Abdul Mahmud: Lessons Nigerians can learn from raging civil strife in Kenya, Togo

Last week, the streets of Kenya and Togo boiled over. In Nairobi, young Kenyans took to the streets in protest. They raised their voices against what they described as the theft of their futures by President William Ruto’s administration. The Finance Bill 2024 was the last straw. Austerity, taxation without accountability, and skyrocketing unemployment ignited a youth movement that is largely leaderless, tech-savvy, and courageous.
In response, the Kenyan state deployed brutality, worse than the naked brutality deployed by British colonialists against Dedan Kimathi and his fellow comrades of the Mau-Mau uprising. Victor Odhiambo, a young protester, was murdered in cold blood. Someone else was killed by a stray bullet on the balcony of his home. He wasn’t a protester. He was an onlooker. Others were shot. Many disappeared. The state shut down media outlets. The Communications Authority of Kenya flexed its censorial muscle, ordering broadcasts off air. It was a naked display of authoritarian paranoia. Ruto and his goons had gone mad.
A few days later, in Lomé, the capital of Togo, protests erupted. The Togolese people took to the streets to demand an end to the fifty-seven-year dynastic rule of the Gnassingbé family. From father to son, the Gnassingbé regime has clung to power like a drowning man to a straw. As in Kenya, the state responded with an iron fist. Protesters were tear-gassed. Others were beaten. Several were arrested. Fear returned to Lomé’s streets like an old ghost.
These protests, though separated by geography, are united by one thing: they lay bare the increasing closure of civic and democratic spaces across Africa. They reflect the desperation of a generation that has been betrayed. Its hope dashed. Its present and its future ransomed, lock, stock, and barrel, by thieving rulers. A generation locked out of economic opportunity.
A generation criminalised for demanding dignity. In Kenya, the youth protests were organised online. TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and WhatsApp became battlegrounds. The streets became the theatres for defiance. The young were orderly. They sang. They danced. They carried placards that demanded honesty from their rulers. Their slogans were fierce, but their protests were peaceful. Yet Ruto rained violence on them.
Victor Odhiambo’s death tells us all we need to know about the state of democracy in Africa. He didn’t carry a gun. He didn’t hurl a stone. He protested. That was his crime. In any functioning democracy, protest is a right. In Kenya, it became a death sentence.
Lomé tells a similar story.
Togo has not known a true democratic transition since 1967. Faure Gnassingbé inherited power from his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who ruled Togo with an iron hand for thirty-eight years. When Eyadéma died in 2005, the military installed his son, bypassing constitutional succession. Since then, Faure has been “re-elected” in sham elections. Each time protests erupt, they are met with brutality. Each time, hope is suppressed. So, what do Nairobi and Lomé teach Africans?
First, they show that Africa’s youth are not asleep. For too long, older generations believed the youth were indifferent. That they paid scant attention to Che Guevara’s famous exultation: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine”. That they were more interested in pop culture than in politics. That they were docile. However, the streets of Nairobi and the counties of Kenya, as well as those of Lomé and Sokodé, have shown otherwise. Today’s young Africans are alert. They are politically conscious. They are angry. And they are organised.
Second, the protests underscore the return of authoritarianism in Africa. Many African governments are reverting to the habits of military dictatorships. Censorship. Intimidation. Arbitrary arrests. Torture. And killings. In Algeria, the poet Mohammed Tadjadit sits in jail, not for violence, but for liking a social media post about a coup. In Togo, Affectio Sokpore, another poet, is imprisoned for condemning human rights abuses. In Cameroon, leaders of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement face constant harassment. In Tanzania, Tundu Lissu, the leader of the opposition party, CHADEMA, faces trumped-up charges of treason.
These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a pattern. African rulers, threatened by the demands of a young and restless population, are shutting the doors of dialogue. They are turning their guns on their own people. They fear ideas. They fear protests. They fear dissent. They fear those who, like Che Guevara, have become kindred spirits to oppressed men and women who, stirred by the sacred fire of conscience, “tremble with indignation at every injustice”. They fear the unyielding solidarity of those who refuse to be numb in a world anaesthetised by tyranny; who still flinch when freedom is violated, who refuse to take to their knees when others kneel. They fear the moral insurgents who have made a creed of resistance, for whom silence is betrayal and apathy is complicity.
