WE SHOULD NOT WASTE AL SHABAAB’S CRISIS

Last week terrorist group Al Shabaab lost its leader Muktar al Zubeyr “Godane” to an airstrike launched by the US, throwing the group into a crisis that the region must take advantage of to ensure peace and stability in the future.

Al Shabaab, meaning the youth, is an offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) who were routed by the Ethiopian army in 2006. The ICU were a group of sharia courts that came together to form a rival administration to the Transitional Federal Government.

Al Shabaab has previously pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and under Godane, has sought to spread its brand of terrorism around the region, with deadly attacks in Kenya and Uganda.

Godane, who had a $5m bounty on his head, had purged many of his lieutenants and analysts think that it will be some time before the group is back on its feet.

This week the group announced a successor Ahmad Umar, who it can be expected will unleash more of the same. 

For the region who are the terrorist organisation’s first line of attack the unsettling -- however temporary, of the group is an opportunity that cannot go begging.

"The obvious thing would be to step up military operations in the short term. Put the group under intense pressure and hope to weaken them severely by death or defections of their fighters. Some observers have suggested that many of the rank and file are not in the fight out of any ideological conviction but see it as a source of livelihood. This tells you something about the desperate economic situation in the country...

This last point is where long term efforts have to be targeted. A resuscitation of the country’s economy is the only sustainable way to deny these terrorist organisation the foot soldiers to promote their deadly agenda.

But for the economy to have a chance peace and stability has to be restored to the country, which for more than a quarter of century has not had a coherent government. This is easier said than done as Al Shabaab is not the only group opposed to the seating government.

The African Union Mission Somalia (AMISOM) work propping up the government is a step in the right direction. War situations are often fluid and it would be foolhardy to put a definitive time frame to the exit of the foreign troops, but it is imperative that they work themselves out of the job by training law enforcement agencies to keep the peace but also the critical bureaucracy to run the war torn country.

The Somali people are the best people to sort themselves out and maintain stability. We should not lose sight of the fact that AMISOM is only there to nurture that process.

An even longer time initiative would be to resolve the issues that lead to the popping up of terrorist groups around the world. At the heart of the issue is the economic inequalities prevailing in the world that mean that for certain populations there is no hope for betterment of their living standards. This desperation feeds very well into the agendas of anarchist groups like Al Shabaab.

"So a regional force might pummel Al Shabaab and leave them for dead in the sands of Somalia, but soon another group, maybe even more ferocious, God forbid, will rear its head to take their place if the underlying issues are not tackled...

As long as these global inequalities persist, that lead to unfair political arrangements, there will always be a terrorist eager to be recruited.

Some circles may rejoice at the taking out of a major pillar of world terrorism, but those in the thick of things know that Godane’s demise may only offer momentary respite before its back to business as usual.

THE FALSE ALLURE OF THE QUICK BUCK

The papers have been awash with tales of billion shilling scams.

Us mere mortals wonder what we would do with a ten percent cut or sh2.4b of a sh24b deal.

The safe bets are we would buy property or start a business to continue to earn an income long after the windfall has been spent and with the balance say, sh100m see the world -- sunny beaches, cocktails at noon and we may even take up skiing or horse riding.

Oh yes, and we would hand in our resignation letters at our places of work.

Reality of course would set in when the returns on our investment cannot maintain us in the lifestyle we have become accustomed to. That’s when you see the “dealers” starting to sell their assets. And before not long they are back looking for a job. In the hope of pulling off another major heist maybe.

Shocking as it sounds this is the fate of most of our white collar criminals. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Think about it.

To have access to sh24b you are a senior official with a lifestyle to match – never mind that your official salary is only sh4m. So for ease of calculation let us say you have sh10m a month lifestyle. That would add up to a sh120m a year budget.

So let us assume you invest all of your sh2.4b where would you put it to at least get five percent a year?

The easiest thing would be to park it in treasury bills and bonds where you might be able to manage the five percent without breaking a sweat and even double digit returns. But because your money may be hard to explain, you would be forced to avoid official channels. Even the banks are tricky (but with all the forgeries flying around maybe not!).

