By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Kenya’s President, William Ruto has announced his country’s readiness to reopen its border with Somalia in April, almost 15 years after it shut over attacks by Islamist militant group al-Shabab.
The group is alleged to have masterminded series of deadly assaults in Kenya from its base in Somalia, including one on a shopping centre in the capital, Nairobi in 2013 that killed 67 and another at a university in Garissa two years later in which 148 were feared dead.
A planned reopening in 2023 was shifted after further attacks were recorded.
Ruto said the intention to re-open two crossings follows years of security assessments, adding that there will be a heavy deployment of security forces to ensure the move does not compromise safety.
Kenya has also been concerned about illicit weapons and other contraband goods being smuggled across the border, Ruto said.
The border was closed in October 2011, when the East African nation launched a major military incursion into Somalia to push back al-Shabab – an al-Qaeda affiliate – from its border.
These soldiers were later absorbed into the African Union force, a version of which is still in Somalia and still has a Kenyan contingent.
Ruto’s announcement came days after the Mogadishu-based Hiraal Institute think-tank issued a wide-ranging report about the security situation in Somalia, saying that al-Shabab was growing in strength and had regained most of the territory in central areas it lost in a big government offensive in 2022.
“The pattern of al-Shabab’s territorial recovery reveals both the group’s strategic acumen and the government’s structural weaknesses,” the report said.
The government’s offensive had been hasty – taking advantage of an uprising over taxes imposed by the militants – but it did not have a strategy to reclaim its sovereignty fully, according to Hiraan’s Mohamed Mubarak.
“The nature of the operation caused a huge desertion of forces,” he told BBC.
“With the government’s mandate ending in less than three months… I don’t think there’s going to be any more operations against al-Shabab in the foreseeable future.”
President Ruto announced the plan to reopen the frontier on a visit to the border town of Mandera, in Kenya’s far north-east, which has a large population of ethnic Somalis.
“It is unacceptable that fellow Kenyans in Mandera remain cut off from their kin and neighbours in Somalia due to the prolonged closure of the Mandera Border Post,” Ruto posted on X.
He hoped that the re-opening would boost “cross-border trade for the mutual prosperity of our people”.
