EATING ITS OWN PEOPLE: Security Laws Pushed By Mt Kenya Leaders During Uhuru’s Time Now Haunts Them

How the chickens have come home to roost for Kenya’s political elite

NAIROBI – In a bitter twist of political irony, the controversial security laws that Mount Kenya leaders bulldozed through Parliament during President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration have now turned their fangs on the very architects who created them.

The Security Laws Amendment Act, which sailed through the National Assembly despite fierce resistance from the then-opposition CORD coalition, has metamorphosed into a weapon of mass political destruction – one that no longer discriminates between friend and foe.

Genesis of a monster

Cast your mind back to 2014.

President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto, buoyed by their parliamentary majority, steamrolled amendments to security laws that opposition leaders warned would eviscerate constitutional freedoms.

The Mount Kenya political establishment, drunk on power and convinced of their invincibility, dismissed these warnings as the desperate cries of a defeated opposition.

James Orengo, then Siaya Senator and CORD’s chief legal eagle, stood before the High Court arguing that these amendments violated the Bill of Rights.

His warnings about threats to freedom of expression, media freedom, fair trial rights, and privacy protections fell on deaf ears among the ruling elite.

“Sometimes governments eat their own people,” Orengo prophetically declared during heated Senate debates. “In another one year, you will be crying in my office to come and represent you.”

How prescient those words now seem.

Boomerang effect

Today, as Kenya writhes under a wave of state-sponsored killings, mysterious abductions, and systematic human rights violations, the security apparatus has shed all pretense of restraint.

The tools that were supposedly designed to combat terrorism have been repurposed into instruments of political persecution.

The recent charging of human rights activist Boniface Mwangi with terrorism-related offenses over his alleged role in anti-government protests epitomizes this transformation.

Police claimed to have recovered an unused teargas canister and blank firearm rounds from his home – evidence so flimsy it borders on the absurd.

Yet under the security laws that Mount Kenya leaders championed, such threadbare evidence can now sustain terrorism charges.

A harvest of tears

The statistics paint a chilling picture of how far the state has fallen.

At least 777 people were arrested during the recent Saba Saba protests, facing charges ranging from terrorism to burglary.

Young political activists like Peter Kinyanjui and Serah Thiga now find themselves branded as terrorists for daring to exercise their constitutional right to protest.

Former Chief Justice David Maraga, watching this grotesque theater unfold, condemned the terrorism charges as naked state overreach.

“A terrorist offence is a serious offence,” he observed. “Charging someone with terrorism just to deny them bond, traumatise them and keep them in custody… We are not going to allow this to continue.”

The reckoning

The cruel irony is not lost on close observers of Kenyan politics.

The very Mount Kenya leaders who dismissed constitutional concerns while expanding state security powers now find themselves and their political allies subject to the mechanisms they championed.

Former National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi, who presided over these amendments, now condemns what he calls the “political weaponisation” of security laws against citizens who dare criticize the government.

Governor James Orengo, vindicated in his earlier opposition, called the terrorism charges against protesters “ridiculous.”

His earlier warning that “revolutions eat their own children” has proven hauntingly accurate.

The bitter truth

What we are witnessing is not merely the abuse of power – it is the logical conclusion of a flawed premise.

When political leaders prioritize expediency over constitutional principles, when they choose short-term advantage over long-term institutional health, they invariably create monsters that eventually turn on their creators.

The Mount Kenya political establishment’s cavalier attitude toward constitutional safeguards during their ascendancy has now created a Frankenstein that threatens to devour them.

The security laws they pushed through with such confidence have become a sword of Damocles hanging over their own heads.

Lessons unlearned

As Kenya grapples with this self-inflicted wound, one cannot help but wonder whether our political leaders will finally grasp the fundamental truth that constitutional rights exist not to protect the guilty, but to restrain the powerful.

The security laws saga serves as a stark reminder that in politics, as in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Those who sow the wind of authoritarian overreach will inevitably reap the whirlwind of political persecution.

The question now is whether Kenya’s political class has the wisdom to step back from this precipice, or whether they will continue their descent into the abyss of their own making.

As Orengo warned all those years ago: “When power gets into your head, you will never remember that one day there is a bigger power… that will deal with you.”

That day of reckoning appears to have arrived.