Kenya’s Season of Protests

Earlier this year, a new young generation of Kenyans went out to protest a crippling finance bill and a government that is undermining their future. The protests, though met by brutal state violence, have fundamentally shifted the Kenyan political landscape.

On my first protest on 25 June 2024, some of the protesters who were streets ahead of me stormed through the barricades the police had set up and managed to occupy Parliament, setting fire to a section of the buildings. The report reached us through a wave of disinformation, ambulance sirens, running bursts to evade the armoured water cannon truck, live rounds fired by the police, and clouds of tear gas. My mother called me in the middle of the chaos as she’d been following the protests from the news as protesters occupied Parliament. ‘Please, please, don’t go to Parliament,’ she pleaded as she had my live location. ‘They are shooting people!’ We couldn’t speak for long, but I promised her I wouldn’t. I almost immediately reneged on this promise as my friends and I walked from Kenyatta Avenue to Cardinal Otunga Street near Parliament Road, where we stopped because of sounds of gunfire.

I’d never seen so many people. Everywhere I looked, there were thousands of people. When I stood on a raised platform, all I could see were protesters. Several were still coming into the Central Business District, walking in from the feeder roads, which lead into the city centre. Near me, a young man in a mask walked past, dragging a section of a fence, which different protesters said had been part of Parliament. In the distance, I saw a flaming pyre and a water truck, commandeered by protesters shouting and singing: ‘Reject Finance Bill!’ and ‘Ruto Must Go!’ 

We were out in the streets to protest the 2024 Finance Bill and President William Ruto’s government. We were armed with our water bottles, bandanas, face masks, phones and Kenyan flags. The Finance Bill proposed a raft of taxation measures that would have left a lot of Kenyans suffering. Some of the measures proposed included: an increase in the tax on bread, a newly introduced 2.5 per cent motor vehicle tax, an increase in taxation of imported sanitary products and diapers, an introduction of Value Added Tax at 16 per cent on financial services and an introduction of an eco-levy tax. The measures were so sweeping that they encapsulated almost all goods and services that many people used daily...