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Unfair Trade: How Dutch Rose Growers Avoid Paying Taxes in Kenya

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Dutch growers who dominate the flower sector in Kenya were already in the news because of environmental violations and poor employment conditions. Now, as investigative journalists Romy van der Burgh and Linda van der Pol found out, they are also being accused of avoiding taxation in Kenya while proudly wearing the “fair trade” badge.

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Unfair Trade: How Dutch Rose Growers Avoid Paying Taxes in Kenya
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A wide tarmac road winds around the freshwater Lake Naivasha, about a hundred kilometers away from the capital city of Nairobi. A stream of heavy traffic manoeuvres from one side of the road to the other in order to avoid the large potholes – sometimes half a meter deep. Drivers of matatus (minibuses) often prefer the dirt tracks on either side of the road, where the chance of a tyre blowout is less likely. Occasionally, individuals are spotted putting their lives at risk pushing a wheelbarrow with stones onto the road to seal a pothole.

The condition of Moi South Lake Road stands in contrast with the well-paved roads that branch from it and lead into fenced compounds manned by armed guards. The flag of Dutch professional football club, Feyenoord, flutters behind one of those gates. The flower farms that are nestled in between Moi South Lake Road and Lake Naivasha are mostly owned by Dutch farmers and appear to be in perfect condition.

In the Netherlands, rose cultivation has decreased spectacularly in recent decades. Between 2000 and 2019, the area under rose cultivation in the Netherlands dropped from 932 hectares to 200 hectares. Many Dutch growers moved their companies to African countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia. Labour, energy, water and land prices are lower in Eastern Africa than the Netherlands and the Eastern Africa climate is favourable for rose cultivation. Roses thrive in sunlight and warmth. The cut flower has since become the largest export product in Kenya and the sector offers work to 500,000 Kenyans. However, the flower industry in Kenya has faced criticism in recent years due to poor working conditions, the large-scale use of toxic pesticides, and the negative impact on the environment, including the pollution of Lake Naivasha.

In light of these past controversies, a new one arises: Flower companies are avoiding their tax liability in Kenya, the Dutch investigative journalism platform Investico revealed. A search through registrations and annual reports show us how flower companies are evading local taxes through export companies in the Netherlands and trusts located in tax havens such as the Cayman and British Virgin Islands, Liechtenstein and Jersey. Others sell their revenue to sister companies in Dubai for an artificially low price, which means that profits do not fall at the Kenyan farm, but at a foreign entity where the profit tax is also much lower than in Kenya.

Of the 32 companies we investigated, of which at least 13 have Dutch origins, 45 per cent can be linked to tax havens. Almost all Dutch growers who went to Kenya transferred part of their business to a Dutch company. Companies that set up an international group of several companies can transfer and settle profits and losses within that group. This way they can ensure that the profit is as low as possible in the country with the highest tax rate. Because Kenya has a high profit tax, this model is attractive for companies that operate there. The Netherlands has tax treaties with many other countries. This makes it easier to channel money through the Netherlands to a tax haven than from Kenya.

While the growers are avoiding paying tax in a country like Kenya, where 36 per cent of the population lives in poverty, they still call their business “fair trade”. In fact, more than half of all the companies that we investigated have a Fairtrade certificate. Fairtrade, a premium label that stands for fair trade between the West and African countries, presents a blind spot for tax avoidance. “Fair trade – that is an oxymoron,” says Alvin Mosioma, director of Tax Justice Network Africa. “There is nothing fair about this trade. Not to the workers who cut the flowers, nor to the government.”

***

In a small hall at Oserian Primary School in Naivasha, parents scramble to get hold of plastic chairs with “Oserian Church” written on the back of the chairs. They have been borrowed from a nearby church and placed in neat rows. During this ceremony, the ten best performing students of the national exam from last year are being honoured: one of them may even join the top five hundred students in the country and soon journalists will swarm around him for soundbites. But first the school principal opens the proceedings with a prayer and in one breath he thanks God and the Oserian flower company for the brilliance of the students.

Oserian is a huge company with Dutch roots: it was founded in 1969 by ex-marine Hans Zwager and is now one of the largest exporters of roses and cut flowers in Africa. A million roses are processed every day. A portion is transported by air to Schiphol to be traded at the auction in Aalsmeer (Netherlands); the rest is delivered directly to European supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s. More than four thousand employees work at the nursery, and hundreds at the rest of Oserian’s estate.

“Fair trade – that is an oxymoron,” says Alvin Mosioma, director of Tax Justice Network Africa. “There is nothing fair about this trade. Not to the workers who cut the flowers, nor to the government.”

Oserian is the banner of the Kenyan flower industry. It puts a lot of effort into conserving wildlife and on its grounds are schools, a hospital and houses for the staff. Founder Hans Zwager was decorated by recently deceased former president Daniel Arap Moi for his pioneering work in the Kenyan horticulture industry and for socially responsible entrepreneurship.

From the Moi South Lake Road there is a view of a palace with white spiers that protrude above the tree line. It once belonged to the colonial British family Delamère and is now occupied by the Zwager family.

