Serial Killer President? Ruto’s Doomsday Reign, Youth Slaughter, and the Capitulation of Kenya’s Courts and Parliament
by admin on | 2025-08-02 17:06:26 Last Updated by admin on 2025-08-27 00:03:42
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Abstract
The Constitution of Kenya 2010 pledged life, dignity, and peaceful protest. Fifteen years later, the promise lies beside the bodies of young people shot on Nairobi’s streets. Since President William Ruto took office in 2022, he has presided over what amounts to a state-run killing spree. At press briefings he instructs officers to “shoot the legs,” a euphemism that often delivers fatal torso wounds. Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen echoes the call, urging police to “open fire.” Under Ruto’s command, crowd control has become an execution ritual. Officers fire live rounds, at chest height, raid homes before dawn to seize perceived protest organisers, and simply ignore habeas corpus orders. Station commanders accumulate contempt citations, three, sometimes four, without arrest or sanction. Magistrates deepen the harm by setting cash bail far above the statutory fines for minor assembly offences, effectively criminalizing poverty. Medical examiners detail crushed limbs and ligature scars on detainees who reappear weeks after abduction, proving torture with clinical precision. All these is against youthful protestors whose only weapon of retaliation is a harmless mobile phone camera. Parliament no longer checks this violence; it amplifies it. Several members of the parliament have stood on rally stages and repeated Ruto’s call for open execution of “rioters.” Two draft Bills tabled in 2024 sought to amend the Public Order Act by outlawing all gatherings without a police permit and raising penalty fines to millions of shillings, a direct strike at the constitutional right to assemble. When police gunfire turns deadly, the House approves emergency security budgets within days and shelves motions for independent inquiries. Members who march with citizens are stripped of committee seats or their security is quickly withdrawn. High Court judges issue stern declarations, yet without custodial power commanders ignore them, and the rule of law stops at the station gate. This piece argues that Ruto himself is the hinge on which the machinery of repression turns. His public directives, executive budgets, and political whip-lines create an inverted rule of law where rights are suspended by presidential fiat, police act with guaranteed impunity, courts speak without enforcement, and Parliament bankrolls the carnage. Until that personal chain of command is broken, youthful dissent in Kenya will remain a wager with death.
Introduction
The Constitution of Kenya emerged from the blood-stained ruins of the 2007–08 post-election violence and promised a definitive rupture with authoritarianism. The Constitution was born of carnage and compromise. It opened with an exhortation- “EXERCISING our sovereign and inalienable right to determine the form of governance of our country”—and then entrenched life (Article 26), dignity (Article 28), freedom from violence (Article 29) and, crucially, the right to assemble peaceably and unarmed (Article 37). The Bill of Rights entrenched the right to life and, with almost lyrical fervour, proclaimed that every Kenyan may assemble, demonstrate, picket and petition “peaceably and unarmed.” Yet between March 2023 and July 2025 police and paramilitary units fired live ammunition at demonstrations in Nairobi, Nyeri, Rongai and many other towns in Kenya, leaving 233 dead, 1076 injured and 91 officially recorded ‘missing’. Every independent body, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), Amnesty International, has pleaded for accountability. None has been heeded. This paper makes a stark claim: Kenya is witnessing a systemic inversion of the rule of law in which the constitutional guardians, Parliament and the courts, have become executors or apologists for presidentially directed violence. The bloody post-election clashes of 2007- 08, 1,133 deaths, half a million displaced, had revealed the moral bankruptcy of what Kenyans ruefully called “the paper Republic”: a web of polished statutes masking an entrenched, personalised state. In the referendum of August 2010, the electorate answered that crisis with uncharacteristic unanimity, approving a charter that rearranged the architecture of power and, crucially, enshrined an expansive Bill of Rights. Life, dignity, bodily integrity and the liberty to assemble “peaceably and unarmed” were hoisted above ordinary politicking, ring-fenced from the vagaries of partisan majorities. The promise was less that the new dispensation would be perfect than that it would never again permit the Read more...
