The humiliation that comes with being a Somali in Kenya

Sunrise...Sunset....Sunrise....Sunset. 

From our vantage point, time moves forward linearly but the status of Somalis in Kenya is stuck in place.

Google Searches for the terms "Somali" "War" and "Terror" in Kenya Since 2010

I decided to look up the relative aggregate search popularity of the terms "Somali","War" and "Terror" in Kenya.

Here is the Graphic

Of Blasts, xenophobia and Somali victimhood mentality

  The bus blast that occurred in Nairobi on Monday night will mean another field day for xenophobes and conspiracy theorists alike. They'll use this incident to ratchet up the volume of their hate speech and I-told-you-so campaign mantra. The police might respond in one of their trade mark "human fishing" expeditions in Eastleigh. No facts will stand in their way including the fact that Police have identified Albert Mulanda, a Tanzanian national, as the sole person behind the heinous act  that took the lives of two people, including the bomber himself, in River Road yesterday. While I wouldn't write off the participation of terror groups in organizing the act, I'll let the semi-professional police do their work and connect the dots. That said, The Kenyan fearfully paranoid mindset should not be whipped into a terrified frenzy by hyping this latest attack. Turning Somalis into bogeyman for all the violence that is going on in the region will further destabilize the country. Any subsequent monumental over reaction to the verbal bluster of Al-shabab might lead to disastrous consequences for Kenya's foreign policy, safety and internal cohesion.

 While this incident might be used by xenophobic local commentators and policemen who are interested in lining their pockets with some cash for Christmas shopping, Somalis should come out swinging against this act, condemn it and offer the police all the help they can. At the very least this will establish a degree of good will between law enforcement and the larger Somali community.Instead of offering ourselves at the alter of self martyrdom and waiting for people to take pity on us, you and I, and other whose ideas overlap with ours should take on the system in defense of our people.

I do not want to enter a new realm that I do not understand very well and thus end up confusing my readers instead of enlightening them. Therefore, I'll spare you anymore of my off the cuff platitudes and poor substances and urge you to write to me what you think we can do change the  Somali alienation that is taking hold in Kenya.

 Alshabab is now holding any Somali anywhere hostage, more so, Somali Kenyans who fall victims to police swoops anytime such acts take place in Kenya.

Poverty is a State of Mind

 For those of you that have a thin skin, please do not go on and read this article and if you do, do not try to confront me on the streets. I have been on a winning tour with Jackie Chan. Also please pardon the headline for its lack of political correctness and benign overlap with  right wing conservative ideology. Despite the similarity of our messages as far as semantics go, the insights and nuances for this article are derived from real life observations of a local.

 I am not not in anyway trying to suggest Somalis are lazy in general. At least that's not true for our brethren across border but one might point to their well oiled pockets for their entrepreneurial success. The same cannot be said of Somali Kenyans.

 Take the case of Garissa. We have perennial droughts, famine and endemic tribal clashes. The city imports about 40% of its food needs from Nairobi  and has a significant number of its masses masquerading as refugees in the camps. This has created an atmosphere of ingrained dependency and lack of self worth.
Then there are our brethren from Somalia who have taken the whole issues of dependence a couple notches higher. They rely on remittances from family members in the west and sit around until the end of the month for the next supply of cash to come. As a society we derive our self worth not from who we are but what clan we are, what relatives we have in high places and what towns are purportedly ours.
  Vegetables are seasonal. Tomatoes and kales are unavailable or expensive between august-march (you hear me Kenyan entrepreneurs). Our road networks are under developed and trillions of gallons of water from the Tana River drain-by everyday while our people starve.
The Red cross and other NGOs have been trying to convince our people to take up subsistence farming but the rate of penetrations has been low among Somalis. Other communities especially those from madogo have accepted the call to independence far better than we have.

Everytime I go to 'Suuq Mugdi' (the dark market), the deplorable health and sanitary conditions turn my stomach. Here are hundreds of people selling and buying products in an environment that is filthy and don't seem bothered. Everyone delegates the cleaning to the other. The lack of collective communal action has left us a couple decades behind the rest of the country. Why don't we just drain the pools of sewage water and fill up the mini lakes with soil. That will not cost more than 10 000 shillings instead of waiting for infantile and irresponsible Councillors.

I can no longer try to rationalize this as marginalization by the government while ignoring the serious under performance of the locals.  I believe that to a large extent poverty and underdevelopment is a state of mind. If we are to see any substantial progress in our lives, we have to stop trafficking in the notion that its the duty of the governments to run our lives and shower us with gifts.

Somalia’s Wars Swell Refugee Camp in Kenya - NYTimes.com

By Josh Kron
Published Nov 11, 2010

DADAAB, Kenya — When Abdullahi Salat came here as a young boy in 1991, fleeing civil war in his homeland, Somalia, little more than shrubs and a few tents dotted the landscape. The woman working for the United Nations who greeted him at this safe haven, then nearly empty, showed him to his own tent and sprinkled a handful of seeds into his palm.

