 Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Thank you very much for coming to what I'm sure will be a very lively and enriching session on a very, very difficult and important subject. My name is Bobby Ghosh. I am a journalist and for the better part of the past 15 years, I was a war correspondent covering conflicts ranging from Kashmir and Palestine to Iraq and Yemen. And in that time, I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations or heard conversations about how to silence the guns, what is the way to stop the violence. It seems that all the conversation to do with militancy, extremism, terrorism, whatever shape or form it takes is how to stop the guns. And that's a perfectly valid question and the usual discussion centers around whether it should be done by military means, whether you can defeat terrorist groups or extremist groups by military means, then law and order questions can throw everybody in jail. There's occasionally discussions about, is there a political solution? Can you negotiate your way out of a conflict? There's very little discussion in my experience on what to do after the guns are silent. Can you? It is not practical. It makes it in the nature of modern extremism and terrorism. It is not practical to think of killing everybody. That's just not going to happen. Nor is it practical in many countries to jail everyone who's ever been a part of, let's say, Boko Haram or Al-Shabaab or ISIS or the numbers are far too great and that's not the sensible way to approach the problem. I think we can all agree. So what that means is that there has to be a mechanism by which when the conflict has ended, people can be reintegrated into the societies. And this is a difficult challenge because how do you get people to live in peace in the very communities that they once terrorized and victimized. But it is a conversation that needs to be had and needs to be had even while the violence is taking place is my argument. Because we need to show to those who have the guns that there is a path out for them, that we are not simply thinking of them as criminal elements or terrorist elements to be eliminated, but that for a large number of people in these groups there is a path back from the edge that they can return. Because I think the chances of bringing them in from the cold, so to speak, is exponentially when we show them that there is a path and that there is a future for them outside of their current role as perpetrators of violence. And to discuss that very subject, we've gathered for you here today a really excellent panel of people with a great deal of expertise and intellect to bring to bear on the subject. I will do a quick round of introductions and we'll swing into a conversation and I will bring the audience in towards the second half of the conversation. But if there is something that you feel that you want to press and ask a question earlier, just make yourself known and raise your hands if I can see you in these lights I will reach out to you. Let me start clockwise with the introductions. We have from Nigeria, Hafsat Abiola Costello. She is renowned across Africa as a democracy activist. She founded the Kudirat Institute of Democracy. She also is an advisor to the government of Oregon State in Nigeria. And in that capacity, I have some very specific questions. Abdi Ayate from Somalia is a minister for international cooperation and let me get the title exactly right and planning, but a former journalist and the founder of his country's only think tank. I think that's still the only think tank. And as a minister in the Somali government, I'm sure we all have some very specific questions for him. Erastus Moencha is the deputy chairperson of the African Union and also, although he's based in Addis now, is from Kenya. Kennedy Odebe is from Kenya as well. He runs a very special organization that is dedicated to providing hope to young people in disadvantaged communities, more specifically in the slums of Kenya and other parts of Africa. And Anton the Plessy from South Africa is a security expert and an expert on questions of law and also on the subject of countering violent extremism. That is our panel, which are permission. I will sit and we'll open a conversation. Abdi, I'll start with you because you're the minister. You're the man in the middle of it all. If you don't mind, I'll start with a sort of very broad overarching question. And that is, is it conceivable that those who are now terrorizing communities can live in those communities in the future and that those communities will allow them to live among them? Thank you. Well, first of all, no place is more exemplifying that very situation than Somalia today, I believe, where we are immortalizing situation whereby former combatants within al-Shabaab are now living within our communities. About five years ago, al-Shabaab was controlling about 60% of Somalia. Today, with the help of African Union peacekeeping mission and with our government forces, they control about 6% of the country. So five years time, we've made a tremendous progress. And many of these people have left violent extremism and are now have rejoined the society. It's not easy to keep them within the society. Oftentimes, what leads to people to take up the guns in the first place are a, systemic marginalization and exclusion from communities from the first place, and B, abject poverty. And we have combination of both in Somalia. We're trying to address those today by A, trying to create basic foundations for economic opportunities for these young people, vocational training and whatnot. And poverty reduction programs which our government now is actively undertaking. And secondly, we have now undertaken a decentralization approach to our governance where Somalia about ten years ago has adopted a federal system of governance and we're applying that so that people can have a control of their governance at the very local level. And that allows for substantially more people to participate in the political process. We have seen the dividends of that already by seeing a huge number of our population participating in the political process by not resorting to the gun, but peacefully by participating in the political process. Finally, then there is an element of reconciliation that is necessary. Despite the fact that we think of groups like Al-Shabaab as a terrorist and as violent organizations, some of them have nationalist ambitions. And we've been realistic about that so that we could approach the ones that have national ambitions, not the transnational jihadist groups. We've tried to understand their grievances and tried to address them systemically, and we're pleased to report that over the past two to three years, a number of their key leaders have actually rejoined or defected from them are now rejoining the society. Of course they're going through a phase of their own, but that has worked quite well for us as well. A lot of the conversation about reintegration often centers around the leaders. Can we bring them to the political table? Can they join the political process? I don't hear enough about the foot soldiers, if you like. And Hafsat, we exchanged