“Oh, you disappear in life there,” says Fredrick, 46, a former employee of Oserian, as he digs into a plate of fish. Cafe Hollywood, located a few kilometres from the flower nursery, is full in the evening. The space is heated by charcoal mounds on which freshly caught tilapias are baked. “Oserian provides all facilities. When I was on vacation, I didn’t know where to look, as if there were no more worlds outside the company.”

For nearly twenty years, Fredrick ensured that the rose buds were fertilized. He now works for himself: he repairs and rents out bicycles. Fredrick initially worked for the flower company for 12,000 Kenya shillings (around 110 euros) a month, but people with that salary were slowly being phased out, he says. New employees earn half that amount. This figure is confirmed the next morning when we chance upon a new rose cutter at Oserian and give her a lift. She confesses that she only gets 59 euros for a month’s work. A third employee, whom we speak to when we deviate from the route during a tightly guided tour of the sorting center, speaks of the same amount – which is roughly equal to the minimum wage for unskilled personnel in Kenya. However, Mary Kinyua, the administrative director of Oserian, claims that the average salary of an Oserian worker is 167 euros.

In 2017, Oserian split the company on paper in two. Some activities, such as the packing of roses, were transferred to a new company. That company is evading the sector CAO (Collective Labour Agreement) that requires a salary of 10,000 shillings (91 euros). In practice, there appears to be little difference in employees from one or the other company. In the pale-green greenhouses, which extend as far as you can see, employees of both companies interact. Both groups do not come close to the living wage calculated by Hivos in Naivasha, which is 2.852 euros per year. Nevertheless, Fairtrade currently agrees with both the minimum wage and the sector CAO.

Dutch flower farmers moved to Africa because of the prosperity that was promised. But in Kenya that landscape has since changed considerably; flower cultivation is also in decline there. “My sixteen hectares in the Netherlands yields more than the seventy in Kenya,” says flower farmer Arie van den Berg, who is farming both in the Netherlands and in Kenya. Dutch roses in Europe are still available for a few euros every Valentine’s Day at the florist, but African roses are sold at Lidl (a European supermarket chain) for a dumping price of 1.99 euros per bunch. Sometimes auction prices are so low that it is more beneficial to destroy a load of roses than having to pay for the flight costs to send it to the auction in the Dutch Westland that revolves around horticulture.

Competition is increasing worldwide and African countries are trying to outdo each other: Ethiopia has begun to compete by offering so-called tax holidays – and there is no question of a minimum wage at all. Another problem is the tax, which is high in Kenya for foreign entrepreneurs: the corporation tax is 37.5 per cent. In a market where every cent counts, some companies do everything they can to get out of that tax burden.

A few years ago, in 2012, Oserian FC and Karuturi Sports football teams, sponsored and named after two competing rose nurseries, competed against each other in the Premier League, the highest football division in Kenya. The “derby of Naivasha” was a crowd puller. Barely two years after this high point, fortunes took a dramatic turn and the players of Karuturi Sports had to hang up their boots in 2014. The Karuturi site has since been abandoned. The vacant greenhouses stretch hundreds of meters. The iron structures occupy one’s view for as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by the occasional individual plucking a stray rose from the wild growing plants in the abandoned greenhouses.

Dutch flower farmers moved to Africa because of the prosperity that was promised. But in Kenya that landscape has since changed considerably; flower cultivation is also in decline there.

Five years after the bankruptcy, a former employee still lives in a hut at the entrance of the company premises – hoping that he will be paid the three-month wages that he is owed, plus his accrued pension. “In the last months before the nursery closed, the working conditions were terrible. There was no longer any protection against the pesticides and the face masks we had on were not even really suitable for dust, let alone poison,” he says.

But the closure of Karuturi was not due to its pesticide use. The company was found guilty of evading more than 18 million euros in taxes. Although Karuturi and the tax authorities came to a settlement of 4 million euros, it turned out to be enough to bankrupt the company. Roses were systematically exported at an extremely low price to their own company in Dubai, from where they were further distributed throughout the market. The Kenyan branch turned into a loss, while the branch turned green figures in the Emirates. But Karuturi paid no tax on this profit: the United Arab Emirates have no income, profit, or dividend taxes and no import duties on transit goods. While 37.5 per cent tax is charged in Kenya, tax in Dubai is 0 per cent.

Dubai is a new tax haven. Free zones, where the official language is English and foreign entrepreneurs may be the full owners of a company, are advancing. Three Dutch nurseries in Kenya have already found a home in the Emirates, according to various annual reports from the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, including the large Oserian, which opened a logistics center, Airflo FZE (Free Zone Enterprise), at Dubai airport.

In addition to low taxes, Dubai offers far-reaching confidentiality to business owners: annual reports are not mandatory and requesting them is impossible. That is why we cannot verify whether Oserian applies the same rulebook as Karuturi. Karuturi was ultimately unsuccessful because it had to disclose more information as a listed company in India. The Dutch companies do not have to disclose financial records to the public because they are not registered on the stock exchange.

