On June 6, 2025, Kenyan blogger and teacher Albert Ojwang was arrested for a post on X that criticized the Deputy Inspector General of Police. Two days later, he was dead in police custody. Official cause: he hit his head against a cell wall.
Ojwang was 31 years old. He was from Homa Bay County. He had not led protests, organized marches, or built a following. He had posted his opinion on a platform that, by its own design, is optimized for reach.
His death ignited the second wave of the 2025 protests. Thousands gathered in Nairobi. The government deployed the military. At least 65 people were killed in subsequent weeks.
The lesson I keep drawing is infrastructural: the platforms that make it easiest to speak truth to power are also the platforms that make speakers easiest to find. X's architecture — designed for amplification and reach — is simultaneously a tool for accountability and a surveillance surface. The government did not need to monitor the whole platform. It needed one complaint and one name.
This is what happens when accountability infrastructure is built on commercial infrastructure that was not designed for it. The pipes were not made for this water.
Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.
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