Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Kenyan Polls:A Road to Hell or Highway to Great New World?



Everyone is strapped in and the Kenyan election roller coaster has begun. A cacophony of electioneering propaganda is being blasted out through every medium. The political godfathers are flying around the country firing up their supporters, screwing down the vote, constituency by constituency and promising heaven after the March 4th poll. Kenya is poised at the top of a ride that could fling the country violently off the rails and send it to hell – as it did after the 2007 election. 

Or it could take the country elegantly into a dynamic new era, a transformation that would make it one of the most democratic countries in the world. John Githongo, a civil society activist, says: “the new world is being born but the old order has not yet died”.

Since the last disastrous election a new constitution has come into force which has divided Kenya into 47 new counties. Each will have its own governor and parliament which will decide how its budget is spent. But devolution goes even further than that.

The County Governments Act stresses democratic participation at every stage of decision making: mass communication and consultation on development plans, civic education programmes, debates at every level from the village to the country parliament, the right of the public to demand – and get – full information about plans and policies and the right to petition the courts. The overarching ideology is that the people will decide.

The problem is that this idealistic and finely constructed constitution is managed by politicians who are largely tribal godfathers. Uhuru Kenyatta, the Kikuyu leader, is the son of the founding president, Jomo Kenyatta. Raila Odinga, the Prime Minister, is a Luo chief and the son of Oginga Odinga, Jomo Kenyatta’s greatest rival and critic. While the constitution prescribes democracy, transparency, good governance and idealism, this election is all about personal and tribal loyalties. 

However, no single ethnic-based party can win outright, so via a protracted and bewildering dance the parties have formed coalitions to secure victory. There are also a bewildering number of parties on the ballot papers but almost all are part of alliances representing, or fronts for, the main candidates and parties.
The registration of party candidates at the grass roots this week was all but wrecked in many key areas by chaos and violence; most of it organised and paid for, both within and between some of the leading parties. 

Under the law, if the process is flawed, the party headquarters decides who the candidate will be. This ensures that the part bosses keep control of the lists and locally popular candidates are kept out.
Politics in Kenya is exceedingly lucrative – with allowances, MPs are paid a third more than their British counterparts. The President gets 10 percent more than his opposite number in the US. They recently tried to award themselves a hugely increased retirement package but it was vetoed by the retiring President, Mwai Kibaki, although he did sign into law his own $200,000 golden handshake. So getting nominated at a local level (the first rung on the ladder to wealth and power) is very important.

All you need is cash, the backing of a godfather and the right ethnic credentials. Issues and policies are hardly mentioned. Winning a parliamentary seat in Kenya is also like winning the lottery.
But already The People are finding their voice. When Mr Odinga tried to nominate his sister and brother to the list of candidates in his own county, local people had other ideas and cast their votes overwhelming for others. Ms Odinga was forced to retire. Elsewhere however, good candidates were outmanoeuvred by cunning or cheating candidates backed by the bosses.

So far it looks as if, at a local level, ordinary people were trying to flex their muscles, but judging by the names that ended up on the lists at national level, the same old faces and parties still dominate. Odinga led the national presidential polling last week with 46 percent of the vote and Kenyatta had 40. That means the presidential vote may go to a run off which is more difficult to predict because Odinga has more enemies than Kenyatta who has only recently become involved in frontline politics.

But there is an even stronger and widespread feeling that the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, having had the first and third presidencies of the country, have too much political and economic power. This could damage Kenyatta. The winner will be the one who has the deepest pockets to build the biggest coalition out of the remaining 14 percent.

There is also another exceedingly dangerous factor supercharging this election. Kenyatta and his running mate, William Ruto, the political Big Man of the Kalenjin ethnic group, face charges at the International Criminal Court. The hearing will take place just before the second round of the presidential poll. Will the violence of 2007 polls, which left more than a thousand people dead and the nation deeply divided, be repeated this time? A vote in which one candidate has nothing to lose could turn into civil war. Barricades and street battles were widespread at the nomination stage last week.

The accepted wisdom is that during the murderous ethnic cleansing and street battles of 2008 Kenya looked over the precipice. The godfathers decided to call off their dogs of war or Kenya would be wrecked. International negotiators led by Kofi Annan, flew in and pieced together a deal – part of which was a carefully balanced list of those to be investigated by the ICC. It allowed a coalition government to be formed with the rival parties but cited leading figures from both sides.

There is an assumption in Kenya that the ICC will negotiate a deal which allows charges against elected politicians to be deferred or the court hearings changed to suit the electoral timetable. Once they realize that this is not the case and the Court will proceed at its own pace, those indicted may feel they have nothing to lose and their best bet is to get elected by any stratagem available, in the hope that Kenyans and other African leaders  will support them in office and defy the Court or get the hearings held within the continent.

In any other African country except possibly South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt, they would probably be proved wrong, but Kenya is also of strategic importance for western economic, security and political interests in the region, consequently its indicted politicians might have a chance.

Again and again over the last 50 years Kenyan politicians have been able to defy Western diplomatic pressure knowing Washington and London needs Kenya more than Kenya needs them. Now that China is an ally and very big trading partner and many fellow African rulers are uneasy about the Court, they may reckon their hand is even stronger today.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Wars End: Sub Saharan Africa is safer than Ever



Recent events in Mali, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan seem to confirm one of the most durable stereotypes of Africa, namely that the continent is unstable and uniquely prone to nasty political violence.

Writing in Foreign Policy two years ago, New York Times East Africa correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Gettleman espoused this view. He painted a dismal picture of pointless wars waged by brutes and criminals “spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic.”

