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Kenya’s Opaque Procurement Deals: The Case of G4S

13 min read.

The opaqueness of public procurement may be losing Kenya much needed tax revenues that would greatly ease the tax burden on ordinary Kenyans.

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Kenya’s Opaque Procurement Deals: The Case of G4S
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In 2016, ActionAid and Tax Justice Network reported that Kenya loses an estimated KSh100 billion (Currently US$1 = KSh110) annually to tax incentives – reductions in corporate income tax, customs duties or VAT ostensibly provided to encourage investment – that often benefit foreign corporations. This amount represented 5.8 per cent of that year’s KSh1.7-trillion government budget.

That same year, former head of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) Philip Kinisu reported that Kenya loses about KSh600 million to corruption each year. At the time, this translated to about a third of the entire national budget. Earlier this year, the president said that over KSh2 billion is stolen every day from government coffers. Granted, this sparked quite the reaction on social media, but nobody really knows how much Kenya actually loses to graft. One of the main reasons for this is the opaqueness of public procurement.

For the government to provide services to the citizens of Kenya, it is at times necessary to contract with private entities to deliver goods or services. Indeed, the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act (Procurement Act) of 2015 provides a framework for efficient procurement by public entities. Under this framework, it is crucial that such procurement is conducted or implemented in a transparent manner. This is especially crucial when dealing with foreign-registered companies. Some may remember the story of CMC Ravenna, the Italian company that filed for bankruptcy in its own country shortly after it had received a KSh15 billion down payment by the Kenyan government for the construction of Arror, Kimwarer and Itare dams. The total value of the three contracts was KSh150 billion.

In 2013, Washington, DC-based think tank Global Financial Integrity (GFI) estimated that the Kenyan government lost potential revenues of KSh97 billion for the year to trade misinvoicing of which KSh21 billion was attributed to uncollected corporate income tax. Meanwhile, Kenya’s budget has been steadily increasing from KSh2.2 trillion for the 2015/16 financial year to KSh3 trillion for the 2019/20 financial year. And of course, most of the tax burden falls on ordinary Kenyans and is supplemented by heavy borrowing, which citizens eventually have to pay for.

So, how is it that multinational corporations are able to siphon so much money out of the country? And why is it that our government keeps dealing with them? To answer this question, I looked into one well-known multinational company with a strong base of operations here in Kenya: G4S.

Public procurement transparency and the case of G4S

Why G4S, you ask? G4S, recently acquired by Allied Universal for £3.8 billion (Currently £1 = KSh150), is a giant global multinational corporation. The world’s largest security firm, it is active in over 90 countries across six continents. In 2019 it reported annual revenues of £7.8 billion, equivalent to 40 per cent of Kenya’s budget and about 60 per cent of the government’s projected tax revenues for the same year. This figure is expected to shoot up to £13.5 billion following the acquisition. In Africa, where it is the largest private employer, the firm reported revenues of £405 million in 2018, which is roughly equal to the Kenyan government’s entire allocation to the health sector that year. Their most lucrative operations on the continent were in South Africa and Kenya.

Half the company’s global subsidiaries are registered in tax havens — a red flag for tax avoidance — and its Kenyan subsidiary is almost wholly owned by a Dutch holding company. Despite this, G4S has been awarded several contracts by public entities in Kenya such as Kenya Power, the Ministry of Energy, and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). All this, combined with the presence of two prominent politicians on G4S Kenya’s Board of Directors, makes it the perfect case study of why we need more transparency in public procurement.

Poor track record

The company has a poor track record in several of the countries in which it operates. In the United Kingdom where it has its headquarters, G4S was in 2011 contracted to run Birmingham Prison for a period of 15 years. However, halfway into the contract period, in 2018, the British government had to take back control of the prison following a rise in violence, substance abuse, and three self-inflicted deaths within an 18-month period. The company also came under fire in 2011 after a Kenyan asylum seeker died while in their custody, just a year after an Angolan deportee died after being held down by three G4S guards on a plane, with fellow passengers hearing him cry out: “I can’t breathe”.

