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HITTING WHERE IT HURTS: How effective has NASA’s boycott been?

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HITTING WHERE IT HURTS: How effective has NASA’s boycott been?
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On November 3, 2017, Kenya’s main opposition party, the National Super Alliance (NASA), spelt out to its supporters the names of three companies whose products they ought to boycott because of these companies’ association with the ruling Jubilee party. The three companies were: Safaricom, the giant money-minting mobile telecommunications company; Brookside Dairies, the largest milk-producing company in East and Central Africa; and Bidco Industries, one of the leading edible oil products manufacturer in this part of the world.

One month later, how has the embargo faired?

The better option?

Bina Wambui has been selling mobile phones’ airtime and sim cards for well over a decade in Nairobi’s city centre. She is an agent for both Safaricom and its main competitor Airtel. Her Charity Sweepstake-type kiosk is located on Moi Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the central business district. “Let me be honest with you,” she told this writer. “The boycott on Safaricom is definitely working. Does Baba (Raila Odinga) have shares in the company (Airtel)?” she asked me, half in jest. “His bonuses should be coming up well. Airtel has a lot to thank Raila for.”

“Let me be honest with you,” she told this writer. “The boycott on Safaricom is definitely working. Does Baba (Raila Odinga) have shares in the company (Airtel)?” she asked me, half in jest. “His bonuses should be coming up well. Airtel has a lot to thank Raila for.”

Bina told me that one of the biggest revenue streams for Safaricom remains the mobile money transfer service M-Pesa. The others are airtime for making voice calls and bundles for surfing the Internet. “My M-Pesa customers are still intact, but Safaricom customers for airtime and sim cards have dipped. I have sold more Airtel sim cards and airtime than at any other time,” she said.

On the day I went to interview her, she told me she had just received her day’s bonus from Airtel’s management. She did not divulge how much the bonus amounted to, but she said it was a good incentive for any Airtel agent who is keen on pushing sales. “An Airtel supervisor, not believing the money I am making in selling Airtel cards and airtime, came personally to see me at my kiosk,” said Bina. “I cannot complain. While my Safaricom sales have been fluctuating, my Airtel sales have been soaring. Should I call it a blessing in disguise?”

“I bank money every single day – money that I cannot dare venture out with from my kiosk. That should give you an inkling of the sales I make in a day.” Bina told me that mobile telecommunication products salespeople who operate in the central business district hold weekly meetings. “The story is the same from the rest of my colleagues: unprecedented booming Airtel sales. Now, the company is even giving a bonus for airtime sold apart from every sim card sold – even on the lowest airtime of 20 bob, you get a bonus.”

However, not all her Safaricom customers have jumped ship. “I will tell you why my M-Pesa customers are still with me: Airtel money transfer is very poor – it is inefficient and hopelessly disorganised and slow – its network is perpetually on a hang mode and if, by bad luck, you make a mistake, it takes between three to four days to sort out the problem. It is too much trouble for a supposedly cheaper money transfer system,” noted Bina. “If only Airtel would fix its money transfer issues, it would really give Safaricom a run for its money.”

A former senior Safaricom executive told me that the sprawling Eastleigh “town” or “little Mogadishu” – so named because of its large Somali population – together with the famous Kibera slum represent the largest Safaricom markets in Nairobi city. Between them, they generate for Safaricom millions of shillings in profits.

“Eastleigh might not be the best place to gauge whether the Kenyatta family’s products are faring well or not,” he said. “There has been a deliberate effort by hoteliers and restauranteurs in Eastleigh and elsewhere where there are food outlets to promote camel milk.”

Eastleigh – which is today a commercial hub of every imaginable type of business, as well as humungous residential estates and three-star hotels – has some of the biggest and busiest Safaricom shops anywhere in the country as well as small retail traders and street vendors hawking airtime and sim cards. My random check on the impact of the Safaricom boycott showed that Airtel had increased its airtime and sim cards sales in this area.

Near the famous Garissa Lodge shopping mall, a woman was selling Safaricom and Airtel airtime from the boot of her car. “Do I need to answer your question of whether the boycott is working?” she asked me. In the fifteen minutes I watched her mostly sell sim cards, only one asked for a Safaricom line; the rest all bought Airtel lines. “Some of my new customers have been forthright on why they are buying new Airtel cards – they are responding to the boycott/resist call,” while keeping their Safaricom lines, said the saleslady.

Ahmed, who I met in Eastleigh, told me that he had recently bought an Airtel card, “because I decided to heed Raila’s call of boycotting some of these consumer products. But I will be honest with you: I will not abandon my Safaricom card – I need it for my M-Pesa transactions. He did not give us a viable option, Airtel is not the option for now – its network system for money transfer is hopelessly inefficient. If Airtel would improve on its money transfer system, I would be the first one to move.”

Airtel has been recruiting massively to beef up the number of its agents countrywide. “One of Airtel’s weakest marketing link has been its inadequate agents to push their products,” said Peter Achayo, a marketing consultant. “Now they have begun advertising aggressively in Nairobi and the other major towns. It is evident they are experiencing a windfall.” Achayo said that part of the reason why Safaricom has been successful is because of its army of agents nationwide. “Agents give your products visibility and generate market competition, which ensures your products are moving fast.”

Like Bina, the saleslady at Garissa Lodge said that the Airtel money transfer system was grossly incompetent. “That is why many people who would gladly want to wholly migrate to Airtel will not: what they are doing is keeping their Safaricom sim card intact specifically for M-Pesa transactions and buying a cheaper non-smartphone phone for their Airtel line.”

Achayo said he had been conducting an impromptu survey to gauge to what extent people had moved from Safaricom to Airtel. “The entire WhatsApp NASA fraternities have changed their mobile numbers to Airtel. I have gone through nearly all the Opposition coalition groups’ on social media, which have members running into their thousands – Airtel fell on a windfall, like manna from heaven, without spending a penny doing any marketing promotion. Safaricom may pretend the shift, however slight it may be, has not affected them, but it sure like hell is feeling the heat.”

Six years ago, Gor Mahia Football Club, named after the famous Luo medicine man and magician, was looking for a sponsor after Brookside Dairy terminated its contract with the club after two years. The premier league soccer club with a fan base across Kenya, whose base support lies among the passionate Luo people, sought Safaricom’s sponsorship.

“My customers warned me I would be playing with fire if they found me selling Brookside. They have formed a vigilante group made of youths who are now moving from shop to shop to detect who is flouting the boycott.”

