PREVIEW
Economic hardship and youth mobilisation are driving a new opposition movement online and on the streets
A year after ‘Gen Z’ activists stormed parliament in Nairobi shaking the foundations of President William Ruto’s legitimacy, a new round of protests on 25 June were greeted with lethal force, tear gas and water cannons. By mid-evening, Amnesty International was reporting that 16 had died in clashes between protestors and the police. The Kenyan National Commission for Human Rights (KNCHR) reported eight deaths across the country all ‘allegedly from gunshot wounds.’ It added that 400 people had been seriously injured including protestors, police and journalists.
Over the last year, the list of those abducted, detained, disappeared and murdered has grown relentlessly (AC Vol 65 No 14, Youth revolt wins after Ruto scraps finance bill and pledges talks). Despite the president’s pledges of reform, activists say his government’s defining relationship with citizens has become one of targeted surveillance, systematic abductions and police killings.
Two weeks after the 7 June death in police custody of schoolteacher and blogger Albert Ojwang, Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga charged six suspects with murder (Dispatches 16/6/25, As protests grow, President Ruto admits police killed dissident blogger). They include Nairobi Central Police Station boss Samson Talaam and police constables Peter Kimani and James Mukhwana. Three detainees – allegedly coerced into attacking Ojwang in his cell – were also charged. The DPP appears to have relied heavily on Mukhwana’s confession to the Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA).
There is considerable public scepticism over who was not charged. Deputy Inspector General of Police Eliud Lagat, who had filed a complaint on 4 June about an online slander campaign targeting him, and who had ‘stepped aside’ to allow investigations to proceed, had been regarded as a person of interest. He now appears to have been absolved.
Ojwang’s death, IPOA reports, has since been followed by those of 20 others, all of whom died in police custody. Anti-police protests on 17 June led to the point-blank shooting of Boniface Mwangi Kariuki. Two riot police were promptly arrested and charged. The protests were met by a contingent of armed thugs on motorbikes who, chaperoned by police, terrorised demonstrators across downtown Nairobi. Media investigations revealed that the thugs were sponsored and provisioned by Kenya Kwanza politicians, having allegedly been procured earlier by security aides to Nairobi governor, Johnson Sakaja. The governor has since issued a public statement emphatically denying any role in sponsoring violence.
Troubled times
Ahead of anniversary protests on 25 June, a group of western ambassadors, including the United States, European Union and United Kingdom, warned that they were ‘troubled by the use of hired goons to infiltrate peaceful gatherings’.
Yet state violence against Gen Z dominates the region’s politics. With elections looming in Tanzania and Uganda in the next six months – and in Kenya in 2027 – limiting dissent appears to be a major regime preoccupation. And with the three states facing a combined US$23 billion in debt service repayments in the next fiscal year – representing 36%, 32% and 25% of total 2025/26 budget spending for Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania respectively – the pressures on the cost of living and service delivery will fall overwhelming on the people.
Despite a recent diplomatic charm offensive, Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan is struggling to shrug off international condemnation and the digital salvos from her Kenyan critics, as well as Tanzanians in the opposition, in exile in Nairobi and, perhaps most worryingly for her, a growing chorus within her own party denouncing her administration for reviving a culture of abductions, disappearances and murder.
With elections in January, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni’s unexpected public apology to ‘Uganda and especially the people of Buganda’ last month appeared to be a tacit acknowledgment that the social media excesses of his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, could no longer be managed as minor diplomatic incidents – and were now a threat to traditional ethnic constituencies once the bedrock of his support.
Ignoring a growing international chorus for the release of his perennial rival, Kizza Besigye – who once again faces treason charges, allegedly for plotting the violent overthrow of the government – Museveni’s apology seems to have been triggered by his son’s social media vigilantism. A late-night boast in early May by Muhoozi on X – he is also the Chief of Defence Forces – that he was holding opposition leader Bobi Wine’s chief of security, Edward Ssebufu (aka Eddie Mutwe), in his basement confirmed that the aide, who had been abducted on the outskirts of Kampala, was being tortured by the army (AC Vol 66 No 12, Muhoozi attacks regime insiders). A new law once again allowing military courts to try civilians accused of weapons-related offences appears designed with Besigye in mind – and will likely keep him behind bars to prevent him from running for the presidency.
