In an earlier article, ‘How Kenya fiddled as Jihad came to our country’, published in this column on April 12, 2014, I argued that Kenya fiddled as al-Shabaab grew into a ‘homegrown’ existential threat.
At the dawn of 2023, a jihadist storm is looming large on Kenya’s horizon. The big question remains: will Kenya fiddle, again, as the Jihadists return with fury?
Kenya has not been at ease since 2006, when the Somalia-based Islamist insurgent group affiliated with al Qaeda, emerged.
Despite its recent strategic goofs and battle-ground losses, the militant Salafi group remains perhaps Africa’s most resilient terror group capable of committing brazen attacks at home and abroad.
Kenya is likely to be more vulnerable to the resurgent group today than ever before. The group fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a police vehicle in Garissa County, killing two officers and one civilian on December 22, 2022.
Kenya’s vulnerability to a resurgent al-Shabaab is linked to a growing anarchy that is rapidly destroying the social fabric of the greater Horn of Africa.
A chain of catastrophic events—a severe desert locust crisis, the socio-economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic; a devastating drought, the longest and severest in over four decades; and the long-term impact of climate change—increased the vulnerability of communities, undermined their livelihoods, food security and nutrition status and pushed them deeper into poverty.
Across the region, the anarchy has fed a new wave of ethnic and religious micro-nationalisms, class-based populism, civil wars and mass forced displacement.
The good news is that the insurgency is on the back foot and on the run in Somalia. Here, the country’s new President, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, had made defeating the Islamists his main campaign promise.
Upon election, he declared an “all-out war” against the insurgents. His ‘Big Tent’ military strategy has created the largest ever multi-faceted coalition against the group involving contingents of the Somali National Army (SNA) and militias of local communities and supported by the African Union’s 22,000 troops and helicopters as well as air strikes from Turkish Bayraktar and US military drones.
Mogadishu has also launched an ideological blitz to regain control of a religious narrative usually dominated by the insurgents and to undercut the funding and networks of the mafia-like terror group.
One is al-Shabaab’s grand dream: to topple and replace the central government in Mogadishu, establish an Islamic State in Somalia, unite all ethnic Somalis in the Horn into a ‘Greater Somalia’ and, ultimately, re-establish the larger Caliphate in Eastern Africa—stretching from Mozambique in the South to Sudan in the North, the Indian Ocean in the East to Congo in the West—itself as part of an envisioned global Islamic Caliphate. It is déjà vu all over again.
In the 2011-2016 hiatus, the Islamic insurgency took advantage of Kenya’s long porous border, strategic position in the Western Indian Ocean rim, large swaths of ‘ungoverned’ or poorly governed spaces, and the growing numbers and influence of the Somali and Muslim population to tragically transform Kenya from a ‘spillover country’ for jihadism from Somalia into a new ‘epicentre’ of homegrown violent extremism.
Now, retreating al-Shabaab Jihadists, who still control Somalia’s arid central and southern states bordering Kenya, including Jubaland and the South West, are poised to return and turn Kenya’s urban spaces and remote Muslim enclaves in the remote coastal and northern regions into “lily pads” from where to revive its networks, structures, institutions and organise assaults.
In the wake of the drought and forced displacement, it has provided humanitarian assistance and services to local populations to enhance its legitimacy.
In a classic divide-and-rule ploy, it has exploited the Muslim-Christian religious fissure and genuine grievances relating to land, historical marginalisation, and exclusion in this largely Christian country to mobilise support in the borderlands.
The group has already revitalised its Jaysh Ayman, was involved in a number of attacks in Lamu, and began targeting Christians and non-Muslims at the Coast and in Northern regions.
In the past, it has forced civilians, particularly children, to join its ranks.
Today, in the context of growing poverty, Kenyans are prone to join the group for financial reasons.
Covid-19’s silver lining has been the intensified use of technology to connect people and communities.
Al-Shabaab will deliver its propaganda blitz through the internet to revive its platforms of recruiting, radicalising and deploying Kenyan Muslim youth.
The second dream is Kenya’s effort to create a buffer zone inside Somalia against militant Islamists.
While Kenya’s intervention in Somalia may have been planned well in advance as part of this strategy to transform Jubaland into a buffer zone, it is al-Shabaab’s terror activities—the kidnapping of foreign tourists, aid workers and government officials for ransom—that triggered Operation Linda Nchi (‘protect the country’) by Kenya’s Defence Forces (KDF) in October 2011.
The operation sought to wrest the militia’s control of the Port of Kismayo and cut its multiple funding streams, which generate between $100 million and $300 million per year.
Today, the stakes are even higher. Kenya needs to protect its new assets and investments in the previously marginalised northern and coastal counties as well as the transnational Lamu Port and the LAPPSET project.
But Nairobi must also take a hard re-look at its Jubaland buffer zone strategy to ensure that it is not unduly entangled in Somalia’s internal clan supremacy wars.
Truth be told, in the past, Nairobi’s Jubaland strategy has been driven by the narrow interests of some sub-clans in Garissa County and their cross-border networks.
As a result, the strategy has always run into the headwinds of fierce sub-nationalism of the Marehan and allied sub-clans. This has transformed the Marehan, one of the largest constituent sub-clans of the Darod that occupies roughly 10 out of 14 districts in Jubaland along nearly 600 kilometres of the 681 kilometres of Kenya–Somalia land boundary, into a community of grievance against Kenya in Somalia, accusing Nairobi of imprudently championing the interests of rival sub-clans in Jubaland. This has been a major trigger of diplomatic tiffs between Nairobi and Mogadishu, which jihadists have exploited.
History, we now know, is a vast early warning system. Kenya should learn from its own past with the al-Shabaab.
Prof Kagwanja is a former Government Adviser, now Chief Executive at the Africa Policy Institute (API) and Adjunct Scholar at the University of Nairobi and the National Defence University (NDU), Kenya.
