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Sometime in 2014, then in my late 20s, I attended a birthday party in a middle-class Nairobi suburb. The host was a young Nairobi millionaire, a wheeler-dealer. The birthday boy was destined to become a future member of parliament. Among those in attendance, two are now MPs, one consequential enough to be considered a potential first millennial president in the Ruto succession politics.
No effort had been spared to make the party a success. The chef was in a decadent mood, serving us the Kenyan favourites of mbuzi choma, various stews, pilau, chapatis, all manner of vegetables and salads, typical Nairobi fare. Nairobi was quickly becoming a whisky-drinking city, as millennials led the shift in drinking tastes, moving from cheap vodkas, gins, and brandies to Scottish/Irish whiskies and American bourbons.
The ladies were fashionably dressed, and the men, in their expensive jackets and shoes, made their aspirations for upward mobility clear.
It was one of those nights where everything goes right, and one senses with apprehension that it may be the last time you will be that young, that happy, and that optimistic.
We were on our first good jobs, earning six figures. Some of us were already married, young parents; for our cohort, the clichéd dream of a five-bedroom suburban maisonette, two children, two family cars, the prospects of another degree or postgraduate studies, and other middle-class ambitions, were all within touching distance.
That party was representative of millennial dreams, seeing how far some of the attendees have since advanced in their respective careers. If there were at least 25 people at the party, there are five who have made it in life, in the material sense of “making it”. Today, I want to talk about the other 20, for whom life has become a mixed bag of fortunes and misfortunes.
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One of the people I am in constant communication with is my friend Patrick. Our conversations revolve around lending each other small amounts of money, primarily for food and basic utilities like electricity, Internet, and the occasional hospital bill.
A decade ago, we usually loaned each other substantial amounts, running into six figures. The transactions were always casual, zero paperwork, just the usual trust between buddies because both of us were doing pretty well; I was in my first corporate job, and he was in business.
Patrick was the host of the party above, and his trajectory over the last decade best reflects how millennials of a certain demographic have gone from conquerors to mere survivors, with dwindling chances of ever rising from the ashes.
The luckiest unlucky generation
The trajectory of a typical millennial in Kenya now in their late 30s or early 40s with a university degree has probably been the following: early 20s struggles, a good start to a fine career in their late 20s, their careers or business/self-employment peak in their early 30s, followed almost instantly by job losses, vanished business, and divorce in their mid-30s. Many now in their late 30s and 40s are back where they were in their early 20s.
As someone on the Internet observed, millennials have lived through two global recessions, 9/11 (add to that all the acts of terrorism in Kenya since 1998), a global pandemic, eight stock market crashes (or the Kenyan equivalent of economic collapse), and the advent of AI which could possibly replace most jobs – and the oldest among them are barely 45.
For millennials with a bachelor’s degree and above, they are the luckiest unluckiest generation. No generation was set up for so much, only to fail so spectacularly than Kenyan millennials.
Since Kenya’s founding, education has long been regarded as the key to success. Indeed, communities that first encountered colonial education, or regions that received the first colonial schools, went on to produce the first class of workers (public and private), with independence giving young, educated people opportunities to inherit jobs previously held by the departing colonialists.
By the mid-70s, the mismanagement of the economy that would characterize Kenya for the next three decades was in motion. Along with it came corruption, the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), the death of the education sector, and other ills, such that by the time President Moi left in 2002, the country was in quite bad shape. In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, education did not guarantee much in the way of a good job or good wages. There was massive brain drain to Europe, North America, and Southern Africa, especially among the educated.
When Kibaki took over in 2003, to his credit, he liberalized the economy, opening and expanding both the public and private sectors.
Millennials who in the late 1990s and early 2000s were coming out of high school and entering university were primed to inherit plum jobs that paid salaries their parents could only imagine. By 2002, joining a university was a cutthroat competition. Only 10,000 of the more than half a million students leaving secondary education each year secured a place in any of the public universities (there were only seven at the time: University of Nairobi, Kenyatta, JKUAT, Egerton, Moi, and Maseno, and three private universities of note – Daystar, USIU, and Strathmore). By 2003, most Kenyans who did not meet the university cut-off marks went to study in Uganda or India. Under Kibaki, universities opened their doors to those who could pay tuition, doubling or tripling university intakes under the self-sponsorship programme. Soon, millennials were on course to become Kenya’s first most educated generation, bagging jobs in Kibaki’s liberalized economy in sectors ranging from banking, media, real estate, manufacturing, higher education, and ICT.
