al-qaida chief ayman al-zawahiri the coordinator 2016 part 29-oil-jihad-21

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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 29-Oil-Jihad-21

The economic transformation of African countries and the falling price of oil.How the search for oil is inflaming tensions in KenyaCommunities at the centre of oil exploration caught between a desire for development and the reality of damaged land.Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and other ruthless groups threaten to turn the continent into global jihad’s deadliest front.

Jihad Comes to AfricaBoko Haram, al-Shabaab and other ruthless groups threaten to turn the continent into global jihad’s deadliest front. By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV Feb. 5, 2016 Africa’s Muslim belt is getting bloodier.Boko Haram—the regional affiliate of Islamic State and one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups—has accelerated its campaign of almost daily suicide bombings. Just last month, the group massacred 86 people, many of them children, in the Nigerian village of Dalori and 32 others in the Cameroonian village of Bodo.To the west, al Qaeda’s regional franchise has been waging war on the government of Mali and expanded its reach last month to the previously peaceful country of Burkina Faso, slaying at least 30 people—many of them Westerners—in an assault on a luxury hotel. In the east, another al Qaeda affiliate, Somalia’s al-Shabaab, overran an African Union military base three weeks ago and slaughtered more than 100 Kenyan troops.Sub-Saharan Africa was long seen as relatively immune to the call of Islamist militancy because of its unorthodox religious practices—rooted in Sufism, a more mystical mode of Islam that focuses on individual spirituality—and its traditional cultures, which are far removed from strict Middle Eastern ways. Today the area has become the fastest-growing front of global jihad—and perhaps its deadliest.Driving this change is a crucial transformation of the way that Islam is being practiced by the 250 million Muslims living south of the Sahara—a population that is projected to grow by 60% over the next three decades. “The Islam that is spreading through society in Africa today is the new active Islam, not the dormant, Sufi, private-life only [version]. It’s going into policy, into economy, into culture, into education. It’s going into public life,” said Hassan al-Turabi, the leading ideologue of political Islam in Africa, who hosted Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders as Sudan’s de facto ruler in the 1990s.Facing this challenge, the U.S. and other Western countries have increasingly chosen to prop up chronically weak African states that can’t handle the onslaught on their own. In 2013, France launched an outright military intervention to prevent a jihadist takeover of Mali, a former French colony, and Paris still maintains some 3,500 troops in Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Chad. Since then, the U.S. has established a drone base in Niger and is setting up another in Cameroon, in addition to sending special-operations forces to several countries in the region. The U.K. also has dispatched military personnel to help fight Boko Haram.Africa is now crisscrossed by war zones stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Thus far, the rivalry between Islamic State and al Qaeda—Sunni terrorist groups that differ in their tactics and policies but have similar aims—has kept these insurgencies separate, but that may not last.Meanwhile, the operations of these African militant groups have become increasingly

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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sophisticated, often thanks to expertise and advice shared by their patrons and allies in the Middle East. Widespread Internet access and increasingly easy

travel have made these connections far simpler than just a decade ago. The collapse of the Libyan state in 2011 and the subsequent takeover of several Libyan towns by affiliates of Islamic State and al Qaeda also provided a nearby redoubt of jihadist control and ambition.Boko Haram—which roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden”—recently declared its allegiance to Islamic State and has put the new connection to use, Western and African officials say. The group has refined its propaganda videos, procured new weapons and improved its roadside-bombing techniques. “To plan the kind of operations that Boko Haram carries out, you need people of proven intelligence. They must be receiving explosives specialists and strategists,” said Brig. Gen. Jacob Kodji, who commands Cameroonian forces battling Boko Haram in the country’s war-ravaged Far North region. “What they want is to create a caliphate and dominate a good part of Africa.”Such aspirations have been fed by a social revolution sweeping many African countries, particularly in the impoverished Sahel region just south of the Sahara. As the continent’s weak, secular, postcolonial states have failed to deliver prosperity, basic services and good governance, their legitimacy has frayed—and their frustrated citizens have increasingly sought answers in Islam. In doing so, they often have abandoned the traditional religious establishment and adopted uncompromising ideologies imported from the Middle East, where a similar process began generations earlier.“These people would say, ‘Your problems exist because you are led by the Western system, and as long as you don’t take the great Islamic way, these problems will remain.’ That’s a very simple and effective explanation, and it worked,” said Moussa Tchangari, who runs a human-rights group called Alternatives Espaces Citoyens in Niger, a Muslim country with the world’s highest birthrate and one of the lowest per capita incomes. “For a while, these people were a small minority,” Mr. Tchangari added, “but as we failed to create a real democracy and resolve social problems, they advanced—and now they have succeeded in imposing themselves.”In Niger and many neighboring countries, the pace of this form of Islamization has been dizzying. Issoufou Yahaya, a historian from Niger, says that when he studied at the University of Niamey in the late 1980s, there wasn’t a single mosque on the campus, which sprawls along the emerald-green southern bank of the Niger River. “Today, we have more mosques here than we have lecture rooms,” said Dr. Yahaya, who now heads the university’s history department. “So much has changed in such a short time.”Just outside his office towers a concrete monument featuring the intertwined flags of Niger and Saudi Arabia, the ultraconservative kingdom whose oil-funded missionary campaign has helped to spread Sunni religious zeal throughout Africa. At the university’s main mosque, Friday sermons by Sheikh Boureima Abdou Daouda, who is also chairman of the League of Islamic Scholars and Preachers of the Countries of the Sahel, attract tens of thousands of worshipers.“Before, people here turned to religion when they reached middle age, and particularly after they retired. But now, it is above all the young ones,” said Sheikh Boureima, who spends much of his time spreading his religious message through Twitter and Facebook. “What we see is a flourishing of Islam.”The surprising degree of Islamization in Niger, which officially remains a secular republic, burst into the open a year ago, after the deadly jihadist attack in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, who is close to French President François Hollande, swiftly jetted to Paris to walk alongside other world leaders





