By The Weekly Vision Political Reporter
Homa Bay County was gripped by scenes on Sunday that have no place in a mature democracy. Armed youths blocked roads with stones and burning tyres, stormed a hotel searching for political rivals, and clashed with police as the Linda Mwananchi movement tried to hold a rally in Nyandiwa. Journalists were assaulted and robbed of their equipment, businesses shut their doors, and ordinary residents found themselves caught in the middle of political intolerance they had no part in creating.
This is not a distant or abstract story. It is happening in the home region of Raymond Omollo, the Principal Secretary for Internal Security, one of the officials charged with keeping the country safe. The irony is hard to miss. When the backyard of the nation’s top internal security official descends into goon-led disorder, serious questions about the state’s capacity and its willingness to maintain order become impossible to avoid.
The trigger was a planned Linda Mwananchi political rally led by Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna and Siaya Governor James Orengo. Reports from the ground indicate that groups of young men, some carrying crude weapons, worked through the night and into the morning to block roads and stop the convoy from reaching the rally venue. Roads were paralysed for hours, and a hotel in Homa Bay Town was reportedly raided the night before, with youths said to have smashed property and chased out guests as they searched for any Linda Mwananchi supporter. Two AFP journalists, Fred Ooko and Brian Ongoro, were beaten and had their cameras, press cards and other equipment taken while simply doing their job.
Accusations are today flying in every direction. Some blame local politicians for inciting their supporters. Linda Mwananchi figures have pointed to what they call state-backed intimidation. Others insist ordinary residents were only defending their community from outside political interference. Whatever the precise origin of Sunday’s chaos, the outcome is the same: Kenya is flirting, once again, with the politics of exclusion and violence, and it is doing so at a dangerous moment.
We are barely a year away from the 2027 general election. The scars of 2007 and 2008 remain raw for everyone who lived through the post-election violence that claimed more than a thousand lives, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and brought the country to the brink of collapse. No Kenyan of goodwill wants a repeat of that history. Yet the early warning signs are already visible in Homa Bay and beyond: organised youth gangs, road blockades, attacks on the media, and the quiet, creeping acceptance of “goon culture” as a normal part of political competition.
Political competition is healthy, disagreement is inevitable, and even necessary, in any functioning democracy. But the deliberate mobilisation of young people as tools of intimidation is a betrayal of the very generation Kenya’s leaders claim to be building a future for. When politicians treat their home counties as personal territory where rival voices are unwelcome, they trample on a right that belongs to every Kenyan, regardless of political affiliation: the constitutional right to assemble and speak freely.
The responsibility for fixing this does not rest with one side alone. Local leaders in Homa Bay must publicly and unequivocally reject violence, whether it is carried out in their name or against their political opponents. National security agencies, under Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, PS Omollo and the Inspector-General of Police, must show consistent and impartial enforcement of the law. Selective blindness, or a slow response, only emboldens those who believe force can replace persuasion at the ballot. Parents, community elders and religious leaders also carry a duty here: to refuse to let their sons and daughters be hired out as political muscle.
Kenya has made real progress since 2007. The country has a progressive constitution, stronger institutions, and a public that is far more alert to the dangers of ethnic and political polarisation than it once was. But that progress is fragile, and it can be eroded quickly. If the language of “no-go zones,” the use of crude weapons against political convoys, and the circulation of inflammatory content on WhatsApp become normal features of the run-up to 2027, Kenya risks undoing years of hard-won stability.
What happened in Homa Bay yesterday is a test. It tests whether political actors can rise above short-term calculation and score-settling. It tests whether the state can protect the right of every group, regardless of who they support, to organise peacefully. And it tests whether ordinary Kenyans will accept the slow return of the politics of fear, or insist on something better.
Kenya must stop this now, not after the next rally, not after the next election, and certainly not after lives are lost. Peace is not simply the absence of politics. It is the presence of rules that everyone, regardless of power or position, agrees to respect. Homa Bay and Kenya as a whole deserve better than a slide back towards the darkness of 2007. The time to draw the line is today.
