Shifta War - Effects

Effects

With Somali support for their movement for self-determination temporarily halted, many former rebels returned to the traditional activity of pastoralism.

The forced internment of the Northern Frontier District's inhabitants also resulted in an economic bifurcation of its other minority residents. Those with means diversified into trade and sedentary farming. Those without became wage labourers, while the poorest were reduced to dependence on outside relief aid. Anthropologist John Baxter returned to the village in Isiolo District that he had researched in 1953, and had this to say about the few non-Somali minority tribes that lived at the time alongside the Somali majority:

In 1982, only a few fortunate ones still maintained themselves through stock pastoralism. Some 40 percent of the Boran and Sakuye of the District had been driven to peri-urban shanty villages in the new administrative townships. There, they eked out a bare subsistence, hanging around the petrol stations for odd jobs, hawking for miraa, making illicit alcohol, engaging in prostitution and the like.

The war thus marked the beginning of decades of violent crackdowns and repressive measures by the police in the NFD coupled with trumped-up allegations and unsubtle innuendo on the part of the Kenyan media charging the region's almost exclusively Somali inhabitants with "banditry" and other vice.

A particularly violent incident referred to as the Wagalla Massacre took place in 1984, when the Kenyan provincial commissioner ordered security forces to gather 5,000 men of the Somali Degodia clan onto the airstrip at Wagalla, Wajir, open fire on them, and then attempt to hide their bodies. In the year 2000, the government admitted to having killed 380 people, though independent estimates put the toll at over 2,000.

Not until late 2000 and the administration of Provincial Commissioner Mohammoud Saleh – a Somali—was there a serious drop in violent activities, partially attributable to Saleh's zero tolerance policy towards abuse by security forces. Ironically, Saleh himself was the target of the local police, having been arrested and booked several times. Wearing plain clothes, Saleh was apparently mistaken for an ordinary inhabitant of the NFD.