Politics
The Laikipia Crisis and the Disenfranchisement of Kenyans in the North
14 min read.The conflicts in Laikipia and elsewhere in northern Kenya ought to be looked at as a national security issue exacerbated by historical land injustices and the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that relegates the true owners of the resources to the periphery.
The widely publicised recent invasions of wildlife conservancies in Laikipia County in Kenya have often been framed as conflicts between pastoralist communities and conservationists. However, the conflicts in Laikipia and elsewhere in northern Kenya ought to be looked at as a national security issue exacerbated by historical land injustices and the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that relegates the true owners of the resources to the periphery.
It is instructive that the state has identified environmental degradation as constituting a threat to national security. This was highlighted in a story published in the Sunday Nation on May 7, 2017 on Kenya’s plans to expand the military. Quoting from The National Defence Policy, the reporter stated that the government had identified environmental degradation as one of the threats to Kenya’s security.
This admission is significant because for a long time the country has taken for granted fatal consequences of wanton destruction of forests, rivers, habitats, ecosystems, as well as serious erosion of biological diversity. How individual actions affect the environment appears not to preoccupy most people’s minds in the country. Collectively though, such injurious individual actions result in a situation that has far-reaching implications, not just on the well-being of the environment or inability of ecosystems to supply life-nurturing environmental resources to citizens, but also on the security of the country.
On its part, the state has kept making one policy pronouncement after another without putting in place the necessary resources and personnel to implement the policies or to whip everyone into line. For many years now, the discord between what is said in official statements and what is done by citizens, companies and the state itself has given rise to serious crises. This greatly affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of Kenyans, some of whom opt for extra-legal measures to stay alive.
Many have gone on to equate Laikipia to the Biblical Eden; “it represents a lost Eden in European settler thinking, epitomised by the writings of Kuki Gallman, which are infused with an imagined sense of entitlement to and identification with her adopted land.”
Added to this is the long-running official neglect of arid and semi-arid areas of the country. Individuals and organisations that constitute the country’s conservation fraternity have capitalised on officialdom’s disinterest by experimenting with a conservation model that is harmful to the communities there. With financial support from multilateral and bilateral donors, as well as big-bucks international NGOs, the fraternity has literary taken over and has been running not just conservation, but also security, livestock marketing and conflict resolution in a manner that greatly interferes with the sovereignty of the communities that claim ownership of the land there.
This sad state of affairs is epitomised by the fact that one organization, Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), openly claims that it has brought into conservation a whopping 44,000 km2 of the lands in the upper Rift, north and coastal regions. The reaction to what happens there and how it affects the rights of the communities to their lands and resources, as well as how this translates into the apparent insecurity in Laikipia and elsewhere in the north, ought to be seen as social reverberations of historical land injustices and official neglect.
The historical narrative
In Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, Lotte Hughes paints a picture of pastoralist communities disinherited from their land on two different occasions in 1904 and 1911. The British author says that between 1904 and 1905, colonial authorities forcibly moved the Maasai people from their favourite grazing grounds between Naivasha and Nakuru into two reserves in order to make way for white settlement. Laikipia was one of the reserves while the other was in the south, on the border with Tanzania. According to Hughes, this was done following the 1904 Maasai Agreement through which the community was promised that it could keep the reserved areas “so long as the Maasai as a race shall exist.” She writes that the British did not honour their promise but went on to move the Maasai again seven years later “at gunpoint from Laikipia to an extended southern Maasai reserve.” More than 20,000 people and not less than 2.5 million livestock were moved between 1911 and 1913. All this was done mainly to pave way for white settlers, although, as Hughes says, there were other extraneous reasons, including the desire by the colonial administration to concentrate the Maasai in one reserve in order to better rule over them and to impose taxes. Consequently, the Maasai lost between 50% and 70% of the land they occupied before 1904.
Since the second “move” was implemented, the Maasai have maintained that this was not an “agreement” per se as their leaders signed it under heavy duress and coercion. “This effectively rendered the first Agreement void,” writes Hughes. This supports the intermittent claims made by activists from the community that they have a legal claim over the land now occupied by the mainly white ranchers in Laikipia.
The campaign for redress for this historical injustice reached a crescendo in the early 2000s when the community, led by the defunct Osirigi NGO and people like the late Elijah Marima Sempeta, intensified calls for a return of the lost lands. The latter was a young lawyer who travelled to Britain and unearthed documentary evidence ascertaining that the leases given to the white ranchers had come to an end and that time had come for the ownership of the land to revert to the local community. Following a spirited campaign, the matter fizzled out after Sempeta was murdered outside his home in Ngong Town in circumstances that remain unexplained. However, the push appears to have borne fruit when lease periods were lowered from 999 years to 99 years in Kenya’s 2010 constitution.
Defeating the land rights campaign
The white lessees of the land in Laikipia have adopted a multi-pronged counter-campaign and have shown – in words and deeds – that they are not ready to forfeit the land. According to Hughes, many have gone on to equate Laikipia to the Biblical Eden; “it represents a lost Eden in European settler thinking, epitomised by the writings of Kuki Gallman, which are infused with an imagined sense of entitlement to and identification with her adopted land.”
In Land Deals in Kenya: The Genesis of Land Deals in Kenya and its Implication on Pastoral Livelihoods – A Case Study of Laikipia District, 2011, John Letai says that Laikipia has “profound inequalities” in land ownership, with 40.3% of the land being controlled by 48 individuals. Among the biggest landowners in Laikipia include Gallman, whose Ol Ari Nyiro ranch is said to be 100,000 acres. Other large ranches include the Ol Pejeta ranch (92,000 acres) that was once associated with Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the Ol Jogi ranch (67,000 acres) owned by the late French billionaire art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. But even with this kind of inequality, it has been apparent that the ranchers cannot countenance the idea of ever giving up the giant parcels of land to the original owners. Some have been offloading the land to other rich people (some of whom are foreigners) while top business and political elites in the country have also increasingly acquired land there.
