East Africa take note: Corruption is now officially a threat to national security

The Westgate attack announces the arrival of the nouveau terrorist. Illustration/FILE 

By Ahmed Salim

In Summary

• If security can be breached at a price, then we are at a point of no return

In the aftermath of the horrific Westgate Mall events in Nairobi, Kenya on September 21, I found
myself thinking about rational and educated explanations to the irrational and inhumane events that took place. It wasn’t easy.

As Kenya, and indeed East Africa, picks itself up from the worst terrorist attack since the 1998 US embassy bombings, we are left with more questions than answers.

Once the dust settles, a key question that will arise is whether the attacks could have been prevented and, more important, whether Kenya’s intelligence apparatus missed key signals.

Prior to sending troops into Somalia, Kenya was the only partner state of the East African

Community not to have sent troops into a foreign territory. As a result, when KDF entered Somalia in October 2011, many security experts warned of blowback from Al Shabaab.

It is critical to understand that terrorist groups like Al Shabaab, as well as Al Qaeda, play the long game. If they strike back, there shouldn’t be an expectation that they will do so within months or a year. So perhaps talk of the demise of Al Shabaab was premature; they were just waiting for the opportune time to strike.

In March 2013, with the support of my colleagues at the Society for International Development, I wrote a brief titled Kenya’s Existential Elections. In the brief, I tried to look beyond election day and stayed away from predicting an election result.

This is what I wrote about the challenges the new president would have to face:

Surprisingly missing from the campaign debates is the Somalia question. How long will KDF troops remain in Somalia? What is the end game? How will a Kenyatta presidency unfold if the West and international partners isolate it? Can they risk isolating Kenya especially after all the progress made in Somalia by Kenya via the African Union Mission in Somalia?

The next president will have to navigate these rocky issues while expecting that a vengeful Al Shabaab could cause some headaches within the country.

For Mr Kenyatta, Somalia can be the trump card that prevents the Western powers from implementing sanctions because there is a clear understanding that the country is crucial to keeping Somalia stable and Al Shabaab at bay… Somalia and Al Shabaab may have been invisible during the political campaigns.

They will reassert themselves very quickly once the president-elect takes the oath of office.

The absence of Somalia discussions demonstrated how distant the war felt to both politicians and the citizenry.

The New York Times wrote of the Westgate Mall attack, “Witnesses said several militants had toted G3 assault rifles, a bulky weapon that Kenyan security services use. Intelligence analysts say this may mean the militants acquired their weapons from corrupt Kenyan officers, who are known to sell or rent out their guns, charging as little as a few dollars an hour.”

Such allegations are quite disconcerting because they indicate how much the intelligence apparatus has been breached. There were also reports that the assailants had rented a shop inside the Westgate mall where they could stockpile their weapons slowly.

This perhaps answers why the siege lasted so long. How was it possible that the terrorists never ran out of ammunition? Clearly, they had enough weapons and ammunition to hold off the entire Kenya Defence Force.