Kenya calls for African solutions to “weaponized borders” by terrorists

Kenya is calling for more African-owned strategies to neutralize the growing geographic concentration of terrorism along the continent’s national borders.

Interior Principal Secretary Dr Raymond Omollo said that extremist groups have turned Africa’s very geography into a potent weapon.

With violent extremist fatalities rising in border-adjacent regions, the country is nudging its regional and international partners into adopting contextualized, innovative, and sustainable approaches to suppress the upsurge in terrorist activity across Africa’s borderlands.

Omollo, who delivered Kenya’s message during the official opening of the Fourth Nairobi Caucus on Border Security and Counter-Terrorism, emphasized the urgent need to reimagine borders as opportunities for integration rather than vulnerabilities.

“It is no longer a secret that a majority of these groups in Africa operate in and around national borders where various vulnerabilities create conditions that facilitate their emergence and survival. These groups seem to have weaponised our borders against us,” Dr. Omollo warned.

According to official reports, more than 80 percent of violent extremist fatalities recorded across the continent in 2024 occurred in communities near national frontiers.

In West Africa, recorded terrorist attacks within 50 kilometres of coastal borders surged from just 50 incidents in 2020 to over 500 in 2024.

On the Indian Ocean littoral, maritime trafficking linked to terrorist networks increased by 25 percent in the past year alone.

Kenya now cautions that if left unchecked, these patterns risk entrenching borderlands as permissive environments for extremist exploitation.

Dr. Omollo, however, stressed that borders themselves are not the problem. Instead, weak surveillance, fragmented jurisdiction, and poor coordination are the cracks that extremists exploit.

“Borders are not barriers, they are opportunities for connection, cooperation, and shared prosperity. It is their porosity that creates permissive environments for terrorist exploitation,” he noted.

Porous frontiers, he added, increasingly give extremist groups tactical depth, enabling them to recruit, traffic arms and narcotics, and maneuver into secure civilian areas with relative ease. This geographic advantage, he said, has become as critical to terrorist survival as ideology or funding.

The Nairobi Caucus, first convened in 2019, has steadily grown into an African-owned mechanism designed to anticipate and adapt to evolving terrorist threats. This year, more than 200 experts, policymakers, and practitioners from over 15 African countries – including, for the first time, West African representatives – are participating.

Kenya is using the platform to rally support for a new generation of counter-terrorism approaches grounded in African realities.

Dr. Omollo called for enhanced intelligence-sharing, smart border infrastructure such as biometrics, drones, and AI-powered analytics, and coordinated cross-border response protocols with neighboring states.

He further stressed that security cannot be divorced from governance and development.

“Borderlands should be zones of prosperity and must therefore benefit from inclusive development, access to services, and participatory governance,” Dr. Omollo said, arguing that underdevelopment and marginalization fuel extremist appeal as much as ideology does.

The two-day Caucus was expected to produce a joint outcome document outlining actionable strategies to transform Africa’s borders from zones of vulnerability into “zones of peace and prosperity.”

Kenya hopes that by anchoring this conversation within an African-owned framework, the continent can move away from generic security templates toward localized and sustainable solutions.

The meeting was sponsored by the European Union (EU).

Present were officials from the National Counter Terrorism Centre led by Director General Kibiego Kigen who emphasized a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to counter violent extremism, focusing on strengthening intelligence sharing and real-time data analysis, modernizing border infrastructure with advanced technologies, and deepening regional and international partnerships.