***

We track the offshore trade and walk of Dutch companies for the first time via the FlowerCompanies.com database, founded by a Dutch entrepreneur. Out of 21 African companies, the country of establishment does not state Kenya or Ethiopia, but the Cayman Islands, a sunny place, but without a single mega farm.

“No idea why this is, how crazy. This is a bug in the website,” the founder says when we have him on the line. After a few hours, the addresses were removed from the website, but we discovered through other means that the majority of those companies do indeed have branches in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands. It is more difficult to prove that they pay little or no tax in Kenya.

By law, all Kenyan residents have the right to request data from government agencies and private companies. Because we are not Kenyan residents, a tax law student in Nairobi helped us to view annual reports of Dutch growers in Kenya. During his first visit to the Kenya Chamber of Commerce, he was summoned to communicate his choices via the internet. During his second visit, he was only given an empty file. During his third visit, he finally got the Oserian file. He paid more than six euros for inspecting it.

Taking photos is not allowed at the Chamber of Commerce and security cameras dissuade visitors from doing so. Our “informant” is reluctant to use a hidden camera. Calling the Netherlands, he browses through the book, which contains an independent Deloitte audit, in which Oserian’s revenue for 2013 is estimated at 2.7 million euros. Below the line, only 3,910 euros of profit remains on their own financial statements, of which Oserian paid just under 1,041 euros to the tax authorities.

We wrote, in accordance with the law, a letter to the Kenya Chamber of Commerce, asking for copies of the file – but the papers that the Kenyan student saw a few days before suddenly got “lost”. The company also refuses to transfer any information about its finances.

The Zwager family, owner of Oserian, built a whole web of companies around the nursery that together cover the entire chain, from breeding to sales and distribution. A company in the Netherlands is concerned with “sales and marketing of cut flowers”. The Dutch company of Peter Zwager generated a gross turnover of 47 million euros in 2010. Most employees, according to the LinkedIn reference, simply work from Kenya. That cannot be otherwise, because there are no workplaces in Amsterdam: the company was transferred to Align trust office.

The ultimate stakeholder in all these “Dutch” companies is Mavuno Group Holding Company Establishment, a trust in tax haven Liechtenstein, which is again managed by a trust office. No country in Europe charges as little tax as Liechtenstein, and above all, it is not open to public scrutiny. The only two shareholders that we identify are a company at the same address in the principality, and one near the picturesque harbour of Road Town, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, which in turn owns a whole range of companies, including a Florida real estate company.

Other branches of Oserian also end up vanishing in the smoke of vague shareholders and directors on tropical islands where neither annual reports nor ultimate owners are made public. We identify New Zealand, the Bahamas and Jersey.

“We do not sell anything in Liechtenstein, we do not trade there, we certainly do not get a tax advantage there – it is just a trust,” explains administrative director Mary Kinyua. “The owner of Oserian, Peter Zwager, puts his assets in.” When asked why Oserian in Kenya only makes about 2,000 euros in profit, she has no answer.

“This is super signing. It is very clear that we are trying to evade taxes here,” says Vincent Kiezebrink of the Research Foundation for Multinational Enterprises (SOMO) when we present the drawn-up corporate structure of Oserian. “It looks like she can try to get the most out of it,” he chuckles. “All tax ports come by. You don’t need so many havens to evade tax. Many large companies nowadays invest in their public image: they no longer settle in the Bahamas but in lesser known tax havens such as Ireland or Cyprus, because they still claim to levy about 15 per cent tax. I do not see that consciousness here. It would not surprise me if this company thinks: ‘The closer to zero, the better.’”

We wrote, in accordance with the law, a letter to the Kenya Chamber of Commerce, asking for copies of the file – but the papers that the Kenyan student saw a few days before suddenly got “lost”.

A world full of crafty lawyers and accountants unfolds around emigrating farmers who show them around in Kenya and, where necessary, help them with agricultural land and tax constructions. The fulcrum in this is the law firm Raffman Dhanji Elms & Virdee based in Nairobi. On its website, the law firm states: “The Firm has been heavily involved in advising the flower and horticultural industries over the last decade in particular with foreign investment into this country and the methods to acquire land and the corporate structures required. This has led to joint ventures between Kenyan and overseas investors and the protecting and balancing of the respective interests.”

Controversial city lawyer Guy Spencer Elms was one of the three names given to us. He was once infamously associated with a multitude of corruption scandals in Kenya. Nonetheless, he has never been convicted and maintains in his defence of a plot by a criminal cartel to always paint his image in a bad light. Guy Spencer Elms says he arranges the tax planning of various Dutch nurseries himself, and he also helps farmers with agricultural land transactions. When we present him with the offshore constructions, he says: “People immediately think of something bad like hearing about a trust in Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands, but often it is just a way of’ estate planning. Trusts are not necessarily a bad thing “.

