We demand the immediate release of Communist Party Marxist-Kenya leader Booker Omole!

Text: Free Booker Omele. Three pictures of Booker on a light green background

We demand the immediate release of Communist Party Marxist-Kenya leader Booker Omole! The Central Committee of the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K) has reported that its secretary general, Booker Ngesa Omole, was violently abducted on Monday in Isiolo town by the Kenya Police Service. In a public statement on the 24th of February, the party documented that Omole was ‘beaten severely. Tortured. Brutalised to near death. His tooth was broken. His finger was cut with a pen knife.¹ After the assault, he was ‘dumped at Mlolongo Police Station’, a facility notorious for extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. As of February 25, party officials report that Omole remains unlawfully detained, and that the police have refused all access to him. No lawyers. No comrades. No family.

The Red Anti-Imperialist Collective denounces this abduction in the strongest possible terms and demands Omole’s immediate release.

This attack on Omole is not an isolated incident but the latest escalation in a sustained
campaign of repression against the CPM-K by the unity government² of President William Ruto, an alliance consisting of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) founded by longtime political operative Raila Odinga. In January 2025, Omole was targeted for assassination. Operatives with night-vision goggles attempted to storm his compound³, an attack which he barely escaped. That attempt came just days after plain-clothes police officers attempted to abduct CPM-K National Chairperson Mwaivu Kaluka and two other party members in Mombasa⁴. Following the party’s national congress in November 2025, Kaluka and former National Chairperson Kinuthia Ndungu:, the latter having already been beaten repeatedly and arrested ten times, were detained at Nairobi’s Central Police Station without explanation. And in 2024, police broke into Omole’s house after he was prevented from flying to Beijing⁵.

History

The violence against the CPM-K must be understood within Kenya’s longer history of
colonial and neocolonial influence. Kenya’s independence from British colonial rule in 1963 was won through the bloody Mau Mau uprising, which the colonial state attempted to suppress with extreme brutality, detaining tens of thousands in concentration camps, torturing suspects, and executing thousands. Yet, independence was handed down to Western-aligned elites. Jomo Kenyatta, the new president, preserved colonial economic structures, and protected British settler landholdings.

His successor, Daniel Arap Moi, ruled for 24 years with Western backing, turning Kenya into a Cold War client-state where political opponents continued to be tortured, and murdered. This pattern of Western-backed repression continues today. Kenya serves as the centre of US and UK strategic interests in East Africa, hosting the largest US embassy in Africa, major military facilities, and serving as the primary staging ground for Western military operations across the region. The Ruto regime, ever dependent, relies on the IMF and World Bank austerity programs to maintain Kenyan living standards and thus keep its grip on power.

Kenya’s ruling elite has also cultivated close ties with Israel, whose corporations provide security training, surveillance technology, and counterinsurgency expertise to state military and security forces. These same forces go on to torture opposition leaders. This alliance reflects the influence of Zionist ideology within certain Christian nationalist circles, who view Israel’s regional dominance as ordained by biblical prophecy and therefore a model for Kenya. These ties have historical origins – when when Theodore Herzl and the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain conspired in the 1903, Kenya was discussed as a possible colony for the Zionist ethnostate⁶.

We see further parallels at this very moment, in direct land grabs by Zionist billionaires, including the Nakuru settlement – where Zionists are moving in to buy land:. A mere week ago, General Secretary Booker Omole challenged this development, ‘Plans are underway to lease land to Israel to create a settlement financed by Standard Bank of South Africa⁷’. He called upon Kenyans to resist colonial displacement and domination, arguing that the same settler logics and crucially, infrastructure, that displaced Palestinians is being used in Kenya

Not only do Omale and the CPM-K speak out bravely against the local comprador leadership, and Western neocolonialism, but have also shown support for
socialist China⁸, condemned Ukraine – calling Zelensky a Western puppet⁹, made a statement in solidarity with Iran against Western imperialism¹⁰, and paid a solidarity visit to Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela¹¹. These anti-imperialist actions have earned him the ire of the global imperialist forces.

(To learn more of perspectives, they have a website and publish a newsletter, Itikadi¹², in English.)

The Regimes Escalating Violence

Since President William Ruto took power in 2022, repression has intensified dramatically. In 2023 alone, security forces killed at least 31 demonstrators. In June 2024, during the Gen Z protests against Ruto’s IMF-mandated Finance Bill which sought to impose savage tax hikes on an already starving population, police murdered more than 60 people. In just the first two months of 2025, at least 50 have been killed in protests, with hundreds more injured or abducted. The abduction of Omole coincides with a wider crackdown on opposition figures ahead of next year’s elections. Weeks ago, police fired tear gas and live rounds at thousands attending a rally in Kitengela organised by Senator Edwin Sifuna, injuring at least 50 of the protesters.

This violence is the political expression of extreme social inequality. Oxfam reports that nearly half of Kenya’s population lives in extreme poverty, surviving on meager daily incomes, while wealth concentrates at the top. The richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than the equivalent of 77% of the population, over 42 million people. Average real wages have fallen 11% since 2020, food prices have surged 50%, and
transport and energy costs remain punishingly high. Public services continue to collapse under IMF-mandated austerity and debt servicing – the interest payments on loans taken by previous regimes to enrich the same elite now demanding further sacrifices from the masses.

The trade union bureaucracy has lined up behind the regime. The Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU), recently declared that workers should “support him [Ruto] and ignore the noise”. After last year’s “Saba Saba” protest massacre, when security forces gunned down scores commemorating the pro-democracy struggles that helped end Moi’s dictatorship, COTU general secretary Atwoli instructed young people to “forget about demonstrations, remain home, silent, and promote peace”, warning that protests were “scaring investors away”, and called on the government to take “firm measures to curb the unrest”.

A pattern of repression

The Kenyan regime’s turn to open repression is emboldened by the example of their allies’ growing willingness to shift towards overt rule by repression and fascist alignment. In the United States, President Trump continues to facilitate ongoing violence and deportation at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while continuing to malign and threaten nascent left-leaning opposition movements. In France, President Emmanuel Macron and the political establishment are exploiting the death of a fascist activist. In Tanzania, thousands were reportedly killed or disappeared following last year’s disputed elections. In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni’s comprador regime which collaborates with Kenyan authorities, continues its decades-long suppression of all opposition (the most prominent of which calls for Western sanctions after fleeing to the West!¹³).

These are not separate national phenomena, but attempts on the part of for the West
to carve out their strategic base within Sub-Saharan Africa. Confronted by the threat of rising multipolarity, they are attempting to pre-empt the rise of Africa in the next decades. Their control is through the police state, and the proliferation of violence against social opposition.

Concluding

It appears in Kenya, that democratic rights cannot be defended by courts, the
opposition, or trade union bureaucracy. All of which support the capitalist state when it matters, regardless of whether progressives, student activists, striking workers or the great mass of disenfranchised or continue to face the harshest of repression. We call on other progressive and anti-imperialist organisations to condemn the Kenyan government, and demand no further harm is done. We call on those in the west to fight their own imperialist governments support for the repressive Kenyan regime.

We unequivocally oppose this brutal attack on Omole, demand his immediate release, and call for an end to all state threats and repressive acts against the CPM-K.

Free Booker Omole!

Author

Davey Heller