Karua demands end to 'politics of goonism,' holds Ruto accountable for security

Martha Karua stood in Murinduko ward, in Mwea, Kirinyaga county, and delivered a message that cut through the usual rhythms of political speech. The People's Liberation Party leader was done with what she called the politics of goonism—the practice, as she saw it, of allowing hired thugs to infiltrate demonstrations, break things, beat people, and then disappear while the government claimed ignorance. She was calling out the Kenya Kwanza administration directly, and she was not softening her language.

What Karua described was a pattern. Groups of youths, she said, were being deployed into peaceful protests not to participate but to sabotage them—to cause chaos, destroy property, and create the conditions for police crackdowns. The police, in her account, were not innocent bystanders. They stood by. They watched. They did nothing while demonstrators were attacked. This was not incompetence, in her view. It was complicity. She called on security officers to remember what they had sworn to do: protect Kenyans according to the constitution, not advance the political interests of whoever held power.

But Karua's sharpest criticism was reserved for President William Ruto himself. The head of state could not simply blame the police and wash his hands of responsibility, she argued. Ruto had taken an oath. He sat at the top. He was the principal person responsible for what the security agencies did in his name. The same applied to Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen. They could not hide behind individual officers. They had to own the system they commanded.

Kenyans, she said, were exhausted. They were tired of political violence. They were tired of intimidation. They were tired of being told that this was the cost of democracy, that disagreement had to be settled in the streets. The country had moved past that era once. It should not return. "We are saying we are tired of your lies," she told the crowd. "Take responsibility or go home. You do not have to complete five years in office." It was a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the government itself.

Karua's words carried weight because of where she was speaking from. Two months earlier, in June, she had traveled to Uganda to represent opposition leader Kizza Besigye in legal proceedings. Ugandan authorities denied her entry at Entebbe International Airport on June 22, despite her holding a Special Practising Certificate from the Uganda Law Council. She was detained and deported. Amnesty International condemned the action and called for an investigation, noting that it raised serious concerns about the rights of lawyers defending political opposition figures. Karua subsequently challenged the deportation in the Ugandan High Court.

That experience—being locked out of a neighboring country for trying to defend someone the government opposed—had clarified something for her. The threats to democracy in the region were not abstract. They were immediate. They were personal. And they required people to speak, even when speaking was costly. She said the incident had strengthened her resolve to defend human rights and democratic freedoms across the region.

What Karua was arguing for, ultimately, was a simple thing: that Kenyans should be able to exercise their political and constitutional rights without fear. That security officers should protect the public rather than be weaponized against it. That political disagreements should not degenerate into violence. That the country's democratic institutions should be protected, not hollowed out. She was also arguing that this responsibility fell on everyone—on citizens, on security agencies, on the government itself. Continued political violence, she warned, could undermine Kenya's stability and force people to live in fear of their own institutions. The choice, as she framed it, was not between order and chaos. It was between democracy and something else entirely.