Politicians rearing monster that will turn around and devour them

There is a moment in the life of every failed state when criminal gangs stop fearing the government, and the government starts fearing criminal gangs. 

That moment, if Kenya is paying attention, is here. Stories of how gangs grew from neighbourhood nuisances into parallel governments abound. In the 19th century New York, Irish and Italian immigrants formed protection groups in places like Brooklyn and the Five Points neighbourhood of lower Manhattan; communities brutalised by poverty, ignored by the state, and preyed upon by rivals. Those protection groups, born of genuine necessity, later became extortion rackets, gambling syndicates, and smuggling operations. 

The Italian-American Mafia that terrorised American cities for decades grew from the same neglect and political abandonment that Kenya's urban poor know today. Sicily's Cosa Nostra and Naples' Camorra followed identical trajectories — neighbourhood protection, political alliance, criminal enterprise, and ultimately a parallel state that rivalled the legitimate one in reach, resources, and fear.

In Rio de Janeiro's favelas, groups like Comando Vermelho control territory, regulate daily life, dispense rough justice, and extract taxation from residents. In El Salvador, MS-13 and Barrio 18 divided the country into fiefdoms so entrenched that the government eventually had to choose between negotiating with them and declaring outright war.

Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel has replaced the state, controlling territory, infrastructure, and political appointments with the confidence of an entity that knows the government cannot defeat it.

However, Haiti is the most instructive cautionary tale. When the government weakens and politicians discover that armed groups are useful tools for intimidating rivals and mobilising voters, the gangs step into the vacuum. Port-au-Prince today is a city where gangs control ports, roads, and neighbourhoods. A place where gangs are not merely present alongside the state, they have become the state.  The politicians who once used them as instruments of political intimidation discovered, too late, that the instrument had developed its own ambitions.

Kenya is not immune to Haiti's predicament, and the conditions that produced it are not foreign to this country. Look at the landscape; Wakali Kwanza, Wakali Wao, Wajukuu wa Babu, Gaza, and Akili za Usiku in Mombasa. Confirm, Eastlando, Nyuki, Mauki, and Dragon in Nakuru. Jeshi Jinga, 42 Brothers, and Chausiku Sacco in Kakamega. 

These are territorial, organised outfits operating with a visibility that makes mockery of law enforcement claims about maintaining order. When six gangsters ride motorcycles to a police station in Mumias West, shoot a police officer dead, steal two guns and 40 rounds of ammunition and disappear into the night, the question is; how far down the Haitian road have we gone? 

Kenya's gangs are being watered and fertilised by political patronage — deployed to disrupt opposition rallies, suppress protest movements, and perform the violence that politicians require but cannot officially commission. The Gen Z protests of 2024 produced credible, documented accusations of security forces working alongside hired goons. Opposition gatherings in Nyanza have been broken up by gangs that witnesses identify with a specificity that points toward organised, funded and directed operations.

A PS has been accused by name, on national television, of financing this violence. When politicians use gangs, they enter a transaction they cannot exit on their own terms. The Mafia did not stay in the service of the politicians who empowered it, it consumed them. Haiti's political class did not maintain control of the gangs it armed and funded, it was eventually held hostage by them.

The gang does not become the government overnight. It does so gradually through a thousand small moments of political cowardice, institutional neglect, and the fatal miscalculation that the monster can always be controlled. Kenya's politicians built this monster. They must dismantle it before it decides it no longer needs them.