This week, a video went round phones. It was of a gunman in a treeline and a police vehicle at speed attempting to escape. Rifles emptied into it until there was nothing left to shoot at.
Thousands shared it as footage of Tuesday’s ambush in Mandera, though it was not. The Counter Terrorism and Security Intelligence Service says Al-Shabaab filmed it in Lamu in 2016, not this week, but it may as well have been.
The treeline could have been Hagarsu. The vehicle could have been the one that left Mandera town early on November 10 with a crew bound for Lafey. The only difference is that nobody was filming on Tuesday, and eight people did not come home.
We shall name them, these fallen Kenyans. Sgt Mohamed Ibrahim Hussein of Koromei and Abdifatah Abdile Ibrahim of Bulla Barwaqo, National Police Reservists posted to protect men building a road; Hassan Hussein Kussow of Lafey, who was driving; and five men who had travelled from Kinangop and Murang’a to build it – John Ng’ang’a Munene, Peter Musili Kiondo, Peter Kahio Kariuki, Stephen Kanyi Macharia and Stephen Munene Ng’ang’a. The attackers, believed to have crossed from Somalia, fled with the reservists’ two rifles and 150 rounds of ammunition.
To their families, I offer my deepest condolences. Three of the dead were buried in Mandera on Tuesday evening. Five were flown to Nairobi the next day, all of them having died doing the most ordinary and necessary work a country asks of its people – keeping watch and nation building. They are owed more than a statement.
They are also owed an honest account of how we got here. Tuesday was not an aberration. In March of this same year, five quarry workers were killed in Mandera.
In May, six passengers died on the same Mandera-Arabia road. In July, five security officers were killed on patrol near the border. A report tabled in Parliament a year ago had already named the Lafey corridor as one of the main routes militants use to enter the country.
The relative calm that sustained operations bought in 2025 was never peace. It was a pause, paid for with extreme vigilance. That vigilance has since slipped.
The slippage did not happen accidentally. In February, President William Ruto stood in Mandera and announced that the border with Somalia, closed since President Mwai Kibaki launched Operation Linda Nchi in October 2011, would reopen in April. Crossings in Mandera, Liboi and Kiunga were opened for miraa trade the same month.
The full reopening was suspended in May after fighting between Somali federal government troops and Jubaland forces spilled towards the frontier. An unnamed Cabinet Secretary still insists that the border is “only closed on paper”.
That is an argument for policing it harder, if anything. Signals, however small, matter greatly on a frontier. A government that announces a date, opens a commercial lane and then retreats is announcing to everyone that that line is negotiable. Nobody, historically, watches the security seriousness of our country more closely than Al-Shabaab.
This same instinct, unfortunately, governed identity documents. In February last year, the state abolished the 60-year-old vetting for ID applicants in border counties. The old system was discriminatory, officials said. It treated citizens as suspects by ethnicity and location and deserved to end. But the remedy was rigorous vetting for every applicant, which is what the President himself proposed in Wajir.
What the country got instead was a lighter process with a 21-day turnaround and, by June this year, we already had a Senate inquiry into reports that foreigners were buying Kenyan national identity cards for as little as Sh15,000.
An ID card is an extremely consequential document in this country. It opens bank accounts, land transfers, the voter register and recruitment into security units. Issued in error, it is almost impossible to recall. Once a compromised individual holds the papers of a citizen, removing him or her becomes a matter of courts, appeals and years. Every lapse at the registration desk is a cost transferred to the security services that are already strained from pointless sub-assignments by the political elite to silence dissidents.
National security is not a subject for sentiment or political correctness. It is a discipline. Kibaki’s regime understood that clearly. He was not a loud leader and did not govern by announcement.
The Al-Shabaab matter remained for a long time neutrally unpoliticised, and we were only briefed to the extent that military clearance allowed. When the threat crossed the line in 2011, he closed the border, sent the military after it, and left the decision standing. It outlived his presidency by more than a decade. That is what decisiveness looks like: a judgment made coldly, maintained without apology and revisited only when the evidence changes beyond doubt.
The evidence has changed, though not in the direction the state had hoped it would. Somalia is now more fractured than it was in February. Al-Shabaab is hitting road crews, buses and patrols in the same corridor month after month.
This will not get easier. The militants will not suddenly turn good because politician X is insulting politician Y. They don’t care about your politics, they don’t care about your internal bickering, and they sure as hell don’t even care anymore about your religion. The three Muslim Kenyans who were murdered are proof of it. This is a Kenyan moment.
The border should stay shut until there is a functioning partner on the other side. Vetting should return, universal rather than ethnic, biometric and intelligence-led. Every ID issued under the relaxed regime should be audited before the next election makes that impossible.
The road to Lafey will be finished. It should be. But it should be finished by people who come back home to their families, invariably.