emails and you had an interesting point. You point out that in Nigeria you have a president who thinks that with Boko Haram that these are primarily criminals and terrorists and need to be dealt with as such. But then in the states where they operate, you have a state governor who says, no, that's not the only way to look at it. That you have to recognize that a lot of people who are today fighting for Boko Haram are actually got swept up in it in some way or have been brainwashed. And they should not be treated as criminals and should not be sort of sought to be eliminated or jailed in that way, right? And what is your, where do you fall in that argument? Thank you for your question, Bobby. I actually agree with both of them. I think they're both right. I went to Borno last year in May. My organization, Kind, has worked in Borno for over 10 years. And Borno is the major state in Nigeria that has been affected by Boko Haram. When Boko Haram was taking over territory, most of the territory they were taking was in Borno. But there are about three, four states in total that are affected, but mainly Borno. And when I went there, I was told about the girls that have been kidnapped that everybody knows about because of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign. So that's 276 girls. But Boko Haram militants don't just abduct girls. They abduct boys, too. And when they abduct boys, they use them as soldiers. They force them into their insurgency. So we know that we have to rescue the girls. Everyone is clear about this. And our president spoke about it in his integration speech last week. But then we should also be very clear that we have to rescue the boys, just because they've been used as soldiers and not sex slaves. It was not their doing. It was the choices made by Boko Haram leaders. And so I agree with the president that we have to hold the leadership accountable, the Boko Haram leaders accountable. We have to incarcerate them and use the legal process to do so. But I do not think that we can do that with the children. And with even the al-Majiri in the streets of northern Nigeria, you have millions of children out of school. And they grow up into adults that have no skills. And Boko Haram uses this group also as its rank and file. We can't also criminalize those people, because it's not also their fault. Those children have been on the street from the age of four. It's a sign of the failure of government and the failure of governance in Nigeria that we did nothing to help those children, to socialize those children, to educate those children, and to give them opportunities. And Boko Haram did that. Boko Haram gives them money every month. They pay them a salary. They give them a place to belong. That's our failure. We must take responsibility for that. And we must provide for the rehabilitation and reintegration of those people. It will be tricky to make a distinction. How will you classify from this horde of soldiers, of militants? But there are ways. And in the communities, people know who are the Boko Haram fundamentalists, who were abducted boys and girls, and who were from our marjorie communities. And we have to make the distinction and provide for them. Now, when the governor was talking about the need to provide amnesty, because that's what he said we need to do, we cannot provide amnesty to everyone. In southern Nigeria, there was a point where the people in the oil-rich areas started kidnapping people and destroying oil pipes. And we provided a blanket amnesty. We cannot continually do that. It actually sends the wrong signal to the rest of the population that it's OK to engage in criminal activity because you're discontent. We have to establish that there are rules, there are parameters of action that everybody must be guided by, and that if you violate that there are consequences. So we have to allow the law to run its course for the Boko Haram leaders. Now, in terms of the amnesty, it cannot also just be that we provide jobs of vocational training or psychological therapy. But we have to look at what is really going on with the poor governance in Nigeria. Why is it that we cannot give a voice to our people that is legitimate? Because the Boko Haram people are responding to the bad governance. They have the wrong answer. But they are asking the right question that we need the right leadership. And we hope in Nigeria that by electing this new government that started within the last few days, we have provided a credible answer to that question and that that government will show that this is a credible answer by really responding and engaging with the Nigerian people. Well, come back to the question of good governance in a minute, but Antoni, to go back to the question of amnesty and the legal aspect of it, if you can wear your legal hat for a second, is it practical that we can make a separation between those who were forced to become soldiers or those who got swept up for various reasons and don't necessarily subscribe to the foundational ideology of one of these terrorist groups and the leadership who came up with that ideology and lead these groups? Can we make that distinction or is that too blurry? It's extremely difficult. But I think it's part of the broader challenge we have to addressing contemporary violence in Africa, which is driven largely by non-state actors who are able to exploit local grievances, local political issues to drive their agendas, whether they organize criminals, whether they're militia groups, whether they're terrorists. And I think it's sometimes problematic to just sort of single out terrorism as a particular special form of violence in Africa that needs to be dealt with in a very particular way. What's happened traditionally is the narrative of the war on terror has won out and you would have thought that after the disastrous experience of the global war on terror that we would have learned our lessons and in many cases we simply haven't. I mean the global narrative is changing at least. There are some important developments globally in terms of reframing the debate around development, inclusion, governance and that terrorism is a very important part of achieving that bigger goal whereas in the past it was the other way around. The calibration was let's improve governance, economic inclusion so that we can protect state security and respond to terrorism. And within that context the very important components of a criminal justice and a law enforcement response to terrorism was lost. So a lot of the development aid, a lot of the focus went into intelligence, sharing for national security and military. Now we're trying to play catch up. But in Africa in particular the criminal justice capacity to be able to respond appropriately and legally to terrorism is not where it should be. And even where it is developed within countries there's a very poor international cooperation or regional cooperation between these governments. So we really do have a long way to go in terms of addressing the ability of our governments to respond judicially through the rule of law to terrorism. Because what we're doing now is still too often we're relying on trying to silence