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On 25 June 2025, Nairobi woke to the smell of tear-gas and the singed timber of shopfronts. One year after the storming of Parliament, Kenya’s youngest citizens poured back into the streets, marking the anniversary with the same mix of mourning and mischief that defined 2024. Amnesty Kenya says at least 16 demonstrators were shot dead, all by police bullets, and downtown businesses were still smouldering this morning. Yet even amid grief, the crowds kept chanting the irreverent anthem that has become their signature: “WanTam!”
Why return to the barricades? First, life has simply grown harder. Inflation has gnawed at every staple, electricity tariffs have doubled since 2023, and the government’s latest tax package promises to bite again next quarter. Formal work remains a mirage for most under-30s: Barely one in ten holds a contract job, while the rest hustle in the low-paid informal economy that economists euphemistically call “self-employment.”
Even the World Bank now concedes that youth unemployment figures underplay the despair of under-employment and casualisation. Add fresh corruption scandals, everything from phantom fertiliser to jet-set travel budgets, and the sense of betrayal thickens. For Gen Z, the ledger is simple: High fees, no jobs, and leaders who ask for patriotic sacrifice while flying private.
Second, state violence has intensified. Independent monitors counted 63 dead and as many clandestine abductions in the 2024/25 cycle as families are still searching for sixteen missing protesters. This year the security machinery was no subtler where plain-clothes officers seized activists in pre-dawn raids, and water-cannon trucks gave way to live rounds by nightfall. A blogger, Albert Ojwang, died in custody only days before the march, prosecutors have since charged a few officers with his murder. Such deaths convince many youths that dialogue is futile and that public space must be wrested, not granted.
Yet what most fascinates outsiders is not the violence but the protest style. Kenya has become a memefied republic, where resistance speaks in GIFs, stickers, Sheng quips and emoji. As media scholar George Ogola observes, satire long ago migrated from weekly columns to the warp-speed circuits of X, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok; memes now “riff on folk, biblical and everyday expressions to ridicule state power.”
The presidency itself has been re-branded by the crowd: Dr William Ruto is WanTam, Uongoman, Kasongo, Kaongo, Zakayo, the biblical taxman, Ananias, Tax Verstappen, Kaunda Uongoman, a pun on his fitted jackets and alleged lies; even El Chapo, after a Mexican drug lord, each nickname a pixel of popular impeachment.
In October 2024, ahead and after the impeachment of former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua (famously known as Riggy G), memes and pictures of Mr Gachagua exercising and stretching as well as him praying facing Mt Kenya emerged on social media and were being shared across all platforms. Subsequently, he became the innovator of the famous phrase WanTam implying President Ruto’s presidency as a simple one-term presidency.
Nothing captures this grammar of dissent like WanTam. The call-and-response begins with an official leading the patriotic cry “Harambee!” (“all pull together”). Instead of echoing the word, the crowd thunders back “WanTam!”, a playful morphing of “wantam no-tam,” heard as “we don’t want” in street slang. Videos show even bewildered riot-police coaxed into the chant, their helmets bobbing to its percussive beat before another volley of tear-gas breaks the spell. Humour, here, is not escapism but simply an insurgent pedagogy. Inverting a sanctified slogan de-legitimises the state’s moral authority while lowering barriers to participation, which means that anyone can meme, anyone can chant.
Such tactics have deep African roots. Studies of political humour across the continent describe comedy as a “primary means through which members of civil society, regardless of status, can intervene in public discourse.” A recent review of African satire argues that jokes “ruffle the social matter and rupture hegemonic narratives,” a low-cost weapon when formal opposition is stifled. Ebenezer Obadare calls it a “logic of socio-cultural improvisation”, that is, laughter becomes a coping mechanism and a mode of transgression in contexts where citizens are condemned to “endless improvising.” Kenya’s Gen Z has simply translated this logbook of dissent into digital grammar.
The results are remarkable. First, humour widens the coalition. A meme in Sheng travels faster than any pamphlet. It folds class, tribe, and even language differences into a shared in-joke. One placard yesterday read, “Akili ni nywele, serikali ni kipara” (“intellect is hair, the government is bald”), an insult instantly legible across Nairobi’s slums and suburbs.
Second, ridicule disarms fear. When politicians fear mockery more than marches, satire gains leverage. A minister who dismisses economic pain on camera is clipped, subtitled, remixed with dancehall beats, and reposted until their press office begs for mercy. Third, memes outwit censorship. You can seize printing presses or jam radio, but you cannot arrest a thousand screenshots hurtling through Telegram, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Predictably, the state has answered with brute force and digital decrees. The Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, once sold as anti-fraud law, now gags those who tweet too sharply. But every takedown spawns a new hashtag; every jailed satirist returns as a martyr with more followers. Activists call it “whack-a-meme”: the harder the hammer, the faster the hydra multiplies.
Still, humour has limits. As last night’s body count shows, laughter alone cannot stop bullets. Nor can memes supply bread. Many Gen Z protesters juggle ride-hailing gigs and online resale hustles and their creativity masks a brutal arithmetic of survival. When rent claims half a stipend and tomatoes cost triple what they did two years ago, jokes flash anger rather than relief.
Humour’s power lies in forcing society to confront that anger without descending into sectarian tropes, an outcome far from guaranteed. The same meme culture that lambasts the political class can easily tilt into misogyny or ethnic caricature, feeding the very divisions protesters swear to transcend.
What, then, does yesterday’s spectacle tell us about Kenya’s democratic horizon? First, that legitimacy now hinges less on ethnic blocs than on meme economies. Politicians who underestimate this shift will wake up punch-lined out of relevance. Second, that repression escalates risk for the state as much as for citizens. Put differently, every abduction broadcast live on Instagram widens distrust and invites global scrutiny. Third, that civic education is being crowdsourced in real time. One livestream of youths schooling a police commander on constitutional rights may teach more jurisprudence than a semester of civics.
Kenya’s experiment also offers clues for the wider continent. From Lagos’ #EndSARS to Kampala’s pop-star opposition, digital-savvy youth are rewriting protest repertoires. They mock dictators’ recycled slogans, remix colonial anthems into trap beats, and weaponise virality against firewalls. Old guard politics, chanting harambee harangues, tribe-first arithmetic, back-room pacts, looks increasingly out of step with citizens who grew up surfing the same global meme pool as their peers in Manila or Minneapolis.
The moral burden now shifts to the state. Does it continue to treat dissent as treason, or recognise humour as a thermostat on public anger? Police reforms, stalled for a decade, need reviving, that is, accountability for killings must move from rhetorical regret to courtroom verdicts. Economic recovery plans must speak to the under-employed millions, not just bond-holders in Manhattan. Most of all, power-holders must learn to listen without choking the microphone.
One protester, clutching a phone still streaming to thousands online, summed up the day: “They tax, we meme. They shoot, we stream.” In that terse couplet lies the dilemma of modern repression. The gun may silence a body, but in a memefied nation, the image of that body that is captioned, looped, ungovernable travels on, indicting the hand that pulled the trigger.
Kenya’s Gen Z has not reinvented resistance, but it has digitised an old repertoire and spliced it with a wicked sense of play. Yesterday, they mourned the fallen, mocked the powerful, and dared the state to do better. The future of Kenyan democracy may depend on whether those in power learn to treat WanTam not as noise to be crushed, but as a warning siren from a generation unwilling to laugh away its pain any longer.
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This article was first published by Democracy in Africa.
