Issue No. 129

Centring North Eastern Kenya - The Rise Of Kenya's Ethnic Somalis

A president does not pay a visit to Wajir by accident. When William Samoei Ruto chose Wajir as the centre stage for Kenya’s Madaraka Day celebrations on 1 June — the first sitting president to do so — he was not merely varying the ceremonial calendar. He was making a premeditated statement about who belongs at the centre of Kenya’s state and who no longer belongs at its margins. The message was not merely ‘taking Nairobi to NorthEastern.’ It was the centring and mainstreaming of an ethnic Somali-dominated region that, for much of Kenya’s post-colonial history, has been treated as a security issue rather than a political constituency. 

The imagery utilised was nuanced and purposeful. On the eve of the anniversary, Ruto toured sections of the ultra-modern Nairobi- Mandera Highway, a thread of tarmac cutting through semi-arid shrubland where the government’s presence was felt predominantly through security operations and famine relief. The next day, he commissioned the new Wajir stadium and delivered a nationally televised address from its stands — speaking to the country from a town long associated with drought, displacement, and Al-Shabaab. His overnight stay at the new Wajir State Lodge signalled that he was making North-Eastern a stage for national politics rather than an arena for crisis management.  

That staging was not purely symbolic. Ruto’s charm offensive and new infrastructure in North-Eastern are a tactical bid to consolidate support in a region that has become an important vote basket ahead of the high-stakes 2027 poll. The 2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census puts Garissa, Mandera, and Wajir at about 1.5 million, overwhelmingly ethnic Somali. The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) 2022 voter register shows the three-county bloc with just over 630,000 registered voters out of about 22.1 million nationally — a small share but pivotal when combined with Somali-dominated constituencies in Nairobi’s Eastleigh. In the 2022 presidential election, North Eastern delivered majorities against Ruto: Raila Odinga won Garissa with 73.1%, Wajir with 61.3% and Mandera with 74.5 %. The infrastructure blitz and presidential visit, in this light, are an attempt to reconfigure that electoral map before 2027. 

Yet to read Ruto’s realignment purely through an electoral arithmetic lens is to misinterpret the deeper current running beneath it. His visit to Wajir is the latest, most apparent iteration of a multi-decade state project — undertaken, with varying degrees of commitment, by successive governments — to integrate North-Eastern and address the legacy of Kenya’s most historically marginalised communities. Ethnic Somalis' integration did not start with Ruto; it has fed off the wider democratisation and liberalisation politics that came with the ‘second liberation’ wave of the 1990s, the transformative 2010 Constitution, and the devolution test which followed. Under President Mwai Kibaki, the North was recast as the ‘new frontier of development’ and positioned as a linchpin in the Lamu Port- South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor. This initial reframing laid the fundamental infrastructural and ideological groundwork for the present momentum. Ruto is expediting and dramatising a long-running state project of inclusion and not simply reinventing a new policy.

Integral to that project has been the quiet deployment of ethnic Somalis as the preferred ‘neutral’ minority in the Kenyan state machinery. Historically, Somali Kenyans were the go- to ethnic group to lead state institutions where impartiality or at least the believable performance of it was paramount. Their apparent distance from the Machiavellian politics of other ethnic groups made them suitable candidates for sensitive posts at the IEBC, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and other institutions. Far from altruistic, these appointments were strategic efforts to install technocrats who could, in theory, mediate between Kenya’s dominant ethnic blocs without being captured by any of them.

Ruto’s input has used this pre-established architecture and aggressively built on it. In his administration, historic numbers of ethnic Somalis have been appointed to the highest levels of government. Aden Barre Duale, who served as Cabinet Secretary (CS) for Defence and currently serves as CS for Health, and Noordin Mohamed Haji as Director-General of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). He also reversed the profoundly detested ‘vetting’ system for national identity cards — a red tape that numerous Somalis experience as a tool of segregation and a reminder that their citizenship was conditional. All these actions recast Ethnic Somalis from a security problem framing or a peripheral minority into a cardinal Kenyan state constituency.

