Nairobi residents say the criminals are getting bolder, and the things they take are getting more personal.
Official figures point the same way. The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) Economic Survey 2026 shows Nairobi recorded almost 10,000 reported crimes in 2025. That is the highest of any county in Kenya and 10.4% of the national total.
“I felt his hands on my scalp”
For one woman, the statistics arrived in a matter of seconds. She was heading into the city centre to run errands when someone came up behind her, moving fast, and grabbed her head.
“Because my wig was quite long, the way it was pulled off and it was glued on my hair, I caught it from the back,” she recalls. “It was so tough because I felt his hands on my scalp. I got hurt on my forehead.”
What stayed with her was how calm the thief was. “Looking back, I saw the guy, he was not even afraid,” she says. “He was just looking at me like, what you going to do?”
She says the theft fits a pattern residents have watched build. “Over time, they have been stealing phones,” she says, and people are always guarding theirs. “It has gotten to a point where they’re stealing hairs. They’re stealing medicated glasses for people. You can’t just have good stuff in town.”
Her account comes alongside wider reports of armed, motorbike-riding gangs carrying out brazen robberies by day and by night. Those reports describe a growing security problem that has turned the capital’s night economy into a hunting ground.
Weeks on, she says the physical injury is the smaller part of it. “It was kind of traumatic to me. And up to the moment right now, I feel the snatching on my head. I can feel it. I can see it.”
She does not expect to return to the city centre any time soon. “I think town should be a safe space for people,” she says.
A trend or a warning sign?
Whether wig-snatching is a passing crime trend or a sign of something deeper is the open question. Residents, and the reported crime figures, point to broader concerns about urban security and economic pressure in the capital.
Petty theft of personal items and organised robbery are different problems, and they call for different responses from police and city authorities.
Editor’s note: the account above is the woman’s own. Police and city authorities have not commented in this piece.
