On 25 June 2024, Kenyans described as 'leaderless, tribeless, and party less' by their own participants marched across 35 of the country's 47 counties, breached the national Parliament, and forced President William Ruto's government to withdraw the Finance Bill 2024 within hours.^[1] At least 22 people were killed as security forces responded with live ammunition.^[2] The bill, which had passed by 195 votes to 106, was retracted.^[3]

The immediate reading was celebratory. A generation excluded from formal politics had achieved what opposition parties, civil society organisations (including non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations), and established leaders had not: a direct reversal of executive legislation through citizen action alone. Within months, however, the limits became apparent. The government fragmented the withdrawn bill and reintroduced its components through other legislative vehicles.^[4] The International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose structural adjustment conditions had made the original tax increases necessary, apologized for the bloodshed while insisting that austerity remained critical to Kenya's economic future.^[5] The Azimio la Umoja-One Kenya Coalition, the leading opposition, rather than consolidating what the protests had achieved, accepted cabinet posts in a broad-based government that activist Sungu Oyoo described as dancing on the graves of those martyred by the state.^[6] Police abductions, torture, and killings of protest organizers continued for months, with no convictions following any of these acts.^[7]

This article argues that the 2024 Finance Bill protests show both the promise and the structural limits of fugitive politics^[8] in contemporary Africa. The Institute of Development Studies diagnosed a broken fiscal social contract: citizens had stopped believing that taxation produces public goods, and that breakdown provided ideological fuel.^[9] But the broader architecture of international debt, elite political manoeuvring, and state impunity shaped what the protests could and could not achieve. What follows traces the uprising drivers and methods, the state’s response, the IMF-imposed structural adjustment conditions and the broader architecture of imperial debt that ultimately determined what the protests could and could not achieve.

What the Protests Were About

The Finance Bill 2024 proposed new taxes on bread, cooking oil, mobile money transfers, and sanitary products, goods that fall disproportionately on the working poor and the precarious middle class.^[10] The bill was the domestic face of conditions attached to Kenya's IMF loan programme, which demanded substantial upfront fiscal adjustment to stabilize public finances in a country whose debt-to-GDP ratio had reached approximately 73 per cent.^[11]

For a generation facing youth unemployment rates above 40 per cent, the bill was an existential threat as much as an economic one. In Kenya, citizens pay taxes without receiving commensurate public services, while corruption diverts the rest.^[12] When a government that has already broken the fiscal social contract demands further sacrifice, resistance follows.^[13]

The resistance that followed the passage of the bill involved a movement that represented various class interests among the population. The movement’s composition complicated the generational framing that dominated early coverage. As activist Sungu Oyoo put it: 'Gen Z is not a political category; it is an age category.'^[14] The protests drew unemployed youth, working-class Kenyans, precarious professionals, and parts of the established opposition's base. That diversity made mass mobilization possible but left unresolved tensions between those seeking policy reform and those seeking systemic rupture, tensions the state's co-optation strategy would later exploit.^[15] The movement’s rapid evolution from #RejectFinanceBill2024 to #OccupyParliament to #RutoMustGo reflected a genuine split within it: whether the goal was to reform the existing order or replace it.

Digital Mobilization and State Repression

TikTok, WhatsApp, X, and Instagram organized the uprising.^[16] Tax experts broke down the bill’s provisions in plain language. Coordination happened in real-time, without formal hierarchies. The leaderless structure denied the state obvious targets. Digital-native outlets such as Politike Africa and The Elephant gave protesters more space than legacy media did, though official sources still dominated overall coverage.^[17]

But the same infrastructure served the state too. On 25 June 2024, at the protest's peak, the government implemented Kenya's first nationwide internet shutdown, despite the Communications Authority's public denial of any such plan.^[18] Safaricom, Kenya's dominant telecommunications provider, faced credible allegations of sharing subscriber data with law enforcement to facilitate the tracking and abduction of online activists.^[19] The Security Laws (Amendment) Act 2014 had already expanded surveillance capacity and established blanket admissibility of electronic evidence without adequate procedural safeguards.^[20],[21]

The technologies that enabled mass mobilization gave the state new tools to track and silence organisers. The surveillance infrastructure tested against protesters in 2024 has not been dismantled. Kenya’s 2027 electoral cycle is the next occasion for its use against opposition organising.^[22]

Gender, Class, and the Politics of Representation

The ‘leaderless’ label was strategically useful but obscured the informal leadership the movement had, and the gendered risks that came with exercising it. Women were central. Sabato connects this to a longer history of Kenyan women’s political participation, from the Mau Mau liberation struggle - where women like Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima fought and provided critical combat support on the frontlines alongside men - to contemporary feminist political participation that has repeatedly had to fight the assumption that women don’t lead from the front.^[23]

This tradition of women’s frontline leadership is not new. Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima fought alongside Dedan Kimathi during the Mau Mau resistance; others who were not field marshals provided logistics on the frontlines, roles that were vital links in the success of the resistance, not rearguard support. Hanifa Adan coordinated broad-based fundraising for injured protesters' medical costs before her detention. Rose Njeri developed an online tool to streamline citizen communication with officials. Faith Odhiambo, as Law Society of Kenya President, provided pro bono legal representation and personally prosecuted the acting Inspector General of Police for contempt of court, earning the informal designation The People’s Chief Justice (an informal title of public acclaim, distinct from her constitutional role as LSK President).^[24] Zaha Indimuli confronted police officers blocking ambulances from reaching injured demonstrators.^[25] The state was simultaneously targeting women specifically. The Law Society of Kenya’s national report documents that women protesters faced distinct patterns of abuse, with survivors reporting heightened fear, emotional numbness, and persistent psychological distress.^[26]

The protests also intersected with Kenya's femicide crisis. Over 500 women were killed between 2016 and 2023, with further escalation during 2024, and feminist activists explicitly connected that toll to poor governance and the rising cost of living.^[27] Most protesters were unemployed youth and the working poor.^[28] Without lawyers, organisations, or political cover, working-class participants had no buffer when the state came for them, whether through arrests or through deals that cut them out. The protests' radical potential was inseparable from that vulnerability.

