Since the attack on the school I have often been asked about the violence here.
What the is violence about?
Why are they attacking things like schools?
Isn’t raiding just about cows?
I came across a statistic that helps answers some of these questions. The livestock industry in Kenya (largely unregulated and under reported) is estimated to be worth $1.3 billion, or around 13% of Kenya’s GDP.
Raiding is a profitable business. Terrorizing communities to displace them, access their grazing land and push into new areas for raiding, is all good business practice. There is often a political element, politics and money go hand in hand, but money is reason enough.
This excellent report in the New Humanitarian is worth a reading. Kenya’s security paradox: Police sent to Haiti as banditry plagues North Rift.
Along with the recent report by the the National Crime Research Centre (NCRC) ‘Managing the Dangerous Drift in Livestock Rustling and Banditry in Kenya’ (reported on here) it highlights the link between education and violence.
The foot soldiers of the pastoralist militias are almost exclusively made up of young men who have never attended school. Getting these young men into some kind of formal education is key to helping them out of the cycle of violence.
Establishing schools in troubled areas, and security for these schools, is essential. Enabling kids from northern Kenyan communities, plagued by violence, to go to school and giving them a chance of a different kind of future, is the best long term solution.