Albert Omondi Ojwang was 31 years old. He was a teacher and he was a son. He was arrested from his home in Homa Bay County on June 7, 2025, over social media posts that were critical of senior police officers. He was dead before the day was out. The official story was that he had banged his head against a cell wall. Pathologists who examined him read the evidence differently. They found signs of assault. Signs of torture. Signs of a man who did not die by accident and could not possibly have died by his own hand.
One year later, nobody in uniform has faced meaningful accountability for it. Not one.
This is not an oversight either. Kenya does not keep failing to prosecute police officers who kill people in custody because the system is overwhelmed or the evidence is difficult to gather. It keeps failing because the system is working exactly as it was designed to. Impunity is the product, not an unfortunate malfunction. The distinction matters enormously because a malfunction can be fixed by people with goodwill and better resources, while a designed outcome requires dismantling the architecture that produces it.
The 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests established this beyond reasonable argument. When young Kenyans took to the streets and eventually stormed Parliament on June 25, 2024, the security apparatus responded with live ammunition. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented dozens killed, many by direct gunfire including sniper fire, hundreds injured, and scores abducted and disappeared. The broader toll across the protest wave reached at least 60 dead. Videos circulated showing police firing on unarmed people. Bystanders were shot. The state did not dispute the footage. It disputed the conclusions anyone was permitted to draw from it.
The Independent Policing Oversight Authority announced reviews. Parliamentary committees summoned witnesses. The Director of Public Prosecutions issued statements. Investigations were opened with the seriousness of institutions that understand optics. A handful of files were eventually forwarded for prosecution. The rest gathered dust, and the officers who fired those weapons continue to draw salaries from the same public they were recorded shooting.
Then came 2025, and Ojwang, and fresh protests in response to his death, and then more deaths in response to those protests, with at least sixteen people killed in a single day of demonstrations in June 2025. The pattern recycled itself with the efficiency of a system that has learned there are no consequences for repetition. Arrest a critic. Deny the assault. Announce an inquiry. Do nothing. Repeat.
President Ruto described Ojwang's killing as "heartbreaking and unacceptable." He had, upon taking office, pledged to end police brutality. He has been president for nearly four years. In those four years, the documented list of young Kenyans killed, tortured, maimed, and disappeared by the security forces has grown longer instead of the promised shorter. The speeches have continued at the same pace as the funerals. At some point, the gap between what a leader says and what happens under his command ceases to be irony and becomes an indictment of the type of person they are.
Consider what deliberate impunity costs at the level of the individual. Ms. Nevnina Onyango is now raising her children without their father. The parents of every young person shot during the Finance Bill protests have spent a year or more attending anniversaries instead of graduations.
Survivors of police beatings and disappearances carry injuries, both visible and otherwise, in a country whose support systems are not built to hold them. An entire generation of Kenyans who exercised a constitutional right and watched their peers bleed for it now look at state institutions and see only predation. That cynicism is a rational conclusion drawn from observable evidence.
The Constitution is clear on all of this. It guarantees dignity. It prohibits torture. It establishes the right to a fair process and freedom from arbitrary detention. Article 59 created oversight bodies. The IPOA exists on paper and is quite honestly, and this is from my personal experience with them, a sorry waste of public money. What it has not produced, across hundreds of documented cases of state violence between 2024 and today, is a single conviction of a senior officer. The architecture of accountability is very elaborate and largely decorative.
Access to justice in Kenya has become a function of proximity to power, not a right distributed equally across citizenship. The connected find technicalities. The ordinary find delays. The young and vocal find the full weight of enforcement directed at them rather than for them. This is the social contract in its current operating state, and it cannot hold indefinitely. Protests recur not because the population is ungovernable, but because the population has not been given a functioning alternative. When peaceful routes produce nothing, people return to the streets. When the streets produce more funerals, the anger compounds. The government has been feeding that cycle for two years and appears totally unbothered by it.
Albert Ojwang spoke truth and paid for it with his life inside a cell that was meant to be the state's custody, its responsibility, its guarantee of safety. The people who put him there have not been charged. The people who killed him have not been named. His widow is still waiting. His children will grow up in a country that has not yet decided whether their father's life was worth a single conviction.
One year is long enough to know that this government will not deliver that reckoning voluntarily. The question Kenyans must now answer with more than marches and memorials is what mechanism exists to compel it, and how much longer a republic can function while the blood of its citizens goes formally, deliberately, unanswered.
