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Tales of State Capture: Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing, and Eurobond

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WACHIRA MAINA examines three major corruption scandals during the Moi, Kibaki and Kenyatta eras that demonstrate how state capture facilitates the massive looting of public funds, and allows the culprits to get away scot-free.

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Tales of State Capture: Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing, and Eurobond
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Corruption and politics, never the twain shall part

Politics and corruption have always been intimates in Kenya since independence. Little wonder that the first commission of inquiry appointed after independence, the 1965 Chanan Singh Maize Commission of Inquiry, was triggered by a corruption scandal involving Paul Ngei, the then Minister for Marketing and Cooperatives.

Mr Ngei had permitted his wife Emma Ngei, through her company Uhuru Millers of Kangundo (commonly referred to at the time as Emma Stores) to directly buy maize from farmers, bypassing the Maize Marketing Board, which he chaired. This was despite the fact that the law did not allow Kenyans to buy maize straight from farmers (which was cheaper than buying from the government). Worse still, Ms Ngei was permitted to buy 2,000 bags of maize, but she refused to pay for them; she wrote “return to sender” on payment demands. In addition, she refused to remit the difference between the farmers’ price and the government price to the Board, which was also against the law.

Widespread speculation in maize by well-connected individuals, coupled with the government’s failure to import more maize in time, eventually led to a national shortage. The Chanan Singh commission of inquiry was appointed by President Jomo Kenyatta to investigate the cause of the maize shortage. Because of his relationship with Uhuru Millers, Mr Ngei was briefly suspended from the cabinet but was later reinstated.

Maize, then, before and since has had a long career in both politics and corruption. That first scandal set the tone for future graft: the politically connected rigging the system to benefit themselves, their relatives and their cronies and when unmasked, resorting to inconclusive methods of investigation, such as commissions of inquiry, task forces or inept prosecutions. The difference between that early corruption and the corruption described here as state capture is that most of it involved abuse of discretion and conformed closely to Robert Klitgaard’s definition: Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion – Accountability

The first corruption scandal encompassing major characteristics of state capture was the Turkwel Gorge hydroelectric power project between 1986 and 1991. Many aspects of the process of contracting for this project entailed rigging and repurposing legal processes for the benefit of President Daniel arap Moi and his cronies. According to an internal European Commission Memorandum of March 1986 written by Achim Kratz, the then Commission’s delegate to Kenya, the contract price for the project was more than double the amount Kenya’s government would have paid under a competitive international tender. The memo stated that the government knew that the price of the French contractor Spie Batignolles was extortionate, but hired them nevertheless, “because of high personal advantages”. Those “personal advantages” were millions of dollars paid to President Daniel Arap Moi and to the then Minister of Energy, Nicholas Biwott. Moreover, companies associated with people close to Moi and Moi’s family were sub-contracted to execute many elements of the Spie Batignolles contract.

The first corruption scandal encompassing major characteristics of state capture was the Turkwel Gorge hydroelectric power project between 1986 and 1991. Many aspects of the process of contracting for this project entailed rigging and repurposing legal processes for the benefit of President Daniel arap Moi and his cronies.

The effect of the combination of personal interest and inattention to geological and hydrological factors was that when the project was finally commissioned by President Moi in October 1993, the reservoir was under 25 per cent full and the project had already consumed three times the estimated cost. The knock-on effect was probably even greater: the Turkwel corruption provoked donors to cut funding to the energy sector, which would eventually generate the crippling power outages of the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.

Some of the lessons learnt from the Turkwel Gorge saga on repurposing state institutions and lawful processes to extract regime and personal gain would be applied with a vengeance to the first unambiguous case of state capture: the Goldenberg scandal.

Goldenberg: Designing the methods of state capture

In 1991 and 1992 Kenya underwent a foreign exchange crunch. The proximate cause for this was mounting pro-democracy pressure by the opposition and civil society groups, to which the government responded with violent crackdowns. Political repression and donor concern about corruption, combined with poor export performance of the leading foreign exchange earners of coffee, tea and tourism, led to a significant drop in hard currency reserves.

The government responded to this with an export promotion scheme in which exporters who deposited their hard currency earnings would not only receive the Kenya shilling equivalent of their deposits, but also an additional 20 percent “export incentive”. Goldenberg International, a company jointly owned by Kamlesh Pattni and the then director of the special branch (Kenya’s secret service), James Kanyotu, concocted a scheme to export gold and diamonds to three companies in Dubai and Switzerland on an understanding that they would be paid 35 per cent “export compensation”. The problem with this arrangement was that gold and diamonds were not covered in the Export Compensation Act and the “incentive” paid to the company was 15 per cent above the lawful limit.

The real scandal, though, was that Kenya had no diamonds and its gold mining was insignificant. In the beginning, Goldenberg International exports turned out to be entirely made up of gold smuggled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). Later, the company stopped smuggling gold altogether and merely completed export declaration forms, produced fake hard currency deposit slips and got paid, not only the coupon amount on the fake deposit slips, but also the 35 per cent export compensation.

The total cost of the scandal is unknown, but some estimates indicate that up to 10 per cent of Kenya’s GDP was lost. The 2006 Bosire Commission of Inquiry into the scandal concluded that up to Sh158.3 billion of Goldenberg money was transacted with 487 companies and individuals. This is probably a gross underestimate, as in fact Goldenberg was a series of inter-connected financial scandals rather than the phantom exports of gold and diamonds that most investigations have focused on since 1992. (The scandal was first revealed in the Controller and Auditor General’s reports for 1991 and 1992.) According to various affidavits sworn by the main suspect in Goldenberg and associated scandals, the beneficiaries of these dealings included the President, the Vice President and his business associates.

Notwithstanding revelations in the Controller’s and Auditor General’s reports, together with whistleblower accounts covered in the media, the government initially stonewalled. This prompted the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) to seek the permission of the High Court to file a private prosecution to remedy the inaction of the Attorney General (AG).

The AG, Amos Wako, suddenly bestirred himself, asking to join the LSK case as a friend of the court. He promptly opposed the LSK’s application, arguing that he had been delayed by investigation reports, and requested the LSK to hand him such evidence as they had so that he may act. Backed by an affidavit by Japhet Masya, the Clerk to the National Assembly, the AG also argued that the High Court had no jurisdiction on Goldenberg given that the issue was before a committee of Parliament.

The total cost of the scandal is unknown, but some estimates indicate that up to 10 per cent of Kenya’s GDP was lost. The 2006 Bosire Commission of Inquiry into the scandal concluded that up to Sh158.3 billion of Goldenberg money was transacted with 487 companies and individuals.

Mr Wako’s pleas were both inexplicable and disingenuous: Parliament has no criminal jurisdiction and any policy issue on Goldenberg pending before one of its committees can have no effect on an indictment for corruption. The AG sounded more like a defence attorney than the head of public prosecutions and guardian of public interest that he was.

