Sixty. That is the minimum number of deaths recorded during Kenya’s 2024 protests against a finance bill, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, a body the government mandated. Two years after demonstrators entered the grounds of parliament, the figure hangs over every conversation about what the uprising achieved.
Anti-riot police filled the streets of Nairobi on Thursday, the anniversary. Young Kenyans say little of substance has shifted. Youth unemployment, the rising cost of living and worries over governance still trouble the generation that organized online and then took to the streets.
“June 25th is a reminder of what this regime is all about,” university student Faith Njeri told DW. In her telling, it marks the moment the government “lost legitimacy to the people of Kenya… because of just simply saying no to the finance bill.”
A date with new meaning
June 25 now carries more than the memory of one march. Activists treat it as a symbol of resistance to police brutality and economic hardship, and to what they see as distance between leaders and citizens.
Rex Masai, a 29-year-old activist, was the first person to die in the June 2024 unrest. Kevin Mwangi, a businessman, listed more names for DW: Denzel Omondi, Eric Shieni, David Chege and Erickson Mutisya, along with “the many who disappeared.” Another student, Mercy Wanjiru, said people were switching their profile pictures to Masai and the other dead. “You cannot kill us and lead us,” she said.
Built online, with no boss
Earlier protests in Kenya usually ran through parties or established civil society groups. These ran through social media and loose local networks. Students, young professionals, gig workers and people who had never protested before joined, making it one of the most spontaneous youth mobilizations in the country’s recent history.
“That’s where the first faction of the Gen Z and youth movement started,” said Beatrice Waithera, national leader of the Red Vest Movement, of the online spaces. Organizers kept a low profile because of scrutiny of public gatherings, she said, and the secrecy worked well enough that President William Ruto joined a conversation on X to speak to them.
Waithera credits earlier activists with laying groundwork, but not with leading the occupation. “We were brave enough to occupy parliament and we did it without Boniface Mwangi being present,” she said. Mwangi is a prominent rights campaigner who has announced he will run for president.
With no figurehead, the movement was harder to co-opt or suppress. Arrests, intimidation and alleged abductions followed, yet turnout held. It now mobilizes online and offline on governance, police accountability and economic reform, not just tax.
What the families want
Rights groups and relatives have asked repeatedly for inquiries into alleged excessive force, and those demands are still unmet. Ruto has recently offered to compensate families of the dead but has not issued an apology.
“There is no amount of money that will ever pay for the lives we lost,” Waithera said. “I see Mama Rex going to the courts all the time.” She asked why no national apology has come, and said the country needs a national conversation of the kind that follows a war.
The next test is the ballot. Waithera pointed to the 2027 general election: “We are angry and we are going to the ballot with it.”
