The words of John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

It is now clear that the Kenyan government has no respect for human life. Kenyan youth have always gone to the streets, not in terror but to form a new nation.

They desire respect, better governance, justice and the freedom to breathe without fear. Their chants on the streets and opinions online pierce the silence of oppression.

But the state only communicates in the form of abductions, torture and live bullets. What if Gen Z would not stop protesting until real change is seen? What if they made opposition a way of life? 

Daily protest is not a tantrum. It is a strategy. Kenya’s own history bears witness. In 1992, the Mothers of Political Prisoners protested for days.

Their first hunger strike in Freedom Corner lasted five days from February 28, 1992, before the then President Moi broke it up with force.

Once excluded from the park, the mothers regrouped at All Saints Cathedral. There, they organised daily meetings and open forums for nearly eleven months, calling for the release of their sons and mobilising growing support until the last political prisoner walked free in January 1993.

From February 28 to March 3, 1992, they did not wait for planned rallies. They stayed. That persistence led to the release of dozens of detainees. 

This is where Gen Z must borrow the script. One-day protests are loud. Daily protest makes history. When the momentum subsides, protests are forgotten and the state recovers. Nothing comes of it.

As John Adams advocated, “The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered, something notable and striking.”

Every day that the Kenyan Youth march, the cost to the regime grows. Roads are closed. Business comes to a standstill. The media pays attention. Investors question.

Each protest is a whisper in power’s ear, “We are still here.” 

I will admit, daily protests come at a cost. They are threats to the government. Parents will be afraid. Some businesses will close up shop.

Fists can sometimes be clenched, but no struggle is tidy. It has not been tidy with our one-day protests. As Martin Luther King Jr reminded us, peace is not the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.

Protest every day must be met with a plan. The chants need to turn into strategies. If the cry is for debt transparency, then lawmakers must find the missing public money.

If the goal is reforming the police, lawyers must lodge cases, doctors must document injuries, and reporters must report the truth. 

This is not a call for anarchy. This is a call for accountability. A call for audacity. A call to meet the dawn not in hopelessness but in drums, chants and signs.

If Gen Z makes protest a way of life, and not just a reaction, then Kenya will never return to quiet. It will resurface. Again. And again. Until the country listens. 

The writer is a lawyer and a Human Rights Advocate