Dr Willy Mutunga, then the chair of the LSK, feared that Mr Wako’s ruse was proof that the government was “determined to complete the Goldenberg cover-up”. Mr Wako, he predicted, would continue to act like “counsel for all the accused persons” and would engineer “protracted delays”, “mention after mention, adjournment followed by adjournment”, ending in a “dramatic withdrawal of the cases”.

So it proved. The magistrate, Uniter Kidullah, appointed the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) after her decision in this case, rendered a rude and intemperate judgment, combining otiose proceduralism with personalised insults against the LSK: Mr Mutunga’s pleadings were inadmissible because he, rather than the secretary, had signed them; the LSK had no legal standing to file a private prosecution since it could not show how its interests had been harmed by the Goldenberg scandal and, so far as she could see, the LSK had acted outside its statutory mandate. Finally, she concluded that the only knowledge LSK seemed to have was that of “stealing from . . . clients”.

There the Goldenberg scandal would have died but for the government’s continuing hard currency crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank warned Kenya that no new programme would be agreed with the country until the government took credible action on corruption in general and on Goldenberg in particular. It was this threat that spurred Attorney General Amos Wako to indict Pattni and his co-accused in 1997, five years after the scandal first broke.

But the charge was not meant to result in effective prosecution. Against the advice of his DPP, Bernard Chunga, the AG framed more than 90 counts in one charge in the face of clear precedent that so many counts would invalidate the charges. Knowing this, in July 1997, Kamlesh Pattni challenged the charges as illegal and was granted an order of prohibition by the High Court, stopping the trial. Donors, aghast at this turn of events, refused to lift the conditions they had imposed on aid to Kenya until Goldenberg was properly prosecuted.

A chastened AG filed new charges in August 1997, calculated to be good optics for an IMF mission that was expected in Nairobi in early 1998. In the meantime, Mr Pattni had concocted a new fraud to defeat any fresh charges that the AG might bring against him. Using forged papers, fake sale agreements backdated to 1992 with the connivance of the Registrar of Companies (in the Attorney General’s Chambers) Mr Pattni purported to be the owner of World Duty Free (WDF), the Isle of Man company to which he claimed to have sold the gold and diamonds. He then obtained court orders allowing him to take over management of WDF shops in Kenya.

The point of this devious scheme was that in a future prosecution Pattni could argue that as the owner of WDF he couldn’t be forced to testify against himself. Armed with this new civil suit, he challenged the fresh indictments, claiming these charges should be stopped as they were prejudicial to the WDF civil case. The court agreed with this risible claim, even though legal principle works the other way: where a criminal case raises the same issues as a civil case, the criminal case is heard first. There are two reasons for this: one, the public interest should be vindicated before the private interest and, two, given that the standard of proof in criminal cases – beyond reasonable doubt – is much higher than the standard in civil cases – on the balance of probabilities – it is more efficient to hear the criminal case first, since facts proved need not be proved again in the related civil case. This botched 1998 prosecution was the last action that the Moi government took to resolve the Goldenberg scandal.

In 2003, Mwai Kibaki succeeded Daniel arap Moi. He quickly set up a commission of inquiry into the Goldenberg scandal, ironically at just about the same time that his own cronies were busy siphoning monies out of Kenya under the Anglo Leasing scandal. The commission was chaired by Justice Samuel Bosire, who would later be declared as unfit to be a judge during the vetting of magistrates and judges mandated by the 2010 Constitution.

The point of this devious scheme was that in a future prosecution Pattni could argue that as the owner of WDF he couldn’t be forced to testify against himself. Armed with this new civil suit, he challenged the fresh indictments, claiming these charges should be stopped as they were prejudicial to the WDF civil case.

The Bosire Inquiry established what everyone always knew but could not prove, because the AG, Amos Wako, had developed feet of clay. Goldenberg, the commission concluded, involved the highest levels of President Moi’s government and Moi had personally authorised two Goldenberg-related payments. After the inquiry, the government imposed travel bans on people named by the commission as connected to Goldenberg. Bosire also recommended that retired President Moi’s role in Goldenberg be investigated. Nothing came of either the travel ban or the Moi investigation. In August 2006, the credibility of the report was seriously dented when Professor George Saitoti (formerly Vice President to Moi), who the commission had found culpable enough to warrant an indictment, got a court order expunging his name from that list of shame.

In the end, no one was ever convicted for any of the Goldenberg crimes. In 2006, six months after the release of the Goldenberg Report, David Munyakei – the man who first blew the whistle on the scandal only to be hounded into destitution for his efforts – died, a lonely and forgotten victim of the forces of state capture.

The Anglo Leasing Scandal

The Goldenberg script would be reprised in the second state capture case, the biggest scandal of the Kibaki era – the 2003 Anglo Leasing scandal. Anglo Leasing was a series of security-related scandals involving 18 state security contracts, collectively worth about $770 million (Sh55 billion), in which the government entered finance lease and suppliers’ credit agreements to pay for forensic facilities, security equipment and support services for Kenya Prisons, the Police Airwing, the police force, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the Administration Police, the National Security Intelligence Service (NSIS), and the National Counter-Terrorism Centre. Thirteen of the eighteen contracts were made under President Daniel arap Moi, the other five after 2002 under President Mwai Kibaki. The true identities and whereabouts of the companies remained unclear. Though the immediate investigation that blew open the scandal involved the Anglo Leasing and Finance Company, in truth the scandal involved many more companies owned by the same set of individuals: Deepak Kamani; Anura Perera; Amin Juma; Merlyn Kettering and Ludmilla Katuschenko.

Within these 18 generally irregular contracts, individual contracts were even more blatantly so: the contract for tamper-proof passports granted to Anglo Leasing and Finance Company was described by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) – ironically chaired by Uhuru Kenyatta – as “an organised, systematic and fraudulent scheme designed to fleece the government through the so-called special purpose finance vehicles for purported security contracts”. How exactly Anglo Leasing became involved in these security contracts is unclear from the records, but the pattern itself is clear.

In 2000, the Department of Immigration did a “computer needs assessment” that concluded that to eliminate fraud, forgery, inefficiencies and revenue loss it would need to procure a passport -issuing system. This was to be done by restricted tender. The Ministerial Tender Committee invited five international firms to submit bids: two British firms, De La Rue Identity Systems and AIT International PLC; South Africa’s Face Technologies; Setec OY of Finland and Johannes Enschede of the Netherlands. Three firms responded. The decision was that AIT International PLC met both the commercial and technical specifications for the award.

However, the ministry’s budget for the 2000/2001 financial year did not cover the Sh622,039,944 contractual sum that AIT International PLC gave as the cost of the system. The procurement was deferred to 2002/2003. Six international firms were now invited to bid, the initial five and GET Group of the USA. Once again, three responded: De La Rue Identity Systems; South Africa’s Face Technologies and GET Group. The previously successful group, AIT International PLC, did not submit a bid.