Its argument was simple and straightforward: We are a leading football club in Kenya and our major colour is green, which is also the brand colour of Safaricom. The club’s management argued that if Safaricom sponsors them, it would be a win-win for both: Safaricom would enjoy enhanced visibility with the green and white matching colours of the two brands, while the club would gain access to much needed financial help. Safaricom dithered and did not consider the offer.

“Safaricom is today regretting not jumping at the offer,” whispered a senior sales and marketing manager at the telecommunications company. Faced with a marketing boycott, the company is now facing the threat of a dent in its profits and market share, which could result in a collision with its major shareholders. Safaricom has been mulling over how to now approach Gor Mahia.

The company is in a dilemma: If they show interest now, it will be obvious they are responding to the boycott and the club may call its bluff and embarrass the company. If they continue dithering, without trying to woo the club, whose supporters are as passionate about football as they are about the opposition and its leader Raila Odinga, they may lose a chance to salvage their company’s reputation. The manager admitted that if Safaricom had agreed to sponsor the club, it would have been difficult and perhaps unlikely that Raila would have asked his supporters to boycott its products.

Camel milk in your tea?

Ahmed invited me for tea in one of the many Eastleigh restaurants that offer exquisite mouth-watering Somali cuisine. It provided me with the perfect opportunity to also ask him whether Eastleigh residents were boycotting Brookside Dairies’ milk. “Personally I take tea made with camel milk – it’s the best nutritionally and it is not overly skimmed,” Ahmed replied. He added that many Somali restaurants were increasingly turning to using camel milk in tea. “Eastleigh might not be the best place to gauge whether the Kenyatta family’s products are faring well or not,” he said. “There has been a deliberate effort by hoteliers and restauranteurs in Eastleigh and elsewhere where there are food outlets to promote camel milk.”

Camel milk is brought to Nairobi in trucks daily from Ilbisil, Isinya, Kitengela and Namanga towns where camel farming, specifically for milk production, is booming business. The milk is distributed to various hotels and restaurants in Eastleigh as well as in Nairobi’s central business district. Increasingly, camel tea is becoming popularly as an alternative to the usual cow milk that Kenyans are used to. A couple of years ago, if you had told Kenyans that camel milk was a practical alternative to what they are used to, they would have smirked, but today it is even sold in supermarkets.

Ahmed, who holds a PhD in Business Administration, told me people only change their habits when they are offered viable options that work just as well, or better. “As of now, Airtel is not that option, so naturally and ordinarily, what people do is such situations is they fall back to what is predictable and what they know best.”

The camel milk option among Kenyans will, in the fullness of time, become an acquired taste, said Ahmed, because just as cow milk is an acquired taste, so too is camel milk. In any case, what cow milk offers, camel milk can offer too, if not better in terms of nutritional value and taste.

Eastmatt Supermarket is a mwananchi (common man’s) shoppers’ departmental store that has three outlets in the central business district. The biggest one is on Tom Mboya Street, across from the Nairobi County Fire Station. Every day before 9.00 a.m., the supermarket receives 100 crates of Brookside Dairies milk products, namely, Brookside, Delamere, Ilara, Molo and Tuzo. A couple of years ago, Brookside Dairies, which is owned by the Kenyatta family, bought out Delamere Milk, which was formerly owned by the Delamere family that is domiciled at Elementaita in Naivasha.

A supervisor told this writer that the supermarket receives 20 crates each of each brand, that is, a total 100 crates every day. Each crate has 18 packets of milk, so it receive 1,800 packets of Brookside products daily. On a good day almost all the packets are sold.

However, in the days following NASA’s announcement of the boycott – which was aimed at hurting the Kenyatta family and its scion President Uhuru Kenyatta – the supermarket was left with a lot of unsold milk. Since the milk has an expiry date, it is the shelf manager’s job to ensure that all unsold milk approaching its expiry date (most expiry dates last three days) is returned to the company.

“Our sales seems to have stabilised somewhat, the boycott now is not as biting,” said the supervisor. Normally, by 8.30 p.m., the sales figures are reconciled and summed up. The day I visited the supermarket, the supervisor said they had 10 unsold crates. That month, Brookside had chosen to rebranded the Ilara brand. When I asked the shelf manager why Ilara milk had been repackaged, he was coy with the answer, only saying, “The company is responding to market demands.”

But if Brookside Dairies’ products have been jolted in the supermarkets, it is in the small retail outlets that the company has faced its greatest challenge. In the slums of Nairobi, from Baba Dogo, Gomongo, Huruma, Kibera to Kariobangi North, Mathare to Mlango Kubwa, Mukuru kwa Reuben, Lucky Summer and Riverside, shopkeepers have been warned to stock Brookside milk at their own risk. People in these areas, who make up NASA supporters in great numbers, have completely boycotted the milk.

Japwoyo, a shopkeeper in Kibera, near Ayany estate, the bastion of Raila’s support in Nairobi, said he had stopped accepting Brookside milk from his distributors. “My customers warned me I would be playing with fire if they found me selling Brookside. They have formed a vigilante group made of youths who are now moving from shop to shop to detect who is flouting the boycott.” Japwoyo said even the Brookside distributors are no longer bringing milk to Kibera in their lorries. “One distributor escaped with his dear life after he was accosted by the vigilante one early morning. He pleaded with them not harm him, and to take the milk and not burn his van. They obeyed, but just this one time.”

“Why Lato is sold in Kenya is ostensibly because Museveni and Brookside Dairies entered into a deal: The Kenyatta family is allowed to access the Uganda market, in return, Lato is allowed to penetrate the lucrative Kenyan market. It was a deal between two business entities and has got nothing to do with a bilateral agreement between two countries,” said my Ugandan friend.

In Kibera, people have taken to Lato milk. Lato is from Uganda and it has both fresh and the long life UHT (Ultra Heat Treatment) milk brands. Although it is manufactured all the way in Mbarara town in western Uganda, Lato UHT milk is 10 shillings cheaper than Brookside UHT. I called my friend from Mpigi in Uganda and enquired about Lato milk. She told me Lato was supposedly produced by President Yoweri Museveni’s company.

“Apart from keeping the cultural and traditional long horned Ankole cows, Museveni also keeps dairy cows in Mbarara. Why Lato is sold in Kenya is ostensibly because Museveni and Brookside Dairies entered into a deal: The Kenyatta family is allowed to access the Uganda market, in return, Lato is allowed to penetrate the lucrative Kenyan market. It was a deal between two business entities and has got nothing to do with a bilateral agreement between two countries,” said my Ugandan friend.

