Saturday, September 13, 2014
In the 1970s, Somali dictator Siad Barre created two groups of militia, the Western Somali Movement Front (WSMF) and Somalia Abo.
Barre had no way of knowing it then, but he thereby begun what would become a decades-long reign of terror in parts of at least three neighbouring countries in the Horn of Africa region.
In the 21st Century, this organization is one of the most inbred, ingenious, infiltration and dangerous organized crime dangers to stability in Kenya.
The militias that Barre begun have morphed into the Mandera Mafia, a versatile and transnational organized crime outfit that thrives on instability.
More than 40 years later, the Mandera Mafia is still killing people, forcibly moving populations and has its tentacles deep into the Kenyan security, political and economic sectors, including the Intelligence agencies, Parliament, the Senate and money transfer.
So powerful and absolutely ruthless is the Mandera Mafia that it has been at war with all other clans for the past two months and has outgunned, outflanked and outwitted both they and the Kenyan security establishment.
The Ajuran, Marehan, Murille, Degodia and Borana have all been attacked this year and over the past five years with superior firepower and barbaric brutality. To the rest of Kenya, particularly national capital city Nairobi and its burgeoning middle class and cosmopolitan international community, the Mandera problem has been too remote, and there has been too little hard and fast information and data, to be of any but the most cursory attention.
However, the Mandera problem is beginning to get dangerously up, close and personal for what happens in Mandera sooner rather than later impacts some of what happens even in Nairobi’s posh gated communities.
Connecting the dots and seeing the Big Picture factors can be an eye-opening experience.
In politics, the Mandera Mafia actually owns elected and nominated leaders like indentured slaves in feudal times. It is an open secret in the frontier region that to qualify to stand for elective or nominated positions, whatever your party membership, a prospective candidate pays millions of shillings to the Mandera Mafia.
Membership of Parliament and Senate goes for around Sh30 million a pop, failing which the popping of small arms and light weapons fire is the next sound the would-be successful candidates hear.
The Mandera Mafia is Kenya’s and the Horn of Africa region’s foremost gunrunners. They are the armourers of the criminal networks up and down the country and across borders in regions that comprise Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda.
Gunrunning is almost as lucrative as drug running and sometimes, in some places, exceeds and, or complements the latter, depending on the magnitude and duration of a conflict or size of an armed crime wave.
And members of one Kenyan frontier clan, crooked, hardened and ruthless individuals whose bloodlust knows no bounds, are the Lords of War and destabilization throughout the region and in many other parts of the country.
These bad seeds are members of the Garre Clan.
By reporting this we are by no means saying that all Garre are supporters, let alone members, of the Mandera Mafia, any more than age-old and multimedia references to the Italian Mafia – including in novels, scholarly research, the cinema and the theatre – are a slur on people of Italian heritage everywhere.
How did these evil individuals amass so much power, influence, treasure and outreach?
And is there an antidote to this multiple-sector Mafia?
The Mandera Mafia is a non-state actor that has so thoroughly infiltrated the Kenyan State it is beginning to acquire some of the salient features and characteristics of a Latin American or West African narco-terror state.