Protesters, police must behave well tomorrow

Tomorrow marks two years since June 25, 2024, that began with citizens' protest and ended as a national wound. Sixty-five Kenyans were shot dead by security forces. Dozens more were abducted. A generation that felt betrayed took to the streets, and the State, rather than listen, responded with brute force.

The anniversary matters because those 65 deaths remain uninvestigated and unprosecuted. It matters because the grievances that drove young Kenyans out of their homes and into the line of fire; the Finance Bill 2024's proposed taxes on bread, cooking oil, sanitary products, and mobile money transfers, were not imagined grievances. 

They were impositions on people who were already struggling. When a government that campaigned on easing the burden of the ordinary citizens turns around and proposes to tax the basics of survival, it should not be surprised when the ordinary Kenyan protests.

Yet demonstrations such as the ones planned tomorrow, however justified, must be conducted within the law. Kenya's Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to demonstrate, picket, and present petitions. That right is not negotiable. But rights exist in relation to others, and the right to demonstrate stops at the point where it begins to intrude on the right of a fellow Kenyan to go about their lawful business peacefully.

The trader who opens his or her stall is not the enemy of the demonstrator. The commuter trying to reach the office is not a symbol of oppression. Looting businesses, blocking critical roads, and visiting violence on bystanders are crimes, and they discredit the very cause they purport to advance.

To those who plan to demonstrate tomorrow must do so peacefully in designated areas, and within the confines the law. Make your point. Make it loudly. Make it with discipline. The generation that changed the political conversation in this country has earned the right to be heard, but that moral authority evaporates the moment a single shop is torched or a single pedestrian is assaulted.

To the government, the lesson of June 2024 is not that protests must be suppressed more efficiently. It is that live ammunition against unarmed civilians is a crime, and a government that fails to learn that lesson invites worse consequences than the ones it is trying to avoid. Police restraint on tomorrow will not be a weakness. Deploying water cannons, maintaining perimeter security, and allowing peaceful demonstration to proceed unmolested is what a mature government would do.

A baton charge or a stray bullet tomorrow will not end the protest movement. It will inflame it. We have one Kenya. Its fault lines, generational, political, and ideological, are real. But they are not fatal unless we allow them to become so. Tomorrow should come and pass without a single death, without a single looted business, and without a single activist disappearing. That outcome is achievable. It requires political maturity from those in power, and civic discipline from those in the streets.