Since independence, policing political dissent has taken different forms. Analysis shows that the approaches have been dependent on varied motivations.
Conversations with former political dissents, activists and legal minds show that repression using partisan security services has been a running thread across the five regimes that have ruled the country since independence.
Ominously, the analysts project that the approach by the Kenya Kwanza administration in dealing with critics is only set to be dire in the coming years as he continues to bleed support and legitimacy.
“With his policies soaring in unpopularity and the tech-savvy youthful population way ahead of him in attacks and poking his ego, I think that the unlawful abductions and tortures may graduate into political assassinations in the coming years,” Kamau Ngugi, the executive director of Defenders Coalition, said.
“The treatment he is getting online is largely his fault because he has shut the streets. He has technically banned street protests as protestors get met with brute force and killings. The dissatisfied younger generation have to use the tool in their hands, which is online, to express themselves. Unlike Moi who had an uneducated population, Ruto has to contend with enlightened folks in a global village.”
The analyst argues that the first Kenyatta administration targeted elites who were largely leftist in ideology and who sought to upset the capitalist state he was setting up.
His successor, Daniel Moi, not only ran away with the Kenyatta playbook but embarked on self-preservation in power after his authority was challenged.
The attempted 1982 coup made then Moi paranoid as he went flat out to crash any perceived or imagined dissidents. Detention without trial was heightened and the Judiciary became an appendage of the Executive and worked in cahoots with the prosecution to mete out sentences at odd hours.
Detainees like Wafule Buke, Koigi Wamwere, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Raila Odinga, Mukhisa Kituyi, Willy Mutunga and Makau Mutua come to mind as the living reminders of Moi’s high-handed approach to politics.
Most of the detainees eventually fled the country, mostly through Tanzania, to places like Norway which became a safe haven for those escaping political persecution.
Moi’s dragnet was not just for those outside his circles. Even those sitting in his Cabinet whom he suspected to be coveting his seat or who were getting more limelight than him would not be spared.
His Foreign Affairs Minister Robert Ouko was abducted from his Koru house and the remains of his charred body later discovered by a herds boy in Got Alila in Muhuroni, Kisumu.
It’s alleged he was first shot in Nakuru State House.
Mwai Kibaki, it’s argued, was Jomo Kenyatta in fine suits, meaning he is associated with the culture of an entrenching capitalistic state and would not hesitate to invoke force on anyone who sought to disturb the status quo.
Moreover, for Uhuru Kenyatta, his approach to dissent had the veneer of legitimacy from the war on terror that led to repressive laws like the 2014 security amendment laws, the computer misuse law and the Prevention of Terror act.
For Ruto, his response to dissent is in the context of a highly educated youth who are either unemployed or under-employed and who use their tech-savvy strengths to express dissent.
Buke, a firebrand political activist and a former detainee during the Moi era, says the motivation of the Moi administration was to silence critics who threatened his legitimacy.
“I sometimes want to understand Jomo Kenyatta because his approach to governance was ideological in nature. He was doing much to align with the West who at the time, was keen to entrench capitalism and tamp down on socialism. This explains his fall out with the Jaramogi Odinga,” he said.
“This also explains why Pio Gama Pinto became the first victim of a repressive state because he was a firebrand leftist. JM Kariuki, Tom Mboya and others fall into this category.”
Buke’s assessment of Moi aligns with that of activist Suba Churchill, who argues that he inherited the Kenyatta state and in early years, worked to consolidate it.
But in quick succession, his authority got challenged by those who though he did not merit and the 1982 coup attempt, making him become dictatorial.
“Moi was motivated by power preservation, and later primitive accumulation of wealth,” Churchill says.
And as the rat race of amassing wealth by plundering public coffers went on in the 80s, the public, who were increasingly sinking in abject poverty, began raising their voice.
“Besides the detention without trial, torture and assassination of bigwigs, Moi also perfected economic strangulation of communities and political shots that did not toe the line.
He coined it as siasa mbaya, maisha mbaya,” Churchill adds. Churchill was arrested and detained eight times when he was at the university.
He says Moi “was just out to silence us because we disturbed the status quo but I doubt if I was to be arrested that many times in the current Kenya Kwanza era I would emerge alive.”
Apart from the assassination of Odhiambo Mbai who was the devolution champion and GP Oulu and Isack King’ara, there was not much high-profile assassinations recorded during Kibaki era.
But his ire was turned political outfits that appeared to question the structure he was entrenching, Buke says.
“Mungiki emerged as the outfit of dissent especially in hi Central backyard after elite consensus failed to trickle down to the poor masses. His response was bloody and swift.”
“I remember talking to a former DC who served in Murang’a and he told me that during the Mungiki crackdown, they killed up to 28 school boys in one go who had no signs of being part of the gang and when he told them Internal Security Minister John Michuki, he was told to be quiet and that they would deal with it in another way,” Buke adds.
Ngugi says that armed gangs like Mungiki emerged because the general population felt that they were left on their own and there was a breakdown of law and order and the communities felt they had to fend for themselves.
“Sadly, this where we are going because you have seen members of the public taking matters into their hands in stopping purported police officers on abduction missions.
While the mob stopping plain clothed police can be seen as a good thing, in the long run, it will morph into mob injustice and it will signify tens of steps backwards in the journey of rule of law,” Ngugi said.
For Uhuru, Buke argues, he can be judged guilty of being laid back and unsophisticated but not brutal.
Uhuru and Ruto came to power in 2013 under the cloud of electoral illegitimacy and ICC indictment, and their number one focus was to cut off the ICC question and manufacture consent among Kenyans, he says.
Moreover, Churchill adds, they took advantage of the general global slide into autocracy to hammer their critics.
Under Ruto in the Kenya Kwanza regime, unleashing brute police force on opposition supporters was his first port of call in late 2022 and whole of 2023 and part of 2024.
Law Society of Kenya president Faith Odhiambo says that things turned for the worse when Gen Z Kenyans became politically conscious, shaking off tribal curtains and standing to demand for their rights.
With the Finance Bill protests, the brutality went a notch higher, with unlawful abductions and detention getting mainstreamed.
“It is upon us as Kenyans to stand up to defend the rule of law and ensure that what is clearly provided for in the constitution does not remain a black and white literature but a living edict,” Odhiambo said.
She says no amount of effort to reverse the democratic resolve among Kenyans will succeed.
“We see this in the attempt to thwart formation of electoral commission to register voters and start preparing for the 2027 elections. It is deeply sad that the judiciary has been co-opted into this terrible scheme. But I’m encouraged that ordinary Kenyans see through this and they see it for what it is. A failed regime clutching on straws.”
Buke agrees with Ngugi’s prophecy that things could get worse as Ruto popularity dips further.
“I don’t think Ruto ever imagined he would be president. So as you criticise him, he does not care. He thinks he’s only there to preserve the power, get as much wealth and he is prepared to do whatever it takes to cling to power,” Buke said.
Latest update from the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights shows that upto 82 cases of abduction had been recorded upto December 2024.
“There have been 13 more cases of abductions or enforced disappearances in the last three months bringing to 82 the total cases since June 2024. Seven of the recent abduction cases were reported in the month of December 2024 with six of them still missing,” KNCHR says