guns by using bigger guns of our own. And it's clear you made the point. We're not gonna shoot ourselves out of this problem. So we need to have a much more multifaceted response and of course the criminal justice system is fundamental to that and within that approach it's very important that we're gonna have to develop the capacity to be able to differentiate between the ring leaders, if you like, that are at the top ends of these organizations and the foot soldiers who are often very young people who are turning to terrorism because they're desperate because they're impoverished and because they desperately try to find an identity within their own communities. Eras, what do you think is a sort of regional approach to this is, or is there a regional approach? Is the question of rehabilitating and reintegrating former militants is that something purely for local communities and local governments or is there something that the African Union can contribute? Perhaps in trying to help governments sort of states create this legal framework. Maybe before I answer that question on the reintegration process, there is a net that I wanted to add to what you just said that often, and this is what ISIS has revealed to us that it's not just the kids of the poor and the marginalized that join this kind of terrorism or this process. And recently I'm sure you know that there was an attack in Kenya in Garisa at the university. What was strange to analyze, particularly the perpetrators, they came from the upper class and well-informed people that you would have thought shouldn't have participated. I think what this is telling us is that they are fundamentals we haven't just understood, or we are yet to really fully uncover. When a society sits with some serious challenges, we gloss over them and we look the other way and leave this to perpetuate for a long time. They themselves create a fertile ground for recruitment and when that recruitment takes place, it doesn't matter on the profile of those who join. They can come from any particular those who feel that joining a cause to fight this kind of injustice or fundamental issues is a just cause. So this is something that we must inform ourselves and know that when this kind of things is bleeding around us, bleeding around us, we need to go to the fundamentals and address them. And that goes to the next point of what you're asking. What do you do when this has happened? There are those perpetrators, there are those who join in voluntarily and at the end of the day, you then must differentiate. And I think what Kostero said is I totally agree with it. Some of those you have to. But on a regional approach and looking at what we are doing, particularly even at the level of the African Union. First of all, there are some specific cases you can look at, for instance, in Central Africa, we have a redistribution there. The Honorable Minister has given a perfect example of what's happening in Somalia and I'm so happy to hear him say that even within the ranks of Al-Shabaab, there are some who have national ambitions and which means that they have some agenda that you can once as you integrate them, try to solve them. This could be because of machinerization or exclusion of some sort or some burning issues, some segments of society have that needs to be approached. And so within the context, in fact, last year, we organized a summit for the first time to address this very issue. And in that summit, we started to understand the need, for instance, of intelligence sharing, which means you don't really wake up to a crisis. And if you are sharing intelligence, you can then upfront develop some instruments that can address those burning issues. But the day after, of course, after the guns have stopped the blessing, you now need to start looking at those issues in a structured manner. Some of the key areas would be to address either institutional failure, where you need to have strong institutional framework that really, I would say fragile state or weak institutional framework within the national level that can make sure that the society is now given sufficient comfort that they way forward. It's not to go to the bush, it's not to carry arms, but there is fundamental channels through which they can address their grievances. And I think that is a mechanism that should be addressed even internationally, because if you look at it, what has happened in Libya, what has happened even in Iraq, it is that lack of, either exclusion or lack of facilities that will enable those that have been marginalized to be able to find voice or a comfort or a place in a society. Kennedy, your group is called Shining Hope for Communities, and you work in the slums of Kenya, you yourself grew up in Kibera, one of the biggest in the world. What is the hope that you can bring or you want to bring to the slums or that sort of, that keep the kids from embracing violence? Yeah, I think we have to be honest about this issue. We are part of the problems, we are. And we are part of the solution. What happened is that when things start affecting the middle class, it's become an issue. In our neighborhood, you see the slums that get people to live under violence, nobody cares, you know? And we're also now blaming ourselves and lying to ourselves about the rich kids joining ISIS. I don't agree on that. They are just few numbers. They are just few numbers, and that's why it became a story. Most of the time they are really poor kids, people who have no hope. At the age of 10, I was a homeless kid. I was on the street. And what I was looking for, I was looking for hope. So what's happening is that young people are losing the sense of belonging. When the ISIS al-Shabaab can give you that, that's what's happening. And I think the issue, the root cause, is you have to go down to the roots. As we work on the policy level, this thing is starting from the industrial level. How do we involve these young people by giving them opportunity? For them, what we do now in Kibera is that we have a community center. We offer trainings. We engage young people. We have schools, you know? And even our governments, business leaders, can start working on these issues earlier. I don't think it can really come where it is. I think is that we are silent when this thing happened in a small scale because there's a slum. Because that's Somalia. Let's open our eyes. And I think we can really solve a lot of things. Has the recent violence in Kenya with the attacks by al-Shabaab, has that made a difference in the mood in Kibera and the other slums? Has that made the government more sensitive to the absence of hope in the slums? That's a good point, yeah. You can see how before there used to be these gun violence. People killing each other in the slums. Nobody cared. But I think what happened now is that, for example, there's an element of a terrorist. What they are doing now, they are coming, giving young people from the slums, they are going for the trainings, you know what I mean? And now, they are coming back and they are carrying the attacks. And so right now there's a lot of, the government of Kenya is really working hard. They are really trying to