President William Ruto has left Kenyans stunned after performing one of the most breathtaking political about turns in recent memory, suddenly praising the very Gen Zs he once labelled treasonous criminals and whose blood, according to former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, is on his hands.
On June 25th, 2024, thousands of young Kenyans took to the streets to protest the Finance Bill 2024, a demonstration that culminated in the storming of Parliament and left over 100 people dead at the hands of security forces.
In the immediate aftermath, Ruto addressed the nation and showed zero remorse, branding the protesters criminals and describing the demonstrations as an assault on democracy.
When subsequent protests followed in the weeks after, Ruto directed police to shoot demonstrators in the leg, a chilling instruction from a sitting president that told the world everything about how little he valued the lives of Kenya’s young people.
Fast forward to this week, with less than a year remaining before the 2027 presidential election and Ruto’s re-election prospects looking increasingly grim, the President stood before the nation as Kenya marked 16 years since the promulgation of the Constitution and delivered a statement that has made jaws drop across the country.
The Gen Zs who protested in 2024, Ruto now says, were not an assault on democracy. They simply wanted their voices to be heard.
The audacity of that statement, coming from the same man who ordered police to fire live ammunition into crowds of unarmed young people, who watched hundreds of Kenyans get killed and thousands more get abducted in the dark months that followed, and who called those same young people treasonous criminals when their bodies were barely cold, has left Kenyans somewhere between speechless and furious.
The calculation behind the pivot is transparent to anyone paying attention. Ruto has been losing ground at an alarming rate. The youth, who once gave him the benefit of the doubt, have turned decisively against him. The united opposition led by Gachagua has successfully pinned the Gen Z deaths around Ruto’s neck as a defining legacy of his administration. With 2027 closing in, Ruto needs the youth vote, or at the very least needs to neutralise their anger, and so the man who ordered the shooting has now decided to rebrand himself as the man who always understood their pain.
Kenyans are not fooled. The parents of the over 100 young people who were buried are not fooled. The thousands who were abducted and tortured are not fooled. And the Gen Zs watching this video are certainly not fooled.
Here is the video of President William Ruto praising the Gen Zs he once branded criminals and whose killing and abduction he allegedly ordered.
https://twitter.com/a_m_media_ke/status/2092886659733885130/video/1
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