Face mask vendor Boniface Kariuki lies on the ground after he was shot by police on June 17, 2025.President William Ruto’s controversial shoot the legs order has been angrily debated for the past week.
The debate has drawn all shades of opinion from adept lawyers to loud street vendors and boda boda riders.
The question is whether Ruto, as President, can create his own rules or even purport to instruct the police.
As usual, Douglas Kanja, the Inspector General, instead of using the powers of his office to state the law, has chosen the dangerous path of silence as though Ruto’s contentious statement does not affect his job or the work of the police force that he leads.
The net effect of Kanja’s decision to bury his head in the sand and imagine there is no problem is that it creates room for the public to believe he will have taken the instruction from a politician and ditched the law or that he will follow Ruto’s public rant as a new way of managing public demos.
Kanja must come out strongly and unequivocally, in the best diplomatic manner he knows how, to tell the rank and file that they must ignore Ruto’s public tirade and they must police by the book.
Failure to reassure the public that the rules have not changed constitutes gross negligence of duty.
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Quote of the day: “There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are outnumbered and without arms.”— American journalist, civil rights activist and co-founder of the NAACP Ida B Wells was born on July 16, 1862