Jack Oduor, who lives in Riverside estate – which is ensconced between Mathare North and Baba Dogo – told me that Lato was selling like hot cakes in these adjoining areas. “My shopkeeper at Riverside is a guy from the Jubilee supporting community. He was warned not to annoy the residents by stocking Brookside milk. The shopkeeper had to extend the warning to his distributors.”

In Riverside, Mathare North, Baba Dogo and Lucky Summer, sales of Brookside milk have suffered, said Jack, who has been doing his own random survey in these areas to find out whether the boycott has been effective. “The truth of the matter is the boycott has been biting,” said Jack. “In these areas, there are boycott vigilante youth groups, whose task is to ensure that Brookside milk is not sold in the shops.”

Just for the record, the boycott is not only confined to Nairobi’s ghettoes. Dan Shikanda, who was Peter Kenneth’s running mate in the city’s gubernatorial election in August, lives and runs a shop in Nyayo estate, a middle-class suburb in Embakasi area, 12km southeast of Nairobi. Once a famous footballer who played for AFC Leopards, Shikanda is also a medical doctor-cum-politician. Shikanda’s customers in the larger Nyayo estate told him that if he wanted to keep them as his loyal customers, he should “re-stock” his shop. Translation: Do not sell Brookside milk.

“Like Airtel, Pwani Oil, Kapa Oil Refineries and Menegai Oil companies have Raila to thank,” said a Bidco sales and marketing manager, who requested anonymity to safeguard his job. “Let me tell you just how bad things are at Bidco: The company has had to do two things quickly to reposition itself: suspend the launch of a new product and do something that we have never done before – enter into sports sponsorship.”

In other multi-cultural and multi-ethnic suburban areas like Buru Buru, Donholm, Umoja, Jacaranda, Greenview Innercore, all in Eastlands, plus Kitengela and Ongata Rongai in Kajiado County, shoppers have found a way to boycott, Safaricom, Brookside and Bidco companies’ products. “We have gone ethnic: we Luhyas in Buru Buru Phase 1 have opted to buy from our Luhya shopkeepers, because we know they will not stock these products. The same goes for the Kisiis and Kambas.” In Kitengela and Ongata areas, where the Kisii diaspora mostly live, my friends in those areas told said that it is a strategy they had also opted for: “Just buying from shopkeepers from our own ethnic communities.”

These boycott warnings are not without their dire consequences. Three weeks ago in Mbita, Homa Bay County, a Brookside milk distributor was nearly lynched for showing up with his canter truck. Confronted by a rowdy vigilante mob, the driver, a Luo, was spared his life because he spoke the youth’s language. Evans Otieno, who runs a retail shop at Katitu on the Katitu-Kendu Bay Road opposite the Sondu Miriu power plant, told me that what saved the distributor’s life was that he was one of their own. “But he was given a stern warning not to be seen distributing Brookside milk in that area.” Of course, the vigilantes emptied the canter truck of all its milk. Otieno himself received the same warning from the vigilante youth group: “I cannot sell or stock Brookside milk.”

Brookside Dairy not only sells fresh and long shelf life milk, but each of its five brands have an accompanying yoghurt product: so there is Brookside Yoghurt, Delamere Yoghurt, Ilara Yoghurt, Molo Yoghurt, and Tuzo Yoghurt. Brookside Dairies’ yoghurt products have not also been spared the boycott – and nowhere has this been felt more than on the Nakuru-Naivasha Highway.

This highway is mostly used by long-distance buses and shuttles going to western Kenya and all the way to the Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania borders. Many of the travellers are destined for Busia, Bungoma, Homa Bay, Kakamega, Kisumu, Kisii, Kitale, Luanda, Malaba, Mbale, Migori, Oyugis and Rongo, among other smaller towns. In western Kenya, these towns form the bedrock of NASA’s support.

At the Gilgil weigh bridge 110km from Nairobi city centre, the buses and the shuttles have to slow down as they file in a queue as the 24-wheel trucks get weighed. Over time, the toll station and weigh bridge have become places that sell Delamare yoghurt and other Brookside yoghurts. Roving yoghurt traders and hawkers have become famous at this Gilgil weigh bridge stop, where they usually do roaring business selling cold fresh yoghurts to travellers. But since the boycott, the hawkers have decried their plummeting sales. “The travellers have been boycotting the yoghurts,” said Edward Okul who lives in Nakuru, and who plies that route between Nairobi and Nakuru every week.

Fishy business

Bidco Industries, which has its main offices in Thika town in Kiambu County, has also been suffering as a result of the boycott. A market leader in manufacturing cooking oil (both liquid and solid) and laundry soaps – known in the consumer market as domestic consumables – Bidco is now having to contend with a sustained onslaught from other market competitors.

Bidco produces more than 10 brands of cooking oil, such as the popular Elianto, Gold Fry, Soya Gold and Yellow Gold and cooking fats aimed at low-income households, such as Chipsy, Chipo, Mallo, Kimbo and Cowboy.

The boycott caught the company flatfooted. “Like Airtel, Pwani Oil, Kapa Oil Refineries and Menegai Oil companies have Raila to thank,” said a Bidco sales and marketing manager, who requested anonymity to safeguard his job. “Let me tell you just how bad things are at Bidco: The company has had to do two things quickly to reposition itself: suspend the launch of a new product and do something that we have never done before – enter into sports sponsorship.”

In the face of a sudden stiff competition amid a dipping market, Bidco Industries halted the launch of a carbonated drink that was to be unleashed in this quarter of the festive season. It also entered into a sports sponsorship deal with the rugby team Kenya Sevens.”

Bidco Industries has divided its Kenya market into three regions: Nairobi, western and coast regions. “All the regions are suffering,” said the manager, who oversees one of the regions. But your guess is as good as mine about which regions are suffering most, Coast and western regions, of course.”

Just after the announcement of the boycott, the sole distributor of Bidco products in western Kenya pulled out. Junet Mohammed, the MP for Suna East constituency in Migori, a great friend and supporter of Raila Odinga, said he could not continue with the distribution no matter however lucrative it was.

The western region begins at Flyover 60kms from Nairobi city centre and covers the region that stretches all the way to Busia, Malaba (Kenya-Uganda border) and Sirare (Kenya-Tanzania) border towns. This market, particularly, the fried fish business mainly concentrated on the Busia-Muhuru Bay along Lake Victoria – commonly knowns as the fish belt market – is key to Bidco Industries’ sales of its cooking oil products. “The fried fish business run by women is big time in western Kenya. Bidco had managed to convince the women that we have the best cooking oil for frying fish,’ said the Bidco manager.

