Murkomen Went to Samburu on July 9. By#THE FEEDBACK TO MURKOMEN July 11, the Bandits Had Answered Him With Bullets.By our Author: Nairobi 11 thJul 2026.
On Thursday, July 9, 2026, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen stood at Lolmolok in Suguta Ward, Samburu West, flanked by Inspector General Douglas Kanja, Deputy Inspector General Gilbert Masengeli, GSU Commandant Johana Tonui, Samburu Governor Jonathan Lelelit and a full delegation of MPs and MCAs.
His mission was unmistakable: to warn the financiers and sponsors of banditry in Samburu, West Pokot, Tiaty and Isiolo that "we know where you are, and we will come for you," and to announce yet another "fresh" intelligence-led security operation, this time fronted personally by the Inspector General. Residents illegally holding firearms were told to surrender them before the crackdown began.
It was a strong language. It was also a language Kenyans in the North Rift have heard many times before — in Kainuk in February, in Turkana and Laikipia in March, in Elgeyo Marakwet in June, and now again in Samburu in July.
The bandits answered fast: In the early hours of Saturday, July 11, 2026 — barely 48 hours after Murkomen's assurances heavily armed gunmen raided Loosuk in Samburu West, killing four people, including a police reservist, before melting back into the bush. The county police commander confirmed the attack; reinforcements were rushed in; the identities of the dead were withheld pending next-of-kin notification. It was the second such incident inside days, coming on the heels of another attack days earlier that had already prompted Murkomen's visit in the first place.
Have the Bandits Dared Him?
There is no way to read the timing as anything but a direct rebuke. A Cabinet Secretary flies in, delivers a warning laced with menace, launches an operation with the country's top police brass standing beside him — and within two days, gunmen strike again, this time claiming the life of a man who was himself part of the security apparatus. If banditry sponsors were listening to Murkomen's warning at all, their response was to test it immediately.
This is not the first time. Murkomen has, by his own admission, acknowledged that attacks "often escalate when security agencies mount operations against criminal gangs" — a line that has now become a kind of standing disclaimer, deployed after nearly every fresh killing that follows a fresh promise. Since 2024, the Interior Ministry has announced Operation Maliza Uhalifu, Operation Rudisha Bunduki, disarmament drives, KDF and NIS deployments, and county-by-county "security-disturbed" declarations across Samburu, Baringo, West Pokot, Turkana, Isiolo, Marsabit and the Kerio Valley. Each has been unveiled with the same confident rhetoric. Each has been followed, sooner or later, by another raid, another funeral, another statement of resolve.
At what point does a pattern stop being "isolated incidents" and start being evidence that the strategy itself is not working? Kenyans in these counties are not asking for more press conferences. They are asking why cattle, homes and lives keep being lost in regions the state insists it has under an active, named, funded operation. Not without the experience by the Kenyan police gained in Haiti, banditry is a menace the Kenyan police can't handle.
A CS Fighting Two Wars — and Losing the One That Matters
Here is what makes the Samburu bloodshed harder to excuse: at the very moment bandits were testing his authority in the north, Murkomen was pouring extraordinary energy into a very different fight — a increasingly personal, increasingly public brawl with former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, including tweets on X.
Over the past three weeks alone, Murkomen has called Gachagua "the goon number one in Kenya," "the father of violence," "a hopeless tribalist," and accused him of running extortion rackets, financing "goons," and orchestrating chaos ahead of the July 16 Ol Kalou by-election. He has vowed to "monitor him day and night... until Kenya crosses over to 2027 peacefully." Gachagua, for his part, has fired back just as hard, accusing Murkomen and the police of deploying "special units" and state-sponsored goons to assault his supporters in Ol Kalou, and daring the CS to act: "There is nothing you can do to me."
It is a spectacle. It is also, fundamentally, a distraction from the docket Murkomen actually holds. The Interior Cabinet Secretary's constitutional mandate is national security and public order — not serving as the ruling party's chief attack dog against a political rival. North Rift leaders themselves put this bluntly: if the ministry can disarm "battle-hardened bandits" and recover thousands of illegal firearms, why can it not apply the same "ruthless efficiency" to protecting Kenyans from the very insecurity it is paid to prevent — instead of trading insults with a former deputy president on X and at rally after rally?
Every hour spent drafting a fresh broadside against Gachagua is an hour not spent interrogating why Loosuk was left exposed again, why cattle-rustling routes through Isiolo into Samburu remain porous, or why a police reservist could be gunned down within days of a CS-led "fresh operation." Kenyans in Samburu, Baringo and the Kerio Valley do not benefit from Murkomen winning a Twitter war. They benefit from being alive, with their livestock intact, when the sun comes up.
The Uniforms Without Faces
The same misplaced energy shows up, in a darker form, in how the state has handled its own citizens in the streets of Nairobi.
On June 25, 2026, Kenyans marked the anniversary of the 2024 Gen Z uprising with fresh demonstrations over police brutality, enforced disappearances and the still-unresolved compensation process for victims of earlier crackdowns. Days later, on Tuesday, July 7, 2026 — Saba Saba, the anniversary of the 1990 pro-democracy protests — police in Nairobi sealed off the central business district, refused to formally acknowledge protest notifications, and deployed checkpoints, unmarked vehicles and plainclothes officers to prevent a peaceful, pre-notified march from Jeevanjee Gardens to Parliament. Journalists on the ground described uniformed officers working alongside unidentified plainclothes men to bundle protesters into unmarked cars and, in at least one case, into the boot of a vehicle. Fewer than ten people managed to gather before they were dispersed. Activist Joshua Nyanjom's assessment was blunt: Kenyans, he said, were "being hunted in our own country."
This is the uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of Murkomen's tenure. When the target is unarmed petitioners carrying a document demanding accountability for extrajudicial killings, the security machinery is fast, coordinated, well-resourced and — tellingly — often unidentifiable, with officers operating without visible name tags or badge numbers in vehicles that carry no markings. When the target is an armed gang that has just killed four people in Samburu, the same machinery arrives after the fact, launches another "fresh" operation, and waits for the next attack.
A state that can deploy anonymous, faceless units within hours to block a peaceful march to Parliament cannot credibly claim it lacks the capacity to permanently dismantle banditry networks whose sponsors, by Murkomen's own account, are already known to intelligence. If security agencies "know where you are" for bandit financiers, as Murkomen warned in Lolmolok, the public deserves to know why that knowledge has not yet translated into arrests, prosecutions and a lasting peace — the same way it clearly can when the state decides, within a single afternoon, to identify, corner and detain a handful of protesters holding placards.
What Kenyans Actually Need From Their Interior CS
Kenya does not need a Cabinet Secretary who is more fluent in political insult than in operational security outcomes. It does not need officers who hide their identities from citizens exercising a constitutional right, while claiming they cannot locate armed men who have terrorised the same counties for years. And it certainly does not need an Interior Ministry whose loudest, most energetic interventions are reserved for a rival politician rather than the families burying their dead in Loosuk, Suguta and across the Kerio Valley.
Murkomen's job is to protect Kenyans and their property — all of them, in Samburu as much as in Nairobi, from bandits as much as from rogue officers. Until that becomes the visible, consistent priority, his warnings to "come for" bandit sponsors will keep sounding exactly like they did this week: strong words, delivered two days before the next funeral.
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