Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah has said he was actively involved in efforts to discourage protesters from marching to State House during the June 25 demonstrations.
The senator noted that such a move by Gen Z protesters could have led to deadly confrontations.
“There was a very big pressure for people to march to the State House,” said Omtatah.
“One of the reasons I was sitting down and tracking the crowd was to stop that march, because I believed people were going to be killed. And I didn’t want another life lost, when we were just commemorating the death of other people.”
The senator said that while he supports calls for accountability and reform, public anger must be channelled constructively.
He called for a peaceful, structured revolution led by young people through the ballot.
“Kenya should avoid an uprising,” he said.
“We should have a revolution. This anger must be channelled to a revolution, not to an uprising. Because the danger of an uprising is that it’s chaos. Organised groups can take state power — and you can see where Sudan is.”
He cautioned that if demonstrators had approached the State House and been met with force, it could have triggered unpredictable consequences.
“If people are shot, and those shooting run away, power can be taken in a chaotic manner,” he said.
“You don’t know what will result; we could end up jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”
Omtatah urged protest leaders and supporters to shift focus from street demonstrations to electoral participation.
“We must manage this anger, this demand for good governance, in a clever way. Using the Constitution, we can engineer a revolution, and that revolution will have to begin with politics.”
He called for mass voter registration, especially among the youth, to ensure they have the numbers to drive meaningful political change.
“People must be registered as voters,” Omtatah said.
“Once they are registered, we prepare for elections and monitor each one carefully.”
He also suggested measures to improve electoral transparency, such as requiring the electoral commission to publish GPS coordinates of all gazetted polling stations.
“In every ward we should say: these are the polling stations gazetted, download the app, move around with the GPS and confirm they exist,” he said.
“Last time, we discovered a polling station allegedly located in a non-existent primary school. One even had just a gate, that’s it.”
