A reckoning with hooliganism’s poison

The protests in Kenya were a ghastly sight. This turn of protests revealed a much uglier undertone to Kenya’s politics. The disregard for human life, the coldness with which politics is prosecuted, but worse… far much worse: the existence of evil within, not just the political class, but some within our ranks. Some amongst us — hooligans, goons, and soulless degenerates — who’ve turned our cries for justice into their playground for destruction. We must burn this rot out, root and stem, or we’ll lose more than our voices. We’ll lose our country.

The chaos isn’t new, but it has mutated, slithering from the shadows of legitimate dissent into a beast that threatens to devour the very soul of our protests. I’m not here to parrot the government’s lazy line that the protests were paid for by politicians. That’s a tired script, a distraction. The Kenyan youth has agency that this government cannot tame. They know this, and the fact that they keep insisting, an entire year down the road, that the protests aren’t organic, and that they’ve been facilitated by some gods in the shadows, is precisely why these things keep happening.

The youth say, Justice for Albert Ojwang’. The government says, But we paid his family Sh2 million. And if they youth insist that there is no clause in the constitution that says if you kill someone you can pay the family, the government and its mouthpieces try to pin a generation’s struggle for a better life on some political players. Such that when there’s loss of lives, the finger can be wagged in a certain direction.

The State’s complicity

Whispers — credible ones — point to key figures, shadowy elites who allegedly orchestrate violence to discredit the movement. These cowards don’t march with us. They sit in their fancy offices, sending armed thugs to smash windows, burn businesses, and even attack protesters. Why? To make you, the ordinary Kenyan, fear the streets. To make you beg for “stability” over justice. To convince you that protests are the problem, not the solution. They want you to see a looted supermarket and think, “These protesters are animals,” not “Who sent these goons?” It’s a script written in blood.

But not every thug is on someone’s payroll. There are those among us — living in our estates, queuing at our bus stops — who need no master to unleash their evil. These are the ones who see a protest and think, “Time to steal, or molest women, or break people’s cars.” They’re the ones who’ll snatch a phone from a protester’s hand or set a kiosk ablaze just because they can. These aren’t activists. They’re not even pawns. They’re parasites, rats, absolute bottom of the barrel humans, feeding on the scraps of our struggle. And they’re not new. But today, they’re bolder, blending into crowds, emboldened by a regime that looks at goons as backup to the police.

And this is why this isn’t just about looters. The State’s complicity is a wound that festers. Security agencies, with their shiny tech and surveillance toys, can track a tweet criticising a minister from a shanty in Mathare within hours. Yet, when businesses burn and protesters bleed, they’re suddenly blind? When goons assault women on their way home, and motorists in highways, suddenly it’s political big talk? If they can pinpoint a dissenter’s SIM card, they can damn well trace the phones around those hotspots of terror. They have the tools — drones, CCTV, phone data. They know who was where. If they’re not acting, it’s not incompetence. It’s collusion. Or worse, orchestration. The same state that shoots unarmed kids for “hurting a senior official’s feelings” is suspiciously unable to point out these criminals.

Push to criminalise protest

This evolution of chaos isn’t random either. It’s a design. For years, there’s been a quiet, insidious push to criminalise protest itself. The government propaganda machine has voices on payroll write posts calling marches “disruptive.” MPs slip clauses into bills to regulate when and where we can gather. PR campaigns flood X with images of burning shops, captioned, “This is what protests bring.” They want you to fear your own voice. They want you to think dissent equals destruction. And when goons — hired or not — turn our protests into battlegrounds, the public sours. “Maybe we shouldn’t protest,” you hear at the bodaboda stage. “Maybe we need order.” That’s the trap. They’re banking on your exhaustion, your fear, to silence you.

But we can’t let them win. Not the goons, not the puppet masters, not the regime. We start by naming the enemy: not the protester, but the hooligan. The looter who steals in our name. The thug who swings a machete to taint our cause. We weed them out by refusing to let their chaos define us. Communities must call them out — name them, shame them, reject them, even... And the state must stop hiding behind “investigations” that go nowhere. If they can track a tweet, they can track a looter. If they don’t, they’re either complicit or useless. Either way, they’re failing us.

Our protests are our heartbeat, proof we’re alive, proof we won’t bow to a system that feasts on our sweat. But we can’t let hooligans steal that heartbeat. We can’t let the state use their chaos to chain our voices. The fight isn’t just against bad laws or corrupt leaders — it’s against the poison within us, the degenerates who thrive in disorder, and the elites who exploit it. Root them out. Stem their spread. Or we’ll lose more than shops and lives. We’ll lose the Kenya we’re fighting for. 

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