Just after the announcement of the boycott, the sole distributor of Bidco products in western Kenya pulled out. Junet Mohammed, the MP for Suna East constituency in Migori, a great friend and supporter of Raila Odinga, said he could not continue with the distribution no matter however lucrative it was. He recalled all his trucks, which today are packed back in Migori town, which has been his home since the family emigrated from the border town of Mandera 30 years ago. “Our competitors are zeroing in hard and quick on us. It is a huge market that no company can afford to lose,” admitted the Bidco manager.

The same story is replicating itself in the coast where Bidco oils have been used to fry fish and make mahamri, a sweet doughnut that is popular in the region. Bidco’s woes are accentuated by the fact that Pwani Oil and Kapa Oil Refineries are based in Mombasa. Pwani Oil products include Fresh Fri, Fry Mate, Mpishi poa and Salit, while Kapa Oil Refineries manufactures Rina. “Bidco is seriously thinking of revising its prices in the hard hit regions as a way of stemming the slipping market to the competitors,” said the manager.

In Nairobi’s slums, most Bidco oil products are also used by traders who make chapati, fry chips, mandazi (a delicacy similar to mahamri) and fish. “These chapatis, chips and mandazi are daily delicacies that are consumed by low-income people at very friendly prices, so what we did, we tailored a cooking fat that is cost effective,” said the manager. “We had penetrated this market – from the frying fish business of Gikomba Market to these feisty small time traders of Congo, Kariobangi, Korogocho, Kibera, Mathare and Mukuru slums.”

It is still too early to conclusively tell if the boycott, called barely a month ago, has thrown these companies’ products off-balance. But as Ahmed of Eastleigh reminded me, habits are acquired and learned and people can be taught to appreciate new tastes.

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Politics

Nigeria: A Messiah Will Not Fix Country’s Problems

In Nigeria’s recent election cycle, many citizens looked to Peter Obi for change. But the country needs people-led social transformation, not saviors.

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Nigeria: A Messiah Will Not Fix Country’s Problems
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On February 25, Nigerians once again took to the polls with a determination that their votes could change the fate of a country in deep despair. For the seventh time since a civilian dispensation began in 1999, Nigerians hoped that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would conduct a free, fair, and credible election. This hope was reinvigorated by the emergence of technology that would ensure, purportedly, a transparent process. Yet, once again, voters had their dreams crushed with an election marred by violence, ballot box snatching, forged results and, of course, voter intimidation and buying. In the days that followed, despite mounting evidence of irregularities and international outcry, INEC declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the winner of the presidential poll. The continuation of a gerontocratic oligarchy was solidified.

Although media attention focused on a young class of voters and the uniqueness of this historical moment, a deeper analysis is necessary. If nothing else, this election provided an opportunity to examine the shifting landscape of Nigeria’s elite electoral politics, and the increasingly complex voting patterns of citizens, while understanding these voters are increasingly a minority—less than 30 percent of the registered voters (about one-tenth of the population) cast their vote.

The dizzying rise of Peter Obi as a “third force” candidate over the last nine months was largely due to a movement of emergent and middle-class youth, the so-called “Obidients,” who used technology to galvanize a youthful base to push forward their candidate. That the Obidient movement was formed, ironically, off the back of the EndSARS movement, is in many ways a direct contradiction. The generation that was “leaderless” now suddenly had a leader. The rate at which young people chose this candidate still gives me whiplash. But there was no shaking their convictions. Obi was their candidate, and no one could shake their belief that a new Nigeria would be formed under his presidency, despite the evidence that he was directly endorsed by the same ruling class that has led to the country’s demise.

Obi is not a revolutionary, a social welfarist, nor even pro labor, but he became the savior many youth were looking for to “rescue” Nigeria. Ironically, the millions of youth that fought the EndSARS battle, and named themselves the leaderless soro soke (“speak up” in Yoruba) generation, did not seek elective office themselves. Rather, many put their eggs in Obi’s basket in supporting an older, veteran politician whose clean cut and soft demeanor led to his near deification. Other EndSARS activists, including Omoyele Sowore, were mocked for running in the election and were seen as not experienced enough for the job. In the end Sowore  performed abysmally at the polls, despite his demonstrated commitment to Nigerian youth and human rights record and involvement in the EndSARS protests (Sowore’s African Action Congress polled only 14,608 votes, faring worse than in the 2019 election).

This absolute faith in Obi was demonstrated when his followers patiently waited for five days after the election to hear from him. Instead of sending them into the streets, he advised them to wait for him to challenge the electoral irregularities in the courts. Why did a leaderless generation need a hero?

The contradictions in the EndSARS ideology and the Obidient campaign will be tested in the years ahead. After the Lekki massacre on October 20, 2020 brought the massive street protests of the EndSARS movement to an abrupt halt, many of the sites of protests shut down completely and groups that were loosely organized dismantled into relative silence for almost two years. In fact, there was little indication that EndSARS would evolve into a mass political movement until Peter Obi emerged on the scene in May 2022. The first- and second anniversaries of the Lekki massacre were marked by smaller protests in Lagos and a few other cities, which paled in comparison to the numbers at the 2020  protests. Still, efforts to free many of the prisoners arrested during EndSARS are proving difficult, with some protesters and victims still in jail today. There was no direction, no cohesiveness, and no willingness to move forward at that point. But in May 2022, seemingly out of nowhere, things began to shift. A candidate emerged that many EndSARS protesters seemed to think would be the savior.

Understanding the youth divide

While often lumped into a sum, the category of “youth” is not a single class of people. When Obi was said to carry the youth vote he actually only carried the vote of a particular category of young people, an emergent middle and professional class, who were also some of the most vocal in the EndSARS movement. However, if we are to use the discredited election geography as a proxy for representation, it is clear that this demographic is both well defined and narrow. Major urban areas like Lagos and Abuja pulled towards Obi, as did a few Eastern states. The North Central states including Plateau and Benue asserted their own identity by aligning with Obi, perhaps in a rejection of the Northern Muslim tickets of the Peoples Democratic Party (with whom Atiku Abubaker ran) and the APC.

