Dadaab refugee camp a dangerous staging post; let us close it pronto
What you need to know:
- The place is a conduit for racketeering and smuggling of untaxed goods from Somalia and beyond.
- Kenyans had better wake up to the reality that the refugees don’t intend to go back voluntarily.
When the government recently announced its plan to send refugees in the Dadaab camp home, we all should have noted how fiercely the camp residents opposed the idea.
One young Somali lady who was born in the camp told the media —in perfect Kiswahili—that her ambition was to take up a nursing job in Thika.
An older colleague was blunt: They will not go back to Somalia even if the GSU were brought in to move them.
We Kenyans had better wake up to the reality that these fellows we welcomed into our country in 1991—on the condition that their stay would be temporary—have no intention of ever going back voluntarily.
THIRD GENERATION
They are now into their third generation. Young women like the nurse-to-be are raising babies who have also been born in this camp.
Nobody wants to leave Dadaab because there are plenty of UNHCR freebies that Somalia can’t provide. Free healthcare. Free schooling. Free food.
Going home is the last thing on the minds of the refugees. Their main concern is how to get a visa to America or Europe.
They are good at using their strong clan networks in Kenya to facilitate that. If that fails, Kenyan papers will do.
We need to be sufficiently alarmed about what is going on in Dadaab. Here are some 350,000 or so aliens idling in one of the largest refugee camps in the world.
If it were a proper town, it would rank as the fifth largest in Kenya after Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and Nakuru.
Granting the dwellers citizenship as they clearly intend to force us to do would greatly change Kenya’s demographics, and not entirely in ways we want.
(Do you remember the highly abnormal bump in the supposed population of North-Eastern Province reported by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in the 2009 census?)
Kenyan Somali leaders keep telling the government that they too want the refugees to return home. The plain truth is, they don’t mean a word they say.
RACKETEERING AND SMUGGLING
There are many reasons why they want the status quo to remain. However, there are just as many reasons why, for the good of Kenya, the Dadaab camp should simply be made to disappear.
The place is a conduit for racketeering and smuggling of untaxed goods from Somalia and beyond.
Camp brokers and aid agency officials are all in cahoots on this. So are Kenyan security personnel. It’s a gravy train for everyone.
A lot of the stuff the aid agencies supply to Dadaab finds its way into the open market in Nairobi and other towns. The rice you ate last night was probably from Dadaab.
A good number of the Land Cruisers you see cruising in Nairobi crossed from other lands through the camp.
ILLEGAL FIREARMS
Certainly most of the undocumented people in Eastleigh are from there. Meanwhile, police statistics tell us most illegal firearms entering our country come from Somalia. Only a mad man would insist that Dadaab doesn’t play a role.
The usual disconnect between what others say and what they demand of us was on display when US Secretary of State John Kerry came visiting and urged us to keep Dadaab open.
Let’s be honest, which country on earth would allow a refugee camp as huge as Dadaab on its soil for 24 long years? More so at a time when a terrorist group sharing the refugees’ nationality is regularly staging bloody attacks against the nation that has hosted them?
Would the US be okay with it? Would Britain, which last week stated it will not take in any of the African migrants dying in the Mediterranean?
Would Indonesia, which is turning back Burmese Muslims stranded in the high seas? How about Australia, whose navy has a record of forcing away at gunpoint Asian ‘boat people’ from entering its shores?
Come on Kenyans, somebody is playing us for fools.