He told her no that day; Dadaab was not his home, and he believed that he would be moving on shortly.

“Now the trees are very huge,” he said.

Over the years since Mr. Salat arrived here — an arid patch of Kenya roughly 50 miles from the Somali border — the refugee population at Dadaab has swelled to nearly 300,000, virtually all Somali, making it the largest refugee complex in the world, United Nations officials here say, and one of Kenya’s largest cities, dusty and spread out.

Next year, Dadaab will celebrate its 20th birthday. But as Somalia’s conflicts rage on, Kenyan attitudes toward them have grown icy, and this collection of refugee camps has become a nettlesome political problem and, some contend, a source of insecurity itself.

Intense fighting in Somalia in recent months has sent new floods of refugees across the border, which Kenya officially closed in 2007. Last week, the United Nations accused Kenyan soldiers of forcing thousands of Somalis who had fled to Kenya back across the border.

In Dadaab itself, a stalemate over what to do with the growing refugee population has led to a critical shortage of schools, health centers and water stations and has raised fears that the refugees are being recruited by the warring parties of the very conflict they fled.

The situation has caught the attention of the United Nations, which recently sent a special envoy on children and armed conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, to Somalia and Kenya.

The use of child soldiers has become a major aspect of Somalia’s seemingly inextricable conflict, and the country’s transitional government, which is supported by the United States, has a history of using children in combat.

So do the Shabab, the fearsome insurgents who control much of Somalia. And so do Somalia’s notorious piracy networks.

“It has become widespread; children are commodities,” Ms. Coomaraswamy said. “They are fascinated by notions of heroic death and the mythology of war.”

In Dadaab, where there are more than 100,000 school-age children, military recruitment is nothing new.

“Nobody wants to go back,” said Mohamed Ahmed, a 20-year-old here, but “sometimes they steal people,” referring to the Shabab and others.

In 2009, the Kenyan government was accused of supporting recruitment drives among refugees from the camps to fight in Somalia’s army.

Kenyan officials and Somali expatriates “came to the marketplaces, during the middle of the day,” Mr. Salat said. “It was very official.”

Human Rights Watch documented the recruitment, in which it said young men and boys were lured with false promises of “exorbitant pay” and claims of United Nations support for the effort. The report said the Shabab also tried to recruit among Somali refugees.

Still, few of the refugees here return to Somalia, United Nations officials say, and the complex’s infrastructure seems to attest to that. Dadaab is replete with grocery stores, cinemas, hotels and international bus offices. Mr. Salat, who was given seeds to plant as a boy, is now a husband and father, and he is still here, working for the camps and assisting the next generation of arrivals.

One statistic may be most telling: The United Nations says Dadaab has 6,000 third-generation refugees, grandchildren of the original arrivals.

But Dadaab is also a settlement cut off from the national grid. The complex relies on a series of boreholes for its water, and most of its residents lack transit papers to travel into the rest of Kenya.

“There is a tendency to see refugee camps as warehouses for storing unused people; we need to treat them as normal people,” said Richard Acland, a senior coordinator for the United Nations in Dadaab. “There are children living here whose parents have never seen Somalia. Can we really say these people are foreigners?”

Indeed, Dadaab poses a critical question for the international community: How does it treat a humanitarian emergency that does not go away?

The United Nations wants to expand the camps, but Somalia’s perpetual violence has taken a toll on Kenya’s hospitality and the government has relocated refugees from Dadaab in the past.

“The international community does not know how to deal with the refugee camps,” said Catherine Fitzgibbon of Save the Children. “Is it an emergency or is it permanent?”

The question has created a political Catch-22. Humanitarian officials say building schools and hospitals is the best way to protect refugees, but donors are hesitant to finance projects that will encourage more refugees to come and stay, Ms. Fitzgibbon said.

The impasse has left Dadaab understaffed and overcrowded. Half of its youth — who make up more than half of all refugees — are out of school and easy targets for militia recruiters.

Today, recruitment is propelled by cellphones and travel agencies. “It’s a problem, but it’s not new,” said a driver for the United Nations in Dadaab, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job.

He said Shabab recruiters posed as refugees on buses and also called residents on their cellphones. United Nations employees have been approached to serve as go-betweens by Shabab agents, he said. “They will recruit as long as they control the border,” he said.

United Nations officials say they are aware of the problem but do not know how, or how many, people are recruited.

Each day more children arrive. Outside Dadaab’s administrative offices, a row of women cradle babies in their arms, hiding from the sun under the shade of a tree. Deqo Noor, 25, a mother of three, said that neither she nor her husband had any work here. She was waiting to register her 2-month-old son so that he could receive food rations.

“I grew up here, I married here, I became a mother here,” Mrs. Noor said. “In Somalia, all I’ve been hearing about is war.”

Wayaha Cusub on CNN

Lead Rapper for the Wayaha Cusub band talks to CNN's inside Africa. The group has recently got funding from the US High commission in Kenya to make Anti-Alshabab songs.