Silverio Omari
Kenyans are demanding the arrest and prosecution of Dadaab Member of Parliament Farah Maalim after a video of him making inflammatory remarks against young Kenyan protesters surfaced. In the undated video, which has since gone viral, Maalim, speaking in Somali, said that if he were the President of Kenya, he would have “slaughtered” 5,000 young protesters every day.
A verified translation reveals that the legislator was criticizing Kenyan Gen Zs for their attempt to march to State House during the anti-finance Bill 2024 protests. He claimed that the young people who took to the streets were from wealthy backgrounds and were brought to the capital with the sole purpose of causing chaos. “This was an attempted coup, a clear attempted coup. Children of wealthy business owners, wealthy parents, and kids raised on ill-gotten wealth, 80% from one tribe, were dropped off downtown and told to riot and take over State House and Parliament buildings,” he said.
Maalim bluntly stated that if he were in power, he would have eradicated them by the thousands. “God forbid if I were president, I would have slaughtered them, 5,000 of them daily. Seriously, there’s no two ways about it,” he said.
Despite clear evidence showing that the video was not altered, Maalim has claimed that it has been doctored and misrepresented. He addressed the controversy during an interview with KTN News on Tuesday, asserting that his adversaries were working against him.
“It’s all editing, cutting, and pasting, taking a word from here, another one from there, and putting it together. There’s a lot of nonsense there. It’s Somalis who would do that because I weighed in on their politics. It’s not the true picture,” he said.
Maalim offered a scattered defense of his comments, saying that his statement was in protest against attacks on critical national facilities, noting that nations with similar invasions have descended into chaos.
“The one thing I said is…when you say that you’re taking over State House, you’re occupying State House, and you’re occupying Parliament, two constitutional institutions that are the bedrock of the country’s stability and the democracy we practice,” he said. “I’m actually trying to sound serious alarms, saying that these headless things called a popular movement, a revolution, we’ve seen it in many places and we’ve seen it in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and the results are always invariably devastating.”
Attempts to reach Maalim for further comment were unsuccessful.
Dj Vnyash