Gentleman is right that warfare and political violence are changing on the continent, but he is wrong to portray that change as one of brutal violence increasing out of control.

In fact, as I show in  recent posts  on  African Affairs, looked at since the end of the Cold War, wars are not becoming more frequent in Sub-Saharan Africa. To the contrary: according to the Uppsala Armed Conflict Data Program, the preeminent tracker of warfare worldwide, wars in the 2000s are substantially down from their peak in the early 1990s. Even if one counts an uptick during the past two years, there were about one-third fewer wars in Sub-Saharan Africa in the period compared to the early-to-mid 1990s.

Another prevailing view is that Sub-Saharan Africa is the most war-endemic region. Not so, especially if one looks at the continent’s history since 1960. Wars in Sub-Saharan Africa (compared to other world regions) are no longer or more frequent on a wars-per-country basis. Those distinctions effectively go to Asia, where between wars in India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, among others, wars are more frequent and longer lasting.

The pattern holds true for extreme cases of mass killing, like Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur in the mid-2000s. Such events are on the decline in Africa; viewed across time, Africa is also not the regional leader of such events on a per-country basis.

My point is not to engage in crude regionalism, but rather to suggest that what often transpires as common sense about Sub-Saharan Africa is wrong.

The bigger point is that we may be witnessing significant shifts in the nature of political violence on the continent. Wars are on the decline since the 1990s, but the character of warfare is also changing. There are today fewer big wars fought for state control in which insurgents maintain substantial control of territory and put up well-structured armies to fight their counterparts in the state—Mali not withstanding. Such wars were modal into the 1990s.

 From southern Africa in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and even Zimbabwe to the long wars in the Horn in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan to the Great Lakes wars in Rwanda and Uganda, the typical armed conflict in Africa involved two major, territory-holding armies fighting each other for state control.

Today’s wars typically are smaller. They most often involve small insurgencies of factionalized rebels on the peripheries of states. Today’s wars also play out differently. They exhibit cross-border dimensions, and rather than drawing funding from big external states they depend on illicit trade, banditry, and international terrorist networks.

Typical of today’s wars are the rebels in Casamance, in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, various armed groups in Darfur, and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The latter typifies an emerging trend of trans-national insurgents. The LRA moves across multiple states in the Great Lakes region. 

Northern Mali is another case in point – prior to seizing control of the north, the Islamists moved across multiple countries in the Sahel. Once they gained territorial control in 2012, they attracted fighters from Nigeria and across North Africa. Moreover, these are not non-ideological wars, as Gettleman claims. The jihadis in Mali and Somalia, the separatists in Casamance, and the rebels in Darfur are certainly fighting for a cause.

To be sure, no one in his or her right mind could claim that warfare or political violence has ended in Africa. Many countries in the region have features that political scientists believe make countries vulnerable to armed conflict: weak states, high dependence on natural resources, and horizontal inequalities. Of the recent armed conflicts in Somalia, Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Chad, and eastern Congo, one obvious commonality is the lack of effective state control. Rebels survive in remote regions where state authority is tenuous. The fact of weak states in these and other countries will not end any time soon.

Moreover, other forms of violence deserve greater scrutiny. Consider, for example, electoral violence. As African states have turned to multiparty elections, so too has the risk of violence during those electoral campaigns increased. 

Electoral violence on the scale of Kenya in 2007 and 2008, Côte d’Ivoire in 2010, or Zimbabwe in 2008 is not the norm, but in many locations there is often some form of violence between incumbent and opposition forces. Yet we know substantially less about patterns and causes of electoral violence.

Consider too violence over vital resources, such as land, water, and pasture. Trends are harder to detect, but one new data collection effort from various Universities show an increase in such violence events since the early 1990s. With climate change, rapidly growing urbanization, and other changes that increase the pressure on vital but often scarce resources, we can expect more violence of the type recently seen in northern Kenya. Yet again, we know much less about this form of violence.

What explains the recent decline in warfare across Africa? I don’t know for certain, but would point to geo-political changes since the end of the Cold War.

First, the end of the Cold War meant that the opportunities for rebels to receive substantial weaponry and training from big external states declined. To be sure, states across Africa still meddle in the affairs of their neighbors, but insurgent funding from neighbouring states is usually enough to be a nuisance to, but not actually overthrow, existing governments.

Second, the rise of multi-party politics has sapped the anti-government funding, energy, and talent away from the bush and into the domestic political arena.
Third, China is a rising external force in Sub-Saharan Africa. China’s goals are mainly economic, but their foreign relations follow a principle of non-interference. To my knowledge, China supports states, not insurgencies.

Finally, conflict reduction mechanisms, in particular international peacekeeping and regional diplomacy, have substantially increased on the continent. Peacekeeping is more prevalent and especially more robust than in the 1990s. Regional bodies such as the AU, ECOWAS, ECCAS, IGAD, and SADC are quite active in most conflict situations. They have exhibited greater resolves in conflicts as diverse as Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Madagascar.

The four posited mechanisms are hypotheses, each of which deserves greater scrutiny and empirical testing. But taken together, they suggest plausible ways in which the incentives of insurgents and even state leaders to fight have been altered in recent years. They give reason to expect that while war is clearly not over in Sub-Saharan Africa, we should continue to observe a decline in its frequency and intensity in coming decades.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Mali & Algeria :AQIM Threat To Europe Overstated


The intervention of French military forces in Mali and the apparent reprisals in the form of the hostage crisis at the In Amenas gas processing plant in Algeria have brought the threat of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) to international attention. The drama of the hostage crisis has shot the hitherto unknown group ‘Signatories in Blood’ and its leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar, variably referred to as an Islamist with ties to bin Ladin and/or a senior al-Qaeda leader, to notoriety overnight and has prompted Western leaders to focus on the possibility of a growing threat of Islamist terrorism on Europe’s southern border. Such tragic events are bound to provoke a strong reaction, yet, upon closer examination, it seems that the idea of a threat to mainland Europe is overstated.

