Suba North MP Millie Odhiambo has sounded the alarm over what she calls a creeping gangster culture in Kenya, warning that President William Ruto’s government is playing with fire by tolerating hired muscle to settle disputes that belong in a courtroom.
Odhiambo took to Facebook after two brazen incidents unfolded on the same day in cities more than 300 kilometers apart, yet carrying the unmistakable signature of organized intimidation.
In Kisumu, more than 100 armed men descended on Fairways Hotel, a property owned by former Principal Secretary Irungu Nyakera. CCTV footage told the story plainly: furniture overturned, the bar ransacked, and a female security guard tied up while the mob moved through the premises at will. Nyakera, who holds a licensed firearm, fired warning shots to drive them off. Police, he said, never showed up despite repeated calls.
Hours later in Nairobi, former Cabinet minister Raphael Tuju appeared in a circulating video squaring off against a group of men who had turned up at his Dari Business Park in Karen. The intruders claimed to represent someone asserting ownership of the property, though the dispute remains active before the courts.
For Odhiambo, the timing was impossible to ignore. She drew a pointed comparison to Haiti, the Caribbean nation where criminal gangs have so thoroughly dismantled state authority that Kenya itself deployed police officers there to help restore order. Her warning was direct: keep this up, and Kenya could one day find itself on the receiving end of that same kind of foreign intervention.
“The rise of gangster culture tolerated by authority will haunt Kenya,” she wrote. “100 gangsters were used to try and evict a businessman from the premises in Kisumu. Similar gangsters were used to hound Tuju yesterday.”
The Lake Basin Development Authority has offered a competing version of events surrounding Kisumu, framing the Fairways Hotel standoff as a routine commercial matter, with the hotel allegedly sitting on over Sh25 million in unpaid rent. But Odhiambo is not buying the sanitized framing. To her, whatever the underlying dispute, dispatching a hundred armed men to resolve it is not a landlord-tenant disagreement. It is a breakdown of the rule of law and one that puts every Kenyan at risk.
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