The 2023 election also forces us to re-examine the dynamics of class, ethnic and religious divides and the deepening malaise of the poor and their disengagement with politics. What is clear from this election, like many before, is that Nigeria has yet to come of age as a democracy; indeed, the conditions for democracy simply do not exist. It is also quite evident that the Nigerian elite are adept at changing the political game to suit the mood of the Nigerian people. Electoral malpractices have shifted over time in response to the increasing pressure of civil society for accountable elections. Strong civil society advocacy from organizations focused on accountability and transparency in government have pushed against electoral practices. While these practices continue, there are significant shifts from previous elections where vote buying was brazen. However, it begs the historical questions: has Nigeria ever had a truly free and fair election, and is the process with which democracy is regenerated through the ballot the path for emancipatory politics? These questions become more relevant as the numbers of voters continue to dwindle, with the 2023 election having the lowest turnout in Nigeria’s electoral history, despite the social media propaganda around the youth vote and the turning tide of discontent that was predicted to shape the election.

Lessons from history

The fact that young people were surprised by the events on February 25 may be indicative of youthful exuberance or a startling lack of knowledge of history. The idea that a ruling class, who had brought the EndSARS struggle to a bloody end, would somehow deliver a free and fair election, needs more critical scrutiny. For those that remember the history of the June 12, 1993 elections—annulled after the popular rise of MKO Abiola—the election is no surprise. But for young people deprived of history education, which has been removed from Nigeria’s curriculum for the past 30 years, the knowledge may be limited. When a young person says they have never seen an election like this, they also cannot be faulted, as many young voters were voting for the first time. Given that many youth seem to underestimate the long history of elections and electoral fraud, the question of intergenerational knowledge and of a public history that seems to be absent from electoral discourse cannot be ignored. It is also hard to fault young voters, in a  land where there is no hope, and whatever hope is sought after can be found in the marketplace.

Many of the young organizers were adept at reading their constituencies and mobilizing their bases, but some of the elephants in the room were ignored. One of these elephants, of course, was the deep geographic and ethno-religious and class divisions between the North and the South. This is evident in the voting patterns in the North West and North East where Obi’s campaign did not make a dent. Though Obi ran with a vice president from the North, the majority of votes in Northern zones were divided between PDP, APC and New Nigeria People’s Party while two of the North Central states, Plateau and Nasarawa, went to Obi’s Labor party. Kano, the largest voting population in the country went to Rabiu Kwankwaso’s NNPP, an outlier who was ignored to the peril of opposition parties (Kwankwaso was the former governor of Kano).

Obi’s campaign also focused on the emergent middle class youth, as well as appealing to religious sentiments through churches on a Christian ticket and ethnic sentiments appealing to his Ibo base in the South East, where he swept states with more than 90 percent of the vote. The North is largely made up of the rural poor with poverty rates as high as 87 percent and literacy rates among young women in Zamfara state as low as 16 percent. Tracking Obi’s victories, most of the states where he won had lower poverty rates and higher literacy rates; states like Delta and Lagos have the lowest poverty counts in the country. While Obi used poverty statistics to bolster his campaign, his proposed austerity measures and cuts in government spending do not align with the massive government investments that would be needed to lift Nigerians out of poverty. While the jury is still out on the reasons for low voter turnout, deepening poverty and the limited access to cash invariably impacted poor voters.

Historically, Nigeria’s presidency has swung between the North and the South, between Muslims and Christians, and this delicate balance was disrupted on all sides. In 2013, an alliance between the Southern Action Congress (AC), the Northern All Nigeria’s People’s Party (ANPP), and Congressive People’s Alliance (CPC) to produce the Action People’s Congress (APC) was able to remove the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) who had dominated the political scene. Another important historical note is that of the legacy of Biafra that lives on, as an Igbo man has never taken the helm of the Presidency since the Civil War. While Obi ran on the promise of a united youth vote, the lingering ethnic and religious sentiments demonstrate the need for his campaign to have created a stronger alliance with the North and the rural and urban poor.

The failure of the youth vote is also a failure of the left

The other factor that we must examine is the failure of the left to articulate and bring into public critique the neoliberal model that all the candidates fully endorsed. Many young Nigerians believe if Nigeria works, it will work for everyone, and that “good governance” is the answer to the myriad problems the country faces. The politics of disorder and the intentionality of chaos are often overlooked in favor of the “corrupt leader” indictment. The left was divided between the Labor Party, whose presidential flag bearer ran on a neoliberal rather than pro worker or socialist platform, and the African Action Congress, who ran on a socialist manifesto, but failed to capture the imaginations of young people or win them over to socialist politics and ideology. In seeking to disrupt the two party power block, young Nigerians took less notice of the lack of difference between the three front running parties, and chose to select the lesser of three evils, based on credentials and the idea that Obi was “the best man for the job.” In fact, the Nigerian youth on the campaign trail emphasized experience in government as a criteria for a good candidate, over and above fresh ideas.

The left also failed to garner the EndSARS movement and channel it into a political force. The emergent youth middle class, not the workers and the working poor, continued to carry the message of liberal rather than revolutionary politics. Unfortunately, just as the gunning down of Nigerian protesters caught young people off guard in October 2020, so too the massive rigging of this election. However, there is no cohesive movement to fight the fraud of this election. The partisan protests and separate court cases by the Labor Party and PDP, demonstrate that the disgruntled candidates are fighting for themselves, rather than as a single voice to call out electoral fraud and the rerun of the election. The fact that there is acceptance of the National Assembly election outcomes and not the presidential election, points to the seeking of selective justice, which may eventually result in the complete disenfranchisement of the Nigerian people.

At this time we must seek answers to our current dilemma within history, the history that we so often want to jettison for the euphoria or overwhelming devastation of the moment. The question for the youth will now be, which way forward? Will we continue to rely on the old guard, the gerontocratic oligarchy that has terrorized Nigerians under the guise of different political parties for the past 24 years? Or will we drop all expectations and pursue the revolution that is sorely needed? Will young people once again rise to be a revolutionary vanguard that works with millions of working poor to form a truly pro-people, pro-poor party that has ordinary Nigerians as actual participants in a virbrant democracy from the local to the federal levels, not just during election time but every day?  Will the middle class Nigerian youth be willing to commit class suicide to fight alongside the poor to smash the existing oligarchy and gerontocracy and snatch our collective destiny back?

It is a time for truth telling, for examining our own shortcomings. As young people, as the left, and as civil society, we have relied too long on the oppressors for our own liberation.

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 once a week.

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Africa in the New World Disorder

The war in Ukraine indicates a new world disorder, where great powers fight for primacy and Africa continues to be exploited.

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Africa in the New World Disorder
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There are some of us in Africa who believe that we should not invest any serious thinking in the war in Ukraine as it is one of the “European tribal wars.” The logic of that belief is that in Africa we have too many of our own problems to invest energy and effort in European problems. The trouble of being African in the present world order, however, is that all problems and wars end up African in effect if not in form. In the sense in which one who knows it feels it, every war in the world is an African war because Africans have, for the longest time, felt and known wars that are not of their creation. The African condition itself can be understood as a daily experience of war.