***

“Tax is Life!” reads the slogan celebrating 100 years of income tax in Kenya. The luxurious Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi is the location of the tax conference organised by the University of Nairobi. Joan, a student, takes a credit note from her bag, and points to the 16 per cent VAT. “This is why I think tax is so important. Taxes can pull Kenya out of the mud,” she says.

Students speak of tax obligations in glowing terms; they see it as the future. Where that change must take place is something that everyone agrees with: the government. Tax guru Attiya Waris, a professor of tax law, points out the loopholes in tax collection throughout Africa. According to the OECD, Africa misses 46 billion euros in tax revenues every year from evasive multinationals. The United Nations estimates that amount to be 92 billion euros. Waris did research for a long time on flower companies in the country. “Kenya transfers its land to foreign companies, but the profit they make falls elsewhere. It is not a win-win situation,” she says.

Other branches of Oserian also end up vanishing in the smoke of vague shareholders and directors on tropical islands where neither annual reports nor ultimate owners are made public. We identify New Zealand, the Bahamas and Jersey.

The Dutch company Berg Roses received 1.8 million in income tax with retroactive effect. The company was accused by the Kenyan tax authorities of conspiring with its parent company in the Netherlands. The Kenyan branch would sell most of its flowers for extremely low prices to the parent company in the Netherlands so that the profit is not realised in Kenya, but in the Netherlands.

The lawsuit is still ongoing because Van den Berg challenged the matter. “We ensure that we make fifty percent profit in Kenya and fifty percent in the Netherlands. We think that is fair. If we lose this case, it will be the death blow for our company.” Van den Berg knows of companies that channel the profit away to offshore trusts and, according to him, we never hear about it.

“Not only in the sector, but also in government is it only in terms of profit, not what is good for the country,” says tax expert Waris at the end of the celebration. She pulls her colourful scarf a little tighter around her shoulders and continues in a whisper when a duo of armed guards walk past. It should be a moral obligation to pay taxes in a country whose land, water and people you use, she says.

But monitoring the flower industry often leaves much to be desired because business and the political elite are intertwined – a euphemism for corruption. That became clear, for example, in the Paradise Papers – leaked files from the law firm Appleby – which show that Sally Jemngetich Kosgei, the former Head of Civil Service, and owner of a flower nursery in Kenya, bought a luxurious apartment in London through an offshore company based in Mauritius. Kosgei told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that she bought the apartment with her personal funds.

Fair trade organisations do not see tax ethics as their responsibility. The cover page of a recent issue of Fairtrade International is adorned with a photo of the Waridi Limited nursery, which is almost entirely in the hands of a company in the Virgin Islands. Almost all Dutch nurseries in Kenya are in possession of the Fair Trade quality mark, which stands for good conditions.

According to the OECD, Africa misses 46 billion euros in tax revenues every year from evasive multinationals. The United Nations estimates that amount to be 92 billion euros.

“Oserian sells 14 per cent of its production as a Fair Trade rose,” says Tara Scally, the spokesperson for Fair Trade Netherlands. Part of the proceeds from Fair Trade roses, which are often more expensive, are returned to a pot that employees of the farm can dispose of themselves: for example, they invest it in education or in the salary of a doctor.

Fairtrade’s focus is on the position of farmers and workers, says Scally. Tax constructions are not part of this. Moreover, tax research requires a lot of specialist knowledge and financial resources, she adds. She fears that companies will no longer participate in the programme if they are required to disclose what is in their books. “The consequence may be that workers lose part of their income. We would rather not see that.”

A ridiculous line of reasoning, counters Alvin Mosioma, founder and director of Tax Justice Network Africa. “Wear a Fair Trade label while not paying your taxes? That is an oxymoron.” Mosioma regards Fair Trade as a marketing gimmick:

“People don’t buy a rose with blood on it. Social responsibility is part of the brand of these companies. They build hospitals, schools. That gives the consumer who buys such a rose a good feeling – the idea that they are making a contribution to the development of such a country. Nothing is further from the truth. These people work under very precarious conditions for a minimum wage. It is rather paternalistic: you give them jobs, and a school. But you also buy people around with it. They are happy with such an investment. ‘Look,’ they say to the government, ‘this company takes care of us, the government does not do that’. No, that’s because the government has no money for that, and also because the same companies are engaged in aggressive tax evasion.”

This article was previously published in the Dutch language in the Netherlands in the following papers/ online: (frontpage) daily paper Trouw, weekly paper De Groene Amsterdammer and online investigative journalism platform Investico

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Romy van der Burgh (@BurghRomy) is an investigative freelance journalist. Linda van der Pol (@lindapolski) is a cultural historian and a freelance journalist based in The Netherlands.

Politics

Being Black in Argentina

What does Javier Milei’s presidential victory mean for Argentina’s black and indigenous minorities?

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Being Black in Argentina
Photo: Argentinian President Elect Javier Milei. Image credit Mídia NINJA CC BY 4.0 Deed.
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On November 19, Javier Milei secured the presidency of the Republic of Argentina with 56% of the vote. However, his victory is expected to significantly impact a specific segment of the country.

