In April 2006, Kenya’s most famous historian, Prof. Bethwel A. Ogot, declared that Project Kenya was dead. Kenya’s 2010 Katiba provides a framework for reviving, if not Project Kenya, at least the debate around it.

For Kenya to deliver on its promise of “Natukae na undugu, amani na uhuru, raha tupate na ustawi” and revive Project Kenya, it must fundamentally redefine its relations with northern Kenya. The Constitution of Kenya 2010 has done the easy part by altering the nature, tenor, and tone of the engagement. However, the hard part is the full realization of the aspirations expressed in the national anthem and the Constitution. Leaders of northern Kenya and of the national government must transcend their mutual mistrust and forge the vision of a new shared future for this to happen.

Post-colonial relations between northern Kenya and the rest of the country evolved in three primary phases. These phases are not clear-cut, tending to overlap.

The first phase was the marginalization period—a carryover from the colonial period. During this period, security was the overarching lens through which independent Kenya looked at northern Kenya. The full incorporation of northern Kenya into independent Kenya started on the wrong footing. The region had voted in a 1962 referendum to secede from Kenya before independence; the outgoing colonial administration’s disregard of the referendum’s outcome triggered the “Shifta War”. While “Shifta” was the state’s primary justification for over-securitizing its relations with the region, the security posture extended way past the 1963-67 period of the war. Securitization is Kenya’s lingua franca in engaging northern Kenya.

The result is that northern Kenya turned into a giant garrison. The region has military bases or schools in almost every former district. Isiolo leads the pack; it houses the School of Infantry, the School of Combat Engineering, and the Kenya Army Armoured Brigade. Thus, to people of a certain age from the region, the government was a Nyap (an enemy), a perception justified by the rich history of human rights violations by state security agencies, including the massacres in Wagalla (1984), Bagala (1998), Malka Mari (1976), etc.

The region was agency-less; it existed at the whim of the national government. The relationship between the north and the rest of Kenya was hierarchical and unilateral — northern Kenya accepted whatever the government gave it.

The second phase, born out of the first, is the Serikali Saidia phase. During this period, former president Daniel Arap Moi was the central figure. In keeping with his modus operandi, he appointed leaders from the region into visible national positions as a token. These leaders acted as native gatekeepers while the national government maintained its securitization policy. As a result, politicians like Dr Bonaya Godana and Hussein Maalim Mohamed became regional kingpins. All that these leaders did at every public event was ask for serikali to help them. But Moi’s “benevolence” could not address the systemic policy that led to the region’s underdevelopment. The country’s first post-independence development plan, Sessional Paper No 10 of 1965: African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya, created a dichotomy of low potential and high potential regions, where the trickle-down from the high potential areas would develop the low-potential areas. As per the policy, northern Kenya was a low-potential region, and therefore, the state invested little in it.

Creating an illusion of systematically addressing northern Kenya’s leaders’ “Serikali Saidia” cries suited Moi and the leaders from the region alike. The relationship between the north and the rest of Kenya remained unidirectional. The leaders could say to their constituents that they had taken their problems to Moi, and Moi could feel that he had addressed them.

The third period is the Katiba phase. The central plank during this period is the decentralization of power and resources through devolution. Devolution altered relations between the people and their leaders in northern Kenya, on the one hand, and between the county government and the national government on the other.

This phase is developing, and the rules of engagement are evolving, and people — not Nairobi, or the region’s members of parliament and senators — have become the critical factor. How this phase is handled has tremendous implications; the early part of the Katiba phase has shown that leaders in the northern region have not woken up to the reality of accountability. Similarly, leaders from other areas, especially central Kenya, still suffer from centralization hangover.

Centring northern Kenya 

Devolution is the centrepiece of the 2010 Constitution, and with it some counties have received more resources in the last 10 years than they have since independence. Naturally, this has spurred discussions about northern counties benefiting disproportionately from the national treasury; this issue became a sticking point during the previous round of revenue-sharing formula negotiations in 2020.

Predictably, politicians from northern Kenya and from other marginalised areas resisted attempts by the national government to reduce budget allocations to counties. In contrast, the most vociferous supporters of the proposed reductions were the politicians from central Kenya under the nefarious one-vote-one-shilling-one-kilometre formula. They even instrumentalized the marginalization discourse, arguing that the current revenue allocation formula is reverse marginalization, with counties in central Kenya being the target.

