What Somalia Can Teach Kenya On Elections And Power Transitions

Incumbents losing an election and graciously conceding is not what most associate with the continent, let alone Somalia. By contrast, the Kenyan experience is rather typical. Here, no incumbent President has ever lost an election. Whether by hook but more often by crook, they manage to cling onto either the end of their terms or their lives, whichever came first.

But a graceful concession from a losing incumbent is exactly what the world witnessed in the Somali capital on Wednesday. The election of former Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo as the country’s ninth President upheld a rather curious, perhaps unique tradition: Somalia has never re-elected an incumbent as President.

It’s a tradition that goes back to the founding days of the Somalia republic. In its first election following independence and unification in 1960, the popular Aden Abdullah Osman Daar was elected President. Seven years later, he would become the first African head of state to peacefully hand over power to a democratically elected successor -his former Prime Minister, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke.

Now this week’s election in Mogadishu was not, by any stretch of the imagination, one to be emulated. Due to the ongoing terrorist insurgency perpetrated by the Al Qaeda-allied al Shabaab, universal suffrage was out of the question. Instead 135 elders picked 14,000 delegates who elected 275 MPs and 54 Senators who elected the President. The process was marred by allegations of corruption, vote buying and intimidation, which is perhaps not surprising for a country that ranks at the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. The head of the country’s police publicly supporting the incumbent and security concerns led to both the shut down oftransportation across the Somali capital and the moving of the election to the airport, which is secured by troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia.

Much of this would be familiar to Kenyans as our own general election looms. Though not as dire as that of our neighbor, our system is not without it controversies. There are credible suspicions of attempts to steal it right from the voter registration stage, with public officials, especially chiefs, illegally co-opted into an effort to help boost registration numbers in areas perceived as supporting the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee party. Further, our global corruption ranking is not that much higher (relatively speaking) than Somalia’s and the expected deployment of thousands of police and security agents to safeguard the election speaks not just to the legitimate security concerns in the wake of our invasion of Somalia, but also to the government’s fear of its own people.

President Kenyatta has recently said he is willing to peacefully hand over power if he loses and to his credit, he has already delivered a historical first: in 2002, he became the only losing Presidential candidate from a major party in Kenya’s electoral history to deliver a concession speech. Whether he will remain true to his word remains to be seen, but, as Somalia illustrates, the fact of a chaotic and problematic electoral process need not preclude it.

Somalia also provides an object lesson in the dangers of the ethnic mobilization and military takeover of civilian affairs. Despite being one of only two largely ethnically homogenous sub-Saharan African states, fragmentation along clan affiliation is one of the main reasons the civil war has persisted for so long. Kenya itself had a taste of it in the violence that followed the disputed elections of a decade ago.

Another factor in Somalia’s disintegration was the military takeover that followed the assassination of President Sharmake in 1969. The Siad Barre dictatorship that followed set the country on the path to destruction. Kenyans should therefore be wary of occurrences that diminish civilian control over the military of give it a taste for civilian responsibilities. Thus the decision by President Kenyatta to appoint Gen Chief of Defense Forces Samson Mwathethe to chair a committee overseeing the implementation of government projects should be of concern as should the seeming inability of civilian authorities to hold the military to account following the debacles at Westgate, El Adde and most recently, Kulbiyow.

Somalis are a fiercely independent-minded lot, not as reticent in expressing their opinions as Kenyans are generally perceived to be. “Every man is his own Sultan” is how one 19th century visitor described them. Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society, in 2011 recounted an incident in which a waiter publicly berates a government minister in a restaurant in Hargeisa, capital of the northern breakaway -and far more peaceful- Somaliland republic. Such a scene would be unlikely to be repeated here (except perhaps on our famously noisy online platforms). But maybe we could learn from that waiter the value of confronting, rather than accommodating, our lying and thieving politicians.

Death, Lies and Videotape - Why KDF Must Tell TheTruth About Casualties In Somalia

In the wake of last week’s sacking of a Kenya Defense Forces base in Somalia by the al Shabaab terror group, the Kenyan government’s communications effort have once again come under a spotlight.

The country had just marked the first anniversary of a similar attack on another KDF camp in the Somali town of El Adde in which close to two hundred Kenyan soldiers were estimated to have been killed. Estimated because the government has never released an official tally of dead, injured and captured. Instead, after initially issuing a few statements offering a chronology of events and promising to answer queries later, it has subsequently maintained a studious silence.

This time, after news of the Kulbiyow attack broke on Friday, the KDF initially put out a statement stating categorically that the attack had been repulsed and that the camp had not been overrun. A second statement later in the day asserted that nine soldiers, including two officers, had lost their lives and another 15 had been injured. It also claimed that at least 70 al Shabaab militants had been killed.