in a huge street march against violent extremism.But back home in Niger, many saw Mr. Issoufou’s visit as an endorsement of

Charlie Hebdo’s allegedly blasphemous cartoons about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Furious crowds gathered in the capital, Niamey, and in provincial cities, torching more than 40 churches and the French cultural center. At least 10 people died in the rioting, which lasted days and deeply unsettled the country’s Christian minority.Of course, Islam—and even Islamic radicalism—aren’t new to sub-Saharan Africa. Medieval kingdoms in present-day Mali and Nigeria converted to the faith many centuries ago. In the 19th century, Muslim leaders in these regions and in Sudan declared jihads against both infidels and Muslim rulers whom they considered insufficiently pious. At the same time, Muslim slave traders established outposts all the way south to the Congo. Roughly a third of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is Muslim today.Only the arrival of European colonialists—and Christian missionaries—stopped Islam’s southward march. That created a Muslim-Christian religious divide that still dominates the politics of many African countries, such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, and led to the 2011 breakup of Sudan.With few exceptions, however, African Islam remained traditionally Sufi and uninvolved in politics. Sufi orders such as the Tijaniya and the Qadiriya, which are still powerful in many African countries, accommodated some elements of pre-Islamic African beliefs, adapting their practices to the region’s multiethnic and multireligious societies. In these orders, religious leadership in local communities is often held by hereditary Muslim teachers and holy men known as marabouts, who are sometimes believed to hold magical powers and whose tombs are venerated.In the era of European empires and the first decades of postcolonial independence, such syncretic practices remained largely unaffected by the political and religious changes sweeping the Middle East. But after the global rise of political Islam that followed the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Africa became increasingly connected to the broader Muslim world—and Africa’s Sufi traditions came under attack.Though Shiite Iran has made some inroads, particularly in Nigeria, with conversions to its minority sect of Islam, the charge in Africa has been led by Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative Sunni religious establishment. Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, the puritanical 18th-century preacher whose teachings remain the foundation of the Saudi state, deemed Sufis heretics and ordered the razing of their graves and shrines. For Saudi clerics, eliminating such heretical “innovations” and returning to the pure, strict Islam practiced by the Prophet Muhammad became the focus of world-wide religious outreach.The arrival of modern communications accelerated this trend, bringing Africa’s once-isolated Muslim communities into the turmoil sweeping the broader Islamic world—and undermining the power of traditional clergy who had preached accommodation with governments and non-Muslims. “Internet and mobile telephony have turned the slow drip into a fire hose,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “A lot of West African Islam was based on practices that were not typical in Orthodox Sunni Islam, on ritual rather than learning and scholarship. But in a world where anyone can look up theology on the Internet, it is no longer credible.”Proselytizing efforts by Saudi charities—and, to a lesser extent, by institutions from Qatar and Turkey—also have flooded Africa with money. Thousands of African theology students have been trained in the Middle East in recent decades, particularly at Saudi Arabia’s Islamic University of Medina, often to return as teachers or imams at the lavish new mosques that the Saudi kingdom has built across the continent.





