{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Don’t blame it on refugees, the new terrorist is nurtured here at - Opinion - nation.co.ke

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Don't blame it on refugees, the new terrorist is nurtured here at - Opinion

By MACHARIA GAITHO
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National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale seems to have undergone a conversion since the Al-Shabaab terrorist massacre in his Garissa Town constituency.

Just one year ago, he was at the forefront against a proposal to close down the giant Dadaab refugee camp in Garissa county. That was part of the recommendation in a joint parliamentary committee report on the Westgate Shopping Mall terrorist attack the previous September.

Mr Duale vehemently disagreed, defending the rights of refugees to be hosted in Kenya and also their right to move freely in the country instead of being confined to camps.

He has also been against the occasional police swoops targeting Somali refugees in Nairobi suburbs such as Eastleigh, arguing that they were investors who contributed greatly to the local economy.

"Kenya is a signatory to the Vienna Convention. You just cannot wake up one day and close the refugee camps as recommended in this report," the MP told Parliament in March last year.

What struck me at the time was the hypocrisy in the garrulous Jubilee coalition Majority Leader pushing an argument based on Kenya adhering to international treaties and conventions, yet he was previously the loudest voice for such agreements, citing the International Crimes Act, to be torn up.

Today, the Garissa Town MP wants Dadaab closed. He led a group of leaders from the North-Eastern region demanding that the cluster of refugee camps be shut.

"The camps have been the centres where the training, coordination, and assembly of terror networks is done… time has come when the national security of our people becomes paramount over international obligations," he intoned.

Is this a real solution or just a diversion? For a long time we have lived under the illusion that terrorism is an exclusively Somali import.

Now we know that it is also deeply embedded in Kenya.

The young fellows who set out on the route of death and destruction are just as likely to be home-bred. They are Kenyan-born citizens who learnt the warped ideology of jihadism and the craft of firing guns and detonating bombs right here in the madrassas, mosques, and community centres of Nairobi, Mandera, Mombasa, Garissa, and Wajir that have been taken over by extremist groups.

Therefore, let us not pretend that kicking out Somali refugees is the sole solution.

The same questions must be raised about the rationale of building a "Berlin Wall" in Mandera town to halt a Somali influx when we know that the bad guys are already right inside Kenya.

And while at it, let us also question President Uhuru Kenyatta's defiance of the High Court order halting the hiring of 10,000 police kurutus found to have been enlisted corruptly.

Our security system is certainly in dire need of more boots on the ground, but the terrorism threat must not be exploited to provide justification for dictatorial edicts. The government can challenge the matter in court instead of promoting contempt of the law.

Someone, anyone, please explain this one to me like I am a five-year-old: How does replacing roundabouts with crossroads make for faster traffic flow?

The fellows promoting this project on Uhuru Highway tell us the new intersections will be "signalised".

That fancy word bamboozles nobody. It simply means that a lot in my good Kenya shillings will be spent on a new set of traffic lights, yet the present lot cost a cool half billion and have never worked as intended.

In this digital age we could not get somebody to properly synchronise the lights! And it never occurred to us that there is a need for a central control room to monitor and control traffic flow.

Some fellows will argue that traffic in South Africa, the US, and Dubai flows and efficiently without roundabouts, but they forget that those countries have working traffic lights, proper traffic flow management systems, and drivers who understand and observe the Highway Code and common road courtesy.

Simply uprooting roundabouts and replacing them with crossroad junctions will not help in any way until all the other things are fixed. The only beneficiaries will be the contractors and the officials getting a cut.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com. @MachariaGaitho on Twitter 

Don't blame it on refugees, the new terrorist is nurtured here at - Opinion - nation.co.ke

http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Somalia-Refugees-Dadaab-Garissa-Attack/-/440808/2677546/-/3bfknhz/-/index.html

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