The full Press Release on #KDFKulbiyow incident @amisomsomalia .#Kulbiyow #NgaoYaTaifa #TukoImaraAngani #OnTimeOnTarget #ThisIsKDF #WeAreKDF pic.twitter.com/Y2OOOCo9D4

— Kenya Defence Forces (@kdfinfo) January 27, 2017

Follow up Operational Update Press Release on #KDFKulbiyow. Our Quick Reaction Force soldiers killed over 70 Al Shabaab terrorists.#WeAreKDF pic.twitter.com/nM69Pckpdp

— Kenya Defence Forces (@kdfinfo) January 27, 2017

However, subsequent news reports, some of which claimed to have interviewed survivors of the attack, have raised serious doubts about the veracity of the KDF account. The al Shabaab, who run a pretty sophisticated propaganda machine, initially claimed to have killed over 50 soldiers and subsequently revised that figure upwards. Earlier this week, the group released gruesome pictures purportedly taken after the attack to back up their claims. The Standard newspaper, citing sources within the KDF, also reported that at least 68 Kenyan troops had died. A more detailed account in the Daily Nation also painted a grim picture of the camp being overrun and “pandemonium” as soldiers fled into the bush.

Following these revelations, the KDF and government communications appear to have retreated into silence. No further statements have been issued and, unlike El Adde, there has been no public comment from either their Commander-in-Chief, President Uhuru Kenyatta, or the Chief of Defence Forces, General Samson Mwathethe.

In both attacks, government communications have sought to minimize the scale of defeat specifically by either distorting or keeping mum about casualty figures, details of the incidents and the outcome of any investigations.

But does that matter? Not if you ask the pro-government online army on Twitter. Any attempt to seek clarification is met with accusations of propagandizing for the al Shabaab and having a morbid interest in death counts, as well as patently false claims that militaries across the world never reveal the true extent of their battlefield losses. It is not important to know how many died, so the argument goes, since even one is too many. Telling the truth about casualties, it is claimed, is demoralizing to our soldiers and gifts the terrorists a propaganda coup.

Yet the trouble that the government and the KDF go to to hide them itself demonstrates that the numbers do matter. The fact is, they are not being hidden from al Shabaab but from Kenyans and it is the official silences and mendacity, not the truth, that allow the terrorists’ propaganda to rule the airwaves unchallenged. 

Similarly, the tendency to spin rather than provide accurate information means that KDF accounts of incidents lack credibility. For example, in the aftermath of the El Adde attack, Gen Mwathethe briefed the press on the battle and response. Many of the details he gave, including claims of three suicide trucks, each with the explosive force of the 1998 US Embassy truck bomb as well as "truckloads of suicide bombers", have proven to be either gross exaggerations or outright falsehoods. The same pattern can be seen in the statements issued on Kulbiyow.

Further, as an article by Nyambega Gisesa to be published this weekend in the Daily Nation states, "since Kenya first went to Somalia in October 2011, no single commander has ever been suspended or fired". At the end of his press briefing on El Adde, Gen Mwathethe promised to provide further details once a Board of Inquiry had completed its work. Nothing has been heard from him since.

Into the void created by the KDF's unwillingness to give forthright and credible information steps the al Shabaab propaganda machine, inundating the media and internet with impeccably timed press releases, interviews, caches of (often graphic) photos and slickly produced video footage of incidents. For a while now, it has been clear that Kenya's official communications on its actions in Somalia have been no match for al Shabaab's. And there is a very good reason for this. KDF and government communicators have been preoccupied with the wrong "enemy"- the Kenyan people.

The overriding objective of government communications ever since the debacle at Westgate has been to keep Kenyans from asking uncomfortable questions. Rather than protecting soldiers’ morale or debunking al Shabaab falsehoods as is sometimes claimed, government propaganda has been focused on protecting senior officials' and officers' backsides. Revealing the real extent of deaths risks rousing public anger, stoking uncomfortable questions and demands for people to held to account. 

Yet, questions should and must be asked. Why did the KDF succumb to an attack that was a carbon copy of the El Adde incident, where it had suffered its biggest ever military loss? Why were lessons seemingly not learnt? What are the systemic failures that led to this and who should be held to account? As the Standard editorialized, “losing more than 250 soldiers in 54 weeks in two identical attacks speaks not to the consequence of going to war but the utter incompetence of the high command.”

The numbers matter. They may not tell the whole story, but they do tell an important part of it. The truth matters. The constitution subordinates the KDF to civilian authority and, in the end, its commanders and civilian overlords are ultimately answerable to the Kenyan people. There is an implicit bargain we have with the troops. They will follow orders and risk their lives to defend us and accomplish the mission they are given but we will hold their bosses to account to ensure that those orders and missions are reasonable and that they are properly equipped and facilitated to achieve them. That requires us to have an accurate understanding of the realities they face and the consequences these have. The silence over the needless waste of lives violates that bargain.

Ezekiel Mutua And Kenya's Language Of Silence

Ezekiel Mutua is at it again. The head of the Kenya Film Classification Board has developed a fondness for showing off the perks that come with his job. In April, he took to social media to boast about using an airport’s VIP lounge and flying business class.

