From marginalisation to victimisation: The weapons in Kenya's electoral politics

Goons in Homa Bay during the Linda Mwananchi rally.[File, Standard]

For the past week, Homa Bay has been a familiar punchline on Kenya’s social-media streets, where images of dusty, cratered roads, with claims of marginalisation by previous regimes, have fueled bitter political rivalry that saw violence during the recent Linda Mwananchi rally.

The roads have been turned into memes depicting a county trapped somewhere between the landscapes of countries in the desert Gulf regions.

The mockery has gone a step further, with social-media users creatively borrowing scenes and titles associated with DJ Afro’s famously dubbed action movies, fictitiously relocating the films to Homa Bay and joking that the county’s roads provide the perfect backdrop for movies supposedly shot in Afghanistan and Yemen.

But beneath the humour lies a more serious political question: how did a region with decades of representation by some of the country’s most influential political figures come to be presented as a victim of perpetual marginalisation?

That question acquired a sharper edge during the recent Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna-led Linda Mwananchi political rally in Homa Bay, where a visit by opposition-linked politicians was met by confrontation and violence.

At least four people, including a police officer, lost their lives in the violence while several others sustained life-changing injuries.

Hours before the fateful day, Homa Bay Town lawmaker Peter Kaluma was captured in a clip that has since gone viral, directing a group of youth to "deal with 'one term' supporters in the county. He later said the sentiments in his local dialect have been misinterpreted.

It is reported that hours after the meeting, the youths attacked some targeted hotels, vandalized and stole goods worth millions of shillings.

Accusations and counter-accusations have since emerged as a section of government-allied leaders and the opposition trade blames on who is responsible for the chaos.

Embakasi East lawmaker and his Suba South counterpart Caroli Omondi took a jibe at Kaluma and Governor Gladys Wanga, accusing them of sponsoring the goons.

"Goons were sent to attack and threaten us," Babu said early this week when he accompanied his security details, accused of planning the violence, to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations headquarters, calling for the arrest of Kaluma and Wanga.

On the other hand, Kaluma,.who has widely been condemned for inciting the youths against the ODM splinter group, pointed finger at the Linda Mwananchi group for orchestrating the violence.

"Orengo and Babu Owino recruited individuals across all towns and trading centers in Homa Bay to coordinate their activities and to enlist local people, college and university students to support them during the rally, and Babu booked these dreaded thugs into hotels across Homa Bay County," he claimed.

Weeks before the rally, reports emerged that there were plans to disrupt the Linda Mwananchi rally.

“We have very elaborate plans to mete out violence against the people of Homa Bay County during our tour next Sunday,” MP Omondi alleged.

The scenes exposed how political competition can transform legitimate grievances about development into a struggle over who has the right to enter a political space, address its residents and challenge the dominant narrative.

Professor of Leadership and Management, Gitile Naituli, argues that the events illustrate a dangerous trend in which marginalisation and victimhood are deployed as political weapons rather than treated as questions requiring accountability and solutions.

“What happened in Homa Bay was very deplorable,” Prof Naituli says, arguing that the condition of roads should prompt questions about the responsibilities of elected leaders rather than simply blame the national government.

"The claim about marginalisation arises from politicians when they have been unable to deliver," he told The Sunday Standard.

His argument challenges a familiar feature of Kenyan politics: the tendency to explain poor development through the language of exclusion while shifting attention away from local political accountability.

For years, politicians across the country have invoked historical marginalisation to consolidate regional support. Communities are reminded of roads that were never built, hospitals that lack equipment, unemployment, poverty and perceived exclusion from national power.

Prof. Naituli observes that while such grievances are real in many cases, the political weaponisation comes when these frustrations are converted into an “us versus them” narrative in which criticism of local leadership is portrayed as betrayal of the community.

He argues that this becomes particularly potent during election cycles because fear can mobilise voters more effectively than policy proposals.

“As a political strategy, it works,” he says, noting that politicians can invoke marginalisation even where communities have substantial representation in Parliament and government.