In Jordan, all six United Nations agencies reportedly cancelled their contracts with the firm after human rights activists highlighted the firm’s complicity in “Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian rights and international law through its partnership with Israel’s police.” A 2019 assessment of G4S’s operations in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates led to Norway’s US$1.1 trillion wealth fund, the largest in the world, excluding the company from its investments because of “unacceptable risk that the company contributes to, or is responsible, for serious or systematic human rights violations”.

The company also came under fire in 2011 after a Kenyan asylum seeker died while in its custody.

In Africa, the company has been implicated in the use of violence, including electrocution and beatings, to subdue prisoners in South Africa’s Mangaung prison. Here in Kenya, G4S has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Some readers may remember the string of robberies back in 2011 that earned them the moniker “Gone in 40 Seconds”. In 2019, part of the KSh72 million cash in transit stolen from G4S by police impersonators was found buried in one of the perpetrators’ father-in-law’s backyard. A former employee was awarded KSh35 million in damages after being fired for rejecting the sexual advances of her superior. The company’s workers have repeatedly gone on strike due to low pay and inhumane working conditions. G4S security personnel beat up and caused grievous harm to refugees picketing outside UNHCR offices in Nairobi, and there have been accusations of G4S security personnel demanding bribes from refugees in Daadab seeking entry into the main UNHCR compound.

Government contracts

Yet despite all the negative publicity, the Kenyan government keeps entrusting G4S with taxpayer money through contracts that are not published in accordance with public procurement and access to information laws. In many jurisdictions, the principles of public accountability demand transparency in government spending, with very few exceptions, for example, on matters of national security.

Private companies in Kenya are legally entitled to a measure of confidentiality and the Access to Information Act does not expressly impose proactive disclosure obligations on private bodies. However, according to the Commission for Administrative Justice (the Ombudsman), “the requirements [of the Act] can be extended to private bodies that receive public resources and benefits, provide public services or [are] in possession of important public information”.

In any case, both Kenya’s Access to Information Act and a 2018 Executive Order from the President require all government agencies to “maintain and continuously update and publicise . . . complete information of all tenders awarded”.

Source: Executive Order No. 2 of 2018 – Procurement of public goods, works and services by public entities

Source: Executive Order No. 2 of 2018 – Procurement of public goods, works and services by public entities

At the very least, one would expect government entities to publish their tender adverts and awards on the public procurement information portal (PPIP), which was created for exactly that purpose. However, when I went to search for contracts awarded to G4S, I only found two published contracts – one of very low value and one that did not even indicate the contract amount.

Source: https://tenders.go.ke/website/Suppliers/SupplierDetails/7173

Source: https://tenders.go.ke/website/Suppliers/SupplierDetails/7173

If the news articles and press releases on their website are anything to go by, G4S does a substantial amount of business with the government of Kenya, so a search on the PPIP should have yielded more results. This definitely heightened my curiosity even more, so I went a step further and conducted a good ‘ole google search: “Government contracts awarded to G4S” – I used different variations of the same search phrase, and while I found more results, none of them appeared on the PPIP.

For example, Kenya Power, the state corporation in charge of distributing electricity, has been consistently publishing each month’s tender awards on their website since March 2018. They published two awards to G4S in December 2019 and March 2020 worth KSh2,693,520 and KSh117,302,726 respectively. This is one example of a public entity that meets the legal threshold of publication under section 138 of the Procurement Act and section 131 of its attendant Regulations of 2020. However, it is unclear whether failure to publish on the portal would attract any penalty. The Ombudsman, which has been mandated with enforcing the Access to Information Act, did not respond to my query on this issue.

