By John Onyando
Star columnist Ngunjiri Wambugu should have let sleeping dogs lie over the abysmal failure of
the government to protect vulnerable Kenyans from last week’s terrorist
attack in Mandera, which was executed in the same area, and aimed at
the same community, as an earlier attack in December. The government
astonishingly took no steps to protect the area, thereby making it is
easy for terrorists to strike again.
In seeking to deflect attention from this indefensible security lapse, Ngunjiri resorted to some of the most bizarre assertions ever published by a Kenyan columnist to explain terrorists’ motivations. By calling the terrorist attacks as “ethnic cleansing,” his goal, as in many of his other columns, was to build support for the government among the Kikuyu community. From the very first sentence of the article, he looks at the terrorist attacks entirely from a tribal perspective and therefore fails miserably in trying to understand ways to tackle it.
The thrust of the column was based entirely on Ngunjiri’s belief that the 2009 Population Census result for the Somali community was inaccurate, since, “considering NEP is an arid and highly impoverished region,” the registered annual population growth rate of about 15 percent was not possible, as more developed parts of the country grew by only about four percent. This contention is, at best, ignorant. One of the cardinal realities on the nature of population growth established by experts decades ago is that as countries or communities develop economically, and more women begin working outside the home, population growth rates fall drastically. A number of countries in Europe therefore have negative population growth, while many developing countries register very high rates.
In seeking to deflect attention from this indefensible security lapse, Ngunjiri resorted to some of the most bizarre assertions ever published by a Kenyan columnist to explain terrorists’ motivations. By calling the terrorist attacks as “ethnic cleansing,” his goal, as in many of his other columns, was to build support for the government among the Kikuyu community. From the very first sentence of the article, he looks at the terrorist attacks entirely from a tribal perspective and therefore fails miserably in trying to understand ways to tackle it.
The thrust of the column was based entirely on Ngunjiri’s belief that the 2009 Population Census result for the Somali community was inaccurate, since, “considering NEP is an arid and highly impoverished region,” the registered annual population growth rate of about 15 percent was not possible, as more developed parts of the country grew by only about four percent. This contention is, at best, ignorant. One of the cardinal realities on the nature of population growth established by experts decades ago is that as countries or communities develop economically, and more women begin working outside the home, population growth rates fall drastically. A number of countries in Europe therefore have negative population growth, while many developing countries register very high rates.
