History will judge Ruto harshly if the goons menace is not dealt with decisively

Goons in kenya streets are becoming uncontrolable.[File, Standard]

Monopoly of violence has been outsourced to goons who no longer answer to anyone.

In her book, 'Frankenstein ', Mary Shelley must have had Kenya in mind. Her main character,  Victor Frankenstein, assembles a being from parts of dead bodies in his elaborate laboratory, breathes life into it, then recoils in horror at what he has made. The creature, abandoned and unclaimed, turns on its maker and everyone around him. "I am malicious because I am miserable", the monster said at some point.

Shelley wrote the novel circa 1816 and titled it ‘The Modern Prometheus’, after the titan who stole fire from the gods and was chained to a rock for eternity as punishment. Kenya, too, is nursing its own Promethean bargain, power held by feeding a fire never meant to be tamed.

The tragedy that followed Frankenstein's experiment was the devastating chain of events caused by the creature he brought to life. Horrified by its appearance, he abandoned it, leaving the being to fend for itself. When it was rejected by society and consumed by loneliness, the creature became bitter and vengeful. It murdered Frankenstein's young brother before killing Clerval, Frankenstein's closest friend. Later, the creature murdered Frankenstein's bride, Elizabeth, on their wedding night.

The tragedy is not just the deaths, but the cycle of rejection, vengeance, and obsession that destroyed both creator and creation. With the advent of goonism, Kenya takes the place of Frankenstein's laboratory, and President William Ruto easily becomes the scientist who was unable to control his monster. Like the creature, Kenya's goons have proven to all that they are not only miserable, they are malicious. Since June 2024, the State has been feeding a monster it will one day be unable to leash.

The chaotic scenes in Kisumu on Sunday were shocking. Goons armed with bows, arrows and clubs stormed St Stephens ACK Cathedral and attacked the Linda Mwananchi team, leaving one man seriously injured. In Nyahururu, another Linda Mwananchi team was ambushed fresh from a service at AIPCA Cathedral, and Murang'a Governor Irungu Kang'ata's driver took a bullet to the chest for his trouble.

Kenya's acquaintance with hired muscle is neither new nor brief. The Mungiki sect terrorised Central Kenya through the 1990s before being proscribed. What distinguishes this latest crop is not their existence but their audacity; the readiness to storm a cathedral mid-service without pretence of restraint.

The goons did not wait outside the church gates or even pretend to respect the sanctuary. Previous governments stood accused of many sins, but their enforcers understood one unwritten rule: a criminal who ran into a church was safe until he walked out on his own accord. That line has now been erased, and sadly, under a president who wears his Christianity like a campaign poster.

Optics suggest that Kenya has quietly graduated from a democracy to a dictatorship, to Wanjiku's consternation. Citizens' voices, and those of civil society, are routinely drowned out by a state that brooks no challenge. Government critics vanish, turn up dead, or simply disappear without a trace, and the police, who deny complicity at every turn, cannot explain why nobody has been arrested for any of it.

Philosopher Edmund Burke's warning that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing was never intended as a governing philosophy, yet it increasingly describes ours.

None of this lawlessness thrives without help. It is fed by a government that treats court orders as mere suggestions rather than commands, and it is emboldened by a state that has effectively donated its monopoly of violence to men with clubs and bad intentions.

Mr President, the monster is now attacking pulpits. It does not care who it shoots or whose cathedral it desecrates. What needs to be done is simple. If the will exists, and it bothers your conscience, simply order the arrest of those behind these attacks, obey the courts your government keeps defying, and reclaim the monopoly of violence your government has so carelessly outsourced. Bar this, history will remember you not as the President who built anything, but as the one who dismembered a country he inherited whole.