By Dr. Mohamed Morowa

There is a particular kind of fear that settles over a country when its young men become weapons. Not soldiers with uniforms and chains of command, but boys from the estates, hired for a day’s pay, a bottle of something strong, and the promise that somebody powerful has their back. Kenya knows this fear well. We have lived it before, in 2007, in 2013, and now, as the country counts down to the August 2027 general election, we are watching it grow again, louder, better organised, and harder to ignore.

I have spent years studying governance, peace and security through an online classroom, reading theory after theory about how states collapse, how militias metastasise, how impunity becomes policy by default. But watching this unfold in real time, in my own country, has taught me something no lecture hall ever could: knowledge that stays on paper protects no one. A dissertation does not stop a machete. A well-argued thesis on state fragility means nothing to a worshipper choking on tear gas inside their own church. If everything I have studied does not eventually walk out of the classroom and into the street, into policy rooms, into uncomfortable conversations with power, then it was never really knowledge at all – it was just an exercise. And I refuse to let it stay that.

The word for what is happening now is “goonism,” and it has become the most tired word in Kenyan political vocabulary, worn smooth from overuse by everyone who wants to blame someone else for it. Government supporters use it to describe the violence they say they will not tolerate. Opposition figures use it to describe what they believe the government itself is sponsoring. Everyone condemns it. Almost no one stops it. And somewhere in between all that finger-pointing, ordinary Kenyans are the ones left counting bruises, funerals, and stolen phones.

Politically sponsored gangs are not new to Kenya. The practice traces back to the early 1990s, when the return of multiparty democracy also brought with it a darker innovation: unemployed young men recruited and paid to intimidate, disrupt, and silence. What has changed is the sophistication. Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen himself admitted as much when he appeared before the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Administration and Internal Security on April 21, 2026, telling lawmakers that these networks had evolved from loose street outfits into “sophisticated and adaptive criminal enterprises” operating as decentralised, coordinated structures. A government-commissioned report reportedly identified around 300 organised criminal groups nationwide, with roughly 130 of them concentrated in Nairobi alone. This is not idle speculation anymore. It is documented, admitted to, and, if you have been paying attention these past few weeks, playing out in town after town in real time.

I wish I could say the worst of it was behind us. It is not. In early July, a Linda Mwananchi convoy carrying opposition figures, including former Chief Justice David Maraga, was ambushed at Keumbu in Kisii County by youths armed with clubs and stones, some of them working, witnesses say, in full view of police who did nothing to stop them. A 36-year-old man named Vincent Osiemo fell from one of the vehicles as the attack unfolded and later died of his injuries. Days later, the same movement’s leaders were attacked twice in a single weekend: once in Kisumu, where suspected goons stormed St Stephen’s Anglican Cathedral trying to reach opposition leaders Edwin Sifuna and James Orengo who were attending a church service, forcing police to fire teargas inside a place of worship just to get them out safely; and again in Nyahururu, where gunmen opened fire on a crowd shortly after leaders left another church service, wounding two people, one of them a governor’s driver. And in Nyandarua County, the Ol Kalou by-election, meant to be a routine contest for a parliamentary seat, has instead become a national flashpoint, with former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua accusing the Interior Ministry of sending a “killer squad” to abduct and beat his supporters, and the government firing back with its own warnings against inciting violence. A curfew on political rallies has now had to be imposed there just to keep the peace.

What strikes me most, reading these reports one after another, is how ordinary the venues have become: a church service, a campaign convoy, a hotel where a candidate’s team happened to be staying. Churches, in particular, keep coming up, and that should trouble every one of us, believer or not. Clergy across the country have been warning for months that houses of worship are being deliberately targeted precisely because they host the kind of open, unguarded gathering where people speak freely. When even a Sunday service is no longer safe from armed men, we are no longer talking about isolated flare-ups of political rivalry. We are talking about a society being slowly trained to expect violence everywhere it gathers.

It would be easy to read all this as a problem for the political class: their rivalries, their hired muscle, their business. But that reading misses something important, something my own field keeps trying to warn us about. These young men being recruited into goon networks are not soldiers with an exit plan. When the campaign season ends and the pay stops, the skills they’ve learned – intimidation, coordinated attacks, extortion – do not disappear. They simply find new uses.

This is precisely the pathway that has turned political violence into entrenched criminal insurgency elsewhere in the world. Haiti offers the starkest warning available to us today. What began there as armed groups aligned with political patrons eventually outgrew their sponsors, merged into federations, and now control large parts of the capital, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and hollowing out the state’s authority over its own territory. Nobody in Haiti in the early 2000s imagined their political enforcers would one day become the government’s most dangerous rival. This is the part of my studies I think about most late at night, because the warning signs Haiti ignored are not theoretical to me anymore. I can see the same pattern here, in real names and real headlines, in Keumbu and Ol Kalou and outside a cathedral in Kisumu. Kenya should not need to relearn that lesson the hard way, and those of us who have studied how these collapses happen owe our country more than silence from the sidelines.

Perhaps the most painful part of this story is not the violence itself but what enables it to continue: impunity. Videos from Keumbu showed police officers standing within arm’s reach of the attackers, doing nothing. Seven suspects were eventually arrested; the politicians accused of orchestrating the violence were merely summoned for questioning. When the men who send the goons are questioned while the goons themselves are the ones who end up dead or arrested, the incentive structure could not be clearer. Mobilising violence remains cheap and consequence-free for those at the top. Government officials deny sponsoring any of it. Investigations continue. Answers remain scarce. This is what happens when a social contract begins to fray. Citizens no longer look to the state purely as their protector. They start to wonder whether the state is, instead, a quiet participant in their intimidation.

None of this is inevitable. Kenya is not Haiti, and August 2027 does not have to become another chapter in the country’s painful history of election violence. But the window for prevention is closing, not widening. What would it take to close it properly? Genuine, visible prosecution of the financiers behind these groups, not just the young men who carry out the attacks. Independent, transparent investigation into police conduct during these incidents, rather than internal reassurances. Real economic alternatives for the young, unemployed men who are the raw material of this entire system, because a country cannot police its way out of a problem rooted in desperation and lack of opportunity. And perhaps most difficult of all, political leaders across the divide need to stop treating “goonism” as a word to weaponise against opponents and start treating it as a shared national emergency.

Kenyans have shown, time and again, remarkable resilience and a fierce attachment to their democracy. That spirit is not the problem. The problem is a political class that has come to treat commanding a militia as simply part of the job description. Changing that will not come from statements of condemnation. It will come from consequences that finally reach the people giving the orders, not just the ones carrying them out – and it will come from people like me refusing to let our education end at graduation, choosing instead to put it to work where it actually matters.

The choice in front of Kenya right now is not really about the 2027 election. It’s about what kind of country shows up on the other side of it: one where political disagreement still gets settled at the ballot box, or one where it increasingly gets settled outside a church, in a highway ambush, by whoever can afford to hire the most goons. I did not study governance, peace and security to file it away in a drawer. None of us should have. Knowledge that never leaves the page is not wisdom. It is just a wasted warning.

Editor’s note: Major (Rtd) Dr. Mohamed Morowa is a Governance, Peace and Security Professional.