When the State wields a sword without a soul

Opinion
By Waweru Njoroge | Jul 21, 2025
Protesters hang on an administration police lorry along Thika road highway during the Gen Z 1st anniversary led protests on June 25, 2025 [David Gichuru, Standard]

When the State wields a sword without a soul, legitimacy is lost

It’s a cold, uncomfortable truth—one that rarely makes front-page headlines: sometimes, the state kills more people than it protects.

Not by accident. Not in war. But quietly. Through policies drafted in polished offices and enforced by anonymous boots on cracked streets. Still, we’re told to call it “order.”

Most citizens don’t go around quoting sociologist Max Weber, but we all live with the weight of his proposition: the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That’s the deal. In theory, we surrender our right to violence so the state can use it—judiciously—to protect us, not to dominate us.

But what happens when that monopoly is abused? When the very hand meant to shield you becomes the one that strikes?

Kenya’s 2010 Constitution was supposed to rewrite that contract. It brought with it a promise: independent institutions, oversight bodies, and a clean break from the violence of our colonial past. But the blood on the ground tells another story.

Between 2013 and 2023, over 1,200 civilians were killed by police in Kenya. Many of them during protests, curfews, or operations billed as “anti-crime.” The laws are there. So are the rights. So are the watchdogs. And yet, the killing continues.

So the question is not whether the state can use force. It can. It must, at times. But the real question is: when does force cease to be lawful—and begin to be lawless? When does the sword of the state shift from protection to repression?

And that tension isn’t abstract—it shows up in the numbers. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), African state forces were responsible for over 8,000 incidents of political violence in 2023 alone—more than all non-state armed groups on the continent combined (ACLED Annual Data Summary, February 2024 – Category A).

When the state uses more force than the rebels it claims to be fighting, what does that say about its legitimacy? Is that still governance—or have we drifted into a form of state-led warfare against dissent?

In a recent conversation with Prof Peter Kagwanja, a scholar of African geopolitics, the dilemma was framed more sharply: “If the state is both the shield and the sword, how do we know when it turns on its own people?” It’s not an academic exercise. It’s a matter of survival—and sovereignty.

And perhaps more urgently: how are citizens supposed to tell the difference between a state that protects, and one that punishes? Especially when the line between policing and persecution grows thinner by the day.

To speak about violence intelligently, we must disaggregate it. Violence is not just a protest turned chaotic. It’s not only a bullet or a baton. Sometimes, it’s the road that never reaches the village. The clinic that’s never built. The child who dies quietly because policy never arrived.

Political theorists and peace scholars identify four distinct typologies of violence: emancipatory, retaliatory, strategic, and structural. Each arises from a different wound. Each tells a different story.

Emancipatory violence is the cry of those who refuse to be dominated. Frantz Fanon, in his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, described it as a cleansing force. For the colonised, violence was the only voice left when ballots were meaningless. Movements like the Mau Mau in Kenya, Umkhonto we Sizwe in apartheid South Africa, or the Palestinian intifadas weren’t eruptions of chaos—they were eruptions of absence. Of justice denied, identity erased, sovereignty stolen. They arose not in lawlessness, but in the vacuum left by illegitimacy.

Retaliatory violence is something else. It is the revenge of the humiliated. As James C. Scott observed in Weapons of the Weak, the oppressed often resist quietly. But dignity denied too long will eventually erupt. The #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. The George Floyd uprising in the United States. Riots in French suburbs after police shootings. These are not organized campaigns for power—they are cries to be seen. Their message is simple: “You cannot brutalize people forever and act shocked when they push back.”

You can suppress a riot with tanks. But until you treat the wound that caused the fever, it will return. And return hotter.

Strategic violence is colder. More calculating. It is violence not of desperation, but of design. It is warlord logic—violence as administration. Think of cartels in Mexico who collect taxes, assassinate mayors, and run towns. Al-Shabaab in Somalia offering their version of justice and order. Wagner mercenaries in Mali and the Central African Republic trading protection for minerals and influence. Or militias in Libya destroying pipelines to earn a seat at the negotiating table. This is not chaos. It is governance—without paperwork. Brutal, yes. But in the eyes of many, more predictable than a state that only appears in times of repression.

Structural violence—perhaps the most invisible, and the most lethal—is the violence of neglect. Johan Galtung coined the term in 1969 to describe how social structures can kill not through action, but through omission. It is the mother in Turkana burying her child because the nearest clinic is a hundred kilometers away. It is the Flint water crisis in the United States, where austerity led to poisoned pipes. It is apartheid’s lingering geography in South Africa’s townships.

According to the World Bank’s 2024 Inequality Dashboard, over half of the world’s 50 most unequal countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-seven million Africans still live in extreme poverty—even as GDPs rise and stock markets glow green.

This form of violence doesn’t scream. It doesn’t trend. It hides in spreadsheets, project delays, and quiet shrugs. But its death toll is real. And no amount of economic optimism can cover the graves. All this leads to a grim conclusion: the state sometimes manufactures its own insurgents.

The UNDP’s 2022 report Journey to Extremism in Africa found that 71 per cent of youth who joined extremist groups cited state abuse or neglect—not religious ideology—as the main driver. That’s not radicalisation. That’s grievance. That’s abandonment. So when a young man picks up a gun, not to destroy the state but because the state erased him, is he a terrorist—or a symptom?

Across the continent, this is not just rebellion. It is a referendum on legitimacy. People are not withdrawing from the state because they don’t want to belong. They’re leaving because they were never truly let in.

Legitimacy doesn’t grow from fear. It grows from fairness. A just state may always need the sword—but that sword must be governed by a social contract rooted in service, not silence.

Consider Rwanda, praised for order and infrastructure, yet still facing questions about civic freedom. Singapore, often held up as a model, still faces global criticism for its heavy-handed policing. These models show that it’s possible to deliver performance—but at what price?

Because legitimacy isn’t just about delivery. It’s about consent.

The real test of governance lies not in how often the state uses violence—but how sparingly. Not in how swiftly it crushes rebellion—but in how deeply it cultivates justice. Control is not consent. And when a government forgets that its citizens are not subjects, the sword it holds turns inward.

And the republic begins to bleed.

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