The lorry sways slowly from side to side along a dirt track as it ambles towards its place of rest. The red straw bags, clothes and empty yellow water bottles tied to the rear end of the open cargo hold tower above the pensive faces peering over colourfully painted steel panels.

The lorry finally hisses to a halt in the shade of a vast Acacian.

We know the lorry is carrying people hoping to flee to Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp in northeastern Kenya, but it is only when the driver hops out of the cockpit and swings open the back latch that we realise there is an entire community inside.

“There are around 40 households inside this truck,” the driver tells us.

We count at least 40 adults and around 70 children, mostly infants, emerging from the vehicle. They look terrified and exhausted.

Set up in 1991 to host 90,000 people fleeing war in Somalia, the three camps that make up the Dadaab complex are now home to more than 380,000 people. Between 40,000 and 60,000 are thought to be living outside the boundaries of the complex – existing as refugees beyond the current scope and control of the UN.

“They are desperate, hungry and wanted to escape to Kenya, so I brought them here,” explains the driver, who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of a backlash from al-Shabab. The group, which is trying to overthrow Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), has reportedly discouraged people from leaving the country.

Adnan Dahir Hassen, the district commissioner of Dobley, says the town is battling to deal with the influx.

“As you can see, there are just too many people coming in from all over southern Somalia … we try to give them security so they feel safe and we also try to welcome them by sharing whatever little we have with them,” he says softly as the cries of newly disembarked children punctuate the already tense ambience.

Hassen says that as the government representative in the city, it hurts to see Somalis leave, but to stop them would be to behave inhumanely.

‘Unimaginable’

“This is an unimaginable drought, something that has not been witnessed in decades,” says Abdi Nasir Serat, the TFG forces spokesperson for Somalia’s Lower Juba region, adding that the country’s ongoing civil war has only intensified the effects of the drought.

“The civil war on top of the drought has forced these people to run away, and part of this is an attempt to find more security for their lives,” Serat says.

Back in the camps of Dadaab, relief workers say that many refugees have cited threats from al-Shabab as a reason for leaving Somalia. Stories abound about the group intimidating farmers and kidnapping young boys who they then force to join their “army”.

This might explain why most of the arrivals are women and children. Young men are conspicuous by their absence, either manning the last of the livestock or fighting in the war.

Those who reach Dadaab are, despite the trauma of their journey and an arduous registration process that takes days to complete as procedures continually shift, in fact the lucky ones.

Norwo, the mother of six, and Ibrahim, the father of nine, have few expectations of the facilities at Dadaab. “We are so hungry, desperate and poor, with no idea where we are going … our problem is hunger and our closest [chance] seems like the refugee camp,” Norwo says.

And, as chaotic as the Dadaab complex is, if Norwo and Ibrahim are able to transport their families safely there in time to receive medical assistance for their malnourished children, they may just save them from death by starvation.

Dadaab is still their best bet because in Dobley, as in other parts of southern Somalia, there is no infrastructure to deal with the famine and little medical care to address the malnutrition. Dobley residents have to go to neighbouring Liboi in Kenya to access treatment.

Somalia: A ‘black hole’

Dadaab might have captured the attention of the international community for the moment, but the situation inside Somalia remains a ‘black hole’ as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

As it stands, more than two million Somalis are affected by the drought while around a million are said to be internally displaced.

The fact that few relief agencies work inside the country – a result of the insecurity there, administrative hassles and the fact that al-Shabab asked them to leave – creates a self-fulfilling cycle.

With no international relief agencies luring the media into Somalia and exposing the conditions there, there is none of the corresponding international coverage that might otherwise bring more international aid to the region.

One in three Somalis are said to be in need of humanitarian assistance, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in March that one in four Somali children are malnourished. Serat says aid agencies could avert a humanitarian catastrophe if they returned to work in certain parts of Somalia.

It may have been an extremely difficult place to work over the past two decades, but Serat says the TFG is making concerted appeals to the international community to come back.

“We are saying that the aid agencies need to come here; we will provide the necessary protection and allow them to work with those who need the assistance.”

Al-Shabab reportedly announced some days back that they would allow humanitarian efforts to reconvene in the areas under their jurisdiction and insiders will tell you that the group has also suffered as a result of the drought – which has impacted movement, food supplies and public sentiment.

This might just provide relief agencies with a chance to establish effective, trusting relationships with the TFG and al-Shabab. Or it could just be an illusion; a mirage of optimism.

As we stand under a tree in Dobley it begins to drizzle; short, refreshing drops from the pregnant clouds above fall through the thin leaves. But it stops just as suddenly it began.

*Published under an agreement with Al-Jazeera English.

Demonstrations are continuing across the Middle East, interrupted only by the call for prayer when protesters fall to their knees on cheap carpets and straw mats and the riot police take a tea break. Meanwhile, in ‘darkest Africa’, far away from the cameras of international mainstream media, reports have surfaced of political unrest in a host of sub- Saharan nations.