And in instances where there is genuine marginalisation, political commentator Daniel Juma says leaders from both camps take advantage of poverty to exploit the people, especially the youth.

"The origin of goonship is the jobless young people who are vulnerable for hire by politicians," he opined, arguing that the incidents of violence in Homa Bay are a sign of marginalisation.

"We need to clean up our politics," he added, stating that politics must solve the problem of a poor economy. particularly unemployment. 

At the center of the  Homa Bay chaos, critics say, was "marginalisation" of the region, a claim by a section of proponents of Broadbased arrangement government leaders led by Wanga.

Weeks before the rally, government-allied leaders had turned their guns against former President Uhuru Kenyatta, accusing him of doing "nothing" to the region during his tenure.

Some roads were blocked ahead of the rally, forcing the Sifuna team to use alternative routes that exposed the poor state of road infrastructure in the county, particularly Suba South.

A section of the county's broad-based leaders would later claim that the poor roads were "feeder roads," even as they largely attributed the problem to marginalisation..

Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi, who served the Constituency as an MP for 15 years, blamed the problem on his successor, Omondi.

However, Suba North MP Millie Mabona dismissed the claims saying: "Let us stop cheating people by saying those are feeder roads and that the main roads were barricaded. What you see are the main roads."

Similar claims of marginalisation have been made by leaders from other parts of Kenya, including Mt. Kenya East.

Recently, Public Service CS Geoffrey Ruku said the eastern region has been sidelined since independence through unequal distribution of development, leadership opportunities and public resources.

"About 77.75% of the roads have been built on the Mt. Kenya West side, while only 22.3% have been built on the Mt. Kenya East side. Are we lesser people? Don't we also deserve roads?" He recently posed while presiding over a function in Meru county.

He added: "But now some people are chanting 'one term', saying the government is bad, calling out 'one term', and using slogans such as 'Kasongo' and 'Soprano'. We are telling them: stop the propaganda."

Coast leaders have also had a share of the claims for years now.

Generally, this has been the culture of politicians. Every electioneering across generations.

Analysts argue that development failures cannot always be attributed to exclusion from State power and that all other locally elected leaders including Governors, MPs and even Members of County Assembly, should be held accountable.

"It is you (leaders) to bring a petition to the table highlighting the issues of your own people and then get a consensus in the house of the nation, like parliament or senate to support that this has to happen," said political analyst Joakim Simiyu.

He warned that leaders claim that they have been prevented from developing their own areas. 

"People who occupy those front seats are only thinking about their own stomachs," he observed, stating that one cannot blame a leader from another region for their own problems.

"It is important that we look into why we have not contributed to solving our own problems instead of pointing a finger at other people," he said, adding that elected leaders control significant aspects of local development and oversight and determine the allocation of national resources.

According to Prof Naituli, this problem is exacerbated by ignorance among Kenyans and the fear of their leaders who have committed economic crimes.

"The fear comes because they have committed crimes. They have used their office not to serve the people,  but to loot, even to murder. So, they are now afraid you will go to jail," he said.

This creates a difficult accountability question for regions such as Homa Bay: if leaders have been repeatedly elected on promises of transformation, who should voters hold responsible when roads remain impassable and public services deteriorate?

The political response, however, is often to redirect the frustration outward.

Instead of asking why promised projects have stalled, politicians choose to tell voters that their community is being targeted. Instead of debating the performance of an MP, governor or administration, political competition becomes a test of regional loyalty.

This is where victimhood becomes electorally useful..

The violence witnessed during the Linda Mwananchi visit therefore carries implications beyond the immediate political confrontation, Naituli warns.

“What they are doing is very dangerous,” he says, warning that if one region begins to suggest that certain political actors should not be allowed into its territory, other communities could respond in kind.

“Nobody is coming to our place. So do we have a country?” he asks.

Sifuna, while appearing on a local TV station, had once also warned against what he termed as characterising specific regions as marginalised.

"Let us approach marginalisation as a national problem," he said, urging leaders to "think of others as well."