Kenya’s diplomatic effort to drain the swamp of terrorism

What you need to know:

  • The threat has fired up regional states and organisations to embark on developing strategies to prevent and counter youth radicalisation to violence.
  • President Uhuru Kenyatta launched Kenya’s national strategy to counter violent extremism, the first of its kind in Africa.
  • Kenya’s new counter violent extremism strategy has the potential of enhancing its diplomatic capacity to stop the threat of violent extremism within its borders and in the region at large.

Violent extremism is poised to increase and to threaten regional stability, development and democracies in the Horn and Eastern Africa.

This is the harrowing conclusion of a recent report by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad) titled: “Al-Shabaab as a Transnational Threat” (March 2016). The threat has fired up regional states and organisations to embark on developing strategies to prevent and counter youth radicalisation to violence.

In this regard, on September 7, 2016, President Uhuru Kenyatta launched Kenya’s national strategy to counter violent extremism, the first of its kind in Africa. Kenya becomes the first African country to respond to the United Nation’s Secretary-General’s Plan of Action on the Prevention of Violent Extremism (January 2016), which calls on member states and regional groupings to develop national strategies and frameworks to counter violent extremism.

Similarly, on September 7-8, 2016, Igad hosted a high-level consultative forum on the threat of terrorism in South Sudan. The forum is part of Igad’s comprehensive process of consultations covering eight countries in the Horn and Eastern Africa region — Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda — aimed at crafting a regional blueprint to prevent and counter violent extremism.

Running through the Kenyan and Igad strategies is the idea of “counter violent extremism diplomacy,” popularised by the American State Department as a slew of coordinated efforts to promote cooperation at the regional and multilateral levels to halt the growing threat of terrorism.

On its part, Kenya’s new counter violent extremism strategy has the potential of enhancing its diplomatic capacity to stop the threat of violent extremism within its borders and in the region at large.

The blueprint signifies Nairobi’s efforts to balance between the imperatives of security and those of democracy, to “drain the swamp” of terrorism by eliminating soft support for terrorist organisations and denying them room to radicalise.

Rather than relapse to totalitarian tactics of the past, Kenya is treading the path of democracy to stop terror — a daring experiment based on the belief that democracy is the best defence against terrorism.

On its part, Igad’s South Sudan strategy forum stressed that Africa’s youngest state is facing a real threat of terrorism. Speakers indicated that South Sudan is a new frontier of money laundering, human and drug trafficking, turning it into an incubator or safe haven for terrorists.

Here, foreign governments such as the United Kingdom have issued travel advisories warning of “an underlying threat of terrorism” which could target travelling foreigners.

The Islamic State and al-Qaida, now operating in Libya and the Sahel region and infiltrating western Sudan, Chad and the Central Africa Republic, are eying the vacuum created by an increasingly fragile state and the civil war. Violent criminal gangs have emerged, which could be easily radicalised and recruited into violent extremism.

The most notorious of these gangs is the “Nigger Gang” — this has no relation with the racial connotations of the West, but cultural association — comprising mainly young men and women who are exploiting the collapse of public order to carry out gang rapes, murders and assassinations.

South Sudan’s “Nigger Gang” has all the making of earlier rag-tag militant groups in Somalia such as the Al Ittihad Al Islamiya formed in 1984 which, after the collapse of the Somali state, turned increasingly radicalised and violent.

EPICENTRE OF TERRORISM

Currently, South Sudan falls under the category that the United Nations Development Programme describes as countries at risk (including Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania) as opposed to the epicentre of terrorism (mainly Somalia) and countries bordering the epicentre (Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia).

However, the toxic mix of a debilitating civil war, state collapse, criminal gangs, high level illiteracy (estimated at nearly 80 per cent) and unemployment potentially makes South Sudan a second epicentre of violent extremism in the region.

Kenya can only stand by and watch as South Sudan slides into violent extremism at its own peril. Nairobi ignored the rise of extremism associated with Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and it is now paying the price of failure to act.

In South Sudan Kenya has been reluctant to forcefully engage, leaving South Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda and Sudan to call the shots.

In 2008, Kenya established the Kenya-South Sudan Liaison Office located in the office of the President, and has contributed $16 million towards Juba in the 2005-2016 hiatus. However, its engagement with Juba has remained weak and the budget for the liason office– estimated at 80 million in 2016/2017 – too little to have any meaningful impact.
Kenya stands to lose economically if South Sudan falls to violent extremists. About 7,000 Kenyans are doing business in South Sudan, and several Kenyan firms are working to establish operations in the country.
Despite the turmoil and fluidity of the business environment, Kenyan investors are making profit in South Sudan.
This year alone, Kenyan banks made more money from subsidiaries in South Sudan than anywhere else. Data compiled by the Central Bank of Kenya shows that subsidiaries in South Sudan accounted for 33 per cent of the total profits, although only three Kenyan banks have operations there.
Of the Sh8.4 billion profit before tax that banks got from subsidiaries in Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda and South Sudan, about Sh2.8 billion came from South Sudan.
Recently, Kenya appears to have recognised the threat of being sandwiched between two epicentres of violent extremism. “Let me be clear: those of us in the region have a primary responsibility for peace and security here (South Sudan)”, President Kenyatta declared.

Kenya has accepted an African Union request in July 2016 to prepare troops for a new reinforcement mission to the country, which Juba has resisted. On August 13, the Security Council authorised the deployment of a 4,000-strong Protection Force Brigade in Juba and threatened an arms embargo against the government.

Igad, African Union and the UN have all agreed to send additional troops to Juba to raise the force from nearly 7,000 peacekeepers to 12,500.

Kenyatta has backed the reinforcement as well as a change of the mandate for the UN peacekeeping troops in South Sudan.

Prof Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute