Police officers arrest a protester on Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi during anti-Finance Bill protests on June 27, 2024.
Tanzanian activist and editor Maria Sarungi Tsehai was abducted by armed men in Nairobi on Sunday, and released on an isolated road after approximately four hours.
Tsehai, an outspoken critic of Tanzania President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s authoritarian tendencies, fled to Kenya in 2020 seeking asylum after facing increasing threats from the government of former President John Magufuli (whose deputy was Suluhu). At a press conference on Monday, she revealed she had been mistreated, shouted at and choked by her unknown assailants. She said she believed their main target was access to her social media accounts as they persistently asked how to unlock her phone.
She also spoke of her conviction that the Tanzanian government was behind her abduction, though she speculated that the abductors were a mix of Kenyan and Tanzanian nationals.
Tsehai is the second leading East African regime critic to be abducted in Kenya within the last three months, following the kidnapping of Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye in Nairobi last November—allegedly by Ugandan security officials—who then took him back to Kampala to face trial in a military court for alleged anti-government activities.
Her ordeal is but one element of a broader crisis of abductions and forced disappearances that has unsettled Kenya since June 2024. The State of National Security report presented to the Kenyan Parliament last week indicated that the country had seen a 44 per cent increase in abductions and kidnappings between September 2023 and August 2024. Additionally, in a late December report, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights disclosed that there had been at least 82 cases of abductions since June 2024, with the fate of 29 of these individuals still unknown. Last week, five of these 29 were released.
Domestic security establishment
While the scale of the problem is evident, the crucial question of who exactly is orchestrating these abductions remains unanswered. Some individuals were indeed taken by police, but the anonymity provided by masks suggests abductors could be anyone, including, as in the cases of Tsehai and Besigye, possibly intelligence agents from neighbouring countries perhaps acting in cahoots with their associates in the domestic security establishment.
For kidnappers and other malevolent actors, this anonymity is the very allure of abduction—once initiated, it becomes an easy tool for control, suppression and settling scores to which they can hitch their wagons.
For Kenya, the concern is where this might lead if it does not cease. Despite the harm already caused by abductions and forced disappearances, the situation remains in its infancy compared to what it could become. One need only look to Latin America from the 1970s to the early 1990s, or closer to home, Uganda during the military rule of Idi Amin in the 1970s and much of the 1980s after his ousting in 1979, to see how much worse it could get.
Abductions and disappearances on a grand scale, as witnessed in Amin’s Uganda where thousands vanished without a trace, can deform and terrorise a society in profound ways. Families were forced into making dire decisions, identifying which members were most vulnerable and how best to protect them.
Often, it was concluded that girls were at the highest risk. The thought of their girls being violated in a dungeon was unbearable to parents, so some of them dispatched them to live with relatives in remote places up-country. Wealthier families sent them abroad. In this way, families were torn apart.
Abduction
In Uganda, as in some other African nations, public behaviour was significantly altered. People ceased gathering in enclosed spaces like bars and restaurants, preferring open areas where one might escape an attack or at least ensure that others witnessed the abduction, providing some semblance of an answer to the question “What happened to him?” However, the follow-up question, “What was done to him?” often remained unanswered.
What ensued was perpetual torment. Every knock on the door could herald bad news—the discovery of a loved one’s body in a forest, a school playground, or a river; news of their sighting in an overcrowded prison; or, in rare instances, the return of the victim, left on some desolate road.
Many victims’ families, and others living in dread, recounted how nights during these times were the worst—long, sleepless, filled with the terror of footsteps in the dark. They lay awake, counting the footsteps of passers-by on the street, listening intently for any pause, any approach to their door. Was another loved one about to be taken? Was a body or a battered survivor being returned?
Why were the dogs barking? The terror of abduction robs one of night’s peace. It steals sleep. Some could only find rest by day, which imposed a financial penalty—on them and the wider economy—as they were immobilised and could not venture out to work. After all, what would it be worth?
The author is a journalist, writer, and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans." X (Twitter); @cobbo3.
