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BP Millions Promised to Offshore Firm Run by Angolan Tycoon Accused of Corruption

13 min read.

The investigation was based on hundreds of pages of confidential files provided by Jonathan Taylor, a former SBM lawyer turned whistle-blower. The documents include emails, contracts, legal advice and corporate intelligence reports. Journalists also had access to hours of secret audio recordings of SBM crisis meetings.

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BP Millions Promised to Offshore Firm Run by Angolan Tycoon Accused of Corruption
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British oil major BP paid $100 million to cancel a shipyard construction project in Angola only for a third of the money to be promised to a Panamanian company run by a powerful and allegedly corrupt Angolan official, according to whistle-blower documents seen by Finance Uncovered.

The documents shine new light on the enormous influence of oil executives at the top of Angola’s state-owned oil company Sonangol, who have for decades acted as gatekeepers to Sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest hydrocarbon reserves.

After cancelling an order for floating oil platforms from the Paenal shipyard in Angola, BP wired its cancellation fee in November 2011 to SBM Offshore N.V., a specialist construction company that had been developing the yard and preparing to lead the build.

Two months later, SBM signed a contract agreeing that, after deducting certain costs, the remaining $70.3 million would be shared, on an equal basis, between it and a secretive Panamanian company called Sonangol International Inc (SII).

There is no suggestion this agreement was reached with BP’s knowledge or consent.

The 50-50 split had been verbally requested by Baptista Sumbe, who was then a top executive at Sonangol, according to SBM documents. Sumbe was also president, chief executive, secretary and treasurer of SII, as well as being the sole signatory for at least one of its bank accounts, according to filings on the Panama corporate register.

More concerning still — and initially unbeknown to SBM’s newly promoted chief executive Bruno Chabas — SBM had been quietly paying millions of dollars in “commissions” to a second Panamanian company run by Sumbe, called Mardrill Inc, without anything in return. This shocking revelation, which later featured in multiple court cases, was discovered by SBM’s lawyers conducting an internal investigation in early 2012 following an unrelated tip off.

This history of bribes to Mardrill had for years been kept a closely held secret, known only to former SBM chief executives and few, if any, others inside SBM, papers in a Swiss court case would later explain. In January 2012, Chabas (left) did not know about it when he signed the agreement to pay $35 million to SII — though he found out days later.

At that point, having learned that Sumbe was suspected of corruption, the SBM boss could have halted the payment and torn up the contract with SII.

Finance Uncovered asked SBM whether, despite its concerning discoveries, it still went ahead and paid $35 million to SII in 2012. The company declined to answer.

In a statement, SBM said Finance Uncovered was asking about “dated issues… the company has long put behind it”. It added: “[Our] legacy issues have been widely reported on for years and have been resolved with multiple authorities around the globe. In 2012 a complete new management team took over.”

The trail of money and promises, leading from BP to Panama, was unearthed in a collaborative investigation involving: Finance Uncovered, De Telegraaf in the Netherlands, Expresso in Portugal and The Telegraph in the United Kingdom.

The investigation was based on hundreds of pages of confidential files provided by Jonathan Taylor, a former SBM lawyer turned whistle-blower. The documents include emails, contracts, legal advice and corporate intelligence reports. Journalists also had access to hours of secret audio recordings of SBM crisis meetings.

Taylor has separately passed documents to the Serious Fraud Office and has said he is willing to share the same files with prosecutors in other countries.

Together, these files provide a front-row view of SBM’s tortuous deliberations as it was forced, on the one hand, to face up to a past built on bribes, while, on the other hand, seeking to remain in favour with some of the most corrupt regimes in the world.

Sumbe’s request that SBM share half the money received from BP sounded simple enough, but it sent the $3.3 billion construction company, listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange, into a spin. Without a written contract that entitled Sonangol or SII to those funds, Chabas and the SBM legal team feared such a payment could look like a bribe.

Justifying the payment

SBM decided it needed to come up with a justification before handing over the funds — a rationale that could be set out in a formal contract.

