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On the afternoon of 17 June 2025, I witnessed a large group of young men riding into central Nairobi on motorbikes carrying whips and clubs. They had come to break up a demonstration over the death of Albert Ojwang, a 31-year-old teacher and blogger who had died in police custody earlier that month after being arrested over allegations that he had posted defamatory content on X about the Deputy Inspector General of Police. The young men beat whoever they caught while officers of the National Police Service stood by. Kenyans call them goons, young men paid to disrupt, intimidate and injure on a politician’s behalf. Kenya has, without announcing it to itself, built a market in political violence and the logic of this market points toward the formation of militias before the general election of August 2027.
A rate card for disorder
In November 2025, the research firm Odipo Dev and the civic collective Tribeless Youth published a report of a trade that runs like any gig economy with a rate card priced by the seniority of the buyer: KSh500 to disrupt a protest for a ward representative, KSh1,500 for the same job commissioned by a member of parliament, KSh2,000 by a governor, and KSh2,500 by a businessman, while a land seizure fetches between KSh1,500 and KSh2,000. A recruiter typically manages between ten and thirty young men. The average recruit clears less than KSh10,000 a month, and the recruiters and handlers can take in hundreds of thousands of shillings during an election season. Payment is made in hard cash just before the job, usually at petrol stations, to avoid traceability. Recruiters work both on the ground, at the “base” and at boda boda stages, matatu (public transport buses) termini, bars and football pitches, and digitally through WhatsApp groups. The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), tracing the evolution of Kenya’s gangs in 2025, describes online gangs that exploit the anonymity, reach and speed of the internet to recruit members, coordinate operations and incite violence, and names X, Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok as central to gang recruitment and mobilization.
The supply side of this market is demography. The World Bank estimates that about 800,000 Kenyans enter the labour market every year to compete for roughly 100,000 formal jobs, and the Federation of Kenya Employers estimates that two-thirds of the country’s unemployed are under the age of thirty-five. According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 83 per cent of Kenyans work in the informal economy. In July 2026, AFP interviewed young Kenyans, and they spoke the language of labour more than politics. “You end up being a goon to at least earn something,” said one, a 27-year-old from one of the largest informal settlements in Nairobi who has been a goon since he was seventeen. Another, a 28-year-old criminology graduate, summed the situation up in a sentence, saying, “They say education is the key, but honestly speaking we never find the padlock open.”
The demand side is politics, and this is the recorded finding of the state’s own institutions. NCIC research concluded in 2017 that almost 90 per cent of Kenya’s organized criminal gangs were financed and deployed by politicians. Its 2025 report on the evolution of those gangs found most members aged between 15 and 35, with some recruits as young as 11. In April 2026, the Interior Cabinet Secretary, Kipchumba Murkomen, told a Senate committee that more than 104 criminal gangs were active in the country under the patronage of politicians. By that point, the police claimed to have arrested over 300 suspects. No politician was among them. The former president of the Law Society of Kenya, Faith Odhiambo, calls the result a procurement system of violence saying, “The goons and criminal gangs have been allowed to run a parallel economy with well-known buyers and sellers; until we prosecute the buyers, the market remains open.”
A lineage of hired youth
The 1960s independence-era single parties in Africa kept youth wings who the political scientist Andreas Mehler described as “often nothing but a group of thugs”. When multiparty democracy returned to Kenya in 1992, the ruling party KANU built Youth for KANU ‘92 (YK92), a group that was accused of buying votes and intimidating opponents. Among its organizers and enforcers was a young William Ruto, the current president of Kenya. The same years brought the ethnic clashes in the Rift Valley and later in the Coast. Human Rights Watch (HRW) counted at least 1,500 dead and up to 300,000 displaced. The Akiwumi Commission, appointed to investigate that decade’s interethnic political violence, recorded fewer numbers, more than 800 killed and approximately 130,000 displaced. The commission named sitting ministers as organizers and financiers. The violence had a price list even then. A parliamentary select committee report, cited in the Kenyan press in 1998, recorded the tariff paid to militia members, including KSh1,000 for every person killed, KSh500 for every grass-thatched house torched, and KSh10,000 for every permanent house burnt down. The 1990s also had Jeshi la Mzee, “the old man’s army” (the old man being the President Daniel arap Moi) that deployed against pro-reform rallies and was named in parliament as the work of the KANU assistant minister Fred Gumo. In Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city, the Baghdad Boys and their offshoot the Taliban, attached themselves to opposition politics. Mungiki, born following the displacements caused by the Rift Valley clashes of the mid-90s, moved into Nairobi’s matatu economy and by 2002 its leaders were warning of violence if voters rejected Uhuru Kenyatta’s first presidential run.