The white lessees of the land in Laikipia have adopted a multi-pronged counter-campaign and have shown – in words and deeds – that they are not ready to forfeit the land.
Another approach has been to front the sprawling ranches as important wildlife conservation areas. Targeted in this approach is a powerful and moneyed audience in the West that has contributed immensely to support wildlife conservation in cash and kind. Initially, the white ranchers had not taken wildlife conservation as seriously. For a long time, many had taken to large-scale livestock keeping but later realised that they stood to gain much more by converting their properties to either mixed livestock-and-wildlife areas or to exclusive wildlife conservation zones. They appear to have been inspired by arguments put forward by people such as Dr. David Western, a former Kenya Wildlife Service director, who championed the parks-beyond-parks concept, as well as the outcome of the 2003 World Parks Congress organised by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in Durban, South Africa. According to Dr Mordecai Ogada, a former chief executive of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, the central theme and message coming out of the Congress was “benefits beyond boundaries”.
“The model that proposed establishment of conservancies outside protected areas … gained immediate currency and caught the eye of donors as well as statutory agencies like the Kenya Wildlife Service, which were keen to gain more habitat for wildlife and secure reservoir wildlife populations that could augment those in parks via wildlife corridors,” says Dr. Ogada.
He says that this led to a “carefully laid out and presented plan” to secure the future of wildlife in these vast lands and to get financial support from private and institutional donors.
To avoid paying taxes and to continue enjoying the largesse of global supporters of wildlife conservation, many of the Laikipia ranchers registered their conservancies as non-profit organisations. Today, Ian Craig’s Lewa Conservancy and Kuki Gallman’s Ol-Ari Nyiro Conservancy are registered as non-profit outfits. However, this is a misnomer because many of them run exclusive, high-end lodges and camps that charge tens of thousands of shillings daily to tourists. For instance, with 12 tents that can accommodate 26 guests, Lewa Safari Camp located in the Lewa Downs charges between Ksh15,500 ($155) and Ksh42,600 ($426) per night depending on the season.
The plot thickens
Getting the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to give world heritage status to the ranches is the third approach adopted by the ranch owners. The secret scheme to have UNESCO play ball is aimed at enabling the ranchers to maintain a lasting claim on the land and, therefore, “eternally” defeat any campaign to have it revert to the Maasai community. So far, this is a feat that only Lewa Conservancy has attained. The 60,000-acre ranch was given this status in 2013, as an extension of the Mount Kenya World Heritage Site together with the Ngare Ndare Forest, which is also in Laikipia.
However, there are those who say that the elevation of Lewa was an anomaly because according to the World Heritage Convention, the duty of ensuring the identification, protection and conservation of cultural and natural heritage sites “belongs primarily” to the state. In addition, Article 5(4) of the convention burdens states with the funding and the protection of such sites, besides coming up with laws to protect them. Further, Article 6(3) states: “Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to take any deliberate measures which might damage directly or indirectly the cultural and natural heritage.”
Nevertheless, Lewa’s success appears to have encouraged others with huge ranches, some which were constituted through the NRT, to seek similar status for their property. According to what I found out, the ranchers commenced this in 2014 when 24 wildlife conservancies and private game ranches made applications to be included in the world database of protected areas. These include Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Segera, Solio Ranch, Ol-jogi Ranch, Kisima Farm and Ol Ari Nyiro Ranch (see: https://protectedplanet.net/ ).
“There is a rush to create a super big protected area stretching from Lewa to Solio – all of it under the cover of Word Heritage Convention,” says Njenga Kahiro, a former Project Officer with Laikipia Wildlife Forum.
If this goes through, it will mean that the conservancies and ranches will be declared of outstanding universal value and natural beauty. It is also bound to have far-reaching implications for Kenya, which is a signatory to the World Heritage Convention. Formulated in 1972, the Convention protects the world’s cultural and natural heritage. In essence, the ranchers appear to be putting forward the argument that the land is special and only its present owners can be trusted to keep it that way. But this has attracted criticism from members of the Maasai community. “This is a misplaced idea and it will receive serious challenges and resistance from human rights and indigenous people,” said Mali Ole Kaunga, the director of IMPACT, an NGO based in Laikipia County. Ole Kaunga accuses the ranch owners of “hiding behind international conventions…in order to get the Kenya government to protect them as it is obliged to by the Convention.”
Laikipia has “profound inequalities” in land ownership, with 40.3% of the land being controlled by 48 individuals.
Eustace Gitonga, the director of the Community Museums of Kenya, says that this will prevent Kenya from ever changing the use of such a vast segment of its real estate. “This will mean that Kenya cannot access any mineral wealth suspected to be in these lands.” Gitonga believes that this will also affect Kenya’s sovereign right to decide on how best to use its resources.
Other dynamics have also set in to further disenfranchise the pastoralist communities. This includes acquisition of large parcels of land by top politicians and rich people, from different ethnic groups in Kenya. Added to this is the phenomenon of absentee landlords and the resettlement of smallholders, mainly from the Kikuyu community, there. According to Letai, today, smallholder farms constitute 22.21% of the land. Many of the owners of the small farms have abandoned their parcels, as ascertained by a study done in 2013 titled The Abandoned Lands of Laikipia Land Use Options Study). A whopping 238,000 acres have been abandoned by some 85,000 titleholders, most of whom live elsewhere.
The absentee landowners, who were settled there by the first independent government under the late President Jomo Kenyatta, ended up using the land as collateral to acquire loans, mainly from the Agricultural Development Corporation. Letai says that there has been a rush to buy off the land from the absentee land owners. “Former commercial ranch managers are identifying the title holders of the absentee lands to convince them to consolidate their holdings and sell them to foreign diplomats, aid workers and even some former Zimbabwean white farmers. He adds that after purchasing the land, the latter have been fencing them which “has created tension with the Maasai and other pastoralists who have been using this land over a long period of time.
