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I was barely 22 when I joined hundreds of my peers protesting against the 2024 Finance Bill. As teargas burned my eyes and bullets cracked overhead, I believed that our generation was finally breaking Kenya’s cycle of false promises and elite manipulation. Yet the rapid absorption of our movement into familiar political patterns revealed a profound truth: meaningful change in Kenya requires more than disrupting the existing system. It demands building alternative structures outside it. This essay explores how Generation Z’s political awakening, while following historical patterns of protest and co-option, also contains the seeds for a fundamentally different approach to transformation through what theorists call “Game B” systems of parallel development.
Kenya’s political history since independence can be understood as a series of frustrated renewals, where moments of transformative promise inevitably collapse into familiar patterns of ethnic bargaining and elite accommodation. This cycle has formed the political consciousness of successive generations, each experiencing its own version of awakening and subsequent disillusionment. Coming of age politically in Kenya involves a painful reckoning with the country’s dysfunctional state.
The pattern of generational political identity formation
Darius Okolla posits that a generation coalesces an identity when members of a certain age cluster develop an actual peer bond, thanks to a specific event of a certain type that knits them together into largely observable mindsets and worldviews.
Gen X came of age during the years of independence before the Kenyan state’s social services were privatized. Their ideologies coalesced around nation-building bolstered by the call for Harambee. Jomo Kenyatta implored them to forget the past and embrace Uhuru na Kazi, freedom and work. Through media indoctrination, the “nation-building” project was fed to the masses, who embraced Kenyatta’s values hoping to self-actualize through civil service jobs which were then considered guarantors of wealth. This ruse cloaked the settler model of land and wealth accumulation by Mzee Jomo and his cronies. Budding intellectuals-students were rendered docile by the threat of losing their privileges. In exchange for non-participation in politics, they had an easier time studying supported by the “boom” loans. Other dissenters were driven underground by to the state-endorsed detentions, assassinations and exile their peers faced.
Those born in the ’70s were raised on Moi’s mythos, his nation-building project built off Kenyatta’s legacy. Raised under a plethora of brainwashing techniques, many would have an optimistic view of the country; free school milk deprogrammed critical thoughts as they sang and praised Mtukufu Rais, endorsing the state’s ethos of peace, love, and unity. With the media under Moi’s control, the propaganda machine was in full flow hence they never reconciled the kindly old man with the gratuitous state violence that occurred. Dissenting scholars were attacked, tortured and detained, with others fleeing into exile. This assault on intellectual spaces successfully curtailed any visions of an alternative Kenya.
The 1990s would usher in a decade of economic decline amid political contestation. IMF-backed structural adjustment programmes caused social systems to collapse as the government prioritized paying off foreign debt. Public institutions were privatized as the elite cannibalized the country. Cost-sharing became mandatory as unemployment skyrocketed. The harsh economic times coupled with the repressive despotic regime birthed radical progressives. Faced with the reality of the dysfunctional state, they decided that Kenya had to be rescued.
Millennials grew up during this expansion of the democratic space. While the opposition challenged Moi’s regime, economic malfeasance continued. Many turned to the creation of informal “hustler economy” alternatives amid rising unemployment.
The new millennium would offer a glimmer of hope. On the economic front, the Jubilee 2000 debt relief campaign managed to push for the cancellation of foreign debt and developing world countries under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. While Kenya did not receive debt cancellation due to its technical ineligibility, it did receive a valuable, albeit temporary, benefit in the form of a Paris Club debt rescheduling in 2000 that provided essential fiscal space during a period of crisis. Two years later, Mwai Kibaki succeeded Moi, coming in with promises of a prosperous future. The progressives who had sown seeds since the Kenyatta regime finally tasted the fruits of liberation. The euphoria was palpable. The optimism all encompassing. They were unbwogable. A new Kenya was born.