A technical committee of the Government Information Technology Services concluded that none of the bids were responsive and subsequently recommended that they not only be disqualified but also that, “the system be redesigned and expanded to cover other aspects of the work of the Immigration Department, such as border controls and immigration monitoring”. It was now agreed that the expanded system would have five components: 1) high security new generation passports; 2) a secure passport issuing system; 3) high security new generation visas; 4) a high security visa-issuing system; and 5) computerisation of machine-readable immigration records. One consequence of expanding the system was a spiking of costs, which would require the Treasury to seek donor funds.

That is how matters stood when on 1 August 2003, a firm named Anglo Leasing and Finance Ltd of Alpha House, 100 Upper Parliament Street, Liverpool L19 AA, UK, sent an unsolicited technical proposal to the permanent secretary (PS) in the Vice President’s Office to supply and install an “Immigration Security and Document Control System, (ISDCS)”. The installation would be done by a sub-contractor of Anglo Leasing, François-Charles Oberthur Fiduciaire SA of Paris, France. To ease the funding problem, Anglo Leasing would offer a facility of €31,890,000 (Sh2.67 billion) to be repaid at an interest of 5% (later 4%) over a 62-month period.

On review, the PAC thought this highly irregular: a financing firm had prepared a detailed proposal for a project very similar to the one recommended by the Government Information Technology Services without a request from the government and, most curiously, in a manner that strongly suggested that the firm “had fore-knowledge of the recommendation to enhance and expand the system”.

Nonetheless, a month later, on 5 September 2003, the Vice President’s Office asked the Treasury to contract Anglo Leasing. That permission came through on 25 November 2003. Also on 5 September, the Vice President’s Office sought legal clearance from the AG’s Chambers, and in a letter dated 18 September 2003, the AG advised the ministry to do due diligence. For example, how many projects of this magnitude had Anglo Leasing successfully undertaken? What was the firm’s credit rating? The PAC did not see any evidence that tests had been undertaken or that the ministry had assessed the “authenticity, capacity, experience and track record of François-Charles Oberthur Fiduciaire”.

On review, the PAC thought this highly irregular: a financing firm had prepared a detailed proposal for a project very similar to the one recommended by the Government Information Technology Services without a request from the government and, most curiously, in a manner that strongly suggested that the firm “had fore-knowledge of the recommendation to enhance and expand the system”.

Even with all these things still outstanding, the government signed the Suppliers Services and Financing Credit Agreement for the ISDCS on 4 December 2003, and two months later, on 4 February 2004, a sum of Sh91,678,169.25 (described variously as “arrangement”, “commitment” and “administration” fees) was paid out to Anglo Leasing.

According to John Githongo’s dossier to the President, all the Anglo Leasing-type shell companies were probably established by one Pritpal Singh Thethy, an accountant and engineer who was associated with Anura Perera. These companies routinely won large contracts to supply goods and services at inflated prices to the security services and were notorious for paying generous kickbacks.

The unravelling of Anglo Leasing began when Maoka Maore, the MP for Ntonyiri, tabled documents in Parliament in April 2004, showing that Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Limited had been paid a Sh91 million commitment fee, amounting to 3 per cent of a Sh2.7 billion contract to produce the tamper-proof passports. The Department of Governance and Ethics, headed by John Githongo, tried to get to the bottom of the affair.

In that same month, whilst on a visit to the United Kingdom he asked Kroll Associates to do some due diligence on Anglo Leasing and discovered that no such company existed. Githongo had begun to suspect that very senior officials in the Kibaki administration were involved. Early suspects included Vice President Moody Awori, Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs Kiraitu Murungi, Minister for Finance David Mwiraria, Minister for Internal Security Chris Murungaru, Home Affairs Permanent Secretary Sylvester Mwaliko, Finance Permanent Secretary Joseph Magari, Internal Security Permanent Secretary David Mwangi, Alfred Getonga, Deepak Kamani and Jimmy Wanjigi.

From an early stage in a series of private meetings, the Vice President, as well as the ministers for justice and finance, assiduously tried to stop the investigation, partly based on the theory that “the Vice President had already given a parliamentary statement”. The scale of Anglo Leasing and the depth of its penetration into the inner sanctum of power would become much clearer over the next few months. It turned out that even as investigations kicked off, additional payments and commitment fees were being processed.

When these stories hit the media, the then Secretary to the Cabinet, Francis Muthaura, said that Anglo Leasing had contacted him and promised to repay the monies they had already received. Shortly thereafter, on 14 May 2004, Anglo Leasing and Finance Ltd wired back €956,700 from Schroder & Co Bank AG in Zurich.

Investigations would reveal even more dirt. By early June, inquiries had established that Anglo Leasing had been paid $5 million for a forensic laboratories contract for which they had done no work. The brains behind the revival of this Moi-era contract were Deepak Kamani, Jimmy Wanjigi, Chris Murungaru, Dave Mwangi, Alfred Getonga, and C. Oyula, the Financial Secretary. It was clear that there were many more Anglo Leasing type contracts, and eventually 16 of them would become public.

From an early stage in a series of private meetings, the Vice President, as well as the ministers for justice and finance, assiduously tried to stop the investigation, partly based on the theory that “the Vice President had already given a parliamentary statement”. The scale of Anglo Leasing and the depth of its penetration into the inner sanctum of power would become much clearer over the next few months.

The case of two of these Anglo Leasing-type companies – Sound Day Corporation and Apex Finance Corporation – closely followed the conspiratorial modus operandi of the contracts for the tamper-proof passports. The two companies, which were managed by Brian Mills, a US national, had signed four contracts, cumulatively worth more than $145 million. According to newspaper accounts, the three Kamanis – Chamanlal Kamani, Deepak Kamani and Rashmi Kamani – became directors of Sound Day in April 1990. Sound Day, like other Anglo Leasing companies, was to provide credit, as well as supply the equipment to be financed through that credit. However, the contract terms were that the equipment would not be supplied until the government paid the first instalment. Sound Day provided no credit, but charged 3 per cent interest on this “financing” whilst, in fact, the financing was the money that had been advanced by the Kenyan government in the first place. This Byzantine arrangement was later described in court as a “classic case of reverse financing”.

As Anglo Leasing unravelled, the attempts to stop investigations became both frantic and menacing. The Minister for Finance, David Mwiraria, indicated that he would not lay before Parliament a damning special audit report compiled by the Controller and Auditor-General until the Treasury had made some “major changes”. The Minister for Justice, Kiraitu Murungi, weighed in with the caution that Mr Githongo should be careful not to “knock out key political people” like Alfie (Alfred Gitonga) and Murungaru given that both were “key players at the very heart of government”. He would later add that, “if Chris [Murungaru] is dropped and Alfie [Gitonga] is dropped we are in trouble, the enemy will have won”. According to him, people were concerned that John Githongo “did not appreciate the political costs of his work”.

A different politician was later to emphasise these warnings, saying that if Githongo’s investigations threatened the “stability of the regime” then the President would stop backing him. Both Mwiraria and Kiraitu said that they hoped that the investigations would stop as soon as Anglo Leasing repaid the money. Over time, the cover-up efforts would turn bizarre: Francis Muthaura even questioned the legal authority of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) to conduct the investigation and implied that the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act was not reasonable legislation, ostensibly because of the broad powers it gave to the KACC.

