In the sweltering heat of Ubungo, Dar es Salaam, on October 29,mere hours after Tanzania’s polls closed under a shroud of blackouts and boycotts, John Okoth Ogutu, a 38-year-old teacher from Siaya County, was gunned down in the streets. He’d spent eight years molding young Tanzanian minds, sending remittances home to his wife and three children in Kenya, only to become the first confirmed Kenyan casualty in what has spiraled into a regional nightmare. Just days later, on October 31, gunfire echoed across the Namanga border, claiming John Kalhindi, a Kenyan businessman who’d built a modest trade empire shuttling goods between Nairobi and Arusha. These names now echo in Kenyan WhatsApp groups, funeral telegrams from Mwananyamala Mortuary, and frantic calls to our Foreign Affairs Ministry, which has issued little more than platitudes about “staying calm.”
As Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s regime cements itself by digging mass graves, hundreds lie dead across the border, but for Kenyan families, this isn’t just abstract geopolitics anymore but about empty chairs at dinner tables and more broadly, a stark reminder that our pursuit of East African unity has become a one-way ticket to grief.
The Sham Ballot: How Tanzania’s Vote Adds to a Regional Inferno
Tanzania’s October 29 elections weren’t a contest; they were a coronation scripted in shadows. With opposition heavyweights like CHADEMA’s Tundu Lissu jailed on treason charges and ACT-Wazalendo’s Luhaga Mpina disqualified on flimsy technicalities, President Samia Suluhu Hassan coasted to a 98% “victory” amid 87% turnout claims that even her own diplomats privately scoff at. Protests erupted instantly from Dar es Salaam’s choked avenues to Mbeya’s dusty outskirts and the tense Namanga crossing, fueled by internet shutdowns, military deployments, and whispers of pre-rigged results.
By November 1, when results were rubber-stamped, the death toll had climbed into the hundreds, with CHADEMA alleging 700 slain and BBC diplomatic sources confirming at least 500. Human Rights Watch documented lethal force from the outset: snipers on rooftops, tanks rumbling through neighborhoods, and bodies vanishing into the night, dumped in shallow pits or ferried to remote forests.
For Kenyans, this isn’t a distant drama but a mirror to our own Gen Z-fueled uprising in June and July 2025, when tear gas choked Nairobi’s streets and Ruto’s security forces turned bullets on youth demanding accountability. Samia’s finger-pointing at “foreign agitators” from Kenya reeks of the same deflection Uhuru Kenyatta once peddled during our trade spats. Our border towns like Namanga, where matatus hum with daily commuters and hawkers swap ugali for mandazi, have become flashpoints.
On October 30, Kenyan solidarity marchers were repelled by baton-wielding officers, their chants of “Ruto must go” morphing into cries for Ogutu’s justice. We’ve lost traders like Kalhindi, whose poultry shipments now rot at the closed border, and teachers like Ogutu, whose classrooms in Dar es Salaam sit empty. This carnage doesn’t stop at passport lines; it bleeds into our economy, our remittances, our sense of safety in a region we once dreamed of calling home.
Kenyan Lives in the Line of Fire
No Kenyan wants to believe that pursuing opportunity across the border could end in a mortuary slab, but the past week has shattered that illusion. John Okoth Ogutu’s death on October 29 wasn’t random collateral; he was caught in Ubungo clashes as security forces fired into crowds boycotting the polls, his body confirmed by activist Hussein Khalid and now lying in Mwananyamala Mortuary, awaiting repatriation his family can’t afford. His wife, Grace, told reporters from their Siaya home on November 2 that he’d called that morning, excited about wiring home his October salary: “He said the streets were tense, but he’d be fine. Now our boys ask when Baba comes back from teaching.” Ogutu’s story is painfully familiar: thousands of us cross into Tanzania yearly for jobs in education, trade, and construction, fueling families back in Kisii, Kakamega, and beyond. But Samia’s xenophobic pivot, blaming Kenyan “bad manners” for exporting our 2024-2025 protests, has turned us into scapegoats.
Then came John Kalhindi on October 31, shot in Namanga amid cross-border skirmishes that spilled into Kenya, his body the first to cross back under a white shroud. A father of four who’d hustled goats and maize between Arusha markets and Nairobi wholesalers, Kalhindi embodied the gritty East African dream until Tanzanian troops, mistaking protesters for “Kenyan infiltrators,” opened fire. Reports from the ground, shared via smuggled OneDrive folders of videos and photos, show similar fates: a Kenyan shopkeeper in Moshi gunned down with his toddler in his arms on November 3, his name withheld as his widow flees with the surviving child. Dozens more Kenyans are missing:lawyer Fredrick Lorent Obuya, snatched from Oyster Bay Police Station on October 31, his phone silent since.
Our suffering isn’t footnotes in Al Jazeera dispatches; it’s the shuttered dukas in Namanga, the halted remittances crippling rural economies, and the terror gripping every Kenyan mama sending her son to Dar for university. Where is Ruto’s outrage? His ministry’s October 30 advisory to “observe local laws” feels like abandonment, echoing the impotence that let Boniface Mwangi and Agather Atuhaire endure state-sanctioned rape in May.
Dictators’ Pact: East Africa’s Regimes vs. the People They Rule
This isn’t just isolated Tanzanian tyranny but a toxic triad binding Ruto, Museveni, and Samia in mutual protection rackets that crush citizens like us underfoot. Recall the EAC’s 1977 implosion, born of Nyerere’s socialist barbs against Kenyatta’s capitalism, a rift that caricatured us Kenyans as greedy individualists while Tanzanians preached Ujamaa unity. Magufuli’s 2015-2021 reign revived that venom, torching our cattle at borders in trade wars that starved Kenyan farmers. Samia briefly charmed us, addressing our Parliament in April 2022 with promises of renewed ties, but her post-election venom revives it, framing Ogutu and Kalhindi’s killers as “defenders of peace” against Kenyan “instigators.”
Cross-border abductions seal the pact: Museveni’s goons snatched Kizza Besigye from Nairobi on November 16, 2024, dragging him to Kampala’s military courts while our own Bob Njagi and Nicholas Oyoo vanished in Uganda on October 1, 2025, their fates unknown even at the moment of writing.
Tanzanian MPs cheered the May torture of Mwangi and Atuhaire; Nandi’s Senator Samson Cherargei echoed it here, calling dissenters “peace disturbers.” It’s a dictators’ EAC, where regimes swap intelligence and impunity, while we the people ; traders, teachers, and tweeters pay with blood.
In the digital realm,the strategy appears to be inspired if not coordinated. Kenya’s new Computer Misuse Act amendments, rammed through in 2025, arm Ruto with sedition charges against cross-border activists; Tanzania’s blackouts and Uganda’s media gags ensure no viral video exposes the next Ogutu.
Yet amid the mass graves, CHADEMA’s November 5 claim of police disposing of hundreds of bodies in CNN-verified footage, flickers of defiance offer Kenyan-led hope. Social media, despite throttles, pulses with youth networks: Tanzanian protesters chanting “Ruto, Museveni, Samia—go!” in Dar clips shared by our Gen Z; Namanga border clashes on November 4 drawing Kenyan youth in solidarity, their hashtags #JusticeForOgutu trending alongside #EndTanzaniaMassacre. It is very much reminiscent of our 2024 streets, where youth toppled finance bills,now exported, tech-savvy, demanding the EAC Court enforce Atuhaire-Mwangi’s July suit against state torture.
Written by Otieno Arudo