TANZANIA – A REGIONAL FOCUS FOR ACTIVISTS
Tanzanian President Suluhu Hassan’s rough treatment of regional activists and opposition figures en route to opposition leader Tundu Lissu’s treason trial in May brought East Africa’s simmering Gen Z crisis to a boil. Acutely sensitive to the international spectacle created earlier in the year by Kenyan opposition figure Martha Karua joining Besigye’s defence team, Suluhu Hassan swiftly turned back Karua, two retired Chief Justices and a group of activists at the airport on their way to observe the Lissu trial (AC Vol 66 No 9, Karua takes on the autocrats).
The arrest, beatings and sexual assault of activists Agather Atuhaire and Boniface Mwangi, detailed on social media, shone a spotlight on the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party’s culture of political violence, forcing President Hassan’s campaign team into precisely the kind of diplomatic back-pedalling they had hoped to avoid when the authorities turned the activists away from Lissu’s trial in April (Dispatches 27/5/25, Hassan intensifies crackdown with torture of Kenyan and Ugandan activists).
On 13 June, Hassan’s United Nations envoy in Geneva, Abdallah Possi, was at pains to defend his government’s record at the Human Rights Council where, on account of Atuhaire and Mwangi’s allegations, Tanzania’s human rights record was laid bare. It makes for grim reading: 200 enforced disappearances since 2019 and a pattern of harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders and opposition politicians – particularly in opposition strongholds (AC Vol 66 No 1, Samia’s liberal dawn is eclipsed).
In January, the failed abduction of social media activist and vocal Samia critic Maria Sarungi Tsehai from Nairobi – where she has been living in exile – deepened Gen Z activists’ suspicions that Kenyan security was cooperating with its neighbours in the abduction of meddlesome foreigners. A month earlier, Besigye had been kidnapped and renditioned from Nairobi by Ugandan security. With mainstream media gagged and Tanzania-based social media platforms on the state’s radar, it is the likes of Tsehai and others in the diaspora, such as the Los Angeles-based regime-influencer-turned-critic, Mange Kimambi, who are blowing the whistle. In 2023, Kimambi alleges, the president’s son, Abdul, flew to Los Angeles to hire her as a social media influencer to support the DP World port deal, which was generating a storm of public protest. When she refused, the government froze her Tanzanian bank accounts, charged her with money laundering, and unsuccessfully engineered her extradition.
The return and growing influence of former Kikwete crony Rostam Aziz, 64, his alleged role in the DP World scandal and closeness to the president’s son have entrenched perceptions of sleaze and cronyism at the top. Increasingly distrustful of the Magufuli-era securocrats who facilitated her accession – she has replaced intelligence chiefs four times since 2021 – Samia now relies on a network of Zanzibari enforcers on the one hand, and Magufulista ultras on the other, to neutralise her opponents, real and perceived. Although senior opposition figures allege that the ruling party’s militia, the Green Guards, is behind the abductions – and operates as a law unto itself – the claims remain difficult to prove.
Having seen off a trio of prominent rivals last year – ex-foreign minister January Makamba and ex-information minister Nape Nnauye (both sacked for plotting against her), and accepting the resignation of party vice-chair, Abdurahman Kinana, long regarded as part of the CCM aristocracy – Samia’s nomination as the party’s presidential contender at January’s special National Congress in Dodoma was a formality.
While East African civil society agitations may have little impact on her re-election campaign, ruling party insiders are turning abductions into a political hot potato. In late May, Josephat Gwajima – MP for Kawe and founder of the Church of Resurrection and Life – delivered a sermon denouncing the abductions. His church, which has 2,000 branches nationwide and an estimated 70,000 congregants, was promptly deregistered. Seeking to isolate him, Samia warned against the ‘Gwajimisation’ of the ruling party. Samia insiders worry that the opposition Chadema party’s election boycott campaign could suppress turnout and undermine her legitimacy. Behind bars and facing the hangman’s noose if convicted, Lissu – who survived a 2017 assassination attempt and still carries some of the 16 bullets fired at him – continues to cast an almost spectral shadow over Samia.
Lissu’s lawyers argue that the treason case is intended to block his candidacy in October’s elections, though they doubt the charges can credibly hold. Even so, Chadema faces a financial crisis if it fails to field candidates. Deeply divided between Lissu’s boycott faction and supporters of former chair Freeman Mbowe, whose ‘G-55’ bloc formally left the party last month, the party may have won the legitimacy battle but lost the political war.
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