Government must now dismantle blocks of violence that're being built

Police lob teargas canisters to disperse Linda Mwananchi rally in Kitengela on February 15, 2026. [Kanyiri Wahito, Standard]

The Fourth Protocol, a work offiction by Frederick Forsyth, kicks off with a covert Soviet plot to manipulate British politics ahead of a general election.

The British intelligence uncovers fragments of a secret plan known as ‘Plan Aurora’ through which the Soviets aim to destabilise the United Kingdom by secretly detonating a nuclear device on British soil and blaming the government. The resulting public outrage is expected to swing voters toward a pro-Soviet political movement.

This mirrors the Kenyan situation where there is an alleged covert plan by the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) to manipulate the 2027 General Election by making the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) appear to be fully supporting President William Ruto’s re-election campaign.

Where the Soviets planned to detonate a nuclear device and blame it on the British government, UDA schemers planted ‘useful idiots’ inside ODM on the promise of the deputy presidency, hoping it would implode and that the resultant break up would be blamed on the gadfly that is ODM Secretary General Edwin Sifuna and former President Uhuru Kenyatta. The plan, had it succeeded, was designed to drive ODM diehards and sympathisers to UDA. However, the plot failed to anticipate contingencies and has been exposed.

Forsyth makes us understand that among the gravest threats to a democracy are institutional negligence, and political opportunism. These two have a way of detonating at the precise moment that a nation is distracted and most divided. That is when political players get into an election mode and polarise the country through inflammatory, ethnicised empty rhetoric.

As we draw closer to the 2027 elections, the conduct of the government in the recent past is cause for suspicion. Revelations that an individual, and perhaps many more, associated with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces have Kenyan passports are unsettling. Since 2023, the RSF under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias Hemedti, has led a savage conflict that has claimed 150,000 and displaced 12 million.

That Sudanese national Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa, a man with blood on his hands is using a Kenyan passport is an indictment on the government. Whether this happened through fraud, systemic rot, or something more deliberate, the damage to the country is huge.

It doesn’t help matters that Dr Ruto received Hemedti at State House in January 2024 while his forces were killing civilians in Sudan. Granted, as a negotiator, diplomatic engagement with assorted actors is sometimes unavoidable, but a warlord? Our financial system could face heightened international scrutiny and our travel documents could attract suspicion at foreign borders.

Kenya is getting into an election period that could easily become the most combustible since the 2008 violence in which over 1,300 people were killed and 600,000 displaced unless the growing tensions are defused now.

The wrangles within ODM have generated their own conspiracy ecosystem; fingers pointing at UDA, at Uhuru and at shadowy external hands that supposedly reach into party affairs from unseen recesses. Internal disputes metastasise into grand persecution narratives that harden ethnic stands. In the noise and fury of political combat, institutions are either captured, weakened, or simply ignored.

In The Fourth Protocol, Britain was penetrated because its political class was too absorbed in its own rivalries to notice what was unfolding in the shadows. Kenya cannot afford that negligence, not with 2027 in plain sight and the country’s fault lines already visible and widening.

An election contested on tribal mobilisation, conducted through compromised institutions in a country whose identity documents are accessible to foreign nationals, is a national security emergency waiting for a trigger.

Immigration controls must be secured and subjected to independent audit. Citizenship processes ought to be transparent. Security and intelligence agencies must operate professionally, not through political manipulation. Political parties on the other hand, must abandon the ruinous tendency to invoke foreign conspiracies every time their internal contradictions overwhelm them.