Few seemed to care that Egypt was also part of Africa, a continent with a billion people, most of whom are living under despotic regimes and suffering economic strife and political suppression just like their Egyptian neighbours.

“Egypt is in Africa. We should not fool about with the attempts of the North to segregate the countries of North Africa from the rest of the continent,” says Firoze Manji, the editor of Pambazuka Online, an advocacy website for social justice in Africa.

“Their histories have been intertwined for millennia,” he explains. “Some Egyptians may not feel they are Africans, but that is neither here nor there. They are part of the heritage of the continent.”

And, just like much of the rest of the world, Africans watched events unfold in Cairo with great interest. “There is little doubt that people [in Africa] are watching with enthusiasm what is going on in the Middle East, and drawing inspiration from that for their own struggles,” says Manji.

He argues that globalisation and the accompanying economic liberalisation has created circumstances in which the people of the global South share very similar experiences.

These include “[i]ncreasing pauperisation, growing unemployment, declining power to hold their governments to account, declining income from agricultural production, increasing accumulation by dispossession – something that is growing on a vast scale – and increasing willingness of governments to comply with the political and economic wishes of the North,” Manji explains.

Rallying cry

“The events in Tunisia and Egypt have become, within Africa, a rallying cry for any number of opposition leaders, everyday people harbouring grievances and political opportunists looking to liken their country’s regimes to those of [Tunisia’s deposed Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak,” says Drew Hinshaw, an American journalist based in West Africa.

“In some cases that comparison is outrageous, but in all too many it is more than fair,” he explains. “Look at Gabon, a tragically under-developed oil exporter whose GDP per capita is more than twice that of Egypt’s but whose people are living on wages that make Egypt look like the land of full employment.”

“The Bongo family has run that country for four decades, since before Mubarak ran nothing larger than an air force base, and yet they’re still there,” Hinshaw says. “You can understand why the country’s opposition is calling for new rounds of Egypt-like protests after seeing what Egypt and Tunisia were able to achieve.”

But with little geo-political importance, news organisations seem largely oblivious to the drama unfolding in the West African nation.

Elsewhere on the continent, protests have broken out in Khartoum, Sudan where students held Egypt-inspired demonstrations against proposed cuts to subsidies on petroleum products and sugar. Following those demonstrations on Jan. 30, the New York-based Committee to Project Journalists reported that staff from the weekly Al-Midan were arrested for covering the event.

Ethiopian media have also reported that police there detained the well-known journalist Eskinder Nega for “attempts to incite” Egypt-style protests.

And in Cameroon, the Social Democratic Front Party has said that the country might experience an uprising similar to those in North Africa if the government does not slash food prices.

“There are lots of Africans too who are young, unemployed, who see very few prospects for their future in countries ruled by the same old political elite that have ruled for 25 or 30 or 35 years,” says CSM Africa bureau chief Scott Baldauf.

“I think all the same issues in Egypt are also present in other countries. You have leaders who have hung onto power for decades and who think the country can only function if they are in charge,” he adds. “A young Zimbabwean would understand the frustration of a young Egyptian.”

Divide and rule

In the past three years, there have been violent service delivery protests in South Africa and food riots in Cameroon, Madagascar, Mozambique and Senegal.

But whether the simmering discontent in Africa will result in protests on the scale of those in Egypt remains to be seen.

“All the same dry wood of bad governance is stacked in many African countries, waiting for a match to set it alight,” says Baldauf. “But it takes leadership. It takes civil society organisation,” something Baldauf fears countries south of the Sahara do not have at the same levels as their North African neighbours.

Emmanuel Kisiangani, a senior researcher at the African Conflict Prevention Programme at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa, believes the difference in the success levels of protests in North and sub-Saharan Africa can be attributed in part to the ethnic make-up of the respective regions.

“In most of the countries that have had fairly ‘successful riots’ the societies are fairly homogeneous compared to sub- Saharan Africa where there are a multiplicity of ethnic groups that are themselves very polarised,” he explains.

“In sub-Saharan Africa, where governments have been able to divide people along ethnic-political lines, it becomes easier to hijack an uprising because of ethnic differences, unlike in North Africa,” Kisiangani says.

An important year

This is an important year for Africa. Elections are scheduled in more than 20 countries across the continent, including Zimbabwe and Nigeria.

But as food prices continue to rise and economic hardship tightens its grip on the region, it is plausible to imagine Africans revolting and using means other than the often meaningless ballot box to remove their leaders.

“What people want is the democratisation of society, of production, of the economy, and indeed all aspects of life,” says Manji. “What they are being offered instead is the ballot box.”

But, Manji argues, “Elections don’t address the fundamental problems that people face. Elections on their own do nothing to enable ordinary people to be able to determine their own destiny.”

This, according to Kisiangani, is because “the process of democratisation in many African countries seems more illusory than fundamental.”

“The protests have created the ‘hope’ that ordinary people can define their political destiny,” he says. “The uprisings…are making people on the continent become conscious about their abilities to define their political destinies.”

*Published under an agreement with Al-Jazeera.