“What they brought back is an Islam that doesn’t take into account the realities of our countries,” said Ali Abdel-Rhamane Haggar, the rector of the

University of N’Djamena in Chad and a former adviser to the country’s president. “But it’s easy to recruit amid the poverty, and the Wahhabis are very rich.” Thanks to their superior knowledge of religious texts and mastery of Arabic, many of these graduates also have competed successfully with traditional Sufi clerics, who often have only rudimentary schooling.“The traditional imams have always been seen as men of the system, preaching patience and not struggle. As the system is not working, more people are getting closer to those who contest rather than those who legitimize what is going on,” said Mr. Tchangari, the human-rights activist in Niger.Perhaps the strongest such Saudi-inspired revivalist movement in Africa is the Izala Society (formally known as the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Re-establishment of the Sunnah), which sprang up in northern Nigeria in the late 1970s to campaign against Sufi practices. It has since gained ground in several neighboring countries.A leading Izala-influenced sheik was Ja’afar Adam, a graduate of the Islamic University of Medina who presided over a popular mosque in the Nigerian city of Kano. One of his favorite pupils was Mohammed Yusuf, the preacher who would go on to establish today’s Boko Haram. Yusuf, who repeatedly traveled to Saudi Arabia, quickly became much more radical, seeking to destroy rather than to change existing African states such as Nigeria and rejecting any Western influence in the Muslim world. In 2007, after Adam publicly condemned his former student, Yusuf ordered the scholar’s assassination. Having spawned Boko Haram, the Izala Society has become one of its main targets, and several prominent Saudi-backed clerics have been gunned down since then.“It’s one of the unintended consequences. People adopt the Saudi ideology and internalize it, and then they realize that Saudi Arabia itself is not living up to that ideology, and so it becomes their enemy,” said Jacob Zenn, a specialist on Nigeria and African security at the Jamestown Foundation.Yusuf was killed in Nigerian police custody in 2009. Under his even more radical successor, Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram formally became the “West Africa Province” of Islamic State last year, abandoning some of its more idiosyncratic ideas and embracing the ideology of Islamic State’s self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.Boko Haram has devastated large parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, launching attacks that sometimes have involved up to a thousand militants, as well as tanks stolen from Nigerian armories. At least 17,000 people have died in the continuing conflict, and 2.6 million have been uprooted from their homes. Lately, Boko Haram’s favorite tactic has become sending suicide bombers—often children—to kill and maim worshipers at Sufi mosques.“These people think that all the Muslim communities that aren’t like them are unbelievers. This is how they brainwash those children,” said Sheikh Abdadayim Abdoulaye Ousman, a Sufi cleric who oversees Chad’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs. “For these extremists, the goal is power, not religion.”Even Mr. Turabi, now a Sudanese opposition politician, says that he is perturbed by how violent the African Islamist awakening that he championed for decades has become, especially in the case of Boko Haram. “It’s a revival, but when they are faced with a challenge, they become very active, even overactive,” Mr. Turabi said. “They want to hit, to struggle and destroy—but they do not know how to build anything.”





Africa's oil shockThe economic transformation of African countries and the falling price of oil.

16 Jan 2015The plummeting of global crude prices is generating ripple effects worldwide. While oil exporters are reeling from plunging revenues, oil importers are bracing for cheaper oil, and the potential economic stimulus. Global economic relations may also witness profound shifts as the United States overtakes Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer.Given the concentration of oil and other natural resources in Africa, it is worth examining how falling oil prices will affect the continent's economic transformation aspirations.Since the turn of the century, sub-Saharan Africa has recorded tremendous growth; it is the world's second-fastest growing region. Many African governments' expressed priorities are converging around sustaining this growth, modernising their economies and translating the benefits of this economic expansion into increased incomes, jobs and better educational and healthcare services for their citizens.These laudable aspirations have been articulated by individual African governments, regional organisations such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Union.Development goalsWhile the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had an overwhelming social development focus, the Post-2015 successor framework aims to "promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation" as one of its proposed Sustainable Development Goals.This renewed focus on the structural transformation of African economies from the domination of small-holder rural agriculture, bloated public sectors, informality and foreign multinationals, is reminiscent of the African industrialisation drive in the 1960s and 1970s. Newly independent African governments then, fired-up by nationalist zeal, and emboldened by resource discoveries, set ambitious economic modernisation plans, to be financed by resource windfalls - copper in Zambia, cocoa and gold in Ghana, and cash crops and oil in Nigeria.However, the lofty dreams were abruptly halted by external shocks from volatile global commodity markets, which disrupted the flow of foreign exchange. The effects were exacerbated through mismanagement by weak bureaucracies, and often, predatory dictatorships as personified by Mobutu in Zaire.Like the 1970s, a commodity boom driven by rising demand from China and other emerging economies since the early 2000s has led to a third boom particularly for oil-producing countries. Once more, resource earnings preceded a resurgence of state planning.Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria and Rwanda are among several countries currently with articulated industrial strategies. Conveniently, a wave of democratisations has rid many countries of brutal dictatorships of decades past.It is on the back of these economic and political developments that sub-Saharan Africa's growth rates were generated. Since June 2014 however, the high global commodity prices have declined steadily; Brent Crude, the international benchmark for oil prices has lost almost 50 percent of its value.If the tumble in commodity prices in the 1980s led to economic contraction, budget deficits, debt crises and social misery, how will the current oil rout affect Africa's renewed economic transformation aspirations?Economic effectsFirst, much depends on the length and severity of the oil crunch. Persistent low prices will





