May 2025 be a year of setting better standards

Ken Opalo is a professor at Georgetown University.

As we close 2024, it is worth considering one of the biggest problems facing us as a country: the total fraying of our social fabric.

The symptoms of the problem abound, from increasing incidents of femicide, to distasteful images of the President shared online, to the rising number of abductions that are allegedly the work of state security agents.

All this is happening when trust in government and public officials is at an all-time low, and households are bearing the brunt of a decade-long slump in earnings. 

At some point, something will give. In June we got a taste of what might come with the storming of Parliament and the state’s blindingly violent response that left scores dead.

The next storm will likely be big enough to overpower those who stand in the way of building a just society for all Kenyans.

Not even the cynical deployment of ethnicity – which appears to be our political elites’ preferred response to our many crises – will work.

Our problems are legion and compounding, and, at some point, will be powerful enough to overwhelm even the most skillful forms of ethnicity-based mobilisation. 

Our enduring tragedy as a nation is that we are led by men and women who are singularly lacking in ambition.

To them, politics is not a means to collective achievements that bring out the best in us. Rather it is a cynical game to that enables them to steal to live. Nothing more.

And so when faced with a crisis like the one we had in June, the best they could come up with is to herd Kenyans to their respective ethnic pens. That is the only way they know to wield their hegemony over society.

But there is a better way. In 2025 ever more Kenyans should commit to staying focused on building a better and fair nation.

We deserve running water 24/7/365. We deserve working schools. We deserve a function public health system. Our roads should not be death traps.

We deserve a political class that is humane and brings out the best in us. We deserve a working economy that rewards hard work and does not condemn millions of our people to dehumanising poverty.

We deserve a society that gives meaning to our lives, and does not lead to atomising alienation. 

Let us resolve to achieve these goals with or without our politicians. That is the least we could do for future generations of Kenyans. Happy New Year! 

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University