What the pressure on Githongo and the repayment of the money on the publicly known contracts revealed was a clever ploy to head off investigators from the other numerous yet to be known contracts by issuing a mea culpa on what was then publicly known.

One issue surrounding the scandal is what President Kibaki knew and when he knew it. For instance, on the forensic labs contract, the Secretary to the Cabinet had indicated to Githongo that he had briefed the President on this contract, but when Githongo met the President on 29 May 2004 Kibaki said that no one had briefed him and asked to be furnished with a copy of the contract. Two days later, Muthaura would insist that the President had been fully briefed and that it had been agreed that all payments were to be stopped and that the authorities must establish who Anglo Leasing were.

Later still, Mwiraria would claim that the President had requested that they “go easy” on Anglo Leasing given that the money had now been returned. Mwiraria and Kiraitu would argue that if the public were to know that there were other corrupt deals of this magnitude, “our government would fall”. Had the President in fact said this or were Mwiraria and Kiraitu using the authority of the Presidency to smother inquiries? Had the President lied when he told Githongo that he had not been briefed?

From the determined opposition to his inquiries, the lukewarm support he received from the President and the threatening messages that he received throughout this early phase of the investigation, Githongo feared for his life and went into self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom in 2005. His conclusion was that the Anglo Leasing scandal went all the way to the top and that its baseline was a scheme to finance the 2007 election.

One issue surrounding the scandal is what President Kibaki knew and when he knew it. For instance, on the forensic labs contract, the Secretary to the Cabinet had indicated to Githongo that he had briefed the President on this contract, but when Githongo met the President on 29 May 2004 Kibaki said that no one had briefed him and asked to be furnished with a copy of the contract.

In November 2005, President Mwai Kibaki finally acted. He dropped Chris Murungaru from the Cabinet. On 1 February, he dropped David Mwiraria and a fortnight later he had “accepted” Kiraitu Murungi’s resignation. Although 80 MPs demanded that the President fire his Vice President, Moody Awori, the President demurred. As with Goldenberg, the government imposed the usual travel bans on the principals and announced that it would also freeze their assets. Whether this happened or not is unclear; there is no official indication that it did.

In 2007, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office tried to get to the bottom of a $30 million transfer made by Apex Finance, one of the Anglo Leasing companies, between April 2002 and February 2004 through the Channel Island tax havens of Jersey and Guernsey. But by 2009 this effort had petered out, partly due to obstruction by Kenya. That same year, authorities in Switzerland launched investigations into Swiss companies named in the scam and froze their bank accounts. It, too, came to naught. By the time President Kibaki had served out his two terms in 2013, no action had been taken on Anglo Leasing.

The next time Anglo Leasing would be in the news was in early 2014, ahead of the country’s debut launch of a $2 billion sovereign bond, half of which would disappear into thin air in the biggest scandal of the Uhuru Kenyatta presidency. The facts were as follows. Kenya had lost a lawsuit in Geneva filed by two Anglo Leasing companies linked to Anura Perera – First Mercantile Securities Corporation and Universal Satspace. (Perera was one of the suspects named in the 2006 special audit of Anglo Leasing.) It then turned out that the country had to pay Sh1.4 billion to improve its credibility with international markets by clearing its (ostensible) debts in preparation for the launch of its debut in the foreign sovereign bond market, the Eurobond.

This was odd for two reasons. First, there was also a contrary judgment from the High Court in Kenya. Justice Mathew Anyara Emukule had ruled in 2012 that the two companies were non-existent entities that could not sue. Second, the government had claimed that the contract was vitiated by bribery and there was a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) audit showing that the goods were over-priced and some had never been delivered, even though payments had been made. The Geneva court rejected these PWC findings.

As a matter of Kenyan law, the government had paid this large sum to non-existent parties. According to Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich, it was necessary to pay out this amount lest the country suffer huge interest penalties. The Deputy Solicitor General, Muthoni Kimani, buttressed the Treasury’s argument with the claim that the Anura Perera litigation in Switzerland had adversely affected the issuing of the sovereign bond. Hot on the heels of this payment, National Treasury Permanent Secretary Kamau Thugge told the Public Accounts Committee that Mr Perera was now demanding an additional Sh3.05 billion for services given to the National Security Intelligence Service, now known as the NIS. (According to Thugge, Perera’s new demand related to another project, Flagstaff National Counter Terrorism Centre,that the government had contracted in 2004 at a cost of $41,800,000.)

A payment of $16.4 million to Deepak Kamani in 2014, also purportedly to facilitate the launch of the Eurobond, seems to have triggered the government’s interest in prosecuting the Anglo Leasing principals. In March 2015, 11 years after the scandal broke, 13 people connected to Anglo Leasing, including businessman Deepak Kamani and former minister Chris Obure, now a senator, were indicted.

The prosecution might be explained by President Kenyatta’s fury at the $16.4 million (Sh1.6 billion) Kamani payment and the extra Sh3.05 billion being demanded by Perera. In addition, some pressure seems to have come from Switzerland. Jacques Pitteloud, the Swiss ambassador to Kenya, told the Financial Times that Switzerland was tired of suffering reputational loss as a safe haven for stolen money. But the real political reason could well be that prosecuting Anglo Leasing deflected attention from scandals involving the friends and relatives of Mr Kenyatta. None of the targets of the Anglo Leasing indictments were connected to the Kenyattas.

As with Goldenberg, none of the arrests and indictments have so far led to convictions. This script of never holding to account those involved in state capture scandals would be replayed by Uhuru Kenyatta, as President, when he was himself caught up in the Eurobond scandal.

The Eurobond Scandal

Less than a year after the election of President Uhuru Kenyatta in March 2013, Kenya went to the international money markets to issue Kenya’s first sovereign bond worth $2.75 billion. This was done in two tranches. The first issue raised $2 billion (Sh176 billion at the time) and the second $815 million (Sh74 billion) for a total of $2.8 billion (Sh250 billion). The government said that the money would be used to reduce official borrowing from the domestic market, which would spur private investment by lowering interest rates.

According to an analysis by economist David Ndii, the government executed two transactions from the offshore account into which the $2 billion had been credited. It paid off a pending loan of $604 million (Sh53 billion) and then transferred $394 million (Sh35 billion) to the exchequer, leaving $1.002 billion (Sh88 billion) in that account. The government has never accounted for this money.

When inconsistencies were pointed out, the government responded with both lies and insults. The lies were that up to Sh120 billion had been used partly to pay pending bills to road contractors and for budget support. But as Ndii points out, the recurrent budget for the 2014/2015 financial year was funded by domestic revenues: the government raised Sh1.106 trillion in revenues, of which Sh229 billion was transferred to the counties. That left Sh877 billion for national government functions. The national government’s recurrent budget for that year was Sh897 billion, a mere Sh20 billion more than the revenue, reflecting no inflow of the Sh120 billion as claimed. According to this logic, the national government required only Sh20 billion more than what it had earned through revenue, so there was no way it could have used the Sh88 billion from the bond.