Establishing equity in revenue allocation is a step on the road to making Kenya an equitable country as envisioned by the 2010 Katiba. However, for it to become a reality, not just in northern Kenya but across the country, equity must be paired with accountability.

Devolution is the centrepiece of the 2010 Constitution, and with it some counties have received more resources in the last 10 years than they have since independence.

Leaders from northern Kenya have been accused of living beyond their means while the region is one failed rainy season away from starvation. To be accountable is not merely to satisfy the demands of those using accountability opportunistically to cut county funds; it is also about ensuring that the people in whose name the money is allocated benefit from it. If anything, corruption is rife across the country, and it is not limited to northern counties alone.

Leaders from other regions should also consider equity when calling for cuts to county funds. Do the leaders from the other regions, especially those from Central Kenya, believe in what they claim when calling for reductions in the revenue allocations to counties, or are they merely playing politics? If they truly feel “marginalized” after 10 years of devolution, then they are in a position to feel what the people of northern Kenya have felt for over 40 years. No part of the country has benefitted from the national government’s largesse like Central Kenya has.

However, at issue is not if one region should benefit at the expense of the other. Rather, Kenya as a country will collectively benefit if all regions benefit. This is why equity is at the heart of the revenue-sharing formula.

Equity is not some esoteric concept but a lived brutal reality; 0.1 per cent of Kenyans own more wealth than 99 per cent of the population, while 36.1 per cent (2015) of the country’s population live below the international poverty line. Given this stark reality, living the “Natujenge taifa letu”, as inscribed in the national anthem, Kenya has to address inequity in the distribution of resources. That requires more than rhetoric and good documents.

I left Oromia just before turning two years old and I grew up among the first Oromo people to call Melbourne home. I vividly remember the days when we were so few that, in Clayton South, the suburb in which I spent 16 years of my life, there was an Oromo family on almost every block. Being such a small community, we didn’t scatter across the breadth of the city but huddled together in a small enclave for safety, support, and the comfort of familiarity. In those days, weddings, birthday parties, funerals, and other community events were attended by people from all the regions of Oromia who made up our little community.

But as our community grew in number, and as the number of people from every region of Oromia grew, I started to see a divide in how we congregated. By my mid-teens, I was almost completely disconnected from the spaces and networks that included Oromo people from outside the Arsi region, where I come from. Naturally, as I reached adulthood, I attended cultural and community events on my own initiative rather than at the invitation of my family. I started to learn about my community all over again. And in the course of this experience, I was never directly and deliberately taught who the Oromo are, who I was as an Oromo, and how and why other Oromo people were different, or the same, to my family. 

Whereas this learning is experiential for one growing up in Oromia, there are gaps when this way of learning is transferred to the diaspora, or even to urban areas in Oromia, and so more recent generations are developing different tools and spaces for learning Oromo identity, culture, and history. What I did learn experientially though, were the nuances that make one a person from Wallaga, another from Haararge, Shewa, Arsi, etc.

Still, l had little knowledge regarding the Borana Oromo. As one who developed Oromomumma (Oromo identity) in the diaspora, and as someone who has spent over a year and a half living in the homes of Borana and Orma Oromo in Kenya, my relationship with this part of my community has developed in an intriguing and adventurous way, and it holds a special place in my heart.

I met Addee Jiloo, a Borana woman, in my early twenties. Each time I had attended Irreechaa (an Oromo thanksgiving festival), it was Addee Jiloo that led the procession to the water. If a woman needed her Gutino (Borana cultural dress) tied at an event, we would frantically search for Addee Jiloo. If we had public events, she would be the one conducting the coffee ceremonies. In many ways, she was collectively identified as a keeper of cultural knowledge, a leader of cultural practice, and an advisor on cultural affairs.

Over the years, I remember repeatedly hearing that “Borannii Hangafaa Oromo”, that the Borana are the oldest of the Oromo. This refers to the position Borana and Bareentu, as the first sons of Oromo, hold as the moieties of the Oromo nation. I had also come to learn that the Borana were among the few Oromo to still practice the Gadaa system, one of the greatest cultural assets of the Oromo nation.  To me, the Borana felt almost like a thing of legend, a mystery to be revered and respected. They seemed to know things about being an Oromo that others didn’t. They seemed to have succeeded in preserving practices that the rest of us were no longer connected to. They seemed to be Oromo with the kind of defiance, resilience, and resistance that I wanted to embody. Although, from what I could see, it seemed like the Borana did so without the existential effort I sometimes felt it took to embody Oromummaa.

