Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has ordered that Chiefs and Sub-chiefs be appointed from next week to tackle insecurity in Samburu County.

🇰🇪 Breaking It Down

While speaking during a church service in Kerio Valley on July 5, he instructed that all interviews of the Chiefs and Subchiefs be conducted and completed by this coming week, so that the qualified candidates can be stationed in their gazetted areas as early as possible.

“I have ordered that all the locations that the government had gazetted previously be made public, and I am ordering the County Commissioner to fast-track the interview process of the Chiefs and the Sub-Chiefs to be done by this week, so that by next week, all the qualified candidates will be stationed in the newly zoned locations,” stated Murkomen. The Ministry of Interior in 2024 gazetted Samburu West as the only new sub-county introduced in Samburu County, with Loosuk as its headquarters. The unit forms part of 578 new administrative divisions created nationally across 31 counties, according to the official gazette notice.

Within the restructuring, the Loosuk Division was established as the sole new administrative division under Samburu West sub-county, a zone Murkomen wants to deploy more security operatives to tackle banditry.

📌 What You Need to Know

Additionally, the CS has warned that no civilians should be caught in possession of a gun in Samburu and the Kerio Valley Region, to be specific. To see this come to fruition, he has ordered that more Kenya Police Reserve (KPR) officers be deployed in the region and directed the return of the SOG (Special Operations Group), an elite, highly classified paramilitary counter-terrorism and anti-banditry unit.

CS Murkomen also used the platform to warn politicians in the area against using the youth in the region by giving them guns to cause instability in the region, and that if any youth is caught by police operatives, they will carry their own cross.

“I am warning any politician in this areas: if you are caught selling huns to these youths, your days are numbered,” stated Murkomen.

“And you, as a youth, if you are caught with a gun, sold to you by a politician, you will carry your own cross in the face of justice.”

Banditry and cattle rustling in the Kerio Valley, spanning Elgeyo Marakwet, Baringo, and West Pokot counties, have escalated into organized violence driven by territorial disputes, revenge attacks, and commercial looting across the volatile pastoralist region.

The protracted conflict primarily involves the Pokot, Marakwet, and Tugen pastoralist communities, as criminal syndicates deploy sophisticated weaponry and hide within the rugged, inaccessible terrain of the Tiaty hills, Silale, and Nadome areas in Baringo.

📰 Source: Kenyans.co.ke