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The average Kenyan does not speak in policy. Most policies that are tabled, often, if not always, go over people’s heads, not because people can’t read, but because there is simply too much going on in the average person’s life to allow for the careful deciphering of policy jargon. Now, walk with me. Can you remember the last time you read a bill to completion? I’m not asking this to shame you or to suggest you are unserious about governance. Mambo ni mob na masaa ni machache. Kenyans are dying from reforms that most do not have the bandwidth to process even remotely, let alone contest. Why? It’s layers of reforms upon earlier layers of reforms, the new one is the top layer, and the others sit beneath it, all wrapped up in language only a select few were ever meant to understand.
Now, walk with me again. Let’s go back a few years. We’re at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital in Embakasi, where I went for a full-body check-up before joining university. The check-up form is one of the requirements when registering as a student. It’s noon, I’d arrived at 8 a.m., and I finally get a chance to see the physician, who asks me for chai ya daktari just before handing me the filled-out form. I look at him and smile nervously, with no intention of giving him a single cent. I am an 18-year-old fresher. We laugh about it awkwardly before he begrudgingly hands me the form.
Part of me wants to blame him. But why? He’s the only physician on duty. His colleagues are outside Afya House with placards; they haven’t been paid for months. I refuse to participate in deepening the cesspool of corruption, but I feel heavy as I walk past the winding queue in the hospital. I wonder when he will have lunch. I wonder if he can afford to have it at all.
I often think of that heaviness in my chest, the same one I have when I see a news headline while scrolling on Twitter (I refuse to call it X). How many times does your heart drop in a day from witnessing? See, policy doesn’t arrive in the common mwananchi’s life as ideology but as that feeling, the constriction in your chest. The intensity is what varies, depending on your proximity to the cause. One day, it’s someone online, the next it’s someone you’ve seen around, then finally, it’s you. It doesn’t arrive with a sticker on its forehead branded “I am an effect of Structural Adjustment Programmes”; it just… arrives. Painfully often. In the lives of some, it begins as compromise; small moral dilemmas. When the doctor asked me for chai, the failure was not individual, but a symptom of an underfunded and flimsy system, which has slowly shaped survival into corruption.
I was born in the year two thousand and… (yes, I am still going), which means that I did not live through the original SAPs of the ’80s and ‘90s, the economic hardship that wrecked the country, the hollowing out of public institutions. I grew up in the aftermath of these policies, and by the time I understood the value of money and resources, I already understood what scarcity was.
My parents did their very best to shield my siblings and I from hardship. That didn’t mean it didn’t exist. It was spoken softly, in delayed payment of fees, or a missed school trip, compensated for by some snacks. Nobody ever said, “The after-effects of the SAPs are making things hard, and your school trip is too expensive.” Some of my classmates went through the same thing, and it was normal. None of us spoke policy; we simply existed.
We chased each other around the school field, played stick of death and kati, did wheelbarrow races, hands on the ground, feet held by another, hoarded twenty-shilling coins to buy chips mwitu and mutura outside the school gate, and studied for our exams, some missing out sitting them altogether because of lack of fees. Lack wasn’t something alien; it felt communal. If you couldn’t go for a school trip or sit an exam, it was just that; life went on.
Thinking back, I realize that this state of things is how we are often trained to accommodate absence. Slowly. It isn’t something new. Slowly, you accept the normalcy of it.
By the time I learned what Structural Adjustment Programmes were in school, the discovery felt a little bit anticlimactic. It wasn’t anything new. It now simply had a name to it. As humans, we are often drawn to naming things; identifying them, sorting them and trying to understand them by categorizing them. SAPs, as I came to understand, were economic reforms. They only became easier to grasp through recognizing their effects, not the theory I memorized in textbooks. I now had a name for the gutted public institutions and for that familiar twinge in my chest. This quiet understanding that some things were just not guaranteed.
In this moment we stand in, I am struck by the cyclicality of it all. How history insists on re-speaking the same things, in flashier words, but saying the same thing entirely, the same way AI engines spew the same prose, in different arrangements while paraphrasing. This current wave of austerity is different, but Kenya deeply recognizes it.
Have you noticed that things are getting worse? Ever since the protests in 2024, things have continued to deteriorate, although it has become slightly harder to notice because the unrest has not been as visible. Did you know that last year alone, over one hundred newborns died in Kiambu County during the doctors’ strikes? One hundred. One, two, three, four… until a hundred, and then some more.
Doctors have families too, don’t they? They need to feed their children, themselves as well, but the families that lost their children are families too, no? Are they not? So who, then, is to blame?
Attempting to answer this is difficult. Blame is hard to hold when everyone is already exhausted and fracturing under the status quo. Doctors are workers, with families, with parents, and mouths to feed, just like the grieving. The state appears in bits here and there, during press conferences, signed and stamped statements on Twitter, statistics blurted out during news segments, but the state remains absent where it matters the most: in the homes of those burying their newborns and the homes of those starving because salaries have not been paid for months. The ordinary mwananchi is left to absorb the shock of policy, again and again.
It happens almost unnoticeably, in a conversation you overhear on a Double M on your way back to Donholm. A woman with deep exhaustion in her voice begins to cry beside you. You don’t really know what to ask her or what to say, so you offer her a paper napkin you had in your bag that the smokie pasua vendor had given you earlier but which you didn’t use because you practically inhaled the food. The woman says thank you, and you hear her phone ring again.
