President Uhuru Kenyatta speaking at the University of Nairobi on
November 26, 2104, during the launch of a campaign against gender-based
violence. PHOTO | BILLY MUTAI | NATION MEDIA GROUP
President Kenyatta has a crisis on his hands, one which he has
inflicted on himself through his poor handling of the country’s security
and which could lead to his fall if he does not get smart, rather than
angry.
There are two ways of looking at the security
failures around the attack by Al-Shabaab last week in which 28 people,
mainly teachers, were executed.
The first one is the accountability view, where we look for the person who failed and nail him to the wall.
This is the typical Kenyan approach, this being a country of vindictive politics and emotion-soaked reaction to failure.
My
own take is that whereas it is good to hold people accountable, merely
sacking the person in question does not solve the underlying problem.
Samuel Kivuitu, and the entire Electoral Commission of Kenya, was sacked, but serious problems remain.
General
Hussein Ali was removed as police boss, replaced with Mathew Iteere and
finally David Kimaiyo. Today, the police force is in its worst shape in
the history of the country.
SLAUGHTERING AT WILL
The
second approach, which is to look beyond the people to the institutions
and the broader security strategy, actually reveals a much bigger
problem regarding Kenya’s secretive but bungling dealings with Somalia.
The
strategy has either failed totally or is in the process of failing.
Kenya sent its troops into Somalia with the intention of clearing three
Somali provinces — Gedo, Lower Juba, and Upper Juba — of Al-Shabaab to
create a buffer against the kind of attack we saw last Saturday.
Secondly,
the military incursion was expected to cut Al-Shabaab’s economic feet
by denying it revenues from the port of Kismayu and, thirdly, generally
taking the war to Al-Shabaab in its own backyard to defeat it and give
Somalia a chance to form a democratic government and end decades of
state collapse.
Whereas, for nationalistic reasons,
Kenyans support the military mission in Somalia, it is difficult to know
what exactly the troops are doing there. There is very little
information from the areas under the control of the Kenyan component of
the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom).
Yes,
Al-Shabaab is out of Kismayu, but who replaced it? Al-Shabaab, which we
thought was on its last legs, is still able to set up camp five
kilometres from the border, cross, attack and slaughter at will. What
happened to the buffer zone?
USELESS REGIME
Propping
up the regime in Mogadishu is a good humanitarian objective, but as an
effective ally in Kenya’s efforts to protect itself from Al-Shabaab, my
opinion is that the regime is useless.
To the Kenyan
public, it appears that the Somali government behaves like an innocent
bystander when its citizens are carrying out acts of terrorism against
friendly neighbours.
It does not feel responsible and
it does not act responsible; it hides behind a tiresome helplessness.
So, we have not got many of the benefits of that security strategy, but
we are paying the full costs.
Kenya has become
Al-Shabaab’s core business: a full 23 per cent of all Al-Shabaab attacks
between its founding in 2007 and 2012 were against Kenya.
Looking
at the big picture, between 1975 (when the first terrorist attack in
Kenya was reported, that is the so-called Maskini Liberation Front’s
attack on Starlight disco) and 2012, there were 251 terror attacks on
Kenyan soil, with “terror attacks” being defined rather broadly.
Al-Qaeda has attacked Kenya three times, killed 240 people, and injured 4,000.
SERIOUS WAR
The attacks on Paradise Hotel and the embassy bombings account for the bulk of that damage.
Al-Shabaab
first attacked Kenya in 2008, when it raided a police station in Wajir
and freed Al-Qaeda suspects. Between then and 2012, it attacked 93
times, killing 121 Kenyans and injuring nearly 500. This toll does not
include last year’s nearly daily grenade attacks and the big one in
September on Westgate.
This is a serious war. It is not
just a security problem that can be solved by buying police more
vehicles. The truth is that the National Intelligence Service, the
military, and the police need a massive kick in the backside.
Certainly,
the police must be built from the ground up; it is catastrophically
broken. The military and the intelligence services must not go into
politics; they must be professional and effective.
The Somalia strategy must be reviewed and modified. The President needs a war council; his current team is a big joke.
Mr Kenyatta’s honeymoon is over, time to start earning the big bucks.
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