In its first public statement on the matter, the Treasury promised to give information on the projects that the Eurobond money had funded. It subsequently gave ministries three weeks to furnish the relevant information. Five weeks later, in an interview with Business Daily, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance lamented that “the ministries cannot differentiate whether the money they have received from the Exchequer came from VAT, income taxes, customs duties, excise taxes, domestic borrowing or the Eurobond”. This is true but irrelevant to the issue. Treasury should have been able to provide the answer. As Ndii points out, the government has a monitoring and evaluation responsibility. “For the Treasury to disburse a huge external loan, the biggest ever, without expenditure tracking seems downright irresponsible,” he commented.

In the following months, the government would “torture” the figures to show that the missing Eurobond money had indeed financed development projects. This was done by “wildly” (Ndii’s word) inflating the cost of nine projects in the energy sector that showed overruns of nearly Sh67 billion. Rural electrification of primary schools was said to have cost Sh34 billion rather than the Sh9.9 billion that had been budgeted. An unbudgeted item for the financial year, military modernisation, gobbled up another Sh62.8 billion. The point of cooking the figures, Ndii surmised, was to create a plausible storyline to explain the missing Eurobond money. “How high up does this fraud go?” he asked.

The government couldn’t – or rather wouldn’t – answer this question directly but its conduct in the coming years had the guilty air of an adulterer caught in flagrante delicto. As David Ndii explained, the government’s real problem was that it could not account for the Eurobond money that it had not spent and still manage to balance its accounts. In the 2014/15 financial year, it partially pulled off this miracle by reducing domestic borrowing for the year from Sh251 billion to Sh110 billion. The Sh140 billion reduction covered the exact amount of Eurobond money that it claimed to have carried forward from 2013/14. Unfortunately, this voodoo accounting was undone by the Central Bank accounts on domestic borrowing and was flatly contradicted by the interest that the government reported having paid on domestic borrowing for the year.

In the following months, the government would “torture” the figures to show that the missing Eurobond money had indeed financed development projects. This was done by “wildly” (Ndii’s word) inflating the cost of nine projects in the energy sector that showed overruns of nearly Sh67 billion.

In 2016 the Auditor General, Edward Ouko, tried to get to the bottom of the affair by conducting a forensic audit of Eurobond transfers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As part of his preparations, he told Parliament that he had already made appointments with top US and UK financial institutions involved in the transactions. Mr Ouko promised to send forensic auditors to scrutinise transaction data at JP Morgan, the Federal Reserve Bank, City Transaction Services New York, JP Securities, Barclays Bank, ICB Standard Bank, Qatar National Bank and other banks that had handled the $2 billion Eurobond transactions.

Mr Kenyatta promptly blocked the investigation, arguing, implausibly, that by saying that “the Eurobond money was stolen and stashed in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York”, Mr Ouko was implying that the Kenyan government and the United States had colluded. “Who is stupid here?” the President scornfully asked.

In the next few years, the government became cockier and more belligerent. With the Auditor General not allowed to follow the international money trail, he was reduced to informing Parliament at the end of each audit year that “investigations into the receipts, accounting and use of funds related to the Sovereign/Eurobond are still ongoing and the accuracy of the net proceeds of Kshs 215,469,626,035.75 is yet to be ascertained”.

As Ndii’s analysis pointed out, unravelling this mystery should not have been as complicated as the Auditor General’s laconic conclusion might suggest and the Treasury’s effort to explain the mystery only compounded it, even with the IMF weighing in to support the official explanation. But as the Mozambique Eurobond story shows, the IMF has been criminally negligent in these matters.

In this case, the IMF’s attempt to aid the government was unavailing. The Fund showed that Eurobond money was received and spent in the 2013/14 financial year. But given that the Eurobond money was received in the last week of that financial year, it would not have been possible for it to be spent in that year. There was no drawdown until the first week of July, which was the start of the 2014/15 financial year. The difference between the Fund’s fiddling and the Treasury’s fiddling was that the IMF reported a domestic borrowing figure of Sh251 billion for 2014/15 domestic borrowing, whilst the Treasury showed one of Sh110 billion. As Ndii noted, “The IMF cooks the books one way, and the Treasury, the other”.

Mr Kenyatta promptly blocked the investigation, arguing, implausibly, that by saying that “the Eurobond money was stolen and stashed in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York”, Mr Ouko was implying that the Kenyan government and the United States had colluded. “Who is stupid here?” the President scornfully asked.

But the Treasury’s lies were also compounded by the mandarins’ poor memory. By 2015/2016, they seemed to have forgotten the 2014/2015 numbers. Now the Treasury reported Sh251 billion as the correct domestic borrowing figure. With Sh251 billion confirmed as the correct amount, the only way to account for the Eurobond Sh140 billion was to show the projects in which it was invested. That no such projects have been named implies that at least $1 billion of the Eurobond money has disappeared into thin air. The conclusion that it has most likely been stolen by some very senior untouchables is compelling.

With investigations never having been started, the Auditor General, beaten down by the President, and the marked lack of enthusiasm from the United States (particularly the New York Federal Reserve), it is unlikely that we will know who stole nearly $1billion of taxpayers’ money.

This is Part 3 of an abridged version of State Capture: Inside Kenya’s Inability to Fight Corruption, a report published by the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) in May 2019.

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Wachira Maina is a constitutional lawyer based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Politics

The Dictatorship of the Church

From the enormously influential megachurches of Walter Magaya and Emmanuel Makandiwa to smaller ‘startups,’ the church in Zimbabwe has frightening, nearly despotic authority.

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The Dictatorship of the Church
Photo: Aaron Burden on Unsplash.
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In Zimbabwe, the most powerful dictatorship is not the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Despite the party’s 40 year history of ruthlessly cracking down on opposition parties, sowing fear into the minds of the country’s political aspirants, despite the party’s overseeing of catastrophic policies such as the failed land reform, and despite the precarious position of the social landscape of the country today, neither former president Robert Mugabe, nor the current president Emmerson Mnangagwa, nor any of their associates pose as significant an existential threat to Zimbabweans as the most influential dictatorship at play in the country: the church.The church has frightening, near despotic authority which it uses to wield the balance of human rights within its palms. It wields authority from enormously influential megachurches like those of Walter Magaya and Emmanuel Makandiwa, to the smaller startup churches that operate from the depths of the highest-density suburbs of the metropolitan provinces of Bulawayo and Harare. Modern day totalitarian regimes brandish the power of the military over their subjects. In the same way, the church wields the threat of eternal damnation against those who fail to follow its commands. With the advent of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020, for example, Emmanuel Makandiwa vocally declared that the vaccine was the biblical “mark of the beast.” In line with the promises of the book of Revelations, he declared that receiving it would damn one to eternal punishment.