Additionally, G4S reported on its website that the Ministry of Energy awarded them the contract to secure the Lake Turkana Wind Farm Project (LTWFP), Africa’s largest wind power project. The details and value of the contract are undisclosed and unpublished. There are also several internet search results indicating various direct contract awards to G4S Kenya between 2015 and 2019, but the links are broken. None of these contracts has been published on either the Procurement Portal or the Ministry’s website, which is the minimum requirement for publication.

G4S Contracts
The two internet search results below also indicate that the Ministry of Energy may have awarded at least two contracts to G4S Kenya in 2017 and 2018. As with the above however, the links are inaccessible. They are also not on the PPIP or the Ministry’s website.

G4S Contracts
When I sent an email to the Ministry of Energy requesting copies of documents containing information on the total number of contracts awarded by the Ministry of Energy to G4S Kenya Ltd or any of its affiliates between 2014 and 2019, the Ministry’s response was, “Please note that we do not have such documents.” A follow-up request was ignored.

G4S also reported being awarded a 2-year contract worth KSh81 million to store, secure and deliver laptops to 8,600 primary schools under the digital literacy programme through which the president had promised to issue each standard one pupil with a laptop. Again, this tender award was not published by the public entities involved. However, I dug further and found that the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) had published an article on their website indicating that they would be partnering with G4S and four other institutions to implement this project.

G4S’s role in this consortium was to distribute the devices to the schools. I wanted to understand how JKUAT, a public institution, arrived at the decision to contract G4S for this public project, and so I sent an information request to the corporate email indicated on their website. To their credit, I received an instant response from one Dr Ngonyo, directing me to the “directorate concerned who will be in a position to respond” to my enquiry. The email that I was given was not functional, and so I wrote him again, requesting an alternative email. Again, he replied instantly. This time, the email he shared did go through, but I have not received a response to date, not even an acknowledgement of receipt.

The digital literacy project ultimately fell short of expectations, with problems such as fewer devices being delivered than had been promised, lack of complementary infrastructure such as electricity, and inadequate ICT training of teachers. In the wake of COVID-19, the entire 2020 school year was cancelled, and public school pupils lacked the resources, or devices, to proceed with e-learning.

I also had the advantage of accessing a data leak from the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMIS), a financial management system that was rolled out by the government to enhance transparency and accountability in public procurement. The data showed that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) made payments of KSh5,548,930 to G4S between 2014 and 2017. These contracts have neither been published on the procurement portal nor in the IEBC’s reports. For instance, the IEBC’s annual report for the 2014/15 financial year included, on page 67, a list of all contracts fully executed between June 2014 and June 2015. There is no mention of contracts for the provision of security services, yet the IFMIS data shows that a total of KSh3,260,280 was paid to G4S between 28th October 2014 and 31st March 2015.

So what’s their secret?

As part of my research, I interviewed the operations manager of another established private security company operating in Kenya. Wishing to remain anonymous to protect the company’s business, my contact said that it is difficult to get government contracts, which are mostly awarded based on political connections. The manager indicated that many private security companies in Kenya are owned by ex-police officers and MPs, which gives them an advantage when bidding for government contracts.

I was unable to verify this information given that beneficial ownership disclosure was not legally required at the time of this investigation. This has recently changed, and companies had until 31st January 2021 to update their beneficial ownership information with the Registrar of Companies. However, by the time of this publication, it is not yet possible for citizens to submit beneficial ownership requests through the eCitizen platform. Companies have now been granted a grace period up to 31st July 2021 before the Registrar starts enforcing for non-compliance.

However, through the PPIP and the official companies search available on the eCitizen platform, I was able to determine that at least two politicians sit on G4S Kenya Limited’s board.

The first is Moody Awori, a 92-year old veteran politician who once served as Vice President under President Kibaki. He also served as MP for Funyala Constituency and as Minister of Home Affairs. He is credited with introducing prison reforms that improved conditions for inmates, but he was also implicated in the Anglo Leasing corruption scandal. According to his autobiography, Riding on a Tiger, Awori was appointed to the board of G4S, then Securicor Services, soon after it was registered in Kenya in 1963. In June 2021 he was still listed by the PPIP as one of the company’s directors.

