By:Ayub Abdikadir (@
Whilst the world was shocked by the events of 2 April 2015 after the Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabaab massacred 147 innocent students going about their academic business at Garissa University College, a milestone shift was made by the campus, which is a constituent college of Moi University, by re-opening its doors once again, perhaps a lesson well laid for the terror group Al-Shabaab whose raison d’etre was to divide Kenyans along religious lines and possibly spark up religious clashes between the Muslims and the Christians.
Since independence, North Eastern Province (NEP) lived under successive State neglect, marginalization and constant socio-economic marginalization and that was even made more complex by the lack of indispensable skill from its leaders and the no-how ability to table its grievance which even in present day NEP is not a new phenomenon.
But the milestone step the country took in October 2011 further deepened the region’s state of affairs when we deployed boots in Somalia as part of our Western initiated foreign policy to battle Al-Shabaab from the frontlines, and that ushered NEP into living under clouds of terror from state oppression, thus putting the region at the tipping point in becoming an Al-Shabaab den who tuned to the region’s young, disenfranchised youths for recruitment.
The vast majority of Al-Shabaab fighters are not driven by religious, or ideological zeal but are conscripted or drawn by the offer of payment or the chance to loot the spoils of their terror. The group has found a fertile ground for recruitment among Somali-Kenyans, Muslims in the Coastal region and slum-dwellers in Nairobi and other cities as the State struggles to come up with measures to prevent the youths from running into the arms of the terror group to become home-grown militants.
The Kenyan Muslim’s quest to distance themselves from Al Shabab ideology largely went unnoticed until what unfolded at the Mandera-bound bus in December when Al Shabab militants stopped the bus and ordered Muslims to separate the Christians in what became a global talked-about story.
However, even as that episode gained appraise from the top leadership locally and coverage from the once namby-pamby international media, the announcement to re-open Garissa University College came as a big blow to Al-Shabaab whose agenda of division in Kenya was hardly hit.
Yes, the United States destroyed Al-Qaeda as threat against the Free World and as part of Washington’s war on terror campaign coined by Bush after 911, but while that campaign still struggles to gain momentum in many parts of the world, Kenya and NEP in particular managed to outdo terrorism not by bullets but via ideological countering.
Garissa University College was a rose in the desert, an iconic learning institution that stood in a deprived region as was education in NEP an enigma lodged at the bottom of a Pandora’s box, and while Al-Shabaab attack was thought to have buried its head, its re-opening will carry an academic uplift in varsity education in NEP as is its rise from ashes a call of unity and love in one of the most diverse nation on earth.
Conceivably, what will remain history will be the manner in which and outmaneuvered terror with hefty lesson for Al-Shabaab militants.
As Al-Shabaab continues to lose grounds in Somalia and that being a big blow to its ideological plan to expand beyond the Horn of African region, the re-opening of Garissa University and the courageous laying of brevity by Mandera heroes exposes the terror organization as far from religious zealot to religious novice, and their excuse of using religious reasons to cover their operations.
Westgate, Mpeketoni and Garissa attacks by Al-Shabaab sparked relentless negativity and stereotypes against Kenyan-Muslims and while that has been the same across the globe as made evident by the proliferation in the rise of Islamophobia millions of Muslims have said “No” to such barbaric attacks including 911 where 93% of the Muslim world rejected it.
However, as suspicion furrowed itself ground in Kenya since Al-Shabaab aligned themselves with Muslims in Kenya in cherry-picking verses of the peaceful Qur’an [Koran], NEP has declined to be its subject of enslavement and painted Al-Shabaab’s quotation of the Islamic text as self-serving and selective with a farrago of misrepresented, misinterpreted and misquoted lines of the glorious book.
The brave step by Garissa University quells the many narratives that have emerged in the aftermath of any Al-Shabaab attack against Muslims in Kenya—targeting sidelined youths for recruitment as it will front a big challenge for the group who will see their goal unachievable in a country that is becoming more cohesively bonded.
Just as the French-Muslim who hid Jews in Kosher Supermarket during the Charlie-Hebdo attack, Mandera heroes and the reopening of the University will dash Al Shabab’s hope to cause clash of civilization and change the dynamics in our country and one that may heal NEP everlastingly.
Ayub Sh Abdikadir is Journalism Student at MKU.
@AyubAbdikadir.
