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As Kenyans welcome the new year tomorrow, they harbour deep resentment and anger at the government over abductions and other gross violations of human rights violations that have haunted the nation in 2024.

The authorities’ lackadaisical and dishonest attitude towards public outrage and questions over these repressive actions is shocking and unacceptable.

A national citizenry’s bitterness is that these incidents are occurring 60 years after independence from colonialism when they were perpetrated against so-called native Africans fighting for freedom and their land.

The 1952-1956 Mau Mau movement – a child of the political, economic and social problems which had accumulated over the years and had not found any solution through constitutional channels – capture these shenanigans.

They were problems of discrimination against Africans in different forms aggravated after “natives” were evicted from their land in the rich interior of the British protectorate which became a White Man’s country (the White Highlands).

Discrimination and alienation bred indigenous peoples’ resentment against the colonial government authorities, giving birth to the Mau Mau uprising whose leaders decided there was no way to reclaim what they lost other than through violence.

Africans suffered and died from Mau Mau, but this is true of many protests, revolutions and uprisings. The Mau Mau violence was met with greater violence from the British Government and its security forces during The Emergency.

Most publicity was centred on what the Mau Mau did and very little was concerned with what the security forces did. Many Africans disappeared, never to be seen again, many were arrested and never came back. Some security forces were reportedly paid for each person they shot.

Why do the events that have provoked outrage against the government evoke memories of the dark evil days of The Emergency. It is because they bear an uncanny resemblance to what has been happening since the Gen Z protests of mid-2024.

The brutal suppression of the youth-led protests against injustices embraced countrywide by citizens, the shooting dead of dozens of young Kenyans and the subsequent spate of abductions that continue to date mirrors the fears and horrors of the colonial regime.

Yet painful experiences of yesteryears reopen fresh wounds and counterproductive emotions in a perceived independent democratic state sworn in under oath of the Constitution to protect the rights and lives of all Kenyans.

No amount of political manipulation and intimidating arrogant statements of denial or ignorance on the origins and perpetrators of the brutality and abductions will convince citizens of the authorities’ non-complicity in their execution.

If the police and the security and criminal justice system claim they don’t know who are perpetrating heinous crimes, then they have terribly failed in their duties as a national disgrace.

A critical deficit of trust in the government continues after failing to fulfil many election campaign promises that gave it to power. Worse, it pledged there would never be abductions and extrajudicial killings under its watch.

The bell is tolling among a restive populace as exposed by the Gen Z protests. It is a tinderbox that could explode at any moment, with grave consequences.

Citizens will not allow gross violations of human rights to be buried without justice for the innocent victims expressing their constitutionally guaranteed expression of freedoms.

The buck stops with the Executive. Order the end of abductions, the arrest and prosecution of the perpetrators to exorcise the evil ghosts of 2024.