Who Owns the Goons? Who were the Hooded Men in Ol Kalou? The Constitution, and the Art of Investigating After the Fact#Looming Questions
By Our Author July 23, 2026
There is a peculiar Kenyan tradition that never fails to disappoint: something terrible happens in broad daylight, in front of uniformed officers, on camera, and the government's first instinct is not to arrest anyone — it is to open a file five days later!? Ol Kalou has now joined the long list of places where this ritual played out, and the question still lingers... five days later is uncomfortably simple: at what point, exactly, does a masked man carrying a gun in front of a police officer become a "criminal" rather than a "person of interest to be probed later"?
The Timeline Kenyans Were Given
On July 14, 2026, two days before the vote, Inspector-General of Police Douglas Kanja stood before the press and assured the country that the Ol Kalou parliamentary by-election would be tightly secured — over 1,000 officers deployed, a minimum of two at each of the constituency's polling stations.
By the afternoon of July 16, that assurance had collapsed into scenes the country is still trying to make sense of. Armed, hooded men driving several SUVs moved through Ol Kalou town, fired shots into the air, and patrolled near polling stations as the vote descended into chaos. Footage showed masked men armed with guns and clubs scattering residents, one man firing from atop a moving SUV while another fired from the rear window as it drove through town. A journalist covering the unrest was attacked while on duty. Voting, which had proceeded peacefully all morning, unraveled by afternoon — with uniformed police, and the vehicles that brought them, already on the ground.
That same evening, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen — not in Nyandarua, but addressing an unrelated event at the Trans Nzoia County Assembly — told the country the allegations of hooded men causing havoc "must be investigated thoroughly," and that anyone culpable would be arrested "regardless of what they were doing and who deployed them." He insisted the National Police Service had deployed sufficient officers, and that the government would not tolerate election violence "whether it was Ol Kalou, whether it was Mbeere, whether it was Narok."
It took until the night of Sunday, July 19 — three days later — for the DCI to formally announce it had opened an investigation, saying detectives were pursuing "credible leads" through forensic examination, digital analysis and witness interviews. By Monday, Nation reporters checking with police sources in Nyandarua found roughly ten complaints filed at local stations — and, tellingly, that investigators still needed to check with local security commanders for any "security briefs" that might have existed on the attackers before the fact.
Then, on July 21 — five days after Ol Kalou and hours after Gachagua accused him of running a "state-sponsored goonism" operation — President Ruto himself addressed the nation from State House, in a speech ostensibly about a new national economic vision. He described a national "consensus" against goonism, recounted how suspects arrested for destroying property are routinely released on a Sh200 bond only to reappear as hired goons at the next political rally, and declared there was "no defence for criminality." Days later, an NTV investigative exposé — #TheOlKalouCrimeScene — linked luxury vehicles and armed, masked men to the unrest, and Kiambaa MP John Njuguna Wanjiku confirmed one of the vehicles named was his, while denying involvement in the violence.
By July 22, Safina Party's Willis Otieno was publicly pressing Ruto to use the state's own intelligence apparatus to identify who was financing the goons, rather than continuing with blanket rhetoric that risks lumping genuine protesters in with hired criminals.
The Irony Writes Itself
Here is the sequence, stripped of officialese: the Inspector-General promises saturation policing. The goons arrive anyway, in convoy, masked, armed, filmed. Uniformed officers are present. Nobody is arrested on the spot. The Interior CS — addressing a different county on an unrelated ribbon-cutting — promises an investigation. Three days pass before that investigation is even formally opened. Five days pass before the President finally weighs in, at a speech about economic vision, denouncing goons in the abstract while never once explaining why the ones filmed in Ol Kalou are still free men.
If this is what "the full force of the law" looks like, one wonders what leniency would have looked like.