1 Accessed from https://tenders.go.ke/SupplierDisplay on 24.06.2021

1. Accessed from https://tenders.go.ke/SupplierDisplay on 24.06.2021

According to former Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics John Githongo’s Anglo-Leasing report, the department of immigration was directly under Awori’s purview. He authorised a contract for printing of passports that was allegedly inflated to three times the cost. Even after a due diligence check by Mr Githongo and then Minister of Energy Hon. Kiraitu Murungi revealed that the contracted company did not exist, he authorised payments anyway. Awori still insisted he did no wrong and refused to resign from his position. At the time of this publication, the contents of the Anglo-Leasing report are the subject of a court dispute.

2. Excerpt from the Anglo Leasing Report

2. Excerpt from the Anglo Leasing Report

The second G4S Kenya director is John Matere Keriri, who was an active politician from the late 80s up until 2007. He was voted in as MP for Kirinyaga Central Constituency, formerly known as Kerugoya/Kutus Constituency in 1997, and was appointed as State House Comptroller by President Kibaki in 2002. Just before his dismissal from State House in 2004, he was approached by Dutch businessman Carlo van Wagenigen to assist with getting government approval for feasibility studies and government guarantees against financial risk for a business idea that would later become the Lake Turkana Wind Farm Project (LTWFP). According to Wagenigen’s account, his “good friend” Keriri set up a meeting with then Permanent Secretary for Energy Patrick Nyoike, who gave the green light for the project.

There is no mention of contracts for the provision of security services, yet the IFMIS data shows that a total of KSh3,260,280 was paid to G4S.

Upon his dismissal from State House in 2004, Keriri was appointed the Executive Chair of the Electricity Regulatory Board (ERB), which was succeeded by the Energy Regulatory Commission, and subsequently by the current Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority. The ERB was established to regulate the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power in Kenya. This included setting, reviewing, and adjusting tariffs, as well as approving electric power purchase contracts between and among electric power producers and public electricity suppliers.

Incidentally, the power purchase agreement between LTWFP and the Kenyan government included a take-or-pay clause that saw taxpayers foot the bill for a KSh1 billion fine when the government delayed in building a transmission line to connect the wind farm to the national grid. The World Bank had earlier expressed concern over this clause that would burden consumers, and withdrew its support in 2012. According to Biashara Energy Solutions Ltd, a renewable energy SME where Keriri was a director, he was “one of the Chief Financial Advisors for Turkana Wind Power project who is attributed for structuring new financing model after the announcement of the World Bank to pull out of the project financing.”

Two years later, after almost a decade of feasibility studies and investment negotiations, project construction started and G4S announced that they had been awarded a contract by the Ministry of Energy to secure the wind farm on a three-year rolling basis for a period of 15 years. Available records show that Matere Keriri joined the board of G4S Kenya Ltd a year later, sitting from 2015 to 2017, though a search at the Company Registry conducted in May 2020 indicated that Keriri was still on the board. G4S has won tenders from the Ministry of Energy, under which the ERC falls, during Keriri’s tenure on its board. The details of these contracts, including the monetary value, are only visible as internet search results whose links are broken. They have not been published on the PPIP or the Ministry’s website as per the public procurement transparency requirements.

This should matter. The lack of information on contracts awarded to G4S and their monetary value obscures a high risk of conflicts of interest or, worse, may indicate that collusion, cronyism, kickbacks, or some other form of corruption was instrumental in G4S’s financial success. The Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act tries to prevent this by prohibiting public officers from taking part in any procurement process in which they have an interest, and also expressly forbids inappropriate influence in procurement decisions.

