NAIROBI, KENYA – It is nearly noon on a Sunday in Lavington, a wealthy Nairobi suburb with palatial homes. Many families approach the Nakumatt Junction mall for brunch after Sunday worship services.
Traffic is heavy approaching the mall, which is unusual for a Sunday. Some inconvenienced motorists turn back. Others opt to use alternative entrances to the mall, investigating if they are less congested.
“Why the heavy traffic today?” asks June Wambua, 38, a single mother of two.
Dressed in blue sports gear from her weekly morning jog, the petite and light-skinned Wambua drives past the mall. Looking closely, she sees there are heavily armed security personnel at the gate, checking each car before permitting its entry.
This has become the new norm in every public facility in Nairobi, the capital, since Kenya declared war on al-Shabab, a militant group in neighboring Somalia, in October after numerous kidnappings and attacks.
Two hundred meters from the mall, police are on foot patrol in the road. The scene is the same throughout the surrounding suburbs.
Like many fellow Kenyans, Wambua says she is on high alert. But she says she believes that it’s about time that Kenya went to war.
“Kenya has been the safe haven for warring neighbors for far too long,” she says.
Kenya’s war with al-Shabab, a branch of al-Qaida in Somalia, has worsened the crisis following famine and drought in the Horn of Africa by causing humanitarian organizations to evacuate aid workers from refugee camps for safety purposes. Business has also been slow, especially during periods after security alerts. While some say it’s about time Kenya went to war and are confident in the conflict’s resolution, others say they are scared and paranoid and fear life will never be the same.
Kenya declared war against al-Shabab in October to protect its borders after multiple kidnappings on Kenyan soil. British, French and Spanish citizens were among those kidnapped from Kenya by al-Shabab forces. There were also grenade attacks and bombings in Nairobi and in areas of the country bordering Somalia.
This month, al-Shabab released a video declaring war on Kenya. The group claimed responsibility for an attack last week in northeastern Kenya in which more than five died and several were kidnapped.
Together, conflict in Somalia and the drought and famine crisis that settled into the Horn of Africa last year have affected more than 13 million people in the region, according to the World Food Programme, a U.N. humanitarian agency that has been implementing food operations in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda.
Conflict in Somalia has worsened the drought and famine crisis in the region, according to the United Nations. The refugee camps along Kenya’s border with Somalia have been particularly hard hit by the war with al-Shabab.
CARE, an international nongovernmental organization, operates three refugee camps in Dadaab, located in northeastern Kenya. The camps receive some 1,300 refugees a day, the majority from Somalia because of the insecurity there, according to CARE. There are nearly 400,000 displaced people living in the camps, which have the capacity to hold only 90,000.
Wambua says she has a friend who was interviewing a few months ago to work at a refugee camp in Dadaab for Oxfam International, one of the many other humanitarian organizations that have been providing aid in the Horn of Africa since the drought.
“She was called for an interview with Oxfam as an aid worker mostly in the arid north, where the Dadaab camp is located,” she says.
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