find the root cause. You know, they are really trying to prevent all these things. But since the Westgate happened, there's been a lot of talk about it. But I think poverty that we have in our country is a big issue. The gap between the rich and the poor, that one, if we don't take care of it, we're gonna be in a very, very huge problem. Guys, please feel free to join the conversation anytime. Don't wait. I just want to illustrate an excellent point that Kennedy just raised. Before this job, I was a researcher and I used to go to this camp of rehabilitated young men who defected from the Shabbat or who were captured in the line of war. And they were too young to be put on a prison so they put them in this camp and used to interview a lot of them. There was one word that came back to me a lot of times by these young people. And that word was, it's the same whether I live or die. In fact, it's much worse to live rather than die. So many of them felt that joining al-Shabaab and fighting for them, they were not necessarily fighting for the cause of al-Shabaab. But they were just escaping from what was and a hopeless life that threw them on the street and that made just living and waking up every day exceptionally difficult for them. And so I can completely understand if you're in Kibera, you're facing the same problem that the child in Southern Somalia is facing today. And so a fundamental issue here is the issue of abject poverty in our societies and addressing that systemically and giving young people hope will do better. You might ask a question of, Somalia was also poor in the 80s and 70s, but we had a military dictatorship that was a communist government. It successfully mobilized hundreds of thousands of young people and gave them some kind of a reason to live. They were participating in volunteer programs. Now we're trying to revive that because we've realized that the government was actually giving these young people hope at that point. Even if they did not give them job, they were giving them a cause to wake up every morning. And that's critical. What kind of programs? They were volunteer programs where they were building roads and other government buildings or schools and whatnot. And the same money for free. For free, they were just giving food. But most importantly, they were galvanized in a nationalistic kind of an environment where they were given hope that they were doing something for the greater good. And I think that is something we could do potentially now and replicate in a lot of African societies. Yes, go ahead. If I could jump in here. I think I want to agree with the point that is being made that object poverty is really a breeding ground for recruitment into such. But let us distinguish between those who plan, execute and run that enterprise from those who are recruited like what Costero said earlier on. And I agree that yes, those are there. And that is a major issue. It could be 70% of the issue. But I think let's not forget this 1% which can always cut us a long way. The masterminders, if you look at the warlords that you see, the ones who have grievances are not really people of ordinary life. They are people of ambition and the way they recruited, of course, then they go to this fertile ground and do it. And so let's distinguish between the architects, the planners, the executors from those that normally would just participate. And I think that is what the issue is. The problem is that we are the ones giving ourselves, we are giving them opportunity. What is happening is that they are very smart, as you know. They know the government and all these people neglect their people. So what they do, they come with a token. So if you have to stop that one first. I think the drivers of conflict in Africa are much more complex. It's not just about object poverty. Of course, object poverty is a big issue, but there are lots of really poor people living in many countries in the world that are not turning to extremism or terrorism or violence for that matter. You need to look at all the structural drivers of violence in Africa, and these include urbanization, these include histories of violence, these include bad neighborhoods, there are many things. But there's one driver of violence in Africa that we can control, and we've touched on that. Bad leaders ensure bad governance, which drives people to feel that it just is fuel on top of that fire of object poverty. And it's getting worse because Africans are more connected. Their sense of relative deprivation is significantly more acute today than it was five years ago. And unfortunately in five years time it's going to be significantly even more acute than it is today. And that is a factor that we have to consider not just looking at object poverty. And link to that, and it's interesting in Kenya that you raise it. We did research in Kenya. We spoke to a number of al-Shabaab youth that had joined al-Shabaab. And we asked them, a lot of them spoke about poverty, a lot of them spoke about hope and dignity and the fact that they wanted an identity which was mostly just about having dignity and hope for something better. But a significant number of them also spoke about Kenya's counterterrorism response, which was adding to it, which is also bad governance. So it's encouraging to see that there's a change happening. It's encouraging to see some of the statements coming out of Kenya, but Nigeria is the same issue. Can I say something on what Anton was just saying? You see, the truth is that it's very difficult to... When I went to Bono, it was very difficult for the people in Bono at first to condemn Boko Haram because they had seen a government that just did nothing for so long. And not for five years. We're talking about 15, 25 years. The poverty rate in Bono is about 76 percent and it's the highest poverty rate in the whole Nigeria, in not just Bono, but the whole Northeast region. But it's not just poverty. What then happened was when Boko Haram first organised, there was kind of a religious group, a religious extremist group, not mainstream, and they had social services that they were giving to their members. And then they fell foul of the police. And then their founder, Mohamed Yusuf, who was compared to what we have now, was actually quite peaceful, was taken and then killed. Actually, the President, Buhari mentioned it in his inauguration speech that it was the response that was made by the Nigerian government that then fuelled this outrage. Now, should it have fuelled outrage that then led to what we're seeing, which has killed 15,000 people in Nigeria, led to 1.5 million refugees? No. There are other ways that you can express outrage. You know, like yesterday was the 4th of June and it was the 19th anniversary of my mother's assassination by soldiers in Nigeria. So I didn't go and form a Kudurad militancy group. I went and I formed an NGO to work for democracy in Nigeria. And after we were able to get a democratic government, I've been working to see that that democratic government functions well. But Maya Angelou said something quite powerful. She said, people do what they know. And when people know better, they do better. And I think