Inside Kenya's deadly crackdown on protesters

Telegraph

19 hours ago

Boniface Mwangi is no stranger to the brutality meted out by Kenya's president and his police force.
The 42-year-old activist and photographer has repeatedly been arrested and beaten as his country is convulsed by youth protests – first against tax rises and then against the ensuing violent crackdown.
He says he has been snatched from the streets and bundled into a car to be interrogated by the security forces, as President William Ruto's government tries to quash what have become known as the 'Gen Z protests'.
'Whenever I am arrested, I am asked who is behind the protest movement because the state believes the protest movement is funded by foreigners,' Mr Mwangi told The Telegraph. 'But I tell them the anger within Kenya is not orchestrated, it is genuine.'
Two months ago, he says, he was seized, stripped, beaten and sexually assaulted after travelling to neighbouring Tanzania to cover the treason trial of an opposition leader.
And he claims that the questions from his Tanzanian interrogators left him with little doubt that the Kenyan authorities were complicit with his torture in an attempt to silence him into submission.
'They had so much information about me and my activities in Kenya. They kept saying I have brought turmoil to my country and now wanted to destroy Tanzania. I believe my tribulations were orchestrated from Kenya,' he said.
Bernard Kavuli, another critic of Mr Ruto's government, described similar treatment earlier this year, when he was snatched from a petrol station outside Nairobi.
'They took me to a very dark room where they stripped me naked, and held me there for four to five days. I was beaten with fists and slapped constantly and denied food,' he said on his release.
However, the two men have been fortunate compared to some of those opposing Mr Ruto's government. More than 100 people have been killed in the past 13 months, and dozens more are still missing.
In the most recent wave of clashes last week, around 38 people were shot dead, including four women and two children, as they called for better governance and an end to police brutality. That brought the death toll to around 70 since mid-June.
The violence has led to international condemnation, with Britain and others calling for investigations into the violence against protesters.
However, Mr Ruto, a British ally who attended both the late Queen's funeral and the King's coronation, has shown no sign of backing down.
Last week, he accused the protesters of trying to 'bring disaster' to the country. His only concession was to suggest police should shoot them in the legs rather than kill them outright.
His violent crackdown makes a remarkable change for a politician who took power three years ago promising reform and jobs for the young in a country with 67 per cent youth unemployment. Instead, he now stands accused of taking a country once considered one of Africa's more open democracies decades back into its authoritarian past.
The protests erupted in June 2024 to oppose rising prices and tax increases, and days later crowds briefly occupied the Kenyan parliament.
The government's heavy-handed response has since seen the list of grievances widen to include police brutality and impunity, corruption, and the betrayal of Mr Ruto's election promises.
The protests were given fresh momentum when Albert Ojwang, a blogger, was allegedly beaten to death in custody. And during demonstrations in June to mark the protests' first anniversary, police again responded with gunfire and by employing hired thugs to beat up participants.
The protests, organised on social media, have been decentralised without any obvious leadership, and have taken their name from the young generation at their forefront.
Justin Muturi, a former minister and attorney general who resigned from the government after criticising Mr Ruto's brutal response to the protests, said: 'There is a general state of frustration in the country. What was promised during the electoral campaigns was an illusion.'
The public are fed up with 'the small clique that runs the country which lives in plenty as the majority sink in abject poverty,' he added.
Mr Muturi's own son, Leslie, was one of those abducted and then released last June. He openly accused the country's national intelligence agency of being behind his son's abduction.
Godfrey Osotsi, deputy leader of the Orange Democratic Movement, which is in a troubled alliance with Mr Ruto, said the current crisis could have been averted.
He said: 'After Ruto got to power, he ignored everything he promised. Instead, he brought back the old order and old habits.
'He came up with punitive taxation that escalated unemployment and what we are witnessing is a collapse of his narrative by a regime that promised so much but has done so little, and there is a complete loss of public trust.'
Some 13 months into the crisis and with another election around the corner in 2027, Mr Ruto has been unable to either appease or intimidate the protestors.
Otsieno Namwaya, an associate director of Human Rights Watch, predicts the unrest will continue. Fresh protests are planned for early August.
He said: 'The anger within the young generation has spread to all generations, regions and classes. If protests don't continue, anything else could happen.'
Mr Ruto has made it clear that if the protests continue, those taking part can expect no mercy.
But Boniface Mwangi said he was not afraid.
'We all die some day. We all die. Protests are a legitimate way of self expression in the face of oppression,' he said.
'I went to these streets to fight the wrongs perpetrated by the Ruto regime and I am ready to go to the streets any time. All we are demanding is for the government to uphold the rule of law and enforce the constitution.
'This president is deeply unpopular and it does not matter how many people he kills. He will go. This president is a one-term president.'