By Joyce Joyce Awino Ochieng It is 10th August 2027. The votes have been cast. Counting is underway. Millions of Kenyans are glued to their screens, waiting for the results. Is the air tense? Is the country calm? Does the uncertainty give way to tension, fear, and a descent to violence and anarchy? Or does it yield to restraint, confidence in the electoral process, and stability? In these critical hours, one question hangs over the country—was the writing on the wall? The answer to this question lies in the days long before the first vote was cast. The manner in which Kenyans navigate the period between the voting and declaration of results determines the events that follow, whether peaceful or otherwise. We have seen the signs before. Kenya has had a history of electoral-related violence since the establishment of multi-partyism in 1991. During the 2005 constitutional referendum campaign, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented incitement and hate speech and called for the investigation and prosecution of 16 sitting and former Members of Parliament. Human Rights Watch later recorded that none of them were investigated or prosecuted. The pattern continued into the 2007 election period. Just before the elections, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights published a report—Still Behaving Badly, a second report under its elections monitoring project that began in October 2007. The report documented the misuse and diversion of public resources, involvement of public officers in political campaigns, incitement and acts of violence, and the use of hate speech by the media and politicians in targeting individuals and communities along gender and ethnic lines. A Human Rights Watch report dubbed Ballots and Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya’s Crisis of Governance recorded significant violence in Kuresoi, Molo, and Mt. Elgon in the months preceding the 2007 election, resulting in about 200 deaths and 70,000 displacements. In those areas, political competition had already been intertwined with ethnic mobilization and organized violence, a troubling indication of the violence that would later engulf the country. Several leaders were implicated, while some persons of interest arrested for inciting and organizing violence were subsequently released as a result of suspected political interference. Does this ring a bell? In other words, the atrocities that plagued Kenya after the 2007 elections were not entirely unforeseen. Unfortunately, the warnings did not translate into sufficient preventive action. That failure should matter 20 years later. The violence that followed the disputed 2007 presidential election was devastating. More than 1,100 people were killed, approximately 600,000 were displaced, and thousands more were injured or lost their homes and livelihoods. Sexual violence was also committed on a significant scale. The violence exposed not only the destructive potential of political mobilization but also serious failures by state institutions to protect citizens and hold perpetrators to account. The Waki Commission subsequently recommended the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute those responsible. When Kenya failed to establish such a mechanism, the information contained in the Commission’s sealed envelope was eventually handed to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Among those who were eventually charged at the ICC were Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, both of whom would later serve as president of Kenya. The cases ultimately ended without trial verdicts, following significant evidentiary and witness-related difficulties, including allegations of witness interference and non-cooperation. The lesson from that experience should not simply be that Kenya once experienced post-election violence. The more difficult lesson is that violence can become predictable when warning signs are repeatedly identified but inadequately acted upon. It is also worth remembering the human consequences beyond the statistics. The violence included sexual violence and resulted in pregnancies. Some of the children born in the aftermath of those violations will be old enough to vote in 2027. They will enter this electoral cycle carrying a history they did not choose. That is another reason why prevention cannot be treated as a matter of political convenience. Now, we have stronger constitutional institutions, a more established election framework, a more active civil society, and greater capacity to monitor electoral risks. The Kofi Annan Foundation’s Electoral Vulnerability Index 2026–2027 estimates that Kenya faces over 80% probability of some form of electoral violence in the 2027 electoral cycle. This assessment should be treated as an early warning of the possibility of violence and attract sustained interventions to curb the same. Less than a year before the 2027 elections, we have already witnessed the disruption of political gatherings, attacks involving organized groups, deaths and injuries, destruction of property, inflammatory political rhetoric, and growing concern over political intolerance and the conduct of security agencies. These developments sit alongside longer-standing drivers of electoral violence, including ethnic mobilization, economic grievances, youth unemployment, historical grievances, community conflicts, organized criminal groups, and mistrust in public institutions. The information environment has also changed dramatically since 2007. Misinformation and disinformation can now travel almost instantaneously, while artificial intelligence introduces new possibilities for creating and amplifying fabricated audio, video, and images. The capacity to manipulate public perceptions during an already tense electoral period is therefore considerably greater than it was twenty years ago. The question is whether our preventive institutions have evolved at the same pace. The events of August 2026 provide a particularly important reminder. On 16th August, violence erupted around a Linda Mwananchi political mobilization in Homa Bay. Human Rights Watch reported that hundreds of people armed with machetes, guns, and sticks attacked a convoy transporting supporters and politicians to a planned rally, with at least three people killed. Journalists covering the events were also attacked and robbed of their equipment. Witnesses reported that police officers were present but unable to contain the violence. The day before, police had reported intercepting people allegedly carrying crude weapons along the Kisumu–Kericho road. Such reports should raise difficult questions about what information was available to the authorities before the violence and, more importantly, whether that information was acted upon effectively. The important point is not to rush to conclusions about who organized