deplete foreign reserves, strain budgets, trigger cuts in social spending and other austerity measures, and ensnare oil producers in new debt. Forecasts

have been indecisive on the medium to long term trajectory of oil prices ranging from $43 per barrel in the first half of 2015 to $95 by year's end.Optimistic projections are banking on an improvement in global economic growth, and Saudi Arabia's staying power in the stand-off with US Shale production. Even if these bullish projections were to hold true, the slowing growth of China and consequent lowering of its demand for fossil fuels, emerging non-OPEC producers and new technologies reducing the cost of shale production could cap oil prices.Thus, if and when prices do rise, they are unlikely to reach the $100 mark. Perhaps, soaring oil prices and windfalls are relics of a time gone by.Second, African oil producers will be hard hit with varying severity. Veteran exporters like Angola, DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and South Sudan will be affected as they all depend on oil rents for 50 to 70 percent of their governments' revenues and more than 90 percent of export earnings. Already, Nigeria is reeling from the consequences.Cuts have reduced capital spending to just 14 percent for 2015 while government salaries and other recurrent expenditure take the mammoth share, and the depreciation of the Naira is likely to have inflationary consequences in an economy that depends on imports for most of its food and consumer goods.The war-torn South Sudan currently receives the lowest oil price in the world, $20 to $25, due to the shocks, the low quality of its oil and the payments for using of the pipeline traversing the Sudan.Declining oil revenues and output will threaten its already precarious attempts at post-conflict nation-building.Third, the experience for oil-importing African countries will be different. According to IMF projections, importers will experience increase in real income on consumption and decrease in the cost of production of final goods, and consequently, on profit and investment. Reduced import bills for countries like Djibouti, Benin and Malawi among others will save the equivalent of more than 11 percent, 6 percent and 5 percent of their GDPs respectively.Countries like Malawi which depend on foreign aid for more than a third of government revenue will have greater fiscal space, while Ethiopia's emerging manufacturing industry could be boosted from savings on oil imports.Fourth, are countries with recent oil finds such as Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Niger, and Uganda. Ghana's case is particularly striking. Having grossly overestimated expected earnings from its Jubilee oil fields, it embarked on a spending spree with wage increases and subsides and borrowed massively against future oil income. These have led to budget shortfalls since 2011, government debt, a 40 percent depreciation in the currency and a request for IMF stabilisation intervention.Critically, Ghana's oil production, like most of the new producers will be on a decline by late 2020 according to International Energy Agency forecasts. Ironically, the country is already exhibiting pathologies associated with the neighbouring dysfunctional veteran oil exporters.As African countries respond differently to the oil crunch, it is clear that resource endowments and the presence of industrial policies by themselves are grossly insufficient without practical measures to ensure that the revenues count and the sustained commitment to generate shared prosperity for citizens.The resilience of counter-cyclical safeguards to buffer the impact of sudden price swings on budgets and development spending will be tested. For instance, whether Angola's $5





billion Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) and Nigeria's $1 billion and its Excess Crude Account for stashing surplus oil earnings will allow them continue

with infrastructural projects remains to be seen.How these countries weather this storm will determine whether lessons have been learnt or whether the third oil boom is yet another missed opportunity.Zainab is a doctoral candidate in International Development at the University of Oxford.

