Since June’s anti-finance bill protests, dozens of people remain unaccounted for—a stark reminder of the Kenyan state’s long history of abductions and assassinations.
November 15, 2024
Source: Africa is a Country
Protestors gather on Haile Selassie Avenue in Nairobi, on June 24, 2024. Image: Onesmus Karanja.
Ruto’s government is abducting people every day. Literally. There is not one day that has passed since the anti–finance bill protests started in June when Kenyans are not being bundled into unmarked Subaru cars by unidentified persons understood as plainclothes police officers (in all of their shades of vigilantism). While the president and his acolytes deny these events, which are often captured on city CCTV cameras or by citizen phones, these state kidnappings continue.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) documents that in the period since the protests began, they have investigated 60 cases of extrajudicial killings and 71 cases of “abductions and forced disappearances.” But the public understands that the figure is likely much higher, since dozens of people who took part in the protests remain unaccounted for. Likely sinister evidence for this is the Nairobi City Mortuary’s admission that it received more bodies than average—over 50 percent more—in June, the period that corresponds to the height of these Gen Z–led street protests.
During the week of October 28, Boniface Mwangi, Maverick Aoko, Lavani Mila, and others were abducted, and countless others detained or threatened with detention for organizing political education platforms or even just expressing their opinions. While Boniface and Lavani were released, blogger Aoko remains missing. In the previous week, activist Hussein Khalid suffered the same fate, and a Briton and Turkish refugees were abducted by authorities on behalf of Turkey, in a manner identical to how many citizens have been kidnapped since the protests began.
None of those who are missing had engaged in anything that is not guaranteed by the 2010 constitution—the right to assembly, the freedom of expression, the right to association, and all of the bill of rights demanded by chapter four of this Kenyan charter. This trend is now so pervasive that on Thursday, October 31, a joint statement by nine EU ambassadors and the UK High Commission conveyed their “concern over ongoing reports of arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances despite High Court rulings.”
While we, as Kenyans, think about how we got here, we also need to be very honest. Every iteration of our colonial and postcolonial state has proceeded, to some degree, through abductions and assassinations. Unquestionably, if there is one guarantee, it is that the Kenyan state will always be on hand to abduct and assassinate in order to shore up its (often illegitimate) power and to silence and subjugate dissent. Just ask Mekatilili wa Menza, Muthoni Nyanjiru, Dedan Kimathi, Pio Gama Pinto, J. M. Kariuki, Karimi Nduthu, all of the young people killed by the Kibaki regime in the early 2000s, and all of the hundreds of people killed between 2013 and 2016 across Nairobi’s low-income settlements. We also cannot forget the thousands of Muslims disappeared as part of Kenya’s two-decades-long “war on terror” articulations both at home and abroad.
Recounting this history—remembering that we have been here before—is not to take away from the murderous role of Ruto and his administration in spilling the blood of young people, like David Chege, outside Parliament during the protests, or in dumping their shackled frames to drown in dams, as was the fate of Denzel Omondi.
Rather, in recalling the many and successive sinister practices of the state, and in memorializing those who have been the collateral of these actions, is to highlight the institutionalization of killings even if this has not, until recently, been part of the middle-class experience or the government’s narrative; disposability has never been a collective story to tell, allowing that, for many years, the wanton gunspeak of our governments continued with impunity while many of us with some semblance of privilege could avert our gaze.
That is, until now.
Binyavanga Wainaina, in his story “A New Cry of Freedom,” writes of the months preceding the 2002 elections, which dispensed with the Moi regime, and shares how “we Kenyans are not known for our boldness. We tend to bow our heads when being harassed. Moi managed to perfect what Kenyatta set out to do: Have a country that does everything he says, that says thank you for every abuse. This model Kenyan is vanishing rapidly.”
That the Kenyan government has always detained, imprisoned, and killed should not surprise anyone, even those who were taken by the narratives of Ruto’s “hustler” government. But what is encouraging, redolent of 2002 but also pregnant with new and powerful urgencies, is the death of this “model Kenyan.”
Certainly, we are back to a place where we feel there is a new dawn, and perhaps one we have never felt as strongly about, and that is more inclusive than ever before.
Undoubtedly, something was ruptured by the over one million people on the streets of Nairobi on June 25, and the hundreds of thousands across Kenya’s towns. Sustaining this pressure, when the streets are filled with police bullets—in nightclubs, X spaces, churches, WhatsApp groups, concerts, embassies across the world, community spaces—are people shouting #RutoMustGo (take a moment, this moment, to shout it too) and forging new determined chapters in our struggle against normalized state violence.
And while there is shock that we are back here—after a new constitution, after a political party manifesto premised on change, after the assassinations of young protestors captured on live TV, after Ruto’s attempted forays into global “statesmanship”—we need to remember we are still governed by institutions that have historically seen the police killings of a thirteen-year-old and even six-month-old as fair game.
Though Ruto’s abduction and assassination state may appear right now to be the most wanton, merciless, corrupt, inhuman version we have encountered, like the ones before it, it will fall. It is not new.
While Ruto’s government has now, as Wainaina remarked of the Moi regime, “ceased all pretense of governing” and our lives are filled with tales of more kidnappings, deputy president impeachments, health care insurance dissolutions, and even the sale of the main airport, it has to come to terms with the reality, a novel one, that the Kenyan populace is no longer the same; for the first time, Kenyans across class, religion, ethnicity, and generation are mobilizing in big and small ways.
Though Ruto will use the state’s institutionalized violence to produce a government intent on abductions and assassinations, he can no longer ignore, we will not let him ignore, that there is no longer any “model Kenyan.”