In the 2007-08 post-election violence, the militias and gangs that politics had cultivated for 15 years went to work along ethnic lines, Mungiki among them. The Waki Commission recorded 1,133 dead and more than 600,000 displaced in a matter of weeks. Its sealed envelope of suspects travelled to the International Criminal Court where the cases, including the one against Ruto, collapsed by 2016 after prosecution witnesses recanted or vanished amid what judges described as witness interference. The state responded to 2007-08 with proscription of sponsors. Thirty-three groups, Mungiki and Sungusungu among them, were banned in 2010 under the Prevention of Organized Crimes Act. The gangs renamed themselves and diversified. Observers of the 2022 election found little organized pre-election violence but noted, in the words of one study of that cycle, that “many active gangs were available to be repurposed to this end if parties deemed it necessary”. Goons were transported across the country during party primaries and one electoral returning officer, Daniel Musyoka, was abducted by goons, tortured, and killed.
The Gen Z protests of June 2024 revealed the current configuration of “goonism”. When demonstrators against the Finance Bill stormed Parliament on 25 June, the state’s first instruments were the official ones. Amnesty International’s count across the 2024 and the 2025 protest waves is at least 128 people killed, 83 forcibly disappeared, and 3,000 arbitrarily arrested by the security agencies. But alongside the uniforms (and the plainclothes officers) came the hired crowd. Professor of comparative politics Gabrielle Lynch, writing weeks into the protests, listed “the apparent hiring of goons to undermine and discredit protesters” as a well-practised strategy of Kenyan governments confronting dissent. The following year supplied this illustration.
In April 2025, the Member of Parliament for Kasipul Constituency Charles Ong’ondo Were was shot dead in Nairobi, weeks after warning of a plot to kill him using imported youths. In May, about a hundred goons invaded former deputy president Rigathi Gachagua’s party launch, the fourth of his events disrupted in six months. June brought the whips. Amnesty Kenya’s monitors confirmed that hundreds of attackers armed with tyre whips, wooden batons and knives had been mobilized, transported and deployed across Nairobi. The Police Reforms Working Group found that police at times “intentionally accompanied, supported and directed their operations”.
On the eve of the Saba Saba protests of 7 July, armed men raided the KHRC’s offices. At least 38 people died in the protests themselves during which the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) accused police of cooperating with machete-carrying gangs, and two days later the president instructed that arsonists be shot in the leg. Prosecutors answered with terrorism charges against protesters while offering no public account of any investigation into the organized attackers.
The by-elections of November 2025 brought what Siaya’s governor, James Orengo, called the “goonification of elections”. Two voters died in campaign clashes in Kasipul and a candidate’s hotel was raided by armed men in Malava. 2026 has shown the pattern hardening. In April, Vihiga County senator, Godfrey Osostsi, was beaten and robbed by hooded youths in daylight. In June, a CCTV camera captured uniformed police officers moving alongside an armed gang as it stormed a civil-society meeting in a Nairobi church. In early July, an opposition rally was overrun, and one person was killed in the chaos while police reportedly watched. In the recent by-election of 16 July in Ol Kalou, masked gunmen in vehicles with concealed number plates stalked the campaign and attacked a candidate’s vehicle. Two days before the vote, the electoral commission warned that goons were being mobilized to disrupt it. On polling day, hooded men fired shots near polling stations while voters, residents and journalists fled. The besieged party won the seat regardless, and the interior minister ordered an investigation.
Two mutations distinguish this decade’s goon from his 1990s predecessor. The first is what payment organizes. The Jeshi la Mzee of the Moi years for instance, was raised through ethnicity and oath and paid within that frame. Today’s goon is recruited on a day rate, at the base, and increasingly through WhatsApp groups, with no creed to join and no community to avenge and reached with a speed that the forest oathing camps never managed. The cash nexus is no longer inside the mobilization. It is the mobilization. The second mutation, and the graver, is convergence with the police.
