Kenyan police suppressed a planned protest march in Nairobi on July 7 — Saba Saba Day (an annual commemoration of Kenya's 1990 pro-democracy uprising, named after the Swahili term for "seven seven") — detaining activists, deploying checkpoints and unmarked vehicles, and declaring the demonstration illegal. The Economic Justice Movement had organised the march to draw attention to alleged extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, rising living costs and shrinking civic freedoms under President William Ruto's administration, but fewer than ten protesters managed to gather before police intervened. The crackdown has intensified concerns about democratic backsliding in Kenya, where at least 127 people were killed during protest periods in 2024 and 2025 according to the country's police watchdog, and where a senior journalist narrowly escaped an apparent abduction days after Ruto publicly criticised his newspaper.