25th June – Gen Z: What can virtue do in the face of brute force?
by admin on | 2025-07-02 06:40:46 Last Updated by admin on 2025-07-03 08:47:27
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Today’s demonstrations commemorate Kenya\'s Generation Z public outrage over the proposed Finance Bill 2024. The youth meet the promised brute force with the epitaph, “In Loving Memory of…”. They are memorialising under an odious threat of bloodshed, worse than in 2024. But our youth embraced the threats in their peculiar way. Some, such as Edwin from Kisii and David Wachira (JNationist), published their eulogies. Pieces well-written out with their entire histories, birth year, death date of 25 June 2025, educational background and social cornerstones. They marched out expecting to die in the hands of the trigger-happy police, and so, they asked their colleagues to accord them decent burials. In another startling move, some of the Gen Z booked the mortuary services of Dr Ann Mwangangi, a well-known mortician, in case they meet their deaths on the streets. One paid for the morgue in advance, although in instalments, others called her hospital to inquire about her mortician’s services. How should we interpret the young people’s standpoint? A religious leader made a spiritual determination and saw the youth’s posture as cultivating a “climate of death”. This self arranging of the funeral and the morgue for their corpses was, to the religious, a “dark spiritual wind… of premature death.” It is impossible to rule out spiritual inspiration in these protests. However, I find it ludicrous to dismiss these youths’ stance as “a DEMONIC SEDUCTION of a generation INTO PREMATURE DEATH”, according to this religious leader. I am not persuaded that this is “a demonic manipulation of destiny. Is it not obvious who is driving the Kenyan youth prematurely to the grave? Who other than the government is “stirring a spiritual climate of death” the religious are talking about? No, our youth are not “romanticizing their death before it comes”, nor are they “erecting altars of blood” as the religious contend. There is another way to interpret this phenomenon, that is, through a sociological prism. The choice to take such fatal risks is an intensely personal decision. We may intuitively think that this has to do with spirits, mind and mood, and little to do with the world outside. We can learn from the eminent French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. In Le Suicide (1897), he identifies the yearning for self extinction as “anomie”, which he defines as...Read more