This week, he posted pictures of his diplomatic passport (which, to the schadenfreudic glee of many tweeps, an embarrassed government has since ordered to him to surrender) on his Facebook account to brag that he had received a visa to visit the United States despite his bigoted and illegal crusade against “content promoting LGBT and Atheists culture in Kenya”. "I didn't even have to go to the Embassy for biometrics or pay the visa application fee. It was delivered to my office free of charge," he averred.

Mutua’s immaturity predictably drew a large number of mocking responses which only spurred him on to new lows, petulantly sending insulting direct message calling one “an idiot” and a “bloody fool”. But however disgraceful we might think his antics to be, we should be careful not to be distracted by them. 

It would be a deadly mistake to focus on the theatrics and ignore the real danger. For that lies, not in his braggadocio, but in the silence that has greeted his distorting the law and the constitution in an attempt to impose his views and beliefs on the rest of Kenya. 

Mutua has used the KFCB, which was set up to regulate “the making and exhibition of cinematograph films, for the licensing of stage plays, theatres and cinemas” in ways not contemplated in legislation. He has attempted to police parties, the internet, TV ads and even claimed the power to regulate the content of political shows. Though there is no law criminalizing homosexuality, he purports to declare it illegal and to ban internet videos that celebrate love between same sex couples. He has claimed that atheism is similarly unconstitutional despite the clear constitutional prohibition on establishing a state religion.

Yet few of these outrages have elicited much discussion outside social media. Much of Kenyan media seems to be blissfully unaware or even worse, dismissive, of the threat he poses especially as we head into the election season. If nothing else, one would expect that the idea of a government official prescribing the limits of political speech would have both journalists and opposition politicians up in arms. But it has elicited little more than whimpers and an empty threat to sue from media owners, which Mutua has laughed off.

This silence mirrors a wider quiet, a tendency to focus less on the substantial and more on the superficial. Last week, as the country marked the third anniversary of the horrific attack on the Westgate mall, I noted that official accounts of terror incidents were mostly designed to cover up the incompetence and culpability of senior officials and officers rather than reveal the truth. But the really alarming fact is that the government’s obviously flawed tales do not elicit much commentary or questioning from either the press, civil society or the opposition.

But just as the silence over the mistakes and criminality at Westgate allowed them to be repeated at Mpeketoni, Garissa, Mandera and El Adde, so the silence over Mutua's overreaching only serves to embolden him and spur him on to further violations. Like the proverbial frog slowly boiled alive, we are all imperiled by the failure to raise the alarm over his menacing of citizens and the government attempt to control the lives and opinions of citizens. 

Kenyan novelist, Yvonne Owuor, has described silence as one of our languages, which "plays out in the hasty attempt of the powerful to shut down independent voices that cannot be controlled." From the harassment of bloggers, to the firing of free-minded journalists, editors and cartoonists, this "shutting down" has been particularly evident in Kenya media. But it is not only happening there. Today Mutua is illegally transforming the KFCB into a tool to bludgeon vulnerable minorities -and political dissidents- into silence.

It is a truism worth repeating that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Whether it is about security and terrorism or the diminution of citizens’ rights to free speech and conscience, this silence leaves us all vulnerable. Freedom from predation by terrorists or even by a narcissistic and insecure public official, will only come when we loudly and consistently demand it.

Why Kenyans Must Not Take The Government At Its Word On Terror Attacks

It was a strange incident by any description. According to the police, on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the US, three women entered the Mombasa Central police station pretending to  report a stolen mobile phone. The police say one jumped over the counter and assaulted officers with a knife before dousing herself in petrol and setting herself alight. The others, one of whom was said to have a suicide vest, threw petrol bombs. All three were shot at killed at the scene and within a few hours, three other women, all refugees from Somalia apparently staying at the house of one of the terrorists, had been arrested for links to the attack.

Nine days later, a human rights group accused the police of manufacturing the incident and murdering three innocent women. Coming on the eve of the anniversary of the attack on an upmarket mall in Nairobi in which at least 67 people died, the accusation struck a chord.

Like with the Mombasa incident, much of what exactly happened inside the Westgate Mall three years ago continues to be shrouded in mystery. An award-winning reconstruction of events by Tristan McConnell,  a foreign correspondent based in Nairobi, concluded that “far from a dramatic three-day standoff, the assault on the Mall lasted only a few hours, almost all of it taking place before Kenyan security forces even entered the building.” Much of the information issued by the authorities both during and immediately after the attack turned out to be misleading and blatantly false.

From claims of 10 to 15 attackers led by the famed “White Widow”, Samantha Lewthwaite and armed with belt-fed machine guns that had been secretly placed in the mall a few days prior, to allegations of hostages being held and subsequently freed by heroic security agencies, to the much-ridiculed accusation of the terrorists setting mattresses on fire to distract the advancing forces, much of the government tale turned out to be untrue.

When shop owners returned to find their stores empty and vandalized, and pictures of rows of empty beer bottles in the mall’s bars as well as CCTV footage of Kenya Defence Forces soldiers carrying laden plastic bags out of the Nakumatt supermarket- where most victims perished- emerged, there was little doubt that the “siege” had been a cover for massive looting by the very teams supposedly deployed to save them. A promised public inquiry into the attack never materialized and a report prepared by a joint parliamentary committee, which purported to clear the KDF of involvement in the looting, was tossed out for being “incompetent”. The rub of it is that three years later, there is still no official account of what transpired.

