Kenya: behind the terror is rampant corruption
The Kenya attacks should shatter the crude picture of Africa's future as one
of crime v supermarkets
Giles Foden <
http://www.theguardian.com/profile/gilesfoden>
* <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian> The Guardian, Tuesday 24
September 2013 20.45 BST
*
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At a burger restaurant, the body of a man and woman lie in a final embrace.
As Kenyan soldiers launch their assault, pop music is still playing from
loudspeakers.
The grisly consequences of an attack by al-Shabaab on Nairobi's Westgate
shopping centre are still unfolding. As individual families mourn, Kenya is
once again counting the cost of its point position as a regional bulwark
against militant Islam. The country has been here before: in 1998 al-Qaida
bombed the US embassy in the Kenyan capital; and in 2002 a terror attack
against an Israeli-owned passenger aircraft and hotel took place in the
coastal city of Mombasa. Westgate, too, is Israeli owned, but this may be
less significant than it might appear.
More important, for the future of Kenya and the continent, are the two
competing visions of Africa that the attacks project, a tension for which
the crude shorthand is: "crime versus supermarkets". Al-Shabaab emerged from
the tradition of the shifta, a word long applied in east Africa to common
bandits, but also (less frequently, and depending who was speaking) to rebel
groups. There is a continuity between the two usages that challenges the
tendency to separate terrorism and criminality into discrete phenomena.
Al-Shabaab is responding, specifically, to Kenyan involvement in a joint
African peacekeeping force (Amisom) in Somalia. But like al-Qaida before it
(the two groups linked formally in 2011), al-Shabaab is really attacking the
very idea of capitalism; not through any greatly developed sense of
revolution, but through an inverted sense of what is good for Africa.
In Kenya crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of
successive Kenyan governments to control either. Indeed, the Kenyan
president, Uhuru Kenyatta (whose nephew has been killed in the attack), and
the vice-president, William Ruto, both face charges of crimes against
humanity in relation to their alleged role in co-ordinating election
violence - Ruto's trial at The Hague has been adjourned for a week to allow
him to come home to deal with the crisis.
These attacks are part of a spectrum of banditry, with corruption at one
end, terrorism at the other, and regular robbery in the middle. Some Kenyans
will feel that the conditions in which the attacks have happened have arisen
because of economic growth in a vacuum of governance. Money that should have
been spent on security and other aspects of national infrastructure has been
disappearing for generations.
Corruption as well as geopolitics made possible a horrific situation in
which Muslim shoppers in Westgate were apparently left alive and non-Muslims
killed, in a ghoulish travesty of the mixed nature of Kenyan identity.
Ordinary Kenyans rightly want to be able to shop safely, and there is a long
history of them doing just that, irrespective of their religion or that of
the shop owner. An Ismaili Muslim from Kutch in India, the great Allidina
Visram (1851-1916), more or less single-handedly invented the retail trade
in Kenya. Muslims have been at the heart of Kenyan commerce for hundreds of
years.
The past decade has seen rapid growth of the Kenyan and other African
economies. This story of "Africa rising" is intrinsically tied up with the
further development of an African middle class, which has brought confidence
and investment. A lot of money has gone into commercial property, and
particularly the building of supermarkets. But without governance it all
looks very shaky.
You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you
like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the
ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties.
For now Kenya must mourn its dead. But unless the corruption stops, and real
investment is made in the social fabric, Kenya will once again be faced with
systemic shocks it is hardly able to deal with.
Giles Foden is the author of Zanzibar, and The Last King of Scotland
Received on Wed Sep 25 2013 - 13:54:31 EDT