Cutting bullet supply key to draining the swamps in the North Rift of lawlessness

Bullets, guns and banditry are the unholy trinity of terror in Kenya’s “arc of insecurity” in the North Rift.

Here, on November 1, 2014, Pokot gunmen massacred 19 Administration Police (AP) officers and three civilians near Kapedo Shopping Centre on the Baringo-Turkana border and made off with uniforms, 22 guns and thousands of bullets.

The government of President Uhuru Kenyatta has taken action. It has launched a multi-agency disarmament operation to flush out bandits, recover illegal firearms and restore security.

Coming barely two years after the killing of 42 police officers and reservists in the Suguta Valley near Baragoi, Samburu County, the operation throws into sharp focus bullets as the pivot of a “war economy” based on rustling, gunrunning and banditry.

Kenya’s “arc of insecurity” is, certainly, more insecure today than it was three decades ago when the Commander of the Presidential Escort, Elijah Sumbeiywo, chose it as a possible sanctuary for the Head of State during Kenya’s darkest hour on August 1, 1982.

Andrew Morton, the biographer of former President Daniel arap Moi, narrates how the Presidential Guards had chosen the Baringo/Turkana region as the site of a scourging guerrilla war against the self-declared “National Redemption Council” that staged the abortive coup by the Air Force.

“With the situation in Nairobi still in a state of flux,” Morton writes, “Sumbeiywo had two options.

AUTOMATIC ARMS

The first was to drive to Eldoret and then fly Moi out of Kenya. Alternatively, they would head north-west and rally the Pokot, a fierce loyal warrior tribe that would have fought to the bitter end to protect their Kalenjin president.

They had just set out for the journey when they were told that “the army is now in control” and that it was safe to return.

Kenya escaped by whiskers a potentially calamitous bush war that would have destroyed the nation. In his book, Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, Blaine Harden observes that “in the entire North Rift, residents consider themselves outside the jurisdiction of Kenya.”

Three decades on, the idea of citizenship in a “Kenyan nation” is yet to take root in this region where residents speak of the state in past tense and say they are coming to Kenya when they leave for Nairobi.

A deadly mix of banditry, criminality and cattle rustling by morans, bandits and soldiers of fortune, armed to the teeth with cutting-edge weaponry, is taking far more lives of Kenyan security officers and citizens than the war against Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

Decades ago, the assegai, arrow, sword, axe and club were the weapons of choice in warfare and raiding. Since the 1970s, these have been replaced by automatic arms as the region entered the vortex of civil wars and instability in the Horn of Africa.

Controlling the supply lines of ammunition has been the key to ethnic hegemony. After the overthrow of Haile Selassie by the Marxist Junta of Haile Mengistu Mariam in 1974, the Turkana controlled the flow of guns and bullets from Ethiopia into Kenya.

This tipped the balance of power and the geo-politics of cattle rustling in their favour as the new regional ethnic “superpower”.

LOW-PRICED BULLETS
However, after the fall of Idi Amin in 1979, Karamojong warriors looted the Moroto army barracks, gaining control of an estimated 15,000 guns and approximately two million bullets. They became the regional hegemons, organising raids as far as Turkana areas.

Their success stimulated a taste for automatic guns and a vicious arms race among the Pokot. As a community straddling the Kenya-Uganda border with about 12 per cent (100,000) of its estimated 850,000 people residing in the Pokot District of Uganda’s Karamojong region, from the 1980s, the Pokot controlled the supply lines of guns and ammunition from Uganda and South Sudan, while having access to supplies from Ethiopia and Somalia.

Access to bulk and low-priced bullets, both licit and illicit, has made the difference between victory and defeat. Guns like AK-47, which are ubiquitously available at a cost of a heifer or a goat, are no more useful than walking sticks.

The bullet is the actual pivot of militarisation and ethnic power. The Turkana owns automatic weapons, but unlike their Pokot rivals, their plight is lack of access to a regular supply of bullets.

“Whenever we engage Pokot invaders and exhaust our bullet supply, they come the following day and overwhelm us, because they have more bullets. We do not know where they get their supply,” laments a Turkana warrior.

NGOROKO UNIT

Warring groups are like the Frankenstein’s monster that turned against its creator. In the mid-1970s, the Government created the “Ngoroko” outfit, a quasi-official force known as “Anti-Stock Theft Unit” to protect mainly the Turkana from raiders from Sudan and Ethiopia.

On March 10, 1974, Pokot leaders claimed in Parliament that the Turkana were attacking them with bullets from their kith and kin in the “Ngoroko” unit.

Similarly, the Government-armed Police Reservists (KPR) in West Pokot for self-protection, but KPR officers have been a source of the bullets that have often found their way into the hands of combatants.

Kenya, with Belgian assistance, established in Eldoret a plant capable of producing 20 million bullets a year.

The consumers of these bullets, however, remain a mystery. Might they have found their way into Africa’s theatres of war and criminality?

In January this year, police in Kitale arrested an arms dealer from West Pokot County who had 15 bullets, nine of them reportedly bearing the serial numbers of the Kenyan Defence Forces (KDF) although tests were required to ascertain which officer was assigned the bullets.

The militarisation of society has given birth to a robust “war economy” hoisted by cattle rustling, gun-running and criminality. Guns have transformed cattle rustling into a business whose proceeds enrich the elite.

It is no longer the innocent cultural practice once used to meet the needs of dowry during marriages or replenish herds after devastating droughts or epidemics.

INSTANT WEALTH
Commercialised rustling is a bloodletting enterprise carried out by sharp shooters lured by the prospects of instant wealth.

One source intimated that donkeys are widely used to transport bullets to the strategic places near the battlefields.

Raiding is a racket involving transportation and sale of animals, often to those with lucrative tenders to supply meat to diverse consumers within Kenya, in regional markets or even to the Middle-east.

As such, immediately after a raid, animals often disappear, never to be found. It is this situation that led, in 2001, then president Moi to ask: “After animals are driven to Kolowa (East Pokot), do they grow wings?”

The discovery of energy resources is literary adding oil to the fire. Turkana leaders attribute the recent wave of attacks to a new scramble for “boundary and resources” following the discovery of oil and water in Turkana.

The commercialisation of raiding has enabled the Pokot and Turkana to amass a large reserve of animals which they use to procure more sophisticated weaponry and ammunition.

Using their raided wealth, the Pokot have constantly updated their weaponry. As one source noted, “G3 is for women, AK47 for training boys and MP5 for experienced morans.”

Cattle rustling thrives on a parallel trade in illegal arms. It is estimated that 25-30 per cent of small arms in the North Rift are from illicit sources.

GUN BUSINESS
The Pokot are both the gun users and gun-runners. Neighbours like Tugen, Njemps, Keiyo, the Ilchamus or the Marakwet are exclusively reliant on the Pokot for their illegal guns and ammunition.

The trade is lucrative. In Uganda, an AK47 gun is reportedly procured for the same cost as a chicken and sold profitably in Northern Kenya at a price of a heifer or goat.

Similarly, a single bullet fetches between Sh3 and Sh50 depending on demand. Bullets, often transported by women at night in sacks of relief food or in milk gourds to escape random police checks, have become an informal “currency” in this criminal economy.

The Pokot are a formidable military power within the Kenyan state, with capacity to wage simultaneous wars such as the one on March 12, 2001, when they simultaneously made raids on the Turkana and the Marakwet.

Cutting the licit and illicit supply lines of bullets is central to draining the swamps of insecurity, banditry and rustling in Northern Kenya.