NRT’s approach
This situation is compounded by the fact that the inappropriate conservation approach and, to some extent, the goings-on in the private ranches of Laikipia, is replicated in the sprawling communally-owned lands within Laikipia and neighbouring counties. Northern Rangelands Trust has been championing the well-oiled conservation initiative, arguing that it enables communities to get revenue from conservation activities, promotes security in the north and has been facilitating the mainly pastoralist communities to put in place grazing plans that lessen their vulnerability to frequent and severe droughts occasioned by climate change. The organisation further says that it is involved in bringing more lands into wildlife conservation through the development of strong community-led institutions and that this forms the basis for investment in tourism and community development. NRT-inspired community conservancies have now spread across Laikipia, Samburu, Isiolo, Marsabit, Baringo/East Pokot, Garissa, Tana River and Lamu counties.
The largesse extended to the NRT is large and extensive to say the least. For instance, last November, the United States government channelled, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), some Ksh2 billion (US $20 million) in a new five-year scheme meant to expand NRT’s operations in 33 conservancies in Kenya’s coastal and northern regions. According to NRT’s website, the conservancies now cover 10.8 million acres (or 44,000km2) of the country and are spread across 11 counties. Announcing the grant, US ambassador Robert Godec said it was meant to “support the work of community rangers, conserve wildlife and fisheries, and improve livelihoods and advance women’s enterprises.”
The NRT was started in 2004 by Craig, with the initial aim of raising funds to aid the formation and running of wildlife conservancies. Its website says it supports the training of relevant communities and helps to “broker agreements between conservancies and investors.” It also says that it provides donors with “a degree of oversight and quality assurance.” Besides the US, the organisation’s activities are heavily funded by the Danish Development Agency (DANIDA), The Nature Conservancy (a US-based international NGO) and the French government’s Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD). Other financiers include Fauna & Flora International, Zoos South Australia, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ of Germany), US Fish and Wildlife Service, San Diego Zoo, International Elephant Foundation, Saint Louis Zo, and Running Wild.
However, it is the massive grants from USAID and Tullow Oil, the British company that has struck oil in Turkana County, which has attracted curious interest from observers who believe that there’s more than is being said in official communication. Pundits say that NRT’s approach affects communities negatively. According to Dr Ogada, the launch of community conservancies “began the mass disenfranchisement of communities in the name of conservation, and the rest is history.”
“Conservation is a noble cause, but like all other sectors, should be properly regulated. Kenya is currently failing to do that.”
In an interview with this writer, Michael Lalampaa, an official with the Higher Education Loans Board who hails from Samburu County, said that “even when droughts occur, pastoralists cannot access part of their lands that are now set aside for wildlife conservation and which constitute the community conservancies.” Indeed, many of the NRT-inspired community conservancies visited by this writer in late December 2016 had set aside big portions of the community lands as exclusive wildlife areas (or core areas). Some of these zones have better ecological characteristics and impressive landscapes favoured by tourists. Lalampaa complains that NRT compels communities to set aside the best portions of their lands for the exclusive use of wildlife and investors subsequently lease it to set up tourist facilities.
What is interesting, as this writer found during a tour of the Kurikuri Conservancy close to Mukogondo forest, is that the NRT not only brokers the investment agreements, but has also insisted on having its employees as some of the signatories of conservancies’ bank accounts. More alarming, the community in Kurikuri is required to meet some of the costs of running the lodges, which eats deeply into the cash they get from leasing out their land and from each of the tourists who visit the conservancy.
To ensure that the operations within the conservancies have the support of relevant communities, NRT has identified and co-opted local leaders and elites who aid in persuading the pastoralists to set aside land for conservation. As a result, some of the prominent personalities within the Samburu, Borana, Maasai and Rendile communities are on the NRT’s board.
Drought part of the problem
Although the prolonged drought that ended last month is believed to have triggered the recent invasions of ranches and conservancies in Laikipia, there are claims that some of the pastoralist communities there have unwittingly locked themselves out of parts of their lands through the conservancy agreements. “Once the agreements are put in place, it becomes impossible for the herders to access pastures in the conservancies as they are confronted by armed scouts who kick them out. It is sad that at times, livestock end up dying simply because their owners cannot graze them in what used to be their lands,” says Lalampaa.
The setting aside of huge sections of community ranches (which is facilitated by the NRT) for conservation purposes has created a dilemma for the communities and is proving to worsen rather than diminish insecurity, particularly in the upper eastern and northern Kenya regions. According to media reports, the alienation of land has contributed to the hardships suffered by local pastoralists, especially during the current prolonged dry spell. Reports paint a worrisome picture of members of communities invading either the areas they had earlier set aside or other private game ranches. For instance, armed herdsmen invaded the ranch belonging to Will Jennings, a mixed race Kenyan, resulting in a shootout between members of the Rapid Deployment Unit of the Kenya Police and the rangers. Other ranches invaded recently include the Loisaba Conservancy and Sera Conservancies established by the pastoralists, the 50,000-acre Segera Ranch owned by Jochen Zeitz, a former CEO of the Puma sports brand, and the Sosian and Galmann ranches. So far, one rancher, Tristan Voorspuy, has been killed in Sosian Ranch, while Gallmann is still recovering in hospital after being shot by herders.
NRT’s security apparatus
Although the government has moved its security machinery into Laikipia, the long-running insecurity in Laikipia and other parts of the north is an indictment on its ability to pacify these areas. It is also apparent that the NRT has “filled the gap” by establishing a security apparatus that is considered one of the most controversial aspects of the organisation’s activities. On its website, the organisation says that it carries out anti-poaching operations, wildlife monitoring and that conservancy rangers are “invaluable to the Kenya Police in helping to tackle cattle rustling and road banditry.” NRT says that each conservancy has a team of uniformed rangers that are “employed by the communities and trained with support from NRT”. By 2014, there were some 645 such rangers.