So the next best thing would be real estate.

A few years ago at the height of our own real estate bubble it was rumoured that you could double your investment in a year buying and selling land. But South Sudan went up in flames, the donors turned off some taps and that avenue for juicy returns dried up.

And not to mention the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) now wants proof of tax on the income you have used to buy property of sh50m and above and buying and selling property becomes very dicey.

Let us assume anyway that before this life changing deal you had bought yourself an acre or two of land, so you need not buy any land now  to develop.

So you put up some rental properties and look forward to collecting rent throughout the year. You will discover very quickly that even if you pour in the whole sh2.4b in a property, after building, managing and other costs you will be lucky to get five percent a year, believe it or not.

And if this recently retired paper pusher cannot make money in real estate what makes you think he will in starting, running and growing a business? Where incomes fluctuate, one has to market, sale, hire and fire and generally put in an honest day’s work, day after day, year after year.

It is not easy to make money no matter how our local businessmen make it seem.

"Collapse maybe delayed but it comes eventually."

Which explains why our corrupt officials keep clinging to office (don’t believe their “for God and my country” spiel), because they need to steal more and more to keep these fictitious empires afloat.

It is this kind of money that fuels bubbles and speculates in Ponzi schemes. These guys are not stupid. They know like the Swahili say, “A thief has forty days” so they are always trying to fashion a soft landing.

But the laws of money always come into play.

Even those who have stolen money that is weighed in tonnes get their comeuppance.

Last week the Kenyan press reported that former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi and his close ally Nicholas Biwott were battling a company to regain property they had entrusted it with in the 1980s. The company denied any knowledge of an agreement between itself and the former political kingpins.

As unpalatable an option as it was, Moi and Biwott have now had to take their case to court knowing full well a lot of uncomfortable details will come to light.

So yes, the takings from corruption are nice while they last. But like the gambler, corrupt officials should hope to die in their sleep, because the reality on the other side can be hard to swallow.

GLOBALISATION’S UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Last week a team from the US Center from Disease Control reported that the Ebola outbreak in west Africa was out of control.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) didn’t help matters by saying that the outbreak had been underestimated.

According to the latest WHO figures, 3,069 people have come down with Ebola. Of them, 1,552 have died— a fatality rate greater than 50 percent.

Half way across the world the latest terror group capturing world attention the Islamic State formerly ISIS (The Islamic state of Iraq and Syria) beheaded a second American hostage, Steven Sotloff. This latest killing comes barely two weeks after another US journalist James Foley met a similar fate.

And also in the same week a group of Australian scientists more or less confirmed the findings of a forty year old research, which warned that our continued exploitation of the world’s finite resources, high population growth and material goods would eventually lead to a crash and civilisation as we know it.

The common thread that runs through these and many other emerging trends is the inexorable progression towards a “global village”.

Globalisation was driven by the need for western economies to have more access to global markets and resources and by the thinking that by increasing global trade everybody will be carried along on a sea of prosperity. It’s hard to refute the former but the jury is still out on the latter.

The ebola epidemics result of  two conflicting developments -- greater ability to move around for populations, boosted by improved infrastructure and falling borders and secondly the collapse in health care systems under the weight of the rapidly growing populations and governments’ negligence or misplaced priorities.

The poor handling of the outbreak is a function of governments’ wariness of the speed of information flow but still frozen in a pre-internet era where news could be supressed and crisis’ would just die off unknown to the wider world, of course with horrific consequences for the affected people.

Uganda, which has suffered three outbreaks of the haemorrhagic fever, using its experience with HIV/AIDS has been quick to clamp down on the disease when it first surface showing increasing competence in containing the disease and restricting infections.

By letting it get out of hand what would have remained a national crisis his ballooning into an international emergency demanding a cross border response.

Which brings us to ISIS. Charles Onyango Obbo writing in the Mail & Guardian Africa suggested that terrorist organisations like our very own AL Shabaab and Boko Haram are doing what decades of talk shops could not – force African leaders to think more and more in regional terms.

