Election Violence in Kenya: What Counts as an Offence, and Who Investigates

When a Kenyan campaign event turns violent, two separate processes are triggered, and confusing them is the reason so many incidents end nowhere.

One is an ordinary criminal matter. Assault is assault, malicious damage is malicious damage, and the fact that it happened at a rally does not move it into a special court.

The other is an election matter. The Election Offences Act 2016 creates offences for the use of force, threats and violence in connection with an election, and the Electoral Code of Conduct binds every party and candidate to prevent it. Those two run in parallel with the criminal file, not instead of it.

What the law treats as election violence

The useful definition is broader than a fight.

It includes force or threats used to stop someone campaigning, to break up a lawful meeting, to prevent a person registering or voting, or to make somebody vote in a particular way. It includes destroying campaign materials and equipment. It includes threats made to a candidate, an agent or an election official, whether delivered in person or by phone.

It also includes hiring people to do any of that. The person who paid is not further from the offence than the person who swung, and in the Act's logic is often closer to the point of it.

The market that supplies those people is a documented feature of Kenyan campaigning rather than an aberration: see how the trade actually works.

Who investigates what

This is the part campaigns get wrong under pressure.

The police and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations investigate the crime. A report is made at a police station, an entry goes into the Occurrence Book, and the investigation belongs to them.

The Director of Public Prosecutions decides whether to charge and conducts the prosecution. Investigators do not make that decision, which is why a file can be complete and still not produce a charge.

The IEBC enforces the Electoral Code of Conduct. Its sanctions are not criminal, and it can act on conduct that would never sustain a prosecution.

The Independent Policing Oversight Authority handles complaints about police conduct itself, which is a different question from whether the police investigated your complaint well: what IPOA can and cannot do.

Where an incident involves a protest or a public assembly, the legal position is more specific than most campaign staff assume: what Kenyan law actually says about protest.

Why most incidents produce nothing

Not usually because the law is missing. Because the evidence is.

The pattern repeats. Nobody records anything at the time. Nobody goes to a police station within the hour. The injured supporter is treated privately and never obtains the medical documentation that a prosecution needs. The campaign posts about it, gets sympathy, and files nothing.

Three days later the only record of what happened is a set of contradictory social posts, and the complaint dies of vagueness rather than of malice.

A campaign that intends to be taken seriously on this has to treat the first sixty minutes as an evidence problem, not a communications one.

What to do on the day it happens

Decide these before your first big rally of 2027, and write them on one page that your organising team carries.

One named person is responsible for incident recording, and only that person speaks for the campaign about it. Video is captured on at least two phones, unedited, and copied off the devices the same night. Names and phone numbers of witnesses are taken while people are still standing there, because they scatter within twenty minutes.

Anyone injured is taken for treatment and the treatment record is kept. Somebody goes to the police station that day and obtains an entry number. Without it you do not have a complaint, you have a story.

The mechanics of reporting, and the choice of which body to approach, are worth reading in full: how to report an election offence.

The part a campaign controls entirely

Whether it is hiring anyone.

A candidate who pays young men to guard a rally has created a group whose presence changes what the rally is, and who will be described in any subsequent complaint as the candidate's people, correctly. The safest security posture for a Kenyan campaign is a small, named, sober team with a written brief that says they de-escalate and withdraw, and a standing instruction that nobody is ever paid on the day in cash for a task that involves standing near other people's supporters.