As protesters are hit with terrorism charges, critics accuse Kenya's government of criminalizing dissent
Boniface Mwangi was arrested over the weekend 'in connection with the facilitation of terrorist activities' during the June 25 protests, Kenya's Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) announced on social media on Sunday, drawing immediate outrage among activists.
When the 42-year-old award-winning photographer appeared in court on Monday, the terrorism charges had been downgraded to two counts of 'possession of ammunition without a valid firearm certificate' because of teargas canisters and blank rounds allegedly found at his office.
His arrest came as activists say more than 100 protesters have been charged with terror-related offenses, arson and money laundering in the past month over demonstrations sparked by widespread dissatisfaction with President William Ruto's administration – especially among the youth whose support propelled him into power.
'I'm known as a human rights defender, not a terrorist,' Mwangi told CNN on Monday evening after he was released on bail. 'I'm so fired up; I'm not scared at all. The only thing that can stop me is a bullet in my head, but as long as I'm alive I'll keep organizing for regime change. The government we have in power is not working for the people.'
Mwangi, who has been critical of successive Kenyan governments and describes himself as 'the people's watchman,' said he was arrested at home by plainclothes policemen on Saturday and taken to his office in the capital Nairobi.
He claimed policemen ransacked the office, confiscating devices and finding two unused teargas canisters and one blank round. Protesters often display the canisters or rounds during demonstrations to journalists as evidence of police brutality and use of excessive force.
Video on social media showed Mwangi shout 'Ruto Must Go!' as he was driven away from his office on Saturday.
Mwangi denied the charges; a judge freed him on a personal bond and set a hearing date for August 21.
Protests erupted in the country in June after several cases of alleged police brutality, including the death of a teacher while in police custody.
During the protests, claims swirled among frustrated demonstrators on social media that government-affiliated politicians had hired people to attack peaceful protesters and damage property to discredit the demonstrations. The Law Society of Kenya, which advises and assists the legal profession, government and public, said the protests had been 'infiltrated by armed, hired goons' in a scathing statement on Monday. 'We strongly condemn this malicious, deliberate re-emergence of radicalized militia sponsored by the political class.'
During recent protests, CNN saw groups of men armed with batons marching alongside police and beating up civilians in Nairobi while uniformed officers watched. Businesses were burnt in other parts of the country and a police station attacked.
CNN has asked the Kenyan government and police for comment, but has not heard back.
President Ruto accused some politicians of misleading youth to riot on Sunday and warned of consequences: 'The police are trained to deal with criminals. They're not trained in parenting. So, if you surrender your children to the police, what do you expect?'
The right to protest is protected under Kenya's constitution but authorities have characterized recent demonstrations as chaotic looting sprees. Kenyan prosecutors slapped several youths with arson and terrorism charges following the protests, and judges imposed hefty bail terms even though many claimed their innocence.
Rights groups have condemned the use of terrorism charges.
'We are deeply concerned by the continued misuse of the Prevention of Terrorism Act to manage public order,' according to a statement on Monday from the Police Reforms Working Group, a coalition of civil society organizations that monitors policing. 'This practice undermines Kenya's criminal justice system and jeopardizes critical international partnerships aimed at safeguarding national security.'
The Kenyan chapter of the International Commission of Jurists on Sunday said it was 'alarmed by the growing pattern of arbitrary arrests and trumped-up charges targeting innocent youth.' In a statement, the human rights group added: 'What began as targeted persecution of young protesters demanding accountability has metastasized into a full-scale assault on Kenya's democracy.'
The government has denied any wrongdoing. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecution defended its use of terrorism charges, saying that the protests were 'calculated and coordinated acts of violence' and that the office 'remains committed to executing its constitutional mandate in accordance with the law, public interest, and administration of justice.'
'We wish to reassure the public that all charges have been brought strictly based on available evidence,' it added on Monday.
Activists like Mwangi and legal experts say the Kenyan government is criminalizing dissent by using charges such as terrorism, arson and money laundering to stoke fear among protesters.
Over the past year, CNN has filmed security forces violently breaking up protests on multiple occasions, shooting at unarmed protesters and assaulting bystanders. At least 38 people were killed and 130 injured in another protest earlier this month, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.
President Ruto previously told police officers on July 9 to shoot 'looters and arsonists' in the leg if they considered them a threat, rather than killing them.
His Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen went further a week later by issuing a directive for officers to shoot at protesters who approached police stations. The former lecturer of law attempted to walk back the comments after public outcry but did not rescind the directive.
On Monday, Murkomen called out those challenging the terror charges, asking: 'If you invade a police station and burn it and steal guns… burn courts… and people's businesses, what is that crime if it is not terrorism?'
Mwangi told CNN that Ruto and his government were 'weaponizing the DCI to criminalize dissent, which is allowed by the constitution – but he's going to fail.'
'They want to scare youth (away) from protesting because it will be hard to get work, or even a visa,' he said. 'And if the kids are not scared, they want to scare their parents.'