During my six-month exchange in Argentina’s Venado Tuerto (pop. 75,000) in 2016, I encountered someone of shared Black ethnicity on the street only once. A person whom many locals incidentally mistook for me—along with a Cuban Black girl, the only black person like me in the whole high school. As insignificant as a census of this small city’s population may seem, it effectively illustrates a sobering reality: the presence of Black people in Argentina is sparse, and their numbers have dwindled over time.

Hay más por otros lados, acá no llegaron” (There are more of them elsewhere, they have not arrived here) is a rhetoric prevalent among many Argentines, but the reality is quite dissimilar. Contacts between Argentina and Black people, particularly of African descent, date back to the 16th century transatlantic slave trade, when West and Central Africa people were brought by Spanish and Portuguese settlers to the coastal city of Buenos Aires, only to be sold and moved mostly within the Río de la Plata, present-day Argentina and Uruguay. In “Hiding in Plain Sight, Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic,” Erika Denise Edwards reports that between 1587 and 1640 approximately 45,000 African slaves disembarked in Buenos Aires. By the end of the 18th century, one-third of Argentina’s population was Black.

What, then, became of the Black African population in Argentina? Some attribute their decline to historical factors such as their active involvement in conflicts including the War of Independence against Spanish colonists (1810-1819) and the war with Paraguay (1865-1870), in which Black men often found themselves on the front lines, enduring the brunt of the attacks, or even choosing to desert and flee the country. These factors intersect with a gradual process of miscegenation and interracial mixing, leading to a progressive whitening of the population—both in terms of physical attributes and ideology.

Adding to this complex mix, political rhetoric comes into play. Influential Argentine leaders, such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in the 19th century, idealized white Europe not only as a model for overcoming the country’s socio-economic challenges but also as a narrative that implied the absence of Black people in Argentina, thereby erasing an integral part of the nation’s history.

Doing so has shrewdly allowed a country to avoid reckoning with its past of slavery and navigate the complexities of its presence, using the escamotage that there are no race-related issues in the country because there are no Black people. This assertion is incorrect for several reasons beyond those mentioned above. First, despite being imperceptible to the naked eye, there is a small but existing population of Afro-descendants in Argentina. Nevertheless, in my second stay in Argentina, this time in Buenos Aires, it became more apparent to me how a certain nationalistic current, in the footsteps of Sarmiento, proudly makes itself of this consistent lack of Black heritage. Comparing itself favorably to neighboring countries, this current boasts a notion of white supremacy in Argentina, which celebrates the Italian immigration from the 19th and 20th centuries as the foundation of national identity, while largely overlooking the historical legacy of African bodies that predates it.

As a result, even in a cosmopolitan capital city such as Buenos Aires, a significant portion of the white Argentine population based its identity on my opposite—not knowing that as an Afro-Italian, my Italian citizenship actually made them closer to my blackness and African roots than they wanted. Asserting that there are no racial concerns in Argentina is misleading. It amounts to the invisibilization of racial discrimination in a country where those who deviate from the preferred prototype, including Indigenous communities such as Mapuche, Quechua, Wichi, and Guarani, experience limited access to education and social services, and are disproportionately prone to experience poverty than their white counterparts.

Even within everyday discourse in Argentina, the assertion is refuted: many are labeled Black despite not matching the physical appearance associated with the term. The expression “es un negro” might refer to everyone who has darker skin tones, grouping them into a specific social category. However, beyond a mere description of physical attributes, “es un negro” delineates a person situated at various margins and lower rungs of society, whether for economic or social reasons. The appellation is also ordinarily used in jest as a nickname for a person who, of “black phenotype,” has nothing. The label “morocho” seems to be the most appropriate appellation for dark-skinned people in the country.

Argentine white supremacist identity is often matched by a certain right-wing political ideology that is classist, macho and, to make no bones about it, xenophobic. In the 2023 elections, such a systemic structure takes on the face of Javier Milei. The Argentine’s Donald Trump claimed in 2022 at the presentation of his book that he did not want to apologize for “being a white, blonde [questionable element], blue-eyed man.” With false modesty, the demagogue took on the burden of what it means in the country to have his hallmarks: privilege, status, and power.

Milei’s need for apologies should not revolve around his connotations but rather the proposals presented during his election campaign and outlined in his political program, which include the dollarization of pesos and the removal of government subsidies. Besides assessing if these actions would really benefit the vulnerable economy of the country, it’s worth questioning why it’s the middle-class, often white population that stands to suffer the least from such policies. They can afford to transact in dollars, weather an initial depreciation of their income, and provide for their children’s education without relying on government subsidies. In essence, they can do without the limited benefits offered by the Argentine state, given their already privileged positions.

The election of this politician not only adversely affects Black minorities, but also targets apparent minorities whom this divisive ideology seeks to erase, including Indigenous populations and the poorest segment of society—the current Argentinian “blacks”—who significantly enrich the Argentine populace. In such a scenario, one can only hope that the world will strive for a more consistent record of their existence.

This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site every week.

