At the Kenyatta International Convention Centre last Thursday, marking 16 years since Kenyans gave themselves a new Constitution, President William Ruto said something that would be unremarkable coming from almost anyone else.

Peaceful protest, criticism and dissent, he told the room, are essential to democracy. Citizens should not be punished for questioning their government. The Gen Z demonstrations, he added, were not an assault on democracy but a call to be heard.

Our former president, the late Mwai Kibaki, had a way of puncturing this sort of thing with a single dry question. How can you suddenly be so clever?

Because surely, we were all here, in July last year, when this same man instructed police to shoot protesters in the leg, get them hospitalised and only afterwards take them to court. He is the president who has described protest as amounting to terrorism, to be met with the full force of the State in 2024, wearing the same suit and tie, by the way.

120 Kenyans have died

He heads a government under which more than 120 Kenyans have died in and around demonstrations since June 2024, and 82 have been forcibly disappeared, some returned broken, some never returned.

The call to be heard, as he now generously characterises it, was answered at the time with live ammunition. Sixteen years is not so long that a country forgets. Sixteen months is even shorter.

While the president was discovering the virtues of dissent, the chairman of his own Council of Economic Advisers had already told young Kenyans, in writing, to say their goodbyes before leaving home in case they caught a stray bullet. He called them stupid.

Others in the president’s orbit have threatened to unleash goons on protesters, and Homa Bay showed this month what that looks like when activated. None of these men has been disowned or dismissed. They remain in position, which tells you which of the policies on dissent is the prevailing one, and which one is reserved for you, the viewer.

The most instructive moment of Katiba Day, however, had nothing to do with the youth at all. On the same stage, the president acknowledged that his Cabinet is unconstitutional. The High Court ruled on June 30 that its composition violates Articles 27 and 81, the two-thirds gender rule, and gave him 120 days to fix it. His response, in the middle of a celebration of the Constitution, was that the matter is a work in progress and the court has given him time.

Supreme law

On the day set aside to honour the supreme law, the president stood before the nation and explained, without visible discomfort, that he is currently in breach of it and intends to remain so until the deadline forces him otherwise. This is a presidency that speaks the Constitution’s language fluently while treating its requirements as an inconvenience to be managed. The habit has a record: court orders on the Ebola facility ignored while construction continued, borrowing beyond the ceilings Parliament set, a Health Cabinet Secretary telling Parliament that public participation was not required because the government had decided it was not.

So why the sudden warmth towards the young? The answer is not mysterious, and Kenyans have not failed to work it out.

For four years this administration has tried, with some persistence, to organise the country’s grievances along the old familiar lines. Ethnic Balkanisation. Regional bargains. The politics of who gets what because of where they come from. It is the oldest playbook in Kenyan politics, and it has worked reliably for 60 years. It did not work this time. The generation that filled the streets in 2024 arrived without a tribe, without a broker, without a leader who could be summoned to State House and quietly bought. There was nobody to negotiate with, which is what made them ungovernable by conventional means.

Having failed to divide them, the strategy is now to join them. Hence the softened vocabulary. Hence the Vision 2060 conversation in which young people are promised a central role. Hence a Katiba Day speech reinterpreting the protests as a democratic contribution rather than the emergency the State treated them as at the time. This is repositioning, lest you be tricked into believing it’s Pharaoh’s heart softening. And it is being executed by a presidency that can feel 2027 arriving faster than it can clean its record.

Wrong generation

The difficulty this time, however, is that times have changed. Reinvention requires an audience with a short memory, and this is the wrong country and emphatically the wrong generation. The people being courted are the ones who watched the footage, who buried the dead, who carry the names in their hearts. They know what was said and by whom, because it was recorded, screenshotted and archived on the same platforms the government keeps threatening to regulate. You cannot deliver a speech about the sanctity of dissent to people who were tear-gassed for practising it and expect the words to travel past the door. WE ARE LITERALLY THE SAME PEOPLE.

Kenya does not need its president to praise the Constitution at KICC. What the document requires is obedience and strict adherence, and both of these are measurable. We have measured Ruto’s presidency and all that surrounds it for four years now, and they have fallen short, quite substantially.

Sixteen years since we gave ourselves a new Constitution, marked by a regime that couldn’t be bothered to follow it. The protection of this Constitution, and ourselves as well, has to be expressed in how we vote next year. Right from the MCA, all the way to the President. We need a presidency that is consistently clever; not suddenly, occasionally.

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