Additional information posted on the organisation’s website shows that the rangers are given basic training by KWS personnel at the wildlife agency’s Manyani Training School. There, they learn “bush craft skills, as well as how to effectively gather and share intelligence, monitor wildlife and manage combat situations.” According to information posted on the website of the NGO Save the Rhino, some rangers have been given Kenya Police Reserve accreditation and “sufficient weapons handling training.” Such advanced training is done by 51 Degrees, a company associated with Batian Craig, the son of Ian Craig. Among the specifics of the training include tactical movement with weapons, ambush and anti-ambush drills, handling and effective usage of night-vision and thermal-imaging equipment and ground-to-air communications and coordination. The rangers are also taken through what is called “typical training of different operations in war situation”, as well as observation, stalking, camouflage and concealment, judging distance and map reading. NRT has also launched patrol boats for security operations in its coastal chapter, which has now benefitted from USAID’s finances.
The crisis is worsened by the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that has resulted in more disenfranchisement of the local people and led to rising incidences of severe drought as a result of climate change. The crisis is further exacerbated by neglect by the state and its unwillingness to stamp its authority in these areas –which has given undeserving space and say to the NRT and its foreign supporters.
“This formidable armed force is under the overall control of a CEO who is a civilian and isn’t even a citizen of this country,” said Dr. Ogada. He added that by allowing this to happen, KWS “has effectively abdicated its wildlife protection role” to the NRT.
Dr. Ogada believes that the immense foreign and private control over such a large proportion of the country’s resources and citizens calls for more overt dialogue and regulation. “Conservation is a noble cause, but like all other sectors, should be properly regulated. Kenya is currently failing to do that.” He adds that the sheer geographical, financial, cultural and political scale of this intervention calls for a lot more thought than has been given to it thus far.
It is apparent that the crisis in Laikipia and other areas in Northern Kenya is a multifaceted one that defies a simple explanation. It has its origins in historical land injustices that have not been addressed even after Kenya became independent. The crisis is worsened by the pursuit of an inappropriate conservation model that has resulted in more disenfranchisement of the local people and led to rising incidences of severe drought as a result of climate change. The crisis is further exacerbated by neglect by the state and its unwillingness to stamp its authority in these areas –which has given undeserving space and say to the NRT and its foreign supporters.
To address this crisis, all players must come together to examine, in a holistic and comprehensive manner, issues related to land ownership and use, security, economic well-being of the people, and vulnerability of the local communities to adverse effects of climate change, among other issues. The state must also pacify these areas, not merely by sending the police or members of the Kenya Defence Forces, but also by starting social and economic projects in a manner that will establish a meaningful and lasting economic footprint there.
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Politics
Risks and Opportunities of Admitting Somalia Into the EAC
The process of integrating Somalia into the EAC should be undertaken with long-term success in mind rather than in the light of the situation currently prevailing in the country.
The East African Community (EAC), whose goal is to achieve economic and political federation, brings together three former British colonies – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania – and newer members Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and most recently the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Somalia first applied to join the EAC in 2012 but with fighting still ongoing on the outskirts of Mogadishu, joining the bloc was impossible at the time. Eleven years later, joining the bloc would consolidate the significant progress in governance and security and, therefore, Somalia should be admitted into the EAC without undue delay. This is for several reasons.
First, Somalia’s admission would be built on an existing foundation of goodwill that the current leadership of Somalia and EAC partner states have enjoyed in the recent past. It is on the basis of this friendship that EAC states continue to play host to Somali nationals who have been forced to leave their country due to the insecurity resulting from the prolonged conflict. In addition, not only does Somalia share a border with Kenya, but it also has strong historical, linguistic, economic and socio-cultural links with all the other EAC partner states in one way or another.
Dr Hassan Khannenje of the Horn Institute for Strategic Studies said: ”Somalia is a natural member of the EAC and should have been part of it long ago.”
A scrutiny of all the EAC member states will show that there is a thriving entrepreneurial Somali diaspora population in all their economies. If indeed the EAC is keen to realise its idea of the bloc being a people-centred community as opposed to being a club of elites, then a look at the spread of Somali diaspora investment in the region would be a start. With an immense entrepreneurial diaspora, Somalia’s admission will increase trading opportunities in the region.
Second, Somalia’s 3,000 km of coastline (the longest in Africa) will give the partner states access to the Indian Ocean corridor to the Gulf of Aden. The governments of the EAC partner states consider the Indian Ocean to be a key strategic and economic theatre for their regional economic interests. Therefore, a secure and stable Somali coastline is central to the region’s maritime trade opportunities.
Despite possessing such a vast maritime resource, the continued insecurity in Somalia has limited the benefits that could accrue from it. The problem of piracy is one example that shows that continued lawlessness along the Somali coast presents a huge risk for all the states that rely on it in the region.
The importance of the maritime domain and the Indian Ocean has seen Kenya and Somalia square it out at the International Court of Justice over a maritime border dispute.
Omar Mahmood of the International Crisis Group said that ”Somalia joining the EAC then might present an opportunity to discuss deeper cooperation frameworks within the bloc, including around the Kenya-Somalia maritime dispute. The environment was not as conducive to collaboration before, and perhaps it explains why the ICJ came in. Integrating into the EAC potentially offers an opportunity to de-escalate any remaining tensions and in turn, focus on developing mechanisms that can be beneficial for the region.”
Nasong’o Muliro, a foreign policy and security specialist in the region, said: “The East African states along the East African coast are looking for opportunities to play a greater role in the maritime security to the Gulf of Aden. Therefore, Somalia joining the EAC bloc will allow them to have a greater say.”
Third, Somalia’s membership of the Arab League means that there is a strong geopolitical interest from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. However, Somalia stands to gain more in the long-term by joining the EAC rather than being under the control of the Gulf states and, to a large extent, Turkey. This is because, historically, competing interests among the Gulf states have contributed to the further balkanisation of Somalia by some members supporting breakaway regions.