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They would include 4.8 million people previously eligible for Medicaid described as "able-bodied" adults 19 to 64 years old who have no dependents and who "do not meet the community engagement requirement" of doing "work-related activities" at least 80 hours a month. Apart from working, doing community service and attending school also fulfill the community engagement requirement. Jennings paired that statistic with a separate analysis of how nondisabled adult Medicaid recipients without dependent children spend their time. But the CBO estimate was a projection - it doesn't represent the current number of nondisabled Medicaid recipients, nor does it say 4.8 million people in this group "choose not to work." The figure represented how many fewer people would have coverage because of the bill's community engagement requirement. 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Research into Medicaid work requirements imposed at the state level has shown that people found it difficult to fulfill them and submit documentation, contributing to coverage losses. In Arkansas, which added a work requirement to Medicaid in 2018, a study based on nearly 6,000 respondents found that about 95% of the target population were already working or qualified for an exemption, but a third of them did not hear about the work requirements. As a result, nearly 17,000 Medicaid recipients subject to work requirements lost coverage. KFF found that adults ages 50 to 64 are more at risk of losing Medicaid coverage because of the new work requirements. More than 1 in 10 in that age group said they had retired, and among them, 28% reported being disabled, said KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. Benjamin Sommers, a health care economics professor at the Harvard Chan school, said many of the 4.8 million "able-bodied" people in the CBO estimate "will actually be engaged in the activities they are supposed to be doing, and lose coverage because they are not able to navigate the reporting requirements with the state and lose coverage from red tape." When Recipients Don't Work, It's Rarely From Lack of Interest There is no universal definition for "able-bodied"; disability can be assessed in different ways. But other studies offer much smaller estimates than 4.8 million Medicaid recipients without dependents who can work but choose not to. Millions of working-age, nondisabled adults joined the Medicaid ranks in states that expanded eligibility under the Affordable Care Act. There were about 34 million working-age nondisabled Medicaid enrollees in 2024, according to the CBO, 15 million of whom enrolled through the ACA. A KFF analysis found a smaller figure of 26 million Medicaid-covered adults, ages 19 to 64, who don't receive Supplemental Security Income, Social Security Disability Insurance, or Medicare benefits. Among this group, KFF estimated, 64% were working either full time or part time. The reasons the rest were not working included caregiving (12%); illness or disability (10%); retirement, inability to find work, or other reason (8%); and school attendance (7%). Few people cited lack of interest in working as the reason for their unemployment. An Urban Institute study found 2% of Medicaid expansion enrollees without dependents who neither worked nor attended school - or 300,000 people out of a projected 15 million subject to work requirements - cited a lack of interest in working as the reason they were unemployed. This was consistent with the Brookings Institution's June 5 analysis that found that, of 4.3 million adult enrollees who worked fewer than 80 hours a month and did not have any activity limitations or illnesses, about 300,000 reported that they "did not work because they did not want to." Mostly Women, Mostly With a High School Degree or Less When Republicanshave described nondisabled adult Medicaid recipients, they have often portrayed them as men in their 30s "playing video games" in their parents' basement or who "smoke weed all day." Research paints a different picture. Jane Tavares and Marc Cohen, of the University of Massachusetts-Boston Gerontology Department, researched Medicaid recipients who are not disabled or working, have no dependent children under 18, and are not in school. They cited 2023 census data from the American Community Survey. They found: --The average age of this population is 41, and 26% are older than 50. --Almost 80% are female. --Most, 80%, have a high school education or less. --Their median individual income is $0, and their median household income is $44,800. --About 56% worked in the past five years, and 23% worked in the prior year. About 30% are looking or available for work. "They are not healthy young adults just hanging out," the authors, along with health law experts Sara Rosenbaum and Alison Barkoff, wrote April 30. "It's clear based on their prior work history and family size/income that they are exceptionally poor and have likely left the workforce to care for adult children or older adults," Tavares told PolitiFact. "Even if these individuals could work, they would have very few job opportunities and it would come at the cost of the people they are providing care for." AEI Study Not Definitively Linked to CBO Estimate On the social platform X, Jennings posted the CBO letter and a May 29 analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, about "how nondisabled Medicaid recipients without children spend their time." PolitiFact contacted CNN to reach Jennings but did not receive a reply. The author of that study, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kevin Corinth, analyzed survey data and found that Medicaid recipients who do not report working spend on average 6.1 hours a day "on all socializing, relaxing and leisure activities (including television and video games)." But it's uncertain whether the people in the survey population he analyzed overlap with the people included in the CBO analysis, said Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of KFF's Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Corinth told PolitiFact "it is difficult to say" how the population he analyzed differs from the CBO's. Tavares, Cohen, Rosenbaum, and Barkoff said Corinth's dataset defined disability narrowly, leading to a "serious underestimation of disability" among the population of Medicaid recipients he looked into. It focused on Medicaid recipients who receive Supplemental Security Income or have a health condition that prevents them from working. The researchers said this approach is too narrow because the SSI program accounts for only those "most deeply impoverished adults with severe disabilities." The group gave a hypothetical example of a 54-year-old woman with a serious heart condition who can work only a few hours a week. She may not be considered disabled under the SSI program, but she may be limited in the work she can do and may need time to rest. "Using her 'leisure time' to justify a work requirement grossly misrepresents her reality," the group wrote. Corinth's analysis also shows that nonworking Medicaid recipients spend less time socializing, relaxing, or engaged in leisure activities than nonworking people who aren't covered by Medicaid. Nonworking Medicaid recipients also spend more time looking for work and doing housework and errands, it found. Our Ruling Jennings said almost 5 million nondisabled Medicaid recipients "simply choose not to work" and "spend six hours a day socializing and watching television." The 5 million figure stems from a CBO projection that 4.8 million people would go without coverage by 2034 as a result of not fulfilling the community engagement requirements. It is not descriptive of current enrollees and does not specify that these people choose not to work. Jennings cited an American Enterprise Institute analysis on how nondisabled Medicaid recipients with no dependents spend their time, but it is uncertain if the population in that analysis overlaps with that in the CBO estimate. Current snapshots of the population Jennings described produce a smaller number. A survey by the Urban Institute found that 2% of Medicaid expansion enrollees without dependents who were neither working nor attending school - about 300,000 people - cited a lack of interest in working. Other research has found reasons this group doesn't work include caregiving, illness or disability, retirement, and inability to find work. Studies of nonworking Medicaid recipients have found the majority are women and have a high school education or less. Their average age is 41, and more than half have a work history in the past five years. We rate Jennings' statement False. ____ Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
