How Kenya fiddled as Jihad came to our country

“What is the name of Muhammad’s mother,” shouted one of the Jihadists in the September 22, 2013 Westgate terrorist attack that claimed 67 lives, pointing a gun at a Kenyan of Indian descent. Unable to say “Aminah bint Wahb”, he was shot — because he was not a Muslim.

It was the Pan-Africanist, W.E.B. Du Bois, who aptly remarked that the problem of the 20th century was the “colour line” (racism and colonialism). It is becoming clear that the problem of the 21st century Kenya is the “faith line” (religious extremism).

Three developments have thrust the faith line to the centre-stage of the security discourse in Kenya. The orgy of deadly attacks by Islamic extremists on churches and worshippers is widening the fault line between Kenya’s 82.5 per cent Christians and 11.1 per cent Muslims.

Baby Satrine Osinya – who survived a delicate medical operation after a jihadist’s bullet that killed his mother, Veronica Osinya, during a terrorist attack at a church in the Likoni area of Mombasa was lodged in his head for weeks – has become iconic of the fear and hope wrought by the brutality of Kenya’s new age of jihadism.

The killing of the fiery cleric, Sheikh Abubakar Shariff alias “Makaburi” – who publicly praised violence, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab and justified the Westgate terror – in Mombasa early this month has also impaired relations between the two faiths.

Meanwhile, the on-going wide-sweeping security operation to tame the spiralling insecurity and contain terrorism – code-named “Operation Usalama Watch” – especially in Mombasa and Nairobi has stoked a deadly bout of Somali ethno-nationalism.

But the power elite is fiddling as Kenya burns. Where behind-the-scenes “quiet diplomacy” would have addressed genuine grievances of Kenya’s ethnic Somalis, sensational “mega-phone diplomacy” is adding fuel to the embers of conflict.

Early this month, National Assembly Majority Leader and the highest ranking Somali leader in the government, Aden Duale, threatened to withdraw support for the government over what he termed arbitrary arrests of “his people”.

While the grievances Duale articulated might be genuine, his sentiments carry the eerie echoes of Somali ethno-nationalism that shored up the “Shifta War” in the 1960s.

Notably, prior to the current radicalisation, Kenya came through as a “collateral damage” rather than a target of terrorism. This was the case with the Norfolk Hotel bombing in December 1980; the bombing of the US Nairobi Embassy in 1998; the attack on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in 2002 and the abortive shooting of an Israeli airliner at the Moi International Airport, Mombasa.

With Westgate and a series of attacks, Jihad has come to Kenya. Therefore, a long view of radicalisation is central to effectively combating terrorism in Kenya and the region. Sadly, the dominant narrative is feeding on myths and fallacies reflective of the larger propaganda environment in which radicalisation is unfolding.

One such myth is that radicalisation is a response to the entry of the Kenya Defence Forces into Somalia in October 2011 and the presence of over 4,000 Kenyan troops in Amisom. But the question is why Ethiopia, which has soldiers inside Somalia, is not a soft target for jihadists.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF TERROR

Unlike Ethiopia, which has wielded a heavy stick against Islamic militants at home and abroad, Kenya is paying the price for decades of fiddling as the tide of radicalisation grew steadily from the 1960s through the 1970s.

Following decades of neglect, jihadists erected a sturdy architecture of radicalisation that is progressively replacing the traditionally moderate Sufist branch of Islam prevalent in Eastern Africa with an external and more radical Salafist Islamic order.

Since the 60s, Kenya dithered as its Sufi sheiks went to Saudi Arabia, supported radical Salafist religious institutions in Sudan and Somalia, only to return home as Salafis.

At home, such Salafist institutions as the Kisauni Islamic Centre in Mombasa, funded by the Saudis in the 1970s, evolved as the hub of radicalisation where radical clerics like Aboud Rogo were trained.

Kenya’s open door policy towards refugees after the fall of Siad Barre in 1991 enabled dozens of high-ranking Somali Salafis to enter the country as refugees where they served as agents of radicalisation.

Moderate Sufist clerics have received no government support against Somali Salafists, who have taken over their mosques and dislodged them in the halls of religious power and influence. Al-Shabaab’s agents prioritised the taking over of mosques as the basic units of radicalisation, mobilisation and recruitment.

Al-Shabaab tacticians have profiled 368 mosques within Mombasa, 136 in its environs and between 100 and 130 mosques in the Eastleigh area alone for take-over by radical Islamic clerics.

“Instead of building their own institutions, they [Somali Salafists] began taking over ours and indoctrinating our members,” lamented a senior official of the largely Sufi Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims.

Fazul Mohammed of the Association of Muslim Organisations in Kenya estimates that between 15 pc and 20 pc of mosques in Mombasa and Nairobi have so far fallen into the hands of militants. But Al-Shabaab was also able to set up its own outposts in the Muslim Youth Centre in Nairobi’s slum of Majengo to indoctrinate and recruit fighters.

Ultimately, radicalisation is an ideological issue that requires the innovative technologies of “soft power” to win the hearts, souls and minds of the Muslim majority and effectively isolate and dislodge extremists from the halls of power and influence.

Prof Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute. [email protected]