Gen Z will be remembered for courage

There are people making fun of the Gen Z, questioning their tenacity to sustain the movement they kicked off more than one month ago.

Most of these online commentators taking a swipe at these young comrades have no historical record of pinning down a cockroach cat walking on their kitchen slabs, let alone controlling themselves at the sighting of a stretching spider on their bedroom wall.

It takes a near miracle to force the president’s hand into shaking up his levers of administration after terrifying him into waving away the signing of a retrogressive law.

The scenes of courage and commitment to a worthy cause witnessed in the past two months have not only left a sense of national pride in the younger generation coming after us but also given the government the much-needed punch in the gut to retrace their missteps and return to doing the Lord’s work they had promised at the heat of the campaigns.

This was no mean feat and at no given time should its glamour be tainted by pigs whose natural habitat is basking in the filth. Before the young people of Kenya visited parliament two months ago to seek answers directly from their MPs who had abandoned them immediately after swearing-in, Kenya had been your classic example of an ‘accept and move on’ country, where those agitating for good governance endured vile and malevolent mockery for being sore losers and accused of seeking state power through the back door.

For times on end, the culture of talking down those who sought to ask questions about the greed with which we have handled our electoral systems had been encouraged, emboldened and entrenched to the extent of discouraging well-meaning Kenyans from participating in the governance system for fear of attacks.

The Gen Z did not just shake the president’s leg and cause him to sit upright and widen his eyesight, they almost sent his entire government on the run. In a country where the police and other agents of state terror have a poor human rights record, that is no mean feat.

To turn around, therefore, and make fun of the young people on account of the lack of fire in the last few protest marches, is not only insensitive to the suffering condition of the many Kenyans they seek to represent but also a symptom of pathogenic envy for which a doctor’s appointment need not be postponed.

Philosophers, the world over, have disagreed on many scientific discoveries since the dawn of time, but one thing they have a consensus about is that no nation can afford to be at war with its young people – this is also a timeless golden rule found in holy and unholy texts regardless of racial or cultural background.

A nation that fights its young for clout is a nation teetering on the brink of disrepair.

You cannot fight the Gen Z and survive – they not only have time on their hands to learn from the folly of inexperience but they also have the energy to keep you jogging till the return of Jesus Christ, if they decide to make your business theirs. Instead of taking aim at the missteps they have made leading to the fizzling out of their movement, there is a need to galvanize the vigour with which they took to demanding transparency and accountability and use it as a force for the common good.

Youth are the lifeblood of any society and the premier agents of sustainable change. A nation that banks on the young for progressive change not only sleeps soundly knowing the future is luminous but also extends its average life expectancy with the knowledge that they have attained that perfect nirvana only enjoyed by a privileged few among the developed community of nations.

What the Gen Z have achieved in less than two months, those mocking them can only achieve in their dreams. Whenever the choice has presented itself for Kenyans to leave the comfort of their homes and face the brutality of police live on ground zero, those who have a lot to say about the failures of the Gen Z movement have always chosen to cuddle their couch as they celebrate another forced off day given to them by those they keep trashing.

Whoever lied to the English world that it is not possible to eat your cake and have it should have visited Kenya first before patenting the narrative. People who prefer to suffer in comfort than put themselves on the line in service of others are not only selfish but also do not mean well for their country. The Bible says, in John 15:13, that there’s no greater love than someone laying down his life for his friends, and by extension his country, for which his friends will enjoy the fruits watered by his blood.

If you cannot be of service to those leaving their homes to fight for a better country for which you will be a beneficiary of their struggle, the least you can do is stay away from acts of omission and commission that may endanger their lives, puncture their morale and kill off the spirit of unity in struggle.

History will always be kind to heroes who stumbled and fell in the pursuit of a worthy cause fully aware of the option of failure and in the end having their names immortalised among those who dared to dream, even if they fell short of their target in the long run.

On the contrary, history has no time nor afford ink to document the fate of cowards whose only preoccupation is maligning those burdened by the state of hopelessness and who seek to do something about it, despite the grave consequences at hand.

Gen Zs should know that the country is proud of its achievement despite limited resources under demoralising conditions. Even if they choose to throw in the towel and call it a day in the struggle for a better Kenya, they would still perch comfortably at the top of the revolutionary leaderboard by a comfortable margin.