Language

I stayed with a Borana family for a few months when I first moved to Nairobi, but for the first few weeks of my stay, I had almost no idea what anybody was saying. I was used to most Afaan Oromoo dialects and Addee Jiloo’s dialect never sounded very different from anybody else’s, so my Kenyan experience sent me into a state of severe culture shock. With time, however, I became used to the difference in dialect and was able to improve my communication and now you can probably detect the influence of the Borana dialect in my spoken Afaan Oromoo.

In many ways, she was collectively identified as a keeper of cultural knowledge, a leader of cultural practice, and an advisor on cultural affairs.

Almost simultaneously with this sense of shock came a sense of overwhelming awe and admiration. Afaan Oromoo is a language that you feel. It is poetry in motion. Intimate, alive, revealing.  I found this exemplified in the Borana dialect.

When I first heard my host answer the phone and greet the person on the other line with, “Qileensii urgooftuu?” Is the air fragrant? I almost wept. Welcoming a guest, the Orma of Tana River along the northern Kenyan coast, say “Diyaadhaa”, come closer, be close. This is a common saying among the Borana and Orma people, and I experienced it frequently during my stay in Tana River. If language is supposed to connect us, I think that the breadth of the Oromo language does so profoundly, and the dialect spoken amongst the Borana and Orma achieves this objective to grand effect.

Traveling up north

When I travelled to northern Kenya, I was bubbling with expectation. I remember sitting at a small shop trying to recover from the long journey, and striking up a conversation in Afaan Oromoo with the shop owner. He responded in a mix of Swahili and Afaan Oromoo. We continued talking and I told him that I was an Oromo from the other side of the border. This meant, well, not much at all to him.

I had expected a dramatic reunion. What I got was a shopkeeper who was not surprised or touched in any way by my presence. The cultural and linguistic relationship that we shared, despite the borders, was not profound for him. The reason that this surprised me was that, when I visited Tana River, there was a palpable sense of connection with everyone I met, for the very reason that we had a shared identity across borders.

Given that I was closer to the border of Oromia and I was in a place that was, in many ways, more engaged with the Oromo cultural and political identity, I think I expected this sense of connection to be amplified. What I experienced after leaving this shop showed me that it was actually because of the consequence of this proximity to Oromia’s border and the political landscape of the area at large, that meant that Oromos connecting and sharing experiences across borders was no special occurrence.

I sat for lunch in the compound of an ordinary looking house. As we ate, a friend, someone who had grown up in the town we were in, began to tell me stories about where we were. In 2002, the house we were in was the target of a bombing by Ethiopian government forces. Luckily, nobody was home. Chief Ibrahim Abdi Dido and his family lived in the house at the time. In the same year, Chief Buke Liban, Chief Taro Sora, Chief Denge Okotu, Chief Huqa Guled, Boru Jiloo, Sheikh Hassan (Moyale), Qasim Abdi and many others were similarly targeted by Ethiopian government forces and in most cases, these community leaders, and oftentimes, their families, did not survive.  Although I knew a little about how the Ethiopian government targeted Oromo people across the border in Kenya, including the kidnapping and assassination of political refugees in urban centres, the arrest and extrajudicial killing of young people, and the displacement of communities, in the months that followed, I learned that the extent and severity of this persecution was far greater than I had first understood.

When I first heard my host answer the phone and greet the person on the other line with, “Qileensii urgooftuu?” Is the air fragrant? I almost wept.

Through listening to the stories of the many people I met on my travels, I also learned that local cultural leaders played and continue to play a role in this persecution by collaborating with the Ethiopian security forces. This was sobering to understand because it resembled the dynamic that’s been at play across Oromia since the onset of Abyssinian colonisation, whereby Oromo people, including local leaders, have opted to participate in the violence perpetrated against their own people.

My experience in northern Kenya brought me back down to earth regarding the way I viewed the Borana Oromo. I was in a place where the people were living with the challenges and consequences of choosing to live their Oromoness every day. Just as it would be incredibly weird for me to go to Wallaga or somewhere in Eastern Haragee or Balee and start wandering around asking people if they thought it was wonderful that we share a language, culture, and political reality (which I have never done), it was weird for me to do so in northern Kenya too.

