In its October 31 issue, the pan-African weekly The Continent published “Sleepless in Nairobi”, a report on how Kenya has gone from a safe haven for East African dissidents to a place where they are abducted.
Its list of latter-day cases includes Twaha Mwaipaya, a Tanzanian Chadema youth-wing activist who was seized on the outskirts of Nairobi on October 25. Mshabaha Hamza, a Tanzanian rights defender, survived an abduction attempt in February. Maria Sarungi Tsehai, a Tanzanian journalist and activist, was grabbed by armed men in Nairobi in January 2025 and released hours later after videos of her abduction caused uproar. The Ugandan cases include Kizza Besigye, the veteran opposition leader, abducted in Nairobi in November 2024 and taken to Kampala, where he now faces treason charges. Four months earlier, 36 members of Besigye’s party were arrested in Kisumu and ferried back to Uganda to face terrorism charges.
Yet this is only one chapter in a much longer history. In 1982, Balaki Kirya, a former Ugandan minister who led the rebel Uganda Freedom Movement, was abducted from his home in Nairobi’s Jamhuri Estate, taken across the border and locked up in Luzira. Tanzania kept an equally close eye on its critics, and small-scale snatchings in border towns and along the coast were commonplace.
Plenty of Kenyans have fled the country over the years, but Nairobi has rarely pursued prominent dissidents abroad. The best-known case is that of Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka and Sergeant Pancras Oteyo Okumu. When the coup attempt against President Daniel arap Moi collapsed on August 1, 1982, Ochuka fled with Okumu to Tanzania. Julius Nyerere’s government initially gave them refuge, and a Tanzanian court rejected Kenya’s extradition request.
The two governments, however, were bargaining over much bigger things, including the reopening of their shared border. In November 1983, Tanzania handed Ochuka, Okumu and several others back to Kenya. Ochuka was court-martialled, convicted of treason and hanged at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in the mid-1980s.
Something similar happened in 1990, when Sweden-based dissident Koigi wa Wamwere travelled to Uganda, where he was seized and handed over to Kenya’s Special Branch at the border.
Today, Kenya has little reason to hunt dissidents abroad because there are few left. Kenyans who flee over politics do not head for Kampala or Dar es Salaam. They go to London, Oxford or Stockholm, where free healthcare and university fellowships await. More importantly, East Africans rarely run away primarily because they disagree with their governments. They flee because they know they may not get a fair trial and could be tortured.
In the other direction, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Kenyans have been caught in Uganda and Tanzania and sent home since the 1960s. You rarely hear about them because they are not political prisoners. They are thieves. Car-theft gangs operate out of Busia, Malaba, Namanga and Isebania. Every year, between 100 and 200 high-end vehicles are reported stolen in Kenya and driven into Uganda, South Sudan and Tanzania on cloned number plates and with forged logbooks.
Cattle rustling is another serious problem, as is piracy on Lake Victoria. Every year, armed gangs based on Ugandan and Tanzanian islands steal hundreds of Yamaha outboard engines and thousands of monofilament nets. Kenyan owners then pay ransoms of tens of thousands of shillings to get their boats back. This is what exercises local Kenyan authorities. It says much about the priorities of the Kenyan State.
Kenya is also open and “law-abiding” when dealing with bank robbers. It does not resort to the cloak-and-dagger methods used in political abductions. After the May 2004 raid on the National Bank of Commerce in Moshi, in which robbers escaped with TSh5.3 billion (Sh260 million), Wilfred Onyango Nganyi was arrested in Kenya and Tanzania sought his extradition. He and four other Kenyans were tried in Moshi and jailed for 32 years. Nganyi’s conviction was later overturned on appeal.
That is the real difference. Uganda and Tanzania pursue people who challenge the political state. Kenya pursues those who commit crimes against private property, and works lawfully with its neighbours to bring them to justice.
It also offers a measure of immunity to wealthy regional politicians fleeing prosecution for other reasons. That is why Somali warlords, South Sudanese generals and members of Rwanda’s Akazu, the inner circle behind the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, found Nairobi so welcoming.
If an exile arrives with bags of gold and buys a mansion in Karen, Muthaiga or Kilifi, Nairobi will happily turn a blind eye. If all they have is a dog-eared copy of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they had better keep civil society lawyers and a few Nordic ambassadors on speed dial. It’s appallingly amoral, but clear and predictable.
The author is a writer, journalist and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X: @cobbo3.