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Politics

Risks and Opportunities of Admitting Somalia Into the EAC

The process of integrating Somalia into the EAC should be undertaken with long-term success in mind rather than in the light of the situation currently prevailing in the country.

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Risks and Opportunities of Admitting Somalia Into the EAC
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The East African Community (EAC), whose goal is to achieve economic and political federation, brings together three former British colonies – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania – and newer members Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and most recently the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Somalia first applied to join the EAC in 2012 but with fighting still ongoing on the outskirts of Mogadishu, joining the bloc was impossible at the time. Eleven years later, joining the bloc would consolidate the significant progress in governance and security and, therefore, Somalia should be admitted into the EAC without undue delay. This is for several reasons.

First, Somalia’s admission would be built on an existing foundation of goodwill that the current leadership of Somalia and EAC partner states have enjoyed in the recent past. It is on the basis of this friendship that EAC states continue to play host to Somali nationals who have been forced to leave their country due to the insecurity resulting from the prolonged conflict. In addition, not only does Somalia share a border with Kenya, but it also has strong historical, linguistic, economic and socio-cultural links with all the other EAC partner states in one way or another.

Dr Hassan Khannenje of the Horn Institute for Strategic Studies said: ”Somalia is a natural member of the EAC and should have been part of it long ago.”

A scrutiny of all the EAC member states will show that there is a thriving entrepreneurial Somali diaspora population in all their economies.  If indeed the EAC is keen to realise its idea of the bloc being a people-centred community as opposed to being a club of elites, then a look at the spread of Somali diaspora investment in the region would be a start. With an immense entrepreneurial diaspora, Somalia’s admission will increase trading opportunities in the region.

Second, Somalia’s 3,000 km of coastline (the longest in Africa) will give the partner states access to the Indian Ocean corridor to the Gulf of Aden. The governments of the EAC partner states consider the Indian Ocean to be a key strategic and economic theatre for their regional economic interests. Therefore, a secure and stable Somali coastline is central to the region’s maritime trade opportunities.

Despite possessing such a vast maritime resource, the continued insecurity in Somalia has limited the benefits that could accrue from it. The problem of piracy is one example that shows that continued lawlessness along the Somali coast presents a huge risk for all the states that rely on it in the region.

The importance of the maritime domain and the Indian Ocean has seen Kenya and Somalia square it out at the International Court of Justice over a maritime border dispute.

Omar Mahmood of the International Crisis Group said that ”Somalia joining the EAC then might present an opportunity to discuss deeper cooperation frameworks within the bloc, including around the Kenya-Somalia maritime dispute. The environment was not as conducive to collaboration before, and perhaps it explains why the ICJ came in. Integrating into the EAC potentially offers an opportunity to de-escalate any remaining tensions and in turn, focus on developing mechanisms that can be beneficial for the region.”

Nasong’o Muliro, a foreign policy and security specialist in the region, said: “The East African states along the East African coast are looking for opportunities to play a greater role in the maritime security to the Gulf of Aden. Therefore, Somalia joining the EAC bloc will allow them to have a greater say.”

Third, Somalia’s membership of the Arab League means that there is a strong geopolitical interest from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. However, Somalia stands to gain more in the long-term by joining the EAC rather than being under the control of the Gulf states and, to a large extent, Turkey. This is because, historically, competing interests among the Gulf states have contributed to the further balkanisation of Somalia by some members supporting breakaway regions.

On the other hand, the EAC offers a safer option that will respect Somalia’s territorial integrity. Furthermore, EAC partner states have stood in solidarity with Somalia during the difficult times of the civil conflict, unlike the Gulf states. The majority of the troop-contributing countries for the African Union Mission to Somalia came from the EAC partner states of Uganda, Kenya and Burundi. Despite having a strategic interest in Somalia, none of the Gulf states contributed troops to the mission. Therefore, with the expected drawdown of the ATMIS force in Somalia, the burden could fall on the EAC to fill in the vacuum. Building on the experience of deploying in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, it is highly likely that it could be called upon to do the same in Somalia when ATMIS exits by 2024.

The presence of the Al Shabaab group in Somalia is an albatross around its neck such that the country cannot be admitted into the EAC without factoring in the risks posed by the group.

According to a report by the International Crisis Group, the government of Somalia must move to consolidate these gains – especially in central Somalia – as it continues with its offensive in other regions. However, Somalia may not prevail over the Al Shabaab on its own; it may require a regional effort and perhaps this is the rationale some policymakers within the EAC have envisioned. If the EAC can offer assurances to Somalia’s fledgling security situation, then a collective security strategy from the bloc might be of significance.

Somalia’s admission comes with risks too. Kenya and Uganda have in the past experienced attacks perpetrated by Al Shabaab and, therefore, opening up their borders to Somalia is seen as a huge risk for these countries. The spillover effect of the group’s activities creates a lot of discomfort among EAC citizens, in particular those who believe that the region remains vulnerable to Al Shabaab attacks.

If the EAC can offer assurances to Somalia’s fledgling security situation, then a collective security strategy from the bloc might be of significance.

