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Providing jobs is a good way to curry favor with local populations in places where the United States wants to maintain a military presence. Other foreign policy tools may not reach the right people. The well-known risk with foreign aid, for example, is that recipient regimes will divert it for their own purposes instead of investing in public goods. Contracting directly with local firms might help bypass corrupt governments. Subscribe Receive daily email updates: Subscribe to the Defense One daily. Be the first to receive updates. But there is a big problem with this seemingly sound logic: to date, there is no evidence that it works as promised.

By some estimates, ten percent of defense-related logistics contracts ended up in the hands of insurgents

The law limits the government’s ability to dictate the hiring of firms it does business with. This caused problems in Djibouti, where the United States has its only base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier. In 2013, the American company in charge of base support fired local Djiboutian employees in search of cheaper labor, despite a diplomatic understanding between the United States and Djibouti that the base would provide jobs for Djiboutians. Between the fallout and threat of hosting a Russian base, the Djiboutian government managed to hike Washington’s annual base rent from $30 million to $63 million.

Congress could make preferential procurement authorities conditional upon independently conducted studies of this spending’s effectiveness

First, we need to be able to answer questions such as: who is getting the business and how many jobs are created? That will enable systematic study of questions such as: what are the downstream effects on local markets? Do local jobs actually buy local goodwill?

Despite testing far less than its neighbors, Somalia has the highest death toll in East Africa. On April 17 and 18, 72 people were tested, out of which 55 were confirmed positive, a staggering 76 percent infection rate. Since this revelation, the Somali government has stopped sharing the numbers of people tested with the public.

Anecdotal accounts of COVID-19 symptoms and a spike in burials abound. “There is extraordinary community transmission. Infections and deaths are out of control,” explained a Mogadishu doctor on the condition of anonymity. “And why visit a hospital if they can’t treat you?” Somalia’s health infrastructure is mere scaffolding: scarce public hospitals struggling with a lack of equipment, unaccredited doctors in private facilities offering unaffordable services, and medication that is as low-grade as it is scarce.

Somalia’s best-equipped medical institution, Erdogan Hospital in Mogadishu, was shut down in April after 3 of its doctors were infected. Martini Hospital—kitted with 76 beds—is the only medical facility in the whole country designated to treat the infected

Answers to this acute health crisis lie in part with the government’s 2020 budget, which allocated $9.4 million for health spending, a mere 2 percent of the national budget. A whopping $146.8 million was reserved for security institutions—a telling indication of a cash-strapped state facing widespread security threats.

The group heralded the disease as divine punishment for the treatment of Muslims globally. Weaponizing the disease, al-Shabab ushered in Ramadan with an attempted vehicle-borne explosive attack at a military base on the first full day of the holy month.

Like the virus, al-Shabab transcends national borders and presents risks not only to Somalia but to its pandemic-weakened neighbors, particularly Kenya, which has weathered violent attacks from the group for years. Born out of a power vacuum itself, al-Shabab will capitalize on lapses in states’ security apparatus as governments redirect resources from preempting terror attacks to enforcing curfews

risks reversing critical security gains

Kenya’s northeastern towns lying on its border with Somalia have been particularly vulnerable to devastating al-Shabab attacks. In response to the illegal smuggling of people and goods from both Somalia and Ethiopia, Kenyan security authorities have recently ramped up aerial surveillance along its borders, in part, to curtail cross-border infection. Ethiopia’s health minister announced last week that 13 of its new cases were imported via illegal migration from Djibouti and Somalia

More than 80 percent of global trade passes through the Gulf of Aden

the resurgence of piracy can be expected

For more than a year now, the central government has been embroiled in a rancorous fight with two of its federal states. This being an election year, the fledgling Somali state finds itself at a critical juncture. It remains to be seen whether federal elections will be postponed, following in the footsteps of neighboring Ethiopia.

The disappearance of remittances—a lifeline for millions on the continent and estimated at $1.4 to $2 billion annually in Somalia alone—makes the situation all the more desperate. These critical cash flows have dried up as a global recession sets in and incomes of workers in the diaspora shrink.

harrowing statistics from across Europe show that Somali communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. In Sweden, Somalis are dying from the virus at “an astonishing high rate” according to the BMJ despite accounting for only 0.69 percent of the population. The World Bank is calling on governments to designate remittance companies as an essential service, a crucial step to easing restrictions on these financial flows.

