Protesters picketing along Moi Avenue in Nairobi during the commemoration of the Gen-Z protests on June 25, 2025.
On June 25, 2024, I stood in the streets inhaling tear gas, dodging batons, and witnessing a wave of youth marching with hope in their eyes. We were terrified, but we showed up. We mourned and protested the Finance Bill 2024 that was bleeding our futures dry.
That day, we chanted through fear. We begged this country to listen. We held up placards and hope, while they responded with bullets. More than 60 lives were lost. Some names we know, many we don't.
But this year, June 25, 2025, the streets were different. The fear was gone. What remained was fury — raw, untamed, and unapologetic. Last year, we walked cautiously. We whispered our slogans, looked over our shoulders, and believed we had something to lose: our lives, our freedom, our names. But now? There’s nothing left to lose. We’ve buried too many to keep pretending that peace will come through patience.
The transformation should be terrifying, not to us, but to the State. We are no longer asking, we are demanding. Our placards read like ultimatums, not requests. The chants were not just defiant, they were revolutionary. We didn’t run when the tear gas came, we advanced. We didn’t scatter when rubber bullets flew. We stood our ground.
The grief that paralysed us in 2024 has hardened into something sharper, and more dangerous. Grief gave birth to rage. And rage, when organised, is a revolution. The State should be worried, not because we are violent, but because we are awake. More awake than we’ve ever been and we are done negotiating our humanity.
I walked beside a graduate who had been jobless for seven years. “I’m supposed to be building a home,” he said. “But I’m still begging landlords not to evict me.” I passed a hawker, who used to balance sugarcane trays in downtown Nairobi. Now, he’s organising neighbourhood resistance cells. We’re all becoming something the government fears most: citizens who see clearly, and have nothing more to fear.
Mourned silently
Last year, we mourned silently, expecting justice to arrive from the very system that kills us. This year, our mourning has become a movement and our pain has become power. We’re not radicalising ourselves, the State is radicalising us.
Every bullet they fire, every protester they abduct, every lie they tell on national television pushes us further into a place where fear no longer holds us hostage. We are not reckless, we are focused. We don’t want chaos but we refuse to coexist with injustice. If that threatens national stability, maybe the problem isn’t us.
Meanwhile, the State spins the same tired script. Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen still calls us “terrorists”. He still praises the police for preventing imaginary coups and still tells officers to “shoot when attacked.” He still refuses to account for the dead. But this time, we’re not begging them to listen.
The slogans have shifted. We no longer say “reform the system.” We now say, “bring it down and rebuild.” The police no longer shock us. Disappearances don’t surprise us. Media blackouts are expected. Brutality has been normalised. What they fail to see is that normalising violence doesn’t create fear, it kills apathy.
We are the children of a broken promise: educated and unemployed; hungry and unheard; and squeezed dry by black tax, rent, school fees, and inflated bills. We have now realised that if we don’t fight, we don’t survive.
They build new fences around State House, while schools collapse and hospitals run out of painkillers. They stage public relations meetings while the youth bury their friends. They invest in surveillance instead of solutions. What do they think happens when a generation raised on dreams realises it was all a scam?
We evolve. We harden. We stop asking. We rise.
On June 25, 2025, I saw something that should send shivers down every government official’s spine: young Kenyans who are no longer afraid to die. Standing up became the only dignified act left.
This isn’t about the Finance Bill anymore. It’s not even about one administration. It’s about a deep rot that keeps trying to silence a generation that refuses to disappear quietly.
Radicalisation
The question is no longer whether we will fight. The question is what the State will do with this energy: Will it continue to shoot, kidnap, gas, and lie or will it finally listen before things become uncontrollable?
At nightfall, I heard a young protester whisper, “We are not here to die in silence. We are here to make them remember us.” And I realised something chilling in its clarity: this government may survive our protests, but it will not survive the radicalisation.
Change is a demand backed by defiance. The youth have picked their side and we don’t need political endorsement. We are no longer looking up to the system. We are looking straight at it and saying: move, or fall.
If anyone in power is still sleeping comfortably, believing this is all noise, they’re making a fatal error because 2027 will not look like 2022, a new voter base is taking shape — young, politically aware, and not beholden to the usual tribal or party loyalties. These voters remember who enabled the Finance Bill. who defended extrajudicial killings, who stayed silent while people were abducted in broad daylight. They intend to vote and they’re keeping receipts.
Kenya is at a crossroads. And if the state continues to respond to pain with power, to voices with violence, to justice with batons, it must be prepared to face a generation that has truly, finally, snapped.
This defiance is not born from hatred, but from love: love for our families, for our dreams, for a future where youth no longer have to die in vain. It’s a grief transformed into courage, a pain transformed into power. It’s the collective heartbeat of a generation saying, “We will not be broken. We will not be erased.” And in that defiance, there is hope, the stubborn, unshakable hope that someday, this country will finally listen