Good times
During my time in college, big corporate organisations like EABL, Nation Media Group, banks, and government bodies like KRA used to set up camp on campus to recruit young people into their graduate trainee programmes. Big-name NGOs were always hovering around, vying for the best talent available. The big auditing firms targeted many business graduates.
In my late 20s, it wasn’t uncommon to hear stuff like, “I don’t like what Deloitte is offering, I am waiting to hear from KPMG…” or, “Oxfam picked me, but I am not willing to relocate…” or, “I will take study leave to finish my master’s/PhD”, from my peers.
An abundance mindset pervaded the mentality of many millennials, and some were literally spoilt for choice. It wasn’t hubris; they happened to be at their most employable in the most fortuitous decade in Kenya’s employment history (2005–2015).
I remember banks used to dish out loans with rampant abandon. On one particular afternoon in 2014, three agents from various banks visited me, selling me mortgages, car loans, and asset financing. In our late 20s, we not only dreamed of owning homes, driving our dream cars, and accessing credit to grow our businesses, but we also actively pursued these dreams, and many millennials succeeded. The growth of suburbs such as Syokimau, Kitengela, Rongai, and Ruiru is a testament to the better days when these dreams were possible.
The romantic and the familial aspirations of millennials
From around 2006 to 2016, big, lavish wedding ceremonies were the norm in Nairobi and across the country’s major towns and cities. The three main TV stations (KTN, NTV, and Citizen) all had wedding shows, and there were even lifestyle magazines dedicated exclusively to weddings.
There was an established wedding-industrial complex in Nairobi: car-hire services (limousines and high-end cars for entourages), filming and photography, floristry, food catering, all the way down to baking. Properly manicured wedding grounds such as never seen before came up all over Nairobi and its environs to cater for the growing, sizeable population of millennials inclined towards ostentatious weddings.
Flashy proposal stunts became routine, with men flying their prospective brides to Lake Ellis on the slopes of Mt. Kenya. Millennials really aspired to the Western style of romance – flashy proposals, fancy weddings, and fabulous honeymoons, a desire fuelled by social media, no doubt.
Even millennials who did not necessarily go for fancy weddings aspired to that middle-class lifestyle: living in a good neighbourhood, with kids attending expensive academies (international curriculum, anyone?), and taking vacations.
First generation of two-income homes
A good number of millennials came from families where the father held a formal job, and the mother stayed at home, either doing small-scale farming or running a small local business in the rural areas to augment the family’s income. Not until after Kibaki came to power did women join the formal workforce in good numbers. Many women also joined chamas (cooperative societies) or “merry-go-rounds” to supplement their family’s income, in addition to their domestic labour of raising children and maintaining a homestead.
Educated millennial men were the first generation of Kenyan men to marry working-class women who were more or less their equals, as had happened in the West from the late 1950s through the late 1970s.
This came with unintended consequences. Married Kenyan millennial women still held very traditional expectations of their men, while also holding on to the model of a modern marriage where spouses share responsibilities equally. Men, too, had conventional expectations of their women, despite the difficulty of balancing work and domestic chores.
Changing dynamics
One evening, in 2018, about eight of us gathered for an evening drink in one of the better bars in Nairobi’s CBD. It was the typical after-work beer, where we exchanged notes on careers, family, and any new developments.
As we became increasingly intoxicated, something emerged. Half of the men at the table were about to separate from their wives or the girlfriends they were cohabiting with. Two were yet to get married, and only two were in stable marriages (that have since been dissolved).
At the time, this bothered me immensely. All of us at that table were stand-up guys, normal salt-of-the-earth types, not the irresponsible, violent men you would expect to be facing marital woes in their early 30s. Something was not adding up. Yet, everywhere I looked, divorce and separation were becoming commonplace among my peers.
Of 20 of my peers, more than half were either divorced, in the process of getting divorced, or had come to the painful realization that their marriages were not working and it had to end one way or another.
COVID-19 pandemic divorces
While millennial unions began unravelling in the late 2010s, mainly due to the dwindling economic prospects of millennials, the COVID-19 pandemic became the graveyard of many millennial marriages.
Starting in 2015, newspapers began giving over acres of space to auctioneers, companies issued profit warnings, and many corporate organizations folded and shipped out. Banks preferred lending to the government rather than to individuals, as the period saw a rise in non-performing loans due to job losses and a stagnant business environment.
When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, the economy contracted, and with that, many people lost their jobs, especially in the hospitality, tourism, service, and retail sectors. Many jobs were on the line in real time, making a bad situation worse.
