At least 16 people were killed and over 400 wounded, 83 of them seriously, on Wednesday as demonstrations, ironically called to protest police brutality, rocked cities and towns across Kenya. The country has experienced a wave of police killings in recent weeks which have claimed the lives of at least another 20 Kenyans just this month.
Held on the anniversary of last year’s storming of parliament by Gen Z protesters, the demonstrations come just a week after police in the capital, Nairobi, shot an unarmed Kenyan street trader, Boniface Kariuki, in the head during unrest over the death in police custody of yet another young man, Albert Ojwang’.
Public uproar over the latter two incidents has forced a deputy inspector general of police to step aside (though the state has been accused of shielding him from prosecution) and pushed authorities to indict several police officers. However, justice remains elusive for most victims, including for the more than 60 killed by police during the 2024 protests.
Combatting police violence had been a major plank of President William Ruto’s 2022 campaign for office, but since taking power he has lapsed into the habits of his predecessors, using the force as a tool for suppressing popular dissent. The persistence of the issue, which has defied decades of attempts at reform, highlights the difficulty of transforming colonial institutions built to reinforce the dominance and extraction of a tiny elite. The problem is not just political; it is institutional.
Colonial origins
Kenya’s National Police Service is the direct descendant of the colonial police force, created not to serve or protect the population, but to control and exploit it. From inception, the police has been the sharp edge of an extractive and violent state.
Described in a 2009 report as a “punitive citizen containment squad”, its recruitment, training, and deployment practices are designed to dehumanise the officers and separate them from the citizens they are meant to serve, ensuring loyalty to the ruling class. Barracked in poor conditions, underpaid, and isolated from their communities, officers operate more as an occupying force, an extension of the mechanism of elite extraction, than a public service.
Police roadblocks are little more than toll booths, and most arrests – 1 in 5 Kenyans are taken into custody every two years – are essentially shakedowns. This is a feature, not a bug.
Police officers are not just tools of political enforcement. They are also participants in a vast system of petty extortion. Police roadblocks are little more than toll booths, and most arrests – 1 in 5 Kenyans are taken into custody every two years – are essentially shakedowns. This is a feature, not a bug. As related in the book Looters and Grabbers: 54 Years of Corruption and Plunder by the Elite 1963-2017, in 1907, just a year after the force was legally created, one colonial settler remarked: “Time and time, I have had a native say they were stopped by an Indian policeman. When I asked them how they got away, they always said, ‘Oh, I gave him something.’”
The 2010 constitution, Kenya’s first real attempt at overthrowing the colonial system inherited at independence in 1963, tried to address this by freeing the police from the clutches of the executive and guaranteeing the police operational independence.
However, in the years since, despite changes in the organisation of the force and increased training on human rights, the reforms have borne little fruit.
Unlike the Kenyan judiciary – which since 2010 has partly exercised its newfound independence to assert itself, striking down unconstitutional laws, and even annulling a presidential election in which the incumbent was declared the winner – the police leadership has remained firmly tethered to the executive. No inspector general has publicly refused a questionable directive from the president. None has defined a new, citizen-centered vision for policing. Instead, the default has been deference and complicity.
It should be noted that this is not just a Kenyan problem. Across the globe, policing systems rooted in colonial violence have proven stubbornly resistant to reform. From Nigeria’s SARS unit to South Africa’s militarised police force, efforts to build democratic, accountable policing have foundered on the deep structural rot at the heart of these institutions.
The West too has not escaped the imperial boomerang effect where governments have deployed repressive policing techniques developed to control colonial territories against their domestic populations, as witnessed recently in the widespread brutal crackdowns on anti-genocide sentiment as well as in the continuing attacks on immigrant communities in the US.
Reimagining the system
This all raises the question whether police are indeed capable of reform. Change of the kind Kenyans yearn for requires a radical rethinking of what public safety means, and who defines and benefits from it. And here is where Kenyan youth can make a difference.
A generation that in 2022 was described as apathetic for its refusal to engage in the ritual of elections that in the last six decades only served to legitimise a corrupt elite has proved to be anything but.
Despite everything the state has thrown at them in the last year, ranging from enticements to brutality, abductions and killings, they have demonstrated an enduring capacity to pioneer new and effective forms of civic education and citizen engagement.
A generation that in 2022 was described as apathetic for its refusal to engage in the ritual of elections that in the last six decades only served to legitimise a corrupt elite has proved to be anything but. Utilising digital and internet tools, it has created a broad-based movement unencumbered by their elders’ obsession with ethnic identity, ran massive online boot camps on everything from constitutional rights to the intricacies of tax policy, and inspired the citizenry to not just demand change but to actually believe in the possibility of bending the state to its will.
This power can now be employed in the service of reimagining radical community-based approaches to addressing criminality and promoting safety that are not hostage to inherited ideologies.
A Gen Z movement that dedicates itself to going beyond demanding accountability for state brutality and pushing for a fundamental reappraisal of how law enforcement agencies are constituted and how they function, could revolutionise what Kenyans think is possible. That includes an abolitionist framework built on the understanding that colonial systems cannot be reformed – or prosecuted – into benevolence but must be uprooted and replaced with systems rooted in the communities they are meant to serve.
