President William Ruto stood in Mandera this week, painting a rosy picture of “kinship” and “revitalized trade” as he announced the reopening of the border post come April. It’s the kind of speech that sounds great in a stadium but feels like a death sentence to those who remember the last time the government tried to play nice with the frontier. We’re supposed to believe that after fifteen years of the Mandera border being a literal no-go zone, everything is suddenly “long overdue” for a comeback. Please. In Nairobi, we call that a delusion; in Mandera, they just call it Tuesday.

Let’s talk about the “thorough security assessments” Ruto mentioned. The last time the government felt this confident, back in May 2024, they promised a gradual reopening of Mandera, Garissa, and Wajir. That experiment ended with eight police officers being blown to bits by an IED in Garissa. Former Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki had to scramble to the Dadaab refugee camp to hit the brakes on the whole project. Two years later, we are expected to believe the Al-Shabaab threat has simply vanished into the desert heat because the President wants a win for his “NYOTA” disbursement tour.

The rhetoric about “mutual prosperity” is particularly hard to swallow. For the average Kenyan, “trade” with a conflict zone doesn’t mean cheaper milk; it means an influx of illicit small arms and a more efficient route for the same criminals the government claims to be fighting. We’ve seen this pattern of institutional blindness before, much like Kenya’s Dangerous Denial regarding child trafficking. When the state wants to ignore a problem for the sake of a headline, they simply declare the problem “addressed” and walk away, leaving the residents to deal with the fallout.

Reopening the border post isn’t just about “connectivity.” It’s about admitting that the fifteen-year blockade failed to stop the insurgency and now we’re trying the opposite extreme out of sheer exhaustion. If the government couldn’t secure a few kilometers of road in 2024 without losing a squad of officers, what has changed in 2026? Security isn’t a switch you flip; it’s a reality on the ground that currently doesn’t match the PR coming out of State House.

By April, the gates will swing open, and the “revitalization” will begin. But let’s be real: until the government proves it can actually police the bush and not just the stadium podiums, this reopening is nothing more than a Mandera mirage. We’re trading the safety of our border towns for a photo-op, and in this country, that’s a price the elite are always willing to let the poor pay.