I had been home for months, an idle, unemployed graduate. And so I killed the time on my phone, scrolling on X, reading threads, and arguing in the comments sections with people I would never meet. That is how and where the 2024 Finance Bill found me. From a quote tweet. From someone breaking down clauses in Sheng, making it harder to look away.

I read it, felt the anger, then put my phone away. Apathy was a habit by then. Politics was a game played above us — we just absorbed the consequences. There was talk of #RejectFinanceBill protests all over X, but I did not plan on going anywhere near the protests, deciding instead to follow events from home, and possibly talk more about it later on at Kijiweni, the same way we talked about everything else. Loudly. 

After all, Uasin Gishu was not supposed to push back. Everyone understood this without saying it. The President’s backyard. If there was anywhere in Kenya that would sit this one out, it was here.

Then my friend Victor came through the fence. He had the look of someone who had seen something they could not hold alone.

“Umecheki Tao bro. Vijana wameamua.”

Victor told me to get on X. And there it was — my Eldoret. Hundreds of young people moving through the streets in broad daylight. Placards. Vuvuzelas. Slogans bouncing off buildings we walked past every week without a second thought. The processions were peaceful and enormous and completely, impossibly real.

Victor did not wait for me to say anything. 

“Wasee wamechoka mamen. Unasemaje — si tufike Sentaa?”

We left.

The road to Maili Nne was already alive. Young people everywhere — on foot, in groups, crammed onto bodas four and five at a time on bikes meant for three, laughing and shouting and going. All of us heading the same direction without having planned it together, without a meeting point or a leader or a formal call. 

Just the same feeling, pulling everyone toward the same place.

We found Marcus on the way, younger than us, twice as lit about the whole thing. Victor and I had told ourselves we would stop at Maili Nne, watch from a distance, stay sensible. We were flat broke. No fare, no plan. Marcus would hear none of it. He sorted fuel for a boda. 

We revved toward Uganda Road with horns blaring, updates still coming in on our phones — police deployed at Zion Mall, at Kisumu Road Junction, all along our route into town. We read them and kept going. We joined the crowd from Paul’s Bakery Junction. Twigs in hand. Whistles going. The crowd swallowed us whole. You could smell the sweat and the smoke. Red eyes and hoarse voices met you at every turn.

The call-and-response started, and the sound of it did something to me — something that went below logic and below language.

“Ataambia watu nini?”

“Ruto must go!”

“Reject, not amend!”

“Reject!”

One half of the crowd throwing the call, the other half catching it and firing it back. Nobody had rehearsed it. Nobody needed to. We already knew the words because we had been living them.

I saw old men standing at the roadside, watching with expressions I could not read — not disapproving, not approving. Just watching, the way you watch the weather arrive. This was Eldoret—the president’s hometown. And we were here.

Then I saw her. A woman, mid-thirties maybe, in a yellow headwrap and a kitenge dress, carrying a placard that read: MY CHILDREN ARE NOT YOUR BUDGET ITEM — in careful, hand-painted letters. She was not screaming. She was walking with a deliberateness that felt more powerful than any noise around her. She had clearly made it herself, at home, before she came out. Gone home the night before, found a piece of cardboard and paint, thought about what she needed to say, and wrote it carefully.

I did not know her name. I did not know if she was OK. But her face stayed with me. The deliberateness of those letters is the reason I became a journalist again.

I will not pretend I was peaceful in my heart that day. 

I was angry — genuinely, physically, bone-deep angry. Not the performative anger of someone making a point, but the fury of someone who had watched doors close on him over and over, not from incompetence but by design. 

We had joked about it for years at Kijiweni; the system is broken. We said it like a greeting, like a truth so settled it had stopped feeling like a protest and started feeling like a fact. That afternoon, we said it with our bodies, in the street.

The wheelbarrows — the ruling party’s symbol — came down. I watched and felt something shift in me. Not triumph. Something quieter. The specific relief of discovering that the silence you thought was only yours was actually everyone’s, and that everyone had been waiting for a reason to break it. 

Two buildings were set on fire. The Eldoret library, set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail by nobody knows who. And the County Court, which was being used by the County Askaris as a hiding place from the rowdy youth. Their vehicles, County vehicles, were also set on fire. The anger that burned that evening was not abstract or imported. It was local, and it was earned.

By evening, the roads were clearing. The police were doing what they do best, rounding up young people along Uganda Road, thrashing those they caught. We had to move.

When we got home, we learned what Nairobi had paid for the same afternoon we had spent marching. I turned on the TV and the anger came back — but it had changed. It became heavier. More responsible. Something I felt I had to justify by doing something with it.

I fell asleep on the couch with the TV still on.