His attempt to reframe has not been friction-free; the growing visibility and economic clout of Somali Kenyans in Nairobi’s Eastleigh, along Mombasa’s commercial corridors in the real estate and transport sectors, has created resentment in most parts of urban Kenya where rivalry for land, jobs, and commercial space is intense. Enduring stereotypes, multiplied by security narratives that conflate Somali ethnicity with terrorist risk, have aggravated backlash: calls for harsher immigration enforcement, localised xenophobic rhetoric and harassment of Somali-owned businesses. The state must address these tensions without resorting to securitisation or allowing the gains of the past two decades to quietly erode.

Devolution has been the most structurally significant of those gains — a positive dividend multiplier that transformed the material relationship between North Eastern and the Kenyan state. The devolved system has enabled limited self-rule and cooperative cross-clan relations while channeling resources into the region on an inconceivable scale before 2013. The figures substantiate this; the Budget Review and Outlook Paper for FY 2023/24 shows that Garissa County received USD 58.6 million in equitable share of national revenue plus USD 5.3 million in additional allocations and conditional grants, bringing total external inflows from the national government to USD 68.7 million for that year. For FY 2024/2025, Garissa’s budget estimates project an equitable share of USD 65.6 million with additional conditional and donor-linked grants pushing the county’s total revenue to USD 88.7 million. In Wajir, the 2023/24 budget stood at USD 84.9 million, largely funded by the equitable share and national government transfers, while cumulative devolved funds over the first decade reached USD 732.9 million for Garissa, USD 794.6 million for Wajir and USD 917.9 million for Mandera — USD 2.4 billion across the three-county bloc. These funds have established schools, water projects, health facilities and county roads, helping to undermine the acute sense of isolation that initially defined the region’s relationship with Nairobi. However, the full potential of devolution remains damagingly unrealised, and the reason is not difficult to find.

The human development reality in North-Eastern still makes for grim reading. The 2024 Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) places Garissa, Wajir, and Mandera in IPC Acute Malnutrition Phase 4 (Critical), with Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) rates of 15–29.9% in several sub-counties — well above the 15% emergency threshold. The 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health survey (KDHS) estimates 18% of children below five have stunted growth and 10% underweight; skilled birth attendance remains a minority experience. The 2024 IPC estimates 2.8 million Kenyans are in Crisis or Emergency, with Northeast taking a significant share, where professional jobs are limited and pastoral livelihoods are devastated by climate shocks. Elite corruption is the main mechanism hollowing the devolution promise. With ghost projects, inflated projects and diversion of devolved funds being the norm, prosecutions remain rare. With billions poured into North Eastern Kenya, and not translated into the improvements devolution promised, a perfect demonstration of the fingerprint of elite capture.  

Security presents a parallel paradox. Interclan warfare has reduced, a genuine achievement attributed in part to devolution-driven local peace initiatives and county-level governance. However, Al-Shabaab-linked violence has not declined; instead, it is structurally embedded. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) shows Garissa, Lamu, Wajir, and Mandera bearing the brunt of Al-Shabaab attacks— roadside bombings, ambushes on security forces, and targeted killings. Without serious mitigation, worsening climate change, collapsing traditional pastoral livelihoods and acute competition over scarce resources are likely to lower the threshold for violence still further. Infrastructure projects and political acceptance alone will not neutralise that risk; they must be matched by security sector reform, community-based conflict mitigation and long-term climate adaptation — none of which are presently being undertaken to the scale the situation requires.

The rise of Kenya’s ethnic Somalis and their integration into the national mainstream is, on balance, a genuinely positive story — of progressive nation-building, of a historically marginalised community shifting from the periphery to the centre of the political arena without resorting to secessionist demands. However, it is not yet consolidated, and it is not yet irreversible. To make it so, national and county governments — with the support of Kenya’s donors and development partners — must intensify resilience building, prosecute county-level prosecution and climate change mitigation with the urgency the scale of the problem demands, and dedicate more resources to healthcare, water and education that turns symbolic inclusion into a lived reality.