Goons, guns and a government in denial: The crisis Murkomen says is exaggerated
The Mt Kenya Times 
Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen..
As the Interior CS dismisses public alarm over political violence as overblown, Kenyans living through it are asking a sharper question — who exactly is being protected?
By Hadassah Karangu
Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen declared yesterday that the problem of goonism in Kenya has been exaggerated, even as he directed security agencies to intensify operations against criminal gangs and the politicians who bankroll them — a combination of reassurance and alarm that satisfied almost nobody.
The remarks, delivered with the measured confidence of a minister in command of his brief, landed in a country where the word “goon” has long since ceased to be political shorthand. For millions of Kenyans, it is a lived reality — the organised muscle deployed to disrupt rallies, silence opponents, intimidate communities and remind citizens that in certain corners of the republic, power answers to the highest bidder, not the ballot box. To be told, from the highest office responsible for their safety, that the threat has been overstated, struck many as not merely incorrect but insulting.
Murkomen was careful, as senior ministers tend to be, to frame his position as a corrective to hysteria rather than a dismissal of genuine concern. He acknowledged that politicians have historically relied on networks of youths for political mobilisation — a euphemism that does considerable work in Kenyan public discourse — but argued that the scale of the problem has been deliberately inflated for political purposes. In the same breath, he promised that police and investigators would pursue criminal gangs and their sponsors without mercy.
It is a difficult pair of positions to hold simultaneously, and the tension between them has driven the national conversation that followed.
Those who share the Cabinet Secretary’s scepticism make a coherent case. Social media, they argue, compresses and amplifies isolated incidents into the impression of a country permanently on the edge of collapse. Kenya, by most objective measures, remains functional and largely peaceful across the vast majority of its territory. Exaggerating insecurity carries real costs — it deters investment, damages the country’s international standing and can feed the very fear it purports to describe.
But for those on the other side of that argument — and they are many — the logic collapses the moment it meets specific human experience. A woman who cannot attend her preferred candidate’s rally without risking violence is not experiencing an exaggeration. A trader whose stall is destroyed during politically motivated unrest is not a social media statistic. A youth recruited into a gang because no legitimate employer would have him is not a footnote in a policy paper. To those people, the Cabinet Secretary’s framing does not feel like a correction. It feels like abandonment.
The deeper concern, and the one that serious analysts of Kenyan political history raise with increasing urgency as 2027 approaches, is not the current scale of organised political violence. It is its trajectory. Political violence in Kenya has never arrived fully formed. It has always begun at the margins — a disrupted meeting here, an attacked convoy there, a community warned to vote correctly or face consequences — before hardening, through impunity and normalisation, into something far more dangerous. The country knows this from experience it would prefer not to repeat.
That historical memory sits beneath every conversation about goonism, lending it a weight that statistics alone cannot capture. When Murkomen promises action against gang sponsors, he is making a commitment the country has heard before. The question Kenyans are asking is not whether the commitment is sincere. It is whether it will produce arrests, prosecutions and convictions — the only currency that buys genuine public confidence.
There is also a structural dimension that no policing operation can resolve alone. Kenya’s unemployment crisis, particularly among young men in urban and peri-urban areas, creates a reservoir of recruitable labour for anyone willing to pay for it. Gang membership, in this context, is often less an ideological choice than an economic one. A government serious about eliminating political violence cannot treat it purely as a law enforcement problem. It must also ask why young Kenyans remain available, in such numbers, to be used as instruments of intimidation by those with money and political ambition.
Political leaders across the spectrum carry their own share of the responsibility. The language of political competition in Kenya has grown progressively more heated, and leaders who frame their opponents not merely as wrong but as existential threats to their communities create conditions in which violence becomes imaginable. Democracy requires the acceptance that opponents have legitimate standing — a principle that has been tested severely in recent years.
Murkomen is right that not every allegation of goonism is accurate, and that responsible public discourse requires proportionality. But proportionality runs in both directions. It demands that genuine incidents are taken seriously, that victims are not asked to accept minimisation as a substitute for justice, and that the bar for complacency is set at zero when the stakes are a free and peaceful election.
Because the 2027 general election is no longer a distant abstraction. It is, in political time, already here. The institutions, habits and expectations being formed today will shape the environment in which millions of Kenyans cast their votes. If those institutions signal, even inadvertently, that organised intimidation is a manageable inconvenience rather than a fundamental threat to democracy, they will have answered the wrong question entirely.
Peace in Kenya will not be measured in press conference assurances. It will be measured in whether a voter in Nyandarua, a trader in Kisumu or a student in Mombasa can participate in public life without calculating the personal cost of doing so.
That is the standard. Everything else is commentary.
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