Kenya’s abduction crisis: Are disappearances being used to silence critics?
By Ndiritu Wanjiru, March 25, 2026The recent disappearance of former cabinet secretary Raphael Tuju once again plunged Kenya into a thorny and pressing national debate over the issue of abductions, forced disappearances and the place of the state.
What first seemed to be a way of reflecting an upward trend of politically sensitive disappearances has become the locus of determining whether the current administration is overseeing or is doing nothing to prevent a disturbing trend.
On Sunday, March 22, 2026, Tuju was reported missing after his car was discovered parked in the suburb of Nairobi, Karen, which immediately sparked speculation that he had been kidnapped.
The political figures and the masses were quick to make comparisons with the recent events where activists and critics of the government had disappeared under the same circumstances.
But a twist of the tale occurred when the Directorate of Criminal Investigations reported that Tuju had faked his disappearance, and the purported trailing by unknown people was a conspiracy theory of how to bring confusion.
The rate at which a lot of Kenyans believed that Tuju had been kidnapped is nonetheless a testament to the prevailing environment.
A common thread in many of these stories is that the victims are often young, politically engaged, or vocal on social media and are picked up by mysterious men in often unmarked cars, without the involvement of a paper trail of any kind of arrest having occurred. Others re-emerge later with torture allegations, and the rest are still missing, leaving families in endless cases of uncertainty.
Is opposition the target?
The victimisation profile has also contributed to suspicions. Many of them are protesters, activists or outspoken individuals against the government, and this makes it doubtful that these are mere criminal acts.
Rather, they seem, at least partially, to be associated with opposition and political outcry. The perception has been supported by greater trends such as strong-handed reactions to protests, mass arrests and extrajudicial killing allegations.
The government, on its part, has never acknowledged its involvement in abductions. Authorities insist that security agencies are acting within the law, saying that police are arresting suspects and not kidnapping them.
In other cases, police departments have attributed the missing to criminal gangs or individual occurrences and vowed to investigate the reported cases.
Nevertheless, these reactions have had little effect in instilling confidence, citing slow investigations, lack of transparency, and lack of meaningful accountability.
Is the government involved in abduction?
It is in this area of contention that the case of Tuju is especially important. On one hand, it allows the government to have a very potent counter-narrative that not all abduction cases are real; some of them may be exaggerated or even fabricated.
Conversely, it highlights a more serious point on a bigger scale, to which abductions have become plausible in the political climate of Kenya today.
In the end, the case of Tuju does not confirm or refute the fact that there is a group of abductions being committed by the state. Instead, it reveals how complicated the question is and the contrary discourses that characterise it.
Although there is no concrete legal data regarding the fact that the government has accepted the use of abductions as the official method of silencing the opposition, the nature of disappearances, the profile of the victims, and the fact that few people hold the perpetrators of such offences responsible create a very serious concern.
What comes out is an image of a nation that is struggling with the rise in the lack of trust between the state and its citizens. The ongoing lack of success in the abductions, whether through involvement or the lack of decisive action, has provided the environment for fear and suspicion to flourish.
Until clear enquiries and plausible attempts at bringing culprits to book, the suspicion will haunt: are they just mere cases of lost life or indications of a more disturbing change in the manner in which dissent is being addressed in Kenya?