Scripture has a phrase reserved for the collapse of false gods: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon.” It is not merely an announcement of defeat. It is a verdict — a declaration that a kingdom which once seemed unshakeable has been weighed and found wanting. This week, Ol Kalou wrote its own version of that verdict.
A parliamentary seat fell vacant. Candidates entered the field, but the real contest was between two: the ruling party, UDA, and the opposition DCP. Underneath the contest of names and parties lay an older battle: could money still purchase a people’s loyalty? UDA answered with confidence — billions proudly poured into rallies, structures, and rented influence, a seat treated as though it were for sale to the most determined bidder. It was Mammon’s evangelism at full volume.
And Mammon lost. Not narrowly, but by a landslide — the DCP candidate outpolling his UDA rival nearly seven votes to one. Ol Kalou, the constituency where UDA was born as a political force, became the place where that same machinery was buried by ballot.
This is worth pausing over, because Kenya rarely gets to see Mammon lose in public. We are used to watching it win — used to billion-shilling seats, used to gifts becoming obligations, used to citizens who accept the handout and still vote their conscience only in whispers, if at all. Ol Kalou did something rarer. It voted its conscience out loud, in a constituency with a long enough memory of promises made and broken to know exactly what it was refusing.
Idols do not fall because they run out of money. They fall because they run out of belief. Mammon’s throne was never built on shillings alone; it was built on the assumption that shillings would always be enough — that a people’s convictions could be calculated, budgeted for, and closed like any other transaction. The moment a people refuse that arithmetic, the idol discovers it was never as strong as its treasury suggested.
There is also the matter of memory. Ol Kalou remembers development promised and deferred, loyalty demanded and unreciprocated — and money spent in defiance of that memory does not multiply, it insults. Arriving without repentance or an honest reckoning of what came before, it does not buy trust; it exposes contempt dressed as generosity. Citizens can often tell the difference between a gift and a bribe long before their leaders assume they can, and no amount of spending changes what a community already knows about the hand extending it.
Then there is the ballot itself. A rally can be filled with transported supporters, chanting on cue. But the vote is cast alone, behind a screen, where no handler and no handout can follow the voter in — one of the last spaces in public life money cannot fully colonise. Ol Kalou is a reminder that this space still holds.
Let those celebrating DCP’s win be careful. It would be easy — and wrong — to read this simply as UDA’s defeat and DCP’s triumph, as though Mammon had switched sides rather than lost the field altogether. Every victor faces the temptation to inherit the very altar it just watched collapse, assuming future contests can be secured the same way, only better financed. A party that defeats Mammon by refusing its currency, then quietly adopts that currency once in power, has not dethroned Mammon. It has merely changed its address.
A warning
The true test of Ol Kalou is in what the winners do with the trust a resistant electorate just handed them. Every politician who benefits from a people’s refusal to be bought owes that people a leadership that is, in turn, not for sale.
But the sermon cannot stop at the ballot box. If Ol Kalou exposed Mammon in politics, honesty requires that we ask where else Mammon has already been welcomed in.
Ol Kalou people have preached a sermon on the nation’s democratic pulpit titled “Even the gods of money fall!” Ol Kalou teaches the Church something about her own captivity. For every pulpit that might preach this verdict, there are churches quietly living the opposite one — churches that light up at a politician’s donation, clear the front pew and hand over the microphone on account of money, turn a sanctuary into a receiving line for envelopes. A Church that behaves this way has made herself a beggar at Mammon’s table, grateful for whatever falls from it.
Let this be said plainly: a church whose bank account depends on the goodwill of political money has found its weakest link, not its strength. That dependency will one day be called in — through silence demanded, sin unaddressed, or prophecy withheld. Priests and pastors who bow before politicians for the sake of an offering must repent and stop. Mammon has entered the Church and found congregations who scream at the sight of a money bundle and praise the one who offers it, as though the giver, and not God, were worthy of the shout.
The same conscience Ol Kalou demonstrated at the ballot box is owed, first, inside the sanctuary — a congregation must learn to refuse “mammonizing” envelopes at the altar rail just as a voter refused to bow down to it at the polling station, not because money is evil, but because worship is not for sale.
Every fallen idol leaves behind a question for those who watched it fall: will we return to it tomorrow? Babylon’s collapse in Scripture was never merely about a city; it was about the end of an illusion — that any kingdom built on exploitation and false security could stand forever. Ol Kalou’s collapse of Mammon’s confidence is a small, local echo of that truth, and echoes fade unless they are remembered rightly.
A nation watching Ol Kalou must ask itself: was this a conviction, or merely a coincidence? Did a people resist Mammon because their loyalty is not for sale — or did one campaign simply outspend and outlast another, leaving Mammon’s throne intact and merely occupied by new hands? The answer will not be found in a single tally sheet. It will be found in whether Ol Kalou becomes a pattern or a memory Kenyans tell themselves happened once and may never happen again.
For now, let it be said plainly, and let it be preached without apology: Mammon came to Ol Kalou with its treasury open and its confidence unshaken. And Mammon fell. Let every altar built on money take note. It is not as secure as its balance sheet suggests.