Young, armed shebabs from chosen tribes crammed in on each side of us, boxing us in the middle of the back seat. The sound of locking doors confirmed our kidnapped status. With screeching wheels, the driver made a dangerous U-turn across the oncoming traffic,” says Yolande Korkie as she recalls the car ride that would leave an eternal scar in her life.
South African couple, Korkie and her late husband, Pierre, had relocated to Yemen in 2009, four years before this fateful day. This was the first of the 228 days Korkie would be held hostage by terrorist group Al-Qaeda, near Taiz, Yemen.
For Pierre, it was his last day of freedom as he would be killed during an attempt by US Special Forces to free him and American photographer, Luke Somers, from their Al-Qaeda captors.
Pierre died on his 558th day of captivity.
“Sometimes love doesn’t have fairytale endings,” says Korkie.
The silver lining to the tragedy, if there ever was to be one, was their children, Peter and Lize, being left at their Yemen home at the time of the kidnapping.
“Our daughter was almost with us that afternoon. The electricity supply in Yemen is way worse than here,” says the soft-spoken and reserved Korkie when we meet her at a B&amp;B in Bloemfontein in South Africa’s Free State province.
As she laughs about the scarcity of electricity in Yemen, which she says is available for only about 20 minutes on a lucky day, it is obvious that even through her positivity, she has suffered a lot. Lize was supposed to join them on their trip to town that day but decided against it at the last minute.
“The electricity came on as we walked out the door and she was with us. She said ‘no, no,’ she’s going to stay home because she was going to watch television with her brother. I can’t praise God enough that she couldn’t come,” says Korkie.
This would be the last time their children would ever see their father alive again.
After the Gift of the Givers Foundation assisted with negotiations, Korkie was released and returned to South Africa on January 13, 2014, after 228 days as a hostage. She never once knew the whereabouts of their children during the kidnapping.
“We asked and we pleaded and we wrote letters and nothing. They just kept saying if they kidnapped them they’ll bring them to us. That’s not the answer you want to hear,” says Korkie.
Pierre died without knowing the whereabouts of his children.
Korkie says there was nothing specific that made them Al-Qaeda targets, except for being foreigners. She says their captors thought they were American because in their mindsets all South Africans are black and they were reluctant to believe there were white South Africans.
Korkie went on to describe the war Al-Qaeda militants have declared against America, giving examples of videos they’ve posted openly declaring war.
“Of course their prize would be an American hostage, that would be their number one prize, but any other foreigner would be a good option, a better hostage than any other Yemeni hostage for instance.”
Korkie’s relationship with God has intensified since the tragedy and she says she has chosen to forgive the perpetrators as she doesn’t want to be a “hostage to unforgiveness”. She says that will poison her children and herself and will not take them anywhere.
After falling in love with Yemen and its people, the couple made a decision to relocate to the country to assist with education and humanitarian work. Pierre was a teacher in Yemen and Korkie did relief work in hospitals.
Korkie describes Yemen as an impoverished country, scaling it alongside Ethiopia, saying it is in desperate need of humanitarian aid. Never did she imagine that their good hearts would put them through such a traumatic experience.
A trained psychologist who used to practice before marriage, Korkie says trauma and grieving are a bit different from what the textbook postulates, saying she would love to do research on this one day.
“We’ve got that shock stage and that reality stage and anger. Those are emotions, but they don’t really come in the textbook order. I’m not saying I’m right but this is just from my own experience,” she says.
Korkie describes these emotions as having various levels at various times. She says for days there would be very little emotion and then suddenly, there would be days where she would have constant ups and downs. As time goes by, Korkie says the emotions soften out and the time between them gets longer.
“Mostly I think that grieving is very unique to the person who is going through it. It’s unique because we’re different. Every person will work through it differently. Some will not work through it, some will deny it, some will manage to put it behind and build their way through,” says Korkie.
Her psychology background was a tool that they tried to use while being held hostage, along with other tools they acquired throughout life. Some of them were useful and others didn’t work. She describes the difficulty they faced in communicating with their captors as they needed them for food and medical supplies. They tried building relationships with their captors; some of them showed kindness, some of them didn’t.
Korkie says it’s very important that governments work together with groups that do hostage negotiations as she believes this could have saved her husband’s life.
After not being able to meet the initial ransom of R32.5 million (around $2 million), the Gift of the Givers Foundation managed to negotiate a facilitation fee for Pierre’s release.
Korkie says they made it clear in the media that negotiations were taking place and they even said on Pierre’s official website, two weeks prior to his possible release, that he would probably be home before Christmas. On December 6, 2014, Pierre was killed when US Special Forces tried to free him.
“They [US Government] say they didn’t know so it’s not my position to say that they did know. I’m not going to go into that. It’s for them to know what they did know and didn’t know. What I know is that we made it clear in the media that we were getting ready to get Pierre released. The South African government knew because we were working very close with them and governments talk,” she says.
Korkie says this whole experience has emphasized the importance of family. She says one might never get the chance to say ‘I love you’ to their loved ones again, so today and now is important.
Earlier this year, Korkie published the book 558 Days, which documents her ordeal.
“I want it to stand as the testimony of God’s love. The book stands as quite a bit of our journey together with Pierre, my husband, and it stands as an encouragement to husbands; how their support and outpouring of their love can actually see their wives and their children through a trauma like this.”
Korkie emphasizes families with a kidnapped member need a strong support system. She says families are hostages themselves as they are never free until their loved one returns. Korkie advises those close to those families to show constant support and love.
“Every minute was possibly now the minute he’s going to be released, so the phone was constantly in my hand. It’s as hard for the family as it is for the hostage,” says Korkie.
“The children and I are still on a journey of working through it. We still have moments where it’s very difficult to just comprehend that we have to continue without Pierre. Now that is the greatest challenge. To continue without him, without his support, his love, his friendship, his companionship, he was everything. It’s just the biggest challenge.”

