By MUTUMA MATHIU
Friday, October 07, 2011
Somali pirates are killing Kenya, one tourist at a time.
Hotels have closed, guests evacuated, bookings cancelled. Yet tourism is Kenya’s life-blood; without it we are lost.
These kidnappers are ruthless. They have destroyed their own homeland, and they would have no problem destroying ours.
Armies exist to secure territory. Yet, the response by the military to this violation of Kenya’s territorial integrity has been notably ineffective.
The Kenya Navy has patrol boats, gunships, very good guns and radar. It should be able to detect and eliminate external threats with relative ease. That’s what it is hired to do.
In this incident, seamen drowned. It had been reported that Navy boats had surrounded the pirates and a helicopter was in the air.
The kidnappers still escaped. How, in God’s name, did that happen?
This incident is an embarrassment. I hope no one in the military is thinking that they will just lie low until the whole thing blows over, because it will not.
President Yoweri Museveni was quoted in the leaked US cables speaking contemptuously of our military as a career force, which can’t fight.
Kenyans would probably see it as a professional force, as opposed to an ideological guerrilla outfit, and there is no reason why a professional army shouldn’t fight as well as any.
Problem is, Kenyans have actually never seen the prowess of their military demonstrated in battle.
The Tanzanians in 1978 fought its way into Uganda and deposed Idi Amin.
Uganda is always fighting: it fought alongside the Banyamulenge and the Rwandans to kick out Mobutu Sese Seko in DRC.
Right now they are fighting Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army somewhere in the forests of central Africa.
They are also in Mogadishu, fighting alongside the Burundians against Al Shabaab.
The Sudan People’s Liberation Army has fought a long war against the forces of Khartoum. Those two are actually war-weary.
Ethiopia, sees itself as a regional military power and I don’t think it has a very high regard for our fighting talent.
Ethiopian forces have been in action in internal conflict for decades, have seen combat against Eritrea, have fought Somalia, and recently invaded that country and kicked out the Islamic Courts Union.
The Somali dread Ethiopia due to its habit of knocking their heads at the slightest provocation.
So in this region, with the exception of peace-keeping duty, which is not quite a fighting assignment, our military is the least experienced.
Probably, the General Service Unit, the Administration Police and the Anti-Stock Theft Unit have had more excitement in their history than the fighting units of the military.
This is not to say that I agree with Mr Museveni. The Kenya military is very well trained and possibly the best equipped in the region. It might be a bit rusty, but that is not the same as not being able to fight.
The problem is the security policy which is based on two things: first, there appears to be an aversion to war because of its costs.
One retired general, a very smart man, once told me that armies don’t go to war, countries do.
When you go to war, you place your economy on the table. The minute you press the trigger, you kiss CDF goodbye.
The second consideration is our vulnerability to attacks by Somali militant groups.
Partly encouraged by countries which want to contain extremists within Somalia but do not wish to waste their resources confronting it, Kenya appears to have taken the attitude: let’s not do anything that will provoke those loonies into setting our cities on fire.
All this is crowned by our sick, fractious polity, sections of which tend to regard the security of Kenyans and their property as nothing more than political currency, easily spent on cheap popularity thrills.
I suppose those loonies will kill our country whether we provoke them or not. One tourist at a time.
A friend told me the story of his friend who went to hospital to have his appendix removed. It was, but he became very sick.
Oops! The doctors discovered that they had folded his intestines badly. Back to the theatre to repair the damage, they cut out a very big piece of his insides. After two operations to correct blunders, he has spent a month in hospital and is still a sick man.
I also heard about a young lady who nearly died after someone hung on her door the ‘nil by mouth’ sign and she went for days without food. Is it really this bad?