Daadab Member of Parliament Farah Maalim has found himself trending on Kenya’s mainstream media, top blogs and social media platforms following a video of him making inflammatory remarks against the young Kenyan protesters who matched to Parliament, two weeks ago.
In the video, the MP speaks in Somali dialect and thanks to a verified video translator, Maalim allegedly said if he were president, he would have ‘slaughtered’ 5000 of the Gen Z protestors every time they took to the streets to protest.
His remarks came about the recent anti-finance Bill 2024 protests in Kenya carried out by thousands of youths demanding change in the govt and it’s leaders.
However to Maalim, the protests were sponsored by rich youths looking to cause trouble – which he would have never put up with.
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 adding;
God forbid if I was president I would have slaughtered them, 5,000 of them daily. Serious, there is no two ways about it.
It was edited
Having had the video go viral, Farah Maalim was forced to explain himself during an interview with KTN earlier this morning, where he denied having uttered the inhumane remarks.
According to him, the original video was edited by malicious people looking to tarnish his name and image.
It’s all editing, cutting and pasting, taking a word from here, another one from here 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.
In his defense, the minister said he was only trying to make sense to those looking to over power the govt, knowing very well it would not end well.
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 on the stability of the country and the democracy that we practice, Maalim said.
He went on to add that the so called ‘revolutions’ have seen countries like Sudan and Somali fall to their knees in the name change and are yet to recover….something he wouldn’t want for kenya.
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.