The EAC Treaty criteria under which a new member state may be admitted into the community include – but are not limited to – observance and practice of the principles of good governance, democracy and the rule of law. Critics believe that Somalia fulfils only one key requirement to be admitted to the bloc – sharing a border with an EAC partner state, namely, Kenya. On paper, it seems to be the least prepared when it comes to fulfilling the other requirements. The security situation remains fragile and the economy cannot support the annual payment obligations to the community.

According to the Fragility State Index, Somalia is ranked as one of the poorest among the 179 countries assessed. Among the key pending issues is the continued insecurity situation caused by decades of civil war and violent extremism. Furthermore, Human Rights Watch ranks Somalia low on human rights and justice – a breakdown of government institutions has rendered them ineffective in upholding the human rights of its citizens.

Somalia’s citizens have faced various forms of discrimination due to activities beyond their control back in their country. This has led to increasingly negative and suspicious attitudes towards Somalis and social media reactions to the possibility of Somalia joining the EAC have seen a spike in hostility towards citizens of Somalia. The country’s admission into the bloc could be met with hostility from the citizens of other partner states.

Dr Nicodemus Minde, an academic on peace and security, agrees that indeed citizens’ perceptions and attitudes will shape their behaviour towards Somalia’s integration. He argues that ”the admission of Somalia is a rushed process because it does not address the continued suspicion and negative perception among the EAC citizens towards the Somali people. Many citizens cite the admission of fragile states like South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as a gateway of instability to an already unstable region”.

Indeed, the biggest challenge facing the EAC has been how to involve the citizens in their activities and agenda. To address this challenge, Dr Minde says that ’’the EAC needs to conduct a lot of sensitisation around the importance of integration because to a large extent many EAC citizens have no clue on what regional integration is all about”. The idea of the EAC being a people-centred organisation as envisioned in the Treaty has not been actualised. The integration process remains very elitist as it is the heads of state that determine and set the agenda.

The country’s admission into the bloc could be met with hostility from the citizens of other partner states.

Dr Khannenje offers a counter-narrative, arguing that public perception is not a major point of divergence since “as the economies integrate deeper, some of these issues will become easy to solve”. There are also those who believe that the reality within the EAC is that every member state has issues with one or the other partner state and, therefore, Somalia will be in perfect company.

A report by the Economic Policy Research Centre outlines the various avenues through which both the EAC and Somalia can benefit from the integration process and observes that there is therefore a need to fast-track the process because the benefits far outweigh the risks.

EAC integration is built around the spirit of good neighbourliness. It is against this backdrop that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has extended the goodwill to join the EAC and therefore, it should not be vilified and condemned, but rather embraced.  As Onyango Obbo has observed, Somalia is not joining the EAC – Somalia is already part of the EAC and does not need any formal welcoming.

Many critics have argued that the EAC has not learnt from the previous rush to admit conflict-plagued South Sudan and the DRC. However, the reality is that Somalia will not be in conflict forever; at some point, there will be tranquillity and peace. Furthermore, a keen look at the history of the EAC member states shows that a number of them have experienced cycles of conflict in the past.

Somalia is, therefore, not unique. Internal contradictions and conflict are some of the key features that Somalia shares with most of the EAC member states. The process of integrating Somalia into the EAC should, therefore, be undertaken with long-term success in mind rather than in the light of the situation currently prevailing in the country.

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Politics

The Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Kenya

Kenya is one of Israel’s closest allies in Africa. But the Ruto-led government isn’t alone in silencing pro-Palestinian speech.

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The Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Kenya
Photo: Image courtesy of Kenyans4Palestine © 2023.
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Israel has been committing genocide against the people of Occupied Palestine for 75 years and this has intensified over the last 30 days with the merciless carpet bombing of Gaza, along with raids and state-sanctioned settler violence in the West Bank. In the last month of this intensified genocide, the Kenyan government has pledged its solidarity to Israel, even as the African Union released a statement in support of Palestinian liberation. While peaceful marches have been successfully held in Kisumu and Mombasa, in Nairobi, Palestine solidarity organizers were forced to cancel a peaceful march that was to be held at the US Embassy on October 22. Police threatened that if they saw groups of more than two people outside the Embassy, they would arrest them. The march was moved to a private compound, Cheche Bookshop, where police still illegally arrested three people, one for draping the Palestinian flag around his shoulders. Signs held by children were snatched by these same officers.

When Boniface Mwangi took to Twitter denouncing the arrest, the response by Kenyans spoke of the success of years of propaganda by Israel through Kenyan churches. To the Kenyan populous, Palestine and Palestinians are synonymous with terrorism and Israel’s occupation of Palestine is its right. However, this Islamophobia and xenophobia from Kenyans did not spring from the eternal waters of nowhere. They are part of the larger US/Israel sponsored and greedy politician-backed campaign to ensure Kenyans do not start connecting the dots on Israel’s occupation of Palestine with the extra-judicial killings by Kenyan police, the current occupation of indigenous people’s land by the British, the cost-of-living crisis and the IMF debts citizens are paying to fund politician’s lavish lifestyles.

