Kenya fears uncertain future

The attack adds to the uncertainties facing Kenyans

By Joseph Warungu BBC editor, East African bureau, Nairobi

The Mombasa bomb attack could not have come at a worse time for Kenyans.

People are already anxious about life after 27 December, when general elections end President Daniel arap Moi's long rule and usher in a new leader.

If you break a cup once, it is an accident; twice is carelessness

No-one knows who that new leader will be or whether he will be voted in peacefully.

The last thing Kenyans needed was more violence and uncertainty.

When Sulami Yehudi saw his Paradise Hotel in Mombasa go up in smoke on Thursday, other hoteliers at the popular tourist resort held their collective breath.

Economic fears

They fear their peak Christmas season profit dreams could also go up in a huge cloud of smoke in the form of hotel booking cancellations.

Once again Kenyans bore the brunt of the casualties

So big is this fear that one of the first calls I received on Thursday from coastal Kenya was not from a Kenyan reeling from the shock of the bomb attack but a Kenya tourism industry operator.

She wanted the media not to name her town of Malindi, which is about an hour's drive from Mombasa, in relation to the site of the bombing.

Today, yet another extremely concerned caller asked me if the BBC would consider broadcasting television commercials to show Kenya is still a great tourist destination despite the bomb attack.

That is how fragile Mombasa is.

Tourism is a key source of foreign exchange earnings for Kenya and Mombasa with its string of hotels dotting the Indian ocean coast line is what attracts the tourist dollar.

But over the years business has been far from good.

Bad old days

In 1997 politically instigated violence in Mombasa just before that year's general elections saw tourism dip in the face of insecurity.

Will the tourists return?

A year later, Kenya was the target of a major terrorist attack at the American embassy in Nairobi.

All this coupled with the global downturn in travel following the 11 September attacks in America, left Kenyan tourism struggling.

However, in recent months things have looked up, and the visitors have gradually returned.

Now following the bomb explosion at the Paradise Hotel and the attempted missile attack on an Israeli tourist flight on Thursday, Mombasa residents fear they may yet go back to the days of watching the skies in anticipation of the arrival of special charter flights ferrying in tourists from overseas.

If the flights dry up, so too might food disappear from the tables of the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on tourism for their livelihood.

Careless

There is a saying in Kenya that if you break a cup once, it is an accident; twice is carelessness.

Many Kenyans feel the 1998 US embassy bombing in Kenya was a tragic accident that paid them an unwelcome visit, but the latest attack in Mombasa is prompting more worrying questions:

Has Kenya become a natural vulnerable target for international terrorism or is a cell developing locally with outside links to terrorism?

Is the ease with which terror weapons find their way into Kenya an indication of a country with fragile security or are the security organs too laid back?

A lot of soul searching is now going on to find answers to these and other questions arising out of Thursday's, as well as the 1998 terror attacks.

Kenyans everywhere are wondering aloud: "Why us?".