Rethinking Security

Kenya’s security system is broken. Two devastating attacks in the space of nine months, each claiming more than 60 lives, are testament to the veracity of that fact. Even before last week’s attacks on the coastal town of Mpeketoni, Kenyans had good reason to fear for their safety. According to the police, in the 35 years from 1975 to 2010 Kenya suffered a total of 6 terror attacks. However, in the last four years, the country has had to endure nearly 80 such attacks. In the light of this, it is amazing that the country is operating with pretty much the same security mindset that informed responses for over a century.

The choice of 2011 as a watershed year is, of course no accident, being the year that Kenya sent its troops across the border into neighboring Somalia where they today operate as part of the UN-funded African Union Mission to Somalia. Most of the attacks have been blamed on the Al Shabaab, the Al Qaeda affiliated terror group that the Kenya Defense Forces were meant to be chasing down in Southern Somalia.

Thus many now see pulling the troops out of Somalia, and in the process fulfilling one of the Al Shabaab’s core demands, as a way to turn the clock back. It is a view that seems to be winning the support of many Kenyan politicians, but one that I consider to be extremely, even dangerously, naive. It is true that Somalia is the Al Shabaab’s primary target, where the extremists previously sought to impose a harsh, Taliban-inspired form of Islamic law alien to Somali culture and history.

However, on many occasions, the extremists have openly declared that their agenda does not stop at Somalia’s borders. Not only has the group allied itself to the global terror network, Al Qaeda, it has also actively provided a safe haven for terrorists such as those who, in November 2002, bombed the Paradise Hotel on the Kenyan coast, killing 22 innocent people.

Consider this 2009 statement from one of its officials following Ethiopia's withdrawal: "The fact that the enemy has left Mogadishu does not mean that the mujahideen will not follow him to where he still remains." The Al Shabaab thought the idea that jihad had ended with Ethiopia's withdrawal was "in clear contradiction with the statement of Prophet Muhammad … that jihad will continue until Doomsday."  Why would they treat Kenya’s withdrawal any differently?

The fact is our security problems did not start with the invasion of Somalia (though attacks have undoubtedly multiplied since) and will not be fixed by withdrawing from there. With Al Qaeda seeking to establish a base next door, we should’ve expected that the war would sooner or later come to our doorstep, whether or not we intervened. The question is why were we not better prepared?

The real issue is that our security setup is not fit for purpose. As David Ndii notes in his recent piece, “we retained the repressive colonial security infrastructure whose primary function was to protect the government from its oppressed subjects.”   As I have written many times before, the colonial state was never overthrown and the extractive state was maintained with our ravenous elites feasting at the top. The entire security apparatus remains designed to protect this obscene banquet.

Thus our agencies (and institutions) are very good at finding political opponents and disrupting citizen demonstrations, but not as good at detecting, preventing or responding to terrorist atrocities. In a very real sense, they are fighting with their guns aimed at the very people they are supposed to be protecting. Because they have been resourced to fight internal opponents of the regime, they have neither the training nor the equipment to deal effectively with the threat from international terrorists. The shambolic responses to the Westgate and Mpeketoni atrocities are proof positive of this.

However, true to form, Kenyan elites both in opposition and in government have been more interested in exploiting these attacks for political and financial gain rather than in resolving our problems. It is the same elites who in the late 90s and early 00s hatched schemes to steal humongous amounts of money under the guise of making much needed technological improvements to the security systems. The improvements, of course, never materialized.

Today, they treat security as a political football, something with which to score points against your political opponent, as opposed to a national emergency that must be addressed with sobriety and honesty. And, as always, they have sought to get paid, utilising the opportunity to sneak in tenders dubious, opaquely sourced and ridiculously expensive surveillance systems.

There appears to be little inclination to find real and long term solutions. Following the Westgate attack, President Uhuru Kenyatta promptly forgot his promise to institute a commission of inquiry into the failures that preceded it and that characterised the response. A joint parliamentary committee probe then produced a report that was so poor that the National Assembly binned it.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” said Albert Einstein and this, unfortunately, is precisely what Kenya is trying to do. However, without a clear understanding of what the long term security challenges are, Kenya will be continue to be prey to the short-term machinations and greed of those in power.