How the search for oil is inflaming tensions in KenyaCommunities at the centre of oil exploration caught between a desire for development and the reality of damaged land.Lisa Laventure | 01 Apr 2016 Kerio Valley, Kenya - James Rotich's parents struggled to send him to school. Only during the good years, when there was enough rain and the maize grew high, would they choose a goat from the herd to sell to cover his fees. Decades later, when the oil company arrived, it occurred to him that life could be different for his own children.He had heard of Tullow Oil, the Anglo-Irish oil exploration firm whose lorries barrelled down the winding, unpaved road towards his small village. The company had made headlines a year earlier when they discovered a billion barrels of oil in Kenya's impoverished Turkana County, some 350 kilometres north of the rural farm James calls home. That day in 2013, as the trucks drove deeper into the valley towards him, James couldn't help but hope that there was oil under the land he had been growing maize and beans on for his entire life."I was proud," says James, now 53, standing in the middle of his plot in Muchukwo, Baringo County. "I thought to myself that if there is oil in our area, we are going to be rich. We are going to be the next Iraq."Trouble brewing in Turkana Muchukwo is a small village on the eastern bank of the Kerio River, a narrow stretch of water connecting the northern and southern points of the Kerio Valley.In the heart of the greater Rift Valley, the Kerio is home to herding and farming subclans of the Kalenjin ethnic group. The river, vital for their livestock, divides the valley in two: Baringo County to the east and Elgeyo-Marakwet County to the west.In partnership with the Canadian company Africa Oil, Tullow had been doing aerial surveillance in search of hydrocarbons - which indicate the presence of oil - in the area for months. Billing itself as Africa's leading independent oil firm, Tullow has been exploring for oil in Uganda and Ghana for a decade.The discovery of oil in Kenya seemed like a stroke of luck for a country that had been an energy outlier in a resource-rich continent. In 2014, Tullow contributed $162.5m to Kenyan coffers in tax revenue and investments. The same year, Kenya's Institute of Economic Affairs estimated that the country stood to earn at least $650m a year from oil exports. But as Tullow's exploratory aircraft flew over James' plot, trouble was brewing around Tullow's projects in Turkana.One of the poorest regions in Kenya, the arid Turkana County in northwestern Kenya was in a precarious state before Tullow arrived.Traditional inter-ethnic conflict between the Pokot and Turkana people stretched back for centuries. Communities fought over access to scarce water resources and grazing land, tensions that were exacerbated by climate change and small arms that flowed in from bordering Uganda, Ethiopia and South Sudan.The area faced extreme poverty, high unemployment and an 80 percent illiteracy rate, and





expectations that Tullow would immediately bring the jobs and development the region needed permeated local communities. Competition over land,

suddenly more valuable than ever, heated up.Conflict between the Turkana and Pokot escalated. Reports of armed cattle raids and dozens of deaths were reported by the local media. Meanwhile, thousands of people, angry that Tullow's search for oil had yet to generate jobs and money, stormed the company's drilling sites.The community accused Tullow of colluding with national politicians, bribing local officials, and failing to compensate them for damage to communally owned lands. Operations were temporarily halted and Tullow employees whisked away to safety.The company decided to change tack, promising more local investment and the creation of a formal grievance mechanism for communities to seek compensation for damages. Local groups criticised the move as a quick fix with no enforcement mechanism. Was the violence that Tullow's exploration for oil inflamed a case of badly managed expectations in a desperate community? Or was it a sign that Kenya, plagued with corruption and ethnic rivalries, was predisposed to the resource curse?Worlds apartToday in Turkana, tensions have tempered as the price of oil has plummeted. Despite the pressure the global downturn has placed on Tullow - reporting a $1bn after-tax loss for 2015 - the firm continues to explore for oil in Turkana and the Kerio Valley.In some ways, Turkana and the Kerio Valley are worlds apart. Economically marginalised with few resources (before the discovery of oil) and neglected by the national government, Turkana has long existed on the periphery of Kenyan politics. In contrast, the Kerio Valley and the Kalenjin clans within it are considered to hold greater political and social influence in the region. But even in the Valley, some worry that lives will be lost as communities are caught between a desire for development and an oil company operating alongside a national government eager to facilitate, and benefit from, their work. Like Turkana, though to a lesser extent, the Kerio Valley is also affected by environmental stresses brought on by climate change that have exacerbated violent competition for land. Literacy and education rates are low, poverty widespread and development desperately craved.As Kenya races to be the first East African country to export oil, international experts say that patterns are emerging in the Kerio Valley that mirror those witnessed in Turkana, pointing to trouble in the future: complaints of damage to communally held lands, lack of compensation and collusion with political elites. Rights abuses have already taken place, say communities within the Kerio, and tensions might rise as exploration ramps up.'We can't grow a thing'In the sleepy Kerio community of Muchukwo, green buds sprout in neatly planted lines on half-hectare plots of land. It's the rainy season, hot and humid, and massive black ants march in formation towards anthills two metres high. Life moves along everywhere, except for a large section of James Rotich's land where nothing grows.When Tullow arrived, he says, he gave them permission to build a road through the few acres of land he owns to bring in the heavy equipment needed in the seismic surveillance part of their exploration. They promised to leave his crops, James' sole source of income, in the same shape as before. The local politicians who facilitated Tullow's introduction to the community encouraged James to cooperate. James says he was drawn to Tullow's talk of oil-funded jobs, schools and roads for his community.James angrily recalls what ensued: Tullow subcontracted the seismic testing to a company that James says diverged from the agreed paths when the ground, softened by rain, proved impassable. When a bulldozer sank deep into the earth, the contractor brought in





