Prof. Mutua's anti-boda boda crusade is misplaced

I see boda boda becoming an existential threat to the republic. - It's time to get rid of boda boda (Prof. Makau Mutua, Sunday Nation, 27th July, 2025)

Many boda boda riders are reckless and dangerous. Many boda boda riders, including their passengers riding pillion, have been involved in serious accidents, many fatal. It has gotten so bad that public hospitals have entire wards dedicated to victims of road traffic accidents involving boda boda. In Nairobi City, boda boda are driven dangerously and recklessly, almost always in complete disregard for the High Code, and have become major contributors to the chaos on public roads, leading to traffic gridlock, and wastage of hundreds of man hours everyday.

Many who patronise boda boda transport services do so because all the other options are either too slow, too expensive, or too inefficient. For example, when it comes to courier services in the City, boda boda riders are a cut above the rest, including global behemoths like Deutsche Post and EMS Speedpost. They are fast, reliable and efficient and, barring the teething problems of the early years of operation, they are also the trusted couriers for food delivery in the City. A vast swathe of Nairobi residents have a boda boda guy on speed dial.

Prof. Mutua, though, is offended by their existence, and he has marshalled his considerable intellect to deconstruct the many ways that boda boda pose a national security threat to the republic. In the late Mr. Shakespeare's words, the lady doth protest too much, methinks (Hamlet - Act III, scene II).

He alleges, without proof, that boda boda will soon become something akin to a militia with warlords to be commanded by the thuggish Kenyan political classes, and so it is in the national interest to not just control boda boda, but we must be rid of them. Maybe he is right, but absent of any credible proof of not just the inherent, unique, criminality of boda boda and the possibility that it will be converted into militias under the sway of politicians, his prescription for the boda boda problem should be taken with a massive dose of scepticism.

Prof. Mutua is now a more or less permanent resident of Nairobi City so he cannot pretend not to see that boda boda are just one element of the public transport dysfunction in the City, and in the republic. Nairobi City's public (and private) road network is badly and dangerously designed. It prioritises the mass movement of passenger cars, and eschews many modern safety features to reduce road traffic accidents and promote the safe, efficient and effective movement of people from place to place.

If Prof. Mutua cares to remember, the 1970s and 1980s public transport system in Nairobi City resembled that of many European cities. Of course, the private motor vehicle ownership numbers were quite low, the City's population had not succumbed to the mass influx of rural Kenyans after the collapse of agriculture, and City Hall and the Public Works Department had not fully embraced procurement fraud to the extent they did. Boda boda, and many other transport sector scofflaws like matatus, simply took advantage of a broken system, and continue to operate with impunity because the corrective measures necessary to protect Kenyans and provide them with safe, efficient, affordable and effective transport services are not being prioritised by the Government.

If we were to compare Prof. Mutua's bugbears to private motorists, many similarities emerge. A substantial proportion of private motorists do not observe the Highway Code, often drive into oncoming traffic, will not give way even when they are required to, will park in undesignated places, will flee from road accident sites if police are not immediately on-scene, will install ultra-bright LED and halogen headlights and switch them to high beam even when it is not necessary, and on and on and on. Indeed, much of the animus against boda boda is because private motorists cannot get away with half of the stunts that boda boda get away with and it makes private motorists, like the chauffeur-driven Prof. Mutua, green with envy.

A small subset of private motorists are so much worse than boda boda: the senior public officer in hurry. Many road users have been the victims of GK-plated Land Cruiser Prados driven on the wrong side of the road, usually with three or four chase cars in tow, at high speed, horns and sirens blaring, and ultra-bright halogen lights flashing in oncoming motorists' eyes, making already terrible traffic situations worse.  Prof. Mutua talks of the risks posed by no-plate boda bodas and refuses to even acknowledge the existential threat prosed by no-plate silver/grey Subaru Foresters and Subaru Outbacks operated by heavily armed and masked un-uniformed secret police units abducting Kenyans off the streets in broad daylight. What is good for the goose, sir, is good for the gander. Boda boda are a reflection of the Government and the Government's priorities. Boda boda stared into the abyss that is public transport in Kenya, and the abyss stared right back.