it goes to this. I'm very privileged in Nigeria. I'm very well educated, not just for Nigerian standards, but globally, global standards. I can meet anybody and explain what I'm thinking. But a lot of the people in Northeast Nigeria are not in this situation. And I was socialized by a woman who only went to high school, but she was the head girl of her school. And she always said that women had a role to play beyond the family. And that we had a role to play in the larger society. She was organizing market women. She was organizing students, marches against dictatorship when my father was jailed. So that was the background. So the background was that we have to organize for change. That's not their background in the Northeast. There are hardly the girls in Northeast Nigeria, 4% of them finish high school, 4%. They have the highest rate of maternal mortality. They have some of the, about 70% of the women cannot read a sentence from the ages of 15 to 19. So it calls into question the kind of education they're even getting in the first place. And they are the ones socializing those children. And the children are coming out with very few tools with which to engage the rest of society. So to the point that you were making about the middle class. In Nigeria, we had a long period where we had associations, labor unions, challenging the military dictatorship. And the military just repressed all of that. So then what the elite then did was that they just retreated to their homes. And if there was no water, they would sink their own borehole. If there's no electricity from the national grid, they'll buy their own generator and power their house. If the schools were bad, they would build their own private schools. But what was happening to the majority of people who were poor? They were just abandoned and left. And this is a warning to all the other African countries that are facing incompetent government that we cannot simply retreat and say we take care of me and myself, me and my family. We have a larger responsibility. We must keep pushing back against government that is not functioning as they should. Which is why there was this whole change campaign. The change campaign in Nigeria should inspire Africa because we had all these small opposition groups. And one party that said it was the largest party in Africa, it had been ruling for 16 years in the midst of great growth. There was rising poverty. The people didn't see this growth. And the opposition came together and they started working for change in Nigeria against the odds. You cannot say that the money that the ruling party was spending, we could even match them by 20%. We could not. But we mobilized the Nigerian people and they delivered that election. So we can only hope that this government will do what is right, what is expected, which I frankly believe that they will. And all Nigerians are now organizing to ensure that they will. We're not just going to sit at home and wait for President Buhari as much as we love and trust them. We're really committed to working with them side by side to deliver the results for Nigeria. Other countries have to do this. We cannot leave this government sit tight in incompetence because that is to condemn to death children in all parts of the country, especially the poor, whether from childbirth or from accidents or from malnutrition. And this is an injustice that will fuel Boko Haram and fuel other kinds of Boko Haram across the continent. We'll come to audience questions in a minute, but I want to go around this group and ask a quick question on best practices. You were talking about the rest of Africa should take inspiration from Nigeria. In the area of trying to rehabilitate from a militant, Africa has had many different experiments in that and different countries have approached it in interesting ways, from Algeria to Liberia to Sierra Leone to Rwanda and Somalia. Now, I'm going to ask each of you to give me a couple of examples where you think it has worked and what has worked and what you think can now be applied to some of the current conflicts. Anton, do you want to go first? I don't know of two countries where it's actually worked. The one is Somalia, where there was a re-insigration program which was funded by foreign donors for a while. It was shut down for various reasons, I understand, and it's continuing in various manifestations, but it really worked. And then I know of an ongoing one in Algeria which has really worked very well. But the other examples are not there, in my view, not successful ones. And I think the problem... What is it about these two examples that you think made them successful and what can we glean from there and apply? Are all these two generis... It's entirely possible that each problem is its unique side. They're completely, completely different. The one in Somalia was driven from the community app with international support. The Algerian one, I understand, was driven by the government. But there was a commitment to the fact that you're not going to be able to kill and incarcerate all the terrorists and we're going to have to reintegrate these people. But it was also part of a broader criminal justice reform process which didn't single out just terrorists. So you're looking at prison conditions where you need to house these people with many other dangerous criminals, gangsters, et cetera, and realizing we can't just have a special facility for radical terrorists. We have to have prison conditions that enable us to reintegrate violent offenders back into society. And of course you need a component of that that deals with violent extremist offenders. But ultimately it's about criminal justice reform in these countries more broadly. And the problem in Africa is that our prison conditions are not conducive to that. Our intake and assessment criteria are not developed enough. So it is part of a broader problem, but unfortunately we don't have enough examples of this good practice and we've got a long way to go. The rest as you take a pan-African view, are there good examples? Yeah, and I think this is, in a way, you cannot say you've arrived in many of the situations that I'm going to mention. It's always work in progress. But I think it's good to recognize the strides that are being made in those countries and the progress towards total integration. I mean, if you look at, for instance, Liberia, many years ago, 10 years ago, it's not what it was. And you can see progress towards that. What is important is to continue to invest more. If you look at Sierra Leone, in practice, a country that, as you've mentioned, was having one of, and I agree with what Kostero is saying, that krodlas in the necessary means is trickling to everybody, but you can see things were coming together. And those kind of examples, and we still have some. What did they do that you think, for instance, Nigeria could try? I think one of the things you notice some of those countries did, first of all, is to start improving the political governance. And I think this is the point she's making, too, that once you create space for people to express themselves, they feel they're participating, they feel their channels through