064-20150618

Free of Captors, Chained by Sorrow

Boko Haram’s latest victim may have been Nigeria’s national elections.
Citing security concerns as reason for postponing the nation’s February general elections by six weeks, the Nigerian authorities have once again succumbed to the bogey of insurgency and insecurity bedeviling Africa’s largest and most populous economy.
The elections will now be held between March 28 and April 11 this year. National Security Adviser, Sambo Mohammed Dasuki, says the government will flush out the terrorists in six weeks. It was a shaky excuse. Nigerians are watching; waiting to see what security magic government will weave in six weeks.
The postponement has near and far reaching implications for the nation and the rest of Africa.
Professor Attahiru Jega, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had previously maintained the commission’s readiness to conduct free and fair polls. Now INEC’s independence and neutrality is being questioned. According to media reports, government may even be shopping for a new, more compliant chairman for the commission.
If this happens, it will translate to political chicanery and serious credibility worries for INEC and the incumbent administration, which funds the commission. The fear that even the new election dates may not be sacrosanct is palpable. Constitutionally, federal and state-wide swearing-in of elected officials must be held on May 29. Observers have called this unfolding scenario a looming coup against democracy in Nigeria.
A prolonged political crisis in Nigeria would further harm efforts at national harmony and stall trade and investment in West Africa, already hit by the Ebola crisis, insurgencies in northern Nigeria and Mali, a democratic interregnum in Burkina Faso, poor external trade balances, fiscal deficits, weakening currencies and mass unemployment.
For most of 2014, Africa’s global image was defined by the Ebola epidemic, despite the scourge being confined to a few countries in West Africa.
Ignoring Africa’s rising middle class, the epidemic revealed the specter of a failing continent,  with poor sanitation, poor health budgets, poor health education, poor medical inventories, poor infrastructure, an entrenched culture of graft and official disregard for society’s commonwealth.
Nigeria’s democratic debacle will therefore be an ignoble chapter in the history of Africa.
For the last 30 months or so, the rest of the world struggled to empathize with Nigeria over its inability to curb the despicable rein of the Islamist fundamentalist group. Boko Haram has made the Sahel forest region around the Lake Chad basin its homestead, launching sporadic attacks into northern Nigerian cities and towns at will; making a mockery of Nigeria’s national security and defense systems. Huge sections of north eastern Nigeria have thus been rendered comatose and ungovernable.
A regional diplomatic initiative involving the governments of Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria failed to plug the onslaught. Indeed the group has become bolder. Last month, Boko Haram threatened to ‘deal with and defeat’ an African Union anti-Boko Haram special force. The group has unleashed more mayhem on northern Nigerian towns even after it kidnapped over 200 teenage girls from their Chibok village school in April 2014.
The political season began last autumn and soon, it would seem that the world had moved on from the sad case of the Chibok girls and the #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign. The conscience of the nation was on the chopping block. Also on the chopping block were investor sentiment and market forces. Agriculture and the automobile industry welcomed new investments in 2014; in the same period, the Nigerian Stock Exchange saw its market cap decline by $8.5 billion, a 13% drop.
Slumping oil prices forced the finance ministry to lower its economic projections for 2015. This year’s national budget was consequently slashed by $3 billion. Nigeria has never saved for the rainy day, largely due to politicians who earn stupendous salaries and allowances and insist on appropriating proceeds from the reserve Excess Crude Account (ECA). Nigeria’s four petroleum refineries operated at less than 50% of their installed capacity between 1985 and 1999 and have remained dormant since then. Parochial politics and economic perfidy has ensured that no new refineries were built in over 30 years.
If business is a natural extension of politics, then it is easy to see why Nigeria Inc. will continue to underperform. The consistent heating of the polity and absence of truth in practically all spheres of Nigerian life is a key hindrance to progress. The system resists reforms. Governance is driven by regional and religious sentiments. The current political class offers little hope. With little or no ideological difference between political parties, defections across party lines is the order of the day. It would therefore seem that principles have no place in Nigerian politics.
With a raft of political parties, presidential and governorship candidates vying for office, this will be the country’s most hotly contested and most expensive elections ever – complete with rented crowds, political hubris and multi-million-dollar media blitz. Nigeria’s cash-and-carry political culture was fully at work.
The late Chinua Achebe once quipped that the problem with Nigeria was Nigeria. The master storyteller would be turning in his grave now, as his beloved nation treks further away from established democratic ethos.
The protracted survival of Boko Haram is a national embarrassment and a scandalous testimonial for leadership in Nigeria. It reflects the failure of the social contract between government and the governed. And as the world prepares to replace the Millennium Development Goals with a new set of goals and priorities this year, Nigerians will also be desperately seeking to replace the mirage of hope with tangible political and economic achievement.