Whistleblower documents reveal executives explored multiple proposals, consulting with three law firms and hiring corporate intelligence firm Kroll to carry out background checks. Finally, a summary of the planned payment was sent to non-executives on SBM’s audit committee for sign off.

The result was a January 2012 contract, signed by Sumbe and Chabas, which, at first glance, appeared to be one of the most polished and scrutinised agreements SBM had contemplated in years.

But investigations by Finance Uncovered and its media partners have cast the agreement in a different light.

One of the main justifications SBM put forward for its decision to pay SII was that the Panamanian company was being reimbursed for money wasted on developing the Paenal yard in preparation for BP’s oil platform order. But whistleblower documents show SII did not incur any meaningful expenses at the shipyard; much of the costs were instead financed by a loan from SBM.

SBM also argued that the money from BP ought to be evenly shared with SII because the Dutch construction firm had regularly split joint venture income with Sonangol companies in this manner since the 1990s. However, the Paenal yard was not a 50-50 joint venture. SBM and SII each had only one-third stakes in the holding company that controlled Paenal. The remaining one-third was owned by Korean company Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co.

A spokesperson for DSME told Finance Uncovered she was unable to find evidence that the Korean company knew of the $100 million from BP, or SBM’s plans to split it with SII.

As well as putting forward seemingly misleading justifications for the planned £35m payments to SII, SBM appeared not to have heeded warnings contained in early legal advice. For example, lawyers from Berwin Leighton Paisner, now part of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, recommended SBM should take steps to ensure funds not reach Sonangol or its executives.

One BLP lawyer wrote: “From the materials we have reviewed, it is not clear what (if any) financial or other risk Sonangol itself has taken in connection with Paenal Yard which would justify its receipt of any portion of the [BP cancellation fee].”

He added: “Absent a clear, contractual entitlement to these funds, any payment made to Sonangol itself would risk being perceived (at best) as an unjustified ‘windfall’ and (at worst) as a payment which may have some corrupt intent given the recipient, the power it wields in Angola and the risk that these ‘windfall’ funds could be paid onwards to government officials.”

Confronting the past

Days after Chabas signed the agreement to pay SII, SBM received news that plunged the company into crisis. One of its customers, the U.S. gas company Noble Energy, had found emails on a laptop suggesting that a former SBM sales executive, who had left years earlier to set up a consultancy firm, knew about suspicious gifts which could amount to bribes — and could be linked to SBM.

Worse still, discreet investigations by SBM’s legal department, codenamed “Project Pandora”, quickly found that concerns raised by Noble were the tip of an iceberg. Bribery at SBM was widespread. And one of the hotspots was Angola, where the inquiries suggested SBM had channeled millions of dollars in bribes to Mardrill, one of the Panamanian companies run by Sumbe.

Despite these revelations, however, Chabas appeared to see no reason to tear up SBM’s contract with SII and break its promise to pay $35 million.

Secret audio recordings reveal how he pressed SBM’s general counsel and head of compliance Jay Printz to ensure the money was swiftly wired to SII. During the fractious meeting, Chabas said: “I thought this [the agreed payment to SII] was signed off … We need to progress. I’m concerned about the relationship with Sonangol, so that’s something we need to progress quickly.”

Printz, who taped the meeting, would quit SBM the following month.

On the recording, he is heard telling his boss: “I’m worried, you know, to be blunt, that … you’re going to have a hard time doing the right thing, which could involve shutting down a lot of business in Angola.

“I mean, these guys are going to have to stop being paid bribes, and they’re not going to like that,” he said. In a later U.S. settlement with prosecutors, SBM would later admit it had bribed at least nine Sonangol executives. Printz added: “And I know perfectly well what’s going to unfold here.”

Three weeks later, the troubled lawyer drafted a resignation letter to Chabas in which he complained of the “inappropriate resistance” he had encountered while leading Project Pandora. “SBM is unlikely to comprehensively remediate its widespread bribery practices,” he wrote. “I remain concerned that further offences are likely to be committed.”