truckloads of rocks to firm up the soil and extract the machine. James says his plot was ravaged: his fence broken and heaps of rocks scattered throughout.

Worst of all, there was no more water."This is very important land for me," says James, pointing to brown, dried-up banana trees lying dead on the ground. James relies on the money he gets from farming to support his family of 10."I used to be able to depend on this land, even in a drought. We thought life was going to improve. But it's as if they burned my land. Now, how do I live? How do I eat?"James' story mirrors the experience of farmers in at least three other communities in the Baringo and Elgeyo-Marakwet counties, all of whom confirmed that the direction of roads built across their land by Tullow were laid running downwards towards the Kerio River, causing the soil to erode and rainwater to flow away rather than sink into the ground. In an area predisposed to drought and erosion, hundreds of acres of land, carefully groomed over generations to retain rainfall using specialised terraces, could no longer grow crops."Normally, we would get about 20 bags of maize per acre," says Johana Chepkonga, a farmer in Keturwo, a village neighbouring Muchukwo in Baringo County. "But now, we have not been getting anything because the land has been destroyed, and we can't grow a thing."Tullow acknowledged that the 500km of roads laid for seismic surveillance exacerbated environmental challenges that have long plagued the Kerio Valley. Tullow's environmental manager, Alex Mutiso, told Al Jazeera that the company tried to rehabilitate the land by planting grass along the eroded gullies, but that "nature won over". However, the grass didn't grow because it was planted during the dry season. In Muchukwo, James says that his annual harvest has been reduced by 25 percent since seismic surveillance was completed. Tullow's internal grievance mechanism, using rates set by Kenya's Ministry of Agriculture, determined James was owed a mere $20 for his damaged crops and $50 for his broken fence - an amount that does not come close to making up for the loss in productivity over the years. As a result, he's had to resort to finding odd jobs and manual labour to ensure his children's school fees are paid.Many more farmers complain that they received no compensation whatsoever. Tullow says 70 complaints have been registered from the Kerio Valley through their grievance mechanism. They would not say how many have been resolved. Critics say the mechanism is intimidating for farmers, who see the company as an arm of a national government eager to sell oil.Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta announced in December 2015 that the administration planned to sell crude from Turkana by September 2016, a full four years before most industry experts believe the oilfields can be commercially exploited. That rush for profit trickles down to local government representatives in the villages, creating a "temptation to be overzealous in pushing the national government agenda", says Charles Wanguhu, a coordinator with the Kenya Civil Society Platform on Oil and Gas (KCSPOG)."When Tullow came here, they came with the permission of the politicians," says Nuluki Komen Cherogony, an 80-year-old farmer in Kerturwo, Baringo County. "The chief told us Tullow would work here and to please facilitate; we were told to comply. You could not interfere because you would be against the government."Tullow says local politicians helped in "rallying the community in support of our activities, because at the end of the day, it looks good on their part". Mutiso added that it was not Tullow's responsibility to ensure that local representatives were giving their constituents accurate information. "If they choose to twist the information, that's on them; we expect everyone to operate with integrity, honesty and openness." oday, Tullow says





their relationship with communities in Baringo remains positive. But a sense of distrust has set in among farmers, who believe Tullow and local politicians