The market has also grown a digital wing. Amnesty International’s report of tech-facilitated violence against young Kenyan activists mapped the same procurement logic online where networks of about twenty operators, organized on WhatsApp, are paid KSh25,000 to KSh50,000 a day to push a client’s message into X’s top trends, posting up to three thousand times in a morning and building counter-hashtags in real time against protest hashtags, alongside government paid bloggers sent to abuse its critics. Informal repression has been extended from the street into the feed with the same deniability.
The militia threshold
A goon is not yet a militiaman. A goon is a casual labourer, hired for the day, unorganized beyond his recruiter and loyal to the fee. A militia is a standing organization with a command structure, an identity, a territory, a purpose that survives the individual contract. However, the distance between the two is short. Others have crossed it along a road Kenya is on, and election years are when the crossing happens.
In The Dark Side of Democracy, the sociologist Michael Mann identified the reservoir from which paramilitaries everywhere are filled and that is young males striving to assert themselves in the world, led by older males who were themselves socialized into violence in an earlier phase of conflict. Mann observed, of the road to Rwanda’s catastrophe, that “in Africa vigorous party competition generates street violence led by party youth movements”, and he traced how the Interahamwe began as a ruling-party youth football association before it was paramilitarized as its patrons’ hold on power weakened. In Yugoslavia, he showed how the state’s security service turned football hooligans and criminals into what the social scientist James Ron called “state subcontractors” – armed, financed, and deniable. Mann’s deeper point is about intention. Escalation proceeds by stages, each plan adopted when the milder one fails, so that the sponsors of stage one never believe themselves to be purchasing stage four. Zimbabwe compressed the sequence in two years. In 2000, ad hoc war veterans mobilized youth after the regime’s referendum defeat and by the 2002 election, this group became a trained national youth militia operating from 123 bases, four in ten of them in schools, determining who could vote and, eventually, who could eat.
Once formed, such organizations do not dissolve on schedule. According to the Sierra Leonean politician and academic David Francis, groups created for regime consolidation “develop lives of their own”, becoming, in his phrase, “hydra-headed monsters” that are difficult to tame or contain. Nigeria’s Bakassi boys travelled in a few years from market vigilantes to a state-chartered security outfit to governors’ private enforces to a franchise available to anyone who could pay. The Interahamwe in Rwanda outlived the state that created it. The political scientist Liisa Laakso, studying Kenya’s 1990s, drew the conclusion that private militias are not a sustainable instrument because the loyalty they sell must eventually be rewarded either in land, office, immunity, and the bill compounds.
In present-day Kenya, the recruits exist in surplus and are already organized into more than a hundred gangs, territorial by nature. The National Crime Research Centre documented 73 in Mombasa alone. The financing exists and is political. As stated before, the state’s own NCIC commission put the figure at 90 per cent a decade ago. The deniability exists with 300 foot soldiers arrested and no buyer charged. Police complicity exists, on camera. The election is set a year away, in a field made volatile by the death of long-term opposition politician Raila Odinga in October 2025 and the realignment that followed. In June 2026, the interior cabinet secretary said the government held intelligence of leaders planning to mobilize criminal gangs against protesters. What does not yet exist is the standing structure of a militia: the uniform, the base, the name. That absence is the whole of the remaining distance between goons and militias.
Kenya in 2026 is not Rwanda in 1993 or Bosnia in 1991. There are no rival claims of sovereignty over territory, which Mann regards as the precondition of the worst outcomes. Kenya has a judiciary that annulled a presidential election, a press that documents, human-rights institutions that count, and a generation of protesters who have seemingly broken the ethnic script on which previous cycles of violence relied. I do not wish to be a prophet of doom. But it is worth noting that the post-election violence of 2007-08 demonstrated what the existing inventory can do in six weeks with one disputed count, that the inventory is larger now; and that the deterrent that followed, the ICC, has been tested and found to be empty. A market this developed, meeting a contest this consequential, under impunity this complete, is how competition militias are made. To warn of it in 2026 is not alarmism. Alarm in 1991, taken seriously, would have spared the Rift Valley. Alarm in 2007 would have spared the country the weeks that killed more than a thousand people.