However, like the nationalism of the ’60s, the dream of renewal was corrupted. The short-lived optimism evaporated as a re-emerging Mount Kenya Mafia under the president’s purview betrayed the goodwill of the coalition. Political realignments based on President Kibaki’s betrayal of the NARC coalition’s MOU by reverting to the ethnic cronyism of the past soon took shape, reigniting ethnic animosities. The 2005 referendum would serve as a prelude to the shambolic 2007 elections. Between these two political events, a mythical economic boom persisted, configured in statistics, but not felt in the reality of everyday Kenya. An apathetic middle class bloomed, seizing opportunities based on ethnicity. Kenya had warped back to the ethno-essentialist Kenyatta era, where one tribe presided over the others. The 2007 elections would provide release for the pent-up frustrations and disillusionment as anarchy prevailed.
Millennials came of age watching political settlement become the new political currency. Peace over justice at all costs, even as corruption thrived under a coalition government. As they struggled to transition into adulthood amid rising unemployment and a high cost of living, they witnessed the chicanery of the Jubilee government: multiple recurring corruption scandals, extrajudicial killings, and major state loans invested in dysfunctional state projects. They watched Raila Odinga, who after holding demonstrations that cost the lives of their fellow youth, broke bread with the Kenyatta heir, legitimizing the crimes and ills of the administration.
Their identity coalesced in a precarious era of a capitalist state careening towards its demise, marked by false renewals. Often the punching bag of the prior generation, they festered in their disillusionment and uncertainty. The millennial edition of The Elephant showed that they had legitimate grievances and the means of expressing them but had not conjoined the two like their peers in other countries.
Generation Z’s political awakening
My generation’s political identity is forming amid similar economic uncertainty exacerbated by the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through shared experiences, we’ve come to understand that our individual struggles with unemployment and economic insecurity aren’t personal failings but systemic issues requiring collective responses. I witnessed this realization spreading among my peers: we could neither outwork failing structures nor ride out the collapse of a country buckling under massive debt and elite extraction. The Finance Bill protests offered a crystallizing moment where I saw this latent generational consciousness transform into visible collective action.
Unlike previous political movements, ours emerged through decentralized digital networks that bypassed traditional gatekeepers. Social media transcended social, geographical, ethnic, and class strata, enabling the formation of peer bonds that provided a basis for collective action. We didn’t have political party infrastructure; we had TikTok, Twitter and Telegram. We formed WhatsApp groups with hundreds of members, sharing politicians’ phone numbers in order to urge them not to pass the bill, disseminated information on what the bill entailed, and coordinated mobilization on the streets. The organizational hierarchy that had characterized previous movements was replaced by fluid coordination through digital tools; when police blocked one gathering point, real-time updates allowed protesters to regroup elsewhere.
Our protest movement also transcended class and ethnic divisions in unprecedented ways. In my protest group, I marched alongside university classmates, but also boda boda riders from Kawangware and market vendors from Gikomba. When police targeted protesters from informal settlements with particular brutality, middle-class participants raised funds for medical care and legal representation. For a brief moment, the ethnic calculations that had dominated previous political formations seemed irrelevant compared to our shared economic precarity.
The June 25th storming of parliament represented both our movement’s zenith and the beginning of its absorption into conventional politics. When police opened fire, killing at least eight people in cold blood in front of the parliament, and with the subsequent state violence that ensued in Githurai, the movement gained martyrs but began losing momentum. The trauma of that violence created openings for political opportunists to claim leadership of a movement that had explicitly rejected traditional leaders.
President Ruto’s subsequent withdrawal of the Finance Bill appeared to confirm a historic victory. Yet in the coming months, I watched with growing dismay as the administration began implementing components of the rejected bill through amendments. More disheartening was how quickly the political class reconstituted itself along familiar lines. By October, President Ruto had aligned with segments of the opposition to impeach Deputy President Gachagua, who then repositioned himself as a champion of the anti-government cause.