A similar darkness envelopes the Al Shabaab attack in January this year on an AMISOM military base manned by KDF soldiers in which an estimated 200 troops were killed. As with the Westgate incident, again much of the information the government and the KDF put out was later revealed to be false. An Al Shabaab propaganda video of the attack showed no indication of the three truck bombs, “each [with] a force equivalent to the terrorist attack on the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998” as well as “truckloads of suicide bombers” as claimed by the Chief Of Defence Forces, Gen Samson Mwathethe. Further, his promise to answer lingering questions once a Board of Inquiry had carried out a full investigation remains unfulfilled eight months later.

There is thus good reason for scepticism about official accounts of alleged terror incidents, which mostly seem geared to cover up the incompetence and culpability of senior officials and officers. The fact that the police have been unable to produce the suicide vest supposedly worn by one of the alleged attackers in Mombasa as well as the emergence of a video apparently showing two of the women being shot outside the station, even as one of them appeared to have her hands raised in surrender, give credence to such doubts.

This is not to say that there was no attack. Rather it is incumbent upon all of us to be much more critical of the overnment's offerings on terror and to demand independent and public investigation of the attacks that have occurred in the past five years. We must insist that all officials and officers found either negligent or complicit in the commission and cover up of crimes are held to account. Only by doing so, can we ensure that government learns the lessons it needs to learn in order to do a better job of keeping us all safe.

Covering or Covering Up ? How Kenyan Media Betrays Kenya

On the eve of Madarka Day, CNN’s Robyn Kriel dropped bombshell. Her investigations had revealed that the Kenya government was engaged in covering up the truth surrounding the deaths of at least 141 Kenyan troops in El Adde, Somalia. The story made headlines around the world. However, here, where it should have mattered most, it was mostly ignored by the local press.

Why? In January when the slaughter happened, it was on the front page of every newspaper. But soon thereafter, it became clear that the media was being careful not to raise too many uncomfortable questions. Over the course of the last 6 months, even as further revelations, including Al Shabaab’s release of footage of the attack, showed gaping holes in the official version of events, the press has demonstrated little inclination to pursue the story. Though long whispered in newsrooms, that it took a foreign journalist to provide the first serious look at potential casualty numbers is most telling.

As I wrote this, news broke of yet another Al Shabaab attack, this time on an Ethiopian-manned base in Somalia. This time, the Kenyan media had few qualms about speculating on casualties or handing the terrorists a propaganda coup, the very excuses it has offered for not pursuing the El Adde story. That the coverage of the attack on the Ethiopians was carefully scrubbed of any mention of El Adde despite the obvious similarities, betrays their real concern: sparing KDF and government blushes.

Meantime, official statements about other events in Somalia continue to rampage across the headlines unchallenged. Kenya Defence Forces’ claims about battlefield successes against the Al Shabaab are reported as gospel truth, even when the facts are in dispute. It is a most curious and intriguing stance taken by a media fraternity that is widely acclaimed as one of the most vibrant on the continent. In truth, the accolades have routinely tended to overstate our media’s autonomy and gusto while underplaying its short memory and its marked tendency to kowtow to politicians and officialdom.

The coverage of the current impasse over electoral reforms and over the fate of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission also highlights some of these shortcomings. Since the 2013 general election, it has been obvious to anyone who cared to look into it, that the electoral system is in dire straits. Its performance (as well as that of the Supreme Court) in that poll left plenty to be desired and a sharply divided country. Yet in the last 3 years, the media has not prioritized the telling of this story. This despite the fact that a clear public interest exists: violence has accompanied all but one election in the multiparty era and the bungled 2007 contest almost tipped us into the abyss of anarchy and civil war.

Indeed, it was not until politicians exploited the situation to create a crisis that the media collectively took note. And even then, the reporting has been little more than an uncritical regurgitation of the opposing sides’ statements. Little energy is expended in articulating the issues of disagreement and whether these reflect simple party political and individual interests or are driven by a serious desire and plan to protect the national interest. Is the dispute about acquiring or preserving jobs for politicians or about fixing the broken system?

The media’s preoccupation has been with the political battles, with picking the winner and losers, rather than with the substance of the fight. A consequent failure to distinguish smoke from fire has allowed the politicians to shape the public discourse in self-serving ways that obscure what’s really at stake. This is how we have ended up with a national debate about the rather absurd proposition that the constitution somehow forbids dialogue or the equally preposterous idea that IEBC commissioners can be fired by physically ejecting them from their offices in Anniversary Towers.

Just as with the tragic El Adde debacle, Kenyan media has mostly been a forum for obfuscation and misdirection rather than a source of light and understanding. It has betrayed the Kenyans who, at great cost in lives, took on autocrats to defend the freedom it profits from and sadly abuses. When it abdicates its agenda-setting role and conspires in the silencing of voices critical of government; when it would rather cover up than expose official misdeeds; when it becomes a megaphone for Orwellian doublespeak; then a free media becomes an instrument of oppression and tyranny rather than a necessary bulwark against it.

