How America Became An African Country

Trevor Noah, the South African comedian and host of The Daily Show, a popular late-night news satire and talk show in the US, once described Donald Trump as America’s first African President.  In fact, Americans could do worse than look to the continent in general, and Kenya in particular, for a preview of what life under a Trump administration would be like.

President-elect Trump and Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta have much in common. Both are fabulously wealthy, the children of privilege with questionable success in business, and both have been accused of fanning ethnic and racial hatreds. Both have risen to head their respective countries in the most unlikely of circumstances and in the face of global opprobrium. While many across the world echewed Trump’s xenophobia and reckless approach to international affairs, Kenyatta had faced similar opposition to his candidacy three years earlier. This was a consequence of his -and his running mate’s - indictment at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in relation to Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence in which over 1000 people died.

Trump and Kenyatta even have similar ideas about how countries should be governed.

Take their shared suspicion and contempt for the media. Where Trump has called journalists “scum”, “illegitimate” and “horrible people” and declared his aim to make it easier to sue them, Kenyatta regularly derides newspapers as only good or wrapping meat, and his administration has introduced new laws meant to stifle independent reporting. It has arrested and beaten journalists who persist in asking uncomfortable questions, and, leveraging its advertising and regulatory muscle, leaned on media houses to fire them or to pull their stories. Just recently, in response to a spate of corruption stories, Kenyatta declared that the media should be required to prove any allegation of government graft they dared to report on or face the consequences.

When it comes to fighting terrorists, their pronouncements are also remarkably similar. Both prefer to speak in vague and bombastic terms and to demonize Muslim refugees and immigrants rather than offer detailed policy prescriptions. Trump says his plan for defeating ISIS is a secret whose details he won’t be revealing to the public any time soon. One hopes he’ll be sharing them with the generals since he claims to know more about fighting the extremists than they do. The Kenyatta administration, after all, has taken more than three years to come up with a strategy to tackle radicalization and is no closer than Trump to articulating a strategy to defeat the Al Shabaab, the Somali based terror group that has murdered nearly 800 Kenyans, most of them after Kenyatta took office.

There is also the question of whether Trump will follow through on his oft-repeated promised to get Mexico to pay for a wall on the US’ southern border to keep out immigrants (which Mexico has repeatedly vowed not to do). Here too, Kenyatta can offer some guidance. Depending on which of its officials you choose to believe, the Kenyatta government is building a wall to keep out terrorists either along the entire 700km border with Somalia, or just on a small section near the border town of Mandera. It may or may not be a physical barrier (there has been some talk of a human wall) whose construction is either ongoing or has stalled.

In addition to the wall, Trump has vowed to round up and deport illegal immigrants whom he says are gaming and mooching off the system, driving up crime, taking jobs and opportunities away from US citizens and depressing US wages. That little of this is true doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. Similarly, the Kenyatta regime has developed a fondness for demonizing refugees from Somalia, blaming them for everything from terrorist attacks to being a drain on the Kenyan economy, as a way of distracting from its own failures. In 2014, under operation Usalama Watch, it begun rounding up and deporting them, and restricting those that remained to the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the desolate north. Then, earlier this year, the government declared it would close the Dadaab camp by the end of November and has been effectively dumping hapless and unwilling refugees back into their war-ravaged country ever since. (That effort has now been suspended following an international outcry).

In September 2013, the prolific Ugandan columnist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, wrote that the International Criminal Court “had finally made Kenya an African country”. What he meant was that as the government worked to scuttle the cases against the President and his deputy (and with them any prospect of accountability for the 2008 violence), it had brought the country into closer alignment with authoritarian regimes in vogue across much of the rest of the continent. In similar fashion, it is perhaps not so far off the mark to suggest that with the election of Donald Trump, the US too has become something of an African country.

This piece was first published in the Washington Post.

Poor Refugees Make For Convenient Scapegoats

One would be forgiven for thinking the Kenyan government has something against sheltering the poor. The last two weeks have displayed some reflexive, ill-advised and even callous decision making that has left hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable citizens facing the prospect of enduring nights out in the cold and refugees being pressed back into the arms of the very oppressors they had fled from in the first place.