By early 2025, I watched Kenyan politics reorganize into now familiar configurations in preparation for the 2027 elections, with ethnic arithmetic once again the primary calculation. Odinga and Ruto solemnized their political union with ODM being allocated 50 per cent of government positions. Simultaneously, an anti-Ruto “popular front” emerged that included Martha Karua, Kalonzo Musyoka, Fred Matiang’i, and the impeached Gachagua. The evolving political alliances revealed new coalitions forming along ethnic lines, with talk of “pan-Bantu” and “pan-Nilotic” alliances that risk reviving the sectarian tensions that led to violence following the 2007 elections. The emerging rhetoric around “isolating the mountain” and responses to Gachagua’s controversial “shareholding” statements evoked a disturbing sense of déjà vu when the “41 tribes against 1” slogan in the 2007 pre-election period preceded widespread ethnic violence. While the protests momentarily jolted previously disengaged citizens, this awakening did not translate into structural reform. Instead, the political class absorbed the shock and reconfigured itself while maintaining the fundamental power structures.
Structural limitations preventing substantive change
As I witnessed our 2024 protest movement dissolve into familiar political patterns, I began questioning why even our unprecedented mobilization couldn’t sustain its transformative potential. Each generation of Kenyans had attempted reform through different approaches – from the nation-building rhetoric of the 1960s to the multi-party activism of the 1990s to our own protests – yet all eventually confronted the same structural limitations. These limitations aren’t simply failures of strategy or leadership, but structural features of a political system designed to contain rather than enable meaningful change.
Kenya’s history portrays a political culture resistant to reform. As Paul Goldsmith reflects, “The Political elite have countered the trajectory of reforms dating back to the 1990s, multi-partyism, liberalization, 2002 victory, institutional restructuring, a coalition government and the new constitution have all failed to unlock the population’s aspirations.”
This is an issue that stems from the colonial-era bureaucratic security state designed to protect the interests of a privileged elite, subsequently reproducing itself across generations. Elections were designed to serve the ruling elite, where bureaucrats exist to serve their masters and Kenyans are used as commodities for profit.
The continuity of this political system is maintained through the “ideology of order” whose imperative is to suppress political dissent. Successive presidents have maintained this ideology, treating citizens as threats to be controlled rather than served.
Political tribalism further entrenches this status quo. As Nicholas Githuku explains it, ethnic groups pressure their representatives to deliver resources to their communities, as the ruling class institutionalizes corruption to satisfy these demands while enriching themselves. This creates a vicious cycle where politicians exploit ethnicity to loot public resources, while citizens support their ethnic representatives regardless of corruption allegations, rather than risk leadership from other ethnic groups. Hence, a veneer of democracy is maintained whereby multi-party elections have devolved into ethnic bouts held every five years while political parties based on principles or ideologies are weakened in favour of ethnic alliances and personality cults.
These limitations explain why conventional political engagement – whether protesting, voting, litigation, or media advocacy – has consistently failed to deliver transformative change despite moments of apparent breakthrough. The system’s colonial foundations, ideology of order and political tribalism work to ensure that participation within existing structures reproduces rather than challenges fundamental power relations.
This realization led me to a critical insight: meaningful transformation would require examining the colonial foundations of our governance systems rather than merely changing who administers them. The question wasn’t just how to reform the state, but how to decolonize it, addressing the embedded logics and structures that have persistently reproduced colonial patterns of extraction and exclusion despite decades of formal independence. This would require engaging deeply with the concept of decoloniality in the specific context of Kenya’s historical experience.
The problem of decoloniality in Kenya
Decoloniality, properly understood, extends beyond superficial changes to names, symbols, or cultural practices. It involves interrogating how colonial power relations persist in our economic structures, knowledge systems, and governance models. In Kenya’s case, it demands recognition that political independence did not automatically transform the extractive relationship between state and citizen, nor did it alter the state’s primary function as an instrument for elite accumulation rather than public service. The continuing frustration across generations – including our own recent experience – suggests that without addressing these deeper colonial continuities, even the most inspiring moments of political mobilization will inevitably be channelled back into familiar patterns of ethnic calculation and elite accommodation.