On the other hand, the EAC offers a safer option that will respect Somalia’s territorial integrity. Furthermore, EAC partner states have stood in solidarity with Somalia during the difficult times of the civil conflict, unlike the Gulf states. The majority of the troop-contributing countries for the African Union Mission to Somalia came from the EAC partner states of Uganda, Kenya and Burundi. Despite having a strategic interest in Somalia, none of the Gulf states contributed troops to the mission. Therefore, with the expected drawdown of the ATMIS force in Somalia, the burden could fall on the EAC to fill in the vacuum. Building on the experience of deploying in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, it is highly likely that it could be called upon to do the same in Somalia when ATMIS exits by 2024.
The presence of the Al Shabaab group in Somalia is an albatross around its neck such that the country cannot be admitted into the EAC without factoring in the risks posed by the group.
According to a report by the International Crisis Group, the government of Somalia must move to consolidate these gains – especially in central Somalia – as it continues with its offensive in other regions. However, Somalia may not prevail over the Al Shabaab on its own; it may require a regional effort and perhaps this is the rationale some policymakers within the EAC have envisioned. If the EAC can offer assurances to Somalia’s fledgling security situation, then a collective security strategy from the bloc might be of significance.
Somalia’s admission comes with risks too. Kenya and Uganda have in the past experienced attacks perpetrated by Al Shabaab and, therefore, opening up their borders to Somalia is seen as a huge risk for these countries. The spillover effect of the group’s activities creates a lot of discomfort among EAC citizens, in particular those who believe that the region remains vulnerable to Al Shabaab attacks.
If the EAC can offer assurances to Somalia’s fledgling security situation, then a collective security strategy from the bloc might be of significance.
The EAC Treaty criteria under which a new member state may be admitted into the community include – but are not limited to – observance and practice of the principles of good governance, democracy and the rule of law. Critics believe that Somalia fulfils only one key requirement to be admitted to the bloc – sharing a border with an EAC partner state, namely, Kenya. On paper, it seems to be the least prepared when it comes to fulfilling the other requirements. The security situation remains fragile and the economy cannot support the annual payment obligations to the community.
According to the Fragility State Index, Somalia is ranked as one of the poorest among the 179 countries assessed. Among the key pending issues is the continued insecurity situation caused by decades of civil war and violent extremism. Furthermore, Human Rights Watch ranks Somalia low on human rights and justice – a breakdown of government institutions has rendered them ineffective in upholding the human rights of its citizens.
Somalia’s citizens have faced various forms of discrimination due to activities beyond their control back in their country. This has led to increasingly negative and suspicious attitudes towards Somalis and social media reactions to the possibility of Somalia joining the EAC have seen a spike in hostility towards citizens of Somalia. The country’s admission into the bloc could be met with hostility from the citizens of other partner states.
Dr Nicodemus Minde, an academic on peace and security, agrees that indeed citizens’ perceptions and attitudes will shape their behaviour towards Somalia’s integration. He argues that ”the admission of Somalia is a rushed process because it does not address the continued suspicion and negative perception among the EAC citizens towards the Somali people. Many citizens cite the admission of fragile states like South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as a gateway of instability to an already unstable region”.
Indeed, the biggest challenge facing the EAC has been how to involve the citizens in their activities and agenda. To address this challenge, Dr Minde says that ’’the EAC needs to conduct a lot of sensitisation around the importance of integration because to a large extent many EAC citizens have no clue on what regional integration is all about”. The idea of the EAC being a people-centred organisation as envisioned in the Treaty has not been actualised. The integration process remains very elitist as it is the heads of state that determine and set the agenda.
The country’s admission into the bloc could be met with hostility from the citizens of other partner states.
Dr Khannenje offers a counter-narrative, arguing that public perception is not a major point of divergence since “as the economies integrate deeper, some of these issues will become easy to solve”. There are also those who believe that the reality within the EAC is that every member state has issues with one or the other partner state and, therefore, Somalia will be in perfect company.
A report by the Economic Policy Research Centre outlines the various avenues through which both the EAC and Somalia can benefit from the integration process and observes that there is therefore a need to fast-track the process because the benefits far outweigh the risks.
EAC integration is built around the spirit of good neighbourliness. It is against this backdrop that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has extended the goodwill to join the EAC and therefore, it should not be vilified and condemned, but rather embraced. As Onyango Obbo has observed, Somalia is not joining the EAC – Somalia is already part of the EAC and does not need any formal welcoming.
Many critics have argued that the EAC has not learnt from the previous rush to admit conflict-plagued South Sudan and the DRC. However, the reality is that Somalia will not be in conflict forever; at some point, there will be tranquillity and peace. Furthermore, a keen look at the history of the EAC member states shows that a number of them have experienced cycles of conflict in the past.
Somalia is, therefore, not unique. Internal contradictions and conflict are some of the key features that Somalia shares with most of the EAC member states. The process of integrating Somalia into the EAC should, therefore, be undertaken with long-term success in mind rather than in the light of the situation currently prevailing in the country.
Politics
The Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Kenya
Kenya is one of Israel’s closest allies in Africa. But the Ruto-led government isn’t alone in silencing pro-Palestinian speech.
Israel has been committing genocide against the people of Occupied Palestine for 75 years and this has intensified over the last 30 days with the merciless carpet bombing of Gaza, along with raids and state-sanctioned settler violence in the West Bank. In the last month of this intensified genocide, the Kenyan government has pledged its solidarity to Israel, even as the African Union released a statement in support of Palestinian liberation. While peaceful marches have been successfully held in Kisumu and Mombasa, in Nairobi, Palestine solidarity organizers were forced to cancel a peaceful march that was to be held at the US Embassy on October 22. Police threatened that if they saw groups of more than two people outside the Embassy, they would arrest them. The march was moved to a private compound, Cheche Bookshop, where police still illegally arrested three people, one for draping the Palestinian flag around his shoulders. Signs held by children were snatched by these same officers.