The State's Response

The state deployed three instruments in sequence: violent repression, co-optation, and delay. The repressive phase was severe. On 25 June alone, at least 22 people were killed, with some accounts suggesting the figure approached 60.^[29] The Law Society of Kenya documented extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, mass arrests, and torture.^[30] The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) recorded at least 27 abductions between June and August 2024, 19 of them likely protest-related. Medical volunteers and social media influencers were specifically targeted, a pattern consistent with the deliberate removal of informal leadership.^[31] Nearly every survivor reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress.^[32] No convictions have followed any of the documented violence.^[33] The acting Inspector General of Police, found in contempt of court for defying judicial orders regarding the abductions, faced no meaningful consequence.^[34],[35] A BBC Africa Eye documentary examining the Parliament killings was blocked from screening in Kenya.^[36]

This pattern is not incidental. Kenya's security forces are instruments of executive power, not neutral state institutions, and have been documented as such across multiple electoral cycles.^[37]

On 8 August 2024, the date protesters had designated for their largest planned mobilisation, President Ruto appointed four leading opposition figures to his cabinet, including allies of Raila Odinga.^[38] This broad-based government replicated the elite-bargain logic of the 2018 'Handshake' between Odinga and President Kenyatta, which Ruto, as a sidelined deputy, had spent years attacking.^[39] In Oyoo's analysis, the arrangement constituted a class response: 'the ruling class, recognising that its collective position was under threat, acted in concert to protect its privileges.'^[40] The appointments were calibrated by region; incorporating regional politicians reduced protest participation in coastal areas, whose youth now felt they had a seat at the table.^[41] ACLED data reflects the result: June 2024 protests reached 70 per cent of Kenya's 47 counties, but by July 2025 activity was concentrated in just over a third.^[42]

The final instrument was delay. Government promises to investigate protester deaths and rein in police brutality were empty political talk; none materialised.^[43] The withdrawn bill's components were reintroduced through less visible legislative channels. By June 2025, protests had reignited over the death of Albert Omondi Ojwang in police custody, with demands having shifted from reform to systemic rupture.^[44]

The Constraint No Protest Movement Can Reach: IMF Conditionality and Imperial Debt

The deepest constraint on the protests lay entirely outside Kenya’s domestic political field. The Finance Bill 2024 was the domestic face of conditions negotiated between Kenya’s Treasury and the IMF, which had demanded substantial upfront fiscal adjustment.^[45] The IMF publicly characterised the bill as an important step in correcting course; activists alleged that Fund officials had privately urged the government to press ahead despite the protests, though no official IMF document confirms that specific instruction.^[46] When protesters directed anger at the institution, communications director Julie Kozack apologised for the resulting bloodshed while maintaining that the austerity programme had to continue.^[47]

Kenya’s situation is not exceptional. Uganda and Tanzania faced comparable IMF-driven tax protests in the same period with Ethiopia having signed a new deal in 2024. The pattern is regional, and familiar: structural adjustment has simply acquired new terminology.^[48] The Institute of Development Studies sets out the trap: expenditure reductions alone cannot prevent the continued borrowing required to service existing debts, producing recurring fiscal crises regardless of electoral outcomes.^[49][50] Popular sovereignty, under these conditions, runs up against constraints that no domestic actor chose and no domestic action can remove. Creditor demands, if ignored, bring immediate and concrete consequences; popular demands can be deferred, their costs diffuse and slow to arrive. Markets can punish democratic responsiveness faster than democratic processes can punish markets.^[51]

Conclusion

Kenya’s 2024 Finance Bill protests achieved a genuine democratic result: a direct reversal of executive legislation through citizen action, outside formal channels, across ethnic lines, without conventional leadership. That belongs in the record of Kenya’s contested democratisation, alongside the pro-democracy struggles of the 1990s, the 2010 constitutional reform, and the elections since.^[52]

But the protests also revealed the structural limits of fugitive politics in post-colonial states under international financial constraint. Leaderless digital resistance can force sovereign concessions, but it cannot stop opposition leaders from taking a deal when one is on offer, cannot secure accountability when security forces operate with impunity, and cannot reach the international creditors whose conditions constrain what democratic governments may choose.

The question the movement has begun to ask and yet remains to be answered^[53]is not how to protest but how to govern. Building durable political capacity without reproducing the clientelism, ethnic arithmetic, and hierarchies of previous reform waves: that is what nobody has yet managed. The 2024 protests demonstrated that the existing order is contingent and contestable. What formed in those weeks as cross-ethnic political subjectivity and a demonstrated capacity for collective action have not yet been absorbed by institutional politics in Kenya.^[54]

The failure to deliver economic dividends to insecure and oppressed populations has fed deep dissatisfaction with formal politics.^[55] The 2024 protests expressed that dissatisfaction; whether that dissatisfaction becomes durable democratic capacity is the question Kenya needs to answer. Popular sovereignty must be continually remade. The 2024 protests showed that Kenyans know this, even if their institutions do not.^[56]

Nehemiah Mutharimi is a law student at Kabarak University and a trainee at the Kabarak Law Review. His research focuses on Kenyan devolution, healthcare governance, and the legal frameworks governing human resources for health in the pursuit of social justice and equity.

Twitter/X: @mutharimi31800; LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nehemiah-mutharimi-21a7bb26b; Instagram: @nemcrates

Endnotes