Murkomen: How government misread the Gen Z revolt

By  Steve Otieno

Reporter

Nation Media Group

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has acknowledged that the government misread the scale and nature of the 2024 Gen Z protests, failing to recognise early enough that opposition to the Finance Bill could evolve from a budget dispute into a national security and governance crisis.

Speaking during a lecture at the National Defence College in Karen, Nairobi, Mr Murkomen said the government failed to anticipate the speed and scale of the protests and did not adequately communicate with citizens about the controversial Finance Bill.

The lecture, titled “Citizen Engagement as a Strategic Governance and National Resilience,” was attended by senior-ranking Kenyan officials seconded to the college by various State departments and participants from 16 other African countries. The students are pursuing master's degrees in National Security and Strategy.

“It is a publicly acknowledged sentiment that we mismanaged the 2024 protests,” Mr Murkomen said.

“First, the scale of the protests, honestly, took everybody by surprise. It was largely unexpected, unanticipated or not planned for.”

His admission offers a rare account from within government of how the administration viewed the protests that shook Kenya in June and July 2024 and eventually forced President William Ruto to withdraw the Finance Bill and undertake a major reorganisation of his government.

The demonstrations began on June 18, 2024, largely led by young Kenyans mobilising through social media against proposed tax increases. What began as opposition to specific provisions of the Finance Bill rapidly expanded into a broader expression of dissatisfaction with the cost of living, taxation, government spending, corruption and political accountability.

The scale of the unrest caught both the government and security agencies off guard.

The protests spread beyond Nairobi to several parts of the country and, on June 25, protesters breached Parliament after clashes with police. Parts of the building were set on fire as the country witnessed some of its most serious political unrest in years.

The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights later documented 60 deaths and 601 injuries linked to the protests between June 18 and July 15, 2024, while the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project recorded 96 political violence events and 82 reported fatalities between June 1 and July 12.

President Ruto subsequently declined to sign the Finance Bill and announced its withdrawal, while his government underwent a major restructuring. On July 11, he dismissed almost his entire Cabinet, saying he intended to form a broad-based government and reassess his administration.

Mr Murkomen, who had previously served as Cabinet Secretary for Roads and Transport before being moved to Youth Affairs, Creative Economy and Sports, was eventually appointed Interior Cabinet Secretary.

He said the government's first mistake was to treat the crisis principally as a Treasury matter.

“This is a budget issue, the Finance Bill, but it will never be remembered as a National Treasury issue but only be remembered for its national security implications,” he said.

“The reality is that a problem that should have been seen from a multidimensional perspective was left to be a budget problem to be dealt with by Treasury and for the police to only protect Parliament from people who wanted to come and harass parliamentarians as they did go about their constitutional duties.”

For Mr Murkomen, the episode demonstrated why national security cannot be separated from governance, public participation and citizen engagement.

He said the government should have anticipated that a contentious national budget would generate concerns extending far beyond taxation and should have created opportunities for citizens to interrogate the proposals before tensions escalated.

“I also think we did not do proper public participation on the budget itself,” he said.

“What should have happened was perhaps to pause and invite these people who allegedly had concerns with the budget and tell them, ‘Here is the budget document, please take us through.’”

The communication failure, he said, was compounded by misinformation.

The protests exposed the speed at which information could spread online and influence public perceptions before government agencies could respond. Mr Murkomen said the government has since sought to become more proactive in countering misinformation.

He cited the more recent budget process, saying Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi had moved quickly to publicly debunk claims he considered false.

The experience, Mr Murkomen said, had demonstrated that government could no longer assume that citizens would automatically understand complex policy proposals.

“We cannot now take anything for granted and say common sense will apply. There is nothing like ‘you should have known’,” he said.

“It is your responsibility, our responsibility as government, to communicate early and give people opportunity to see the things we are engaging in.”

The protests also exposed weaknesses within Parliament, he said, arguing that misinformation can gain traction when even legislators have not fully interrogated government documents.

He recalled instances in which MPs had quoted provisions that were not contained in the legislation under discussion.

“It is very easy to come up with small fabrications,” he said.

But Mr Murkomen also drew a distinction between the original Gen Z movement and the violence and destruction that followed.

“This was a very well-driven protest by young people initially, and everybody thought it was going to be peaceful as it had happened days before,” he said.

He argued that political actors and criminal elements later exploited the demonstrations, including during the attack on Parliament.

“It was not the intent of Gen Zs, the young people who had protested earlier, to burn Parliament,” he said.

That, he said, presented the State with a difficult question: how to protect the constitutional right to demonstrate and petition under Article 37 while preventing protests from being infiltrated by criminals or political actors seeking to exploit public anger.

For the Interior CS, the central lesson from the protests is that citizen engagement is itself a national security tool.

“Security is a whole-government issue, and it can stem from a very different issue,” he said. “In this case, a budgetary issue and snowball to something serious.”

He argued that the same principle applied to insecurity in Kenya's North Rift, where he attributed persistent banditry partly to decades of marginalisation and inadequate development.

The State, he said, could not permanently resolve insecurity simply by deploying security forces.

“The more you move development closer to people, why is this problem only happening in areas where there are no roads, no water, no schools, no police stations?” he asked.

For him, the answer lies in addressing underlying grievances alongside security operations.

“Operations to kill the bandits, take their guns and do all these things, this is just treating the symptoms,” he said.

The focus, the CS said, should be on building resilience before crises erupt, through early communication, meaningful public participation and government institutions capable of listening to citizens.

Follow our WhatsApp channel for breaking news updates and more stories like this.