The Central Region Police Commander, Geoffrey Mayek, and the IG have offered an explanation of sorts: the armed, masked individuals were operating in "unclear circumstances," and officers on the ground were prioritizing election security over confrontations that might have triggered mass casualties or scared voters away. This is, at best, half an argument. It may well be true that a firefight in the middle of a polling exercise would have been reckless. But convoys of armed men in unmarked SUVs, firing weapons into the air and physically assaulting a journalist, is not an "unclear circumstance" requiring forensic analysis to identify as criminal. It is a crime in progress. The Constitution and the law that governs the police do not require officers to wait for a name and a case file before intervening — they require the opposite.
What the Law Actually Says
Article 244 of the Constitution does not leave the National Police Service's obligations to interpretation. It requires the Service to strive for the highest standards of professionalism, to prevent corruption and promote transparency, and to comply with constitutional standards of human rights in the exercise of its powers. Article 245 places command of the Service under the Inspector-General — meaning that when officers stand by while an armed convoy terrorises a town, the chain of command, and the accountability for that inaction, runs directly to the top.
Section 24 of the National Police Service Act is even more direct about what police are actually for: the maintenance of law and order, the preservation of peace, the protection of life and property, and — critically — the prevention and detection of crime. Prevention. Not documentation after the fact. Not a file opened once the SUVs have driven off, the shots have stopped, and the footage has already gone viral on social media. The statute does not say police may observe criminality and log it for later; it obligates them to prevent it in real time, using the powers of arrest already available to any officer who witnesses an offence being committed in their presence. Quite sad that if they required a Blogger who has critised any top government official, they could fetch him as far as Homabay and by pass all the nearby police stations only to let him killed by instructed Inmates in a police cell far away from his destiny. But these police men in uniform could not arrest, neither prevent or battle with masked hooded men who stormed Ol Kalou just within their vicinity.
That is the constitutional and statutory gap Ol Kalou exposes. If uniformed officers with vehicles, batons and firearms stood within sight of masked men discharging weapons in a public place and made no arrest, that is not a case requiring five days of "investigation" to establish whether a crime occurred — it is a case requiring an explanation for why officers who witnessed a crime in real time did not act as the law obliges them to. An investigation into who financed and organised the attack is necessary and welcome. It cannot substitute for the far simpler, far more urgent question of why nobody was handcuffed that afternoon.
Does the State Own the Goons?
This is the accusation now being made openly, not by fringe voices but by a former Deputy President and a growing chorus of civil society figures: that the recurring pattern — goons appear, police watch, officials promise investigations, investigations quietly stall — is not incompetence but arrangement. Kenya has seen at least a dozen such attacks by armed gangs disrupting political rallies, church services, public participation forums and now a by-election within just a few months, most targeting opposition leaders or government critics, with senior security officials repeatedly vowing to hunt down the attackers and their financiers each time, only for the earlier investigations to appear stalled once fresh violence erupts. Even Ruto's own July 21 remarks conceded the revolving-door problem: suspects arrested for destroying property, granted a token Sh200 bond, walking free to reappear as paid muscle at the next rally.
If the President himself acknowledges this cycle exists, the obvious follow-up question is why it is allowed to continue. A government that possesses "the full apparatus of the national security architecture," as Otieno put it, and still cannot explain how armed convoys drive unmolested through a heavily policed by-election town, invites — rather than dispels — the suspicion that the goons are not an intelligence failure but a tolerated instrument.
Murkomen and Kanja can insist, as they have, that there is no overarching national security crisis. Kenyans watching hooded men fire weapons in the street while uniformed officers stand nearby, followed by five days of silence before anyone in government said a word beyond "we are investigating," might reasonably ask what exactly qualifies as a crisis, if not this.
The Bottom Line
Investigation files matter. Prosecutions matter more. But neither can retroactively manufacture the one thing Article 244 and Section 24 actually demand: officers who intervene while the crime is happening, not detectives who arrive once it is over. Until Kenyans see handcuffs on the men in the Ol Kalou footage — not just another press statement — the government's protestations that it does not own the goons will keep sounding less like reassurance and more like an alibi.