Why Kenya Thinks It Wins When It Loses

As is the case with other nations, the Kenyans memorial landscape is littered with moments of heroic triumph and unspeakable horror. Within its contours, one will find the anniversaries of murders and massacres as well as achievement and acclaim.

Today marks the three-month anniversary of a terrible tragedy -  the slaughter of nearly 200 Kenyan soldiers by the Al Shabaab terror group at El Adde in southern Somalia. Two weeks ago we observed another tearful memorial for a remarkably similar atrocity – the slaughter last April of nearly 150 people in another Al Shabaab attack, this time on the Garissa University College.

These two horrors are united by more than the fact that they were committed by the same terror group, the large numbers of casualties involved and the unspeakable grief they brought to our shores. For the last three years, there has been a remarkable, and remarkably successful, attempt to dress up nearly all major Al Shabaab atrocities as Kenyan glories.

From President Uhuru Kenyatta declaring the defeat and shaming of our enemies at Westgate to KTN speaking of the triumph at Garissa and the ubiquitous reference to the heroism of El Adde, we have appeared to be a society determined to turn tragedies on their heads and to snatch victory from the jaws of disaster.

This is more than the celebration of individual heroic behaviour as the tragedies unfolded. While there has been some articulation of this, most notably at Westgate, the main thrust has been to paint the events themselves as showcasing the conquest of the “Kenyan spirit” over adversity. In short, we won every time we lost.

But in these contexts, what do words like "victory", "triumph" and "heroes" mean? What work do they do?

I think it is clear that such double-talk is meant to obscure more than it illuminates. It is remarkably similar to the doublethink in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like in Oceania, today’s doublethink is created and perpetuated by official newspeak and designed to make all other modes of thought traitorous and shameful if not impossible.

In this brave new world, those who today insist on truth and accountability for the failures at Westgate and Mpeketoni are accused of being Al Shabaab sympathizers; or of indulging morbid fantasies when they demand to know the actual number of “heroes” being feted at El Adde and details of what actually happened. This official discourse pretends to honor “sacrifice” while devaluing the lives that have been sacrificed by the official negligence and incompetence it is trying to cover up.

Today’s newspeak goes beyond describing tragedies as triumphs. It is constantly being deployed in the service of an empty, unthinking and unquestioning "positivity". The government and its lackeys in the press and on social media are fond of categorizing criticism as either positive or negative. These categories respectively roughly follow the contours of what they are willing to admit and respond to, and what they are not. “Negative” criticism is demonized as soul destroying.

In this scheme of things, it was not the government’s inability to provide lucid answers to questions about how it spent the Kshs 275 billion it borrowed via a Eurobond two years ago that causes investor jitters. Rather it is the very fact that these “negative” queries are raised in the first place that is the problem.

Similarly, it is not official laxity and ineptitude that exposes us to terrorist attack; it is the demand to audit and fix such laxity and ineptitude that emboldens the enemy. It is thinking that seeks silver linings but ignores the cloud.

But why do so many Kenyans buy into it? My guess is it is because it is comforting. People engage in spin to hide or hide from truth. Those hiding truth are running away from accountability. The rest of us are running away from vulnerability. It is, after all, a profoundly scary thing to admit that those we have charged to protect us are failing.  It is much more comforting to insist we are feeling safer even as loud noises routinely terrify students into leaping out of windows and soldiers into firing aimlessly.

We would thus rather proclaim and commemorate empty triumphs than acknowledge our vulnerability and ask the hard questions.

Lying in State: Official Deception In The Jubilee Era

The reactions to the International Criminal Court’s Appeal Chamber’s ruling last week is a good example of the doublespeak that has come to characterize our politics. The Leader of the Majority in the National Assembly, Hon Aden Duale, who for the last two years has been advocating a Kenyan and African withdrawal from the Rome Statute, declared on Twitter that “civil societies and their financiers have been ashamed and the rule of law prevailed”. He even went further to say that “the 14th assembly of state parties resolution on #Rule68 has been upheld” and that the verdict had redeemed “the creditbility (sic) of ICC and respect of the Rome Statue.”

Now, it will come as no surprise to anyone that our political class lies. In its daily sermons, it swears fealty to the rule of law even as its members continue violate both the spirit and letter of it. Few will have forgotten the words of Nandi Hills MP, Alfred Keter, at a weighbridge station in Gilgil: “We are the ones making laws; when we want, we break them.”

But the Jubilee coalition has transformed public insincerity into an art form. And little showcases this better than its shifting stand with regard to the cases against the President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy, William Ruto, at the Hague. Their deceptions have been behind the cases mutating from a “personal challenge” as candidate Kenyatta once called them, to a challenge to national sovereignty, which it isn’t, to an example of “race-hunting” on a continental scale, a bare-faced lie.

