A quiet procession of mourners, clutching roses and white lilies, traced the perimeter of a Nairobi barricade today. They marked one year since police lines held firm as protests demanding constitutional reform turned bloody. At least 23 people died. The barricade, a metal fortress erected by officers, still stands as a monument to a day when the state's coercive power overwhelmed its duty of care.
Now, the spotlight falls on the training of those who stood behind that barrier. The officers involved were participants in a long-standing programme with UK police, designed to instill 'public order management' skills. Since the tragedy, human rights groups have demanded a full audit of this collaboration, questioning whether imported crowd-control tactics are fit for a context as volatile as Kenya's.
I've watched this playbook unfold before. In the UK's own history of protest policing, from the miners' strikes to the 2011 riots, there has always been a tension between maintaining order and preserving consent. When you transplant those methods to a society with deeper fractures and less institutional trust, the software of policing clashes with the hardware of inequality.
Kenyan officials initially defended the training, but now murmur of 'lessons learned'. The families laying flowers do not need lessons. They need accountability. They need a barrier between past and future. This is not a story about a single day. It is a story about what happens when we export expertise without ethics, when we assume that code written in one context can run in another without bugs.
The flowers will wilt. But the question of who trains whom, and for what purpose, must not. For the sake of the families, and for the sake of the police who must eventually face the next barricade, we need an open-source audit of this relationship. Let transparency be the patch that fixes the flawed algorithm of power.
