By Morris Wambua

In this Republic, some transformations defy logic. One day, a sober young man plays evening soccer with friends, with no prospects, just pure happiness, and dreams too tired to take flight. Next thing you know, he returns to the village six months later in a stiff blue uniform, swinging a gun like a
shepherd’s rod and barking orders as if he invented the concept of law. He then beats one of his childhood friends, just to send a message that he's not just any regular chap.

It's clear that something happens in between.

Something unholy.

Because what returns to us is not the same man. No. The boy who once asked for salt from the neighbor is now a cold-eyed instrument of intimidation. The girl who once sold sukuma at the roadside now walks around with a swagger reserved for war veterans. You’d think she just came back from liberating Mogadishu.

All because of that cursed uniform and a badge glued to the heart like a demon’s contract.

This is the story of the Kenyan police. A story not just of brutality, but of betrayal. A story of state-sponsored cultism masquerading as law enforcement. And it’s time we call it what it is: a savage
institution manufactured to protect the powerful by dehumanizing the poor.

Welcome to the Police Training Colleges: The Churches of Pain

Let’s start with the source. The Police Training Colleges, the so-called cradles of our nation’s peacekeepers. You'd imagine that a police training college is a place of learning, character-building, and public service ethics.

Don’t fool yourself.

It’s not a college. It’s a conversion camp. A place where young, often underprivileged recruits are psychologically stripped of empathy, force-fed obedience, and baptized into the gospel of violence.

Here, pain is a teacher, and humiliation is a rite of passage. Cadets aren’t taught to serve the people—they’re trained to dominate them. Discipline isn’t modeled through integrity, but enforced through fear. By the time they leave training, they aren’t human beings trained to uphold justice.

They are cult initiates, fiercely loyal to the uniform, indifferent to the Constitution, and paranoid toward the public. They don’t emerge as police officers. They emerge as soldiers of a quiet war against their own people.

Civilians vs. Cultists

The first thing a new police officer learns isn’t how to manage conflict. It’s how to hate civilians.

Yes, hate.

Contempt drips from their mouths whenever they refer to “raia,” that dreaded word. Raia are to be distrusted, extorted, and brutalized. In their eyes, you are always up to something. And even if you’re not, they’ll make sure you are.

This is not a force trained to serve. It’s a force trained to separate. To create an artificial distance between themselves and the very society that birthed them.

It's cult logic.

Cults must make you believe you’re special. Chosen. Different. And just like cultists, these officers begin to treat outsiders with disdain and paranoia.

But the irony is as bitter as it is obvious. Strip away the badge, and the average Kenyan police officer lives a life not unlike the people he brutalizes. Worse, even.

Of Iron Sheets and Broken Souls

Go to any police lines. Not the show piece ones for tourists and camera crews. I mean the real ones. The crumbling barracks in Nyeri, in Kisumu, in Isiolo. Rusted mabati sheets that scream every time the wind blows. Shared toilets. Broken beds. Mold in the corners. Rats for roommates.

Here, you will find men and women who are supposed to be protectors of the state. Yet they live like prisoners in some low-budget dystopia. Eight grown adults sharing a single room, boiling water on a jiko in a basin, and hiding their misery behind forced authority.

They are sent to quell riots in estates where the residents live better than them. Their children get shoved into the same broken-down public schools. They queue in the same public hospitals with expired gloves and nurses on strike.

And yet they act like overlords.

Why? Because of the gun. That weapon doesn’t just shoot bullets. It shoots ego, too.

To the Kenyan police officer, the gun is more than a tool. It is a symbol of spiritual elevation. It grants them the power to become something they were never allowed to be—feared.

The government won’t give them decent housing.Won’t give them decent pay. But they’ll give them a gun and let them do as they please. They may not afford diapers, but they can shoot your knee caps and go home smiling. It’s a twisted bargain: tolerate poverty, but in return, here’s unchecked power over your fellow man.

And they take it gladly.

They live for it.

It’s the only time they feel alive.

On duty, brandishing the gun like a divine artifact, shouting at matatu drivers like colonial agents, demanding bribes like self-appointed tax collectors. Because where else can a man who lives in a tin box feel like a god?

A System Built to Break Everyone

Make no mistake—the system is working exactly as intended. The Kenyan police aren’t broken. They are functioning precisely as designed: to protect the political class and control the poor.

They aren’t meant to think, or question, or resist. They are meant to follow orders, slap civilians, and secure “peace”—defined, of course, as the absence of inconvenience to the rich.

They are trained to see every protester as a potential terrorist. Every slum as a breeding ground of crime, and every youth as a suspect. Their loyalty is not to the people but to the chain of command. A command that feeds on bribes, thrives on fear, and punishes decency.

That’s why they’ll beat you for loitering, but salute a land thief in a V8. That’s why they’ll harass boda riders trying to make an honest living, but escort drug lords across county lines. That’s why
they’ll kill unarmed teenagers in Mathare and plant a gun on the body, then be celebrated in the mess hall over tea and maandazi.

It’s not madness. It’s policy.

But here’s the cruel twist: these officers weren’t born monsters. They were made.

They are victims, too. Victims of a state that gives them guns instead of dignity. Victims of a system that dangles power like a drug to numb the pain of poverty. Victims of a culture that teaches men that to be feared is better than to be respected.

They suffer. Their families suffer. And rather than confront their masters, they turn their rage on the only people more powerless than them; the ordinary mwananchi.

It’s a tragic cycle: the oppressed becoming the oppressors. The wounded becoming the ones who wound. And deep inside, many of them know it. That’s why they’re so angry all the time. That’s why they slap first and talk later.

That’s why a petty traffic stop can escalate into a homicide. They are angry at their own lives. Angry at the lie they were sold. Angry that after all the salutes and uniform polishing and arrests, they still go back to sleep in a leaking metal shack with a plastic chair and a mattress from 1998.

But they don’t know how to aim that anger up the food chain.

So they aim it at us.

Reform? You Must Be Joking

How many times have we heard it? "Police reform is underway." A new commission. A new IGP with a fresh smile and empty buzzwords. New slogans. New rules.

And yet every day, someone is extorted at a roadblock. Someone is shot for refusing a bribe. Someone disappears and is found floating in a river. Same faces, same methods, different headlines.

You cannot reform a cult. You must dismantle it. Rebuilding this force requires more than uniforms and PR. It requires unlearning decades of indoctrination. It requires starting from scratch, with
new leadership, new philosophy, and real accountability. But until that day comes, we will remain trapped in this national hostage situation.

So what do we do?

We speak. We shout. We document. We remember.

We must stop pretending this is normal. It is not normal to fear the police more than criminals. It is not normal for young men to vanish without a trace. It is not normal to pay bribes just to walk home at night. And it is not normal for a nation’s security force to be made up of angry, underpaid, overarmed cultists who live like orphans and act like warlords.

Kenya deserves better. And so do the police, ironically. They, too, are humans trying to survive a system designed to dehumanize everyone.

But they will not be saved by pity. They will only be saved by a nation that demands more. More integrity. More accountability. More sanity.

Until then, remember this: when you see a Kenyan police officer swaggering with a gun and spitting insults at a street vendor, don’t just see a bully. See a man trapped in a broken mabati dream. A foot soldier in a cult of national tragedy. A mirror of a state that long stopped caring.