It's high time Kenya changed its response to cattle raids

Last week, around 400-armed raiders attacked Nadome area of Turkana County killing 66 people and stealing hundreds of livestock.

This was the most recent (and deadly) of a series of violent cattle raids that have wracked northern Kenya.

In response, the Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery ordered a major security operation to arrest the culprits and disarm local residents. Nkaissery said that the operation, which is now underway, was ordered after political leaders failed to eradicate cattle rustling in the region.

This logic – of criticising community members for insecurity and of forcibly disarming local populations – is a poor excuse for inadequate security provision.

In short, while leaders, who endorse, organise or incite raids (and community members who participate in them) should clearly be held accountable for their criminal activities, ultimate responsibility for security provision lies with the state and the security services.

Blame and disarmament is also a tried and tested approach that has failed to end cattle raids. Instead, it has further fuelled cycles of violence, and depolicitised the problem in a way that distracts from longer-term solutions. 

First, the suggestion that community members and their leaders are ultimately responsible for security provision feeds into a logic whereby communities need to protect themselves against raiders and take responsibility for retrieving stolen cattle.

This has led the state to periodically arm communities for the purposes of self-defense, only to later disarm them when people use these weapons in their own raids.

Moreover, these operations are usually marred by gross human rights abuses, while communities soon reacquire guns to protect themselves from their neighbours.

More importantly, this logic of self-defence, as the historian Dave Eaton has argued, lies at the heart of violent cattle rustling.

CYCLE OF VIOLENCE BEGINS

The reason: the idea that people cannot rely on formal security provision and legal recourse encourages them to respond to minor thefts by organising counter-raids to reclaim stolen cattle. However, since it is usually unclear where stolen cattle have been taken, these counter-raids tend to target innocent people, which can then prompt further retaliation. And so a cycle of violence begins.

The idea that security should work differently when it comes to cattle rustling, as compared to other violent crimes, also reinforces a sense of cultural difference.

In short, raiding is presented as something that is traditional, timeless and ritualised, and as something that has been exacerbated by the proliferation of small arms, population growth, climate change, and other apolitical factors.

However, while all these factors are no doubt important, they ignore an important aspect of cattle rustling; namely its politicisation.

In this way, the anthropologist, Clemens Greiner has shown how raiding “is increasingly enmeshed in politicized claims over administrative boundaries, struggles for exclusive access to land, and attempts to establish or safeguard an ethnically homogenous electoral base”.

In his opinion, multi-party elections, election-related violence, political and administrative restructuring, and land reforms “have created windows of opportunity for violent (re)negotiation of territorial claims in the pastoralist areas in Kenya’s arid north”.

These conclusions fit with my own discussions with people in Turkana County last year, when community members explained how, for example, devolution and the discovery of oil had exacerbated long-standing tensions between Turkana and neighbouring Pokot.

Their argument was twofold. First, as Turkana lose seasonal grazing lands around the oil fields they argued that many will be pushed closer to their neighbours and, second, that cattle rustling is actually “land rustling”.

The idea is that some Pokot claim large swathes of Turkana County as part of their traditional grazing lands, and insist that the boundary should be modified in line with colonial maps.

In turn, some Turkana allege that cattle raids are being used to foster insecurity along the border area, push Turkana back into the hinterland, and thus open areas for Pokot to occupy and use, and, perhaps, ultimately become the ‘locals’ that benefit from the spoils of oil.

The implication is that, a longer-term solution requires discussions about local grievances and mechanisms to resolve disputes in a peaceful way. This is well known to people on the ground whose response to raids is not to demand a military operation, but to call for adequate security provision to prevent initial thefts, and to initiate discussions about inter-communal grievances and tensions.

Gabrielle Lynch, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Warwick, UK ([email protected]; @GabrielleLynch6)