The anti-government protests in Kenya seem to have gotten out of hand and into the wrong hands of all, those of thugs and police.
I have personally seen and met some of the pacifist protesters, artists and creatives from the social movement that identifies itself as Generation Z. There are influencers, jazz musicians, cartoonists, digital graphic designers and so-called 'content creators'.
They are joined by office workers, freelancers, the unemployed and many students.
But this is especially the case in Nairobi, where yesterday they had exclusively gathered in front of State House, the presidential palace, to demand the resignation of President William Ruto, who they say has let them down for all the promises he has made, not only for the proposed finance bill that he refused to sign.
Yesterday the protests flared up more decisively in the rest of the country, and with the same anger in the centre of the capital. You see it immediately when they are not peaceful demonstrations that have clear objectives and ideas or demands to put forward. Generation Z in its leaflets writes 'Phones, not stones', while the violent for their own sake (and according to the young people themselves on social media, 'paid by someone to mess up and discredit us') set tyres on fire and block the streets with huge rocks, cover their faces and wave sticks. In Mombasa, the police failed to disperse these kinds of demonstrators and started using real bullets, while the genuine people tried to parade constructively. This was the case in Migori and Homa Bay, opposition strongholds in the Lake Victoria region.
Even in the usually quieter part of the Kenyan coast, that of Kilifi County, demonstrators blocked the road from the capital to Watamu with stones and bonfires.
The police cleared it within a few hours, but there were scuffles, particularly in Kilifi.
In the suburbs of Nairobi there were looting of supermarkets, of shops. In the CBD, (Central Business District) shopkeepers, tired of having to repair shop windows and shutters, which no insurance now protects, have in turn hired people to protect their businesses.
Scenes of pre-emptive guerrilla warfare: guards with sticks, malicious men with stones and balaclavas, police with tear gas and pointed rifles. These are not protests, it is a substratum that has been ignored for too long and that is coming to the surface and that risks creating irremediable rifts between different types of Kenyans, and especially between those who want change because they are committed, believe in what they are doing and in the potential of their country, and those who want revolution because it can't get any worse, and even death at the hands of the police might be a better way to evolve.
Behind this scenario that is difficult to understand if one does not live in a certain Africa, there are political and tribal battles, the interests linked to power and seats, the longa manus of the international economy and the interested paternalism of some nations. A complex system, much more than happiness.

(photo: Reuters - Facebook)