Kenyans are demanding the arrest and prosecution of Daadab 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, while speaking in the Somali dialect, said that if he were the President of Kenya, he would have “slaughtered” 5,000 young protesters every day.
A verified video translation reveals that the legislator was censuring the Kenyan Gen Zs for their attempt to march to the State House during the anti-finance Bill 2024 protests.
In the video, Maalim claimed that the young people who took to the streets were from wealthy backgrounds and were dropped off in the capital with the sole purpose of causing mayhem.
“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 in downtown and told to riot and take over State House and Parliament buildings,” he said.
Maalim blatantly noted that he would have wiped them out in their thousands if he had reigned over the nation.
“God forbid if I was president I would have slaughtered them, 5,000 of them daily. Serious, there is no two ways about it,” he said.
Despite keen observations clearly showing that the video was not tampered with, Maalim has claimed that the video has been doctored and is misinforming. He was forced to clear the air on the video during an interview with KTN News on Tuesday, where he said that his adversaries are working against him.
“It’s all editing, cutting and pasting, taking a word from here, another one from there, and putting it together. There is a lot of nonsense there. It’s Somalis basically who would do that because I weighed in on their politics. It’s not the true picture,” he said.
Maalim delved into a scattered defence of his comments, noting that his statement was in protest against the attacks on critical national facilities, and nations which have had similar invasions have descended into anarchy.
“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 a bedrock of the stability of the country and the democracy that we practice,” he said.
“I’m actually trying to sound serious alarms in 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 his comment were futile.