Last week, I noted that on his visit to the site of the collapsed building in Huruma where at least 50 people died, President Uhuru Kenyatta did not appear overly concerned about the fate of the many who would be rendered homeless by his order that all Nairobi residents living in unsafe buildings be evicted. By his administration’s own count, more than half of the city’s buildings were unsafe, the vast majority in poor areas.

Then came another decision seemingly out of the blue. The Dadaab refugee camp in the remote northern part of the country has been ordered to empty by November, the hundreds of thousands of refugees living there to be forcibly repatriated, most to still warring Somalia. This not only violates Kenya’s obligations under international law, but also rubbishes an arrangement with the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees for voluntary repatriation of Somali refugees. But more than that, like with the poor in Nairobi, government’s treatment of refugees exposes a callous disregard for their humanity and welfare.

It has long been clear that the poor in Kenya have been considered to be little more than sources for elite plunder, foot soldiers for elite battles and excuses for elite failures. The foreign poor have been especially badly treated by the state - relegated to the margins of society; confined in remote camps; robbed and raped by both state officials and bandits (who are many times one and the same); and then scapegoated for the government’s own security failures.

In an article published in the UK explaining the decision to close the camps, Interior Secretary Joseph Ole Nkaisserry says it was prompted by national security concerns, and especially the threat posed by Al Shabaab terrorists whom, the government claims, used the camps to plan and execute attacks like the September 2013 Westgate Mall atrocity. Of course, the Secretary was not concerned with inconveniences like facts and history.

Perhaps there is a good reason why the piece was published abroad. Many back home will remember that the though the government never provided any tangible evidence linking Dadaab to Westgate, this did not stop it demonizing refugees as security threats. Further, many will recall Operation Usalama Watch in April 2014 which was little more than officially sanctioned pillage of the sort residents in the North East are unfortunately familiar, cloaked in the language of counter-terrorism.

Even more importantly, many will remember the government’s shambolic response to Westgate and other subsequent attacks, the many failures to act on intelligence to stop the attacks and the failure to institute promised public inquiries into them. Many will remember that it was easier to blame the refugees rather than look at the real causes and failures leading to the atrocities.

Of course this did not stop Gen Nkaissery doubling down on his accusations. In an address to the local press a few days later, he accused the refugees of everything from gun running to wildlife poaching. Again, little evidence was offered for the claims. It was another blatant attempt to blame the refugees for the government’s own shortcomings. For example, despite the photogenic bonfires with which it likes to declare its commitment to wildlife conservation, the government’s actual record in this area is far from inspiring.

This same dynamic is present in the response to Huruma and in the implication that poor families move into decrepit buildings out of choice. The idea of evictions, and now of giving those displaced by the collapse tiny amounts to help them move on, implies there is somewhere for them to go. Yet as Kwame Owino of the Institute for Economic Affairs noted in November 2014, what is commonly seen as a housing problem is actually an income and employment problem.  He says that in a country in which poverty is pervasive, “a cheap house will necessarily be a bad house.”

Of course the reasons for poor incomes and high land and construction costs are to be found squarely within the policies pursued by the government as well as the interests it has prioritized. But, as with refugees, it is easier to blame the poor.

Somalis In Kenya Are "Available For Genocidal Imaginations"

Speaking last week during the commemoration of two decades since the genocide in his country, Rwandan strongman, Paul Kagame, argued that the catastrophe had been decades in the making. “The most devastating legacy of European control of Rwanda was the transformation of social distinctions into so-called “races”. We were classified and dissected, and whatever differences existed were magnified according to a framework invented elsewhere … The colonial theory of Rwandan society claimed that hostility between something called “Hutu”, “Tutsi”, and “Twa” was permanent and necessary.”

Today, it seems obvious that the murder of 800,000 people was not an overnight event but rather the result of deliberately cultivated hate over a lengthy period. It begins with the classification and dehumanization of people and communities, with “differences magnified according to frameworks invented elsewhere” and leads to “permanent and necessary” hostility, and eventually, disaster.