Additionally, in just the same way that dictators stifle discourse through the control of the media, the church suppresses change by controlling the political landscape and making themselves indispensable stakeholders in electoral periods. The impact of this is enormous: since independence, there has been no meaningful political discourse on human rights questions. These questions include same-sex marriage and the right to access abortions as well as other reproductive health services. The church’s role in this situation has been to lead an onslaught of attacks on any institution, political or not, that dares to bring such questions for public consideration. But importantly, only through such consideration can policy substantively change. When people enter into conversation, they gain the opportunity to find middle grounds for their seemingly irreconcilable positions. Such middle-grounds may be the difference between life and death for many disadvantaged groups in Zimbabwe and across the world at large. The influence of the church impedes any attempt at locating this middle ground.

Additionally, because the church influences so many Zimbabweans, political actors do not dare oppose the church’s declarations. They fear being condemned and losing the support of their electorate. The church rarely faces criticism for its positions. It is not held accountable for the sentiments its leaders express by virtue of the veil of righteousness protecting it.

Furthermore, and uniquely so, the church serves the function of propping up the ZANU-PF party. The ZANU-PF mainly holds conservative ideals. These ideals align with those of the traditionalist Zimbabwean church. In short, the church in Zimbabwe stands as a hurdle to the crucial regime change necessary to bring the country to success. With a crucial election slated for the coming months, this hurdle looms more threatening than at any other time in the country’s history.

The impact of the church’s dictatorship on humans is immeasurable. Queer people, for example, are enormously vulnerable to violence and othering from their communities. They are also particularly vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and infections due to the absence of healthcare for them. The church meets the attempts of organizations such as the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe to push for protection with cries that often devolve into scapegoating. These cries from the church reference moral decadence, a supposed decline in family values, and in the worst of cases, mental illness.

Similarly, the church meets civil society’s attempts at codifying and protecting sexual and reproductive rights with vehement disapproval. In 2021, for example, 22 civil society organizations petitioned Parliament to lower the consent age for accessing sexual and reproductive health servicesCritics of the petition described it as “deeply antithetical to the public morality of Zimbabwe” that is grounded in “good old cultural and Christian values.”

Reporting on its consultations with religious leaders, a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee tasked with considering this petition described Christianity as “the solution” to the problem posed by the petition. This Committee viewed the petition as a gateway to issues such as “child exploitation … rights without responsibility … and spiritual bondages.” The petition disappeared into the annals of parliamentary bureaucracy. A year later, the Constitutional Court unanimously voted to increase the age of consent to 18.

A more horrifying instance of this unholy alliance between the church and the state in Zimbabwe is a recently unearthed money laundering scheme that has occurred under the watchful eye of the government. Under the stewardship of self-proclaimed Prophet Uebert Angel, the Ambassador-at-Large for the Government of Zimbabwe, millions of dollars were laundered by the Zimbabwean government. Here, as revealed by Al Jazeera in a four-part docuseries, Ambassador Angel served as a middleman for the government, facilitating the laundering of millions of dollars and the smuggling of scores of refined gold bars to the United Arab Emirates. He did this using his plenipotentiary ambassadorial status to vault through loopholes in the government’s security systems.

Importantly, Prophet Angel was appointed in 2021 as part of a frenetic series of ambassadorial appointments. President Mnangagwa handed out these appointments to specifically high-profile church leaders known for their glamorous lifestyle and their preaching of the prosperity gospel. Through these appointments, Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government earned itself a permanent stamp of approval from the church and access to a multi-million member base of voting Christians in the country. Mnangagwa’s gained access to freedom from accountability arising from the power of the endorsements by “men-of-God,” one of whom’s prophetic realm includes predicting English Premier League (EPL) football scores and guessing the color of congregants’ undergarments.

In exchange, Prophet Angel has earned himself a decently large sum of money. He has also earned the same freedom from critique and accountability as Zimbabwe’s government. To date, there is no evidence of Angel ever having faced any consequences for his action. The most popular response is simple: the majority of the Christian community chooses either to defend him or to turn a blind eye to his sins. The Christian community’s response to Prophet Angel’s actions, and to the role of the church in abortion and LGBTQ discourse is predictable. The community also responds simply to similar instances when the church acts as a dialogical actor and absolves itself of accountability and critique

Amidst all this, it is easy to denounce the church as a failed actor. However, the church’s political presence has not been exclusively negative. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, for example, was the first organization to formally acknowledge Gukurahundi, a genocide that happened between 1982 and 1987 and killed thousands of Ndebele people. The Commission did this through a detailed report documenting what it termed as disturbances in the western regions of the country. Doing so sparked essential conversations about accountability and culpability over this forgotten genocide in Zimbabwe.

Similarly, the Zimbabwe Bishops’ Justice and Peace Commission has been involved in data collection that is sparking discourse about violence and human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. In doing so, the Commission is challenging Zimbabweans to think more critically about what constructive politics can look like in the country. Such work is hugely instrumental in driving social justice work forward in the country. What uniquely identifies the church’s involvement in both of these issues, however, is that neither touches on matters of Christian dogma. Instead, the Commission responds to general questions about the future of both God and Zimbabwe’s people in ways that make it easy for the church to enter into conversation with a critical and informed lens.

The conclusion from this is simple: if Zimbabwe is to shift into more progressive, dialogical politics, the church’s role must change with it. It is unlikely that the church will ever be a wholly apolitical actor in any country. However, the political integration of the church into the politics of Zimbabwe must be a full one. It must be led by the enhanced accountability of Zimbabwean religious leaders. In the same way that other political actors are taken to task over their opinions, the church must be held accountable for its rhetoric in the political space.

A growing population has, thus far, been involved in driving this shift. Social media has taken on a central role in this. For example, social media platforms such as Twitter thoroughly criticized megachurch pastor Emmanuel Makandiwa for his sentiments regarding vaccinations. This and other factors led him to backtrack on his expressed views on inoculation. However, social media is not as available in rural areas. There, the influence of the religion is stronger than elsewhere in the country. Therefore investments must be made in educating people about the roles of the church and the confines of its authority. This will be instrumental in giving people the courage to cut against the very rough grain of religious dogma. Presently, few such educational opportunities exist. To spark this much-needed change, it will be useful to have incentivizing opportunities for dialogue in religious sects.

More than anything else, the people for whom and through whom the church exists must drive any shift in the church’s role. The people of Tunisia stripped President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of his authority during the Jasmine Revolution of January 2011. The women of Iran continue to tear at the walls that surround the extremist Islamic Republic. In just the same way, the people of Zimbabwe have the power to disrobe the church of the veil of righteousness that protects it from criticism and accountability.

In anticipation of the upcoming election, the critical issues emerging necessitate this excoriation even more. This will open up political spaces for Zimbabweans to consider a wider pool of contentious issues when they take to the polls in a few months. Above all, the people of Zimbabwe must start viewing the church for what it is: an institution, just like any other, with vested interests in the country’s affairs. As with any other institution, we must begin to challenge, question, and criticize the church for its own good and for the good of the people of Zimbabwe.

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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Politics

Pattern of Life and Death: Camp Simba and the US War on Terror

The US has become addicted to private military contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability” in the so-called war on terror.

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Though it claimed the lives of three Americans, not 2,403, some liken the January 2020 al-Shabaab attack at Manda Bay, Kenya, to Pearl Harbour. The US would go on to unleash massive airstrikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia.

