Kenyan government says it has stationed 3,000 soldiers in the banditry-prone North Rift region and that calm is returning. The claim is disputed by local people and some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are helping to lead inter-communal dialogues and are launching peacebuilding measures to try and ease hostilities.

Hassan Ismail of Interpeace – an NGO working on reconciliation and development – describes the current relative calm as “negative peace”.

“The impact of conflict is still immense,” he explained. “People have lost livestock, relatives and properties, and they require [the implementation] of a humanitarian and developmental agenda.”

Lorengei is also not optimistic. “The problem is, right now, the bandits can say they are willing to talk and stop fighting because they have grass for their cows,” she said. “But when it’s dry, they will still come back and terrorise us.”

With the militia fighters able to hide in the hills, she doesn’t regard the police post at the school as a long-term solution.

“The police only secure us here in the compound,” she said. “The government can’t talk of peace when the bandits still have guns. If they are talking of peace, then they have to surrender the guns.”

The pastoral sector, valued at $1.3 billion – equivalent to 13 per cent of Kenya’s GDP – has historically been overlooked by both colonial and post-independence governments. Throughout much of the colonial period, northwestern Kenya was declared a closed region; hence only administrative/military posts were established. Following independence, the new authorities continued the marginalisation, with a policy that favoured investment in areas with abundant natural resources and settled populations deemed likely to “yield the largest increase in [economic] output”.

Free movement across the rangelands is central to both the local economy and the pastoral lifestyle. But the creation of county borders following devolution in 2013 has interrupted that mobility and led to boundary disputes – particularly in areas with abundant grazing land, water and minerals, with communities vying for control.

Weapons abound in the region. I saw many young men carrying guns, something I had not expected, assuming they would keep hidden rather than display in public.

“Why can’t the government just take these guns?” I asked my driver, a local from Baringo, as we passed a herder with a rifle, who looked barely 15 years old.

“It’s not just a matter of taking the guns,” he explained. “If they take these guns today, the community will feel attacked by the government and they will rise and retaliate.”

Mistrust between warring communities has created an arms race among pastoralists, leading to the cycles of violence that repeatedly displace vulnerable families, as well as hindering economic development.

While disarmament is key, a deepseated distrust of the government makes gun-bearers reluctant to surrender their weapons. Some local politicians – believed to have links to the militias – accuse the government of taking sides when it comes to disarmament, and have frustrated past initiatives.

In 2023, Kenya launched Operation Maliza Uhalifu (Operation Eliminate Crime), one of numerous unsuccessful multiagency disarmament efforts aimed at bringing peace to the region. It omitted to address the underlying drivers of violence – the competition over resources exacerbated by the lack of government investment in the local economy, and in its pastoralist sector in particular.

The North Rift region has the lowest levels of education in Kenya. A 2023 survey found that 35 per cent of young people have never enrolled in school, leaving many with limited options for a livelihood beyond pastoralism, a lifestyle under threat as a result of the dwindling rangelands and worsening droughts.

The Kenyan government has belatedly responded by promising more investment in schools as part of a broader initiative to restore peace to the area.

Musa Makal, 22, was a member of a pastoralist militia but is now attending an electrical engineering course at a local vocational school. The initiative is part of an Interpeace-run disarmament programme providing job training.

Makal, like many of the young men who have enrolled, has no formal education. “There were guns in my household for as long as I can remember,” he says. “My father and my big brothers had guns, and they all went to fight.”

But after the death of a friend in a clash between the Pokot and Turkana pastoralists in 2022, he sees his future as lying outside pastoralism. Without an effective police presence to ensure peace, the pastoralists’ leaders remain suspicious of any disarmament programme.

Community elders, political leaders, NGO representatives, and administrative officials at a peace consultation in Kapedo, Turkana County.

That was clear from a dialogue session I witnessed between Pokot and Turkana communities, organised by Interpeace in Kapedo. It drew together village elders, political leaders, and administrative officials. I had never before seen so many guns in the hands of unauthorised civilians. 

The discussions initially focused on building trust, and while the participants seemed to agree on most issues – including refraining from attacking each other – disarmament was a sticking point.

“You cannot ask one community to surrender arms,” said Turkana East MP Nicholas Ngikolong. “If these people are not protected [with their guns], who will protect them? What are the police doing?”

Velma Mkaudi, a teacher at Lomelo Primary School where the meeting took place, believes the government is not only not doing enough to deal with insecurity but says it’s also out of touch with the reality on the ground.

“Those who say there is calm in the North Rift don’t know the life we live,” she explained, directly rebuffing the government’s position that the deployment of soldiers has improved security in the region. There is a common perception here that corruption is also fuelling the violence – with a blind eye turned by officials to the trafficking of weapons.

“If they say that the guns come from Somalia, don’t we have police at the border who have been there for years? Where are they when these guns pass through the border? Let them tell us the truth of what they do,” said Mkaudi.

For Ismail of Interpeace, the real issue is the need for more effective policing rather than just additional boots on the ground.

“The security organs should have addressed criminal events [here] just like they would do in Nairobi, and any other place,” Ismail said. “If there was tracking, intelligence gathering, they could have responded effectively, and [the violence] would have been fully managed.”

• The New Humanitarian report