Finance Uncovered was unable to reach Printz or confirm that the draft resignation letter was sent. After he left SBM, Chabas asked another member of the legal team, Jonathan Taylor, to take over Project Pandora. Taylor also grew concerned and resigned two months after Printz.

SBM’s payments to Mardrill would later feature in the settlement of criminal cases in the United States and the Netherlands, which together cost the company $478 million.  They were also used as key evidence in the Swiss prosecution of Didier Keller, one of Chabas’s predecessors as SBM chief executive.

By contrast, Chabas’s decision to authorise a $35 million SBM payment to SII has never featured in a criminal case. In fact, prosecutors have mostly praised Chabas for his cooperation and for the steps he took to clean up SBM’s culture of corruption.

SBM would later boast that remedial measures taken by the company in 2012 left it “the white swan in a pitch-black pond.”

When asked a series of questions about SBM’s dealings with Sumbe, and about payments to the Panamanian companies he operated, Mardrill and SII, the Dutch construction company declined to give specific answers.

Finance Uncovered and its media partners identified several similarities between SII and Mardrill that might have given SBM cause for concern: both were registered to the same address in Panama, though neither had operations in the country; both used accounts at a bank in Portugal where Sonangol was the largest shareholder; and the two companies had two directors in common.

Another warning sign that might have troubled SBM was the fact that the exact ownership of both Mardrill and SII was shrouded in mystery. Though both companies presented as part of the Sonangol empire, neither were named on a list of subsidiaries companies published in Sonagol’s 2012 annual report. Meanwhile, filings at the Panama corporate registry showed both were set up in the late 1990s with “bearer shares”.

Companies that issue bearer shares are popular with people looking to hide their control of bank accounts and other assets. Such firms do not keep a register of shareholders, instead granting ownership rights to the person — the “bearer” — in physical possession of share certificates. The use of bearer shares has been restricted or outlawed in many countries in recent years.

SBM said it had carried out additional inquiries into SII’s ownership in 2012 and was eventually satisfied that it was owned by Sonangol. It did not respond to questions about the ownership of Mardrill.

Sonangol also told Finance Uncovered that it is the owner of SII. This is confirmed in Sonangol’s recent annual reports, where the Panamanian company is now listed as a subsidiary company.

BP thrives in Angola

The trail of evidence running through the whistleblower documents raises questions not just about decisions at SBM, but also about BP’s anti-graft efforts in notoriously corrupt Angola, Africa’s second largest oil producer.

Finance Uncovered asked BP whether it knew that part of the cancellation fee it paid to SBM was later promised to a secretive Panamanian company run by allegedly corrupt Angolan official Sumbe. BP declined to answer directly, but hinted that it took no interest in what SBM did with the money.

In a statement, it said: “BP paid the contractually required sum to settle the … liability to SBM under the terms of the contract. It did not have any intention for, or control over, the future use of the [cancellation fee] in the hands of the payee.” BP said the cost of paying the fee was shared with co-investors in its Angolan operations.

BP’s code of conduct suggests the company is committed to a more pro-active approach to combating corruption. It says: “We do not tolerate bribery and corruption in any of its forms in our business …. [W]e work to ensure our business partners share our commitment.” As part of anti-corruption efforts, the code says, BP follows “counterparty due diligence procedures,” though what these entail is not specified.

The fineprint of BP’s original contract with SBM contained clauses giving the British oil giant the right to inspect SBM’s books and records if it became concerned that payments had been used to fund bribes. Asked if it had exercised these inspection rights, BP declined to answer. It said: “BP completely rejects any suggestion that it acted improperly in the payment of the [cancellation] fee to SBM.”

Asked why, in 2011, it chose to abandon plans to build oil platforms at the Paenal yard, BP said it had “encountered various technical and commercial challenges” at three deep water reservoirs in Block 31, many miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, directly westwards of the mouth of the Congo River.

It said the decision was taken collectively, with its consortium partners, and the cost of cancellation was shared. BP said it had wanted to delay construction work at the Paenal yard rather than cancel it, but SBM refused to grant a contract extension.

