Compensation offer deepens rift between grieving families and state
NAIROBI — The money arrived as an announcement, not a negotiation. A significant sum, the government said. Enough, it implied, to close the matter.
Giliam Munyao calls it a joke. A big one.
Her son Rex Masai was the first to die in the June 2024 protests. A young man with a job waiting for him in the United Kingdom. Her firstborn.
The government’s offer of compensation, she says, treats his life as a line item — something to be priced, paid off, and forgotten. “Take the money and shut up,” is how Munyao describes the message she and other families receive.
The anniversary of the protests approaches. Dozens of Kenyan youths were killed. Many more wounded.
The government has yet to establish a structured mechanism for talking to the families. No formal process. No real dialogue.
Just a figure announced from on high. This is the pattern that has emerged over the past year.
The state moves slowly. Families wait. Frustration builds.
Then an offer appears, presented as resolution but received as insult. Munyao questions what she can invest in to raise Rex’s two siblings.
Her life, she says, was shattered by his death. No amount of money rebuilds that. The government’s approach reads as contemptuous of human life.
That is the accusation from the families. And the record supports them. There has been no structured engagement.
No acknowledgment that the victims’ families might have a say in what justice looks like. Instead, a top-down payout, announced without their input.
Where does this lead? To more bitterness. The compensation offer, rather than closing wounds, has reopened them.
Munyao does not see a government that values her son’s life. She sees a government that wants the problem to go away.
Cheaply. The protests of June 2024 were violent. Young Kenyans took to the streets.
The state responded with force. Deaths followed. Injuries followed.
Now, a year later, the families are still fighting for basic recognition — that their children were not numbers, that their grief is not a transaction. Rex’s mother speaks for many.
She is not alone in her disappointment. Other families have echoed the same complaint: the government has dragged its feet. Compensation was slow.
The process was opaque. The result feels like a consolation token, not genuine redress.
What happens next is uncertain. The families have not accepted the offer. They are skeptical.
They want a structured mechanism, a seat at the table, a say in what accountability means. The government has given no indication it will change course. So the standoff continues.
The anniversary will come. The families will remember.
The government will likely repeat its offer. And the gap between them — between the official price of a life and the actual weight of a loss — will remain unbridged. Munyao lost her firstborn son.
She has two other children to raise. The government offered money.
She calls it a big joke. That is where things stand.
