The trouble with Kenya: Leaders who promise heaven, deliver hell

Ransacked section of Parliament during anti-Finance Bill protests in Nairobi on June 24, 2024. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

Finance Bill 2024, to repeat, was the trigger. June 25, 2024, was Kenya’s #BlackTuesday. Period. 

This is the first way to think about this past week.

On a day when innocent young people were shot dead by our trigger-happy police across the country, including snipers in Nairobi (why would you have snipers for a public protest?), and the counts range from 53 by the multi-stakeholder Police Reforms Working Group to higher numbers circulating on X/Twitter, the defining image for this administration must be the headshot to a young Kenyan donned in the Kenyan flag.

It is incredulous that the official fatality figure offered by our leadership was six people. It is probably more unconscionable that there has been no hint of regret in official addresses to date.

As people asked on social media platforms, was death the price of this unpopular Finance Bill?  I had said on Tuesday that Parliament had three options. Pass the bill as is.  Amend the bill.  Ditch the bill.  Not because of the bill itself, but because of what it represented about this regime.  A regime that seems not to understand its fine agenda and is instead obsessed with gloss and glamour. A regime that is, to repeat, a mix of hubris on one side, and incompetence on the other.

In a political matrix where daring policy adventure is at war with primitive accumulation. And that’s where we get to the lies and looting that cause the angst that Gen Z is loudly talking about. 

I am being generous in describing this understanding of the agenda because, pretty sensible as it is overall, Kenya Kwanza has spent its first two years making promises while playing crybaby.

The day after Tuesday was Wednesday. Sitting with a colleague waiting for others for a meeting, we ventured – as Gen X  parents - into a Gen Z X/Twitter space around the previous day’s events and the legitimacy of our political leadership.  It was truly heartbreaking.

We were both in tears, not of grief, but grievance. We heard genuine anger from Gen Z about a leadership of a thousand promises – all hat, not cattle. 

We heard young people asking about why their friends were shot dead indiscriminately across the country, not just in Nairobi, by our police.  We listened to young voices, themselves in tears of anger and grief, cursing our leaders, starting at the top.

We followed this tearfully as parents of our Millennials and Gen Zs.  In the end, our meeting didn’t happen. And, if I am not wrong, some authority quickly closed that X/Twitter space.  I am writing this piece with tears still flowing because this administration was willing to pass a finance law and sign it off with the blood of young Kenyans seeking an address to their issues.  This is not an IMF problem it’s ours. To repeat, the IMF didn’t invite themselves here, we invited them.

Which is exactly the point. What these protests tell us, despite more shootings at peaceful public protests on Thursday after two presidential addresses to the nation, and images of unfettered, weaponized counter-protest gangs in the President’s home county, is something changed. 

Actually, that’s not quite correct.  Nothing has changed. The fundamental problem that Kenya must achieve is a radical transformation from an administrative to a political state.  This is pretty much what our constitution demands and commands.  Knowing that the first state assumes its citizens but the second is its citizens.  The task of this administration is to deliver this transition.

This does not require yet another round of taxpayer-funded dialogue.  From 2007 we got Agenda Four.  Only two of its ten agenda items are delivered. BBI under Uhuru’s regime, and NADCO under Ruto’s are latter-day gimmicks; neither answers the deep-seated issues that 2007 surfaced. Lest we forget, we already have a President paid to deliver and a government paid to work.

The issues?  Agenda Four sought constitutional reform (we got a new constitution).  Judicial reform (we have a transforming Judiciary).  To repeat, two out of ten.  The rest?  Parliamentary reform.  Executive and civil service reform.  Police reform. Land reform.  Poverty, inequality and regional imbalance (the last of which was partly resolved through devolution). National cohesion and unity. Transparency and accountability and the war on corruption, and wider impunity. 

Oh, and unemployment, especially among the youth. This was our 2008 peacemaking deal.

Now look at the unresolved agenda items.  Every single one can be captured in our past week.

A smart and conscientious leadership would by now have figured out that it is in the public, not private, interest to fix the outstanding issues.  Instead, international attention is focused on the fig leaf of Finance Bill 2024.  

Meanwhile, Ruto’s 63 foreign trips in 21 months have now been overshadowed by violence covered twice in a fortnight by the Wall Street Journal less than a month after his US state visit.  Then look at this week’s Economist on Kenya - “A New Breed of Protest has left Kenya’s President tottering: President Ruto has capitulated to people power and cancelled hated tax increases”.  Essentially, a “banana republic” headline because we don’t listen. 

Let’s put it another way, as a senior Treasury official once told me 20 years ago, “In footballing terms, Kenya needs to stop playing in the Sunday League”.  Basically, this country needs to step up.

This is why, despite two unconvincing speeches, this is an opportunity for President Ruto.  I will not go into my view that we need a “Governator” (governance and rule of law leader) after three securocrats and one econocrat.  The easier ask is for reflective, then active, transition from a “HILL” of hubris, incompetence, lies and looting to a simpler one of humility, inspiration and lesson learning. If this week has not taught him and his administration anything, nothing will.

To be clear, #BlackTuesday was a message that it is no longer business as usual in Kenya. To be clearer, this is not a talking moment. As we learnt as kids, “actions speak louder than words”.