Wangui Kimari i is on the editorial board of Africa Is a Country and participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Center.
Protestors gather on Haile Selassie Avenue in Nairobi, on June 24, 2024. Image: Onesmus Karanja.
Ruto’s government is abducting people every day. Literally. There is not one day that has passed since the anti–finance bill protests started in June when Kenyans are not being bundled into unmarked Subaru cars by unidentified persons understood as plainclothes police officers (in all of their shades of vigilantism). While the president and his acolytes deny these events, which are often captured on city CCTV cameras or by citizen phones, these state kidnappings continue.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) documents that in the period since the protests began, they have investigated 60 cases of extrajudicial killings and 71 cases of “abductions and forced disappearances.” But the public understands that the figure is likely much higher, since dozens of people who took part in the protests remain unaccounted for. Likely sinister evidence for this is the Nairobi City Mortuary’s admission that it received more bodies than average—over 50 percent more—in June, the period that corresponds to the height of these Gen Z–led street protests.
During the week of October 28, Boniface Mwangi, Maverick Aoko, Lavani Mila, and others were abducted, and countless others detained or threatened with detention for organizing political education platforms or even just expressing their opinions. While Boniface and Lavani were released, blogger Aoko remains missing. In the previous week, activist Hussein Khalid suffered the same fate, and a Briton and Turkish refugees were abducted by authorities on behalf of Turkey, in a manner identical to how many citizens have been kidnapped since the protests began.
None of those who are missing had engaged in anything that is not guaranteed by the 2010 constitution—the right to assembly, the freedom of expression, the right to association, and all of the bill of rights demanded by chapter four of this Kenyan charter. This trend is now so pervasive that on Thursday, October 31, a joint statement by nine EU ambassadors and the UK High Commission conveyed their “concern over ongoing reports of arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances despite High Court rulings.”
While we, as Kenyans, think about how we got here, we also need to be very honest. Every iteration of our colonial and postcolonial state has proceeded, to some degree, through abductions and assassinations. Unquestionably, if there is one guarantee, it is that the Kenyan state will always be on hand to abduct and assassinate in order to shore up its (often illegitimate) power and to silence and subjugate dissent. Just ask Mekatilili wa Menza, Muthoni Nyanjiru, Dedan Kimathi, Pio Gama Pinto, J. M. Kariuki, Karimi Nduthu, all of the young people killed by the Kibaki regime in the early 2000s, and all of the hundreds of people killed between 2013 and 2016 across Nairobi’s low-income settlements. We also cannot forget the thousands of Muslims disappeared as part of Kenya’s two-decades-long “war on terror” articulations both at home and abroad.
Recounting this history—remembering that we have been here before—is not to take away from the murderous role of Ruto and his administration in spilling the blood of young people, like David Chege, outside Parliament during the protests, or in dumping their shackled frames to drown in dams, as was the fate of Denzel Omondi.
Rather, in recalling the many and successive sinister practices of the state, and in memorializing those who have been the collateral of these actions, is to highlight the institutionalization of killings even if this has not, until recently, been part of the middle-class experience or the government’s narrative; disposability has never been a collective story to tell, allowing that, for many years, the wanton gunspeak of our governments continued with impunity while many of us with some semblance of privilege could avert our gaze.
That is, until now.
Binyavanga Wainaina, in his story “A New Cry of Freedom,” writes of the months preceding the 2002 elections, which dispensed with the Moi regime, and shares how “we Kenyans are not known for our boldness. We tend to bow our heads when being harassed. Moi managed to perfect what Kenyatta set out to do: Have a country that does everything he says, that says thank you for every abuse. This model Kenyan is vanishing rapidly.”
That the Kenyan government has always detained, imprisoned, and killed should not surprise anyone, even those who were taken by the narratives of Ruto’s “hustler” government. But what is encouraging, redolent of 2002 but also pregnant with new and powerful urgencies, is the death of this “model Kenyan.”
Certainly, we are back to a place where we feel there is a new dawn, and perhaps one we have never felt as strongly about, and that is more inclusive than ever before.
Undoubtedly, something was ruptured by the over one million people on the streets of Nairobi on June 25, and the hundreds of thousands across Kenya’s towns. Sustaining this pressure, when the streets are filled with police bullets—in nightclubs, X spaces, churches, WhatsApp groups, concerts, embassies across the world, community spaces—are people shouting #RutoMustGo (take a moment, this moment, to shout it too) and forging new determined chapters in our struggle against normalized state violence.
And while there is shock that we are back here—after a new constitution, after a political party manifesto premised on change, after the assassinations of young protestors captured on live TV, after Ruto’s attempted forays into global “statesmanship”—we need to remember we are still governed by institutions that have historically seen the police killings of a thirteen-year-old and even six-month-old as fair game.
Though Ruto’s abduction and assassination state may appear right now to be the most wanton, merciless, corrupt, inhuman version we have encountered, like the ones before it, it will fall. It is not new.
While Ruto’s government has now, as Wainaina remarked of the Moi regime, “ceased all pretense of governing” and our lives are filled with tales of more kidnappings, deputy president impeachments, health care insurance dissolutions, and even the sale of the main airport, it has to come to terms with the reality, a novel one, that the Kenyan populace is no longer the same; for the first time, Kenyans across class, religion, ethnicity, and generation are mobilizing in big and small ways.
Though Ruto will use the state’s institutionalized violence to produce a government intent on abductions and assassinations, he can no longer ignore, we will not let him ignore, that there is no longer any “model Kenyan.”
Wangui Kimari i is on the editorial board of Africa Is a Country and participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Center.
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