Before Prof. Mutua addresses the speck in the boda boda's eye, he should take time to remove the massive mote in the Government's eye. If we address the shortcomings in public transport in a holistic fashion, the boda boda menace will be tamed. Thus, we must begin by prioritising the safe, efficient, affordable and effective movement of people from place to place. This can be done by slowing down the massive investment in extra public roads and extra public road lanes, and increasing the public investment in bus termini, bus stages, dedicated bus lanes, safe and inclusive pedestrian walkways (you would be shocked how difficult it is for persons with disabilities to traverse the Central Business District), and the operations of PSV buses and matatus. I hope Prof. Mutua and his fellow unhappy wabenzi are listening.

The effects of antisocial media

Online spaces have lost much of the utility they offered when they were first popularised in the early 2010s. They have become spaces where highly motivated agitators will go to wage wars that, on closer inspection, advance no fresh ideas or address any matters of contemporary notoriety. Trolls have taken over, and trollish behaviour is encouraged. Complex software algorithms channel the worst trends o your timeline and it is only an active curation of your timeline that will ensure that you do not fall prey to the machinations of the trolls, though this doesn't always work.

In Kenya, the social media space is dominated by young people, classified in the popular lexicon as GenZ. Some are thoughtful and wise beyond their years. The vast majority, though, are badly educated and aren't shy about flaunting their bad education for all the world to see. What they are interested in, it seems, is the total number of likes and retweets they will receive for the stuff they spout. In short, they seek widespread notoriety, if not fame or infamy, no matter what.

What is increasingly noticeable about them is how very little they read about the things they purport to speak about. Few of them have taken the time to review the documents of their civic life, whether it is the Constitution or the Laws of Kenya, or the foundational documents of the various societies, organisations and associations they happen to be members of. They extract a sentence from these documents, apply their own biased lenses to any analysis of those sentences, and then publish their half-baked views for all the world to see and when they are called out for it, instead of taking lessons from the criticism, they double down and invite hordes of equally-uninformed trolls to support their viewpoints.

These people are, as a result, easily manipulated. You can tell by how easy it has been for the 527/= gangs to hijack hashtags and promote reactionary views that are contrary to the stated desires of GenZ agitators. Instead of prosecuting their ideas, GenZs are forced to counter the subversion of their agenda by the 527/= gangs, and in the end, their GenZ agenda is never implemented and the movement of the day fizzles out.

This is apparent in the way GenZ have been outmanoeuvred when it comes to public finances. The victory they won at such terrible cost in 2024 with the withdrawal of the Finance Bill has not been replicated. Though a valiant effort was mounted in 2025, and the same terrible outcome for GenZ was visited not hem once more, they have not fundamentally altered the structure of public finance or how public money is collected, spent, ad accounted for. This was recently revealed by their utter lack of understanding of what it means for the Government to borrow.

Many of us, whether GenZ, Gent, Millennial or Boomer, are motivated with deeply selfish interests and nowadays, we are not shy about stating this upfront. It is no longer about the commonweal; what matters is the individual stomach. Because reactionary forces, whether political, professional, social or cultural, have spent the decades since Mwai Kibaki's presidential electoral victory in 2002 subverting the common good, and promoting selfish person interests, the structures that would have built resilience among and for the people have withered and atrophied. Brief spurts of harambees for Genz protest victims only starkly reveal how far apart we are as peoples.

If rational discussions cannot be held among people, regardless of the stated desire for reform and change, little will occur, and shattered dreams will litter the online spaces, where performative wailing and gnashing of teeth will take place. The irony of faster and wider telecommunications among the largest proportion of the population being used to divide them and poison the civic bonds among them is not lost on me. Social media, it turns out, is dangerously antisocial.

Don't fall for it, Hanifa.

Someone has set a trap for Haifa and it will be interesting to see whether she will fall into it. Let me explain.

One of the most effective ways to undermine civil society in Kenya has been to co-opt its members into the firmament of the State. After 2002, Mwai Kibaki was acutely aware that he would not govern if he was constantly facing off against civil society. So he appointed its members to public offices, and promoted the political ambitions of others. His government enacted laws that created positions for civil society representatives. (The Law Society of Kenya was a prime victim of this tactic.) It paid off.

If it wasn't for the KANU holdovers in Kibaki's government, and Kibaki's own KANU-ist instincts, epitomised by the reckless and wanton extra-judicial killings and widespread looting by Kibaki and his cronies, civil society would never have gotten the second wind it did that culminated in the 2010 constitution. But the principle of the thing remains true: co-opted civil society hard-asses will spend so much time trying to "reform government from within" that they will fail to realise that they have been swallowed by Leviathan.