Even at a glance, the nature of the attack – hostage-taking for financial gain – is not the kind we have come to associate with al-Qaeda over the years.  Rather than reflecting the “signature” suicide attack with mass casualties, the event fits more appropriately into the series of other hostage-takings that have taken place in Algeria in recent years but which have not been on so grand a scale and hence have not gained the same attention as events at In Amenas.

It is not only the events which are different: the particular branch of al-Qaeda to which they have been ascribed, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), formerly known as the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat – Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) stands out for its focus on a local agenda. Although it has allegedly claimed that it supports Osama bin Ladin, the group, which was found to be responsible for car bombings that took place in Algiers in 2007, as well as a number of other local incidents, appears to be more concerned with the goal of overthrowing the Algerian government and the institution of an Islamic state in its place than with bin Ladin’s vision of the reestablishment of the caliphate and global jihad against the West.

While it can be argued that the above is not entirely out of touch with al-Qaeda’s stated aims, it is nonetheless a return to the “near enemy” – the forces of occupation and secularisation – that have preoccupied Islamists for almost a century. While the AQIM’s claim to be acting in the name of “al-Qaeda central” feels very much like a convenient piece of flag-waving, current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri declared in 2006 that America and France were the enemies, indicating a pragmatic approach by which senior al-Qaeda leaders aim to flatter their local affiliates, enabling one side to continue to maintain the impression of its global reach while the other benefits from association with the infamous name. 

The true extent of any link or co-operative strategy, however, remains open to question.
If there is little evidence to suggest genuine cooperation between AQIM and the senior leadership of al-Qaeda, the connection between al-Qaeda and Belmokhtar and his Signatories in Blood is even more tenuous. Sometimes referred to as “Marlboro man” for his cigarette-smuggling exploits, Belmokhtar has a wide-ranging and impressive criminal career which includes drug trafficking, diamond smuggling and the kidnapping of dozens of Westerners, such as diplomats, aid workers and  tourists, for ransoms of up to $3 million each. Yet Belmokhtar’s success and growing influence were to be his downfall as far as his membership of AQIM was concerned.

While his actions at In Amenas supposedly link Belmokhtar to al-Qaeda in the eyes of the West, he in fact made the news on various jihadist forums for falling out with AQIM for his “fractious behavior”, and either resigned or was formally dismissed from its ranks in late 2012. Such splintering is far from exceptional; indeed, it exemplifies the present state of al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), operating in Yemen, and the recently formed Ansar al-Sharia are a case in point: despite their different names and agendas, the two groups are frequently referred to as one and the same and are conceived of as somehow representing a joint force.  This bias amongst commentators towards presenting a united al-Qaeda in various regions of the world is conducive only to resurrecting the popular, yet deeply flawed theory that al-Qaeda operates on a global basis as a cohesive group, with all that this implies for the threat it poses to global security.

Today more than ever before, al-Qaeda and its local affiliates are highly fragmented and in disagreement as to their priorities of ideology and strategy.  Indeed, the lines of fragmentation only begin here: beyond the increasing internal debate, al-Qaeda and its local affiliates find themselves in direct contest with other, often more established Islamist groups with radically different worldviews and agendas, many of which now enjoy greater popularity because they are not so ready to spill the blood of their fellow Muslims.

Whilst the existence of groups such as The Signatories in Blood and the dramatic, violent nature of incidents such as mass hostage-takings and car-bombings heightens fears in the West of a resurgence of the al-Qaeda that caused so much death and destruction on 9/11, the truth is that most of today’s al-Qaeda franchises have a much more limited vision. 

Thus, when David Cameron announces that Britain must pursue the terrorists with an iron resolve, he unwittingly reinforces a notion of a unified Islamist threat that does not exist in that form in reality. It is a convenient narrative which benefits both the propaganda machine of Islamists and the calls of those in the West who support military action, yet the true picture of those who claim to act in the name of al-Qaeda – both in Africa and elsewhere – is far more nuanced, and much less of a threat to Europe, than we are commonly led to believe.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Obama II : Africa policy on a Pivotal change?


Barack Obama’s second term may witness an American pivot to Africa—and not for the reasons you might have expected.

As the president of the United States publicly took the oath of office for the second time, it is understandable why, in stark contrast to four years ago when Barack Obama’s unique personal history made his election to the White House the cause for intense pride and excitement across Africa, many Africans shrugged off the event and carried on with their lives.

To be fair, many Africans’ expectations of the then-new American president were wildly unrealistic and Obama had quite a number of pressing challenges demanding his immediate attention, not least of all a U.S. economy in meltdown.

Nevertheless, the sense of let-down acutely felt, both in African capitals and among the Africa constituency in Washington, over the lack of engagement during most of the administration’s first term, remains palpable. Even for the administration’s most reflexive defenders, there is no getting around the data.

While veteran diplomat Johnnie Carson was installed as assistant secretary of state for African affairs within four months of Obama’s first inauguration, an ambassador to the African Union was not on post until nine months after the president’s swearing in and, until just nine months ago, there was no permanent assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for Africa.

The U.S. Strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa was not released until June of last year. As for the president himself, he has not set foot on African soil since his brief visits to Egypt and Ghana during his first year in office—and the latter a stopover lasting less than twenty-four hours.

