Since Kasipul MP Ong’ondo Were was murdered on April 30, the police have apprehended 12 suspects and arraigned them, most before the MP was laid to rest on May 9. Despite this remarkable progress, emotions remained high, peaking at the funeral service in his Karabok village, where a close relative reportedly associated a national government official with the murder without providing evidence.

Though not as tragic, an incident once turned me into a suspect in circumstances nearly as similar. Unknown to the security and welfare committee of a neighbourhood association I chaired, a group of armed men had accosted a 10-wheeler truck driver on the Nyahururu-Nyeri highway days earlier, killing the driver in the process. I recall raising the matter with a daytime guard when I spotted an unfamiliar truck parked in the compound. But he defended himself vehemently, claiming it belonged to a visitor to a house near where it was parked.

The committee once toyed with the idea of engaging a security firm. But a review of their charges against contributions that depended on the goodwill and mood swings of residents returned a reality check we wouldn’t be able to sustain their services.

As it turned out, some of our guards had been recruited into a criminal gang that would go on carjacking orgies whenever they weren’t on duty. Initially, they targeted cars they could dismember in the compound of a colluding resident. But with time, they became more daring.

As police officers from the ‘flying squad’ descended on our court, speculation that I was the mastermind rent the air. How could such a mind-boggling and seemingly entrenched crime have gone on without the knowledge and connivance of the committee? Being the chairperson, thick clouds of suspicion bordering on slander wafted around me. It did not help that one of the guards was related to me.

Later, we were regaled with enthralling accounts of how our guards’ lifestyles changed for the better as soon as they were employed. They changed one iPhone with another model, high-priced luxuries their employers could barely afford. Tellingly, their peers always loitered around, constantly lobbying for vacancies, for which the committee paid subsistence wages.

Kristina McMorris, a former actress, writes in her Bridge of Scarlet Leaves (2022) that “during times of grief, the whole world can become the enemy, especially when you lose what you love”, a suggestion that grief and loss can distort one’s perception of the world, leading to a feeling of being betrayed by everyone, including those who have been supportive.

Days after Were was buried, Homa Bay Deputy Governor Oyugi Magwanga narrated on national TV a chilling account of an attempt on his life. Politically instigated murders in the county did not start with Were, if the past is anything to go by.

In 2014, Boaz Odhiambo Ondiek, a Kibiri ward rep, was murdered at his home by two unknown assailants. In 2020, Peter Asoyo Oriema, a Kaksingri West ward rep, was attacked by thugs while tracking down a motorbike he had been robbed of at gunpoint.

Kenyans still recall how Philemon Opar was killed in June 2019 at a petrol station he operated in Kendu Bay, days after his nomination as the county’s executive committee for roads and infrastructure.

Murder as a means of ascending to political power seems to be spawning impunity in Homa Bay. Even as the police pursue justice for Were, a reported attempt on the life of 28-year-old Vickins Bondo, an MCA from the county, days before the MP’s brutal murder may not have been conclusively investigated.