In her illuminating series of essays on Kenyan intellectual discourse, scholar Wandia Njoya identifies a fundamental contradiction that shapes our political landscape: anti-colonial rhetoric often coexists with deeply embedded colonial frameworks of thought. This contradiction, she argues, stems from “an intellectual weakness”: our collective inability to engage with what she calls the “intermediate category” between individual morality and universal principles.
Additionally, the intellectual foundation of Kenya’s decoloniality movement ironically shares its epistemological roots with Euro-Christian Protestant liberalism. The Protestant emphasis on individual salvation through personal conversion finds its secular parallel in decolonization through individual acts of cultural authenticity, such as “reverse baptism (dropping European names). Such performances may satisfy a personal quest for cultural identity but fail to challenge the institutional legacies of colonialism, such as inequitable education systems, economic dependency, and governance structures that prioritize external interests. Similarly, the Christian-influenced belief that “one’s morality is the sole measure of politics” reduces complex political issues to questions of individual virtue. When political discourse centres on whether “the current president is a liar” rather than on substantive policy issues, it reflects this moralistic framework that cannot engage with structural problems requiring collective action
Kenya’s conservative political vernacular further complicates meaningful decolonial discourse. The prevailing reluctance to engage with social and political questions beyond individual morality creates an environment where deeper structural analysis is actively discouraged, encapsulated by common deflections like “let’s not politicize issues” or “speak for yourself”. These rhetorical strategies effectively shut down any substantive engagement with the structural dimensions of colonialism and its ongoing effects, reducing decolonial discourse to a performative exercise in individual virtue-signalling.
The absence of robust historical education compounds these issues. Without a shared understanding of Kenya’s colonial past and its ongoing legacies, conversations about decoloniality lack the necessary context and nuance. The competency curriculum has reduced history to mere “citizenship”, designed to legitimize rather than critique the state. Without historical understanding, decolonial discourse becomes unmoored from context, rendering it superficial and easily co-opted.
A critique of Kenya’s prevailing decoloniality discourse reveals a crucial insight: authentic decolonization cannot be achieved through moral performance or individual transformation alone. It requires engaging directly with the structural legacies of colonialism while developing concrete alternatives to those structures. This realization transforms how we might approach our generational mission. Rather than getting trapped in cycles of protest and co-option or performing symbolic acts of cultural authenticity, we need a decoloniality that is practical, forward-looking, and capable of building new systems rather than merely critiquing existing ones.
As I considered these requirements, a framework emerged that connected our local struggle to global conversations about systemic transformation. The persistent failure of conventional political approaches across generations in Kenya raises a critical question: What if meaningful change requires building alternative systems alongside existing ones rather than attempting to reform entrenched structures from within? This question led me to explore what American theorist Paul Goldsmith, in his analysis on decolonizing Kenya, has referenced as “Game B”—a conceptual framework that offers practical pathways beyond the limitations we’ve encountered.
Game B: An alternative framework for transformation
The concept of “Game B“, developed by systems theorists Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall, offers a useful framework for understanding our predicament. They describe our current social, economic, and political arrangements as “Game A” – systems built on win-lose competition, resource extraction, and incentives that ultimately undermine the societies they organize. Kenya’s post-colonial state, with its cycles of elite accommodation and ethnic bargaining, exemplifies these Game A characteristics.
Rather than attempting to reform these systems through conventional politics, Game B proposes an alternative: building new structures alongside existing ones that operate according to different principles. This approach creates change not through confrontation with entrenched interests, but through demonstrating viable alternatives that gradually become more attractive and functional than the systems they aim to replace.