On local and international fora, the President and his minions have regaled us with tales of “a global standard” on Head of State immunity, conveniently ignoring the standard that our own constitution sets in Article 143 which unambiguously says in subsection 4: “The immunity of the President under this Article shall not extend to a crime for which the President may be prosecuted under any treaty to which Kenya is party and which prohibits such immunity.” The Rome Statute is just such a treaty.

The pattern of deception has inevitably filtered down to discourse on other local issues. “It begins with you” has become the catch-all phrase that absolves the government of any responsibility when it fails to do its job. When corruption flourishes and infects all arms of government, the proffered solutions are not to fix the systems that incentivize and reward such behaviour, and to punish the corrupt. Rather, we are treated to the fiction of a society-wide malaise which will be solved by teaching ethics classes to primary schoolkids.

Similarly, when the government fails in its duty to provide the public good of security, it attempts to socialize this failure and to blame everyone in society. The problem we are told, is that we don’t share information with the state. In reality, the fact that security forces had prior intelligence on local terror attacks does not seem to have made them any more effective in stopping them. Further, a senior police officer pointed to the real problem when he told the Nation: “There was never a review meeting on how we handled incidents”. As a result, the paper goes on to say, “the police service has basically learnt nothing from Westgate, Garissa, Mpeketoni and others.” Many will remember that the President’s promise of an inquiry into security failures surrounding the Westgate atrocity a has similarly failed to materialize, as has his vow to punish those responsible for the them.

A final example of the government’s mendacity is the paucity of public information on the El Adde attack. A month after the Al Shabaab terror group overran an African Union base manned by Kenyan troops in southern Somalia, we are yet to get definitive figures for how many soldiers we lost and how many were captured. Despite promises by CS Raychelle Omamo and the Chief of Defence Forces General Samson Mwathethe to provide a full account, we still only have rumours and unconfirmed reports that put the death toll at above 100, with some sources suggesting up to 130.

Meanwhile, at the funerals going on around the country, the government continues to “honor our fallen heroes” with bugles and gun salutes and flag-draped coffins. Yet the one thing that would truly honour their memory continues to stay hidden: a proper telling of how and why they died, and a learning of lessons have been learnt to ensure the same never happens to their comrades. The reason the authorities remain vague about the details is not to protect national security but rather the backsides of senior officers and officials.

While it may, in a limited number of extreme instances, be in the national interest to temporarily withhold information from the public, across the world it is clear that officials lie mostly to escape censure for mistakes and shortcomings. Just as has been the case with terror attacks on civilians inside Kenya, the silence over El Adde, for example, is intended to keep the Kenyan public, not the Al Shabaab (who already know the scale of the damage they inflicted) in the dark.

Politics is often described as a dirty game. “One must know how to colour one’s actions and to be a great liar and deceiver” wrote Machiavelli of the successful ruler, adding that "men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived."  In a Machiavellian world, where public officials are only concerned with the acquisition and perpetuation of their power, it may be permissible to routinely mislead the citizenry. However, the sovereign is also urged to “not deviate from the good, if that is possible”. Ethics and moral behaviour are thus not entirely outside the purview of politics, even in a dictatorship. And they take on an even more important role when it comes to democracies, where citizens require accurate and sufficient information in order to hold public officials to account.

However, nowadays politicians and public officials also routinely lie, and the public has come to expect that they will do so. This expectation, in turn leads to a debilitating cynicism about the political process and a resignation to the inevitability of deception. When the lies are not just expected but acceptable, when they no longer arouse outrage and when national policies can be built around them, then societies are treading on very dangerous ground. The disastrous 2003 US invasion of Iraq, one of whose consequences is the rise of ISIS, is but one recent example of the havoc deception can wreak.

So when we permit Interior Cabinet Secretary, Gen Joseph Nkaissery, to get away with declaring public scrutiny of his ministry’s questionable spending a threat to national security; or the President to escape censure for inciting mobs into destroying private property via an illegal directive against alcohol; when patently unconstitutional laws are used to punish legal conduct and expression that those in power do not like; then we are putting our liberties, our democracy, our very lives and prosperity in great peril.

The words and sentiments streaming out of the mouths of our public officials should mean something. And the people behind them should be held to account.  We do not pay them to lie and mislead us or to treat us like children who can’t handle the truth. Or worse, to subvert the constitution, the very thing that limits the power they can wield over our lives.

So as we snigger and make fun of the antics of Hon Duale and his friends over the ICC, we should be very careful lest we wake up and find that the joke is on us.

Why The KDF Lion Must Learn To Speak

Until the lion learns to speak, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. The truth of this statement is today being demonstrated in the aftermath of the devastating attack by the Al Shabaab terror group on the AMISOM base at El Adde in southern Somalia.

With over Kenyan 100 troops feared dead, this is turning out to be not just a tactical victory, but a propaganda coup as well for the Al Qaeda linked militants. Panicked Generals in both AMISOM and the KDF have effectively shut down their public communications, effectively handing the airwaves to the enemy. And Al Shabaab has not been slow to exploit this opportunity. For nearly a week its tale of the hunt has been propagated around the world pretty much unchallenged.

