By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
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Recently we have been getting reports that Somalia’s Al-Shabaab is in trouble. That the organisation is no longer the beauty queen of jihadi terrorism, and now young Islamist militants in the world want to go instead to Syria and Iraq and join Islamic State (IS) instead.
The rise of Boko Haram and IS “has left Al-Qaeda-aligned Al-Shabaab in the dust, damaging its capacity to attract foreign recruits”, said a report carried by Bloomberg News.
The world of extremism is, to say the least, complex. IS is attractive because its beheadings, burning people alive, throwing gays off rooftops to their deaths — and the fact that they terrify the world more and attract bigger global headlines — is a bigger come-on for aspiring militants!
So here we are: For all its murderous ways, it seems Shabaab has not gone the way of Boko Haram or IS because it is a quintessential Somali organisation and, therefore, pragmatic and essentially “capitalist”.
If you see the areas where Shabaab was running things, it always had its eyes on the money. It would stone adulterers and chop of the limbs of thieves, but it would improve business operations and remove corruption.
Shabaab understood that if you are to tax businesses, then you first have to help them make money.
And those who study Shabaab commend it for being anti-clan. It is one of the few non-sectarian Somali organisations.
All that because, well, it is nationalist. Its big political project is not religious, it is political — to recreate the great Somali nation, bringing back together lands it lost in the battles and swings of history (to Kenya, Ethiopia, and so on) into one united motherland again.
Islam is the butter in this pan-Somali grand scheme; it is not the bread.
This is important, because the biggest constraint on Shabaab is the vast Somali diaspora. Wherever they are scattered all over the world, they are quite successful business people (one reason resentful thugs target their shops in South Africa).
So, no matter what it does, Shabaab probably ensures that it does not cross a red line that causes the mood to turn massively against the Somali diaspora. IS and Boko do not have such constraints.
Thus, unlike IS — and worst still Boko Haram — Shabaab is not a single strategy organisation. It uses violence and terrorism, but also seeks to portray itself as an effective State and, therefore, wins hearts.
When it was running the Kismayu port, business people in the Horn of Africa and East Africa thought it was a good manager, doing sensible things like keeping “taxes” low.
This dollar sense of Somali terrorism and criminal enterprise is evident in how their pirates differ from the ones in West Africa, who are now bigger than the ones in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Somali pirates did not rob the ships they hijacked. They used them and their cargo and crew to negotiate a ransom. This meant that they had to have a negotiation structure: intermediaries, offices, and phone numbers that could be reached.
The pirates in West Africa do not do ransom; they steal the cargo in ships and rob their crews. Thus a West African pirate will pat down and even look into the wallets of ship crews and ransack their cabins before carting off goods.
To the Somali pirates, the people on board were just products in a bigger trade. They were, therefore, more vested in their survival.
The result is that the West African pirates are more brutal and murderous, the Somali ones more conniving and sophisticated. Same as the terrorists.
The pragmatism of Shabaab terrorism means members are more likely to turn traitor if the price on the other side is better. Also, we have seen more defections from the Somali militants.
If Shabaab has lost the jihadi pageant, therefore, one can only hope that it will do the smart thing and reinvent itself as a militant political organisation and seek to share in the spoils in Mogadishu.
If, however, it decides that it should outshine IS, and to do so it needs to become even more spectacularly violent and bloody than the latter, then we should all be afraid.
I never thought I would say this, but perhaps East Africa is lucky that our region has Al-Shabaab for its terrorists, and not Boko Haram or IS.
The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter:@cobbo3