Gen Z protests on June 25, 2024 There is something profoundly cynical about a government that compensates its victims while shielding its executioners.
On Monday, June 15, 2026, President William Ruto stood at State House and unveiled a Sh2 billion compensation package for over 1,100 Kenyans killed, maimed, disappeared and brutalised by the very security apparatus he commands.
He said the money could never adequately compensate for lives lost and futures shattered. On that much, at least, he was right. A mother who watched her son fall to a police bullet during a peaceful protest is now being offered Sh2.5 million and told the matter is progressing toward closure. Sh2.5 million for a life. That is not justice. That is a receipt.
And yet this entire exercise carries a weight the government did not intend. The very existence of this framework is an admission — however reluctant, however lawyered — that the state killed, tortured and disappeared its own citizens for the crime of demanding better governance.
You do not compensate people you did not harm. You do not create a reparations framework for atrocities you did not commit. The state has now, by its own hand, entered into the public record an acknowledgement of guilt.
That matters. But it also obliges every Kenyan to ask the harder question the President's contrite tone was designed to obscure: what happens to the people who pulled the triggers?
Because here is what we know. When young Kenyans took to the streets in June 2024 to oppose a punitive finance bill, the state responded not with dialogue but with bullets. What followed were months of abductions and enforced disappearances — citizens plucked from their homes and streets, some reappearing bruised and terrified, others never reappearing at all.
Since then, every anti-government protest has been met with the same playbook: disproportionate violence followed by official denial, followed now by the farce of state-sponsored goonism that has reached even the sanctuary of the church.
This is the record of a government that treats democratic dissent as a threat to be neutralised rather than a right to be protected.
And the more damning truth is how this compensation came about. The President did not volunteer it. His first instinct was to create a panel overseen by the very Interior ministry implicated in the abuses — a move the KHRC rightly condemned as a whitewash.
It took a High Court ruling declaring that panel unconstitutional to force the government's hand. Monday's ceremony was therefore not an act of conscience. It was the consequence of losing in court.
That is why I do not trust the timing, the framing, or the motives. This has the unmistakable feel of managed crisis rather than genuine reckoning. The dead are acknowledged, the families are offered money and the government hopes the conversation ends there. But the perpetrators remain unnamed. The trigger-happy officers remain in uniform.
The command structure that authorised the violence remains untouched. No senior official has resigned. No genuine prosecution has been announced.
The KHRC framework has value, and I do not dismiss the work of those who fought for it. But no framework, however well designed, can substitute for accountability. Reparation without reckoning is apology without meaning.
The real test is not what the President said on that day. It is what his government does tomorrow — whether the KHRC is genuinely empowered, whether IPOA is strengthened, whether the officers responsible for extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances face genuine legal consequences, and whether the culture of impunity that made all of this possible is finally broken.
Without these steps, Monday's ceremony is not the beginning of reform. It is a down payment on public silence.
I refuse to call it justice when the state pays for its absolution in public while protecting its agents in private.
