Empower Somali govt to do its job
- Written by Editorial
The official mourning after the terrorist attack that killed 67 people in Kenya ten days ago is over but the pain will last forever.
As the inquest into what went wrong begins, asking whether anything could have been done to stop the carnage, it’s also time to reflect on Somalia, the country in whose name the terrorists committed their macabre act.
Truth is, the intervention of African Union forces, Amisom, through Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Djibouti and Sierra Leone, has made Somalia better off and put it on a recovery path for the first time in 20 years, but it has not necessarily made the region safer. In fact, it has made the region more prone to terrorist attacks.
That doesn’t mean the countries involved must cut and run; doing that would hand easy victory to the terrorists and the gains made in Somalia over the last couple of years would immediately be lost.
But it means the foreign players in Somalia should be mindful that there is a limit to what they can achieve. While the major cities have been liberated from al-Shabab, the militants continue to hold large parts of rural Somalia and it would take many more Amisom soldiers to smoke them out of the countryside and then hold onto the territory.
Yet Amisom cannot run Somalia for Somalis. Therefore, much more effort should be invested in supporting the government, particularly training the armed forces to deal with the security threat by themselves, and also exploring a possible political solution to the problem.
Uganda has been in Somalia for six years now and there doesn’t seem to be an exit strategy in place. This cannot go on forever, or else the threat of terrorism will continue to hover over Ugandans’ heads for many years to come.
The African Union and the international community in general must do more and faster to empower the Somali government politically, economically and militarily to be able to deal with al-Shabab and other internal challenges by itself. The seemingly endless involvement of Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and others is not sustainable.