Is Kenya's president safe in a crowd? Security expert scans VIP protection checklist
The issue of presidential protection in Kenya has become particularly relevant following an incident in early May 2025 when someone in a crowd threw a shoe at President William Ruto during a public event, hitting his hand.
I have studied policing and security policies in Kenya for over 15 years, interacting closely with the country's security protocols. In my view this incident exposed several critical security lapses around the elite officers tasked with protecting the president.
The security of the president is a critical issue in Kenya. The country is exposed to terror groups like the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab and other criminal networks in the region.
In 2021, a businessman embedded himself into the presidential motorcade and drove into then president Uhuru Kenyatta's official residence. In 2017, an unidentified man who was said to have illegally accessed the highly protected state house grounds was shot dead by presidential guards.
There are multiple layers to Kenya's protection protocols. They include National Intelligence Service officers, the Kenya Defence Force, Presidential Escort Police officers drawn from the highly trained General Service Unit, bomb disposal experts and regular police officers. Their deployment depends on the nature of the presidential engagement.
While the shoe incident may be passed off as simply embarrassing, it should serve as a wake-up call to tighten security protocols around the president without necessarily compromising his public engagement with citizens.
Prior to any presidential visit across the country, security teams conduct a thorough reconnaissance of the destination. This includes coordinating with local policing agencies, clearing airspace, mapping secure transport routes and identifying nearby medical facilities in case of emergencies.
Presidential motorcade routes are pre-planned and a dry run is made. This often includes mapping alternative routes to avoid predictability should there be assailants along a presidential route. It is common to see some roads temporarily closed and security officers conducting sweeps for any threats or explosives. In areas deemed high risk, counter security sniper teams are covertly deployed in strategic areas.
Cases of attacks on presidential motorcades are rare in Kenya. However, in 2002 during presidential campaigns, angry opposition supporters stoned then president Daniel Moi's motorcade. In November 2021, an angry mob hurled rocks at then deputy president Ruto's motorcade.
The National Intelligence Service and Presidential Escort Unit covertly scout locations in advance, assessing potential security vulnerabilities. Crowd sizes, and entry and exit points for the head of state are mapped out in advance.
In cases where meetings are held in town halls or huge tents, attendees are screened using metal detectors and/or physical searches. Uniformed and plainclothes security officers embed themselves in the crowd to monitor any threats.
The president and any dignitaries accompanying him have at least three layers of security.
The inner ring consists of close protection officers who are always within an arm's length of the president to physically thwart any threats. The middle ring has armed security guards who watch for, among others, sudden movements and abnormal behaviour within the crowd. The outer ring consists of regular police and paramilitary units from the General Service Unit who secure the outside perimeter.
The presidential motorcade is a coordinated convoy of heavily armoured vehicles. It includes lead and chase cars, communication units and emergency response teams. Traffic is managed by local traffic police officers to ensure unobstructed movement. Routes are kept confidential until necessary.
The president's security may opt to use a decoy vehicle if there is a security threat, to confuse and derail potential risk sources. In all these cases, there is a contingent of specialised General Service Unit officers, called the Recce unit, that always accompanies the president.
Kenya's presidential security precautions follow standard VIP security protection like those for heads of state across the world. However, in some neighbouring countries, for instance, presidents move in heavily armed military convoys. This has not been seen in Kenya.
If a potential threat is detected, the president is immediately shielded and whisked away to a secure vehicle or evacuated by air in high-risk events. In such cases, the Kenya Defence Forces secures the president.
Despite stringent security measures, incidents can occur. For instance, in March 2025, a British tourist was fatally hit by a vehicle in Ruto's motorcade. This prompted investigations and reviews on motorcade safety protocols.
Such events highlight the challenges of balancing presidential security with public safety, especially in densely populated urban areas.
The shoe-throwing incident targeting Ruto highlighted five major failures in presidential protection protocols.
First, crowd screening and access control failures. The alleged assailant was very close to the president, suggesting an inadequate distance between the crowds and the president. The inner ring of security also failed to spot the perpetrator raising a shoe in the air to use as a projectile. This indicates weak front-row eye sweeps and scans by the president's security.
Second, there was an apparent delay in security response. The elite officers around the president should have subdued the alleged attacker within seconds. It could mean most had their eyes on the president or cameras, as opposed to scanning the crowds for any sudden movements.
Third, security allowed the president to stand too close to a crowd that hadn't been screened. Best practices require a no-go zone of three to five metres for individuals who have not been scanned or screened.
Fourth, there was an apparent gap in intelligence and threat assessment. Aggressive or agitated people next to the president should draw the attention of security officers. Plainclothes security officers are usually deployed to monitor crowd behaviour. It isn't enough to rely on uniformed officers.
Undercover agents are critical for flagging pre-attack signals, such as nervousness or repeated adjustments of positions.
Fifth, there was no clear evacuation plan for the president. After the incident, the president continued speaking. In high-risk scenarios, protocols often demand instant relocation of the president to a secure vehicle or helicopter, where the military takes over and airlifts him to safety.
