In Jukistopia, whenever a crime occurs, the first instinct is simple: follow the motive. Draw up a list of individuals or entities who stand to benefit—directly or indirectly. It is an old, almost obvious principle. Yet, time and again, it is the one we ignore. Thus breeding the Shadow Economy of Sabotage

Take the recent bus bombs. Predictably, attention turned to the usual suspects—terror groups like Al-Shabab. But something felt incomplete. There was no claim of responsibility, no signature bravado. Just fear, disruption, and a conveniently created vacuum.

So the question lingers: who benefits?

Because beyond ideology and extremism lies a quieter, more insidious possibility—the deliberate sabotage of public infrastructure to manufacture demand.

Consider the ecosystem that thrives in the aftermath of fear:

• Vendors of metal detectors suddenly find a booming market.
• Private security firms become indispensable overnight.
• Contractors line up for lucrative CCTV tenders.
• Business rivals quietly gain ground as competitors stumble under disruption.

Each of these actors has a plausible motive. Not necessarily to kill—but to destabilise just enough to create urgency. Fear, after all, is a powerful procurement officer.

And this is not without precedent.

Killing Telkom Kenya

When mobile telephony began to take root, Telkom Kenya still stood as a formidable—if inefficient—player. Denied a mobile license, it remained entrenched in last-mile connectivity through its extensive copper network, alongside a growing terrestrial fibre backbone.

But it had to be cut to size.

Then came the “vandals.”

At first, the explanation was simple: thieves targeting copper cables for resale. It made sense—until it didn’t.

Because soon, something changed.

The cables were no longer being stolen. They were being cut and left behind. Even more curious, fibre optic lines—worth little in scrap—began to suffer the same fate.

This was no longer theft.

It was sabotage.

The destruction was not about extracting value. It was about erasing it.

Within government supply chains, there is a term for this quiet destruction: kuchoma bulb. The practice of deliberately damaging a working item so that it can be replaced—freeing up procurement, justifying new orders, keeping the cycle alive.

It starts small.

A light bulb “burns out.”
A toilet latch mysteriously breaks.
A door knob loosens beyond repair.

But it doesn’t end there.

In hospitals, beds lose their springs, trolleys lose their wheels, fridges stop working, chairs collapse. On highways, road signs vanish overnight, crash barriers evaporate, and cat’s eyes pop out of the tarmac.

Individually, these are inconveniences.

Collectively, they are a system.

And in that system, destruction is not failure—it is strategy.

Because in erasing functional infrastructure, space is created. Space for new suppliers. New contracts. New technologies. New monopolies.

The pattern is uncomfortable but hard to ignore: when existing systems are deliberately weakened, the market does not collapse—it reshapes. And those who anticipated the collapse, or worse, engineered it, are perfectly positioned to profit from the rebuild.

This is the shadow economy of sabotage. Not loud, not claimed, but deeply effective.

It thrives in the gap between assumption and investigation. In our willingness to accept the easiest explanation. In our reluctance to ask the most inconvenient question:

Who benefits from the breakdown?

Because sometimes, the real crime is not the explosion, the vandalism, or the outage.

It is the business model behind it