Of course, the administration has scored some noteworthy successes, not least of which was helping see the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to its fulfillment in the largely peaceful referendum and subsequent secession of South Sudan—although the continuing conflict between Africa’s newest independent state and the country it left behind remains a challenge the administration must tackle in its second term alongside the overall lack of economic development and general governance capacity in Juba.

Likewise, the defeat of Somalia’s al-Shabaab as a military force, the improved security in and around Mogadishu, and the installation of a new parliament, president, and prime minister represent relatively big advances, even if the progress is still far from consolidated.

With this rather modest record of accomplishments, rendered all the more so when set next to the activist Africa agendas of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, some Africa watchers have set fairly low expectations for the U.S. policy during the next four years of the Obama presidency, citing in addition the political gridlock in Washington that show little sign of abating. Such pessimism might well be justified, but it need not be dispositive.

In fact, there are indications that a modest, but not insignificant, pivot toward Africa may well be in the offing.
Ironically enough, one reason for the optimism is precisely the current dysfunctional state of America’s divided government. Within Washington’s insular foreign policy community, the tiny Africa constituency has long been known for bipartisan comity—it could hardly be otherwise given how Africa has long been the stepchild of U.S. foreign policy—and has largely retained this pragmatic ethos, an achievement reflected in the broad continuity of policy through administrations of both parties.

Moreover, even if specific measures will still have to be negotiated, current issues of concern on the continent lend themselves broad agreement between Democrats and Republicans—an important attribute given that polls indicate most Americans are increasingly frustrated with the inability of their elected leaders to get even the most routine business conducted.

Given the growth and spread across Africa of militant Islamist groups in general, and the French intervention in Mali against and the subsequent siege of the Algerian gas plant by security Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in particular, (both of which invited comparisons to an Afghanistan-like entanglement,) security may be the most immediate item on the administration’s agenda for Africa as President Obama begins his second term.

Yet the U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM), the umbrella military structure responsible for implementing whatever military operations are eventually deemed necessary, whether training and equipping African forces or taking direct action against terrorist leaders and groups, has never been properly resourced, having been launched in 2006, a time when America was already deeply involved in two difficult wars.

Irrespective of what comes out of the upcoming debates over the federal debt ceiling and the Pentagon budget, Congress and the administration will have every incentive to strike a side deal that ensures that AFRICOM will be able to carry out the tasks assigned to it—including the strengthening of African capacities as well as conflict prevention and management so as to avoid the one course of action for which there is virtually no appetite for in Washington, direct American involvement in combat operations on the continent.

As important as security is and will probably remain for the next four years, the real focus of U.S. policy towards Africa will likely be trade and investment and involve strong public-private partnerships, with an emphasis on the latter. Part of the reason is simple arithmetic: given the parlous state of the American government’s accounts and the historical indifference, if not more than occasional outright antipathy, of the country’s electorate to all but the most modest foreign assistance programs, there is little expectation of initiatives requiring spending on any scale.

Add to this calculus the recognition that there can be no fixing the sluggish American economy without bolstering trade and, in this respect, Africa, home of six of the world’s fastest growing economies over the last decade, beckons with its growing middle class and markets which have been delivering double-digit annual returns.

One engine that has driven increased US trade with Africa has been the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), enacted under the Clinton administration and expanded and extended under Bush. AGOA will be up for renewal during President Obama’s second term and while Congress does not need to take up the matter until 2015, an early extension would allow businesses a great deal more certainty with which to develop their plans. 

The legislation, however, focuses primarily on trade in goods; there is need to also encourage investments which would also strengthen America’s position vis-à-vis China, which in 2009 surpassed the United States as Africa’s biggest trading partner, and other countries which have expanded their presence in the service and manufacturing sectors of African economies.

During last year’s campaign, President Obama proposed the creation of a ‘secretary of business’ to oversee consolidated government agencies involved with firms doing business domestically. Whatever the merits of that suggestion, some sort of coordination of the disparate economic and commercial policies towards Africa, such as proposed last year by Senator Dick Durban, the number two-ranked Democrat in the upper chamber, would probably garner support from both sides of the aisle.

This would also be the case for the proposed ‘U.S. Jobs Through Greater Exports to Africa Act’, sponsored by Republican Congressman Chris Smith, chair of the Africa subcommittee of the House of Representatives, and Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush.

Some ideas, such as the proposal advanced by Todd Moss of the Center for Global Development to consolidate the private investment facilitation functions currently spread across multiple agencies across the government, may not even require much by way of legislative action.

The key in all of these measures is that they allow relatively easy wins for both the administration and Congress, whilst subtly transforming U.S. Africa policy from constant crisis management to the active promotion of peace and security through the expansion of trade, investment, economic growth, and development—on both sides of the Atlantic.

In his preface to the Africa strategy document, the president acknowledged that ‘as we look toward the future, it is clear that Africa is more important than ever to the security and prosperity of the international community, and to the United States in particular’. To her credit, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acted accordingly and made Africa a diplomatic priority during her tenure in office, visiting twenty-three of the continent’s fifty-four countries.

There is reason to be cautiously optimistic that Senator John Kerry, President Obama’s nominee to be Clinton’s successor, will continue the active engagement: not only has he been especially involved in Sudan policy, but his wife Teresa was born in Mozambique and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. 

If, as expected, his colleagues in the Senate confirm Kerry as the sixty-eighth secretary of state, an early indication of where he intends to take Africa policy will be who he recommends to the president as a replacement for the retiring Carson as the daily steward of America’s diplomatic interests on the continent.

