I have developed a strange habit every June. I stop listening to what the government says and start watching what it does. Governments are often at their most truthful when they are not speaking.
Speeches are crafted, press statements are rehearsed, and interviews are carefully managed. Actions, however, have a way of betraying what leaders genuinely believe. And nowhere is that contradiction more visible than in the days leading up to June 25.
Every year, the script unfolds almost identically. Around April, the official position is one of complete indifference. June 25 is dismissed as just another date on the calendar, with government officials projecting confidence that the country has moved on. By May, however, the nervousness begins to creep in.
Cabinet Secretaries suddenly become regular guests on television. Police commanders hold endless press briefings warning of unnamed threats. Intelligence agencies speak in vague, ominous language about criminal infiltration. Politicians who spend the rest of the year insulting young people suddenly rediscover the language of peace, patriotism, and dialogue.
A government that claims June 25 means nothing behaves like a government preparing to repel an invasion. Watching it insist everything is normal while surrounding itself with razor wire and heavily armed officers is like watching someone loudly declare they are fearless while constantly looking over their shoulder.
It was the day power discovered that titles, sirens, and high walls offer very little protection when citizens collectively decide they have had enough.
We remember those who walked into Nairobi carrying nothing but a Kenyan flag, a smartphone, and hope, yet never made it back home. We remember families whose lives were permanently divided into two chapters: before June 25 and after June 25. We remember friends who became photographs on placards instead of familiar voices on our phones. They were shot and killed for demanding something every constitution promises its citizens — the right to be heard. Kenya has never truly recovered from that day, and neither have many of us who witnessed it.
This year's anniversary carried the weight of those memories. Yet in many ways, the biggest demonstration of the day appeared to come from the State itself. Before sunrise, roads leading into Nairobi's central business district were already blocked. Thousands of police officers occupied the streets in numbers that suggested they were preparing for a foreign army rather than Kenyan taxpayers.
For days beforehand, government officials had repeatedly assured the public that June 25 would be an ordinary working day. It turns out that the government's definition of ordinary includes barricading an entire city before breakfast.
The State does not deserve praise for choosing not to kill its own citizens.
Those who once defended state violence cannot now present themselves as custodians of the resistance without confronting their own role in creating the very crisis they now condemn.
We must equally remain suspicious of opportunists who suddenly wrap themselves in the language of revolution. We saw many of them during the protests. The moment teargas filled the air and bullets began flying, they disappeared. They abandoned the mothers, students, and ordinary citizens they had encouraged to march. They fled to the safety of their tinted SUVs while everyone else faced the consequences. Too many politicians treat citizen suffering as campaign material rather than a genuine struggle.
That is why June 25 cannot belong to the government, opposition, or political opportunists. It belongs to ordinary Kenyans. It belongs to university students who skipped lectures because they believed their future mattered more than attendance registers. It belongs to boda boda riders who ferried wounded strangers to hospitals without asking how they voted. It belongs to volunteer medics, lawyers, journalists, families, and countless anonymous citizens who stood together when the country needed them most.
Most importantly, it belongs to a generation that discovered something every government fears: its own collective power. That is why anxiety returns every June. Press conferences become more frequent. Warnings become louder. Barricades appear earlier. Governments do not spend enormous public resources preparing for dates they have defeated. They prepare for dates they still fear.
But memory alone is no longer enough. The streets awakened an entire generation, but lasting change cannot depend solely on annual demonstrations. The next chapter must be political organisation. Young Kenyans must build institutions capable of contesting power itself. They must organise beyond hashtags, register voters, build ideological parties, and occupy the very offices where today's decisions are made.
Real transformation will not come simply from confronting barricades outside Parliament. It will come when the generation that demanded accountability finally sits at the tables where power is exercised.
Governments will continue trying to reduce June 25 to another date on the calendar. Yet every barricade they erect, every warning they issue, and every anxious press conference they convene only confirms one undeniable truth: June 25 still shakes them. That is precisely why Kenya will never forget it.