The modern media operation is a 24-hour beast that needs to be fed round the clock. National and international mass media is the most important disseminator of news for the vast majority of people and what it carries shapes opinions and influences decisions. It is for this reason that terrorists make every effort to maximize coverage of their attacks.

And perceptions do matter. Especially in war, which the great Prussian general and military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz described as “the continuation of politics by other means.” Politics, as is readily apparent, is a game of perceptions and opinions. To a great extent, wars are too. They end when the losing side acknowledges it cannot win (except on the rare occasion when it is entirely eliminated).

So war itself can be seen a great communications effort, albeit one where the message is transmitted via bombs and bullets. Sun Tzu’s advice that “victorious warriors win first and then go to war” can be paraphrased thus: “Win first, then go tell your opponent about it.”

In today’s world, the fight against the terrorists is not only waged on the ground, but on newspaper pages, TV and radio broadcasts and on internet as well. This is especially true of the struggle against Al Shabaab.

Most Kenyans tend to mistakenly think of the group as a rag-tag militia with little in the way of effective organisation. In reality, Al Shabaab is well organized and resourced, and what it lacks in tanks and armour it makes up in communications capabilities.  It has established a media department which is adept at producing slick propaganda videos and churning out pictures and footage to feed the media beast with its version of events.

Now, it is true that wars are not won by press releases. But it would be a great mistake to conclude that effective communications don’t matter. In its first three years, AMISOM struggled to find its voice. Its tale was told by others, including by its enemies and detractors. As a result, it struggled to convince Somalians of its intentions, to get countries to deploy troops and to articulate its need for more and better equipment. By 2010, there was talk of “constructive disengagement” and winding up the “failing mission”.

It was in recognition of this, and at the request of the AU, that in 2009 the UN provided AMISOM with a team of civilian communications consultants as part of a wider logistical support package. I was a part of this team, which is based in Mogadishu, for nearly four years and witnessed fist-hand how well-executed communications strategies made AMISOM more effective on the ground.

From countering Al Shabaab propaganda to explaining its mandate and operations to a sceptical international audience to communicating successes on the ground, AMISOM became more adept at influencing local and international perceptions and managed to turn its reputation around. By the end of 2012 this effort- combined with the success its troops delivered on the ground- had countries competing to contribute troops and the UN Security Council voting to beef up its support for the Mission.

One of the many important lessons I learnt is that to compete effectively in the media arena, one has to be fast, first and provide accurate facts. Even, and perhaps especially, when it was bad news, you would rather the public heard it from you and not from the other side. It is a race to get your side of the story out first and to control the narrative. Another lesson was the critical need always to preserve your credibility by never putting out information that one knows to false.

On both these counts, the Kenyan Government has performed poorly. AMISOM has a long standing policy of letting its troop contributing countries speak on casualties and so its silence is somewhat understandable. The Kenyan state and its defence forces, on the other hand, has worked to prevent any details on the operation leaking out, including by prosecuting people who forwarded purported pictures of the dead Kenyan soldiers issued by Al Shabaab. It has also now provided a provisional version of events via the Chief of Defence Forces, Gen Samson Mwathethe, elements of which not only contradict its earlier statements, but also fly in the face of the few facts that have already been established.

This sadly fits into pattern that the Government has followed whenever confronted with failure. It has done little to shore up its credibility in speaking on matters security since the Westgate disaster. It has tried to impose its “Official Truth” and refused to address any holes in yarn that it has spun. More than two years later, there has been no credible official account of what happened inside that mall for four days. It is a curious position for a government famous for its formidable public relations machine to be in.

Regardless, it is clear that we can ill afford to cede the media space to Al Shabaab without a fight. Our lion must learn to speak.

El Adde Shows How Not To Fight Al Shabaab

In the wake of the Al Shabaab attack on a base manned by the Kenyan contingent of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in the south Somalia town of El Adde, many of our returning soldiers, as well as the many who died, are being hailed as heroes. On social and mainstream media it has become de rigueur to declare love for the Kenya Defence Forces, to hail their bravery and martyrdom. Questioning the details of the incident only invites appeals to national mourning or accusations of spitting on their sacrifice.

Yet the questions must be asked. If, as seems likely, reports of tens, perhaps over a hundred killed turn out to be true, it would be the highest one-day toll both the KDF and AMISOM have suffered in their history. It would also demonstrate that reports of Al Shabaab’s imminent demise may be greatly exaggerated. The immediate as well as wider reasons for both the catastrophe and for Al Shabaab’s ability to inflict such pain must be explored if we wish to prevent similar disasters in the future.

The facts of what happened at El Adde should give us all pause for thought. Newly deployed and inexperienced troops came under attack, their camp was overrun, their commander captured and the soldiers scattered to the wind in disarray. Many died, others fled to the bush or requested shelter from local civilians, from where we are now trying to recover them. This is not how we should be fighting our wars.

Especially worrisome is the fact this attack did not come out of the blue.