Not everything went badly for BP’s Angolan operations in 2011. In December that year, BP signed a new deal with Sonangol that dramatically expanded its interests in Angola, providing access to five new deep water exploration and production blocks covering 24,200 square kilometres. Soon after, BP described Angola as one of its four target countries for investment and growth.

Finance Uncovered has seen is no evidence to suggest a connection between BP’s $100 million cancellation fee payment and the oil major’s transformative deal with Sonangol a month later. For the avoidance of doubt, BP confirmed in a statement that no such connection existed.

In 2012, BP began pumping oil from other Block 31 reservoirs, using a oil platform built in Singapore by Modec, a competitor to SBM.

Sumbe’s Texas mansion

Records disclosed last year as part of the Swiss prosecution of former SBM chief executive Didier Keller show, in detail, what happened to some of the corrupt payments the Dutch oil platform company made to Mardrill.

Prosecutors described how, during a two and a half year period spanning 2006 to mid-2008, $4.7 million was paid from an SBM bank account in London to an account owned by Mardrill at Banco Comercial Português, now called Millennium BCP, in Lisbon, Portugal.

And during the same period, Mardrill made 45 transfers, totalling $2.9 million, from its account at Millennium BCP to accounts controlled by Baptista Sumbe and his wife Rosa Sumbe. Prosecutors said the couple made extensive personal use of this money.

Four years later, in May 2012, SBM whistleblower documents show, SII, like Mardrill, requested money be sent to an account at Portuguese bank Millennium BCP.

Sumbe knew this bank especially well. Not only did the two Panamanian companies run by him own accounts there, but Sonangol was the bank’s largest shareholder, with a stake of 11 percent at the end of 2011.

In February 2012, Sumbe secured a seat on one of the Portuguese bank’s board committees and by the end of the same year Sonangol had increased its stake in Millennium BCP to more than 19 percent — welcome support for a bank struggling in the face of the sovereign debt crisis gripping many European countries at the time.

Millennium BCP told Finance Uncovered it could not comment on specific customers, but added: “In all cases, regardless of the bank’s possible relationship with the parties involved in a transaction, Millennium BCP carries out its duties of analysis and reporting of all entities and transactions with the same rigor.”

Another Sonangol executive who once sat on a Millennium BCP board committee was Sumbe’s boss, Manuel Vicente, who served as president of Sonangol unitil January 2012. Vicente was also a director of SII until 2014.

According to Swiss court documents, Vicente is alleged to have played an early role in encouraging SBM to make payments to Mardrill. According to Keller’s evidence to Swiss prosecutors, the SBM boss had initially attempted to resist pressure from Sumbe to start paying Mardrill in 2001. Keller told prosecutors he thought it suspicious that Sumbe wanted “commission” payments wired to a company set up in Panmana, so he queried the scheme with Vicente. But Keller’s questioning was not well received, according to Swiss court documents, and Vicente criticised him for not trusting Sumbe, his right-hand man.

After this uncomfortable episode, the Swiss court found, Keller knew the commission payments were very likely bribes but authorised them nonetheless. The judge later gave Keller credit for his admissions of guilt, and for cooperation with ongoing criminal investigations, handing him a fine and a two-year suspended jail sentence.

Finance Uncovered’s efforts to contact Sumbe, who no longer works for Sonangol, were unsuccessful. Similarly, Rosa Sumbe could not be reached. For many years, the couple lived with their children at a $1.3 million mansion within the Royal Oaks Country Club gated community in Houston, Texas. The large house has a swimming pool and views over the 16th hole of the club’s golf course. In January this year, Rosa posted a picture on Facebook which appears to show her and her husband at the Houston mansion, suggesting the couple may still live in the area.

Despite the Sumbes and Vicente being named in court proceedings in Switzerland, there is no record of them ever being arrested or charged in relation to Mardrill payments. Nor is there evidence that they personally benefited from funds belonging to SII.

