BLOOD MONEY: 2 BILLION TO BE USED TO CLEANSE OFF THE BLOOD OF THE CITIZENS KILLED

On reparations, impunity, and a government that has learned death is negotiable

The Kenyan government announced it would begin paying out Ksh2 billion in compensation to victims of protest violence — covering deaths, injuries, and enforced disappearances stretching from 2017 all the way to 2025. Families of the dead are being offered between Ksh50,000 and Ksh2.5 million, depending on the verification process. President Ruto, launching the framework, called it a step toward healing, careful to note that the money was not “the price of life, of pain, or of loss.”

He’s right about that, even if he didn’t mean it the way it landed. No amount of money is the price of a life. But that’s exactly the problem here, because while the state has found Ksh2 billion to write checks, it has not found a single prosecution for the people who pulled triggers, gave orders, or stood by while Kenyan teenagers bled out on tarmac they were protesting on for their future.

Let’s be clear about what we’re compensating for. In June 2024, when the Finance Bill protests erupted and young Kenyans stormed Parliament, police responded with live rounds. Rights groups and the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented dozens of deaths in Nairobi alone that month, with the toll climbing as the unrest continued. KNCHR alone recorded over 80 abductions or enforced disappearances between June and December 2024 — citizens who simply vanished, some never to be accounted for. A year later, when GenZ returned to the streets to mark the anniversary, the state killed again: at least 16 dead according to Amnesty Kenya, most by police gunfire, with over 400 injured. By Saba Saba in July 2025, the toll for a single day’s protest hit 31 dead in one report, with rights groups calling the killings what they were — extrajudicial.

This is not a single tragic incident the state is atoning for. This is a pattern. Year after year, protest after protest, the script repeats: young people gather to demand accountability, the state responds with bullets, lives are lost and afterward — eventually — a compensation fund appears.

That sequence tells you everything about how this government understands a citizen’s life. It is not a thing to be protected. It is a liability to be priced.

The Impunity Arithmetic

Here’s what should disturb every Kenyan about this compensation framework: it exists in a vacuum where accountability does not. No senior police commander has stood trial for ordering officers into crowds with live ammunition. No politician has answered for the shift in rhetoric — from “shoot in the legs” to the chilling escalation many officials and officers were later accused of normalizing on the ground. The compensation framework was born out of the 10-point political agreement between Ruto’s UDA and Raila’s ODM — a deal cut between political elites, not a verdict delivered by courts.

When a state pays families without ever naming, charging, or jailing the people responsible, it isn’t admitting guilt. It’s purchasing closure on its own terms — closure that lets the institutions and individuals who did the killing walk away untouched, while the public ledger is marked “resolved.”

And that has a price far beyond Ksh2 billion. It tells every officer holding a rifle at the next protest that the worst-case consequence of killing a demonstrator is a line item in next year’s supplementary budget. It tells every commander that orders given in the heat of a crackdown will never trace back to them in a courtroom. Impunity isn’t just the absence of punishment, it’s an incentive structure. And we are now several budget cycles into proving that incentive works exactly as you’d expect: the protests keep happening, and so do the killings.

What money cannot buy

There is also the matter of what this framework cannot even pretend to cover. How do you compensate a survivor of sexual violence at the hands of police or government-aligned goons during a protest crackdown — a violation rights organizations have documented but that rarely appears in any official tally? What is the line item for a family whose son or daughter was abducted and has never been found, more than a year later? What checkbook number do you write for a child shot while walking home from school, in a country where the explanation offered afterward was an insult to the intelligence of everyone watching?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the actual shape of what happened in this country, and no framework — however well-intentioned the bureaucrats designing it may be — was built to hold that shape. It was built to hold numbers: Ksh50,000 here, Ksh2.5 million there, a tidy AI-assisted case management system to keep the disbursements orderly. Order is not the same as justice. It just looks like it from a distance, if you don’t ask who built the order and why.

What we are actually being asked to accept

The quiet demand embedded in this whole exercise is that Kenyans accept money as a substitute for accountability — that we let the state close this chapter without ever opening the one where the people responsible are named in a courtroom rather than a press release. Families have already pushed back, rejecting the original Ksh3 million offer as insultingly small for a lifetime of loss. That instinct is correct, and it should go further. The number on the check was never really the issue. The issue is what’s missing from the framework entirely: prosecution.

Until that happens, every shilling disbursed under this program is, in the most literal sense, the cost of doing business — the price the state has calculated it can afford to pay for the right to use lethal force against its own citizens without consequence. And if that price is affordable, there is no reason to believe it won’t be paid again.

We are not a country that should be grateful for compensation. We are a country that should still be demanding trials.