Will it be a conventional appointee to ‘mind the shop’ or someone who might seize the opportunities offered by the current political and strategic constellations, domestic and foreign, to lead a real American pivot toward an Africa to which, as Carson noted in his valedictory address last week, ‘the twenty-first century will belong’? We will know soon enough.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Nigeria: The War within



Ethnicity and religion are not predetermined; they  are not born, do not possess an innate sense of ethnic or religious affiliation, you become Yoruba, Christian, Hausa or Kataf largely as a factor of geographical, ancestral, and societal influences.

Against this backdrop, it is ironic that in a substantial number of the 19 states that make up northern Nigeria, and indeed in the country as a whole, ethnicity and religion have become the primary factors that dictate how they (co)exist.  Of course, the question of Nigeria’s fragile unity has never been in doubt. But much as Nigeria is burdened with crises of ethnic and religious nature, the (near-clichéd) media characterization of  ‘largely northern Muslims and southern Christians’ is anomalous and misleading, for the mere fact that both southern and northern Nigeria are multi-ethnic and multi-religious.

Moreover, the unity of the northern region as an entity in itself is arguably in a worse state than that of the country as a whole. It may, therefore, not be far-fetched to suggest that northern Nigeria, even though geographically homogeneous, is on a precarious cliff due to its continued and ever-widening heterogeneity, comprising of ethnic, religious and political dynamics, and that if left untended, will have national implications.

It is hard to recall a three or five-year period – since the famous anti-government and intra-religious riot that was led by the YanTatsine group in Kano State in the ‘80s – in which one or other settlement within northern Nigeria has not been consumed by ethno-religious strife. It is also one of nature’s not so funny jokes that warring parties largely happen to be neatly divided along religious lines, and belong respectively to ‘majority’ (Hausa and Fulani and Muslim) and ‘minority’ (Kataf, Berom, etc. and Christian) ethnic groups. States like Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi and recently Plateau have been the traditional flag-bearers of the country’s ethno-religious riots.

For instance, the riots that happened in Kano in 1982 and 1991 were largely caused by religious differences, the former to do with Muslim opposition to the reconstruction of a church in Fagge area of the state, and the latter, in objection to the invitation issued to a German Evangelist Reinhard Boonke to hold a Christian crusade in the state. It is worthy to note that Muslims primarily objected to the Christian crusade because they had been denied a chance to host the late Ahmed Deedat, a Muslim scholar from South Africa in Kano for an Islamic sermon. This of course led to loss of lives and destruction of property.

A near-unique characteristic of riots in Kano is its largely inter-religious nature – there is relative ethnic harmony within the state since most of the indigenous population is Hausa and Muslim. However, because of the cosmopolitan and commercial nature of the city, there is an intersection of tribes, with the Igbo – largely Christian – being the most visible because of their commercial success. The Hausas have been known to clash with the Igbos in the course of religious tension, thus bringing non-regional entities into the fray and further complicating an already complex situation.

Unlike Kano state, Kaduna and Plateau (Jos) states are marked by, ethnic, territorial and religious differences largely driven by the issue of  ‘indigeneship’ or the ‘indigene-settler clause’. While the issue of indigeneship is a burdensome colonial legacy, it is also promoted by a vague and rather discriminatory constitutional provision that fortifies the superiority of the indigene over the Nigerian citizen – who in this context is considered to be a settler – thus, making the settler an inferior entity lacking political influence, and denied benefits like scholarship opportunities.

According to a recent report released by the International Crisis Group titled ‘Curbing Violence in Nigeria: The Jos Crisis’, 80 episodes of violent riots have occurred from 1999 to 2004 between the indigenous Berom/Anaguta/Afizere (largely Christian) and non-indigenous Hausa and Fulani (largely Muslim) tribes in Jos. 

In Kaduna, Southern Zaria Christians of Zango Kataf, Kafanchan etc. who enjoy a numerical advantage are constantly at loggerheads with Hausa Muslims and this often leads to reprisal attacks in neighbouring cities. One such notable riot that generated reprisal attacks in Kano and Kaduna metropolis was the May 1992 Zango Kataf riots. A more recent example, which had a chain effect (of both attacks and counter-attacks) from Kaduna to Zango Kataf to Kano etc. was the 2011 post (presidential) election violence.

Ethnicity and religion therefore can be considered the badge of identity the average northerner (or Nigerian) wears; apart from establishing social interactions, they also determine political viability and by extension economic inclusiveness, which intensifies power struggle and conflicts among rival ethnicities within a given state (Kaduna, Plateau come to mind). Competition over access to state resources, generated mostly through oil revenue from the Niger Delta, provides much needed fuel to keep the ethno-religious inferno alive.

As if indigeneship and its divergent, divisive complexities were/are not trouble enough, with the return to democratic rule in 1999 and armed (again) with an ambiguous constitutional reading, 9 northern states with Muslim majority population instituted the Sharia legal system (both civil and criminal) as the law. 3 more northern states followed with the adoption of Sharia, but only in areas with large Muslim populations. 

Adoption of, and Sharia in itself, is not by any means wrong, and represents the aspirations of certain section of people within those 12 states, but when considered within the context of a society already steeped in mutual animosity and violent conflict, or within the context of a multi-faith, multi-ethnic and democratic society, the counter-intuitive nature of that policy becomes glaring.

Institution of the policy predictably led to riots in various northern states, consolidated the ethno-religious divide, which for instance culminated in the advent of separate living communities/quarters in some areas in Kaduna state (it is claimed that there is currently no single Muslim living in Sabon Tasha and no single Christian living in Rigasa – both areas of Kaduna metropolis). I would suggest that for a multi-faith region steeped in inter-ethnic/religious suspicion, secularism would have continued to serve as a better balancing act.

