Safari to Pagak or Singapore? Why Homa Bay should worry us

Youth storm Nyandiwa shopping centre in Homa Bay County after goons attacked Linda Mwananchi convoy. [Sammy Omingo, Standard]

Are we going to Singapore, or are we on Safari to Pagak? This may sound like a strange question to ask of Kenya in 2026. Yet this is precisely the question we should ask, after the mayhem in Homa Bay last week.

Singapore is now a familiar meme. It is a common name in almost every Kenyan household; President William Ruto’s shorthand for the modern country he imagines Kenya could become.

Beyond being modern in the econometric sense, it could also, hopefully, be a disciplined and efficiently governed nation.

President Ruto repeatedly invokes the Singapore trope as a model of transformation.

This is easy to understand. East Africa, generally, marvels at the Southeast Asian island that morphed from relative poverty to extraordinary prosperity within one generation.

Through discipline, investment, institutions, technology and long-term planning, the tiny island (50km from east to west, and 21km from north to South) bid goodbye to poverty and poor standards of living.

Kenyans lament that in her poor days, the Asian nation was at par, well, almost at par, with their own country. And while Singapore has dragged herself out of the miasma, East Africa has dug and sunk deeper.

Sixty years on, the two are worlds apart. But Kenya now dreams of waking up and catching up. Hence, the notion of the journey to Singapore.

The Safari to Pagak is less familiar. That is indeed why it is useful to ask if Kenya could embark on this journey.

It was Okot p’Bitek who told the world of Safari to Pagak. In the dramatic and poetic monologue titled Song of Lawino, Pagak is the place of no return, death’s homestead. It is the destination of the last safari.

Last week’s happenings in Homa Bay, and many more elsewhere, speak to a country that could be headed to Pagak, and not to the Singapore city-state.

Singapore is a dream, Pagak a warning. And somewhere between the two, Kenya is making a journey. The question is, in which direction?

That is a question President Ruto should ask each morning, as he wakes up, and each evening, as he retires to bed. For, it is the only question by which his helmsmanship in State House shall be remembered. Did he take Kenya to Singapore, or did he sink the nation into Pagak?

The question has acquired an uncomfortable immediacy after what happened in Homa Bay.

There have been reports of young men openly carrying machetes and other crude weapons. Roads blocked with rocks. Vehicles attacked and torched. Journalists assaulted and injured. People maimed and lives ruined. Police subsequently arrested dozens of suspects.

There is cause to believe that young people were recruited and paid to disrupt the Linda Mwananchi visit to the county.

Lawmakers, who are graduates of good schools and universities, were heard at rallies proclaiming death to anyone against the broad-based Kenya Kwanza-ODM regime.

This, in itself, is a giant oxymoron. A lawyer, who is also a lawmaker, invites and incites citizens to affray! There was never greater lived incongruency.

But there is one fact that requires no interpretation. Machetes were present in a political confrontation. That should trouble us. What is a machete doing in a political argument?

Chinua Achebe, in Anthills of the Savannah, gives us a deceptively simple thought: where one thing stands, another thing can stand there beside it.

It is a profound observation about possibility. Where an argument stands, another argument can stand. Where one political programme stands, another can stand. Where one grievance stands, another grievance can stand. But what if, beside the argument, we put a machete, like we are now doing in Kenya?

When you cannot counter an argument with another argument, you counter it with a machete. Suppose then, where one machete stands, another machete could stand there, to counter it? And then another machete? And another?

That is where the trouble begins. Why? Because the great achievement of democratic politics is not that it eliminates disagreement. People will always disagree. Yet, democracy civilizes disagreement. It permits us to hate an argument without hating the person who makes it. To lose an election without losing the country. This is what every legislator, every governor, youth leader and every President must wake up to. That even if they lose an election, the country should not also be lost.

Democracy permits the defeated politician to go home and prepare for another contest.

The machete breaks that compact. It says that disagreement may no longer be settled by argument. The other person is no longer merely an opponent. He is an enemy. This is what Kenyans have heard, unfortunately not only in Homa Bay, but also in Wamunyoro, Sagana, and Kericho.

Opponents are being defined as enemies, to be flushed from under their beds, to meet death. It does not matter if the person saying this is Rigathi Gachagua, or Peter Kaluma. Theirs is a call to Pagak.

Enemies, unlike opponents, can be dealt with by force. They can be killed, as they do not belong to our moral community, where things like killing are taboo.

Kenya Kwanza-ODM is taking Kenya to this dangerous transition, particularly when young people are incited and involved. For, Kenyan youth are perhaps the most exciting political factor in the country today. The youth have demonstrated, since June 2024, that they are impatient with inherited hierarchies. They question political authority. They are technologically sophisticated. They communicate outside the old party and media structures. They have shown that they can mobilise rapidly and, sometimes, spectacularly. This is a boon.