Kenya's presidential security detail may be forced to:
increase standoff distance between the president and crowds
deploy more plainclothes officers to blend in and monitor crowds around the president
mandate stricter screening of those in close proximity to the president
conduct more frequent security risks drills for rapid neutralisation of potential threats.
The exact details of presidential security in Kenya are confidential. However, the overarching structure aims to provide comprehensive protection to the president while maintaining public safety and order during official engagements. No security protocol is 100% foolproof. But a balance needs to be struck between overly aggressive crowd control and accessibility.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Douglas Lucas Kivoi, The Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA)
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Douglas Lucas Kivoi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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The Americans were willing to do a deal, too. 'Trump was offering a huge amount, sanctions relief and a drawdown in U.S. forces, to get him back. It was eventually taken off the table because of changing geopolitics … but there was in any case a very slow response from the Syrian government.' [Assume we tried to confirm this with Trump admin?] By that time, it was clear to the knowledgeable insider, there was no Tice to course, there remain other possibilities about what befell Tice different from al-Hassan's version. He might have been killed or died for another reason in al-Hassan's custody. Keenly aware that he's on the radar of the American authorities, al-Hassan now might be seeking to shift the blame upward — an easy thing to do since Assad is hiding in Moscow and out of America's judicial reach. (In al-Hassan's account, according to Elwood, the Tice family spokesperson, he argued with Assad. ''We shouldn't do this,' he said, 'Tice is a valuable asset.' But Bashar al-Assad was intractable and not listening to reason.') There will also be the suspicion that al-Hassan is trying to win some advantage by peddling spurious information about the only thing that U.S officials want to know. Some eyebrows will be raised at the fact that the FBI has an outstanding $1-million reward for information 'leading directly to the safe location, recovery and return' of Tice while the U.S State Department is offering $10 million for the same. 'Maybe the region is changing, and he's a survivalist,' guessed the U.S. law enforcement official. But the same official was clear: There were no deals. In the wake of the fall of Assad's regime in December, more than a few journalists traveled to Damascus and began combing through Syrian regime prisons in search of Tice. In December, for example, The Times (of London) reported an interview with a 'Syrian undercover journalist,' who claimed to have been detained in the same Damascus prison as Tice, as recently as 2022. The prison, according to the report, was Branch 85 of the general intelligence directorate, in the Kafr Sousa neighbourhood. The undercover journalist said he'd seen Tice a few times 'when he was allowed out to the main corridor for exercise or on his way to be tortured.' The Times shared the information with the Tice family. But if al-Hassan's account is to be believed Tice was never held by the General Intelligence directorate. In any case, according to Syrian human rights groups, there was no such prison in Damascus named Branch 85. In January, CNN followed Austin's mother Debra Tice as she toured another prison formerly controlled by the General Intelligence Directorate, Branch 251, otherwise known as 'al-Khatib' alongside Nizar Zakka, who was publicly co-ordinating the search. Zakka's team led Debra Tice inside a grim underground Damascus prison where she became emotional at the discovery of some graffiti that they thought was written by Tice. 'The Tice family asked us not to show the graffiti itself out of respect for their privacy,' said the journalist, as the camera drew away. But from a different activist video of the same cell it's clear that it simply read 'Mama I love you' — and could have been written by any of the hundreds of foreign fighters who had joined Syria's rebellion. (Asked about her trip to the prison, Debra Tice didn't want to comment.) Bassam Al-Hassan wouldn't be the only one still seeking to deploy Tice for his own advantage; some have accused the new Syrian regime of improperly leveraging Tice's case. In an interview with ITV News in December, Tice's sister Megan gently warned Syria's new leaders that her brother was 'not a pawn in a political playbook.' But whether dead or alive, Tice's fate will continue to be an important political bargaining chip between Syria and the United States. A risible story was published by Al Jazeera in May that Tice had been discovered in a grave in northern Syria along with victims of ISIS; it was immediately denied by the Tice family. The knowledgeable insider with access to both former Syrian regime and U.S. officials, said he learned the report angered some of those U.S. officials because they suspected it had been orchestrated by the Qataris, close allies of Syria's new Islamist government, to help guarantee a meeting between Syria's new President Ahmed al-Sharaa and Trump which took place a few days later. The two most common baseless rumors about Tice's purported location since the fall of the Assad regime have focused on Syria's Coast and the currently restive province of Suwayda. Both areas have seen heavy-handed interventions by forces allied to the new Syrian government to quell rebellions against its authority, involving major human rights abuses by its soldiers against two of Syria's minorities, the Alawi and the Druze. It's conceivable that Tice's alleged location might be deployed as another justification for such incursions, to root out 'regime remnants' and get him the exception of Assad and his former henchmen, no one wants Tice to be dead. But the continued litany of fallacious tips, evidence-free sightings and credulity-defying tall stories seem to represent the triumph of hope over the weight of evidence, which is that this intrepid adventurer turned brilliant warzone journalist has joined the ranks of Syria's disappeared. They also risk perpetuating his family's agony. In the absence of a body or any more definitive proof of his death, that agony seems certain to continue.