When Boniface Mwangi took to Twitter denouncing the arrest, the response by Kenyans spoke of the success of years of propaganda by Israel through Kenyan churches. To the Kenyan populous, Palestine and Palestinians are synonymous with terrorism and Israel’s occupation of Palestine is its right. However, this Islamophobia and xenophobia from Kenyans did not spring from the eternal waters of nowhere. They are part of the larger US/Israel sponsored and greedy politician-backed campaign to ensure Kenyans do not start connecting the dots on Israel’s occupation of Palestine with the extra-judicial killings by Kenyan police, the current occupation of indigenous people’s land by the British, the cost-of-living crisis and the IMF debts citizens are paying to fund politician’s lavish lifestyles.
Kenya’s repression of Palestine organizing reflects Kenya’s long-standing allyship with Israel. The Kenyan Government has been one of Israel’s A-star pupils of repression and is considered to be Israel’s “gateway” to Africa. Kenya has received military funding and training from Israel since the 60s, and our illegal military occupation of Somalia has been funded and fueled by Israel along with Britain and the US. Repression, like violence, is not one dimensional; repression does not just destabilize and scatter organizers, it aims to break the spirit and replace it instead with apathy, or worse, a deep-seated belief in the rightness of oppression. In Israel’s architecture of oppression through repression, the Apartheid state has created agents of repression across many facets of Kenyan life, enacting propaganda, violence, race, and religion as tools of repression of Palestine solidarity organizing.
When I meet with Naomi Barasa, the Chair of the Kenya Palestine Solidarity Movement, she begins by placing Kenya’s repression of Palestine solidarity organizing in the context of Kenya as a capitalist state. “Imperialism is surrounded and buffered by capitalistic interest,” she states, then lists on her fingers the economic connections Israel has created with Kenya in the name of “technical cooperation.” These are in agriculture, security, business, and health; the list is alarming. It reminds me of my first memory of Israel (after the nonsense of the promised land that is)—about how Israel was a leader in agricultural and irrigation technologies. A dessert that flowed with milk and honey.
Here we see how propaganda represses, even before the idea of descent is born: Kenyans born in the 1990s grew up with an image of a benign, prosperous, and generous Christian Israel that just so happened to be unfortunate enough to be surrounded by Muslim states. Israel’s PR machine has spent 60 years convincing Kenyan Christians of the legitimacy of the nation-state of Israel, drawing false equivalences between Christianity and Zionism. This Janus-faced ideology was expounded upon by Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Michel Lotem, when he said “Religiously, Kenyans are attached to Israel … Israel is the holy land and they feel close to Israel.” The cog dizzy of it all is that Kenyan Christians, fresh from colonialism, are now Africa’s foremost supporters of colonialism and Apartheid in Israel. Never mind the irony that in 1902, Kenya was the first territory the British floated as a potential site for the resettlement of Jewish people fleeing the pogroms in Europe. This fact has retreated from public memory and public knowledge. Today, churches in Kenya facilitate pilgrimages to the holy land and wield Islamophobia as a weapon against any Christian who questions the inhumanity of Israel’s 75-year Occupation and ongoing genocide.
Another instrument of repression of pro-Palestine organizing in Kenya is the pressure put on Western government-funded event spaces to decline hosting pro-Palestine events. Zahid Rajan, a cultural practitioner and organizer, tells me of his experiences trying to find spaces to host events dedicated to educating Kenyans on the Palestinian liberation struggle. He recalls the first event he organized at Alliance Français, Nairobi in 2011. Alliance Français is one of Nairobi’s cultural hubs and regularly hosts art and cultural events at the space. When Zahid first approached Alliance to host a film festival for Palestinian films, they told him that they could not host this event as they already had (to this day) an Israeli film week. Eventually, they agreed to host the event with many restrictions on what could be discussed and showcased. Unsurprisingly they refused to host the event again. The Goethe Institute, another cultural hub in Kenya that offers its large hall for free for cultural events, has refused to host the Palestinian film festival or any other pro-Palestine event. Both Alliance and Goethe are funded by their parent countries, France and Germany respectively (which both have pro-Israel governments). There are other spaces and businesses that Zahid has reached out to host pro-Palestine education events that have, in the end, backtracked on their agreement to do so. Here, we see the evolution of state-sponsored repression to the private sphere—a public-private partnership on repression, if you will.
Kenya’s members of parliament took to heckling and mocking as a tool of repression when MP Farah Maalim wore an “Arafat” to Parliament on October 25. The Speaker asked him to take it off stating that it depicted “the colors of a particular country.” When Maalim stood to speak he asked: “Tell me which republic,” and an MP in the background could be heard shouting “Hamas” and heckling Maalim, such that he was unable to speak on the current genocide in Gaza. This event, seen in the context of Ambassador Michael Lotem’s charm offensive at the county and constituency level, is chilling. His most recent documented visit was to the MP of Kiharu, Ndindi Nyoro, on November 2. The Israeli propaganda machine has understood the importance of County Governors and MPs in consolidating power in Kenya.
Yet, in the face of this repression, we have seen what Naomi Barasa describes as “many pockets of ad hoc solidarity,” as well as organized solidarity with the Palestinian cause. We have seen Muslim communities gather for many years to march for Palestine, we have seen student movements such as the Nairobi University Student Caucus release statements for Palestine, and we have seen social justice centers such as Mathare Social Justice Centre host education and screening events on Palestinian liberation. Even as state repression of Palestine solidarity organizing has intensified in line with the deepening of state relations with Apartheid Israel, more Kenyans are beginning to connect the dots and see the reality that, as Mandela told us all those years ago, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians.”
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site every week.
Politics
Only Connect: Human Beings Must Connect to Survive
We must fight to remain human, to make connections across borders, race, religion, class, gender, and all the false divisions that exist in our world. We must show solidarity with one another, and believe we can construct another kind of world.