which they can operate, and that's the healing process. And so governance is a very important tool to make sure that you have true democracy, that you have strong institutions of justice, you have strong legal process, not only justice in that process, but also institutions of enforcing law and order, that helps. And I think those are fundamentals that if you notice some especially countries that relapse is because the governance aspect, architecture falls apart. Abid Somalia has lessons to teach. Let's try and be specific. So the Central African Republic now has a kind of slightly unstable, but there is some sort of a peace deal on the table. The violence has abated. If you had the opportunity to advise the government there on how to reintegrate two separate groups of people who are fighting each other, what examples from Somalia do you think you can offer them? Well, three things I could draw on. One is reconciliation and addressing the legitimate grievances. There are illegitimate grievances with transnational jihadist groups. We're not interested in talking to those because they have no vested interest in Somalia. But those who have a vested interest in Somalia with legitimate grievances of exclusion, we have been talking to them. And the rehabilitation program that you referred to addressed that more specifically and said that if you are interested in Somalia, we have a political space for you to participate. That leads me to the second issue, which is decentralization, which I started with earlier. We have 18 regions, 93 districts in Somalia. People are now electing their city council members and their mayors and their parliaments of federal member states. And the number of people participating in the political process has probably increased by 400 or 500% over the past few years, largely because we have given them a space so that they can participate. If they had issues with governance, now they can become the government themselves and govern their local village and district and whatnot. And the final issue is economy and poverty. I agree that it's not one issue over the other. It's not either or. It's multifaceted, so economic reconciliation, decentralization, but obviously force is part of it. You have to deal with the transnational ones, the ones who are not interested in being part of your political process. Those, you have to continue fighting them to show the other is that that's not a way to go as well. So those are the three things, I think, that have worked for us. I have said when you look around Africa, are there places where you say that's something we can learn from? Bobby, I want to talk to you about within Nigeria because Nigeria is like 170 million strong. And we have six geographical zones. The most peaceful part of Nigeria, I'm fortunate to say, is where I'm from, Southwest Nigeria. And I want to talk to you about a little bit of what we have done there, not what I have done, but what has been done over decades. We were very fortunate in the founding of Nigeria in 1960 that in the Southwest, we had what we call, what within Africa is a political leader that is called, in a way, Socialist Awoloa, it was the leader for Southwest Nigeria. And he pushed for universal free education for Southwest Nigeria. He pushed for healthcare, he pushed for cocoa, we had cocoa farmers to guarantee prices for cocoa farmers and support infrastructure to rural communities. It did so many things that till today in Southwest Nigeria, and it died in the 80s, till today in Southwest Nigeria, I really credit a lot of the goodwill and the trust, the relative trust between followers and leaders in Southwest compared to the rest of Nigeria, to all of that. Because, so now I'm in Oregon State government and I'm in a cabinet that has about over 30% women, we're almost 40% the women in our cabinet. And we're able to, and we go into the communities to work with our people. There's some of the things we're doing that is very hard. Like we're destroying so many houses to build, to put in the proper road infrastructure that we think we need in our state. We should see our people, how they, first they come out on the street and when the governor comes to walk on those roads and to see the people whose homes he has broken down, they come and meet him and they explain that this is what, and he will explain that this is the plan for paying compensation. Then listen to him, he listens to them, there's trust there. Then also, you know, when I was, I managed $20 million per year for the MDG office. And because of this issue of maternal mortality, which Nigeria has one of the highest rates in the world, I mean, we have 2% of the world's population and 10% of the maternal mortality rate in the world. So when I became the special advisor to the governor and MDGs, they gave me like, I don't know, like a million dollars just for any intervention I wanted. So I said that we should use it to help poor women go to hospital for antinatal care, to deliver their babies and for postnatal care. We're the first state in Nigeria to use money for this kind of project. And it became a national example. So now it's been replicated in 12 of our 36 states and the progress of it has been mapped by UNFPA. But is it happening in the states where Boko Haram is strong? No, no, that's what, my point is that we're doing so many things to make sure that the people see what their government is doing. If the people are upset, they can talk to us and we can respond and we can change course if needed. Now, I think it should be replicated in other parts of Nigeria. And in fact- But other parts of Nigeria have different specific problems. They were not blessed, as you point out, with a foundational inspirational leader. How do they overcome these problems? Yes, a lot. Even now the national government has taken on one of our programs in Southwest where we give meals to children in schools every day. And it actually increases the rate of enrollment and retention in schools. It's not going to be a national program. It's going to help in Northern Nigeria. It's going to help parents who have very little money and have all these children. And they'll say, at least go to school, at least do it. They may not necessarily say, oh, we really believe in this Western education and what it's going to give you, but it will give them food. But that is what Boko Haram allows the schools to be open and the milk to be distributed in the first place. Yes, but for the Boko Haram problem, the position that Nigeria is taking, that the president is taking, which I think is the correct position, is that we have to fight militarily to stop Boko Haram. And then once we can stop Boko Haram, but Boko Haram is only in the Northeast. There's North Central. There's Northwest, which also have very poor education attendance. The purposes of this discussion, we are focusing on reintegrating those who are, you know, those who have joined extremists or terrorist groups. So they can definitely replicate a lot of the programs that we have. Even the ones, even look at the one on maternal mortality. They can do that even now. They can do that even in Bono state. When we say Boko Haram, Boko