Under section 176 of the Act, any person found guilty of violating this law faces up to 10 years of imprisonment or a fine of up to KSh4 million, or both. Should the offending party be a body corporate, then a fine of KSh10 million will apply. The Act also requires procuring entities to publish tender notices and awards. This means that any public entity that has failed to publish contracts awarded to G4S and other public entities is in breach of the law. However, the Act is unclear on whether this is a punishable offence.

Source: Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act, No. 33 of 2015

Source: Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act, No. 33 of 2015

Given the lack of publicly available information, Kenyan citizens have no way of checking whether they are getting the best value for their money with regard to these contracts.

G4S’s questionable corporate structure

According to records filed with the Company Registrar, G4S Kenya Ltd is 82 per cent owned by a Dutch holding company. In the world of financial crime and illicit financial flows, “Dutch holding company” is a red flag for tax avoidance. The snapshot below shows that the G4S structure comprises of a series of subsidiaries and holding companies ultimately owned by G4S plc based in the United Kingdom.

Source: G4S Company Scan by The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO)

Source: G4S Company Scan by The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO)

This should concern Kenyan taxpayers. This company structure raises questions of tax planning and tax avoidance, especially since Oxfam ranked the Netherlands third out of fifteen countries that “facilitate the most extreme forms of corporate tax avoidance”. The European Parliament has also labelled it a tax haven. Corporate tax havens have been known to help big business cheat countries out of billions of dollars every year and in fact, a 2016 study by Oxfam Kenya shows how companies in the extractives industry use conduit companies in the Netherlands for tax avoidance.

If public procurement continues to be shrouded in secrecy, then citizens will have no way of finding out whether G4S and other multinationals are indeed cheating the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) out of much-needed taxes, or whether they are relying on political patronage to win government contracts paid for by taxpayer money.

The need to strengthen the access to information regime in Kenya

When I reached out to G4S to clarify some of the points raised in this article, they told me that I had no written authority to write about G4S, and should I attempt to publish anything without their written authority, it would “cost me”. When private companies have dealings with the government, when they have prominent politicians sitting on their board of directors, and when they play critical public roles such as the provision of security, then citizens and especially journalists should have the right to look into their affairs, and the veil of secrecy ought to be lifted.

There is a need to demand increased accountability for companies that conduct business with government agencies. Without full disclosure, there is a potential risk that Kenya may be losing much needed tax revenues that would greatly ease the tax burden on ordinary Kenyans.

In the world of financial crime and illicit financial flows, “Dutch holding company” is a red flag for tax avoidance.

I also contacted the Commission on Administrative Justice, otherwise known as the Ombudsman, the agency in charge of enforcing the Access to Information Act of 2016. After my requests for information to JKUAT and the Ministry of Energy were denied, I asked the Ombudsman whether they could offer any redress mechanisms to citizens who are denied their right to information, or if government agencies faced any penalty for failure to disclose information. Ironically, I was informed that I had to write a formal letter on the letterhead of the organisation that I represented, which would then go through their internal processes before eventually landing on the relevant officer’s desk. As of the writing of this article, my request is still pending. Nonetheless, the Ombudsman indicated through their official twitter account that requests for information are valid as long as they provide sufficient details of the information sought. Furthermore, such requests do not have to be in writing.

Unless the government starts respecting the constitutional right of access to information, we shall continue to lose billions that could have gone towards the public good, such as for example, providing social services in education, healthcare, or social welfare cushions for small business owners that have been hit hard by the COVID-19 control measures.

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Jacqueline Wahome is a freelance writer and journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

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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Only Connect: Human Beings Must Connect to Survive

We must fight to remain human, to make connections across borders, race, religion, class, gender, and all the false divisions that exist in our world. We must show solidarity with one another, and believe we can construct another kind of world.

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UK-Rwanda Asylum Pact: Colonial Era Deportations are Back in Vogue
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24 November 2021. We wake to the news that 27 migrants have drowned in the English Channel.