The Oromo of Ethiopia and the Oromo of Kenya are, in many ways, fighting the same fight. Both make huge sacrifices for the political struggle, and suffer the consequences of this, along with enduring the consequences of simply being an Oromo in relation to the Ethiopian state, political activity or not. The indifference of the shopkeeper I met at the beginning of my travels makes sense. He experienced the same, if not more, breadth and depth of Oromummaa as I did; there was nothing novel I offered him in being an Oromo from the other side of the border.

The Borana-Gabra conflict 

When I arrived in northern Kenya, I remember getting off the bus from Nairobi and wondering why on earth it had dropped me so far away from the town I was going to, only to learn that it was an Orma-owned bus company, and they were careful about infringing on the territory of the Borana. The same person who told me the story about the house in which we ate lunch has lost family to protracted conflict between the Borana and Gabra people. When I asked him what the root cause of the conflict was, he said, “It just started a long time ago. We speak the same language, we are the same people, but a feud that started between a few, a long time ago, has continued on.” I didn’t know if the origins of the conflict were as vague as my friend described them to be, or if his description is just how the existence of the conflict feels to someone who has suffered because of it, but I did come to learn that access to resources like water and land between nomadic pastoralists (Borana) and settled subsistence farmers (Gabra) and ongoing political power struggles play a huge role in the enduring and deadly conflict.

Lamu

Many years ago I spent some time in Lamu and I met two Orma people on the Island. At the time I thought that it was just a bizarre coincidence that they were there but I now know that the Orma have been living in the northern coastal region of Kenya since the late 1800s.

Being from the Ethiopian side of the border, a landlocked country, it is very interesting for me to think that I share a language, history and, even if only in small ways, a culture with a people that have lived along the coast for over a century. The Oromo worldview places great emphasis on our relationship with and duty towards land. As one develops the essence of Oromummaa, I believe that a person intuitively connects with this worldview. From this perspective, learning that we are connected to a people whose relationship to land is connected to the ocean — there is just something about that that stirs something in me.

I was in a place where the people were living with the challenges and consequences of choosing to live their Oromoness every day.

Who we are as a people is infinitely complex. I am talking about the Oromo, of course, but I think I’m also talking about us all. If I have learned anything over the past year and seven months, it is that I will only ever keep living and reliving this one truth: people, their stories, and their lived realities are not linear, rigid, or made to be easily and simply comprehended. Life exists on a continuum of relationships and storytelling. I want to remain willing to relate to who people are, as they are, rather than clinging onto what I have constructed of a people through imagination, hearsay, and the effects of groupthink. I want my analysis of the world to shift and change as I learn and grow, and I want my posture of service to people to also shift and change as I learn anew. Getting to know my people on the other side of the border has taught me that state violence is pervasive, unconfined by borders, and resistances adapt accordingly. I also learned that I can do little to effect real and lasting change if I do not cultivate my ability to meet the complexity in individuals and in communities with a willingness to learn and an openness of heart and mind.

At the approach of the 2022 elections, and with every vote crucial, populist candidates from the major national political parties are appealing to pastoralist communities, especially those in rural areas. However, nothing substantive is promised would improve the well-being of these communities. Instead, candidates focus on programmes that are based on “individual well-being” and nothing at all on the “group rights” that are so critical to the livelihoods of the (historically marginalized) pastoralists, minorities and indigenous peoples.

Such framing could result in under-representation, inequality, and discrimination in policy and development processes. Pastoralists and other minorities should carefully interrogate the policies, strategies, and programmes of such leaders. They should be wary of candidates that are averse to the respect for pluralism. Most populists do not acknowledge the different conditions obtaining for certain segments of the population such as pastoralists. This is even when the constitution recognizes the same. They would rather see pastoralists’ social-economic challenges through the same lens as that with which they view other Kenyan social-cultural groups. This demeans the constitutional prescription that the historical marginalization of groups that depend on group-based livelihoods requires special interventions such as affirmative action programmes.

Rising Populist appeals

Populist appeals by Kenyan politicians have a rich history. Since independence in 1963, populist appeals have been variously employed by politicians during election periods to mobilize support from rural and urban poor. J.M Kariuki and Bildad Kagia are known to have taken sides with the “marginalised poor” against the corrupt elite; the two were up against the confluence of economic, and political power (in Kenyatta and his close co-ethnics) which had rendered redistributive policies unworkable. More recently, populist overtures by presidential candidates target segments of the voting population such as the pastoralist communities of northern Kenya and other ethnic minorities or marginalized groups, including those that self-identify as indigenous peoples.

