Zenab Bagha, 19 April
In late February, as representatives of 15 employers’ organisations from across Africa gathered at a beach hotel in Mombasa to discuss the continent’s response to its unemployment
problems, a court some 10 kilometers away was making its ruling on the fate of 70 youth arrested for attending a meeting allegedly organized to propagate violence.
Two unrelated events, but for some community leaders in Mombasa the correlation between high levels of unemployment in the city and the recent spate of youth violence is clear. An idle youth population, decades of marginalization, the creeping in of extreme ideologies, and violent counter-violence measures are seemingly creating a combustible mixture that could ignite full-blown chaos.
In the last five years, youth-led protests have rocked the continent, from Tunisia, to Mozambique to Senegal. With an estimated 200 million Africans aged between 15 and 24 years old, youth not only make up the majority of the continent’s general population, they also account for 60 per cent of Africa’s unemployed, according to the World Bank.
The statistics are giving pause to African employers. “We saw what happened in Tunisia a few years ago,” Alexio Musindo, the International Labour Organisation’s Director for Eastern Africa said in an interview on the sidelines of the Feb. 25-26 employers’ meeting. “Poverty is a threat to investment. If there is poverty, it does not take long to disrupt and destabilize society.”
In Kenya’s second largest city, the incidence of confrontations between police and youth has risen noticeably in the last year – with most of these incidents having been staged around Majengo’s Shuhudaa mosque (formerly known as Mussa musque).
Religious radicalization is not new to Kenya. Kenyans were involved in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and have been linked to other terror plots, including the Westgate Mall attack.
Islamic leaders like Sheikh Muhdhar Khitami of the Supreme Council of Muslims (SUPKEM), point out that anyone with a sound understanding of the religious texts and traditions would never be swayed by extremist teachings. However, there are fears that heavy-handed counter-terrorism measures, when put in context with the continued neglect of the coast, is pushing vulnerable youth into the arms of radicals.
“There’s no doubt that marginalization and unemployment is to blame (for disaffection among Mombasa youth),” says Yusuf Aboubakar, a Mombasa-based lawyer. “There’s a growing feeling in the Muslim community that there is a deliberate move by the government or people in the government to marginalize its youth.”
According to a recent report sponsored by the British government’s Department for International Development, the rate of unemployment among Mombasa youth is 44 per cent – more than double the national average of 21 per cent. The report, prepared by Adam Smith International, an economic advisory firm, notes that “the feeling of marginalization is widespread throughout Mombasa County” and felt in all spheres: political, social and economic.
“The reason why Muslim youths are always turning violent is because they are denied jobs,” Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho told a press conference in mid-February. Joho was referring to employers from private sector, but the sidelining of coastal communities when it comes to government and public sector jobs is well-documented. Joho’s statement offers perhaps a simplistic explanation, but since independence, indigenous coastal communities have repeatedly forfeited land, jobs and economic opportunities to upcountry Kenyans, while seeing little of the wealth generated by tourism, the country’s highest foreign exchange earner.
“We do not condone violence by the youth but we must acknowledge the dire situation we’re now in (at the coast) after decades of marginalisation,” Hussein Khalid, the Executive Director of Haki Africa, a Mombasa-based human rights organisation says. “Today we’re talking about violent youth, before that we were talking about the Tana River clashes, before that the Mombasa Republican Council, before that Mulungu Nipa and before that something else, all the way to Kaya Bombo. And this trend will continue unless we address the core of coastal issues.”
Broken dreams
Ahmed (not his real name) was among those arrested by police during the raid on the Shuhudaa/Mussa mosque. On Feb. 26, charges against him and 40 other youth were dropped on the orders of Magistrate Richard Odenyo. According to his sister, the unemployed 22-year high-school graduate has never shown an inclination to violence or radical teachings. He went to the meeting “to give his friends company”, she says.
Established reports indicate that most of the attendees, like Ahmed, were drawn by curiosity and a desire for free food. However, there’s recognition that the idle minds of these youth could easily become dangerous minds. Gabrielle Fondiller, who founded Hatua Likoni, an NGO that provides scholarships and career guidance to bright, needy students in Likoni, sums up the situation in this way: “Frustration and alienation. When you don’t see economic opportunities, you become willing to act out in counter-productive ways.”
The biggest obstacle to social mobility, she says, is poor education, and in particular, Mombasa’s low transition rate between primary and secondary schooling. A recent survey by the Ipsos market research company reveals that 41 per cent of coastal people have not completed primary school. Only a third have gone beyond secondary school, and drug abuse and prostitution rates among Coastal youth are the highest in the country.
There is a strong feeling of isolation and marginalization which is only being made worse by the state’s “harsh” counter-violence strategies, says Khalid. “Ninety-five percent of radicalization is caused by the government’s inclination to violence,” he says. “Marginalisation and discrimination are triggers. But the main issue for these youth is state violence… Unemployment, lack of IDs, landlessness; these are adjoining issues.”
Lack of leadership
In a new 90-page report launched in March, the Muslims for Human Rights (Muhuri), a non-governmental organization, details the illegal renditions and extra-judicial killings of dozens of Kenyan Muslims between 2007 and 2013. Khalid who helped produce the report, says since November 2013 “an unknown number of” Muslims have “been killed or made to disappear”.
They include Hassan Suleiman Mwayuyu who was murdered on a public bus in Tiwi, South Coast, Salim Hemed who has not been seen since he was bundled into a police Landrover during the Masjid Shuhudaa/Mussa raid, and Abubakar Sharrif aka Makaburi and his comrade Hafidh Bahero. There are concerns that others may have gone “missing” during anti-terror crackdowns in Mombasa and Nairobi.
No inquiries have been launched into the disappearances of Kassim Omollo, Samir Khan, and others mentioned in the report. Most Mombasa residents blame the Anti-Terror Police Unit for the illegal killings and arrests. “We’re talking of killings almost every month and yet police don’t have a single on-going investigation into these deaths,” Khalid says.
In an essay on his widely-popular Muslim Matters website, Yassir Qadhi, a North American Islamic teacher who formerly espoused extremist teachings, offers this advice to Muslim leaders: “If we truly wish to fight radical ideas amongst our youth; if we wish to persuade them away from rash measures drawn from raw emotions, and to persuade them to act upon wisdom and perform real acts of courage, then the first step that we will have to take is to become more vocal about the grievances that drive young men to acts of desperation.… after discussing these woes, we will need to educate our youth about the proper way forward in solving them: away from foolish and un-Islamic militancy, and towards education, political activism and other positive channels.”
The need for Muslims to speak not just to each other, but also to the wider society is highlighted in a 2013 report by the Institute for Security Studies that explores the vulnerability of Kenyan youth to radicalisation and extremism. While acknowledging that there is “no quick fix” to the problem, the report notes grimly that the “biggest threat to country’s stability” would be for it to divide along religious lines.
