Police officers stand behind a razor wire with flowers placed on it, as protesters chant during demonstrations to mark the second anniversary of the 2024 anti-government protests, in Nairobi on June 25, 2026.
Chief Whip Silvanus Osoro confessed that opposition MPs were paid and flown abroad to be absent for the 2023 Finance Bill vote.
Amnesty documented a network of roughly 20 paid bloggers, earning up to Sh50,000 a day, manufacturing pro-government trends.
This is an angry piece on disappointment, not one of Philip Ochieng’s overlearned columns. I don’t know whether my Sociology classmates at Egerton – Choti, Kasire, Mkala, Ndambuki, Munene, Analo Makonjio, etc – remember Emile Durkheim and the term he coined for circumstances when a society’s rules stop making sense to the people living under them. Anomie.
It applies to moments when the moral scaffolding collapses and citizens no longer believe the game is winnable by honest effort. Today, millions of Kenyans wake up, work, pay, queue, obey and feel, correctly, that none of it is buying them a stake in the republic their fathers fought and some died for. Are we even Kenyans? Do we belong, or are we just but metaphorical monkeys, swinging on the trees of this “paradise” of affordable housing, “world class healthcare” and flyovers, taxed to death, suffering and dying poor?
