Reopening the Frontier
Today's editorial in The Somali Wire is written by Dr Ngala Chome.
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In April 2026, two points along the porous Kenya-Somalia border will finally reopen, nearly 15 years after it was first shuttered by Nairobi. Last Thursday, during a visit to Mandera, Kenyan President William Ruto announced that plans for the much-awaited reopening —first sanctioned in 2023 —would be resuscitated. Declaring it "unacceptable that fellow Kenyans in Mandera remain cut off from their kin and neighbours in Somalia", Ruto's intervention is the latest in a long history of Nairobi-led attempts to influence (and for the most part, contain) events along the 700-kilometre border between Kenya and Somalia.
In 2023, with Ruto just a year into his term, the Kenyan government announced plans to reopen the Kenya-Somalia border. The pronouncement represented a major departure from his predecessors, who had broadly considered the North-East a territory to subdue rather than empower. The incumbent government was soon forced to about-turn, however, when Al-Shabaab escalated its cross-border campaign against Kenya, which had begun in 2022 and continued for much of 2023. As ever, Mandera, Wajir, Garissa, and Lamu bore the brunt, with the first enduring the greatest number of attacks. ACLED recorded 40 civilian fatalities in 2022, more than double those recorded in 2021, while dozens of IED bombings were conducted against army and police positions.
Discussion of reopening the border and facilitating trade was subsequently abandoned, and Nairobi returned to its historically militarised stance. Unconfirmed reports suggested that the Kenyan government had even considered constituting clan forces with which to counter the jihadist presence, akin to their Somali counterparts known as 'ma’awiisley.' In the end, however, 7 Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) were established along the 700-kilometre border, in which the Kenyan army remains broadly siloed, struggling to prevent the flow of Al-Shabaab to and from Somalia.
Despite being formally closed, the border has reflected a myriad of complex, overlapping local arrangements, necessitated by the close kinship and business ties between the peripheral areas of Southern Somalia and North-East Kenya. Both are located far from their country's centres of political power and economic dominance, that is, Mogadishu and Nairobi. Indeed, significant informal cross-border trade continues to bloom, particularly in the dense areas of interaction and exchange between Kenya's Garissa County and Somalia's Lower Juba region: Liboi, Hulugho and Kulbiyo. The Mandera Triangle, too, between South-Eastern Ethiopia, Kenya's Mandera County, and Gedo in Somalia, remains a cradle of cross-border interaction. Livestock and farm products, household goods, sugar, powdered milk, construction materials, and to a lesser extent, vehicles make their way, managed by local conventions and understandings involving businesspeople, pastoralists, clan elders and administrators representing both national governments.
Distant—geographically and politically—from Nairobi and Mogadishu, substantial leeway has long been granted. Children living in Beledhawo town in Jubaland, for example, often travel to Kenya for schooling. Cattle from the Gedo region of Somalia are allowed to receive vaccinations in Kenya's Mandera town. But such unofficial and often ad hoc arrangements – existing below an official border closure – have come with risks as well, including at times enabling easy movement of militant elements to and from Somalia, and creating opportunities for human smugglers and traffickers, including predatory elements within Kenya's law enforcement agencies. Violence, intimidation, and corruption all persist, with local officials able to wield the stick of the 'closed border' to justify extortion. Meanwhile, the fraught politics of Somalia continues to bleed into North-Eastern Kenya and Nairobi as well. In particular, intermittent clashes last year between Jubaland forces and Somalia's federal government in the neighbouring Gedo region exposed faultlines within the Kenyan establishment between those who supported the Madoobe government and those affiliated with Mogadishu, amplified by those linked with the wealthy, shadowy Salafist movement known as Al-I'tisaam.
From April, formalising parts of cross-border movement means opportunities to standardise elements of the largely unofficial cross-border trade. Movement may also benefit, not least by initiating the process that will eventually enable the establishment of formal border crossings, including a potential One-Stop Border Post (OSBP), as at Moyale on the Kenyan border with Ethiopia, and by operationalising various methods for certifying the origin of products. And formality instils standardised practices in weights and measures, as well as in the inspection of goods for quality control, especially the vast quantities of sugar and powdered milk that are transported across the Somali border. The sale of Kenyan-grown miiraa/khat, chewed by most Somali men, is also expected to cross the reopened border, as well as continue on the daily flights between northern Kenya and Mogadishu.
Further, the restoration of the revenue and immigration offices —having been pulled back from the border —will theoretically facilitate the daily movement of people to and from, as well as taxation. But restoring formal border crossings after well over a decade of closure will require care to avoid introducing new impediments to the fragile borderland economies. A more cynical argument might suggest that Nairobi-based influential ethnic Somali politicians in the Ruto government, with vested interests in cross-border trade, are seeking a way to deepen their economic integration in the borderlands.
Though pledges on renewed security and heightened vigilance have been made, it is difficult to argue that the threat of Al-Shabaab has been eliminated or even substantially reduced since 2023. Though it is several years since the jihadists conducted a spectacular attack in Kenya, the broad consensus is that this stems not from a lack of capacity, which has been rebuilt since the setbacks in 2019-2020, but rather strategic interest. With substantial investments in a host of businesses —licit and illicit —in Nairobi, drawing the heavy hand of the Kenyan state serves no current purpose for Al-Shabaab, though plots do intermittently arise in Jilib.
