Kenyan President President William Ruto. (Wikimedia Commons)
On the very morning we were waking to the devastating news of veteran politician Raila Odinga’s death, Kenyan President William Ruto signed into law the Computer Misuse and Cybercrime (Amendment) Bill, 2024.
This is a draconian piece of legislation that effectively criminalises dissent. The law states that if you post something that “offends” someone online, you could be fined up to KSh20 million or jailed for 10 years. Ten years for a tweet, a meme, a Facebook post or a TikTok video that the state finds uncomfortable.
This is not a law about protecting the public from cybercrime. It is a law about protecting power from criticism. It is a desperate attempt by a failing regime to silence the country’s most vocal and politically awake generation, the Kenyan youth.
Ruto’s obsession with control and fear is fast becoming the defining feature of his presidency. He came to power branding himself a “hustler”, the voice of the ordinary people. But that mask has fallen. What remains is a ruler terrified of the same young people he once courted, those who tweet, post and protest because they have been denied jobs, dignity and hope. Instead of fixing the economy, he is fixing his grip on power. Instead of creating jobs, he is creating jail sentences.
If Ruto fought corruption with the same zeal he uses to fight free speech, Kenya would be far better off. But he will not. Because corruption sustains his political system, while free speech threatens it.
The president and his allies understand something important — that Kenya’s youth have changed the rules of political engagement. They no longer wait for mainstream media to tell their stories. They have built their own spaces on X, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where truth travels faster than propaganda and where power can no longer monopolise the narrative. In those spaces, they have exposed government scandals, organised protests and mocked hypocrisy. That is what scares Ruto.
By criminalising “offensive” speech, the regime is not protecting civility. It is criminalising emotion. It is declaring war on anger, satire and expression, the lifeblood of democracy. What does “offensive” even mean? The offense is subjective. To a tyrant, truth itself is offensive. To the corrupt, exposure is offensive. To the liar, facts are offensive. This law, in its vagueness, gives the state infinite power to decide who can speak and who must be silenced.
And yet, history has shown that suppression always births rebellion. Every generation that has been silenced has found new ways to speak. When former president Daniel arap Moi banned student politics in universities, students turned lecture halls into underground movements. The state controlled newspapers and dissidents like Raila Odinga, Kenneth Matiba and this columnist printed their own on secret presses. Today’s youth don’t need printing presses. They have smartphones — millions of them.
Ruto’s government might soon discover that fear does not kill freedom; it fertilises it. The more you try to silence a generation, the louder they become. The more you criminalise their voices, the more creative and defiant those voices grow. You can not jail an entire generation’s imagination.
It is also worth remembering that social media is not a luxury for Kenyan youth. It is survival. It is how small businesses advertise, how artists build audiences, how freelancers find work and how citizens seek accountability. It is the new town square, the new parliament, the new court of public opinion. To attack digital freedom is to attack the very lifeline of a generation that already feels betrayed by a broken economy and a corrupt state.
The new cyberlaw is, therefore, not just unconstitutional, it is immoral. It violates the spirit of Article 33 of Kenya’s constitution, which guarantees every citizen the right to freedom of expression, including freedom to seek, receive or impart information and ideas. It violates the legacy of those, like Raila Odinga, who fought and died for a democratic Kenya, where speech is free and citizens are not ruled by fear.
But beyond its illegality, this law is politically foolish. It signals a regime that is tone-deaf to the times. Kenya’s youth are not the same generation of the 1980s that could be cowed into silence. They are globally connected, politically aware and fearless. They speak multiple languages of memes, of hashtags, of humour, of resistance. They will not be lectured into submission by a government that can not feed them, house them or employ them.
Ruto’s problem is not the youth’s online “offence”. His problem is the truth. And truth has a way of surviving. It slips through cracks, jumps firewalls and finds a home in every whisper, every protest, every post.
The Computer Misuse and Cybercrime (Amendment) Act might silence a few. It might scare many. But it will not kill the idea that birthed Kenya’s digital awakening, that power must always answer to the people. Ruto can jail words, but not ideas. He can fine posts, but not principles. He can intimidate youth, but not history.
Kenya stands today at a dangerous crossroads. We can either slide into a digital dictatorship, where fear replaces freedom, or rise in collective defiance and reclaim the right to speak, to question and to dream. The choice, as always, will not be made by those in power but by those who dare to speak truth to it. President Ruto has chosen fear. Let the youth choose freedom.
Gitobu Imanyara is a human rights and pro-democracy lawyer, publisher and former member of the Kenyan and Pan African parliaments. This article first appeared in The Standard Follow him on X @GitobuImanyara.