A comprehensive and independent public inquiry into the terror attacks and security responses of the last four years would help identify causes and lapses and provide the fodder for us to think about security in new ways. So far, only Musalia Mudavadi has had the good sense to demand one, albeit timidly. Let’s hope that in the coming days, many more will join him.

The Past Is Never Dead

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun. Over the last week, the truth of that phrase has been reconfirmed in Kenya. Six years ago, the country was almost dissolved in an orgy of bloodletting. Two years later, we inaugurated a new constitution meant to ensure that never happened again. Today, however, the ruling elite is busy recreating the very conditions that led to the violence and making a mockery of the aspirations of millions of our citizens.

It seemed oh so different just over a decade ago, when we thought we were “Unbwogable” and “Yote yawezekana bila Moi”. At the time, as we approached the 2002 general election, everything truly seemed possible and the future was full of promise, not fear. In a very real sense, we were leaving the humiliation, self-doubt, failure, corruption and violence in the past where it belonged, and moving on. 

Sadly though, the past was not through with us. It refused to die. Within months, the politics of ethnicity and corruption would resurface and in five years, we would be at each others’ throat. By 2013, we were most definitely a “bwogable” nation, scared of the thoughts in our own heads and terrified of the future; seeking solace and safety in the very people responsible for taking us to the brink in 2008. 

The past is still not through with us. Last week, we heard the same grumblings about the ethnic preferences characterising presidential appointments that heralded the unravelling of the NARC coalition a decade ago. The same ghost of corruption that haunted NARC from early on is rarely far from nearly every policy proposal made by the Jubilee government. The traditional victimisation and collective punishment of the Somali and Muslim communities is today presented as counter-terrorism policy. 

The imperial presidency has also made a comeback, not only with the unilateral move by President Uhuru Kenyatta to increase the powers of county commissioners but also, apparently, his own to agree security deals worth nearly Kshs. 15 billion to increase its surveillance of Kenyans without seeking Parliamentary approval. He as well chose to ignore the protestations of Parliament and the advice of the Auditor-General and unilaterally authorize the payment of over Kshs. 1 billion to briefcase companies in deals he himself, as leader of the opposition in 2006, had declared to be illegal. 

The past isn’t dead. It refuses to be buried under constitutions that exist on paper but not in hearts. It will not be drowned out by the statements of a government that prefers rhetoric to action. It is not even past but expressed when those close to power can openly discuss the murder of an inconvenient blogger and incite violence against certain communities without fear of prosecution. When the President promises yet more investigations into the AngloLeasing scams while ignoring the Kroll report, which details where the country’s thieving elite has stashed away its ill-gotten gains, and that of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission which offers us a way to begin addressing the decades of state persecution of the citizenry. When his administration presents a budget which allocates more money for his wife’s “hospitality” than to the entire Anti-Terrorism Police Unit and when it refuses to prosecute the poaching kingpins behind the devastation being wrought on our wildlife today. 

We have spent over a decade trying to outrun the past, to ignore it, to hide from it or to hide it. None of that has worked, nor was it ever likely to. The past is something we must acknowledge as being the stuff of the present. “What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare and if we do not begin to confront it, it will also be the stuff of our future. It should be clear that as the very conditions of ethnic polarization, concentration of power, inequality and impoverishment that led to the violence in 2008 are re-established they can only bring about similar results. If we are to get off the cycle of polarization, corruption, poverty and violence, we must learn to do things differently. 

Face up to the past instead of trying to escape it. Perhaps instead of ignoring corruption, we decide to do something about it. Instead of victimising innocents, we try to understand our vulnerabilities to terrorism and to improve the capabilities of our security forces to investigate and prosecute the real attackers. Maybe we try to implement the reports that we commission, to enforce the laws that we pass and to implement, not just the letter, but more importantly, the spirit of our constitution. 

A major theme of Faulkner's, according to Gene Andrew Jarrett, Professor and Chair of the English Department at Boston University, is that “the life of the past in the present and in the future has often been a curse, often too difficult to defeat in one blow." A single act, such as passing a constitution or voting out (or in) a particular leader, is thus unlikely to exorcise our demons. However, if we consistently choose to learn from the past instead of running from it, and resist the temptation to indulge our elites in return for the promise of a temporary safety, we can then have a realistic chance of not repeating it.

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.