ISIS of course is playing on a bigger stage. Their ambitions to create a caliphate that straddles Iraq and Syria is forcing the US to contemplate unpalatable alliances. ISIS for one are opposed to the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria but also the US backed Iraqi government.

The flare up of these kind of “super empowered” groups, all taking a cue from Al Qaeda, is being facilitated by improved technology. The innovation that happened in the last half of the 20^th century is more than has happened in all of human history and this trend is only accelerating.

Unfortunately the innovation has not been restricted to peace time application but has extended to the means to wage war. So ISIS a relatively small group of combatants can hold the much larger armies of Syria and Iraq at bay and even force a return to Iraq of the US army.

What is little reported is the killing the global military industrial complex makes whenever there is a whiff of insecurity anywhere in the world. Because believe t or not these companies have growth targets to meet and a peaceful world is not good for their bottom lines. Growth regardless of the consequences.

And finally the 1972 book “Limits to Growth,” warned against such gratuitous growth, growth regardless of the consequence to the environment and human considerations. In the 40 years since it was written the global economy has continued to grow. In burst and spurts but to grow never the less. Unfortunately this growth has come in line with the biblical saying “To those who have, more shall be added onto them and to those who don’t have, even the little they have shall be taken away from them.”

The drive for faster and faster growth and the widening inequality in global wealth has led to break downs in systems, as we see with west African health system and precipitated unprecedented insecurity as we see with increased insurgency around the world.

Globsalisation is a desired end result it’s the means by which it is being executed that is throwing up all these unintended consequences. 

The sooner we recognise this the better.

UGANDA COULD HAVE DONE BETTER ON THE CENSUS

It’s amazing how things change. This is my third census in Uganda. 

In the first census there was a public holiday. We all sat around the enumerator when she came and dutifully answered her questions the first time. The second time I don’t think I was counted chances are the enumerator bounced at our locked home. So they couldn’t have been a public holiday even then. This time I was informed that we had been counted days after the fact.

I am better than some of my friends some who swear they hadn’t been counted but found their gates marked as such. One friend waited all day dutifully at home on Monday and no one turned up. When they drove out of their gate on Tuesday morning they had been marked as counted!

It was heartening to see enumerators climbing mountains, crossing rivers and maybe even deserts to get the job done.

Looking forward to the next census hopefully in 2024 the question needs to be asked, IS there a more efficient and effective way of carrying out a census than we have been doing since the first one in 1911?

I am sure our data storage has been vastly improved given the changes in computer technology in the last 10 years. But our enumerators are still using pen and paper to get the job done.

Maybe we should start planning for the next census as soon as this one is done. And should not be a problem for the bureau of statistics alone.

Imagine a situation where all births and deaths are logged into a centralised data bank. All students in our education system are fed into the same bank. All ID, passport and driving permit holders as well. All NSSF members. All property and business owners too. And we shouldn’t forget mobile phone owners. 

By the time we get to 2024 the census would be for mopping up those living on the fringes of society and verifying the existing statistics.

The beauty of such a system is that our population numbers would be real time, with changes happening with ever increasing sensitivity to the reality.

Some people were still wondering what the purpose of the whole census is? In theory the census should help our planners in their job. The government is supposed to plan for its citizens, ideally for an improved standard of living for them going into the future. In the best of circumstances this is no easy task but would be made even more complicated without a sense of population numbers.

Which probably explains the state of our universal primary education effort. At the time it was conceived it was supposed to be for a maximum of four kids per family but enforcement collapsed and it was decided to open it for all. And we had no clue what that would mean. We are still suffering the effects of that.

The importance of the planning function cannot be understated, but the credibility of our planning will be determined by the data we are working with.

Let us invest in the hardware and processes to make the exercise, which comes around every ten years, less time consuming, effective and cheaper. 

But there lies the catch.

 Of course for the planners one of the major drawbacks of greater use of technology is that it will cut down on the surface area for  eating and  per diems!