{UAH} Don't take your eye off Al Shabaab, they fight back - Comment -
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Don't take your eye off Al Shabaab, they fight back
The Somali militant group Al Shabaab has been having very good days at the terror office in recent weeks. On Thursday, it claimed responsibility for a suicide car bomb attack that killed at least 12 people near the security service headquarters in the capital Mogadishu.
The previous week, it had staged a bold attack on the presidential palace, killing officials and guards.
These violent attacks in Mogadishu have increased in recent weeks, as have nighttime mortar raids and daytime clashes between the security forces and Al Shabaab.
The Mogadishu areas are under the control of the Ugandan and Burundian components of the African Union peacekeeping forces, Amisom, who have been in the country since 2007.
Also, while Amisom and the Somali government forces are in control of the most strategic positions and towns in Somalia, they barely control 30 per cent of the country. The rest is still Al Shabaab territory.
To complicate matters, both Uganda and Burundi are having domestic issues back home that could be distracting them. President Yoweri Museveni has had his hands full recently. He got a ruling party MPs' caucus to endorse him as its sole presidential candidate in the 2016 election. It will be his seventh term overall, making him the longest-ruling leader in the entire region.
He has also been chasing down Ugandan homosexuals and the country's scantily clad women. He signed an anti-pornography law that forbids women, among other things, from wearing dresses that allow their thighs to show.
And in a nationally televised spectacle, in the face of international criticism, he signed one of the world's most stringent anti-gay laws. All this while he was juggling Uganda's controversial role in the South Sudan conflict, where he dispatched troops last December to back President Salva Kiir against his former vice president Riek Machar.
Now events in Mogadishu suggest that if you go against Al Shabaab, you need to give them at least 25 per cent of your attention, not 2.5 per cent.
Likewise, Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza has been scheming at home to amend the Constitution and run for a third term. Critics have been purged and militias are being readied for the hour of reckoning if it comes to that.
The Somalia situation is probably at a dangerous stalemate now. Amisom has 22,000 troops. Though it plans a troop surge and a major offensive against the militants, it will still need thousands more men and big time logistical support to dominate Al Shabaab. Fresh African fingers on triggers may help the mission, but the rest of the continent — and the world — isn't about to send troops to the Somalia quagmire.
Nor can Uganda and Burundi deploy the power of positive example. On current form, neither country offers an inspiring example of the kind of society a new Somalia could seek to be.
And matters are not helped by what is happening not too far off in places like South Sudan and the Central African Republic. In South Sudan, armed men are robbing patients and shooting them in their hospital beds. And in CAR, the warring sides have turned cannibal. Say what you will about Al Shabaab. In Somalia, at least, they are not as bad as that.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo3
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