“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Of course Martin Niemöller could not have imagined the Kenyan youth. We are not an ignorant people. We know the language of power, the anatomy of corruption and the evolution of our own suffering. We can tell you who made this country wrong and which constitutional provision they violated while doing it. Give us a podcast, and we might even explain why the person explaining the problem is himself part of the problem.

In July 2024, we came out in the thousands. We spoke when they came for us. We filled the streets, buried our dead, watched our friends disappear into the machinery of the state, and forced a government to retreat from a Finance Bill it had intended to pass. For a moment, we discovered that power could be made to listen.

And then we went home.

Not all of us, of course; many have paid dearly for refusing to be silent. But the anger that had been boiling since the time Kibaki handed over power to Uhuru found new homes in podcasts, breakfast shows, panel discussions and the curated propaganda of internet personalities. The revolution acquired a vocabulary, then a guest list and then a schedule. Some of those homes pay rent. A few of the loudest voices of 2024 now draw a fee for explaining the government's case to the same youth who buried their friends.

We have become so good at dialogue that one wonders whether it is the government's most successful counter-revolutionary instrument. We discuss our predicament with the composure of people who have mistaken being invited to the table for having power over what is served.

Look at Serbia. Their uprising began in 2024 too, after a canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station and killed sixteen people, and they did not go home when the cameras left. Two years of pressure later, last week, Aleksandar Vučić, fourteen years in power, stood before his own supporters and admitted that he had lost. Serbia is no fairy tale, and the count is still coming in, but pressure that outlasts the news cycle carries a grievance far past the moment that lit it.

Kenyan youth are not stupid. That is the indictment. We know a concession from a solution. We know a government can retreat from one bill and return through another door, and the president has bragged about it. At an AIC church in Kasina, Mwingi, on Sunday, he told the congregation, “We had to stop the Finance Bill not because it was wrong but because of propaganda,” and that its clauses were all passed anyway, through different channels. The powerful are always more patient than the people they govern.

And still, we speak.

Have we mistaken the ability to theorise our oppression for the ability to overcome it? We have become great at dissecting the system without disturbing its sleep.

Niemöller warned about the cost of silence. Ours is even more strange. We are a generation that found its voice, used it to be heard and then let the voice replace everything else.

First they came, and we spoke. They came again, and we explained.

How many times must they come before we remember that speaking was never supposed to be the end of the story?