24 November 2021. We wake to the news that 27 migrants have drowned in the English Channel.
“Stop the boats!” cry the Tories. It’s the hill British Prime Minister Sunak has chosen to die on. But there is no political will to stop the wider crisis of global migration, driven by conflict, poverty, persecution, repressive regimes, famine, climate change, and the rest. Moreover, there is zero understanding that the West is behind many of the reasons why people flee their homes in the first place. Take Afghanistan, a useless Allied war that went nowhere. It left the Taliban more powerful than ever. Afghans who worked for the British army, betrayed when our forces pulled out. Now they make up the majority of cross-Channel migrants.
Not for them the welcome we gave Ukrainians. Wrong skin colour, maybe? Wrong religion? Surely not.
Some right-wingers rejoice at news of these deaths. “Drown ’em all!” they cry on social media. “Bomb the dinghies!” There are invariably photos of cute cats and dogs in their profiles. Have you noticed how much racists and fascists love pets? Lots of ex-servicemen among them, who fail to see the link between the failed wars they fought, and the migration crisis these spawned. The normalisation of a false reality is plain to see. Politicians and the media tell folk that black is white, often in meaningless three-word slogans, and the masses believe it. Migrants, especially those who arrive in small boats, are routinely labelled criminals, murderers, rapists, invaders, Muslims intent on imposing Islam on the UK, and “young men of fighting age”, which implies that they are a standing army.
If you bother to look beyond the stereotypes, the reality is very different.
One couple’s story
Riding those same waves, a year or so later, are two Iranian Kurds. A young couple. Let’s call them Majid and Sayran. They have sadly decided not to have children, in 12 years of marriage, because they believe Iran is no place to bring up children. Activists who oppose the regime, they were forced to flee after receiving direct threats. They ran an environmental NGO, and held Kurdish cultural events that are banned in Iran.
The husband, Majid, a writer, first fled to Iraq in 2021. He and his wife were parted for 18 months. She eventually joined him in a Kurdish area of Iraq. They were forced to flee again, when the Iranian regime bombed the homes and offices of political dissidents in Iraq, killing and wounding many of their friends. They decided their only hope was to head for Britain via Turkey, Italy and France. They paid people smugglers around USD30,000 in total. They eventually ended up in a hotel in my home town. Their story continues below.
Feeling powerless
Meanwhile, there I am sitting at home in the UK, getting more and more enraged about my government’s attitude and policies on immigration. I feel powerless. I think about refugees living in an asylum hotel in my town. I’m told many of them are Muslim, now trying to celebrate Ramadan. I picture them breaking their fasts on hotel food, which relies heavily on chips and other cheap junk. I meet some of them in the queue at the town’s so-called community fridge, where I used to volunteer. I chat a little to Majid, who can speak some English. I try to find out why they are there. The “fridge” gives out food donated by supermarkets to anyone in need. The food would otherwise be thrown away because it’s about to reach its sell-by date. The refugees go there, they tell me, to get fresh stuff because the hotel food is so awful. I can sense the growing resentment from locals in the queue, who want to put “Britain first”.
Thinking, thinking. Then I berate myself. I should take action, however small. Get down to the supermarket, buy food for, say, six families. I can’t feed everyone, but let’s start somewhere. Food that people from the Middle East (the majority of the hotel residents) will like. Hummus, flatbreads, dates, olives, nuts, rice. Divide it into six bags. I don’t know how I will be received (I feel rather nervous), but let’s give it a go.
I can sense the growing resentment from locals in the queue, who want to put “Britain first”.
The hotel manager is cagey. (I am later banned. He and his female head of security are rude and hostile, but that’s still to come.) For now, he lets me in to distribute the food. Luckily, I spot Majid, just the person I’m looking for. I recognise him from the “fridge” queue. He can translate for the others, who quickly gather in the lobby. The food is snatched within minutes, people are delighted with it. (It turns out Majid and his wife are atheists. But they get some food too.)
I didn’t do this for the thanks. But I’m glad I made that first move. Taking it further, I invite them both round for a meal. I spend hours making Persian rice, it’s a big hit. My new friends fall on the spread like ravening wolves. One thing leads to another. We start to meet regularly. It helps that they have some English, which greatly improves as the weeks pass and they go to classes. They are thrilled by everyday things – walks in the country, pizza, a local fair, being taken to see the film Oppenheimer. (“We were amazed to see so many British people go to the movies!”) They tell me they are delighted simply to make contact, to see how ordinary people live, to be invited into my, and my friends’ homes. I tell them I have plenty to learn from them, too. We get a bit tearful. I say hi to Sayran’s mum on the phone in Iran. We also laugh a lot. Majid has a black sense of humour.
At first, I don’t ask about their experience of crossing the Channel. All I know is that the entire journey, from Iran to Britain, was deeply traumatic. Until now, months later, when I ask Majid to describe what happened.
Majid picks up the story of their journey in Turkey: “The most bitter memories of my life were witnessing my wife’s tiredness, fear and anxiety as we walked for nine hours to reach Istanbul. I saw my wife cry from exhaustion and fear many times, and I myself cried inside. In a foreign country without a passport, our only hope was luck, and our only way was to accept hardship because we had no way back. The most bitter thing in this or any refugee journey is that no one gives any help or support to his fellow traveller. The smallest issue turns into a big tension.”
To reach the sea, where they would take a boat to Italy, they walked through dense pine forests. “There were about 30 of us in this group and none of us knew each other. We passed through the forest with extreme anxiety and fear of being arrested by the ruthless Turkish police. We were all afraid that some babies who were tied tightly on their father’s shoulders would cry and the police would find us. But as soon as we stepped into the forest, all the children became silent due to their instinct and sense of danger. They didn’t make a single sound all the way. We were in the forest for about 12 hours, and reached the beach by 8 a.m. Here we were joined by several other groups of refugees; by now we were more than 100 people.”