There is a nascent, but seemingly determined, effort to put Hanifa up as a candidate in the next general election as the woman representative of Nairobi City County. If she falls for it, she will lose everything she has built for herself the past two years, the least not being her name and her identity. If you think this is hyperbolic fearmongering, search on YouTube for the video of the day the President signed the Finance Bill into law and see the meek image that Millie Odhiambo cut at State House. She looks so out of place and one wonders if she knows that she is no longer the fearless lioness she was when the Security Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2014, was introduced in the National Assembly.

There is no institution better at sanding down your naturally rough instincts to stand up for the weak and forgotten than Parliament. It doesn't matter whether you enter Parliament as an independent or as a member of a political party; your name and identity are swallowed up in the maw of an institution that no longer represents the interests of the people but only the interests of parliamentarians and, whenever it is profitable so to do, the interests of the executive branch of the Government. And if Parliament will not co-opt you, it will isolate you, and you will be a lone voice in the wilderness, a person of legislative irrelevance. Can you think of one effective reformer in Parliament today?

As a member of the Committee of Experts, Otiende Amollo agreed with and promoted the constitutional principle of the separation of powers. The executive would make and implement policies, including development policies. Parliament would enjoy the power of the purse, that is, it would decide whether or not to fund any of the executive branch's development policies. But witness the recent determined push by Mr Amollo and his colleagues to "entrench CDF in the Constitution" so that they can undermine several judgments of the constitutional court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court that "CDF is unconstitutional". The reformers, like Mr. Omtatah, have been isolated and ignored and their strongly held beliefs about the role of Parliament have been received by their parliamentary colleagues the same way one receives a fart in a poorly ventilated room.

A woman representative is just one person among 349 parliamentarians, a single member of an institution that requires collective action to get anything done. Mr. Omtatah, frustrated that he has not gotten any of his colleagues on his side, has spent a great part of his time in the Senate litigating in the constitutional courts to hamstring the work that the Senate (and National Assembly) has done and continues to do. He has had limited success, but this is exactly what he did when he was in civil society before he was elected. His election did not change the trajectory of his life; in fact, it could be argued that it undermined it greatly.

Hanifa faces the same challenges that Judge Maraga faces. Unless she can marshal a cohort of like-minded women and men to contest for the 349 elected parliamentary seats and 1,150 elected county seats, she will be a lone voice in an institution that is expert at co-opting, or stifling, lone voices. She shouldn't fall into this trap.

Saba Saba at Thirty-five

I was a boy when Kamukunji became a battleground between the restore-multiparty zealots and Baba Moi. And a boy, I filtered the political questions of the day through the lens of my parents' anxieties. It is thirty-five years since "the opposition" forced Moi to decree that Section 2A of the former constitution would be repealed and Kenya would be restored to multi-party politics.

The more things change, the more thee stay the same.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr  (1849).

History is a funny thing. The longer you live, the more you forget, the more you must be reminded by those who are younger than you. The Seven Bearded Sisters initiated a sequence of political events that culminated in the restoration of multiparty democracy. They could not have predicted how wildly the pendulum would swing against the principles they held or, even more wildly, how many of the pro-democracy campaigners would betray those principles or how.

Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibakli oversaw a security apparatus that murdered pro-democracy campaigners with impunity. Extra-judicial executions of Kenyans fighting for a more democratic political environment defines some of the darkest moments of the Kenya political project. In 2025, the political environment is redolent of the accusations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. In many cases, the same faces feature. Where once they were bit players in a larger political narrative, today, they are star players.

What has not changed is that the pro-democracy campaigners are young, educated and highly motivated. They will not win, though, unless they learn the lessons of the 1990s and 2000s. They must eschew the narrative that revolutionary change ends with the toppling of an existing order. They must accept that the project they are engaged in is a multi-generational one, one that will require the highest level of dedication and sacrifice for the longest period and that it shall need to be handed off to successive generations who, even in the most optimistic scenarios, may not enjoy the fruits of.

One of the defining features of the 1990s was the fracturing of "the opposition" and the co-option by Moi's KANU of opposition stalwarts. Many "ate ugali" in State House. They never lived down the accusations of betrayal and died as pariahs. Many "crossed the floor" of the National Assembly and entered into "coalitions" with the ruling party. What they got in return was lucrative public tenders that were never closely scrutinised by the Controller and Auditor-General - or Parliament.