Over centuries Africa has been structured and positioned to be on the receiving end of all world problems. As such, Africa is not only the storied cradle of mankind, but also the cemetery of the human condition where every human and world problem comes to kill and to die as well. The worst of the human condition and human experiences tend to find final expression in Africa. It is for that reason that Julius Nyerere once opined that the Devil’s Headquarters must be in Africa because everything that might go wrong actually goes wrong in the continent.As the world tiptoes precariously from the COVID-19 pandemic, at the same time it seems to be tottering irreversibly towards a nuclear World War III. The countries of the world that have the power and the privilege to stop the war pretend to be unable to do so. Even some powerful and privileged Western thinkers are beating the drums of war. For instance, Slavoj Zizek, considered “the most dangerous philosopher in the West,” wrote for The Guardian in June 2022 to say: “pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine,” and “the least we owe Ukraine is full support, and to do that we need a stronger NATO.” Western philosophers, not just soldiers and their generals, are demanding stronger armies and bigger weapons to wage bigger wars. In Ukraine, the conflict is proving too important to be left to the soldiers, the generals and the politicians. In that assertion Zizek speaks from the Euro-American political and military ego, whose fantasy is a humiliating total defeat of Russia in Ukraine. Zizek, the “dangerous philosopher” takes his place as a spokesperson for war and large-scale violence, agitating from a comfortable university office far away from the horrors of Bakhmut.

United States President, Joe Biden, spoke from the same egopolitics of war before the Business Roundtable CEO Quarterly Meeting on March 21 last year: “And now is a time when things are shifting… there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.  And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.” Clearly, an “end of history” fantasy of another unipolar world led by the US and its NATO allies has possessed Western powers that are prepared to pump money, weapons and de-uniformed soldiers into Ukraine to support the besieged country to the “last Ukrainian.” During a surprise visit to Kyiv on the eve of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden hawkishly said the US will support Ukraine in fighting “as long as it takes,” dismissing diplomatic alternatives. Suggestions for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine that have come from influential figures, such as Henry Kissinger on the right and Noam Chomsky on the left, have been dismissed with the sleight of the left hand, and this is as Ukraine is literally being bombed to dustAfrican countries that have for years been theaters of colonial invasions, proxy wars, sponsored military coups, and regime changes can only see themselves in Ukraine. What Ukraine is going through is a typical African experience taking place in Europe and the first victims are Europeans this time.

Being Africans in Africa, at the least, should equip us with the eyes to see the war in Ukraine for what it is, a war driven by a Euro-American will to power, a spirited desire for world dominion against the Russian fear of NATO encirclement and containment, and nostalgia about a great Soviet empireIt is a war of desires and fears from which the belligerents will not back off. The envisaged “new world order” can only be another “world disorder” for an Africa that has for so long been in the periphery of economic, political, and military world affairs.

Destined for war: The Thucydides trap

Well before the war, the Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani described how the “world has turned a corner” and why “the West has lost it” in trying to maintain its economic and political dominion by any means necessary and some means unnecessary. Power is shifting under the feet of a young and fragile Euro-American empire that will not lose power peacefully, hence the spirited desire to force another unipolar world without China and Russia as powersTaiwan and Ukraine are the chosen sites where the Euro-American establishment is prepared to militarily confront its threatening rivals. That “from AD 1 to 1820, the two largest economies were always those of China and India” and that “only in that period did Europe take off followed by America” is little understood. That the Euro-American empire has not been the first and it will not be the last empire is little understood by the champions of the “new world order” that Francis Fukuyama, in 1989, mistakenly declared as “the end of history and the last man;” a world ruled by the West, led by the US  and its European allies had arrived and was here to stay in Fukuyama’s enchanting prophecy. Ensuing history, 9/11 amongst other catastrophic events, and the present war in Ukraine, were to prove Fukuyama’s dream a horrific nightmare. Mahbubani predicts that the short-lived rise and power of the Euro-American Empire has “come to a natural end, and that is happening now.” It seems to be happening expensively if the costs in human life, to the climate and in big dollars are to be counted.

In the struggle of major world powers for dominion of the globe Ukraine is reduced to a burnt offering. While, on the one hand, we have a terrified Euro-American empire fearing a humiliating return to oblivion and powerlessness, on the other hand we have the reality of an angry China and Russia, carrying the burden of many decades of geopolitical humiliation. Such corners of the world as Africa become the proverbial grass that suffers when elephants fight. The scramble to reduce Africa to a sphere of influence for this and that power is a spectacle to behold and the very definition of the new world disorder; a damaged and asymmetrical shape of the world where the weaker other is dispensable and disposable.

In its form and content, this new world disorder is ghastly to ponder, not only for Africa, but also for the rest of the world. Graham Allison pondered it in 2015 and came up with the alarming observation that “war between the US and China is more likely than recognised at the moment” because the two powerful countries have fallen into the Thucydides Trap. The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, described the trap when he narrated how avoiding war becomes next to impossible when a ruling power is confronted by a rival rising power that threatens its dominion. Thucydides witnessed how the growing power and prosperity of Athens threatened Sparta in ancient Greece,  driving the two powers to warThe political and historical climate between China and the US captures the charged political temperatures that punctuated the relations between an entitled and proud Sparta confronted with the growth and anger of a frightening Athens. The proverbial chips were down.

For the US and China to escape the Thucydides Trap that is luring both superpowers to war, “tremendous effort” is required of both parties and their allies. The effort is mainly in mustering the emotional stamina to see and to know that the world is going to be a shared place where there must never be one center of power; that political, economic and military diversity is natural, and the world must be a decolonial pentecostal place where those of different identities, and competing interests can share power and space, is the beginning of the political wisdom that can guarantee peace. President Xi Jinping of China seems to have read Allison’s warning about the Thucydides Trap that envelops China and the US because on a visit to Seattle he was recorded saying: “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might make such traps for themselves.” The world is sinking deeper into new disorder and violence because rival powers cannot resist the Thucydides Trap and keep repeating “strategic miscalculations” based on their will to power and desire for global dominion.