“We Americans hate being caught out,” a spy-plane pilot and contractor recently told me. “We should have killed them before they even planned it.”

Both the Manda Bay and Pearl Harbour attacks revealed the vulnerability of US personnel and forces. One brought the US into the Second World War. The other has brought Kenya into the global–and seemingly endless–War on Terror.

Months before launching the assault, members of the Al Qaeda-linked faction bivouacked in mangrove swamp and scrubland along this stretch of the northeast Kenyan coast. Unseen, they observed the base and Magagoni airfield. The airfield was poorly secured to begin with. They managed not to trip the sensors and made their way past the guard towers and the “kill zone” without being noticed.

At 5.20 a.m. on 5 January, pilots and contractors for L3Harris Technologies, which conducts airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for the Pentagon, were about to take off from the airfield in a Beechcraft King Air b350. The twin engine plane was laden with sensors, cameras, and other high tech video equipment. Seeing thermal images of what they thought were hyenas scurrying across the runway, the pilots eased back on the engines. By the time they realized that a force of committed, disciplined and well-armed al-Shabaab fighters had breached Magagoni’s perimeter, past the guard towers, it was too late.

Simultaneously, a mile away, other al-Shabaab fighters attacked Camp Simba, an annex to Manda Bay where US forces and contractors are housed. Al-Shabaab fired into the camp to distract personnel and delay the US response to the targeted attack at the airfield.

Back at the Magagoni airfield, al-Shabaab fighters launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the King Air. “They took it right in the schnauzer,” an aircraft mechanic at Camp Simba who survived the attack recently recalled to me. Hit in the nose, the plane burst into flames. Pilots Bruce Triplett, 64, and Dustin Harrison, 47, both contractors employed by L3Harris, died instantly. The L3Harris contractor working the surveillance and reconnaissance equipment aft managed to crawl out, badly burned.  US Army Specialist Henry J Mayfield, 23, who was in a truck clearing the tarmac, was also killed.

The attack on Camp Simba was not the first al-Shabaab action carried out in Kenya. But it was the first in the country to target US personnel. And it was wildly successful.

AFRICOM initially reported that six contractor-operated civilian aircraft had been damaged. However, drone footage released by al-Shabaab’s media wing showed that within a few minutes, the fighters had destroyed six surveillance aircraft, medical evacuation helicopters on the ground, several vehicles, and a fuel storage area. US and Kenyan forces engaged al-Shabaab for “several hours”.

Included in the destroyed aircraft was a secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) military de Havilland Dash-8 twin-engine turboprop configured for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. A report released by United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in March 2022 acknowledges that the attackers “achieved a degree of success in their plan.”

Teams working for another air-surveillance company survived the attack because their aircraft were in the air, preparing to land at Magagoni. Seeing what was happening on the ground, the crew diverted to Mombasa and subsequently to Entebbe, Uganda, where they stayed for months while Manda Bay underwent measures for force protection.

I had the chance to meet some of the contractors from that ISR flight. Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu, the coastal town where I live. On one recent afternoon, they commandeered a bar’s sound system, replacing Kenyan easy listening with boisterous Southern rock from the States.

Sweet home Alabama! 

An ISR operator and I struck up an acquaintance. Black-eyed, thickly built, he’s also a self-confessed borderline sociopath. My own guess would be more an on-the-spectrum disorder. Formerly an operator with Delta Force, he was a “door kicker” and would often—in counter-terror parlance—“fix and finish” terror suspects. Abundant ink on his solid arms immortalizes scenes of battle from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his fifties, with a puffy white beard, he’s now an ISR contractor, an “eye in the sky”. His workday is spent “finding and fixing” targets for the Pentagon.

Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu.

He tells me about his missions—ten hours in a King Air, most of that time above Somalia, draped over cameras and video equipment. He gathers sensitive data for “pattern of life” analysis. He tells me that on the morning of the attack he was in the King Air about to land at the Magagoni airstrip.

We talked about a lot of things but when I probed him about “pattern of life” intel, the ISR operator told me not a lot except that al-Shabaab had been observing Camp Simba and the airstrip for a pattern of life study.

What I could learn online is that a pattern of life study is the documentation of the habits of an individual subject or of the population of an area. Generally done without the consent of the subject, it is carried out for purposes including security, profit, scientific research, regular censuses, and traffic analysis. So, pattern-of-life analysis is a fancy term for spying on people en masse. Seemingly boring.

Less so as applied to the forever war on terror. The operator pointed out the irony of how the mile or so of scrubland between the base and the Indian Ocean coastline had been crawling with militant spies in the months preceding the attack at Camp Simba. Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”

ISR and Pattern of Life are inextricably linked

King Airs perform specialized missions; the planes are equipped with cameras and communications equipment suitable for military surveillance. Radar systems gaze through foliage, rain, darkness, dust storms or atmospheric haze to provide real time, high quality tactical ground imagery anytime it is needed, day or night. What my operator acquaintance collects goes to the Pentagon where it is analysed to determine whether anything observed is “actionable”. In many instances, action that proceeds includes airstrikes. But as a private military contractor ISR operator cannot “pull the trigger”.

In the six weeks following the attack at Magagoni and Camp Simba, AFRICOM launched 13 airstrikes against al-Shabaab’s network. That was a high share of the total of 42 carried out in 2020.

Airstrikes spiked under the Trump administration, totalling more than 275 reported, compared with 60 over the eight years of the Barack Obama administration. It is no great mystery that the Manda Bay-Magagoni attack occurred during Trump’s time in office.

Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”

Several al-Shabaab leaders behind the attack are believed to have been killed in such airstrikes. The US first launched airstrikes against al-Shabab in Somalia in 2007 and increased them in 2016, according to data collected and analysed by UK-based non-profit Airwars.

Controversy arises from the fact that, as precise as these strikes are thought to be, there are always civilian casualties.

“The US uses pattern of life, in part, to identify ways to reduce the risk of innocent civilian casualties (CIVCAS) (when/where are targets by themselves or with family) whereas obviously Shabaab does not distinguish as such and uses it for different purposes,” a Department of Defense official familiar with the matter of drone operations told me.

The Biden administration resumed airstrikes in Somalia in August 2021. AFRICOM claimed it killed 13 al-Shabaab militants and that no civilians were killed.

According to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Mustaf ‘Ato is a senior Amniyat official responsible for coordinating and conducting al-Shabaab attacks in Somalia and Kenya and has helped plan attacks on Kenyan targets and US military compounds in Kenya. It is not clear, however, if this target has been fixed and killed.

A few days after the second anniversary of the Manda Bay attack, the US offered a US$10 million bounty.

The American public know very little about private military contractors. Yet the US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”.  “Americans don’t care about contractors coming home in body bags,” says Sean McFate, a defense and national security analyst.

These airstrikes, targeted with the help of the operators and pilots in the King Airs flying out of Magagoni, would furnish a strong motive for al-Shabaab’s move on 5 January 2020.