The week-long journey to Italy in a 12-meter “pleasure” boat carrying 55 people was terrifying. “As the boat moved towards the deep parts of the sea, fear and anxiety took over everyone. The fear of the endless sea, and worse, the fear of being caught by Turkish patrols, weighed heavily on everyone’s mind. The boat moved at the highest speed at night, and this speed added to the intensity of the waves hitting the hull of the boat. Waves, waves, waves have always been a part of the pulse of travellers. As the big waves moved the boat up and down, the sound of screams and shouts would merge with the Arabic words of prayers of old, religious passengers. I can say that there is no scene in hell more horrific than this journey. It was near sunset when several passengers shouted: ‘Land! Land!’”
On the way to France, they somehow lost their backpacks. All their possessions gone. Moving fast forward, they found themselves in yet another forest, this time close to the French coast.
“For the first time, I felt that the whole idea I had about Europe and especially the French was a lie. Nowhere in the underdeveloped and insecure countries of the Middle East would a couple be driven to the wrong address at night, in the cold, without proper clothing. But what can be done when you illegally enter a country whose language you do not know? It was almost 2 o’clock in the morning. The sound of the wind and the trees reminded us of horror scenes in the movies. It was hard to believe that we were so helpless in a European country on that dark, cold and rainy night.” He collected grass and tree leaves to make a “warm and soft nest. I felt like we were two migratory birds that had just arrived in this forest.” Eventually they found what they were looking for – a refugee camp. The next step was to try and cross the Channel.
“I can say that there is no scene in hell more horrific than this journey.”
“We reached the beach. The sky was overcast and it was almost sunset. A strange fear and deadly apprehension gripped all the poor refugees in that space between the sky, the earth and the sea.” A smugglers’ car brought a dinghy and dumped it on the beach before quickly driving away. It was no better than a rubber tube. The refugees filled it with air, and attached a small engine. “They stuck 55 people in that tube.” The dinghy went round in circles and ended up on another part of the French coast. Many people decided to disembark at this point, leaving 18 passengers.
“Women and children were wailing and crying. The children looked at the sea dumbfounded. Men argued with each other and sometimes arguments turned into fights. The boat was not balanced. I was writhing in pain from headaches, while my wife’s face was yellow and pale because of the torment.”
At last a ship approached, shining bright floodlights at the dinghy. It belonged to the British coast guard. “When they threw the life rope towards our plastic boat, we were relieved that we were saved from death.”
Hotel life
My friends tell me about conditions at the hotel. Grim. Food that is often inedible, especially for vegetarians like them. They send me photos of soya chunks and chips. Residents are banned from cooking in their rooms, or even having a fridge. Majid and Sayran have sneaked in a rice steamer and something to fry eggs on. (They have to hide them when the cleaners come round.) Kids have no toys and nowhere to play except in the narrow corridors. Everyone is depressed and bored, waiting for months, sometimes years, to hear the result of their asylum claims.
Majid takes up the story: “Due to the lack of toys and entertainment, the boys gather around the security guards and help them in doing many small tasks. The image of refugee children going to school on cold and rainy mornings is the most painful image of refugees in this developed country. In schools, language problems make refugee children isolated and depressed in the first few years. What can be the situation of a pregnant woman, or a woman whose baby has just been born, with an unemployed husband, and poor nutrition, in a very small room in this hotel? Imagine yourself. Many elderly people here suffer from illnesses such as rheumatism, knee swelling, and high blood sugar. But many times when they ask for a change in the food situation or request to transfer somewhere else, they are ridiculed by the hotel staff. One day, a widow who had no food left for her and was given frozen food, went to the hotel management office with her daughter to protest. But one of the security guards took the food container from this woman’s hand and threw it on the office floor in front of her child. Now that little girl is afraid and hates all the security.”
“When they threw the life rope towards our plastic boat, we were relieved that we were saved from death.”
Yet racists rant about migrants living it up in five-star hotels costing the taxpayer £8 million a day. They don’t think or care about how we got here: the Tories let the asylum backlog soar, by failing to process asylum claims in a timely fashion. Some of us cynically wonder if this was deliberate. The number of people awaiting an initial decision is now 165,411. This compares to 27,048 asylum applications, including dependents, between January and September 2015, before the UK left the European Union.
I’ve done what I can. Lobbied the Home office to improve the food and conditions. I eventually got a reply, both from them and the catering contractor. Wrote to my MP, local councillors, inter-agency bodies that monitor conditions in hotels, migrant organisations, the press. We have had some success. There is a lot more to do.
I ask my friends if the threat of being deported to Rwanda (a key plank of the UK’s asylum policy) might have deterred them from coming. Or if anything would have stopped them. Majid replies: “Not at all! Because everywhere in this world is better than Iran for life. Especially for me, I have a deep problem with the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They threatened me with death over the phone.”
Making sense of the world
World news has become unbearable to read, watch or listen to. Once a news junkie, I increasingly find myself switching off. I’m equally appalled by the widespread apathy, even among friends who were once politically engaged. Then there is all the dog whistling our government does, in language that echoes that of the far right. Ministers and MPs have shamelessly whipped up suspicion, hatred, and fear of the Other. “Cruella” Braverman was one of the worst offenders, but at least she is no longer Home Secretary. Her “dream” of deporting refugees to Rwanda (her words) has become a nightmare for Sunak. Both are of East African Asian heritage.
Ministers and MPs have shamelessly whipped up suspicion, hatred, and fear of the Other.
This may sound trite, but we must struggle to remain human, and make connections where we can – across borders, race, religion, class, gender, all the false divisions that exist in our world. We have to keep lobbying those in power, and going on protest marches. We must show solidarity with one another. We have to believe we can construct another kind of world, pole pole, from the bottom up. A kinder world would help, for starters. It can begin in very small ways.
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