With the vehement negation of all state and constitutional authority and the call for national adoption of the Islamic legal system by Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awatih wal-Jihad (popularly called Boko Haram), a terrorist group operating in northern Nigeria, Sharia once more became a contentious issue, only on a much bigger platform this time around. Even though the views of the terrorist group are not shared by northern Muslims in general, the continued negative leveraging of Sharia as a condition for cease-fire, continued massacre of innocent civilians and bombing of churches and state properties by the group, has led to calls by some in the south for a re-negotiation of the continued unity of Nigeria.

Considering the above narrative of detrimental intersectionality between ethnicity, religion (Sharia), and power struggle, it has become imperative to seek practical solutions to re-stitch the unraveling thread of unity, first regionally and then nationally.

How can the northern region advance a psychological erosion of ethnicity, or bring northerners out from their respective ethnic enclaves, to embrace regional harmony?
So far, government at state and federal levels has set up various committees to look into remote and general causes of the riots, several reports and recommendations have been given, but implementation is lax. For instance the International Crisis Group has urged the government to ‘implement the recommendations of the published Fiberesima, Tobi and Ajibola commissions of inquiry and whitepapers,’ note that these submissions were respectively made in 1994 (Fiberesima), 2001/2002 (Tobi), 2009 (Ajibola). 

Similarly, the recommendations from various commissions of inquiry into the causes of the Sharia crisis in Kaduna over a decade ago have not been implemented. What is needed primarily is a body of committed and specifically, regionally focused civil society and other pressure groups to see to the implementation of reports.

The status of the constitutionality and legality of adoption of Sharia law in a pluralistic, federating nation, and respective states, has to be made constitutionally clear. Likewise, the indigene-settler clause needs to be reviewed. The discriminatory aspects of that policy, like educational, political privileges for (only) indigenes have to be broadened to include non-indigenes, but for a longer term national integration goal, the clause will have to be abrogated completely. It remains doubtful though whether a mere constitutional provision can sufficiently erode the acquired psychological effects of ethno-religious differences.

This suggests the need for CSOs to oversee the launch or intensification of policies that drive inter-faith and inter-ethnic dialogues between conflict-ridden parties at the grassroots. These groups also need to build capacity and political literacy especially for youths, with respect to understanding rights and duties of political representatives.

As a matter of urgency, the national mono-economic system, and culture of dependency on federally allocated funds for development of states and local governments needs to be revised. When all local government (chairmen) or states (governors) are made to generate revenue for local and state sustenance, instead of being dashed ‘free oil money’ and freedom not to account for state funds – the incentive to occupy public and elective offices will reduce and by extension only competent hands will vie for such positions and emerge as leaders. This will ensure that the immediate constituency for respective politicians will no longer be mosques, churches or their ethnic enclaves.

The northern leadership, especially the Northern State Governors’ Forum (NSGF), needs a people-focused regional alliance, a ‘new’ blueprint for development that prioritizes literacy, (youth) employment, infrastructure development, girl child and women empowerment schemes, and optimization of mineral resources. This can effectively deplete the number of available recruits that fight during ethno-religious crises. Northern NGOs and CSOs need to act as watchdogs and guide the policies of the NSGF.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

The Malian Question..


From being a blank spot on the map, the Sahara now looks like a springboard for the advance of militant Islam.

Until recently Mali was famous only for its music and for Timbuktu — our nickname for nowhere. Suddenly the French are invading this huge, poor, sparsely populated, landlocked African country, much of which is empty desert. Britain is helping them (if they can get their aircraft to fly).

Just a couple of years ago Mali was held up by Western aid donors as a success. It had been relatively democratic since the Malians overthrew a dictatorship in 1992. And despite being poor — its main earners are gold and cotton — it functioned better than many of its neighbours. But last March there was a coup and now its Government is ineffective. What went wrong?

First, the Government was not in fact as good as the donors proclaimed. Basking in Western aid and praise, it became complacent, corrupt and did not deliver development, especially in the poor North of the country. Sensing discontent among the population, a young army captain, Amadou Haya Sanogo, seized power last year. Although he was forced to accept a civilian president and prime minister and prepare the country to return to democratic rule, he remains a powerful but unaccountable player.

Second, the North of the country, the Sahara desert, has been home to Salafist rebels pushed out from Algeria in the late 1990s and targeted by militant Islamist movements inspired and funded by Saudi Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalists, preaching jihad against the West.

Like many, my first reaction was that they were welcome to live in the desert. What damage could they do there? But the desert, flat and empty, is also like a sea, in that people can cross with few natural obstacles and no visible state boundaries. It is perfect for smuggling money, drugs, cigarettes, guns and people across vast distances and several borders. Foreigners were, and still are, often kidnapped.

The desert was also home to the Tuareg, tough camel-riding nomads with their distinctive blue turbans, who managed the trans-Sahara trade. Traditionally they were like an aristocracy, keeping themselves apart from the black Africans to the south and frequently enslaving them. But droughts in the 1980s and 1990s destroyed their herds, and many of the young Tuareg went north to join Colonel Gaddafi’s Army.

When he was overthrown in 2011, they grabbed as much weaponry as they could and headed back to Mali, planning to seize the North and declare it an independent country called Azawad. They found well-funded allies in the Islamists and launched their rebellion in January last year, pushing the Malian Army back before taking the entire North of the country and declaring it independent shortly after Captain Sanogo’s coup.

The Tuareg may have had the guns but the Islamists had the money and a strategy. The Islamists also started destroying historic Islamic shrines and, apparently, the ancient libraries of Timbuktu. Well armed and battle-hardened, they then turned on their Tuareg allies and routed them. The Tuareg nationalists have now called off their demand for an independent state but they have made themselves unpopular.