- set to gain politically and financially if oil is struck - only informed them about the "good side of oil".In Kenya, communally held land is not covered by law, meaning there is no legal framework by which communities can seek compensation in the case of damages. A Community Land Bill meant to address this issue has yet to be passed - a delay that has been described as "ominous" in a report by the KCSPOG. Baringo communities are demanding that the government issue them with individual title deeds for the lands they farm. That legal protection, they say, is the only way they can protect themselves against the future risks of drilling for oil.Their biggest fear: a spill.Their concerns have precedent. In 2008, oil spills in Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, destroyed thousands of hectares of mangroves and the livelihoods of fishing communities in Ogoniland. The company responsible, Royal Dutch Shell, originally offered the villagers a mere $6,000 in compensation. Only after years of legal battles by groups such as Amnesty International was the company forced to pay $83.5m for their responsibility in causing one of the worst spills in the country's history.The knowledge that a spill could threaten their livelihood unites farmers in Baringo to demand increased legal protection that would only come with individual land rights. In the meantime, they refuse to cooperate any further with Tullow.Without deeds, they say, there will be no drilling.Betting on oilOn a Sunday morning, the road leading down to the town of Cheptuket, in Elgeyo-Marakwet County, is teeming with vehicles. Church service has just ended and a cluster of people sit by the side of the road, watching as lorries pulling heavy machinery roll by. Their conversation pauses, unable to hear each other speak as the machines rumble by, kicking up dust in their wake.The machines are all headed towards a five-hectare stretch of land just a few kilometres down the road where, on December 28, 2015, Tullow began drilling its first exploratory well in the Kerio Valley.Cheptuket experienced the same issues as villages in Baringo County following Tullow's seismic surveillance work. But instead of resisting development until they can achieve stronger legal assurances, the community in Cheptuket has doubled down on their bet that Tullow will strike oil and bring economic development to the county. Tullow also approached Cheptuket slightly differently after their experience in Baringo. The dozen or so farmers with claims to the land Tullow is currently drilling were provided with title deeds by the county government. Tullow entered into lease agreements with them directly. Dozens of jobs and skills training were provided before the exploratory drilling began.But even here, people are nervous. An older man, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals from the oil company, wonders if it's true that oil spills are easy to clean up. There's a sense of distrust here, too, and people suspect that they aren't hearing the full story with respect to the environmental risks presented by drilling for oil. The group's conversation moves on to the gossip they say they've heard from Tullow employees: If they find oil here, that must mean there's oil everywhere. "This well will be the 'mother' that determines all other drillings, from Marakwet to Baringo," the man says. "If they get oil here, then maybe it will persuade the Baringo people to cooperate. And if not Baringo, maybe they will pass them and go north or south. There will be so many wells around."'Divide and conquer'Those rumours have reached Baringo County, where people are worried that villages





across the river, such as Cheptuket, will win out, and Baringo may miss an opportunity to benefit from Tullow's presence as they seek individual land

rights. They also fear tensions may increase among communities that have competed over resources in the past.Joshua Koros is among a sparse first generation from the Kerio Valley to receive a university education in Nairobi. He became alarmed when he began hearing stories from his family members of damaged lands and crops - the same crops that put him through school. Along with a few friends from nearby villages in Baringo, men who had pursued MBAs and advanced degrees in environmental sciences, Joshua formed the Kerio Valley Community Organisation (KVCO). The group say they tried to raise their concerns directly with Tullow."They had no intention of speaking to anyone," says Koros, who says Tullow is trying to frame the KVCO as outsiders who lack the legitimacy to represent their community. "They said they had spoken to the governor, they had spoken to the member of the county assembly, and the land is government land, so they don't need to consult with anyone else."Frustrated with Tullow's response, the KVCO looked outside Kenya for help. They reached out to two organisations providing pro bono legal assistance to indigenous communities: the International Seniors Lawyers Projects (ISLP), based in New York, and the Toronto-based Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP).A group of lawyers from both organisations flew to Kenya in March 2015. Alongside the KVCO, they organised community "barazas", or gatherings, to discuss what rights communities had in negotiations with Tullow. The lawyers presented the group with pictures of pipelines, oil spills in Nigeria and derricks in Los Angeles. To the lawyers, it was clear that the community had little access to the experiences of other communities who are also grappling with the changes that come with oil.That raises questions about the community's capacity to consent to oil exploration in the first place, says Shin Imai, a professor at the Osgoode Hall School of Law in Toronto, and the director of JCAP. "What really struck me was the degree to which people simply had no idea what oil is. Tullow is operating on a bed of ignorance."Bernadette Maheandiran, a Toronto-based lawyer with JCAP, said that people were fearful to even attend the workshops she organised in Baringo. People felt anxious, she says, that attending the workshop would be perceived as political dissent.She says people feared there would be a "crackdown right before, or even during the workshop"."We kept lists of people that attended, but there was a general sense that those lists could get into the wrong hands. It was horrifying."The combination of inexperience and political pressure is dangerous, says Imai, who has worked extensively with indigenous communities in Latin America, where mining companies have been linked to violent conflicts. He sees similar seeds of conflict being planted in the Kerio Valley through the use of "divide and conquer" campaigns that can stoke divisions within communities. He points to the practice of entering directly into leases with a few individuals rather than the village as a whole, a tactic employed by Tullow when initiating exploratory drilling in Cheptuket. It creates a system of haves and have nots, he explains, where there is competition within a community and the risk of stoking insecurities that can benefit companies in the long run."It's the same power dynamics. It's this idea: lets just deal with the people who want to deal with us. It is a general distrust that these companies create, of saying, well, we were going to help you, but we can just go over there instead if you don't want to cooperate."