This approach speaks directly to our post-protest reality. It acknowledges the formidable resilience of existing power structures while creating space for meaningful action outside their constraints. It harnesses our generation’s digital connectivity and cross-ethnic solidarity for constructive purposes beyond protest. Most importantly, it offers practical applications that address immediate needs while building towards systemic alternatives.
The decolonial challenges facing Kenya require solutions that operate both within and beyond conventional political frameworks. The Game B approach offers practical pathways for addressing these challenges through parallel development rather than direct confrontation. Several initiatives across Kenya already embody Game B principles, creating parallel structures that demonstrate different operating logics:
Digital commons and knowledge networks: Ushahidi emerged during the 2007–2008 post-election violence, allowing citizens to map crisis information without gatekeepers. During our 2024 protests, similar platforms documented police brutality, creating accountability outside state control.
Community-based resource management: Mikoko Pamoja in Kwale County enables communities to manage mangrove forests, selling carbon credits with proceeds directly benefiting village development through community assemblies rather than political hierarchies. In Turkana, solar microgrids managed by cooperatives provide energy independence from unreliable national providers.
Community finance systems: The Sarafu Network operates community currencies in informal settlements where national currency is scarce, keeping wealth circulating locally. The Bangla-Pesa currency has demonstrated how a community currency can stimulate local trade and resilience during economic downturns.
Cultural regeneration: Art collectives such as the Nest collective and Qwani provide avenues for creative expression, and learning outside mainstream narratives by creating new third spaces and communities.
Participatory governance: Local community-based movements such as sheria mashinani and bunge la mayut have been established to promote civic education among the marginalized and, in the latter’s case, the youth. These initiatives alert the public to their role in public participation and demystify the civic process.
Networked transformation: The critical difference
What distinguishes Game B from isolated community development efforts is its networked nature. Rather than projects operating in silos, these initiatives increasingly connect through digital platforms and resource-sharing networks. This networking capacity is uniquely available to Generation Z. During the Finance Bill protests, we demonstrated our ability to coordinate without centralized leadership; this same capacity can now link and scale these parallel systems.
For these alternatives to create systemic change, they must move beyond fragmentation towards diverse initiatives that maintain adaptation to local contexts while developing coordination to function as viable alternatives. This requires: Documentation platforms that capture learning across initiatives; coordination tools enabling collective action without centralized control; resource pooling reducing dependency on external funding; replication protocols facilitating adaptation rather than standardization.
Critics might argue that this Game B approach represents an abandonment of traditional political engagement in favour of small-scale experiments with limited impact. This criticism misunderstands the strategy. By creating functional alternatives that address immediate community needs while demonstrating different principles, we establish both the practical infrastructure and conceptual framework for larger systemic change. History shows that transformative moments often occur when parallel systems have developed sufficient capacity to absorb the functions of failing structures. The MPesa revolution in Kenyan finance didn’t begin by dismantling the banking system but by creating an alternative that eventually forced institutional adaptation. Similarly, the community-based systems I’ve described won’t replace the state overnight, but they can gradually shift power and resources towards more equitable and sustainable arrangements while building the social cohesion necessary for broader political transformation.
The Finance Bill protests revealed our generation’s unprecedented capacity for collective action. Now we must channel that capacity not just into opposing what exists, but into creating what might be. While previous generations struggled within the constraints of Kenya’s colonial inheritance, we have the technological tools, historical perspective, and global connections to build meaningful alternatives. This is the essence of authentic decolonization: not simply replacing who occupies colonial structures or performing cultural authenticity, but methodically building systems that render those structures obsolete.
As we approach Kenya’s next electoral cycle in 2027, we face a choice that previous generations also confronted: whether to invest our energy in another round of ethnic political bargaining or to direct it towards creating the resilient community systems that might finally break the cycle. By choosing the latter path, Generation Z has the opportunity to move beyond the frustrated renewals that have defined Kenya’s post-independence history and towards a decolonization that is both practically meaningful and systemically transformative. Our protest showed we could mobilize against the system; our legacy will depend on what we build beyond it.
