NAIROBI-KENYA-Smoke still hangs over Nairobi’s central avenues where supermarkets were stripped bare and storefronts lie in charred heaps after the latest round of anti-government protests. Reuters counts at least ten buildings torched in one night and dozens of shops looted, even as county crews sweep up the glass and ash the following morning . Why, though, does political anger so often tip into arson and theft? Two rival explanations circulate in Kenya’s cafés and newsrooms.

The first points to the crowds themselves. Demonstrations have drawn thousands of young people whose bank accounts are empty and whose hopes dimmed when taxes and prices spiked. In that combustible mood a single smashed window can act like a starter’s pistol: police redeploy toward Parliament, metal shutters fall late, and a knot of thrill-seekers or desperate onlookers decide that a free television set is a fair rebate for years of official graft. Videos from Ronald Ngala Street show looters darting in and out of supermarkets while most marchers keep walking or film the chaos on their phones . Crowd-behaviour scholars would call the result an “opportunistic riot,” where a tiny fraction hijacks a mass protest the moment arrest feels unlikely and moral restraints snap under peer contagion.

A darker narrative assigns agency elsewhere. Human-rights monitors have logged undercover officers in balaclavas mingling with protesters, sometimes firing live rounds from unmarked positions, and withdrawing just before key buildings ignite . The theory runs that provocateurs, whether plain-clothes police or hired party operatives, spark spectacular acts of vandalism to brand an overwhelmingly peaceful movement as criminal. Within hours of the fires, Interior-ministry statements labelled demonstrators “terrorists” and invoked zero-tolerance doctrines to justify live ammunition and mass arrests . If the goal is to erode public sympathy and open legal space for tougher crack-downs, selective sabotage is politically rational.

Both accounts rest on fragments of evidence. CCTV stills and court dockets show ordinary citizens carting away stolen goods, which weakens the notion of a violence wholly manufactured by the state. Yet the synchrony between police pull-backs and high-profile blazes, plus verified images of armed men without insignia, tugs the story toward orchestration. A hybrid picture may be closest to the truth: genuine anger supplies the crowds, opportunists supply the looters, and, at critical moments, shadowy actors supply the spark that turns protest into the televised inferno that governments find easiest to condemn.

Absent a forensic timeline of telecoms data, CCTV footage and deployment logs, Kenya’s streets will keep offering both theories as viable scripts. What is clear is that every burnt storefront now serves multiple agendas: for some, a vent of pent-up frustration; for others, a made-to-order pretext to tighten the riot shields and drown out the chants for change.

Sent by Anonymous Political Analyst based in Kenya