The Dashcam That Broke the Ruto Regime: How a Car Camera Exposed Kenya's Rogue Police Unit
The point of no return disaster for the Ruto regime came very fast and unexpectedly on the Gilgil, Nakuru highway. What the country witnessed in those few minutes of dashcam footage was not just a crime. It was the unmasking of a parallel state. And I will say this plainly: the Ruto regime has not faced a crisis this serious since it took power.
Let me be clear about what we are dealing with. A dashcam. A digital car recorder. Something ordinary Kenyans install in their vehicles so that, when the worst happens, there is evidence. So that insurance claims are paid. So that a driver is not left to defend themselves with words against the word of a more powerful party. It is a humble device. And it has just done what no journalist, no human rights body, no opposition leader, and no international press corps has managed to do in all this time. It has put the Ruto regime's secret police on film. With sound. And Kenya has not been the same since.
The abduction that became visible
Let us start this story at the beginning, as usual.
Alex Kiprotich, an associate editor at the Standard Group, was taken. Not by criminals. Not by strangers in a getaway car. He was taken by men who came in a Subaru, men who knew exactly what they were doing, men who were armed to the teeth and who arrived with the confidence of people who answer to no one. The Standard Group, and I must give them credit, were prepared for a day like this. Most journalists, most Kenyans, do not have a head of security as their first call when the Subaru boys arrive. But the Standard did. And that preparation is exactly what turned this story from another disappearance into the biggest crisis the regime has faced.
Because when Kiprotich was taken, the evidence was captured. Frame by frame. The vehicle, the four men, the faces, the words. All of it recorded by the very tool that the men who came for him never thought to look for.
The man who said "utaona maajabu"
Let me pause on the most chilling detail in this entire saga. The man who led the operation, the man who came to the front of the vehicle and banged on the bonnet, identified as Corporal Ronald Chemosit, looked at the journalist and said these words: utaona maajabu. Loosely translated, you are going to see wonders. You are going to see things you will not believe.
Think about what that means. These are not the words of a lawful officer making an arrest. These are the words of a man who is certain that, once he takes you, no one will ever see you again. It is the language of the killing fields. It is the language of those who know they will not be held to account. And if anybody doubts the meaning of those words, they should remember the late Albert Ojwang. He saw wonders. He did not come back, he will never come back.
A low-ranking officer running a high-level operation
Now here is something that should trouble every Kenyan. The rank of this man is corporal. That is the second-lowest rank in the Kenya Police, just above police constable. Yet this corporal was leading an operation of this nature. This was not a traffic stop. This was not a routine check. This was an abduction of a journalist from a national media house, executed in a moving vehicle, coordinated on the phone, with a command structure responding in real time.
So I must ask: why is a corporal leading this? The answer, in my opinion, is that the command structure we are looking at is not the command structure of the Kenya Police as we know it by law. It is something else entirely. It is a parallel force. A force that is not in any constitution. A force that follows no law. A force that is, by any honest definition, illegal. And it operates side by side with the police we know, even as it hides inside it.
We told you on this channel last week that Kenya now has two different police forces. Some of you doubted us. You do not have to anymore. This is the evidence. It is on video. It has a soundtrack.
The man behind the unit: Zakaria Kariuki
The dashcam did not only expose the foot soldiers. It led the Standard Group directly to the man who runs the unit. A retired officer by the name of Zakaria Kariuki. Hold on. A retired officer is a civilian. So we have a civilian, a former officer, reportedly on contract until August 2027, running a unit that abducts journalists off the highway with no lawful authority whatsoever. He is not in uniform. He is not in the chain of command that the constitution creates. He is, by every measure, operating an illegal unit from inside the machinery of the state.
And this is precisely why the situation is so dangerous. Because it means the commands are not coming from the visible police command structure. They are coming from somewhere else. Somewhere that does not answer to Parliament, does not answer to the courts, does not answer to the people. It answers only to itself. And to the regime it serves.
Kenyans removed the mask
Here is the part that should give the regime sleepless nights. The faces of these four men are all over social media. Do not joke with Kenyans. When we are given footage, we do not sit and wait for official statements. We take the footage and we do what a free technology-enabled public does. We enhance it. We zoom in. We identify. We remove the mask. And now the whole country can see the face of Chemosit, the man who said utaona maajabu, and the faces of the other men who came for the journalist.
If only the dashcam itself were human and could be abducted, you understand what would have been done to it. The regime would have found a way. But you cannot abduct a recording. You cannot make a video forget. And that is the regime's problem, and it is our gift.