Although the U.S. Justice Department has extensive powers to prosecute companies and individuals responsible for paying bribes, there is currently no specific offence of benefitting from corrupt payments. President Joe Biden’s administration is currently looking to strengthen U.S. law in this area.

Vicente stepped down from Sonangol in January 2012 to start a political career, soon after becoming Angola’s vice-president, a role he held until 2017. Though he remained a director of SII until 2014, a spokesperson for Vicente said he had nothing to do with activity at the company after moving into politics.

Sumbe’s controversial boss

Vicente is no stranger to corruption allegations. In 2010, Angolan anti-corruption campaigner and journalist Rafael de Morais published a report alleging that a U.S. oil exploration company called Cobalt International Energy had gone into partnership with a front company secretly owned by Vicente and two other top Angolan officials. U.S. authorities began investigating the matter in 2011, and the following year Vicente confirmed his involvement to the Financial Times newspaper. Cobalt and Vicente denied wrongdoing but the front company nevertheless ended its partnership with Cobalt. U.S. investigations into the matter petered out.

Vicente was again linked to bribery allegations in 2017, this time in Portugal. The former Sonangol boss was charged with corruption and money laundering after allegedly paying €760,000 ($810,000) to a prosecutor for dropping an investigation into his dealings in Portugal. After the investigation shut down in 2012, Vicente, who sat on the board of Millennium BCP, allegedly asked a colleague at the Portuguese bank to offer the prosecutor job, which he did.

In 2018, the former prosecutor was convicted of bribery offences and sentenced to six years and eight months in jail. Vicente denied the charges, which were thrown out by an appeal court after the Angolan government successfully intervened in court proceedings and argued that the case against the country’s former vice-president should be referred to prosecutors in Luanda.

Anti-corruption campaigners at Transparency International have expressed concern that Angolan prosecutors may never take up the case against Vicente.

Under president João Lourenço, who came to power in 2017, Angola has been aggressively pursuing allegations of past corruption linked to certain former Sonangol executives — most notably Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former president José Eduardo dos Santos. Some media articles allege that Vicente has enjoyed a more favorable relationship with Lourenço, reportedly acting as one of the president’s advisers.

In March this year, Dos Santos filed papers in a London court case alleging Lourenço is pursuing a “personal vendetta” against her. The allegations are based on secret recordings of Angola’s business and political establishment, including Vicente, which were made by Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube, according to the court filing.

Black Cube is well known for deploying undercover private detectives to inveigle their way into the confidences of unsuspecting individuals before secretly taping conversations. Its most famous client was the former Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein, who hired Black Cube as part of an unsuccessful effort to fight off accusations that he had used his position to launch multiple sex attacks on women.

Taylor in limbo

Jonathan Taylor, the SBM whistleblower, is currently fighting extradition from Croatia. He had travelled there on what was supposed to be a family holiday 10 months ago, but has been prevented from leaving because of an extradition request from Monaco. He is wanted for questioning over allegations of extortion in Monaco, where SBM’s head office was formerly located. Taylor denies any wrongdoing.

Written following a research collaboration with Edwin van der Schoot and Micael Pereira

This article was first published by Finance Uncovered.

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Simon Bowers Investigations Editor at Finance Uncovered. He joined in November 2020 after four years as European Co-Ordinator at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Before that he spent 19 years at The Guardian in the UK, where he was a senior reporter working on tax and financial investigations. Simon’s reporting has featured in some of the world's most prestigious news media. He has also given a TEDx talk on a collaborative investigation into Nike’s pan-European tax avoidance activities. He has been part of collaborative reporting teams that have won several awards, including three George Polk awards for Financial Journalism (Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, LuxLeaks) and a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting (Panama Papers).

Politics

Nigeria: A Messiah Will Not Fix Country’s Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding the youth divide

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

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

Lessons from history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Africa in the New World Disorder

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

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

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

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

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

Destined for war: The Thucydides trap

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

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

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

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

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

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

Africa in the new world disorder

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

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

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

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

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

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Understanding the Crisis in Northern Kenya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The main cause of a complex issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was first published by The Pan African Review.

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