“Sasa, surely where will we get three hundred thousand? Dialysis itakwama. Oh dear God, what will we do?”
You don’t ask her anything even as she continues to cry, but your heart drops. You ache for a stranger.
This is where austerity becomes especially cruel because, theoretically, public hospitals should be able to care for critically ill patients. In practice, this language of austerity we have learned speaks of sacrifice endlessly, without ever specifying who is meant to bear it. It talks about reform with neutrality as though nobody actually experiences it, as if its consequences do not settle unevenly, across certain neighbourhoods, certain futures, certain bodies.
Austerity promises stability while extracting suffering; where is stability when you have already lost those for whom this stable future is supposedly being built? It behaves as if time is unlimited, as though people can suspend their lives as the economy “stabilizes”. Life is still moving. Time is moving. It never stops.
Families continue to painfully readjust to rising costs, students remain stranded between semesters and strikes, for months on end, unsure whether to plan their lives ahead or to remain suspended in this economic paralysis. Graduates enter an economy with no hands to hold them and are told that, soon, things will stabilize. Soon, they will use their degrees. They just have to hustle, endure it; it’s been done before, right?
But this waiting is terrifying. This paralysis. Time moves relentlessly, and life does not pause to catch up. What I find most difficult about living this way is the amount of adjusting and recalibration it demands. We’re always adjusting everything, whispering plans lightly that will be forgotten at the slightest disruption, which is very likely to occur.
“Pesa itapata kazi,” we say. Money not immediately used for its intended purpose, will find a use, an expense will manufacture itself out of thin air. Nothing is ever really certain in these times. We have all learned, through experience, that certainty fades away very easily. We hear it in conversations we have with friends and family; if things improve, if the strike ends, if money comes through.
If.
The uncertainty breeds this language of conditionality, which seeps into other aspects of life without asking for permission. Even community and joy become provisional; we enjoy them with “one eye open”, in case they slip past us. You no longer find yourself going dancing in the garden of the Alliance Française as spontaneously because you’re working a night shift, asleep when everyone you love is awake. You are slowly isolating yourself. To pay bills. To feed yourself. You don’t dance anymore, except perhaps in your room, late at night, trying to jumpstart your serotonin because facing another shift feels unbearable.
Over time, political engagement becomes harder to sustain because caring grows more demanding. Participatory action requires hope and warmth, but when the system is bleeding everyone dry, where does that zeal come from? What sustains it? When possibilities feel distant, in this state of paralysis, withdrawal begins to feel like self-preservation, rather than low-hanging political apathy. You start to wonder if you have the time and energy to fight for a better future if that future is laced with uncertainty. The children are already dying in underfunded hospitals. Slowly, conversations begin to shift, and the apathy turns into simmering anger. Everything starts to feel wrong all the time. There is only so much a human being can withstand.
Despite everything, life, like a seed pushing through rocky ground, moves on even as the paralysis sets in. Families continue to lean on each other, communities form informal safety nets where the state has formally failed, and there’s dignity in the ways people show up for each other when the systems are failing. It is difficult, but it is there. There is also increased resentment towards the state. The resentment was always there, and it still runs through all those who continually endure the effects of reforms they had no hand in shaping. Austerity keeps demanding adaptation. It teaches people to bear the brunt of it while never naming those who benefit from it.
Waltz of resilience
If you sit on the stone benches opposite Kencom, right next to that small police post, at around 6:30 a.m. on a weekday, you watch a queue begin to form. Just before the city wakes up fully and the noise thickens, before everyone steps back in line to perform the waltz of resilience.
Nobody directs this queue; you watch it assemble without a conductor, an orchestra of some sort – everyone knows where to stand. Faces are heavy with sleep, bodies hunched while standing, documents in brown envelopes, plastic files in hand, handbags and laptop bags. You watch this orchestra form, an orchestra belonging to the people of a system, not to one single institution. This queue is a queue of possibility, however slim, leading to the KBS and Citi Hoppa buses heading towards Upper Hill and beyond. To work or to interviews. Towards survival.
Nobody in this queue speaks with outrage at that 6:30 a.m. People simply wait for the buses to come.
This is where policy actually lands. Not in the press briefings or in parliamentary debates; it lands here, at Kencom, in this quiet orchestra of people negotiating time and patience. It sheds its jargon and lands on the tired shoulders of a widow, a mother of three, trying to make ends meet after draining all her savings on her late husband’s cancer treatment. Her children are still eating, and life is moving. Here, policy is in how she hunches in the line, waiting for the bus to Upperhill.
Why do we continue to participate in systems that have already failed us?
The common mwananchi has nowhere to go, no choice; they work as history repeats itself obediently, as leaders are re-elected, as promises are recycled, and suffering gains new names. The queue grows longer as the number of graduates increases and more people wait. We have learned to wait, to accommodate absence, to treat delay as normal. That’s just how things are, huh?
Living inside the long shadow of policy does not require full understanding, only to keep adjusting because life must move on. It doesn’t matter if you never tasted the fruits when they were ripe; you will bear the brunt regardless. And so will your children.
For those of us born into the shadow of the original SAPs, this feels inherited. As austerity steadily returns with a new vocabulary, our bodies already recognize it, and we fall into place, like dominoes. Years later, history repeats itself. Not loudly or dramatically. But obediently.