The problem with China (the Athens of our present case) that troubles the US as the Sparta of the moment is that, as Allison observes, “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.” The problem with world powers, past and present, seems to be that they cannot live with difference. In fact, political, economic and cultural differences are quickly turned from competition to conflict, from opposition to total enmity. How to translate antagonism to agonism, and to move from being enemies to being respectful adversaries that can exist among each other in a conflictual but shared world is a small lesson that seems to elude big powers, whose egopolitics drives their geopolitics into a kind of militarized lunacy. One would be forgiven, for instance, to think that playground toys are being spoken of when presidents of powerful countries talk about monstrous weapons to be deployed in Ukraine. Observing from Africa one can hazard the view that big powers might be small and slow learners, after all. The death-drive of the superpowers is perpetuated by the desire to force other countries, including other powers, to be “more like us” when they are formidably determined to be themselves. To break out of the Thucydides Trap and avoid war, for instance, the US has to generate and sustain enough emotional stamina to live with the strong truth that China is a 5,000-year-old civilization with close to 1.5 billion people and in its recent rise is only returning to glory and not coming from the blue sky. And that the world has to be shared with China and other powers, and countries. China, and allies, would also not have learnt well from  many years of decline if they dreamt and worked for a world under their sole dominion.

Any fantasy of one world ruled from one mighty center of power is exactly that, a fantasy that might be pursued at the dear cost of a World War. Away from that fantasy, the future world will be politically pentecostal, not a paradise but a perpetually in the making and incomplete world where human, national, cultural, political and religious differences will be normal. From Africa that future world is thinkable and world powers should be investing thought and action in that and not in new monstrous weapons and military might.

Africa in the new world disorder

The symptoms are spectacular and everywhere to be seen. It can be the Namibian President, Hage Geingob, on live television having to shout at a German politician, Norbet Lammert, for complaining about the growing Chinese population in Namibia. Geingob asks why Germans land in Namibia on a “red carpet” and do “what they want” but it becomes a huge  problem for the West when the Chinese are seen in Namibia. That Namibia should not be reduced into a theater of contestation between the West and China because it is a sovereign country was Geingob’s plea to the German politician. It can be President Emmanuel Macron of France, in May 2021, asking President Paul Kagame of Rwanda for forgiveness for France’s role in the genocide of 1994—the bottom line being that African conflicts and genocides bear European footprints and fingerprints. Africa is reduced to the West’s crime scene, from slavery to colonialism and from colonialism to present coloniality. 

Coloniality is brought to life with, for instance, the US Republican lawmakers launching a bill “opposing the Republic of South Africa’s hosting of military exercises with the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and calling on the Biden administration to conduct a thorough review of the US-South Africa relationship.” Africa as an object that does not have the agency to act for itself but is acted upon in the new world disorder, is real. It is Africa as a child in the world system that must be protected from other relationships and that must be told who to relate with and who not to relate with. It is also Africa as an owned thing that must be protected from rival owners. Behind the myth of African independence and liberation is the reality of Africa as a “sphere of influence,” about which world powers are still scrambling for control and ownership, including Russia and China. When in January 2018, Donald Trump referred to African countries as “all these shithole countries,” he meant that Africa still metaphorized the toilet of the world order, where disposable waste and dispensable people were to be found. Looking at the world disorder from Africa is a troubling view from the toilet of world affairs.

Looking at the world disorder from Africa with African eyes and sensibility makes it obvious that it is Africa that should be against war and for a decolonial, multipolar world order where differences are legitimated, not criminalized; where economic competition, political opposition, and rivalry are democratized from antagonism to agonism; and where political opponents are adversaries that are not necessarily blood enemies that must work on eliminating each other to the “last man.” Such a world order may be liberating in that both fears and desires of nations may play out in a political climate where might is not necessarily right. From long experiences of being the dominated and exploited other of the world, Africa should expectedly be the first to demand such a world. 

World powers need to be persuaded or to pressure themselves to understand what Mahbubani prescribes as a future world order that is against war, and liberating in that it is minimalist, multilateral, and Machiavellian. Minimalist, in that major countries should minimize thinking and act like other countries are minors that should be changed into their own image. Multilateral in the sense that world institutions, such as the United Nations, must be pentecostal sites where differences, fears and desires of all countries are moderated and democratized. Machiavellian in that world powers, no matter how mighty they believe they are, must adapt to the change to the order of things and live with the truth that they will not enjoy world dominion alone, in perpetuity. The world must be a shared place that naturalizes and normalizes political, economic, cultural, and human diversity.

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 once a week.

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Understanding the Crisis in Northern Kenya

The violence plaguing the North Rift region in Kenya is complex, as it is caused by a multiplicity of factors

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Understanding the Crisis in Northern Kenya
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On the 14th of February 2023, Kenya held a national prayer day in accordance with our government’s habit of holding ‘prayers’ when certain stressors reach an unbearable level on a national scale. Currently, there are many factors triggering national stressors, and one of them is a complex security issue loosely termed “banditry”, for which our government has no viable solution. So, we pray, declaring war on our people, instead of reflecting on and addressing the root causes of the crisis.

Over the years, these theatrics, which reflect the inadequacy of the government’s policies in dealing with our challenges, have occurred in different forms including ‘prayer breakfasts’, ‘national prayers’, ‘crusades’, and other forms of supplication. And while these functions are met with a wide spectrum of reactions ranging from approval to derision, depending on people’s spiritual or political leanings, it is crucial for us as citizens to realize that as much as these may be expressions of faith at our leaders’ personal level, at the political level they are basically ‘time-outs’ or pressure release valves. Where one has a strategy, time-outs create room for the implementation of plan ‘B’ or ‘C’. However, in the absence of a strategy, time-outs are called in the vain hope that the adversary or adversity at hand will somehow lose momentum.

There is more to the “banditry” phenomenon than meets the eye

There have been violent conflicts of many kinds in northern Kenya for many decades, some driven by terrorism, ethnic animosity, resource conflict, cattle rustling and other factors. Since 2017, however, many Kenyans have had greater awareness of the fact that the violence in northern Kenya isn’t just mere disorder; people have come to terms that there are definite geographical, economic and social patterns to, and causes of, the violence. The ongoing sporadic skirmishes of violence and cattle rustling in the North Rift area are exacerbating the difficulties that the communities there are already facing as a result of a debilitating drought. Most tragically, the violence in the region has led to the death of 16 security personnel and over 100 civilians in 6 months, a period largely overlapping with the first 5 months of H.E. President William Ruto’s time as the president. Sadly, over the years, Kenya had become largely inured to this slow-burning war due to its long duration and the boorish mentality that made the majority of us see certain parts of the country and pastoralists as somewhat ‘backward’ or ‘lesser’ beings. The most harmful effect of this attitude has been the inability or unwillingness of Kenyans to understand the root of this problem.