It is also the case that the neutralisation of Al-Shabaab regional cells in Kenya and Tanzania back in 2019, including the 22 February 2020 killing of Bashir Mohamed (also known as Qorgab) by a US airstrike, was a major setback to Al-Shabaab's operations against Kenya. At the time of his death, Qorgab was not only the commander of Al-Shabaab operations within Kenya, but he also led the Camp Simba attack against the US military at Manda Bay, Lamu County, on 5 January 2020. Afterwards, Al-Shabaab abandoned its previous strategy of working through regional affiliates and/or autonomous cells and military units (such as the Kenyan-led Jeysh Ayman) to target Kenya. Instead, the leadership appointed a new set of Kenyan Al-Shabaab commanders who assumed responsibility for directing attacks against targets in Mandera, Wajir, Garissa, and Lamu counties, operating principally within Al-Shabaab's conventional Jabhat (military) forces since 2022.
Low-level attacks on the arm of the Kenyan state thus persist, targeting police and army convoys with IEDs or the occasional local official. And last month, the yearly spike in attacks was accentuated, with January recording the highest monthly total in two-and-a-half years. Particularly concerning, a chief and teacher were killed by Al-Shabaab in a targeted attack in Hulugho in Garissa on 26 January. And with sustained military operations in Somalia scant, some Al-Shabaab fighters that had been drawn from the borderlands for operations in central Somalia in 2025 are now gradually returning to Kenya. Whether or not this represents a more substantial positioning is yet unclear, but for the time being, the jihadists' focus remains on Somalia.
Yet Nairobi's attempts to control events along its border with Somalia – typically mediated by an elite of Kenyan Somalis, most of whom hail from the Ogaden-dominated county of Garissa – have not been solely about security threats. It once took on the form of stemming refugee flows, establishing the sprawling Dadaab camp that hosts over 400,000 Somali refugees. But since the rise of Al-Shabaab in neighbouring Somalia and particularly the Westgate attack in 2013, Nairobi's considerations have often been understood through the prism of instability and jihadism. Some attempts have been more successful than others, with one ploy to install Professor Mohamed Abdi Mohamed, better known as 'Gandhi,' as the leader of Jubaland failing. Post-2011, and in conjunction with Ethiopia, Kenya was successful in supporting the Ras Kambooni militia, which seized Kismaayo from Al-Shabaab, a mission spearheaded by the incumbent Jubaland President Ahmed Mohamed Islam, better known as Madoobe.
Today, there is little doubt that Somali political capital is ascendant within Nairobi's halls of power, with former Defence Minister Aden Duale particularly influential within the Ruto administration. Duale, as well as intelligence chief Noordin Haji, have come to play prominent roles, while, more broadly, Kenyan-Somalis now comprise a significant part of new government hires. Could this unprecedented Kenyan-Somali influence – with close ties to the state leadership of Jubaland– within Ruto's administration explain the now-second attempt to reopen the Kenya-Somalia border, all within the president's first term in office? The Kenyan government may now be convinced that Al-Shabaab poses no immediate security threat, as was the case in 2022-2023. While Mogadishu has persistently lobbied for a formal reopening of the border, justified as part of its ascension to the East African Community (EAC) regional bloc and for visa-free travel, it is hard to overlook the presence and possible role of influential Kenyan-Somalis within Kenya's current administration, and the concerted push in recent years to officially reopen the border.
Another, more controversial discussion running through the public discourse over the elevation in the President's calculus of North-East Kenya, in the context of the upcoming Kenyan general-elections of 2027. Some commentators have alleged that the incumbent president's wooing of the North-East and now the reopening of the border relate to a broader strategy intended to shore up his position, in essence 'importing' votes from Somalia. Amplifying this narrative have been successive controversies over the actual population of the North-East, including a dispute over the 2019 census, during which elements of the regional leadership rejected the outcome.
What these developments signal, however, is that within Kenya, there has been a transformation of the Kenyan-Somali identity, once viewed with deep suspicion as part of the enduring legacy of the Shifta War, and in more recent decades, the threat of Al-Shabaab's terror. But anti-government and anti-Somali commentators are seizing upon these narratives, yet again, to whip up accusations that the incumbent government may be reopening the border to permit Somalis in Somalia to vote in Kenya.
In sum, and perhaps different from the past, moves to now reopen the Kenya-Somalia border should be seen as part of a wider constellation of interests that cut across multiple fields of action - business, power, security and politics. In a way, the Kenya-Somalia border, it has come to the attention of national elites, can no longer be considered as a peripheral, frontier wasteland, but for both Nairobi and Mogadishu, has become inexorably linked to national interests and political power plays.
Dr Ngala Chome is an expert on security, geopolitics and political economy, with eleven years of experience working mainly in Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa region. He has recently served in senior roles at Sahan Research, a think-tank on peace and security issues working on the Horn of Africa, alongside developing his own work as an academic researcher on multiple research projects covering violent Islamist groups, Muslim politics, elections, governance, political stability and the political economy of development. Ngala obtained his doctorate from Durham University (UK) in 2021.