You cannot make an occurrence book entry go away
Now, there is something else you should know about how prepared the Standard Group were. One of the first things they did was go to a police station to report the matter. To get it into an occurrence book. This matters, because documented evidence is the backbone of any serious legal or journalistic process. You need to be able to show how the issue started, how it was followed up, and what the state did or did not do about it.
But here is the scandal. When the Standard team went to the police, the officers were welcoming. They were helpful. Right up until the moment they heard what the matter was about. Then it was as though the officers had been handed a piece of hot charcoal. Nobody wanted to touch it. Officers walked around. They shuffled. They waited. They did everything except take the report. Until finally, the Industrial Area police station was the only one with officers brave enough to take the statements and make the entry.
That is a scandal within a scandal. Because it tells us that police officers know. They know exactly what this unit is. They know what happens to people who get involved. They know a man could do something perfectly innocently, take a report, do his duty, and then one day find himself on the dock facing murder charges. That is the fear, and it is a reasonable fear. It is the fear of a police force that is no longer certain it is on the side of the law.
So going forward, the regime has a new problem. If this unit survives this controversy, it will struggle to find enough officers brave enough to make a simple occurrence book entry. That is a signal of a force that has lost faith in itself. And a force that has lost faith in itself cannot be commanded by the law.
Why they drove and drove and drove
Let me now deal with the other piece of hot charcoal, the one the four men suddenly found too hot to hold. Alex Kiprotich himself has described what happened. They simply drove. And drove. And drove. He never entered an office. He never entered a safe house. They just drove. And then, finally, he was dumped at Masinga Dam.
I want you to understand what that means. The four men were in constant phone communication with someone on the other end, relaying progress. And I believe it was that person on the other end of the line who told them that the operation could not proceed as originally planned. Abandon. Abandon. Let him go.
And why? Because of a dashcam. Because what was supposed to be an invisible abduction had become visible. Because the plan had always been, in all likelihood, for Alex Kiprotich to see maajabu. To disappear the way Albert Ojwang disappeared. The evidence was already out. The video was being shared generously, not just nationally but internationally. The international press was picking it up. The international community was asking what is happening in Kenya. Human rights bodies who had been ignored for years suddenly had proof.
It is one thing to release a statement and make claims about how somebody was waylaid on a major road. It is quite another to attach footage of the actual event. That is a completely different level. And this is why the operation was aborted. Alex Kiprotich did not see maajabu because the footage had already made his kidnapping impossible to complete. That is the only reason. I say that without hesitation. We would otherwise be talking a very different story today.
The best friend of the long-suffering Kenyan
Here is the ironical part. That dashcam, the humble device some people dismiss as an unnecessary expense, has become the best friend of the long-suffering people of Kenya. It has opened can after can of worms. It has exposed the command structure. It has named the officer. It has named the civilian running the unit. It has shown us the faces. It has shown us the language of the killers. And it has done all of this without a single person paying the price that would have been paid had the footage not existed.
The abductors thought the dashcam was a piece of metal and glass in a car. It was, in fact, a witness. A witness that cannot be intimidated, cannot be bought, and cannot be made to forget.
What this means for the politics
Let me close on the political reality, though I suspect it is already obvious. This is a regime seeking a second term. It wishes to continue ruling us. And the manner in which it has been ruling us is now on display. The question for every Kenyan is a simple one: do we want a second term of a government that abducts journalists using an illegal police force run by a retired officer under contract until August 2027?
I will say this. The moment this footage went public, the regime's claim to be a government under the rule of law collapsed. You cannot shoot video of a kidnapping and simultaneously insist you are a democracy. You cannot name a civilian running an abduction unit and pretend the law applies to everyone else. You cannot tell Kenyans to trust the institutions of the state when the officers who hold those institutions are themselves too afraid to write down an occurrence book entry.
Kindly make your own conclusions. But I have made mine.
This is not a moment for despair. It is a moment for clarity. The dashcam gave us something priceless, and Kenyans have not wasted it. We know who they are. We know who runs them. We know what they intended to do. And we know that the only thing that stopped them, this time, was evidence.
The long game remains. The regime will adapt. It will find ways to avoid dashcams. It will speak of reform while covering its tracks. But the damage is done. It cannot un-film what happened. It cannot un-name Zakaria Kariuki. It cannot un-expose the command structure. And it cannot convince the world, or the people of Kenya, that the man who says utaona maajabu is acting under the law.
The ground has shifted. Things will never be the same again. And that, in the end, is the best thing this regime could have done accidentally: it gave us the evidence to see it plainly.
SEE ALSO; Alex Kiprotich Abduction: Inside the 4-Hour Kenya Deep State Mystery
