By Wahome Ngatia
There is a quiet but unmistakable pattern spreading across East Africa. Governments, each with their own political vocabulary and their own preferred euphemisms, are doing the same essential thing: closing down the space in which citizens dare to speak, gather, and disappear — sometimes literally.
Amnesty International’s State of the World’s Human Rights 2026 report, covering developments through 2025, does not mince its words on Kenya. The country’s human rights situation, it concludes, “deteriorated significantly.” That is a careful diplomatic phrase for what, on the ground, looks rather like a state at war with its own citizens.
The numbers alone are damning. On June 25, anniversary protests marking the 2024 anti-finance bill demonstrations — in which at least 60 people had already died — were met again with lethal police force. Nineteen people were killed that day. Then, on July 7, during the Saba Saba pro-democracy commemorations, at least 38 more were shot dead across more than 20 counties. Over 500 protesters faced criminal charges, some filed under the Prevention of Terrorism Act — legislation designed for armed militants, now pointed at youth in the streets.
Beyond the shootings, there is the quieter architecture of repression. The Communications Authority directed broadcasters to cease live coverage of the June protests. Two new bills — one on cybercrime, one on information and communications — moved through parliament in 2025 carrying provisions that human rights groups say threaten digital privacy and press freedom. Albert Ojwang, arrested for an online post demanding government accountability, died in police custody. An independent autopsy found severe head injuries. Police said he inflicted them himself.
What is striking about Kenya’s record is not simply its severity, but how closely it mirrors what is happening next door. In Tanzania, post-election protests triggered a crackdown that killed hundreds between late October and early November 2025, with the internet severed for five days to ensure the violence occurred, as Amnesty puts it, “out of public view.” In Uganda, the ruling establishment deployed enforced disappearances, military courts for civilians, and death threats issued openly from the president’s son on social media.
The most alarming thread connecting these three countries is something Amnesty calls “transnational repression” — a cross-border collaboration in silencing. A Tanzanian activist was abducted in Nairobi. Two Kenyan human rights defenders were seized in Kampala. A Ugandan activist and a Kenyan were arrested together in Dar es Salaam, tortured for four days, then deported. The borders, it seems, are open enough for the security services even when they are closed to dissent.
To understand why Kenya’s trajectory is so concerning, it helps to place it in its continental context. Across Africa, the Amnesty report documents a continent where governments have, with remarkable consistency, chosen coercion over accountability.
In West and Central Africa, the picture is, if anything, more extreme. Military juntas in Burkina Faso and Mali have dissolved political parties, expelled NGOs, conscripted journalists into silence, and aligned with Russian private military forces whose alleged summary executions of civilians are described in the report in clinical, horrifying detail. In Cameroon, at least 48 people were killed during October protests disputing a president’s re-election to his eighth term. In Nigeria, forced evictions killed residents in broad daylight. In the Sahel, more than 307 million people — over a fifth of sub-Saharan Africa’s population — were experiencing hunger by July 2025, a crisis made sharper by US government aid cuts that also shuttered HIV clinics, tuberculosis programmes, and maternal health services across more than a dozen countries.
Then there is the structural silence: the laws that criminalise speech, the regulators that sanction broadcasters, the courts weaponised against opposition. Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe imprisoned people for “insulting the president.” South Sudan blocked social media for up to 90 days. The pattern is not random; it is a governing philosophy dressed in the language of national security.
What distinguishes Kenya, and East Africa more broadly, is the degree to which repression has become both institutionalised and, in some cases, exported. Kenya is not a military junta, nor a post-conflict state clinging to fragile authority. It has functioning courts, a vocal civil society, and a constitution widely praised at its 2010 drafting. That the state is nonetheless deploying anti-terror laws against protesters and directing autopsies to be contradicted by police press releases suggests something more troubling than a governance failure. It suggests a deliberate choice.
Amnesty’s recommendations are pointed: governments must bring policing into compliance with international human rights law, end internet shutdowns, release journalists and activists, halt enforced disappearances, and create genuine space for civil society to function.
Whether Nairobi — or Kampala, or Dodoma — is listening is, unfortunately, a different question entirely. The pattern documented in this report is not one of governments losing control; it is one of governments exercising it.
