Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has dismissed claims that Kenya is facing a growing and dangerous goons crisis, insisting that the country is safe and that politicians raising the alarm are simply peddling lies to advance their own agendas.
Speaking in Naiberi, Uasin Gishu County, Murkomen was characteristically blunt in batting away concerns about the proliferation of political gangs across the country, arguing that Kenya’s real crisis is not goons but the bankruptcy of ideas among politicians who cannot campaign on merit.
“Those who are trying to say that this country is in a crisis because of goons are liars. The crisis in this country is the bankruptcy of ideas by politicians who are unable to campaign, and they go and send goons to fight themselves and then want to make it a national crisis. There is no national crisis. Kenya is safe,” Murkomen declared.
However, Murkomen’s dismissal was almost immediately contradicted by his own government’s institutions. The National Assembly Committee on Administration and Internal Security, which had accompanied Deputy Inspector General of Police David Lagat to Kiganjo Police Training College, openly acknowledged that criminal gangs and goons are very much a real and present problem in the country. What is more, the committee pointed the finger of blame squarely at the political class, including the very kind of men who share platforms with Murkomen.
Committee chairman Gabriel Tongoyo was direct and unsparing in his assessment.
“What you are seeing in the country, these gangs and criminal groupings, almost entirely, if not all, are being sponsored by politicians, the men in ties, men in big offices,” Tongoyo said.
He went further, calling for a collective national response rather than leaving the burden solely on the police.
“This is not an issue of the National Police Service alone. It is an issue for everybody, the political class, the religious class, the students and the youth. We all have to work with the police and stop these criminal gangs,” he added.
The committee also expressed confidence that the new generation of police officers graduating from Kiganjo was adequately equipped to handle emerging forms of crime and help maintain stability ahead of next year’s general election.
The contradiction between Murkomen’s flat denial and his own parliamentary committee’s frank acknowledgement of the goons problem tells its own story. When the men in ties that Tongoyo refers to include those sitting in Cabinet, telling Kenyans there is no crisis becomes very difficult to believe.
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