Trucks queue to refuel at a petrol station along Kisumu-Kakamega Road in Kisumu on May 6, 2026, as drivers seek to secure fuel amid supply constraints.
There were so many things I wanted to write about this week! Fuel prices are going up again in a country where people are already struggling financially.
There were the images from Murang’a of children’s bodies being dragged from the river, while crowds stood by helplessly, some filming, some crying, and some simply staring, because what else can you do in the face of such horror? Another woman was killed in Kilimani, her throat slit so mercilessly on the road that you read the story twice, hoping it was exaggerated.
The rising number of femicide cases now feels less like isolated incidents and more like a national emergency that nobody truly wants to confront. Then again, maybe I should write about the terrible state of the roads, exposed by the rains, which makes it feel like the country is physically collapsing in front of us.
Where do I even begin? That is the problem with living in Kenya. Too much grief is vying for your attention. Before you can process one tragedy, another arrives. Before one family has buried their dead, another family is identifying a body in a morgue somewhere else. Every day feels like waking up to another disaster.
Electricity tokens
You wake up to find that fuel prices have risen again. In Kenya, fuel prices are never just fuel prices. They are food prices, transport prices. Transport prices. School fees. Rent. They are a matter of survival. Somewhere, a mama mboga is already calculating how much less stock she will carry tomorrow. A father is wondering whether to fill up his motorbike or buy electricity tokens.
A worker in Nairobi is deciding whether to skip lunch because the cost of transport has increased again. While politicians announce these things from air-conditioned offices and podiums, ordinary people experience them in their stomachs. Then you open your phone, and there are children’s bodies in a river.
Not statistics. Not headlines. Children. They were supposed to grow up, go to school, annoy their parents, dream about their future careers, fall in love, complain about their homework and ask for snacks in the middle of the night. Instead, they are being pulled out of the water while the country watches in horror for two days, before moving on to the next outrage.
That is what scares me the most. It’s not even the tragedies themselves, but how we quickly move on. The images from Murang’a refuse to leave my mind: The panic in people’s voices. The confusion. The helplessness. The way Kenyans gather around tragedy, time and time again, with phones in our hands and heartbreak in our throats. We are becoming a country surrounded by death: Dead children. Dead women. Dead hope.
Women being killed
Another woman has been killed. Another name to add to an ever-growing list that is becoming impossible to keep up with. Women are being killed in their homes, in Airbnbs, on the street, in relationships, outside clubs, in broad daylight and at night, by strangers and by men they trusted and loved.
Every week, another photo circulates online. Another woman reduced to a trending topic. Another family is destroyed forever. The cruelty growing in society cannot be ignored anymore. Violence is becoming normalised. There is a lack of empathy. Our country is becoming emotionally numb because there is simply too much pain everywhere.
Even the roads look exhausted. The rains came and exposed everything: Roads are caving in. Estates flooded after just a few hours of rain. Cars are swallowed by potholes. There is mud everywhere. Traffic stretched endlessly because the infrastructure in this country is built for corrupt tenders, not for the people who live here. Every rainy season, Kenya reacts as if rain were an unexpected natural phenomenon that nobody could have prepared for, despite it happening every year.
Ultimately, it all comes back to leadership and priorities, and to a country that increasingly feels abandoned by the people who are supposed to protect it.
Sometimes I sit and wonder what kind of nation we are becoming. A country where children die so often that we barely pause to mourn them. A country where women live in fear, where survival itself has become exhausting. People are working harder than ever before, yet they are still drowning. Young people are losing all faith in institutions. Families are one emergency away from collapse. Yet the political elite move around in convoys, pretending that everything is normal.
Nothing feels normal. Not when parents are burying their children so often. Not when women are dying in such brutal ways. Not when the cost of living keeps rising while wages remain the same.
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This writer is a journalist and a human rights defender. [email protected]
