bird’s call of the day – by Hewete Haileselassie
May 9, 2025
Provided by bird story agency, Africa's narrative-change news agency.
This week I am in Kenya and we have just completed a bird Story Agency team awayday – brainstorming about the way forward. As we carve out our narrative changing niche in a crowded media market we could not help but notice – and discuss the reverberations after the BBC Africa Eye documentary, Blood Parliament, on the killing of protesters by Kenya’s security forces during the protests against tax hikes in June 2024. Credible reports put the death toll at 65 with 89 “disappeared”.
Meanwhile in Sudan – seemingly inflammatory comments by the Sovereign Council head and army commander, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, saying that the time for peaceful protests is over and that it’s time for “the gun” have provoked angry reactions from the pro-democracy forces behind the 2019 uprising that unseated President Omer al-Bashir. Further afield – there have been anti-Trump protests to coincide with international labour day. It is a paradox that many of the young Kenyans who did not vote in the last presidential elections were the first to go to the streets to demand the tax bill be revoked. We’ll be looking at the reactions to this story and others in coming days.
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