Things came to a head on the 11th of February 2023 when a group of security personnel on patrol were ambushed on the Lodwar-Kitale highway resulting in the death of 3 officers and the loss of guns, ammunition and patrol vehicles. This daylight highway attack was a huge affront to the authorities, resulting in instant opprobrium from citizens all over the country who wonder why our much-vaunted security agencies still couldn’t subdue these “bandits” after all these years.

Such attacks were turning into exasperating feelings of déjà vu because we see the same places, roughly the same seasonal conditions, the same kind of weapons, and even the same meaningless terminology and knee-jerk government reactions time and again. In every other part of Kenya, when laws are broken, they are investigated and addressed all along the chain from perpetrators, enablers, participants and beneficiaries. Most of the time, cases are brought to logical conclusions, but not in this case. Why?

Insights into the depth of this particular problem came from a very knowledgeable (if unexpected) source. The Governor of Trans-Nzoia County, Mr George Natembeya, came out at the National Prayer Day with a hard-hitting statement, asking the President not to let people around him “shield” him from the realities on the ground concerning the “banditry” in the North Rift areas. He went on to detail the woes of the security personnel working in the area, claiming that they were being sent into a veritable war zone without adequate allowances, equipment and even food supplies. I was personally taken aback because the previous operation took place when Mr Natembeya was the Rift Valley Regional Coordinator (RC), a position he held until last year when he resigned to run for a political office. Ironically, the office of RC is a very senior position in the executive arm of the Kenya Government that placed Mr Natembeya in direct charge of deploying the security personnel who suffered the same deplorable working conditions he was now lamenting about.  In a show of cognitive dissonance that is so typical of Kenyans, the Governor was widely praised for his ‘straight talk’ and honesty in ‘speaking truth to power’. Obviously buoyed by this newfound adulation, he went on to hold a press conference where he robustly advocated military involvement in the operation against bandits, firmly stating that the civilian security apparatus (where he spent the majority of his career before moving into politics) is inadequate to protect Kenyans. This advocacy was worrisome because the use of the loose term ‘banditry’ betrays a lack of knowledge of the identity or objectives of the adversaries.

The first major cause for alarm was the haughty ‘pre-devolution’ tone with which Mr Natembeya pronounced himself on the deployment of the military. He proceeded to even give recommendations on the orders that need to be issued, stating that they should be instructed to “decimate” the bandits. This is a startlingly cavalier term when used by a senior public servant in reference to citizens who haven’t been positively identified in any way. It is a term that could be useful in the primitive theatre of war, where opponents are positively identified by uniforms, positions or other means, but sustainable solutions to the security problems in the North Rift region invariably require more sophisticated approaches that would ensure that innocent citizens are protected and not “decimated” alongside. It would have been much easier for us ‘spectators’ to dismiss these statements as hot air emitted by someone who failed in his earlier responsibilities, but we lost that option when the government moved with speed to implement these external ‘instructions’.

The main cause of a complex issue

The violence plaguing the North Rift region in Kenya is complex, as it is caused by a multiplicity of factors. If it was simple, it would have been solved a long time ago through any of the heavy-handed responses deployed by successive governments against it. My work as a conservationist has given me unique insights into one aspect of it which seems to have been ignored by many.

Northern Kenya has a roughly 5-year drought cycle, and 2017 was a drought year. As a consequence, pastoralists moved south into Laikipia county in search of pasture. They invaded private ranches and provoked an inevitable state response, which resulted in the death of many ranchers, pastoralists, security personnel, and hundreds of livestock.

I headed a team of consultants tasked by an indigenous rights NGO to study Marsabit, Isiolo, Laikipia, and Samburu counties in a research project aimed at uncovering the dynamics and drivers of the southward transhumance and the resultant conflicts. We collected data from hundreds of respondents, including ranchers, pastoralists, government personnel and NGO practitioners. Three things stood out in our findings. The first was the sheer distances covered by the pastoralists with their animals, and the second was the fact that almost all the (government-designated) livestock movement routes have been blocked by private landowners. The most compelling finding, however, was that a vast majority of the pastoralists were from homelands that were now ‘wildlife conservancies’ controlled by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT),( -a conservation NGO. The pastoralists had lost access to their dry-season grazing areas.

After completing our fieldwork and analysis, we planned and held a validation workshop in Nanyuki on the 14th of June 2017. The findings of our report presented at the workshop resonated well with the community members who attended the workshop, some of whom provided us with further insights into the crisis. Our views on NRT were also ‘validated’ by a dramatic moment when my presentation was interrupted by their Laikipia county director, Mr Richard Kasoo, who literally screamed at me to stop vilifying NRT and had to be ejected from the room by the elders present. The top NRT management later called a more cordial meeting at a Nanyuki hotel, asking me as the team leader to expunge certain items from the report, which they felt portrayed them in a ‘negative light’. Much to their chagrin, I declined to do so, out of respect for my team and our respondents. This entire experience was a cameo of what ails us in this arena. Man-made stressors are routinely met with deafening silence and frantic inactivity until we invariably take ‘ruthless’ steps to ‘decimate’ the people we should have engaged before the fighting broke out. As such, those of us who observed the violent resource conflict in 2017 know that it wasn’t brought to an end by any human intervention. The drought ended, the rains came, and people who were fighting simply went back home.

These findings and my views have since been shared with several senior state officials and several non-state actors as well (including the protagonists), but have been invariably met with deafening silence and frantic inactivity. This is not to suggest that this is the only set of causes because the bloodletting certainly predates wildlife conservancies, which only started around 2004. Ethnic animosities that exist in this and other parts of Kenya are realities that we must factor in. The displacement and loss of access to resources also eliminated a lot of the geographical space that typically limited contact and conflict between some communities, resulting in more frequent flare-ups. However, the negative impact of conservation practices on the communities’ ways of life is definitely one of the easier drivers to deal with, so it is difficult to imagine that anyone is dealing with the more intractable and socio-politically fractious ones.

Most notably, the alacrity with which government authorities have embraced the advice of a former RC with a less-than-stellar record to handle a crisis is a worrying indication of not having a plan. One doesn’t need to be an expert to know that militaries aren’t trained to investigate, arrest or prosecute, so we could be courting numerous extrajudicial killings. The Interior Minister speaking in January, added his voice to the frightening miasma, saying that the Government will be ‘ruthless and brutal’ in this operation. We don’t seem to have had a plan for what we are doing now, so it cannot be easy to envision any plan for managing the inevitable fallout of such violence either. We are at war with ourselves in pitch darkness, struggling to finish ‘the other’ before dawn because the light of day might reveal who we really are.

This article was first published by The Pan African Review.

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