A Coup Against Democracy?

After terrorists were rooted out of the Westgate shopping mall, a group of dignitaries flocked to the site of the siege. One of the first to visit the shopping mall was Phyllis Kandie, the cabinet secretary for East African affairs, commerce and tourism.
After laying a wreath, she turned to the swarming media and declared: “The country is still safe for tourists.”
<div id="attachment_2274" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2274" class="size-medium wp-image-2274" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/NM_00001208-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />NAIROBI, KENYA &#8211; SEPTEMBER 23: Heavy smoke is seen from the site of the terrorist attack, Westgate Mall, on September 23, 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya. The attack occurred on Saturday, 10-15 gunmen from the extremist group Al-Shabab entered the mall and opened fire at random on shoppers; 68 deaths have been confirmed. (Photo by Gallo Images / Nation Media / Salaton Njau)</div>
One day later, the country’s principal secretary of Kenya’s treasury, Kamau Thugge, emerged to assure investors of the country’s security. The officials’ sentiments reflected the uncertainty over the effects the attacks committed by the terrorist group, Al Shabaab, which left 67 dead and dozens missing, on the Kenyan economy.
While government spin doctors insist that the siege will not have any effect, analysts predict a slight dent on economic growth. The most immediate impact was the closure of stores in Westgate, which housed international brands like Deacons, Clarks and other businesses, such as banks.
On a larger scale, global credit rating firm, Moody’s, predicts that Kenya’s economy will lose 0.5% of potential GDP growth this year. In an advisory to investors, the firm noted that the attack will affect Kenya’s growth and fiscal revenues, most directly through its effects on tourism.
This industry accounts for 2% of Kenya’s GDP and earned the country more than $13 billion last year, in addition to creating millions of jobs.
Moody’s could have been onto something. Barely a week after the siege, the governments of the United States, Britain, Australia and Sweden cautioned citizens against visiting Kenya, to the chagrin of Kenyan state officials who had pushed for the West not to do so. These countries account for half of the 1.7 million tourists who visited Kenya last year.
<div id="attachment_2276" style="width: 187px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2276" class="size-medium wp-image-2276" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RTX13XVR-177x300.jpg" alt="" width="177" height="300" />Kenya Defence Forces soldiers comb the rooftop of the Westgate shopping mall, on the fourth day since militants stormed into the mall, in Nairobi September 24, 2013. Somalia&#8217;s al Shabaab Islamist group said on Tuesday its militants were still holed up in a Kenyan shopping mall they attacked at the weekend and there were &#8220;countless dead bodies&#8221;, raising fears the death toll could be higher than 62. REUTERS/Noor Khamis (KENYA &#8211; Tags: CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW MILITARY) &#8211; RTX13XVR</div>
Kenya, which is known for exotic wildlife safaris and pristine beaches, is traditionally a tourism hotspot. The attack came at a bad time. The sector’s peak season is from July to December and many hotels and parks had hoped to benefit from the many bookings normally recorded in this period. After the attack, some have recorded cancellations as visitors adopted a wait-and-see attitude.