Haram has not taken over 10% of Bono state. The rest of, I visited the governor and his wife and their whole team. They're still working in Bono state. So while we're waiting to be able to secure all of Bono, there's a lot that the government can be doing to take away the argument that Boko Haram is making that these governments are incompetent. They'll show that, no, the government actually is changing. And there's no need to support Boko Haram to have a change to government because it's already happening. We'll folks start putting their hands up so we know how to reach you with the mics. Can we start with this lady here? And please identify yourself. Thanks. It's Shannon Ibrahim from Independent Media. I had a question for Costello. You've outlined for us the impoverishment of Northern Nigeria. It's economic marginalization and the neglect by the central government. And we all know that Boko Haram needs to be dealt with and probably quite severely. But what happened in the last week is Amnesty International really strongly criticized the Nigerian government under its new leadership for basically massacring 8,000 members of Boko Haram. And you said in the North there has been a reluctance to criticize Boko Haram. So even though people may realize they need to be reined in, could this not create more sympathy for them because this will be another example of human rights abuses by the central government? Thanks. Actually, the militants, the report that Amnesty has just released is more about the previous government. The current government has only been in office since May 29. So there's no way that in the few days they've killed 8,000 Boko Haram militants. They're actually are recording what the previous government was able to do in Northern... What the previous government did in Northeast Nigeria was to declare a state of emergency and they sent soldiers to the Northeast. And when the soldiers got there, the soldiers could not tell who was Boko Haram and who was not. The intelligence was very poor and they committed a lot of human rights violations in that time. So that has been an ongoing problem. In fact, it was the reason why if you looked at the votes from the Northeast, the current president pretty much won landslide across the Northeast. Because people felt that the previous administration was not concerned. I don't know if you recall Baga, the incident in Baga, where Amnesty released a report that about 2,000 people, up to 2,000, they couldn't really ascertain the number. But they said up to 2,000 Nigerians had been killed in Baga in January in an assault. And the president, it was at the same time that Paris, there was the incident, Charlie Hebdo incident, where there were 12 people killed in Paris. And our president sent a message of condolence to Paris, to France, and said nothing about the incident in Northeast Nigeria. So I and a couple of my friends that I work with in the Young Global Leaders Community of the World Economic Forum, wrote a letter that was published in the Guardian UK, challenging the president, essentially asking him if he was going to be running for office in France or in Nigeria. The truth is that the current president is a former military general. And while he was in office, we had a similar incident that was 20 years ago. It was a former military head of state as well in the early 80s. When he was in charge of the army as chief of army staff, we had an incident called the Mitocino riots, where a lot of similar to Boko Haram was occurring. He was the one that went and put a stop to it. So Nigerians are confident that he's going to be able to deal with this issue. He's also aware that the soldiers have been acting in a way that are violating human rights, and he's talking about training them last week before his inauguration on Tuesday in that with David Cameron, prime minister of the UK, to begin to look at what kind of support, technical training that can be offered to Nigerian soldiers so that we can actually stop the insurgency without killing innocent civilians. And there's going to be a partnership that will begin with the UK on that. And then he has also sent the military leadership away from Abuja, the political capital, and he has sent them to establish the theater of the headquarters of their operations in Bono state itself. Why? Because a lot of the, we've spent trillions of Naira, trillions of Naira on this fight against Boko Haram. But I tell you that if maybe 50% of that got to the front lines, we will be lucky. Much of it has been lost through corruption. And a lot of the generals who are making the decisions about how to wage this war are in the safety of Abuja, sending soldiers without proper equipment to the front lines. So he has sent them to join those soldiers in the front lines. And if they want, they can steal the money, but while their own lives are in danger, I suspect that that money will get to the front lines and we will see a change in the situation very quickly. A question here. My name is Gwendolyn Myers and I'm a global shaper from Unruhvia Hulp of the Global Shapers community. Given the fight that we have no clear distinction when it comes to issues relating to domestic and regional saber conflicts and as well every conflict has an international dimension and as well global security. My question is, given also the fight that on the 29th of May, we celebrate the 70 years of peacekeeping globally. It is very sad for me as a young lady coming from a post-conflict country, Liberia, to know that after 70 years of peacekeeping globally, today's conflict remain complex and volatile. I'm really interested in knowing and we do also agree that conflicts really occurred in areas where they are by-government and in lack of investment in human security. What is actually the road of powerful states when it comes to the issue coming off a more robust strategy in addressing issue of peacekeeping and peacemaking and how do we see the active involvement of young people also in issue of peace-building? Thank you. Rassus, you want to take that from the African Union point of view? It's a very important question and the global peace architecture is one that continues to enlist it, a lot of debate and concern because as my sister here is saying, look at how much money we spend when guns are blazing. But we don't invest that money to stop guns blazing. And I think this is the crux of the matter, what she's saying. If you look at, for instance, the Royal Peace and Security Council of the UN, they are quick and eager to authorize a peacekeeping mission with very poor mandate sometimes because they can see on the television people dying but if we invested some of that money and I think this is what she's saying, what is the role of the powerful nations? At that point they read threat checks to authorize peacekeeping missions but when they would have authorized development keeping missions early on and I think this is the point that if you brought water, if you brought electricity, if you brought development and the amount of money we spend in each of those operations is enough to address what the minister is saying. Our experience, for instance, if you look at Somalia, it