The troops in El Adde had only been there for two weeks, many coming fresh from their base in Eldoret. Al Shabaab have been known to attack AMISOM positions immediately after troop rotations, knowing that AMISOM’s practice of replacing units of experienced soldiers with entirely fresh soldiers guarantees they would face inexperienced opposition.

Further, despite losing much of the territory it once controlled across Southern Somalia, the Al Qaeda-affiliated terror group has shown time and again that it remains capable of mounting devastating attacks across the country.  Of late, the group has developed an appetite for taking on AMISOM’s Forward Operating Bases.

The El Adde attack was the third such attack in the last seven months. Over 50 Burundian AMISOM soldiers were reported to have been killed when the group overran their base at Leego, 62 miles north-west of Mogadishu. Then four months ago, they sacked the Ugandan contingent’s base in Janale, again killing at least 19 soldiers, though media quoted a briefing note sent to diplomats by Western military officials claiming that around 100 soldiers were "unaccounted for" after the attack.

The tactics Al Shabaab has employed across the last two assaults are also remarkably similar to those used in the El Adde attack, both coming immediately after troop rotations and involving use of suicide car bombs and large swarms of fighters to overwhelm resistance.

Even more damning are the reports that the El Adde attack was widely anticipated and that locals had left their homes in advance of it. It is curious that little has been said about the Somali National Army troops that were co-located with the AMISOM troops. They appear to have not taken part in the fighting which probably means that they too had evacuated the area in advance of the attack. The reports indicate that this information may even have been shared with the Kenyans!

Further, the obviously poor state of relations and distrust between the Kenyan contingent and local people is another source of concern. Somalia’s fractious clan divides are a dangerous minefield that would be peacekeepers must navigate carefully. The KDF’ support for Ahmed Madobe in Kismayo has inevitably earned Kenya the suspicion, if not hostility, of clans rivalling the Ogadeni, including the Marehan who dominate El Adde.

All this is most troubling. There is a clear and massive failure of leadership which left our troops at the mercy of our enemies and that should not be swept under the carpet of a jingoistic patriotism. Once the current search and rescue operations are done, we must set up an inquiry, learn lessons and hold senior officers to account. We failed to do this following similar KDF failures at Westgate and at the Garissa University and are once again paying the price for it in blood.

The above also invites a serious debate about Kenya’s and AMISOM’s objectives in Somalia and what it will actually take to achieve them.

Kenya’s invasion of Somalia in October 2011 was in response to a spate of kidnappings for ransom by Somalia-based bandit gangs which threatened the lucrative tourist industry. Although the goals of Operation Linda Nchi were not well articulated at the time, at the very least it was meant to make the country safe for tourism. By that measure, the invasion was a spectacular failure. In the time since the invasion, attacks by Al Shabaab (which by the way had denied responsibility for the kidnappings but was targeted by the KDF anyway) on the Kenyan homeland multiplied exponentially, almost obliterating the tourism Linda Nchi was meant to save.

Today, little is heard about this. This is because Linda Nchi was hurriedly would up and the Kenya forces in Somalia rehatted as AMISOM less than a year later. They thus acquired a different set of objectives. AMISOM is a peace support mission mandated to help restore the Somalia National Security Forces, fight Al Shabaab and help extend the writ of the government in Mogadishu. It does not exist to secure Kenya.

However, it is true that a stable Somalia would be a boon for security across the region and there is no doubt Kenya would be a major beneficiary. It is important then, as a contributor to AMISOM, that Kenyans examine how that effort is doing.

On the surface, there is reason for hope. Since 2011, as noted above, Al Shabaab has been pushed out of nearly all of Somalia’s major towns including all the ports it once controlled. But while the terror group has been degraded, the authority of the Federal Government does not extend much outside the towns and Al Shabaab is still able to operate freely in much of rural south Somalia. Further, as the El Adde attack demonstrates, the Somali forces are far from ready to take on Al Shabaab.

This has critical implications for AMISOM. Its exit strategy is predicated not just on sufficiently degrading Al Shabaab, but also on training up effective Somali troops. The latter’s continued weakness is a double blow to AMISOM. Firstly, it delays the date of an eventual AMISOM exit. Secondly, one of the reasons for the UN Security Council authorising relatively low troop numbers for AMISOM was the expectation that the SNA would fill the gap. The UN Operation in Somalia II (UNOSOM II) – the second phase of the initial UN intervention, from March 1993 to March 1995 – had a similar mandate to AMISOM and had 30,000 troops. AMISOM has just over 22,000 and for much of its time Somalia has had much less.

The Mission also lacks crucial equipment and support enablers. Although belatedly authorised by the Security Council in 2012, helicopters are yet to arrive in the Mission area. Thus despite the successes it has achieved, there remain serious questions as to whether AMISOM, as currently constituted, can fully deliver on its mandate.

These and other issues should form the basis of an informed public debate on the wisdom and objectives of the KDF deployment in Somalia.  There is an opportunity today for Kenya to begin to seriously examine the options it has in Somalia and for the Kenyan public to finally have an informed say on what course to follow.