Kevin Njoroge*, a worker on a flower farm in the Kenyan lakeside town of Naivasha, was making his way back home from his shift last month when he was surrounded by police officers, arrested and thrown in prison.
He usually got the bus home, but because of protests taking place that day across the country, including in Navaisha, 55 miles (90km) east of Nairobi, he had to walk. The demonstrations were to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Saba Saba (7/7) protests that took place in 1990 and which ended Daniel arap Moi’s autocratic 24-year reign.
“When I got close to my neighbourhood in Kihoto estate, some police officers found me and arrested me along with others. They were picking anybody they saw off the streets and arresting them,” he says.
The next day, Njoroge was brought to court and charged with robbery with violence and given bail of 200,000 Kenyan shillings (£1,160) – more than 16 times his monthly salary. Neither he nor his family could pay it so he was taken to prison.
“My mother and brother tried their best to raise money for me but they couldn’t. So I was sent to the remand prison, which was already overcrowded and meant that it was hard to get things like food or even a place to sleep,” he says.
He was released on 21 July after his brother managed to crowdfund his bail, which had been reduced to KSh50,000.
“For a moment I thought I’d spend the rest of my life in jail yet I had done nothing wrong,” he says. “I worry for many of the other young men I left behind in prison. Many of them don’t have any means of getting out.”
Njoroge was one of nearly 1,500 Kenyans arrested and charged after the nationwide 7 July protests. Announcing the arrests, Kenya’s interior minister, Kipchumba Murkomen, described the protesters as “marauding gangs of looters and barefaced anarchists”.
Data shared with the Guardian from the Police Reforms Working Group, a civil society coalition focused on strengthening oversight and the rule of law, documents 316 such arrests. The majority are of men below the age of 25.
Of the 316, 70% – or 221 of those arrested – have been charged with terrorism, robbery with violence, theft and arson – offences that carry high bail conditions of up to KSh1,000,000.
Legal experts say that charging people with such offences indicates a shift in tactics by the Kenyan authorities to a new form of state repression that relies on the law to silence dissent.
Mwaura Kabata, vice-president of the Law Society of Kenya, says: “This is ‘lawfare’. The government is weaponising existing acts of parliament as well as trying to introduce new ones, such as the assembly and demonstration bill, in order to address both offline and online dissent.
“In 2024, many of the cases that were prosecuted against protesters were dropped and so the government is using more punitive laws,” he says.
Kabata argues that the government’s actions will have a chilling effect on Kenyans’ ability to demonstrate because of how punitive, vague and expansive the charges are. “This is just as much about the message as it is about the process,” he says. “It’s a kneejerk reaction from the government, which saw these protests getting out of hand. Its main intent is to silence dissent.”
Vincent Chahale, country director of the International Justice Mission – Kenya (IJM), says the use of these laws against protesters at this scale is new. Last year they were mostly charged with unlawful assembly, creating disturbance and damage to property.
“One emergent thing witnessed in the recent past is the charging of some protesters with offences under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. This is unprecedented.
“The disadvantage to the protesters is that the bail terms would be high as opposed to if they had been charged with normal offences under the penal code,” says Chahale.
Kabata believes the government was testing the waters earlier in the year when it used the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act in several cases. In January, Jackson Kuria, a prison officer turned activist known as “Cop Shakur”, was charged with publishing false information linking state officials to the abduction of government critics.
In May, a software developer, Rose Njeri, was arrested in Nairobi for launching an email automation tool that allowed citizens to submit objections to the finance bill more easily. In the same month, four film-makers were arrested after the state linked them to the BBC World Service documentary Blood Parliament.
Kabata says: “If they’re able to weaponise the cybercrimes law then definitely they’ll try to replicate this with as many other laws as they can.”
Kenya’s director of public prosecutions (DPP), Renson Ingonga, has defended his office’s decision to press such charges against protesters, arguing that they were justified and not politically motivated.
In an interview with local media, Ingonga said: “The ODPP [Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions] doesn’t work under anybody’s direction. We make our own decisions based on the law and evidence available.”
Addressing the particular use of terrorism charges against protesters, even for “vandalism”, he added:“Terrorism is not only when you use bombs or guns … any act against government installations is an act of terrorism.”
Kenya’s Judicial Service Commission also defended the bail and bond terms imposed on protesters, saying that they were informed by the constitution, the criminal procedure code and the judiciary’s bail and bond policy guidelines.
But Kenya’s civil society and human rights organisations and legal professionals are sounding the alarm about what they see as “the weaponisation of the criminal justice system”.
Several lawyers have offered their services for free to those who were imprisoned and a fundraising campaign has been launched to help secure bail for detainees.
But Kabata says that freeing protesters and others caught in the government’s dragnet will not be enough as the charges will have seriously damaging consequences.
“We’ll have to work to get these [criminal] records expunged,” he says. “These charges have lasting effects on people and will affect their future. Terrorism, for example, is a crime that is recognised both locally and internationally.”
* A pseudonym has been used to protect his identity.
