In his remarks to the nation both before and after Wednesday’s Gen Z protests President William Ruto has been clear on where he stands with regard to recent youth-led demonstrations. He has sided with the police. In making that choice the President ignores hard lessons of history. He is a poor student of history.
In every era, across every continent, when the old order has proven stubborn and deaf to reason, it is the youth who have stood up to jolt history awake. From the alleyways of Prague in 1968 to the blood-stained streets of Soweto in 1976, from Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square, and now from Nairobi’s Central Business District to Githurai, the story is the same: When entrenched power fails, it is the young who dare imagine and demand something better.
In Kenya today, we are witnessing a historic uprising of Generation Z. A generation long dismissed as apolitical, distracted, or self-absorbed. Yet, it is this same generation that has forced a national reckoning, not just with a failed Finance Bill, but with the entire structure of State violence, economic exclusion, and elite impunity. In so doing, they join a long global lineage of youth-led resistance movements that have played a pivotal role in reshaping societies.
Take the Soweto Uprising of June 1976, for instance. In apartheid South Africa, a regime of racial terror and economic apartheid ruled unchecked. But it was not political parties or unions that sparked the most decisive rupture.
It was high school students, protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of instruction. Their peaceful march was met with bullets. Hector Pieterson, just 12 years old, became the face of that defiance when a photo of his lifeless body, carried by a fellow student, shocked the conscience of the world. That moment galvanised international opposition to apartheid and fueled decades of internal resistance.
Fast forward to Tiananmen Square in 1989, where Chinese students gathered in the heart of Beijing demanding political reform and democratic freedoms. They held banners, read aloud the Chinese constitution, and staged hunger strikes. For weeks, the world watched their peaceful protest with awe, until the Chinese state unleashed tanks and terror. Though brutally suppressed, Tiananmen became an enduring symbol of courage in the face of tyranny.
Then there was the Arab Spring, ignited by a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself ablaze in protest against police harassment and corruption. Within weeks, cities across North Africa and the Middle East were on fire with youthful rebellion.
In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, it was again the youth who led. Organising through social media, holding sit-ins, and toppling regimes once thought immovable. While not all their hopes were fulfilled, they shattered the myth of Arab political passivity and changed the political map of the region.
Even in the United States, the mythologised bastion of democracy, it was the youth who pushed the country forward. In the 1960s, student protests drove the anti-Vietnam War movement and strengthened the Civil Rights Movement. In recent years, young people, from the Parkland school shooting survivors to Black Lives Matter organisers, have been at the forefront of struggles against gun violence and systemic racism. These youth movements share certain traits. They are often leaderless but not directionless. They are decentralised, organic, and tech-savvy.
They thrive on peer-to-peer communication and horizontal organisation, rejecting top-down hierarchies in favour of mass participation. Most importantly, they are powered by moral clarity. The belief that injustice, no matter how normalised, must be confronted.
That is exactly what we are now witnessing in Kenya. The youth protests sweeping across Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Eldoret, Meru and beyond are not just about taxation. They are about legitimacy. They are about a generation saying enough is enough to corruption, enough is enough to police brutality, enough is enough to empty political rhetoric and broken promises. They are calling for a new social contract. One built not on tribal patronage, but on equity, dignity, and accountability.
And yet, like all historic youth movements, they face violent repression. Tear gas, water cannons, arbitrary arrests, and live bullets have already been unleashed. The state is rattled, reacting with the old playbook: Criminalise dissent, brand protesters as criminals, and deny the structural rot that has provoked this wave. But history teaches us that repression only delays the inevitable. The youth always return, wiser, stronger and more organised.
Ruto and his allies would do well to study history before dismissing this generation. They would learn that it is often the young who make democracy real. Not through speeches, but through sacrifice. The future is never gifted by the powerful. It is claimed by those who dare to fight for it.
Today’s Gen Z protesters are not “idlers” or “saboteurs.” They are patriots in the highest sense of the word. They are acting where others have stayed silent. And in so doing, they are giving this country a second chance to live up to its own Constitution. A document born, let us not forget, out of protest, blood, and defiance.
This is not the first youth uprising in history, and it will not be the last. But it may well be the one that finally forces Kenya to choose between politics of extraction and politics of care; between elite preservation and public service; between fear and freedom. The youth have spoken. The world is watching. And history, as always, is listening.
By Gitobu Imanyara