While seemingly persuasive programmatic promises have been liberally made by populist candidates to Kenyans in general, pastoralists and other minority groups are beginning to realize the inability of political parties to respond to their issues. To them, parties have yet to become effective agents of democracy, national development, and national cohesion. Instead, major parties only articulate the communal and personal interests of their respective leaders.

Personal interests are therefore conflated with communal or ethnic interests. Usually, substantive issues and interests of pastoralists and other minorities are merely glossed over, if not altogether ignored. For instance, in spite of comprehensive and authoritative economic, social, cultural, and political records of historical injustices that have for decades been visited upon the pastoralists of the north and other minorities, politicians hardly address these issues on the campaign trail and no mention is made of how the recommendations of the Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission and other offices could be implemented.

Even as drought continues to ravage northern Kenya, leading to massive deaths of people and livestock, little has been heard from the various presidential candidates in terms of remedial and developmental programmes for the region. That is, with the exception of Democratic Party leader, Justin Muturi, who, during the inauguration of his campaign, promised to develop a “Marshal Plan” for northern Kenya once elected.

Local politicians have not been any better at profiling the needs of pastoralists in their parties or national platforms. Mohammed Guleid, CEO of Frontier Counties Development Council (FCDC) noted that: “Unfortunately, the political class, even those from the hardest-hit regions who are supposed to lobby for more intervention from the government, are lazing and drinking cappuccino in fancy Nairobi hotels,” adding that the “Majority of them are hanging around presidential candidates who seem not to have any feelings for the dire situation. The country is in an election mood and politicians don’t care about the plight of the pastoralists.”

It is noteworthy that nothing substantive seems to come of the closeness pastoralist leaders enjoy with the various major party leaders and prospective presidential candidates. While leaders from other regions are cutting substantive “deals” with other national parties and presidential candidates, northern Kenya leaders are presiding over internal/intra-regional incoherence and fragmentation. This has substantially weakened advocacy struggles towards more inclusive, representative, and democratic norms and structures for the political participation of the marginalized. Perhaps it is for this reason that Guleid saw the need for the region to have a spokesperson that could better project and protect the interests of northern Kenya pastoralists.

Alienating minorities

The political parties only reflect the approach of many previous governments where policies were designed and implemented to fit all social-cultural groups irrespective of their different circumstances, leading to greater marginalization for some groups. In this respect, the dominant political parties have demonstrated their inability to positively respond to minority demands. For this reason, minority groups are slowly but increasingly becoming conscious of the need to re-calibrate their advocacy work, particularly through civil society.

At another level, and as a default mechanism, minorities are beginning to form their own parties. In effect, when the political paths through which to channel their demands are blocked, minorities and indigenous peoples resort to more radical mobilizations. Advocacy occasionally turns into armed movements. The refusal of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Mexico to form a relationship with any political party or to participate in electoral processes, clearly demonstrates this trend. The Biafra insurrection in 1967 Nigeria and the recent Pwani Si Kenya movement of the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC) at the Kenyan coast are indicative of this trend.

It is noteworthy that nothing substantive seems to come of the closeness pastoralist leaders enjoy with the various major party leaders and prospective presidential candidates.

The insignificance of the issues of pastoralists and minorities is best demonstrated by their minimal interaction with major political parties and candidates during the campaigns compared with other segments of the Kenyan population/groups and regions. Very few campaign rallies have been held in pastoralist areas such as Moyale, Mandera, Samburu, or Turkana.

Research by Pewresearch.org in 2016 showed that nearly half of Kenyans had attended a campaign rally. Yet, in reality, pastoralists in the north have had fewer encounters with presidential candidates compared to other regions. This is because fewer rallies have been organised in their regions. Leaders from pastoralist areas may occasionally be compelled to fund such campaign forums themselves. Otherwise, occasionally, delegations of leaders from the north appear not to have much choice but to converge on Nairobi, often at the invitation of the national patrons.

Given the history of populist presidential candidates and parties ignoring pastoralists’ issues and interests, even in cases where agreements have been reached through pre-election negotiations, it behoves pastoralists from northern Kenya, and other marginalized groups, to studiously interrogate the politics, strategies, programmes, and campaign and leadership styles of populist candidates to determinate their alignment with their substantive issues and interests before voting for them. This should include exploring how pastoralists and other minorities should engage with the candidates or craft a new path for future advocacy if need be. Otherwise, all the invitations they receive from populist candidates to vote for them will be just an invitation to further marginalization and discrimination.