A minimum of eight individuals had been killed and tons of extra injured in nationwide demonstrations in Kenya yesterday, timed to mark the one-year anniversary of mass protests in opposition to proposed tax will increase. Final yr’s protests had been equally met with intense repression by state safety forces, and outstanding rights teams later accused Kenyan authorities of masking up dozens of police killings, abductions and unlawful detentions associated to the demonstrations. (New York Occasions)
Our Take
The inciting issue of final yr’s protests was the potential implementation of controversial tax hikes at a time when a cost-of-living disaster, seen throughout the World South, was nonetheless being deeply felt by Kenyans. And but, as we wrote on the time, the mass demonstrations additionally mirrored longstanding social grievances that created the sentiment, particularly among the many youthful generations, that the federal government was each unresponsive and ineffective.
Kenyan authorities’ violent repression of the youth-led protests, then, solely served to solidify that view. Within the wake of the demonstrations final yr, safety forces kidnapped, interrogated and tortured dozens of individuals, a few of whom are nonetheless unaccounted for. And Kenyan police routinely mischaracterized the killings of protesters by safety officers to cowl up their deeds.
