|
By Tristan McConnell
Eastleigh, Kenya, January 09, 2010 – “That shopping centre,” said my
Somali translator pointing to a garish multi-storey building clad in
tinted glass, “was built with pirate money.”
As we bumped along yet another traffic-clogged street that was more
rubble than road the translator pointed out a series of half-built
high-rise apartments, shopping malls and hotels.
“People talk of global recession, but here there’s no recession,” he
laughed.
Above the banging and clattering of the construction boom the
ear-piercing calls of the muezzins echoed. Beat-up buses disgorged the
newest arrivals fresh from Somalia, and on Twelfth Street a row of
wooden kiosks awaited the daily delivery of khat, a popular narcotic
herb.
Women in burkas walked alongside open sewers and past piles of festering
rubbish, and knots of young men hung about outside the neighborhood
mosques clutching copies of the koran and mobile phones.
“Keep your head down – all the [al-]Shabaab go to that mosque,” the
translator warned as we drove past one.
Everywhere people spoke Somali not Swahlili because although this is a
suburb of the Kenyan capital Nairobi it is Eastleigh, otherwise known as
Little Mogadishu.
When the Somali-Canadian rap star K’naan wanted to film an authentic
video for his hit song Soobax he came here to Eastleigh: it was the
closest thing to the no-go zone of his hometown Mogadishu.
Last month property investors in Nairobi were told that while the
slowing global economy had hit remittances sent back to Kenya from
family members abroad, investment flows from within the Horn of Africa –
and specifically from Somalia – had risen to meet the shortfall.
“We are basically saying that the Kenyan diaspora has been replaced by
this retired ‘pirate’ cash,” said Kenneth Kaniu, an investment manager
at Stanbic Investments East Africa.
One property agent moaned that pirate money was overheating the market.
“They pay over the odds for anything and everything,” the broker told
The Times. “And they pay cash!”
By some industry estimates property prices in Eastleigh have more than
doubled in the past year.
It is reckoned that Somali pirates made at least £50 million from
ransoms in 2008 but with war convulsing their country there is little
hope of secure investments.
Kenya is particularly popular, partly because of its large ethnic Somali
community – some Kenyans, some Somali refugees – but also because it has
yet to pass a proposed anti-money laundering law.
In a matter of minutes cash can be transferred from a pirate town to
Eastleigh via clan-based Islamic "hawala" agencies and invested in
Kenyan property and businesses. The Government has now decided to carry
out an audit of city property.
It is not just retired pirates and their money that are making new homes
in Eastleigh.
This month Kenyan police, backed by the paramilitary General Service
Unit, made a rare appearance in Eastleigh rounding up 300 Somalis acting
on intelligence reports that Islamist fighters were taking refuge in the
enclave.
It is thought some of those arrested were fleeing members of the Hizbul
Islam opposition group that has lost a number of recent battles in
southern Somalia against its former ally al-Shabaab.
For the most part Kenyan security is invisible in Eastleigh which, with
its radical madrassas and mosques, its thriving business community and
growing refugee population, is becoming a fertile recruiting ground for
al-Shabaab as well as a valuable source of funding.
Source: Times Online, Wednesday, January 06, 2010
|
|