Kenya’s repression of Palestine organizing reflects Kenya’s long-standing allyship with Israel. The Kenyan Government has been one of Israel’s A-star pupils of repression and is considered to be Israel’s “gateway” to Africa. Kenya has received military funding and training from Israel since the 60s, and our illegal military occupation of Somalia has been funded and fueled by Israel along with Britain and the US. Repression, like violence, is not one dimensional; repression does not just destabilize and scatter organizers, it aims to break the spirit and replace it instead with apathy, or worse, a deep-seated belief in the rightness of oppression. In Israel’s architecture of oppression through repression, the Apartheid state has created agents of repression across many facets of Kenyan life, enacting propaganda, violence, race, and religion as tools of repression of Palestine solidarity organizing.

When I meet with Naomi Barasa, the Chair of the Kenya Palestine Solidarity Movement, she begins by placing Kenya’s repression of Palestine solidarity organizing in the context of Kenya as a capitalist state. “Imperialism is surrounded and buffered by capitalistic interest,” she states, then lists on her fingers the economic connections Israel has created with Kenya in the name of “technical cooperation.” These are in agriculture, security, business, and health; the list is alarming. It reminds me of my first memory of Israel (after the nonsense of the promised land that is)—about how Israel was a leader in agricultural and irrigation technologies. A dessert that flowed with milk and honey.

Here we see how propaganda represses, even before the idea of descent is born: Kenyans born in the 1990s grew up with an image of a benign, prosperous, and generous Christian Israel that just so happened to be unfortunate enough to be surrounded by Muslim states. Israel’s PR machine has spent 60 years convincing Kenyan Christians of the legitimacy of the nation-state of Israel, drawing false equivalences between Christianity and Zionism. This Janus-faced ideology was expounded upon by Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Michel Lotem, when he said “Religiously, Kenyans are attached to Israel … Israel is the holy land and they feel close to Israel.” The cog dizzy of it all is that Kenyan Christians, fresh from colonialism, are now Africa’s foremost supporters of colonialism and Apartheid in Israel. Never mind the irony that in 1902, Kenya was the first territory the British floated as a potential site for the resettlement of Jewish people fleeing the pogroms in Europe. This fact has retreated from public memory and public knowledge. Today, churches in Kenya facilitate pilgrimages to the holy land and wield Islamophobia as a weapon against any Christian who questions the inhumanity of Israel’s 75-year Occupation and ongoing genocide.

Another instrument of repression of pro-Palestine organizing in Kenya is the pressure put on Western government-funded event spaces to decline hosting pro-Palestine events. Zahid Rajan, a cultural practitioner and organizer, tells me of his experiences trying to find spaces to host events dedicated to educating Kenyans on the Palestinian liberation struggle. He recalls the first event he organized at Alliance Français, Nairobi in 2011. Alliance Français is one of Nairobi’s cultural hubs and regularly hosts art and cultural events at the space. When Zahid first approached Alliance to host a film festival for Palestinian films, they told him that they could not host this event as they already had (to this day) an Israeli film week. Eventually, they agreed to host the event with many restrictions on what could be discussed and showcased. Unsurprisingly they refused to host the event again. The Goethe Institute, another cultural hub in Kenya that offers its large hall for free for cultural events, has refused to host the Palestinian film festival or any other pro-Palestine event. Both Alliance and Goethe are funded by their parent countries, France and Germany respectively (which both have pro-Israel governments). There are other spaces and businesses that Zahid has reached out to host pro-Palestine education events that have, in the end, backtracked on their agreement to do so. Here, we see the evolution of state-sponsored repression to the private sphere—a public-private partnership on repression, if you will.

Kenya’s members of parliament took to heckling and mocking as a tool of repression when MP Farah Maalim wore an “Arafat” to Parliament on October 25. The Speaker asked him to take it off stating that it depicted “the colors of a particular country.” When Maalim stood to speak he asked: “Tell me which republic,” and an MP in the background could be heard shouting “Hamas” and heckling Maalim, such that he was unable to speak on the current genocide in Gaza. This event, seen in the context of Ambassador Michael Lotem’s charm offensive at the county and constituency level, is chilling. His most recent documented visit was to the MP of Kiharu, Ndindi Nyoro, on November 2. The Israeli propaganda machine has understood the importance of County Governors and MPs in consolidating power in Kenya.

Yet, in the face of this repression, we have seen what Naomi Barasa describes as “many pockets of ad hoc solidarity,” as well as organized solidarity with the Palestinian cause. We have seen Muslim communities gather for many years to march for Palestine, we have seen student movements such as the Nairobi University Student Caucus release statements for Palestine, and we have seen social justice centers such as Mathare Social Justice Centre host education and screening events on Palestinian liberation. Even as state repression of Palestine solidarity organizing has intensified in line with the deepening of state relations with Apartheid Israel, more Kenyans are beginning to connect the dots and see the reality that, as Mandela told us all those years ago, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians.

This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site every week.

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