In the United States, on average, men who are not working full-time are 33 per cent more likely to get divorced within 12 months.
“Contemporary husbands face a higher risk of divorce when they do not fulfil the stereotypical breadwinner role, by being employed full-time,” says Alexandra Killewald, a sociology professor at Harvard University who authored a study in 2016 for the American Sociological Review.
One of the theories advanced to explain divorce is that, with their financial independence, degrees, and careers of their own, women do not feel dependent on their spouse or their marriage for economic stability.
While we don’t have exact figures in Kenya, anecdotal evidence suggests that more than half of men are divorced as soon as they lose their bread-winning role. Other factors, such as how many react and adjust when they lose their jobs, also contribute to a typical divorce. This has become a touchy subject online, one of the most debated topics, generating significant rancour as both genders trade blame as expectations and responsibilities shift. With women still the primary caregivers to children in most cases, working and providing is invariably difficult. Men may find it difficult to adjust to domestic responsibilities amid cost-cutting measures, for instance, when the house help is laid off to save on living expenses. Also, however westernised we have become, on the domestic front, traditional gender expectations prevail in many households, and a stay-at-home husband is still considered an aberration.
Millennial men have been in a bind. Their women held very traditional expectations of a breadwinner husband, even when they had an income that could sustain a household. Ironically, our mothers held it down for our fathers in the 1990s when they (fathers) lost their jobs, despite not having formal jobs, being unemployed or surviving on meagre earnings from their small businesses. It wasn’t a perfect world, but as parents, they cooperated, whether it meant making complex adjustments like moving back to the village or to a more affordable neighbourhood.
Millennial men didn’t have the same privileges bestowed by patriarchy as their fathers. And thus, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I met many men who had left their matrimonial homes to start life afresh. Most of my friends at the aforementioned party, who had initially lived large in middle-class estates and suburbs, had been reduced to living in single rooms or at the city’s periphery as they reckoned with the reality of co-parenting. It is as if we have lived two lives: early success in our late 20s and early 30s, a life of survival and struggle in our late 30s and early 40s.
There is also another subset of quiet divorces in the villages, where wives leave their husbands to go and work abroad, especially in low-skilled jobs in the Gulf and other parts of Asia. In parts of Central Kenya and Nyanza, young wives typically leave their children with their parents and do not formally end their marriage, since many marriages may not have been formalized. And when they sign up for those two to five-year contracts in the Gulf, the marriages are effectively over before they have taken off.
In the villages, where marriages were pretty stable, the declining agricultural potential of the rural areas, driven by an increased population and overexploitation of farmland, is making marriage stability increasingly shaky, as younger millennials and older Gen Zs hold out much longer before marrying.
Black tax and buddy bailing tax
Over the last five years, something has become evident to me. The level of black tax has risen significantly, and something else has become far too common. For a while, I relied on friends to survive in Nairobi when I was down on my luck. It wasn’t just the occasional bailout that you may need for rent when salaries are delayed, or one of those one-off emergencies like funds to cover a medical emergency. It was a steady stream of aid from friends for food, rent, and utilities over an extended period. In the past, one used to be helped once or twice, then connected to a job or a gig.
Now, more and more millennials are taking up to five years to find a job, a gig, or anything going for them. Many millennials are falling through the cracks, adopting negative coping mechanisms, such as falling into alcoholism and drug abuse to escape the harsh reality of life, or resigning themselves to the village while yet in their prime.
Many who have divorced and lost their families don’t seem to have a comprehensive comeback plan, and nothing in the air offers any form of hope.
And thus, beyond the black tax that millennials, like other Kenyans, pay to their families, with the rising costs of healthcare, education, food, and other utilities, well-off Kenyan millennials must now fend for friends going through a rough patch – what we can call buddy bailing, or the buddy tax.
Unmet expectations
Compared to their parents, millennials may have peaked early, and those who escaped and secured good jobs and futures have done well for themselves. However, younger millennials, and especially those who finished college around the time when Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee came to power, have missed many milestones.
More and more millennials are unable to accomplish the markers of maturity like marriage, building a home, and settling down. Those who divorced earlier, who should have remarried and started over again, are taking more time, since turbulent economic conditions rarely make for a stable environment for relationships to thrive.
Compared to their parents, who held it down family-wise on a single income, there are situations where it is the ageing, poor parents who have to rescue their children. Where in the past Kenyans moved out of home in their late teens and early 20s, we now have older ones (25 to early 30s) who are still stuck at home, having failed to launch, despite having an education.