I was in India when the Congress government of Inder Kumar Gujral fell. I was still there when the BJP government of Atal Behari Vajpayee succumbed to the anti-Muslim Hindu supremacism of the RSS and Sangh Parivar culminating in the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. The six years between the two events demonstrated to me the value of a coherent ideological consistency for a political party. The relatively swift destruction of the Congress's socialism between the election of Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda and the resignation of IK Gujral was mirrored by the ascension of AB Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. In the former, the party stopped believing in its own ideology; in the latter, the party solidified its ideology, purged the party of Doubting Thomases, and cemented its own rule for the next two decades, culminating inn the ascension of the Hindu purist, Narendra Modi.

Kenya's Gen Z, violently effective as they may be, do not have a coherent political ideology. They will never take political power so long as this remains true. They are a mirror to the ideological nakedness of the Second Liberation Movement: it was only invested in the restoration of multiparty democracy, and no more. Saba Saba 1990 forced Moi to recalibrate his politics; it did not establish an alternative political philosophy and therefore, it was easy to fracture the opposition.

We are in 2025. The names in the parliamentary Hansard are almost all new. The same narrative is being told, though. Laws that make no sense. Constitutional amendments that cement politicians' power but offer nothing for the electorate. "Activists" demanding "change" but whose members are only held together by vague promises of "full implementation of the constitution" and not much else. The Gen Z may have developed into a political force; but they have no political identity or ideology. (These contradictions befuddle me, I promise.) Thirty-five years after Saba Saba, the shedding of blood is the same; the lack of ideology is the same; will the political outcome be the same?

What goes around, comes around

Toadies are an exhausting lot. There is one in the senate, and I won't say for whom he toadies, who's fat smug face arouses a deep and baleful rage that it is a wonder he has not been smothered in his bed by the woman he shares it with. There is another one in the National Assembly who speaks with cut-glass kizungu who does so much to remind the people why they hate her and hate her with a passion that it boggles the mind that her not-so-great wealth and power has so far managed to insulate her from the national bile she inspires.

These sorts of people can be found in all sorts of places. They all have the same qualities, though: they are just decently smart enough to be noticed but not so smart as to make anything meaningful of themselves. They are very good at sussing out the direction of the wind, even if the wind happens to be their patrons farting in their face. And because their noses are so finely tuned to wind-direction, they know when to lay supine for the boss's belly rub and when to push whoever happens to be in the vicinity into the path of their boss's inevitable rageful flip-out. And their bosses ragefully flip out a great many times.

They are excellent snitches and, in this day and social media age, expert snitch-taggers. The more successfully they toady, the more they are rewarded, and they usually turn these rewards into armies of 578/= snitch-tagging bloggers who do nothing but parrot the praise-singing of the toadies. They are also well acquainted with the use-and-dump philosophy; so long as it is in their masters' interest, they will use you, abuse you, and dump you faster than they dispose of the prophylactics they use during their more careful assignations. Yet, they forget, they too, are equally disposable.

This is, in fact, their defining characteristic. They assume airs and turn their noses up at the rest of us, believing that the boss would never turn on them. They step on toes and bury knives in so many rivals' backs, it is a wonder that don't notice the blood trails they leave behind wherever they go. This blindspot stays firmly in place until the day they are replaced by brand new toadies. When their usefulness ends, because they no longer pay attention to the task at hand, their fall from grace is so abrupt and so violent, many never recover.

A former chief justice cuts a pitiable sight these days. When he was at the height of his powers, members of the Bar and Bench feared him, and grown men and women quaked in their shoes in terror whenever he turned his attention to them. He wielded power with a brutal viciousness, all in the service of the man he served. He was pitiless. He was remorseless. He was relentless. He did it all to please his master. Then the end came. It was quick. It was brutal. One minute he was in in. The next minute he was a pariah.

Gone were the whispered silences whenever he entered a room; he no longer had rooms to enter. Gone were the furtive glances whenever he passed one by; now even children stare him dead in the eye without fear. Gone was the respectful attention with which people listened to his declamations; now he is lucky if a matatu kange notices he has asked for his thirty-bob change back. Toadies think that they will reign with their masters forever. And while karma doesn't exactly work that way, what goes around, comes around.

What is Judge Maraga playing at?