The Pentagon carried out 15 air strikes in 2022 on the al-Qaeda-linked group, according to the Long War Journal tracker. Africom said the strikes killed at least 107 al-Shabaab fighters. There are no armed drones as such based at Camp Simba but armed gray-coloured single-engine Pilatus aircraft called Draco (Latin for “Dragon”) are sometimes used to kill targets in Somalia, a well-placed source told me.

The US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”.

The contractor I got to know somewhat brushes off the why of the attack. It is all too contextual for public consumption, and probably part of army indoctrination not to encourage meaningful discussion. He had, however, made the dry observation about the al-Shabaab affiliates out in the bush near the airfield, doing “pattern of life” reconnaissance.

The strike on Magagoni was closely timed and fully coordinated. And it appears that the primary aim was to take out ISR planes and their crews. It was private contractors, not US soldiers, in those planes. I pointed out to the operator that those targets would serve al-Shabaab’s aims both of vengeance and deterrence or prevention. His response: “Who cares why they attacked us? Al-Shabaab are booger-eaters.”

With that he cranks up the sound, singing along off-key:

And this bird, you cannot change

Lord help me, I can’t change….

Won’t you fly high, free bird, yeah.

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Politics

Breaking the Chains of Indifference

The significance of ending the ongoing war in Sudan cannot be overstated, and represents more than just an end to violence. It provides a critical moment for the international community to follow the lead of the Sudanese people.

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Breaking the Chains of Indifference
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They say that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

As someone from the diaspora, every time I visited Sudan, I noticed that many of the houses had small problems like broken door knobs, cracked mirrors or crooked toilet seats that never seemed to get fixed over the years. Around Khartoum, you saw bumps and manholes on sand-covered, uneven roads. You saw buildings standing for years like unfinished skeletons. They had tons of building material in front of them: homeless families asleep in their shade, lying there, motionless, like collateral damage. This has always been the norm. Still, it is a microcosm of a much broader reality. Inadequate healthcare, a crumbling educational system, and a lack of essential services also became the norm for the Sudanese people.

This would be different, of course, if the ruling party owned the facility you were in, with the paved roads leading up to their meticulously maintained mansions. This stark contrast fuelled resentment among the people, leading them to label the government and its associates as “them.” These houses were symbols of the vast divide between the ruling elite and the everyday citizens longing for change. As the stark divide between “them” and “us” deepened, people yearned to change everything at once, to rid themselves of the oppressive grip of “them.”

Over the years, I understood why a pervasive sense of indifference had taken hold. The people of Sudan grew indifferent towards a government that remained unchanged. It showed no willingness to address the needs of its citizens unless it directly benefited those in power. For three decades, drastic change eluded the Sudanese people. They woke up each day to a different price for the dollar and a different cost for survival. The weight of this enduring status quo bore down upon them, rendering them mere spectators of their own lives. However, as it always does, a moment of reckoning finally arrived—the revolution.

Returning home after the 2019 revolution in Sudan, what stood out in contrast to the indifference was the hashtag #hanabnihu, which from Arabic translates to “we will build it.” #Hanabnihu echoed throughout Sudanese conversations taking place on and off the internet, symbolizing our determination to build our nation. To build our nation, we needed to commit to change beyond any single group’s fall, or any particular faction’s victory. Our spirits were high as everyone felt we had enough muscle memory to remember what happened in the region. We remembered how many of “them” came back to power. With the military still in power, the revolution was incomplete. Yet it still served as a rallying cry for the Sudanese people. It was a collective expression of their determination to no longer accept the unfinished state of their nation.

Many Sudanese people from the diaspora returned to Sudan. They helped the people of Suean create spaces of hope and resilience, everyone working tirelessly to build a new Sudan. They initiated remarkable projects and breathed life into the half-built houses they now prioritized to turn into homes. We had yearned for a time when broken door knobs and crooked toilet seats would be fixed, and for a time when the government would smooth out the bumps on the road. For four years following the revolution, people marched, protested, and fought for a Sudan they envisioned. They fought in opposition to the military, whose two factions thought that a massacre or even a coup might bring the people back to the state of indifference that they once lived in.

Remarkably, the protests became ingrained in the weekly schedule of the Sudanese people. It became part of their routine, a testament to their unwavering dedication and the persistence of their aspirations. But soon, the people found themselves normalized to these protests. This was partly due to the fact that it was organized by the only body fighting against the return of this indifference: the neighborhood’s resistance committees. These horizontally structured, self-organized member groups regularly convened to organize everything from planning the weekly protests and discussing economic policy to trash pickup, and the way corruption lowered the quality of the bread from the local bakery.

The international media celebrated the resistance committees for their innovation in resistance and commitment to nonviolence. But as we, the Sudanese, watched the news on our resistance fade, it was clear that the normalization of indifference extended beyond Sudan’s borders. The international community turned a blind eye to justice, equality, and progress in the celebrated principles of the peaceful 2019 revolution. In a desperate attempt to establish fake stability in Sudan, the international community continued their conversations with the military. Their international sponsors mentioned no  retribution against the military for their actions.

During my recent visit to Sudan, the sense of anticipation was palpable. It was just two months before the outbreak of war between the army and the paramilitary group. The protests had intensified and the economy was faltering. The nation stood at the precipice as the activism continued and the tensions between “us” and “them” had begun to grow once again.

Now, as war engulfs the nation, many Sudanese find themselves torn. At the same time, they hope for the victory of the Sudanese Army. Despite the army’s flaws, Sudanese people hope the army will win against “them” while recognizing that this war remains primarily between different factions of “them.” We wake up every day with a little less hope. We watch them bomb Khartoum and the little infrastructure that existed turn to dust. We watch as the resistance committees continue to do the army’s job for them. They work fiercely to deliver medicine, evacuate people and collect the nameless bodies on the sides of the streets next to the burnt buildings that were almost starting to be completed.

Another battle takes place online. On Sudanese social media, people challenge the negative mood of the war. Sudanese architects and designers work from their rented flats in Cairo or Addis, posting juxtaposed images that place the grainy, rashly captured photos of the latest burnt-down building in Khartoum next to different rendered perspectives. These perspectives reimagine the same building in a rebuilt Sudan. They thus instantly force a glimpse of hope in what now looks like a far-fetched reality to most people.

Just as these young visionaries attempt to defy the odds, international intervention and support are pivotal to help Sudan escape the clutches of this devastating conflict. Let Sudan serve as a catalyst for the change that was meant to be. Diplomatic engagement, humanitarian aid, and assistance in facilitating peaceful negotiations can all contribute.

The significance of ending the ongoing war in Sudan cannot be overstated. It represents more than just a cessation of violence. It provides a critical moment for the international community to follow the lead of the Sudanese people. The international community should dismantle the prevailing state of indifference worldwide. The fight against indifference extends far beyond the borders of Sudan. It is a fight that demands our attention and commitment on a global scale of solidarity. We must challenge the systems that perpetuate indifference and inequality in our own societies. We must stand up against injustice and apathy wherever we find it.

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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