Suddenly from being a blank space on the map, the Sahara from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east is beginning to look like the springboard for a new Islamist offensive by AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and other Islamist groups. Mali borders seven African countries; next-door Niger, an equally fragile state, another five. 

According to Africa Confidential, a well-respected newsletter, the Islamists are targeting Mauritania next, with its rich fishing grounds and mineral wealth, and then Niger, which has uranium and oil.

But the biggest prize would be the destabilisation of Nigeria to the southeast, shortly to take over from South Africa as Africa’s biggest economy and chief foreign supplier of oil for the US. Nigeria already has its own Islamist insurgency, Boko Haram, which has received weapons and training from AQIM. In 2010 Boko Haram bombed the UN headquarters in the capital, Abuja, in the centre of the country, and has attacked churches and government buildings in northern cities. But it has not yet hit targets in the mainly Christian south.

There are reports that the Islamist groups are fighting among themselves, which may happen if all the attacks are in Muslim areas. Most of this part of Africa was traditionally Sufi Islamic — tolerant of local practices that are blasphemous to strict Wahhabi Islam. Shrines and tombs of local holy men and saints are now being desecrated and women forced to stay at home and wear the full hijab in public.

In Mali women have traditionally played a substantial role in public affairs and dressed in bright colours, their hair often uncovered. But today they wear black or drab green or brown and are forced to stay at home and are only allowed to meet a man if accompanied by a male relative.

Last week Islamist rebels in Mali began to advance south towards the capital, Bamako, taking the key town of Konna. The French realised that the Malian Army was incapable of stopping them and launched their own counter-attack by air.

Mali was part of their African estate and until recently France has remained engaged with its former territories far more closely than Britain has. Since 2006 the US has taken the lead on opposing Islamic militancy in Africa, establishing military training missions in most countries bordering the Sahara. 

One of the most alarming outcomes of the Mali episode is that most of the US-trained troops are reported to have either stayed in their barracks or deserted and joined the Islamists. But now the US cannot give direct military support to the Mali government because, under US law, it can only give such aid to democracies.
Can this rebellion be stopped by air attacks?

Bombing arms dumps and concentrations of rebels may hinder their advance but AQIM can only be quelled by troops on the ground who have the support of locals. At present the Malian Army is weak and lacks morale. That means the French will probably have to provide the core of a force that includes soldiers from other West African countries. 

They may get help from Tuareg nationalists but they remain untrusted.
Laurent Fabius, the French Foreign Minister, has said the action in Mali would be over “in a matter of weeks”. These are words he may regret.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Kenya..Headed the Nigerian Way!



Never again!’ blared Kenya’s radio stations in the heady days of 2008, when the blood of the victims of the post-election violence was fresh on the streets and politicians scrambled to negotiate the coalition agreement. 

One of the centerpieces of that agreement was a new constitution: a clean sweep, the final curtain on the colonial era, as though erasing a century of historical injustices were as simple as writing a new charter, creating more public offices and setting up a Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission. 

As the March 4, 2013 elections approach, those hopeful chickens hatched during the hastily agreed and drafted constitution are coming home to roost and Kenya’s political landscape is beginning to resemble another country that placed much faith in new devolved constitutions: Nigeria, now on its fourth since independence.

Throughout 2008 and 2009, Kenyans were routinely disappointed by the government’s thwarting of every attempt to deliver justice for the victims of the violence, by the slowness of resettlement and assistance for internally displaced people, by the failure to reform the police and the delays in establishing the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission.

Finally, in 2010, the new constitution, passed by over 60 percent of the electorate, seemed like a piece of good news. It set out a leaner executive, stipulated that cabinet members could not also be MPs, guaranteed a nominally independent judiciary, embedded a requirement for police and land reforms into the text, barred indicted suspects of serious crimes running for office and created a new administrative structure based on counties with their own legislature, governors and tax raising powers. A Senate would also serve as a check on the lower house.

Following the promulgation, there was widespread optimism and hope for a change of tone. But the moral force of the document barely survived into the next year. By 2011, the normal dynamic of Kenyan politics had reasserted itself: police reforms stalled, judicial reforms resulted in no new investigations or prosecutions into the previous polls, MPs awarded themselves another grotesque pay rise and the first signs of trouble erupted in Isiolo and Moyale on the border with Ethiopia in November of that year.

Members of the Borana and Gabra communities had read the runes of the constitution and correctly perceived the new Marsabit county – with Isiolo at one end and Moyale at the other – as a prize worth having. Their traditional rivalry over pasture, livestock and political patronage assumed a whole new urgency. Whoever had control over the coming Marsabit county government and the governorship would have a whole new level of power over revenues, security and dispute resolution. 20 people died in the fighting and around 7,000 were displaced.

Away from the headline politics of shifting alliances within the Nairobi political elite, 2012 saw a frighteningly violent turn in many areas as minority groups woke up to the realities of the new political dispensation. More power and more money at the local level meant new ethnic arithmetic. The sudden irruption of more offices meant a whole new field of competition, with dramatically higher stakes.

Across the more sparsely governed areas of Northern, Western, Eastern and Coastal Kenya, centralized power of a county in the hands of one governor offers enticing possibilities for enrichment of one man and his gang (of the kind that the country has seen effected at the national level by Messrs Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki). 

