Kenyan Police Arrest Two in Killing of University Scholar Amid Mbita Land Dispute
Nairobi—Kenyan police say they have arrested two brothers in connection with the killing of a university professor during a land boundary dispute in Mbita, Homa Bay County, a case that has rattled academic circles and revived debate over the country’s fraught relationship with land.
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The suspects were picked up Saturday in the lakeside town after a multiday manhunt, according to police. Authorities say they are seeking three additional suspects linked to the attack, which occurred on Tuesday, September 30, when Prof. Thomas Tonny Onyango Mboya, 56, was reportedly assaulted as he marked boundary beacons on a contested parcel.
Police said the two men in custody are expected to appear in court on Monday to face murder charges. “We are pursuing several leads and anticipate more arrests,” said a senior regional investigator, adding that officers are working with local administrators to retrieve evidence and secure the contested property.
A dispute turns deadly
By multiple accounts, the dispute had simmered for months and wound its way through court. Witnesses say tensions rose after a recent ruling ordered the removal of structures erected on the land. On the day of the attack, Prof. Mboya was at the site with his father, Wilson Onyango Opanga, awaiting the arrival of police and the area chief to help enforce the order. What happened next was swift and devastating.
According to police, a group of assailants descended on the pair before the officers could arrive. Prof. Mboya was killed at the scene, while his father suffered deep cuts from a panga—a machete commonly used across East Africa in both farming and, too often, in rural conflicts. Opanga was rushed to a hospital in Homa Bay and was in critical condition.
Residents raised the alarm as the attackers fled, and a crowd formed. Mob justice has long shadowed Kenya’s rural areas when formal justice seems slow. This time, police say, the suspects escaped the crowd and vanished into nearby villages, prompting a dragnet that culminated in Saturday’s arrests.
A scholar remembered
In Nairobi, the shock rippled through lecture halls and staff rooms. Prof. Mboya served as Associate Professor and Director of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the Technical University of Kenya (TUK), where colleagues described him as a quiet force for rigor and mentorship. “He had a way of making hard problems feel solvable,” a colleague told me by phone, voice breaking. “Not just in mathematics—he believed any knot could be undone if we worked through it together.”
Born in 1970, the son of Homa Bay, he charted a classic Kenyan story of persistence and excellence: Kokuro Secondary for O-Levels, Homa Bay High for A-Levels, Egerton University for his Bachelor of Education in 1993. After a stint with the Teachers Service Commission, he pursued an M.Sc. in Mathematics at the University of Nairobi, then earned a Ph.D. in inverse and ill-posed problems at the University of Leeds in 2008. He returned to teach at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, then joined TUK in 2012 as a senior lecturer before rising to lead his school.
In a country where STEM mentors are in short supply, his loss felt heavy. He leaves behind classrooms of students trained to navigate complexity—statistical models in Nairobi, yes, but also the painstaking geometry of life along the lake, where maps, memories, and livelihoods often collide.
Why land disputes keep turning violent
The killing underscores a familiar Kenyan paradox: a robust legal framework for land administration—and a daily reality where land remains memory, patrimony, and survival. Kenya’s 2010 Constitution established the National Land Commission and recognized public, community, and private land. The Environment and Land Court was created to unclog complex cases. In practice, boundary disputes and overlapping claims still choke the system. Enforcement is often slow, and paper orders must be implemented in fields and homesteads where neighbors—and sometimes relatives—stand in the way.
Across the region, land is becoming scarcer as populations swell and climate shocks amplify pressure on arable plots. In Homa Bay and other counties ringing Lake Victoria, plot boundaries are threaded through family inheritance, migration, and decades of informal settlement. Surveyors’ beacons—small concrete truth-tellers—divide crops and kinsmen alike. When court rulings arrive, they need careful choreography: police presence, local administrators, time for appeals, and community dialogue to prevent flare-ups. When those steps are rushed or contested, violence has too often filled the gap.
Kenyan officials have for years encouraged alternative dispute resolution, village mediation, and the use of elders’ councils to diffuse tensions before they harden into court cases and, worse, confrontations. Yet the deeper question persists: How can a legal order map a nation’s living, breathing relationship with land—one that carries ancestral graves, dowries paid, and decades of unrecorded improvements? The answer may be part policy, part patience.
The investigation and the law
Nyanza Regional investigations chief George Mutonya said detectives are piecing together the chain of events leading to the attack, including the timeline from the court directive to the arrival of the professor and his father at the site. The remaining suspects are being sought, and police appealed for calm as the case moves to court.
Under Kenyan law, murder is among the most serious charges. The country retains the death penalty on the books, though courts have discretion in sentencing and executions have not been carried out for decades. In 2017, Kenya’s Supreme Court struck down the mandatory death sentence, a ruling that judges now apply in weighing individual circumstances.
For now, the small coastal inlets of Mbita—better known for tilapia nets and the ferry to the Rusinga islands—are a crime scene. On social media, alumni groups traded condolences. At TUK, administrators promised to support students and staff shaken by the news. And in Homa Bay, a wounded father fights for his life.
What this moment asks of us
Stories like this can become statistics. But they also ask us to look honestly at how our communities handle conflict: Is there a safer path between a court’s ink and a community’s earth? Can local authorities stage and secure enforcement in ways that keep people alive, even when tempers flare? And what can universities, churches, and civic groups do to help mediate before machetes come out?
Those are not abstract questions in Kenya or across the Global South, where land is both home and inheritance, and where the violence of a single dispute can ripple through families for generations. A scholar who studied ill-posed problems—a class of equations with too many unknowns—became a victim of one. The people of Mbita are left to seek a solution, and the rest of us to ask how we can prevent the next tragedy.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