“Stop the boats!” cry the Tories. It’s the hill British Prime Minister Sunak has chosen to die on. But there is no political will to stop the wider crisis of global migration, driven by conflict, poverty, persecution, repressive regimes, famine, climate change, and the rest. Moreover, there is zero understanding that the West is behind many of the reasons why people flee their homes in the first place. Take Afghanistan, a useless Allied war that went nowhere. It left the Taliban more powerful than ever. Afghans who worked for the British army, betrayed when our forces pulled out. Now they make up the majority of cross-Channel migrants.

Not for them the welcome we gave Ukrainians. Wrong skin colour, maybe? Wrong religion? Surely not.

Some right-wingers rejoice at news of these deaths. “Drown ’em all!” they cry on social media. “Bomb the dinghies!” There are invariably photos of cute cats and dogs in their profiles. Have you noticed how much racists and fascists love pets? Lots of ex-servicemen among them, who fail to see the link between the failed wars they fought, and the migration crisis these spawned. The normalisation of a false reality is plain to see. Politicians and the media tell folk that black is white, often in meaningless three-word slogans, and the masses believe it. Migrants, especially those who arrive in small boats, are routinely labelled criminals, murderers, rapists, invaders, Muslims intent on imposing Islam on the UK, and “young men of fighting age”, which implies that they are a standing army.

If you bother to look beyond the stereotypes, the reality is very different.

One couple’s story

Riding those same waves, a year or so later, are two Iranian Kurds. A young couple. Let’s call them Majid and Sayran. They have sadly decided not to have children, in 12 years of marriage, because they believe Iran is no place to bring up children. Activists who oppose the regime, they were forced to flee after receiving direct threats. They ran an environmental NGO, and held Kurdish cultural events that are banned in Iran.

The husband, Majid, a writer, first fled to Iraq in 2021. He and his wife were parted for 18 months. She eventually joined him in a Kurdish area of Iraq. They were forced to flee again, when the Iranian regime bombed the homes and offices of political dissidents in Iraq, killing and wounding many of their friends. They decided their only hope was to head for Britain via Turkey, Italy and France. They paid people smugglers around USD30,000 in total. They eventually ended up in a hotel in my home town. Their story continues below.

Feeling powerless

Meanwhile, there I am sitting at home in the UK, getting more and more enraged about my government’s attitude and policies on immigration. I feel powerless. I think about refugees living in an asylum hotel in my town. I’m told many of them are Muslim, now trying to celebrate Ramadan. I picture them breaking their fasts on hotel food, which relies heavily on chips and other cheap junk. I meet some of them in the queue at the town’s so-called community fridge, where I used to volunteer. I chat a little to Majid, who can speak some English. I try to find out why they are there. The “fridge” gives out food donated by supermarkets to anyone in need. The food would otherwise be thrown away because it’s about to reach its sell-by date. The refugees go there, they tell me, to get fresh stuff because the hotel food is so awful. I can sense the growing resentment from locals in the queue, who want to put “Britain first”.

Thinking, thinking. Then I berate myself. I should take action, however small. Get down to the supermarket, buy food for, say, six families. I can’t feed everyone, but let’s start somewhere. Food that people from the Middle East (the majority of the hotel residents) will like. Hummus, flatbreads, dates, olives, nuts, rice. Divide it into six bags. I don’t know how I will be received (I feel rather nervous), but let’s give it a go.

I can sense the growing resentment from locals in the queue, who want to put “Britain first”.

The hotel manager is cagey. (I am later banned. He and his female head of security are rude and hostile, but that’s still to come.) For now, he lets me in to distribute the food. Luckily, I spot Majid, just the person I’m looking for. I recognise him from the “fridge” queue. He can translate for the others, who quickly gather in the lobby. The food is snatched within minutes, people are delighted with it. (It turns out Majid and his wife are atheists. But they get some food too.)