Sandwich generation
As the employment landscape has changed, with people losing their jobs and others stuck in career limbo with stagnant wages, something else has crept up on millennials: they’ve grown old too fast to be Kenya’s sandwich generation.
Many millennials in their mid-30s to mid-40s are now expected to care for themselves, their children, their siblings, and their ageing parents, and it is taking a toll on them. These additional layers of responsibility come at a time of job-market uncertainty and a shrinking economy. This is heaping significant financial and emotional strain on millennials. It is worse for those who have the additional, less discussed responsibility of caring for their parents. Balancing a career (if you have one) with a caregiving role is a big enough stretch. To do so when one has no stable job, and where mitigating institutions like the Social Health Authority or the Ministry of Education don’t have their act in order, has seen millennials suffer from black tax fatigue.
However, increasingly, some unlucky millennials now have to depend on their parents, who spent a fortune on their education, an unenviable situation.
Coping mechanisms
One noticeable trait of millennials is their arrested development, which manifests in many ways. Many don’t seem to slow down on what Nairobians call sherehe. In the past, when individuals reached their mid-30s and early 40s, they tended to slow down and adjust to their parenting responsibilities.
Most millennials seem to be in a zone of regret, made worse by the Internet. Even as Gen Z takes its place on the social map, millennials in a Peter Pan mood refuse to cede their spaces to the younger generation. Go to any popular nightclub anywhere in the country, and you will see millennials jostling for space with Gen Z – some nearly half their age.
Additionally, many have taken up drinking, no longer as recreation and socialization, but rather as a way to cope with the vicissitudes and demands of adulthood. Even women who previously indulged in sweet, creamy liqueurs have crossed over to hard liquor, and it is not uncommon to now see videos of women in worrying states of inebriation online, or even in social spaces. Even alcohol-related violence from women is now a common occurrence that no longer raises eyebrows. It gets worse and worse every year.
The strange thing about millennial coping mechanisms, even among those well off materially, is that they seem to be equally caught up in the strain and pressures of “adulting”, and sometimes they don’t have their act together any more than those doing badly.
Rehab conversations are now common among groups, and virtually every urban millennial knows a friend or two who could use some rehabilitation.
On the family front, the guardrails of the extended family, the church, and the community that once ensured that the institution of marriage was preserved have become weakened so much over the last decade that quiet divorces have become the norm in the city. The level of accountability people once had is absent among millennials. People divorce, and not even close friends or even parents-in-law get to hear such consequential news in time.
Interventions
Ultimately, millennials, to whom so much was promised, must come to terms with the reality of their times. Our politics are not about to improve, nor is the economy likely to, at least not in the short run.
Career stagnation, unemployment, and underemployment have arrested the social progression of many. But at some point, one has to take individual responsibility for how they forge ahead as retirement approaches.
Millennials will be the first generation to retire with no social protection. Our grandparents had their descendants take care of them. Millennials have lovingly cared for their parents to the best of their ability. Our parents had pensions, and those who didn’t are the last lucky generation who could retire to the village and still eke out a living from subsistence farming with our support.
For millennials, farming is out of question. They cannot rely on their children, since the economy may not reopen quickly enough to absorb the millions of unemployed youths. Not many millennials have saved enough in pensions and have good health insurance to survive the demands of old age, especially as lifestyle diseases become more entrenched.
For now, many millennials have left the country, ending up in destinations across North America, Europe, the Gulf, and Central Asia. Currently, the government estimates that at least three to four million Kenyans work abroad, and more than half of those are due to the brain drain under the Jubilee and UDA governments. The Kenya Kwanza government even prides itself in having labour exports as one of its pillars.
However, the West is not particularly receptive, with right-wing politics fuelling anti-immigrant sentiment, leaving Kenyans, and indeed Africans, to reimagine other ways to make things work back at home.
Nothing short of a systemic change can arrest the sinking of millennials and Gen Zs. The June 2024 Gen Z protests offered a glimpse of the angst of the two generations now bearing the brunt of the mismanagement of the economy by successive regimes, especially the last two. Kenya remains on the brink of a revolution unless the government takes radical measures to address the economic and social issues affecting both generations. Presently, there is no sign that the Kenya Kwanza government understands the weight of responsibility on its shoulders. Given a chance for a reset in 2024, President Ruto did the opposite. And while he remains a frontrunner in the 2027 elections with the opposition weak and disorganised, it is up to millennials and Gen Zs to rise to the occasion and rescue the country, and in doing so, rescue themselves.