Third, the protests show the importance of civic space. A democracy without civic space is no democracy. Civic space is where citizens express themselves, organise, and hold power to account. When the civic space is shut down, democracy dies. What we are witnessing is the slow strangulation of civil rule passed off as democracy in Africa. The irony is this: many of these ruinous rulers came to power through opportunistic protests.
Ruto was once implicated in the violence spawned by protesters of the Orange Democratic Movement of Raila Odinga, facing charges of organising and funding crimes against humanity, as the chief strategist of the hustler nation at the International Criminal Court. Faure had a different trajectory, but one underlined by the opportunistic thrust of the controlled spaces of his father’s party. Many of today’s African rulers built their reputations on the ruins of autocratic regimes. But power has changed them. They now deploy the same tools they once condemned. Example: Tinubu.
There are also broader implications.
First, the future of African democracy rests on the youth’s ability to reclaim it. Young people make up over 60% of Africa’s population. They are educated. They are digitally connected. They are bold. But they are locked out. Locked out of political offices. Locked out of meaningful employment. Locked out of policy-making. The protests are a cry for inclusion. Second, Africa’s partners in the international community must stop treating African repression as a domestic issue.
The brutalities in Nairobi and Lomé should be a concern to the world. Silence is complicity. The international community must speak up. It must support the repressed citizens of countries around the world. It must impose consequences on regimes that kill, jail, and censor their citizens. The days of non-interference in the face of murder must end.
Third, Africans must reimagine their roles in the emerging movement of defiance and resistance. The old forms are no longer enough. The new movement must be digital, mobile, creative, and agile. It must engage with new tools, whether in the form of art, music, social media, satire, or culture. It must build coalitions across borders. A protest in Nairobi must inspire protests in Lagos, Harare, Dakar, Algiers, Yaounde, Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, or Kinshasa. Solidarity is no longer optional. It is now urgent due to the fierce demands of the present.
But the lesson is not just for rulers. It is for citizens, too. Silence in the face of oppression is dangerous. It breeds impunity. When governments crush one protest, they are emboldened to crush the next. When one citizen is killed for dissent, all citizens become targets. Africans must defend each other. Africans must speak up for each other. Kenya today, Togo tomorrow. Nigeria next- who knows? Injustice anywhere is a threat everywhere. The killings, arrests, and censorship are not just legal issues. They are moral ones.
There is something else.
The protests remind us that ideas cannot be killed. Victor Odhiambo may be gone, but the movement he joined is alive. Affectio Sokpore may be in jail, but his words have wings. The poets, the students, the street hawkers, the nurses, the journalists all carry the fire. That fire burns in Nairobi. It burns in Lomé. It burns in Algiers, Yaoundé, and Dar es Salaam. It will not go out. In the end, the rulers will fall. No regime lasts forever. The streets have long memories. History has a sharp memory. What leaders do today will be remembered tomorrow. Those who ordered the killings in Nairobi will be named. Those who silenced poets in Togo will be known. And they will be judged, not only by courts, but by conscience, by history, and by the people.
The final lesson is this: true African democracy may tarry, but it is not lost. It will come not as a thief in the night – sudden, furtive, or unseen – but as a lava, certain as its eruption from the womb of a restless volcano. It is gathering strengths beneath the surface, fed by decades of struggle and silence, waiting for its hour. It will rise from the echoes of protest songs, from the steady rhythm of marching feet, from every defiant slogan etched in the air of tear-gassed streets.
As it takes shape in the chants at the barricades, in the trembling voices that refuse to be hushed, in the clenched fists lifted against fear, it will come. Not out of concession, but out of conviction. Not from the goodwill of rulers, but from the unwavering demands of the people for freedom, dignity, and justice. And when it comes, it will not whisper. It will roar.
Victor Odhiambo’s name is now written in the book of African martyrs. His blood joins that of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Thomas Sankara, and the thousands who died for justice. He did not die in vain. History is taking notes. The streets are watching. The world is watching. As the late Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, not Chukwuemeka Ike, screamed in the title of his 1975 novel, our children are coming. Beware. Be aware. They are reawakening and coming to reclaim their continent. And their countries!
Be aware—yes, be very aware—for the signs are written upon the walls of the moment.
Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja
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Abdul Mahmud: Lessons Nigerians can learn from raging civil strife in Kenya, Togo
There are also broader implications.
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