I didn’t do this for the thanks. But I’m glad I made that first move. Taking it further, I invite them both round for a meal. I spend hours making Persian rice, it’s a big hit. My new friends fall on the spread like ravening wolves. One thing leads to another. We start to meet regularly. It helps that they have some English, which greatly improves as the weeks pass and they go to classes. They are thrilled by everyday things – walks in the country, pizza, a local fair, being taken to see the film Oppenheimer. (“We were amazed to see so many British people go to the movies!”) They tell me they are delighted simply to make contact, to see how ordinary people live, to be invited into my, and my friends’ homes. I tell them I have plenty to learn from them, too. We get a bit tearful. I say hi to Sayran’s mum on the phone in Iran. We also laugh a lot. Majid has a black sense of humour.

At first, I don’t ask about their experience of crossing the Channel. All I know is that the entire journey, from Iran to Britain, was deeply traumatic. Until now, months later, when I ask Majid to describe what happened.

Majid picks up the story of their journey in Turkey: “The most bitter memories of my life were witnessing my wife’s tiredness, fear and anxiety as we walked for nine hours to reach Istanbul. I saw my wife cry from exhaustion and fear many times, and I myself cried inside. In a foreign country without a passport, our only hope was luck, and our only way was to accept hardship because we had no way back. The most bitter thing in this or any refugee journey is that no one gives any help or support to his fellow traveller.  The smallest issue turns into a big tension.”

To reach the sea, where they would take a boat to Italy, they walked through dense pine forests. “There were about 30 of us in this group and none of us knew each other. We passed through the forest with extreme anxiety and fear of being arrested by the ruthless Turkish police. We were all afraid that some babies who were tied tightly on their father’s shoulders would cry and the police would find us. But as soon as we stepped into the forest, all the children became silent due to their instinct and sense of danger.  They didn’t make a single sound all the way. We were in the forest for about 12 hours, and reached the beach by 8 a.m. Here we were joined by several other groups of refugees; by now we were more than 100 people.”

The week-long journey to Italy in a 12-meter “pleasure” boat carrying 55 people was terrifying. “As the boat moved towards the deep parts of the sea, fear and anxiety took over everyone. The fear of the endless sea, and worse, the fear of being caught by Turkish patrols, weighed heavily on everyone’s mind. The boat moved at the highest speed at night, and this speed added to the intensity of the waves hitting the hull of the boat.  Waves, waves, waves have always been a part of the pulse of travellers.  As the big waves moved the boat up and down, the sound of screams and shouts would merge with the Arabic words of prayers of old, religious passengers. I can say that there is no scene in hell more horrific than this journey.  It was near sunset when several passengers shouted: ‘Land! Land!’”

On the way to France, they somehow lost their backpacks. All their possessions gone. Moving fast forward, they found themselves in yet another forest, this time close to the French coast.

“For the first time, I felt that the whole idea I had about Europe and especially the French was a lie. Nowhere in the underdeveloped and insecure countries of the Middle East would a couple be driven to the wrong address at night, in the cold, without proper clothing.  But what can be done when you illegally enter a country whose language you do not know? It was almost 2 o’clock in the morning. The sound of the wind and the trees reminded us of horror scenes in the movies. It was hard to believe that we were so helpless in a European country on that dark, cold and rainy night.” He collected grass and tree leaves to make a “warm and soft nest.  I felt like we were two migratory birds that had just arrived in this forest.” Eventually they found what they were looking for – a refugee camp. The next step was to try and cross the Channel.

“I can say that there is no scene in hell more horrific than this journey.”

“We reached the beach. The sky was overcast and it was almost sunset. A strange fear and deadly apprehension gripped all the poor refugees in that space between the sky, the earth and the sea.” A smugglers’ car brought a dinghy and dumped it on the beach before quickly driving away. It was no better than a rubber tube. The refugees filled it with air, and attached a small engine. “They stuck 55 people in that tube.” The dinghy went round in circles and ended up on another part of the French coast. Many people decided to disembark at this point, leaving 18 passengers.

