New anti-terrorism laws will reinforce feeling of alienation among Kenyans
President Uhuru Kenyatta signs the Security (Amendment) Act 2014 Bill. Popular responses to untimely deaths thus provides further evidence of the need for the government, and for its security forces, to work harder to earn citizen’s trust rather than seek to manage, control and discipline, if it is going to govern efficiently and provide security. PHOTO | PSCU
What you need to know:
- The threat of violence by the State or by rival clans/tribes has kept millions of Somalis and other Africans in a perpetual state of terror.
- Al-Shabaab is also making huge profits by controlling the charcoal supply chains and production sites.
A young man whom I follow on Twitter announced last week that his close relative had told him that it was his duty as a Kikuyu to support Kenya’s new anti-terrorism laws. The young man wondered what tribal affiliation had to do with support for oppressive laws. Does patriotism now translate into blind loyalty towards a tribal chief? Where can Kenya’s 40-plus other tribes find refuge? Have they been declared disloyal and unpatriotic simply because of their genetic make-up?
Or perhaps these other tribes have never ever been part of this entity called Kenya. In a recent article published in the Mail & Guardian, Christine Mungai describes the sense of abandonment and alienation that forced her middle class friend from “an opposition stronghold” to liquidate his assets and think of migrating from Nairobi (where he has spent all his life) to his “home village” (where he has never lived).
His feelings, says Mungai, reinforce what Kenya observers have been saying for years — that the Kenyan State is a fragile entity with unresolved group grievances and which those in power can conjure up at will, and make disappear just as quickly.
“For those outside elite circles, the very concept of Kenya is a shadow, a whiff, an odour in the air, but with no real form or substance,” says Mungai.
The Jubilee Government will no doubt argue that it is an inclusive government whose leading proponents are in fact neither from the President’s nor the Deputy President’s tribe. So how does one explain the sense of alienation experienced by the Nairobian?
Hussein Bulhan, a trauma specialist who works in Hargeisa, explains how the Somali elite exploited the notion of clan, or tribe, to pursue their personal ambitions to the detriment of the Somali people, and how clan loyalty has distorted politics and society in Somalia. In his book, Politics of Cain, Bulhan shows how oppressive colonial laws combined with the traditional pastoral ethos of clan loyalty, nepotism, and looting created what he calls an “auto-colonial state” that is inherently prone to instability, conflict, and crisis.
In such a scenario, the politics of the ruling elite is characterised by thrill-seeking, pathological glibness, anti-social pursuit of power, and absence of guilt.
He writes: “The Somali elite who engage in this type of politics are socialised into two drastically different cultures — traditional and colonial — both of which they had internalised but only partially and selectively use aspects of to serve their interest. Lacking, therefore, coherent values and consistent moral structure, they egotistically behave as they wish, avoiding punishment or obtaining rewards by whatever means available to them, regardless of the consequences of their behaviour for others.”
THREAT OF VIOLENCE
The threat of violence by the State or by rival clans/tribes has kept millions of Somalis and other Africans in a perpetual state of terror.
Kenya’s new anti-terrorism laws, which may have been well-intentioned when they were drafted, have not only re-introduced the kind of fear and paranoia experienced during Moi’s rule, but have made it virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to question the State’s policies and practices.
Some provisions, such as imposing hefty penalties on those who aid or abet terrorists (which, hopefully, will lead to the sacking of corrupt immigration and police officers) are much needed, but others, like criminalising people who “adopt or promote an extreme belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically-based violence to advance political, religious or social change” are so broad that they could even apply to evangelical Christian churches or to the State itself, which has been forcibly evicting and inflicting violence on entire communities in the coastal, north-eastern, and Rift Valley regions for decades.
Some sources have told the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea that not only are the Interim Jubaland Administration and the Kenyan forces in Somalia reaping profits from the illegal sale of charcoal from the port of Kismayu, but that Al-Shabaab is also making huge profits by controlling the charcoal supply chains and production sites.
If these reports are indeed true, then both the Kenyan forces and the Interim Jubaland Administration should be charged with aiding and abetting terrorists under Kenya’s new anti-terrorism laws.
