Aden Duale owes it to Kenyans to name terror financiers

NAIROBI: After nearly a month's absence from media spotlight, Aden Duale, the Member of Parliament for Garissa township came out last week and said he owed no one an explanation over his failure to release a list of financiers of terror.

His minders probably advised him to not utter a word after his initial pronouncements proved to be a doubled-edged sword.

In the wake of the Garissa University attack that killed 142 students, Mr Duale sensationally promised to expose the financiers and sympathisers of Al-Shabaab in the country. It could be that the announcement, which also fingered Dadaab Refugee Camp as a place where terrorists hide and recruit, was made on the spur of the moment.

One would have hoped that the supposed moral indignation and sense of shock displayed by Mr Duale and other functionaries at the brazen attack would be followed with action.

Nearly two months after the declaration to unmask the financiers was made, the public is still in the dark.

Mr Duale is not just anyone, he is the Leader of Majority in Parliament. As such, he should not be allowed to walk away from the matter so casually and with such disdain. As a  national leader, he has to show he is responsible for the utterances he makes and is ready to be held accountable.

Those who lost their loved ones in that attack (and many other terror-related incidents) had hoped that justice would be seen to be done.

Naming and shaming what in every sense are co-conspirators of such attacks would have been one step in the long journey to justice. That seems lost for now.

If, when the government carried out a security operation in Eastleigh last year Mr Duale cried foul, lamented what he saw as ethnic profiling and threatened to quit the Government, does the death of 148 innocent Kenyans mean nothing to him?

Having made his spur-of-the-moment declaration and perhaps realised the magnitude of his gaffe, Mr Duale noticeably took a very low profile and hoped the matter would blow over. Mr Duale should not be allowed to get away it.

The implication of his statement was that he knew the financiers. That means a lot.

His contention that leaders from North Eastern had played their part in the war on terror by making recommendations to President Uhuru Kenyatta on how to win it is, at best, simplistic.

In the same month, there were reports that terrorists had murdered a chief in Mandera after failing to get a Sh4 million ransom they had demanded. Early this month, 20 Al-Shabaab gunmen attacked a police camp at Hamey in Garissa County and killed one police officer.

Last week, terrorists under the command of their Garissa-born leader Mohamed Kuno crossed into Kenya from Somalia and had the audacity and leisure of preaching their vitriolic version of Islam to terrified locals at a mosque in Ijara for several hours at gunpoint.

Silence is always golden, it may yet prove otherwise for Mr Duale. Because he risks being seen as harbouring those who have caused Kenyans great harm and anguish.

At the very least, he could just come out and accept that he had erred in promising to release the list.