The possibilities for disenfranchisement for those left out are huge. Wherever a county does not contain a convincing majority from one ethnic group, or wherever the majority can be effectively challenged by a coalition of minorities afraid of being excluded, violence can be expected. This is why the solidly Kikuyu counties of Central province are immune from competition, and why the mostly Kalenjin central Rift and the Luo, Luhya and Kisii parts of rural Western Kenya are quiet so far. On the other hand, the ethnically diverse cities of Kisumu, Nairobi and Mombasa are hotspots, along with Coast, the North, and areas of the Rift Valley where the Kikuyu and Kalenjin populations have a level of parity (Kuresoi, Nakuru and Molo).

In February 2012 more fighting broke out in Mandera county on the Somalia/Ethiopia border between the Degodia and Garre clans with 40 dead and tens of thousands displaced. Clashes continued through July and August as rivalry over Mandera North constituency intensified and the Murulle became drawn in too.

Then, in August, tit for tat strikes between the Pokomo and the Orma escalated and Tana River County became a blood bath. Even after extra police were deployed, further attacks were perpetrated in September, December and January leaving an estimated total death toll of over 160 and 13,500 displaced. In a multi-sided contest involving the Tana River County senate and governor seats as well as a dispute over access to the Tana River from Ijara constituency, Omar Godhana MP, Danson Mungatana MP and Defence Minister Yusuf Haji fielded allegations of their involvement.

Although many of the fights in the Northern deserts and semi-arid areas are ostensibly about grazing, cattle and cattle rustling are an important factor in fundraising for political campaigns and rewarding youth for violence. It is in this light that the shocking November attack in Baragoi in which 45 policemen attempting to recover stolen Samburu cattle were slaughtered by Turkana warriors should be seen. The exact details are unclear, but three Turkana MPs, including two ministers, were questioned by police after defending the killings on television.

While the police were either uninterested in preventing or complicit in allowing violence in Tana, in Baragoi they seem to have been co-opted by one side. Partial policing was a feature observed in the post-election violence in 2008: in Kisumu and Nairobi police shot hundreds of rioters, many in the back, whilst in Naivasha and Nakuru, Kikuyu Mungiki mobs were left to do their worst against Luo and Kalenjin victims.

In the absence of serious police reforms (and the coalition government has shown no urgency), this is the future: a national force prey to the same ethnic, political and organized criminal influences as politicians. If parliament is the premier spot from which to rob the public purse and obstruct economic activity for one’s own benefit, then the police force comes a close second.

As Kenyan politics has become even more ethnically polarized under Kibaki, minority groups without national alliances with big men from other communities risk being marginalized completely. In such a context it is no wonder that they might begin to seek other means of political empowerment.

The Mombasa Republican Council is, in this respect, ahead of the curve, and perhaps a forerunner of things to come. They have declared that there shall be no election in Coast province, for, they argue, ‘Pwani si Kenya’ – the Coast is not Kenya, according to a colonial era memorandum of understanding, which promised a referendum on the membership of the coastal strip within an independent Kenya after 50 years. Time’s up, they say.

After 50 years of marginalization and the perennial grabbing of coastal land by up-country politicians on behalf of their ethnic constituents, the MRC has lost faith in the Kenyan political system, and thousands of indigenous Coast inhabitants belonging to the Mijikenda collection of tribes are heeding their call not to register to vote and even to prevent the election from taking place.

The MRC is, arguably, the only genuine grass roots social movement in Kenya. It enjoys popular support in all 20 Coastal districts, and raises money in mosques and churches every Friday and Sunday. If it were a political party it would likely sweep the province. Countless visitors to their Mombasa headquarters, including me, have advised them to eschew violence and to turn their movement into a political party. “Everyone advises us that,” the Council told me, “But every politician we have sent to Nairobi over the last fifty years gets bought as soon as they arrive. Nothing can be achieved in parliament.”

They have a point. The cases currently before the ICC were only referred after parliament failed three times to establish a special tribunal to try the cases domestically amidst allegations of large sums of money being paid to all sitting MPs. And when the package of legislation to implement and operationalize the constitution was sent to parliament by the Commission to Implement the Constitution it included a ‘Leadership and Integrity’ bill that specified the requisite qualities to run for high office. After allegations of corruption again, the bill was passed in August but gutted of the provisions on wealth declaration, vetting by state agencies and publication of pending criminal cases. The way was clear for Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto to run. A court case attempting to revise the language of the bill to its former state is ongoing but the plaintiffs are facing threats.

Add to this depressing picture the prospect of oil in Lake Turkana and Kenya’s first flash of Muslim-Christian violence in November when a Nairobi mob attacked Somalis in Eastleigh following one of the (now routine) blasts by suspected al-Shabaab militants, and you have a political scene that looks very Nigerian.
Like Nigeria, whose economy is also growing at a good clip, Kenya will have regional governors who command hefty shares of local revenues and who behave as kingmakers in their area supported by gangs of thugs and politically connected businessmen. 

At the national level, politicians dole out contracts amongst themselves whilst, locally, mobilizing half-interested populations in campaigns of hatred against whichever scapegoat is most convenient. Witness then, Uhuru and Ruto’s bizarre campaigning on a platform of anti-Luo feeling to distract from the violence they allegedly fomented against each other’s ethnic group last time.

Turnout in recent elections in Nigeria has gradually shrunk to shocking levels; in many places in 2007 nobody voted at all and in 2011, the result was a foregone conclusion. This time in Kenya, through a mixture of active disruption (in Coast and Dadaab), bureaucratic incompetence, and fear, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IBEC) has only registered around 65 percent of the electorate, undermining the poll’s credibility.

 Meanwhile, the Kenyan press is awash with gossip about meetings between elders in marginal districts hammering out deals on governorships and county seats, even before polling has begun. As the formal political process collapses under the weight of money and cynicism, it makes sense that real negotiations will happen elsewhere. In such circumstances the question will soon arise, why bother to vote at all?