is easy for us to know there is an Al-Shabaab cell in the Sajjah place. Go and attack them, dismantle them. But often at the time, what happens? They melt into society. They become part of society. You can't even distinguish. And what happens if you pursue them? The human rights kick in. You are now killing indiscriminately. And so, but the best way, even when we do that, we then ask the government to take that position, take charge. It's not enough for the government to bring their own governance and sit there. The best way is then to bring in development, open schools, open markets, open roads so that people can start business. And this is the crux of the matter. If we share development, we can then tackle. That is the only way we can bring peace. I'm gonna bring Anton into this because you have some thoughts on how the big powerful states are beginning to change the dialogue from counter-terrorism to countering extreme violence before it becomes terrorism. Yeah, there are important shifts happening in the global narrative. In the 10 years after the 9-11 attacks, the narrative, the calibration, as I said earlier, was we've gotta do development. We've gotta do investment. We've gotta get economic growth so that we can secure powerful nations from the threat of terrorism. And that calibration was the wrong way around and I think it drove a divide between the development community and the security community. It securitized development and I think Africa was worse off for it and I think we're still paying the price. It was a short-term political solution which was too heavily focused on the military. But from about 2008, actually about 2006, the UN General Assembly really is changing the debate. Supported by many regional organizations but the current global framework is known as the UN Global Counter-terrorism Strategy which is framed within the development and countering violent extremism narrative and I think what we've seen this year is important. As we, in 2015, with the Sustainable Development Goals discussion with the US and other powerful countries having global summits and discussions on countering violent extremism, we're getting the global framework right. It's now moving that into implementation but getting the global framework and the calibration right matters because once you've got that framework cemented, it prevents bad leaders in continents that want to use terrorism to crush political dissent, that want to use the threat of terrorism for their own machinations. It takes away the political cover they had over the last couple years and that's important but civil society and other groups need to make sure that we use that global narrative to hold our governments to account and I think we're at the beginning stages of it. Unfortunately, the progress we've made is precarious and if there had to be a big attack on a Western embassy or in a Western country, that progress could be reversed and we should watch it very, very carefully to make sure that we don't return back to framing everything through security, particularly a national security lens. We have five minutes left so I'm afraid we're not going to be able to take all the questions but we'll take one question from there and then the great thing about being in the World Economic Forum is that you can call on any of these people and me after the session and maybe get a chance to ask some questions. Last question to you. My name is, I'm Asantua Loliou, a global shaper from Jubahab, South Sudan and I'm one of those people who are living in a conflict, post-unconflict zone and my interest is, I'm also surprised there's nobody from the UN here on the panel because they're part of the stakeholders in this and my interest is how are we also engaging the youth who are in those conflict areas? In IDP camps, refugee camps, because I work with them and honestly, as Ochen said, they're hopeless and some of them are willing to join the rebels because nobody is taking care of them. Programs are focusing on young people up to 18 years, I mean on children and women. From 18 to 35 or 24, there's a gap and they are the ones who are so vulnerable and can easily be influenced. So how are we moving the narrative into seeing how we can engage these people? I want to bring Kennedy into it first and then Abdi. Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think right now we have to accept that the African population of young people is growing very fast and can be a threat, can be a blessing and what now we have to do is how do we engage these people? And we're lucky we have you here and this I think that the heads of the government and can do. Another thing I'm very fond of is that let's not only rely on governments, people to do first things. I think it's time to go for our communities. I was having a hard time growing up in a slum with no hope, having a very hard time. But I knew that change will only come from, you have to change yourself first. So as upon as as young people, we go back to where we come from and try to start changing things and before when the government start doing things. The last point I want to put is that on the solution, what's happening about terrorism and all this act of violence, they want to be listened. And I ask the head of state and government to allow civil society and media to expose issues because I think that these people feel like nobody want to listen to them. So they go, they go what? They become extreme. And when Somalia sort of is sort of reintegrating people, is there a particular age group that deserves special attention, most vulnerable to, as the lady pointed out, most vulnerable to resuming the violent activities? Oh, without a doubt. We just released our population estimate survey two weeks ago, and 74% of our population is under the age of 30. It is incredible. I don't know of any country that has that many people under the age of 30, which tells you where Somalia and probably many other African countries need to invest. And keeping that in mind, we're now writing a poverty reduction strategy paper. And it's tailored primarily toward young people because we are focusing on them as the one segment of society that deserves a lot of attention. And to your question more specifically how young people are participating, the word young could also be relative, but I do know that in our new government, about five of my colleagues now are under the age of 40. And one of them is out of 25, which is significant progress. And four of them are women, also significant progress from what we had because of the fact that now a lot more younger people are coming to places of power so that they can also think about their peers as well. So, and 10% of our population is also IDPs, according to this population estimate survey which we had and many of them are young people. So, we're certainly putting young people on to everything we're designing right now for the future in Somalia. Okay, this is a subject that I'm sorry, I see more hands raised, but we could go on for very, very, very long time, but for the purposes of this session, the time is at an end. I want to thank all of the panelists. Ladies and gentlemen, your panel.