Sunday in Nairobi. The Nairobi Dispatch introduces itself with the observation that, as weeks for political columnists go, this one required no embellishment. The facts did the work. I shall present them with the seasoning they need and no more.

Ruto in Mandera: “Noisemakers and Vision-less”

President William Ruto spent part of Friday in Mandera County. Reading from what appears to have been the morning’s prepared remarks, he dismissed his political opponents as “noisemakers and vision-less,” questioned whether they could locate Border Point One on a map, and asked rhetorically whether any of them had been to Rhamu or Wajir.

This is a particular register of Kenyan presidential rhetoric. It is also a register Ruto has been deploying with increasing frequency over the last four months, as opposition pressure has intensified around fuel prices, IMF conditionality, judicial reforms, and the general cost-of-living compression. Presidents who speak this way about their critics are usually presidents who feel the critics are gaining traction. Secure presidents ignore critics. Nervous presidents name them.

Mandera Governor Adan Khalif backed the President’s development track record, praising the three presidential visits to the county in eight months. Health CS Aden Duale defended the remarks against claims of disrespect. The usual choreography.

I note only that the President reciting the names of towns in northern Kenya — “Do they know where Wajir is?” — is a curious rhetorical move when those towns have, for decades, been the locus of precisely the sixty years of neglect the President himself has said his government is trying to correct. If neglect has been the pattern, then yes, previous governments’ opposition figures may well not have visited Wajir in any functional capacity. The question proves the premise.

How ODM Walked Into a Trap

The Daily Nation ran a piece this weekend — and it is worth reading in full — arguing that ODM has walked into a political trap of Ruto’s making. The sequence: quiet meetings after the 2024 post-protest crisis. Then cabinet appointments (Mbadi to Treasury, Wandayi to Energy, Joho to Mining, Oparanya to Cooperatives, Askul to the East African Community docket). Then shared platforms. Then, with Raila Odinga’s death last year, the loss of the one figure whose authority could impose discipline on the arrangement.

The result is what ODM is now confronting: the party is fragmenting. Some MPs are being pressured — ODM’s own description, repeated by Minority Leader Junet Mohammed — to defect to UDA. The Linda Mwananchi splinter group is publicly attacking ODM’s leadership. The Central Management Committee has scheduled a meeting to consider withdrawing from the arrangement entirely.

This is the political question of 2026 for Kenya. ODM supplied the cabinet stability Ruto needed after the protests; in exchange, ODM appears to have lost the coherence of its national opposition function. Junet has now said — publicly, in an interview — that “there are people in government who are fighting this union.” The stronger reading of the same facts is that the union was the fight; the absorption was the point.

As of yesterday, ODM has suspended 2027 coalition talks with UDA. This does not end the arrangement. It signals that the party’s leadership has finally read the room.

Whether ODM can rebuild opposition credibility between now and 2027 with its Treasury Cabinet Secretary still serving the President it is trying to challenge is — I would submit — the kind of question that does not have a satisfactory answer.

The Fuel Crisis and Tuesday’s Planned Protests

Kenyans have threatened to take to the streets on Tuesday to protest high fuel prices, despite President Ruto’s VAT reduction signed last week (fuel VAT was cut from 16% to 8% in the Finance Bill amendments). The opposition is arguing that the cut has not translated to pump prices because global oil prices — now at approximately US$100/barrel following the Iran tensions — are swamping the domestic tax adjustment.

The opposition is correct on the mathematics. The government is correct that it took the one fiscal action available to it. Both can be true.

The question on Tuesday is whether the protests remain at the level of rhetoric and small demonstrations, or whether they scale to the 2024 June-July register. The 2024 protests produced a cabinet restructuring and the eventual ODM arrangement. A repeat at similar scale would produce political consequences that I cannot predict and that, frankly, the current administration has limited bandwidth to absorb.

I urge anyone planning to attend to know your rights, know the location of the nearest hospital, and do not go alone. I hope there is no reason for any of that advice to matter.

Sama Lays Off 1,108

Sama — the Nairobi-based data-annotation and business process outsourcing firm, formerly known as Samasource — has issued redundancy notices to 1,108 employees.

Sama has been one of Kenya’s most visible tech success stories for over a decade. It trained thousands of Kenyan workers in data labelling for major AI companies. Its founder has been celebrated in global media. Its workforce has been the subject of both praise for creating jobs and criticism for the conditions under which some of that work was done (content moderation of traumatic material for OpenAI, for instance, led to a lawsuit settled in 2024).

Now the business model has hit its limit. Large-language-model training has reduced demand for the specific annotation work Sama was built to supply. The company is restructuring. Eleven hundred Kenyan families are receiving redundancy notices.

This matters beyond Sama. The broader Kenyan digital-outsourcing sector — which was sold to a generation of educated young Kenyans as the future of the labour market — is contracting. Teleperformance and similar firms are restructuring regionally. The narrative that “tech will absorb our youth” is under stress at precisely the moment when the fuel crisis is compressing the rest of the labour market.

The Ministry of Labour should be thinking very seriously about where these 1,108 people land. Based on public statements to date, it is not clear the Ministry is thinking at all.

The Meru Tragedy

I will be brief on this because it deserves more than I can give it in a launch column.

A father in Meru, in apparent mental distress, killed his children with poisoned yoghurt. The details are in the Daily Nation; I will not reproduce them here.

The pattern of fathers killing their children in acute moments of crisis is not, unfortunately, a novel one in Kenya. It usually emerges at the intersection of mental illness, economic pressure, and the cultural code that prevents men from seeking help. The public conversation after such events typically runs its course in three news cycles and then dies, until the next one.

I would like to see something else this time. I would like to see the Ministry of Health, together with the relevant parliamentary committees, convene a serious working group on male mental health in Kenya — not a task force, not a committee, an actual working group with a six-month timeline and a budget. The pattern will not stop until we address it as a pattern rather than as a series of individual tragedies.

The children in this story had names. Their mother is alive. The community is shattered. We owe them more than a news cycle.

Closing

A president dismissing critics. An opposition party discovering the terms of its accommodation. A protest being organised. A tech company closing its doors on eleven hundred families. A father destroying his own family in Meru.

This is Kenya in April 2026. A country that can produce all of this in a single week is a country worth writing about carefully. I shall.

— The Nairobi Dispatch