Ever since the dawn of time kingdoms have risen and fallen no matter how powerful and wealthy they were from the Roman,British,Ottoman in the Europe to the Maurya ,Mongol, Mughal Empires in Asia and lastly the Egyptian empire in Africa all led by tyrannical leaders who stopped at nothing to gain their power but eventually their were uprisings that forced a new regime and in most revolts the younger generation is tasked with the duty of fighting for the rest of the population since they’re considered to be stronger,energetic and frankly have more time to topple oppressive regimes at will. But in the recent years millenials and Gen Z have faced scrutiny and critisisms for being one of the laziest and dormant generations of all time and just watching as things go haywire meanwhile all they do is sit around and stare at their screens.
This was the case to be honest because in recent years we have experienced less and less protests by orchestrated by the younger generation especially by students in universities, who were distinctly known for their nack in leading extreme protests that left a major impact on the society. For example, in 1972, students went on strike demanding an underpass on Uhuru Highway that separated the university lecture theatres from the halls of residence after a student had been killed by a car. The University’s student paper, The University Platform, gave the most detailed description of this demonstration and its suppression in its 27 July 1972 issue. However, this proved to be its final issue, as it was banned as a result. Despite the strike being violently broken up, with many students injured and some arrested, and The University Platform being banned, by 1973, the underpass had been built within only six months.
In 1974, two major protests calling for fair representation led to ‘police violence, widespread student injuries, expulsions and closures.’ The first protest was prompted by what students termed mass failure rates in the faculty of architecture. The students highlighted the fact that ‘at the end of the 1972/73 academic year, only two Kenyan Africans qualified as architects’ and by 1974, ‘only two Kenyan Africans were in the fifth year’ dubbing it a ‘clearly worked out plan to control the entry of Black Kenyans into this vital profession’.
Comprehensively it is safe to say that between 1969 and 1990 there were alot of universities strikes that were effective at highlighting the injustices in the society and most were successful in driving major policy shifts in government.But after the nineties and early 2000’s they were less and less revolutions taking place especially after the mass casualties in the 2007 post election violence, but in defense of the milenials and Gen z it’s not only fair but accurate to say that we’ve seen alot of rebellions trying to change things coming in with better ideas and dreams to liberate the people only to see our parents spirits crushed time and again by the faintest hope that if the right people are in power maybe just maybe their children will have a better, safer and comfortable life but the government has done a stellar job in letting them down as oppressive governments are replaced by even more oppresive governments (except the late honarable Kibaki one that tried to give us a slither of what the people diserved).
This sense of hopelessness led to the younger people to lose the zeal to fight only to see things remain the same or even worse with the rich becoming richer and the poor languishing in poverty and living in sub-human living conditions. This repeated oppressive nature inevitebly caused a revolutionary disillusionment” or “revolutionary fatigue and led people/youth to resort escapism or a “dont care” attitude which seemed better than houbering dangerous hope which will leave us distraught and dishertened like our parents who broke their backs to give us a better future only for the governments they elected to push the oasis further and further away until their souls depart from them. But this government has pushed everyone to the wall by taking everything from the very people that elected them in power, they have taken the meaning of education by not only increasing the burden of paying for school i.e increasing the fees but also making it harder and harder to get employed despite your credintials, they are raising the taxes in rediculously high rates, they propagate corruption, destroyed peoples homes, made it harder to get good health care and many more attrocities that they have done and continue to do all just because they have the power to do so, the same power we gave to them.
But with everything lost to the common ‘mwananchi’ we have nothing to lose and “When a man has nothing left to lose, he becomes truly dangerous.” And since this government is refusing to listen the youth will make them listen, they’ll show this oppressive,greedy, maniplative government that Kenya isn’t and will never be an oligarch system, it’s a democracy and in every democracy power is for the people,belongs to the people and is the people and we are coming for what belongs to us and just like our parents fought for us we are willing to put everything on the line to keep their dreams alive.
“You can kill a revolutionary but you cannot kill a revolution” ~Fred Hampton
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