The tensions that the KVCO and JCAP lawyers say Tullow's exploratory drilling risks exacerbating are ones the company has a legal and moral

responsibility to understand, says Maheandiran."Things have already been done incorrectly. Rights abuses have already taken place," she says, adding that there is still a window of opportunity to get things right and establish a precedent where communities are meaningfully engaged on a more even playing field by issuing them title deeds to their land."That opportunity is now in the valley, and it's now in Kenya," she says.'No peace'In Keturwo, Baringo County, a group of men aged 30 to 80 sit together eating chapatti and sipping milky tea. Music plays in the distance, celebrating the union of a young couple that married that morning.The wedding, between a young woman from Keturwo and a young man from a village across the river in Marakwet, highlights the strong linkages between the communities and the unlikelihood that competition will become violent, says an elder at the table. "We have all married together, we are one family," he explains.The younger men in the group disagree. It's they who want the jobs, boreholes and schools they believe Tullow promised them. They have the most to lose, they say, and they are watching closely as Cheptuket reaps the benefits from their arrangement with Tullow.Already, there have been disputes between themselves and the young men in Elgeyo-Marakwet, they say.We don't see eye-to-eye any more," says Ali Kipsang Kigen, 36, adding that there has been an increase in violent skirmishes at the border between the two counties while herders graze their animals. "Because we have demanded titles, and Elgeyo-Marakwet, the other side, they did not demand titles, they call us the enemies of development. They tell us, if we cross the boundary, that there will be consequences - that they will arrest us."Our political leaders blame us for preventing development," Kigen adds, "but we won't be exploited. We will protect our community."In March, Tullow confirmed to be true the speculation that had permeated communities in Baringo and Elgayo-Marakwet that their exploratory drilling in Cheptuket would determine the fate of the valley. The company announced in a press release that "strong oil shows encountered in Cheptuket-1 indicate the presence of an active petroleum system with significant oil generation", in what Tullow's exploration director Angus McCoss called the most significant well result to date in Kenya outside of Turkana.Analysis of the findings from the well will determine future exploration in the basin, regardless of presently low oil prices. Tullow has estimated that the break-even price for Kenyan oil is relatively cheap at $25 a barrel. Results from the Cheptuket well will provide hints as to how much oil there is in the area, and where in the valley other deposits are likely to be. But more drilling in more sites and possible disputes over how the national and county governments will split future revenue from the discovered oil are likely to lead to higher tensions. What happens next in the Kerio Valley largely depends on what's found in the exploratory well currently being drilled in Cheptuket. Results are expected within weeks. Exploration is likely to continue in Kenya regardless of currently low oil prices. Tullow has estimated that the break-even price for Kenyan oil is relatively cheap at $25 a barrel. Results from the Cheptuket well will provide hints as to how much oil there is in the area, and where in the valley other deposits are likely to be. More drilling and disputes over how the national and county governments will split future revenue from the discovered oil may lead to higher tensions.





"If our leaders do not share these resources properly, there will be conflict," says an elder in Keturwo. "Now we have learned, based on history, that these

countries that produce oil, they have no peace at all. But what is happening in these countries like Libya, we must not let that happen here."Whether Kenya can avoid the resource curse and the aggravation of conflicts in areas such as Kerio largely depends on the passing of legislation such as the Community Land Bill and meaningful engagement with communities living on the frontlines of oil exploration."The fact that there is a struggle here shows that the community wants to stay alive; they are not happy to be crushed in exchange for a few dollars," says lawyer Shin Imai.But for some, that struggle has already proved too costly. In Muchukwo, the farmer, James Rotich, focuses not on standing up to a government and company he believes exploited him, but on the day-to-day struggle of supporting his family."We have already suffered too much. I pray to God Tullow does not return."Follow Lisa Laventure




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