The populations most at risk in Somalia are those living in the densely populated camps scattered across the country. More than 2.5 million internally displaced people live in these cramped conditions, already weakened by malnutrition and compromised immune systems, and with limited access to clean water, soap, or bathrooms.

According to the World Food Programme, the number of food-insecure people in East Africa is projected to reach up to 43 million in the next few months—more than double what it is now—sparking fears of conflict over scarce resources.

The specter of drought and famine, alongside the unforgiving plague of locusts that has ravaged crops in recent months

deadly flash floods

will force more people to move, compounding the internal displacement crisis and heightening intercommunal tensions  even as it spreads the disease further

Border closures across the region have throttled migration flows, making it ever harder for people to escape conflict or starvation. This will simply force migration into the shadows, opening up avenues for human trafficking and exploitation. Irregular movement of refugees has already been observed across the Horn of Africa’s highly porous borders.

During  Friday prayers at Mogadishu’s Marwazi mosque on April 10, armed forces tried to forcibly disperse a congregation of worshippers without notice. A massive demonstration broke out, and shoulder-to-shoulder prayers continue across the country today

Riots swept the streets of Mogadishu again on April 24 in response to the fatal shooting of two innocent civilians by police as they tried to enforce a curfew. Ramadan, replete with nightly rounds of public taraweeh prayers, is likely to catalyze disease spread in the absence of clear communication with communities and Islamic leaders.

The virus demands self-sufficiency. Countries are forced to make do with their own systems, however broken.

government’s restrictions on press freedom and access to information about the novel coronavirus to the detriment of its own people

As has often been the case in the disaster-prone country, it will be up to grassroots community groups, the private sector, and members of the diaspora to mobilize en masse to contain the crisis.

Two officials at the Ministry of Health have already been arrested on corruption allegations related to COVID-19 response donations, denting public confidence.

With domestic flights suspended, it is all the more critical to invest in hospital and testing capacity across the country. This cannot be achieved without genuine collaboration between the federal government and its constituent member states.

The Rome Treaty, which established the EEC in 1957, was nothing short of a resurrection of the Berlin Conference's General Act, which 73 years earlier had sought to create an internationalised regime of free trade stretching across the middle of Africa. In Rome, six European countries, without the involvement of any Africans, promised each other equal access to trading and investment opportunities in what is today the territory of 21 African countries: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Central Africa Republic, Chad, Gabon, the Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Togo, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. In fact, as noted by Hansen and Jonsson, three-quarters of the territory covered by the EEC actually lay outside continental Europe.

Senghor personified the contradictions of independence. A formidable intellect, he led his nation into the Yaounde agreement, was the foremost proponent of negritude and ruled for two decades before retiring on New Year's Eve 1980, the first African president to leave office voluntarily. He then promptly left for France, where he had been a citizen since 1932.

It was into this context that the countries of Africa were born. Congenitally misshapen, they were easy prey for Europe. The Eurafrica project was simply given a makeover as the 1963 Yaounde Convention signed between the EEC and 18 former French and Belgian colonies. Under the agreement, the Europeans allowed free access to their domestic markets to products from the African members, while the latter were, at least initially, permitted to impose restrictions on the entry of European goods into their territories in order to protect their own infant industries. Three years earlier, however, the UN Economic Commission for Africa had warned, as related by Hansen and Jonsson, that the arrangements were likely to lead to economic dependency by tempting the Africans "to prefer the short-run advantage of tariff concessions [in EEC markets] to the long-run gains of industrial development".

By 1962, an American observer in Paris, Schofield Coryell, declared that African countries remained "essentially what they were: agricultural appendages to Europe". If this sounds familiar, it is because African elites are, to borrow from Wole Soyinka, still heading to foreign capitals to loudly proclaim their tigritude, while consigning their countrymen into debt and bondage.

Although Europe was "the home of nationalism" according to Macmillan, Africans were encouraged to think of it as genuine indigenous expression. Even though the African nations espousing it were born out of the 1884 Berlin Conference and African nationalist leaders were the products of colonial schools and European universities, African nationalism was still cast as the antidote to colonialism rather than an outgrowth of it.

True decolonisation requires more than just the physical absence of the coloniser. It means deconstructing the frameworks that have been used to define the African's place for him. That is the work that remains to be done.

Patrick Gathara is a communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political cartoonist based in Nairobi.