These are important lessons for the rest of the continent. They are particularly relevant for Kenya today. 

Following a series of terrorist attacks across the country, the government has launched a crackdown on supposed criminal and terrorist elements, but one which actually seems to target the country’s minority Muslim and Somali populations. As the country marks a year since the swearing in of President Uhuru Kenyatta, the venue of his inauguration has been playing host to thousands of almost exclusively ethnic Somalis who have been arrested for not producing proper identification documents.

For many of them, officially sanctioned harassment is nothing new. For the last half century, Kenyan authorities have treated Muslims and ethnic Somalis with suspicion, seeing them at best as just short of being Kenyan and at worst as a fifth column – the enemy within. In fact, as an essay by Prof. Jeremy Prestholdt of the Department of History, University of California states, “the government of Kenya’s anti-terrorism initiatives have compounded an already deep sense of alienation among those most severely affected by the new measures: Kenyan Muslims, particularly those of Arab and Somali ancestry.”

In colonial times, their status as native Africans was at best ambiguous and in the run-up to independence, a push towards greater autonomy at the coast and the desire of the Somali population in the then North Eastern Frontier to join Somalia heightened perceptions that these communities as traitors to the Kenyan cause. The paranoia of the upcountry elites who took over from the British simply served to reinforce these views.

As the report of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission showed, for most of Kenya’s independence history, the government has systematically marginalized and oppressed these populations. Its policy towards them has been one of demonization and collective punishment. It is a history replete with rape, massacres and other human rights abuses, one in which the “differences magnified according to frameworks invented elsewhere” became defining features of a “permanent and necessary” hostility. It has to be noted that the same treatment, though not necessarily to the same extent, was meted out to other communities, such as the Luo, who were also perceived as a threat to the Old Establishment.

Seen within the context of this history, the current administration’s actions are perhaps not surprising. Today the language of counter-terrorism is being employed to continue this tradition of dehumanization and delegitimization. It is a tradition that allows “Kenyans” to identify with the tragedy and triumph of baby Satrin Osinya while remaining blind to the suffering of Somali infants spending their nights in police cells. “Refugee” has been made synonymous with illegality and terrorism, with a status undeserving of rights. Like the Kenyan Somalis and the Muslims of the coast, their presence has been shown to be merely tolerated rather than accepted, and deeply suspect to boot.

In these populations, as marginalized even at the centre as they were in the periphery, the government has found a convenient scapegoat for its failures. According to a report titled Kenya and the Global War On Terror by Samuel Aronson of the London School of Economics “the current anti-terrorism strategy in Kenya neglects the history and geopolitics of the nation and is thus flawed in its most basic capacity.” But I think the reality is a lot more sinister. The government doesn’t ignore this history. It exploits and reinforces it. 

What it deliberately ignores is that “Wahabbiism is being rejected by most Kenyan Muslims and that of the roughly 200 mosques in Mombasa, ‘maybe five [can] be considered extremist.’” What it is unwilling to acknowledge is “the difference between radicalized terrorists and theologically conservative Muslims” or that “the predominantly Sunni coastal population takes issues with Sh’ia and Wahhabi foreigners who, according to many on the coast, lure the ‘lesser educated and financial needy Africans away from the true faith.’” It is more convenient to believe “the coastal [and Somali] population is mainly terrorists.”

That makes it easy to distract from the real failures. From the corruption and incompetence of the security forces. From the fact that despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid that has “allowed Kenyan authorities to expand their security infrastructure significantly, this infrastructure has [not] been seen to affect authorities’ ability to identify terrorists, foil terrorist plots, and bring criminals to justice.” That counter-terrorism efforts have been more about ethnic stereotyping and less about intelligence gathering and actual police work.

But worse than that, by following in the footsteps of previous regimes, the government not only makes us all less safe, it perpetuates the very logic of exclusion and isolation that led to the terrible events in Rwanda twenty years ago. As Keguro eloquently puts it, "Eastleigh—and Somalis via Eastleigh—has become available for genocidal imaginations."

A version of this article was previously published on Aljazeera.