THE FIGHT THAT BECAME A FUNERAL
Written by John on June 16, 2025
In the winter of 2024, Kenya’s streets echoed with chants, placards, and defiant TikToks as Generation Z rose in massive protests against the Finance Bill. What started as a tax revolt became a national reckoning, one that cost young lives. Many of those who marched never returned home. Today, some of their names are etched in headlines. Others have vanished into silence.
The protests, largely led by students and recent graduates, turned deadly when police opened fire. Among the young lives lost:
Rex Kanyike Masai – shot in the CBD on June 20, sparking national outrage.
Eric Shieni, Evans Kiratu, and David Chege – all gunned down outside Parliament during peaceful demonstrations.
Beasley Kamau – disappeared during the protests; his body later turned up in the city morgue.
Kennedy Onyango – only 12, was shot eight times while retrieving a book for school.
Ibrahim Kamau – 19, killed by two bullets to the neck. He had just finished high school.
Others like Charles Owino, Shaquille Obienge, and Denzel Omondi were misrecorded as “mob justice” victims or drowning cases, part of a documented police cover-up.
According to Amnesty International Kenya, at least 65 Gen Z protesters were killed. For many families, the pain didn’t end with the burial. It deepened with the silence that followed. No one has been held accountable. There have been no convictions, no public inquiries that name those responsible, and barely any government acknowledgment of wrongdoing.“My son left with a placard and came back in a casket. I still don’t know who shot him. No one called. No apology. No justice,” said the mother of Rex Masai during a vigil held in July.
Families have made repeated visits to IPOA (Independent Policing Oversight Authority) and other state bodies, only to be met with red tape, evasiveness, or vague promises of future investigations.
Some have had to raise funds online just to claim bodies or pay for autopsies. Others say that the deaths were labeled “accidents” in official records, erasing both the violence and the cause they died for.
These weren’t criminals. They were students, creators, coders, future lawyers, and social workers. They lived in a Kenya they believed they could change until the system responded with bullets instead of dialogue.
Yet, even in mourning, their peers are refusing to be silenced. Digital memorials, documentaries, art installations, and continued protests are demanding one thing: Justice.
If a government can kill its youth and rewrite the story as “chaos,” then what hope does a democracy have?
Parents continue to ask:
Who killed our children?
Why is no one being held responsible?
How many more must die before justice is served?
Kenya’s Gen Z uprising may have been pushed back by force, but their deaths lit a fire. The youth of this country are still watching, still organizing, and still refusing to forget. Because silence is no substitute for justice. And grief is not the end of resistance.
END…
BY: FALARY MUTETHYA.

The author is an experienced radio journalist and media manager.