Act now to silence the drums of war
Opinion
By
Editorial
| Jul 21, 2026
A report by the Kofi Annan Foundation, Electoral Vulnerability Index 2026-2027, warns that Kenya is staring at an 84 percent chance of electoral violence during the 2027 General Election. Indeed, the signs are there, and have been for a while now.
In 2013, South African Judge Johann Kriegler, who chaired the Commission of Inquiry that dissected the horror of 2007/2008 post-election violence, warned that without deep, deliberate reforms to our electoral and legal architecture, the next electoral conflagration would dwarf the one that killed 1300 Kenyans in 2008. Thirteen years later, that warning sounds less cautionary and more like a prophecy.
The evidence is staring us in the face. Opposition rallies are routinely broken up by goons who descend on them with the confidence of men expecting no consequence. Sometimes police officers walk beside them as opposed to against them. Linda Mwananchi teams were recently attacked in Kisumu and Nyahururu. EALA MP Kanini Kega was also attacked in Ol Kalou after a campaign rally. Even church services have not been spared the attention of goons and thugs. Men wielding machetes and clubs move through our streets in broad daylight without bothering to hide their faces.
Despite these blatant attacks and disdain for the rule of law, no arrest has landed hard enough to serve as a warning. Public outrage has come and gone like rain in the wrong season, wetting the ground without changing the soil. Leaders who should know better are busy zoning the country into tribal fiefdoms, speaking of counties and regions as if they are personal property.
Poet William Butler Yeats wrote of “a centre that cannot hold”, of mere “anarchy loosed upon the world”. Kenya's centre, the institutions built specifically to prevent this kind of eventuality, are behaving as though nothing is amiss. The police, the IEBC, the NCIC and DCI neither see nor hear any evil. They are content to let citizens assume that calm means control.
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Must we re-learn the lessons of 2008 through fresh graves? Must every electoral cycle in this country be a referendum on whether we will kill each other? The government cannot simultaneously be at war with the opposition and expect the temperature to stay low. Individual politicians cannot arm goons to intimidate rivals and then issue perfunctory statements calling for peace.
The drums of war are sounding loudly and unmistakably across the country. Kriegler warned us once, and now the Electoral Vulnerability Index is saying it again with statistics. The relevant institutions must act while there is still time. Politicians must rein in their goons now. Kenya has stood at this precipice before, and we know exactly what is down there. In 2008, the scale of violence took us completely by surprise. Nobody gets to say, this time, that they did not see it coming.