The sector is also still reeling from the election blues in March, when visitors stayed away due to fears of a repeat of the post-election violence that took place in 2008. Last year, the uncertainties over elections and the European economic crisis led to a 1.9% decline in the number of tourists.
The attack and any political instability brought about by the trial of the country’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his deputy, William Ruto, at the International Criminal Court will hurt risk ratings, making it difficult to raise money in foreign markets. Any money that is raised will also attract higher interest rates.
Kenya plans to issue a $1.5 billion Eurobond this year to finance rail, road and port upgrades. The country has a favorable rating by various firms. For instance, Standard and Poor’s rating for Kenya is ‘B+’ stable and Fitch has graded it ‘B+’ positive outlook. Weakened by the terrorist attacks, the favorable rating is also being assaulted by politicians.
There have been calls by the Senate and the National Assembly to ratify a motion to pull out of the Rome Statute that creates the ICC, where Kenyatta and Ruto are on trial. Moody’s has warned that Kenya risks being downgraded from a stable rating of B1 if it goes ahead with this, signifying a higher risk for investors.
A lower rating may deter investors with plans to put their money in Kenya in addition to raising premiums that insurers charge for terrorism cover. George Otieno, the chief executive officer of Africa Trade Insurance Agency, an institution that insures investors against terrorism in different countries, told reporters that premiums are likely to go up for those taking terrorism and sabotage cover. However, he predicted that the costs will go down in the long run.
In addition to insurance, firms will also have to spend more on security by installing CCTV cameras, alarms and metal detectors. They will also have to train employees and arrange back-up for their data. All this will increase the cost of doing business.
The government, under pressure after analysts accused them of bungling the intelligence gathered before the attacks, is likely to increase spending on security and defense.
“This will have the consequence of raising the government’s gaping budget deficit,” noted Laura Chakava of investment firm Alpha Africa Asset Managers. Kenya’s budget deficit has grown from 6.5% of the GDP in the 2012/2013 fiscal year to 7.9% in 2013/2014, marking a 1.4% increase. This is against a target of 5%.
Though there are no reliable studies on the effect terrorism, like the Westgate attack, will have on the flow of foreign direct investment in Kenya, research by American scholars offers a glimpse.
In a paper published this year, Subhayu Bandyopadhyay of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Todd Sandler of the University of Texas at Dallas and Javed Younas of the American University of Sharjah looked at how terrorist activity had impacted foreign direct investment (FDI) to 78 developing countries between 1984 and 2008. They noted that one domestic terrorist incident per 100,000 persons reduces net FDI between $323.60 million and $512.94 million for an average country. On the other hand one transnational terrorist incident per 100,000 persons reduces net FDI between $296.49 million and $735.65 million.
Kenya plans to attract $8 billion in foreign investments over the next five years.
However, both governments and analysts agree on one thing; the fundamentals of the Kenyan economy are sound. Unless other factors crop up, the attacks will only have a short to medium-term effect on growth.

Tag: Terrorists

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Free of Captors, Chained by Sorrow

A Coup Against Democracy?

The Cost of Terror In The Mall