After last Friday's so-called "Saba Saba Rally," which fell on the anniversary of a famous Kenyan popular uprising on July 7, 1990, Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga had announced that citizens would return with him to the streets today, Wednesday 12, to protest President William Ruto's administration.
"We are peaceful citizens and we respect the rule of law. On Wednesday we will exercise our democratic right in a peaceful and organized manner," Odinga said, urging Kenyans to participate in large numbers in demonstrations across the country.
Joining them were taxi drivers and "matatu" owners who decided to go on strike.
The result: deserted cities and closed stores, and those who try to raid around are thwarted and possibly arrested by the police. 
In fact, the problem with demonstrations and marches in Kenya are the derelicts, the desperate for whom every opportunity is good to mess around, loot stores and seek their minimum gain from a day of chaos, as well as the provocateurs by trade, who battle the police on principle.
The protests over the caravan and political rallies will be limited to Nairobi, with the opposition rallying; in the rest of the country it looks like the usual chaos created to destabilize, but leading to nothing but risk to the safety of so many people.
Many people will parade through the streets of Nairobi and the country's major cities with "sufuria," or traditional pots in which to cook polenta and its side dish, on their heads like hats, banging with ladles to make their disapproval heard.

And in between, there are a lot of no less poor people who even on a day of protests they might consider legitimate, are eager to go to work to earn honestly what little they need to get by hoping for better times. There are the students, who are concerned about their future and would really like to parade peacefully, then find themselves caught in the crossfire of stone throwing and responses with smoke bombs and bullets and get the worst of it. It happened to Eunice, a 22-year-old university student who was killed in the town of Kisii. Five other people, including two Kisumu slum residents, died during last Friday's clashes, with several dozen injured hospitalized.

Meanwhile, fortunately, the judiciary is demonstrating its independence for the umpteenth time, as was the case during Uhuru Kenyatta's previous government, which was deprived of new laws that would have allowed him to continue with his third term. In fact, on Monday, the High Court upheld the suspension of the finance bill passed by parliament, which would have raised taxes and is one of the reasons for opposition protests. It is a sign that the roads to solving internal problems may come more through legal avenues and constructive confrontations, rather than through street expressions that, from peaceful, risk becoming powder kegs.