Three pictures sum the day that was the 16th of July 2024 in Kenya. A journalist with multiple bullet wounds in the thigh, a young boy shot in the leg and a young man wounded in the left eye after he was hit by a teargas canister.
It was so rich an occasion in the capital that at a given point, footage shared by CNN’s Larry Madowo on X, formerly Twitter shows water cannons used against marked members of the press and uniformed police officers.
The big question that jogs around anyone’s mental faculty is : Who are those plain clothes in balaclavas arbitrarily arresting peaceful protesters, shoot live bullets at some and cannot spare law enforcement officers?
It’s a shame that stinks to high heavens that in a sophisticated democracy like Kenya, Police brutality is still something that citizens grapple with.
Under the auspices of article 37 of the constitution of Kenya,”Every person has the right, peaceably and unarmed, to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket, and to present petitions to public authorities.”
Peaceably? The sustainability of the ongoing demonstrations in the country has largely depended on the meticulous mobilization done by a number of digital activists, who have repeatedly insisted to their followers that there’s absolutely no room for violence, and to everyone’s dismay, the pickets were massively peaceful until post June 25 events, when certain ‘goons and dangerous criminals’ hijacked the noble cause, and ‘gave room for police to use live bullets on protesters’.
The of 16th July demonstrations were just but a justification that protesting youths have nothing to do with violence and looting. They simply, in their own terms, want to be heard by those who lead them. They yearn for change, and their only business in the streets is to demand it.
“What we are asking for is better policies, ” a young man talks to City Bite Magazine along the streets of Kisumu, a city known for the most lethal protests in the country. “They have branded us as destructors of property in the past, but this time, we are simply passing our message, yet they can’t stop lobbing teargas and shooting live bullets at us,” he said.
After the finance bill 2024 was rejected and the cabinet dismissed, Kenyan youths are saying that it is not enough. They want President William Ruto gone, alongside his deputy and Prime Cabinet Secretary H.E Musalia Mudavadi. They also want parliamentarians recalled and a fresh election conducted in accordance with the constitution. They’re also demanding the number of county governments halved, CDF moved to Ministry of Education, reduced salaries for holders of political offices, investigation of dismissed ministers and abolishment of the Women Representative position.
What remains to be seen is whether these demands are tenable or whether President Ruto will decide to call it quits and be the first ever President in Kenya to resign from office.