When Mr. Okiya Omtatah was elected in 2022, his election as declared at several polling stations in Busia County. Several judgments of Kenya's superior courts have ruled that the election results at the polling station are final; the results at the county level declaring, for example, Mr. Omtatah to be elected as the Senator of Busia County, are tallies of the results from the polling stations within the county. If Mr. Omtatah wanted to ensure that he was not cheated of his victory, he would have had an agent to represent his interests in each of the 760 polling stations in Busia County.

Now Mr. Omtatah, and Chief Justice Emeritus David Maraga are eyeing the presidency. Mr. Omtatah is familiar with the cut-and-thrust of an election to the senate, though on a considerably smaller scale to that of a presidential election which in 2022 consisted of around 56,000 polling stations. Judge Maraga is not so lucky.

While he may have a clue as to the scale of a presidential election - after all, as Chief Justice he presided over a presidential election petition at which statistics were bandied about by the parties - he has not yet participated in a cutthroat contest such as the one a presidential election usually is. What little we know of his plans to secure victory in the presidential election does not inspire confidence.

The presidential election consists of the election results at each of the 56,000 polling stations as captured in Forms 34A, the tallies at the county level captured in Forms 34B, and the final tall at the national tallying centre captured in Form 34C. If he is well-prepared (and well-resourced), he will have at least one agent at the 56,000 polling stations, 47 agents at the county tallying centre, and a battery of agents, lawyers, political operatives and supporters at the national tallying centre to ensure that none of his votes is stolen. For this to be true, he needs to have started the onerous job of setting up from scratch a ground game to mobilise supporters who will volunteer time, resources and energy to support his candidature, whether he stands in the election as an independent or as a candidate sponsored by a political party.

Since he has not declared that he is a registered member of a political party yet, we shall assume that he is still mulling where to pitch his tent or he is seriously considering a dark horse campaign as an independent. Either way, he still needs a team to help him organise his campaign.

First, he needs forty-seven county team leaders. They will help him map the 290 and constituencies and identify the current 1,150 elected county assembly representatives, 290 constituency representatives, 47 county woman representatives, 47 senate representatives, 47 county governors and deputy county-governors, 47 speakers of county assemblies, 47 clerks of county assemblies, 47 county secretaries, and the nominated members of the National Assembly, Senate and County Assemblies, together with he political parties that sponsored them to the various legislatures, and the strength or weakness of the incumbents.

He will need all this baseline data to decide whether he should sponsor his own slate of candidates or poach the incumbents from the political affiliations they are members of. The dossiers will be voluminous and tedious to read. But read he must. This is not swotting for the Bar; its way more difficult than that.

Second, he will need to commission several polls to gauge his level of popularity at this point, to gauge the most resonant political questions that he can exploit, to gauge the level of support the incumbents enjoy, to gauge the level of opposition he is likely to face when the campaign is up and running, among a host of many other political issues.

Third, he will need to identify the sources of his campaign finances to pay for the cost of campaigning. County offices. County staff. County volunteers. Cars. Airplane tickets or charters. Airtime. Internet data bundles. Computers. Mobile phones. Meals. Hotel accommodation. Several thousand line items in a complex budget.

Fourth he will need to form a headquarters team of campaign staff. Lawyers (of course). Accountants. Personnel managers. Finance managers. Transport officers. Drivers. Bodyguards. IT technicians. Webpage developers. Telephone operators (or their modern-day equivalent). Mailroom gremlins. Secretaries. Personal assistants. Messengers. Dozens of jobs that have nothing to do with politics have to be staffed up over a matter of months.

Fifth, he needs to fashion a manifesto. The Message he will campaign on. The political brand he will fashion for himself. It is not just vibes and Inshallah. Professional politicians have been doing this for as long as he has been an adult. He is starting the race at the back of the pack and whether he can build a brand that can surpass the current brand in power is all a matter of intuition and storytelling. Judge Maraga is not an intuitive or natural storyteller.

So far, he appears happy to portray himself as a man who has announced that he intends to seek the presidency. He doesn't not appear to be doing much else. While there is a coterie of social media mavens and dingbats who will sing his praises to the moon and back, they do not appear to be a political campaign team of any sort. Time flies when you're in the aluminium siding business, as they say in the United States. If he is not careful, Judge Maraga will blink and find himself locked out of the ballot for want of a real political campaign strategy.