“Women and children were wailing and crying. The children looked at the sea dumbfounded.  Men argued with each other and sometimes arguments turned into fights.  The boat was not balanced. I was writhing in pain from headaches, while my wife’s face was yellow and pale because of the torment.”

At last a ship approached, shining bright floodlights at the dinghy. It belonged to the British coast guard.  “When they threw the life rope towards our plastic boat, we were relieved that we were saved from death.”

Hotel life

My friends tell me about conditions at the hotel. Grim. Food that is often inedible, especially for vegetarians like them. They send me photos of soya chunks and chips. Residents are banned from cooking in their rooms, or even having a fridge. Majid and Sayran have sneaked in a rice steamer and something to fry eggs on. (They have to hide them when the cleaners come round.)  Kids have no toys and nowhere to play except in the narrow corridors. Everyone is depressed and bored, waiting for months, sometimes years, to hear the result of their asylum claims.

Majid takes up the story: “Due to the lack of toys and entertainment, the boys gather around the security guards and help them in doing many small tasks. The image of refugee children going to school on cold and rainy mornings is the most painful image of refugees in this developed country.  In schools, language problems make refugee children isolated and depressed in the first few years.  What can be the situation of a pregnant woman, or a woman whose baby has just been born, with an unemployed husband, and poor nutrition, in a very small room in this hotel? Imagine yourself.  Many elderly people here suffer from illnesses such as rheumatism, knee swelling, and high blood sugar.  But many times when they ask for a change in the food situation or request to transfer somewhere else, they are ridiculed by the hotel staff.  One day, a widow who had no food left for her and was given frozen food, went to the hotel management office with her daughter to protest. But one of the security guards took the food container from this woman’s hand and threw it on the office floor in front of her child.  Now that little girl is afraid and hates all the security.”

“When they threw the life rope towards our plastic boat, we were relieved that we were saved from death.”

Yet racists rant about migrants living it up in five-star hotels costing the taxpayer £8 million a day. They don’t think or care about how we got here: the Tories let the asylum backlog soar, by failing to process asylum claims in a timely fashion. Some of us cynically wonder if this was deliberate. The number of people awaiting an initial decision is now 165,411. This compares to 27,048 asylum applications, including dependents, between January and September 2015, before the UK left the European Union.

I’ve done what I can. Lobbied the Home office to improve the food and conditions. I eventually got a reply, both from them and the catering contractor. Wrote to my MP, local councillors, inter-agency bodies that monitor conditions in hotels, migrant organisations, the press. We have had some success. There is a lot more to do.

I ask my friends if the threat of being deported to Rwanda (a key plank of the UK’s asylum policy) might have deterred them from coming. Or if anything would have stopped them. Majid replies: “Not at all! Because everywhere in this world is better than Iran for life. Especially for me, I have a deep problem with the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They threatened me with death over the phone.”

Making sense of the world

World news has become unbearable to read, watch or listen to. Once a news junkie, I increasingly find myself switching off. I’m equally appalled by the widespread apathy, even among friends who were once politically engaged. Then there is all the dog whistling our government does, in language that echoes that of the far right. Ministers and MPs have shamelessly whipped up suspicion, hatred, and fear of the Other. “Cruella” Braverman was one of the worst offenders, but at least she is no longer Home Secretary. Her “dream” of deporting refugees to Rwanda (her words) has become a nightmare for Sunak. Both are of East African Asian heritage.

Ministers and MPs have shamelessly whipped up suspicion, hatred, and fear of the Other.

This may sound trite, but we must struggle to remain human, and make connections where we can – across borders, race, religion, class, gender, all the false divisions that exist in our world. We have to keep lobbying those in power, and going on protest marches. We must show solidarity with one another. We have to believe we can construct another kind of world, pole pole, from the bottom up. A kinder world would help, for starters. It can begin in very small ways.

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