When he was still in office, Kenya’s retired President, Daniel arap Moi, woke up in a foul mood one day. And standing at a long forgotten roadside, rungu firmly in hand, he told Somalis in Kenya to go back home.

“We also have our own problems,” he fumed.

He had been irked by the shenanigans of Somali groups who were in Kenya negotiating a peace deal or, more precisely, throwing punches and chairs at each other and tearing to pieces hotel rooms paid for by Kenyans.

Apparently, Americans never listened and when they went to Mogadishu in their typical gung-ho style, they were routed in a gun battle immortalised by Hollywood in the movie, Black Hawk Down.

Yes, Somali militants dragged the body of a slain American Marine through the streets in the full glare of international television cameras.

And then in went Ethiopia, boasting one of the most experienced armies in Africa. They may have won the war. But they, too, had to go home when it became apparent that even if they stayed in Somalia forever, they would never install a functional government there.

External help

It wasn’t long before the African Union (AU) sent its own force — an undermanned, poorly equipped battalion comprised of 5,000 Ugandan and Burundian soldiers with restrictive rules of engagement. As a result, militants have been using the peacekeepers for target practice with 22 Ugandan peacekeepers dying for a cause they do not understand or care about.

The same militants vowed to attack not just Uganda and Burundi but Kenya as well — the same Kenya which takes in, and hosts, hundreds of thousands of Somalia refugees. And now it has come to pass. An estimated 74 Ugandans, who don’t give a farthing about Somalia, have been murdered by a terrorist attack assumed to be the handiwork of Somalia’s al-Shabaab militia.

Now the all important question must be asked: Why is everyone busting a gut helping people who obviously don’t want any external help and are doing nothing to help themselves?

All-consuming fire

Evidently, Somali men have no problem being ordered to grow beards and told what not to watch on television like small children. They don’t mind having their wives and daughters ordered not to wear bras or receiving lashes in public for a little hanky panky, either. If they did, they would stand up and fight to the death.

Why, after all, should other women’s sons die for them when the most they can do is scamper across the border to Eastleigh, USA and Europe? The Rwandese didn’t wait for the AU and Somalis shouldn’t expect foreigners to liberate them.

Either way, you can bet that an enraged Uganda President Yoweri Museveni is polishing his jungle boots. Maybe, with this slaughter of Ugandans, the al-Shabaab has just lit a raging, all-consuming fire under its backside.