clocks in about 50 laboratories around the world.
"In Eastern Africa, Kebs is the only institution allowed by the BIPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measures, based in France) to contribute to the UTC," Ahmed says.
In Africa, the other laboratories are in South Africa, Egypt, and Tunisia.
Telecoms like Safaricom and internet giants like Google pick their time from secondary sources like the network time servers via network time protocol or global navigation satellite systems like the popular GPS.
Apart from physical security, the South C clock is ringfenced by five power sources to ensure it doesn't go off unless there's a catastrophe.
"We have the Kenya Power line, a generator, a UPS, a DC battery and each clock here has another battery," the timekeeper says.
Ahmed was never a timekeeper, since his days at the Sultan Hamud Primary School in Kajiado.
But before he left Starehe Boys Centre in 1994, he says, he was a dedicated member of the Meteorology and Science Club.
He later graduated with a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical and Communication Engineering from Moi University in 1999.
"After joining Kebs, I did in-house training and then travelled to other peer metrology institutes for further training," he says.
He holds certifications from the German National Metrology Institute and the US's National Institute of Standards and Technology, among other institutions.
The firstborn in a family of eight clarifies that he cannot tweak our times whenever he feels like.
"The rotation measurements are done by the International Earth Rotational Services which then instructs the contributors of the UTC when to insert a positive or negative leap second. There is ongoing debate on the abolition of the exercise in future," he says.
For instance, the single second he added in 2016, was already agreed on by all countries in the world.
He says the modern world now runs on atomic clocks.
But while atomic time is constant, a leap second must be added on our clocks every now and then to synchronise them with the earth's ever-slowing rotation.
If this anomaly is not corrected, such a drift would eventually result in clocks showing midday occurring at night and GPS systems giving wrong directions.
But even such leap seconds are difficult to implement in computers and can make systems fail temporarily.
For instance, when such a second was introduced in 2012, Linux, Mozilla and LinkedIn all reported crashes and severe glitches.
During the recent World Metrology Day Celebration, Kebs acting head of the metrology department Dominic Ondoro noted that as short as it is, a second is an extremely important unit of time.
Ondoro explained, "Imagine if your mobile phone service provider steals five seconds from your every time you make a call, it's very expensive."
He said Kebs will soon introduce an online portal displaying the most accurate time for the country.
(Edited by R.Wamochie)