But Homa Bay has taught us that being young is not itself a political virtue. Kenya is reminding the world that young people can renew democracy, yet they can also destroy it.

The danger is therefore not that Kenya’s youth are becoming political. It is that Kenyan politics is encouraging and even paying them to become violent. By any standards, that is a terrible betrayal of the political potential in the country’s youth.

History shows us that Kenya’s old political class has always understood the usefulness of youthful energy. Young people can fill rallies.

They carry flags. They chant, and they can defend a politician and attack his opponent.

In the darkest form of political mobilisation, they can carry weapons and administer them upon the enemy, as paid and instructed to administer.

The politician stays behind, the young man takes the risk. The young man is injured and sometimes gets arrested, too. Indeed, the young man may even die.

Meanwhile, somebody else harvests the political benefit. The MCA, MP, governor, or even the President, harvests the political benefit, while the young man rots away in a lonely grave.

That is not youth empowerment to the First World, it is the exploitation of youth. It is not taking Kenya to Singapore, it is sure Safari to Pagak.

And this Safari raises another question. What happens when one side believes the other side is armed? It is simple: it arms itself. When the first side sees the second side’s weapons, it arms itself further. The cycle becomes self-justifying, and endless.

If they have stones, we need stones. If they have clubs, we need clubs. If they have machetes, we need machetes. If they have guns, we need guns.

The political disagreement becomes a primitive arms race. This is how political violence isnormalized – or shall we just say, becomes the norm?

It is not necessarily through one great national catastrophe, but through a series of gradual acceptance of things that were once unthinkable.

One rally is disrupted, and one opponent intimidated. One mob tolerated, and one weapon displayed. One injury is explained away and one death is rationalised.

One politician who should condemn violence, instead, finds a reason to excuse it. It is particularly telling when that politician is the MP, senator, governor, or the President. For then, another weapon must stand beside the first.

This is why Homa Bay matters beyond Homa Bay. The question that the world must ask before it is too late is this: what kind of political culture is Kenya building, even as people talk about Singapore?

I wrote here last week that Singapore is not simply about tall buildings, ports, technology and GDP. It is worth repeating for the benefit of the owners of the Singaporean dream that Singapore’s deeper achievement is institutional.

It represents a society in which rules, administration, order and long-term purpose have been made central to national development.

You cannot build that kind of country while allowing political disagreement to become physical combat.

You cannot demand world-class investment while teaching citizens that political opponents may be driven from the streets by force. Or that mobs can invade a tourist hotel and destroy it as the police watch helplessly.

For what are ten policemen before a State-sponsored armed gang of two hundred? You cannot build a rules-based economy on a political culture in which the rules are negotiable, because political stakes are high.

President Ruto and the university professors who dream with him about Singapore need to be reminded that Singapore is more than an economic destination.

It is disappointing that we have to remind professors who introduced us to political science at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s and in the ‘80s that Singapore is a political discipline.

Pagak is the opposite warning. It is not simply another country, or another place

It is a metaphor for the point at which political violence becomes normal, institutions lose authority and citizens begin to settle political questions by force.

The most frightening thing about Pagak is that one does not necessarily know when the journey has begun. These Safaris are made of small steps.

So, perhaps, we should ask uncomfortable questions about Homa Bay.

Who were the young men carrying the weapons? Who organised them? Who financed them?Who expected them to get away with it? And, most importantly: Who benefits when Kenyan youth become political weapons to be used against the Opposition?

These questions matter more than the machetes themselves. The machete is only an instrument.

The deeper problem is the political imagination that puts this object into someone’s hand. And what should the Kenyan nation, in good conscience, do about such a person?

Civic happenings since June 2024 show that Kenya’s youth stand at an extraordinary crossroads.

 They can become the generation that changes the grammar of Kenyan politics or the demographic that sends the country to the dogs. They can make Kenya less ethnic, or be the instruments of decay.

Homa Bay demonstrates that they can become the generation that reproduces, with younger faces, the crass political habits it claims to despise. This is the Singapore-Pagak paradox.

Singapore is what Kenya says it wants to become. Pagak is what Kenya seems to be becoming.

Countries do not travel by eloquent pious speeches. They travel by habits, what they tolerate, and what they punish. The machetes in Homa Bay should trouble every Kenyan, not because one Sunday proves that Kenya is on Safari to Pagak.

Maybe it is not yet, exactly, on that road.

Yet, it should still trouble us, because every political culture has a direction.And Kenya-Kwanza-ODM seems to be pointing towards Pagak.

If one thing can stand beside another one, it should be a political argument. The thing standing beside political power should be accountability.

When the elections come next year, the thing standing beside victory should be restraint, while that beside defeat should be dignified acceptance of defeat.

It cannot be a machete. Singapore requires construction. Pagak requires only the abandonment of restraint.

To President Ruto, his Cabinet, and his visionary professors: are we going to Singapore? Or have we begun the safari to Pagak?