Mr President, Gen Z's are saying enough is enough!

A group of youth offered their respects to the victims who were shot dead during the anti-tax protests at a Saba Saba concert at Uhuru Park Nairobi on July 7, 2024. [Samson Wire, Standard]

Give it to Kenyans.  We love our country.  We celebrate our successes loudly.  We are quick, and we can be dirty.  Mpesa didn’t come to Kenyans, Kenyans came to Mpesa.  KoX (Kenyans on X (formerly Twitter)) is pretty much a brand.

Hell, KoX didn’t come to the President, the President came to KoX. In footballing terms, our Sunday League politics constrains our Premier League economic potential.  That’s the basic message our leadership should hear day and night. 

When we get past defensively irritating arguments about the algorithm-driven network effects of social media, the fact of the matter is the loud voice of Gen Z in the past three weeks has got our leaders shaking in their Baby Boomer bling and Gen X garb. 

Because enough is enough. Enough with the hubris.  Enough with the incompetence.  Enough with the lies and the lootocracy.  It comes as no surprise that the anti-tax protests mutated into a call for the President to resign. 

This call has been buttressed, not moderated, by specific asks including firing, not just reshuffling the Cabinet, getting rid of CDF and even dissolving Parliament itself. 

With the “Yes” National Assembly MPs still in hiding, it was as amusing as it was amazing to observe their Senate counterparts speaking to the same radical surgery that Gen Z sought on our streets.  Accepting that many, but not all, were speaking with forked tongues, the message is clear.  Enough is enough. 

President Ruto has had six chances to respond to this public angst.  His first, angry response was overshadowed by deployment of the army to quell protests.  The next two (including the media interview) lacked both empathy and sympathy. 

If we take Thursday’s cabinet meeting as the fourth, we have two responses, first a hyper-aggressive presser showering praise on the police who killed young people, and second, a measured cabinet dispatch that provided some balance. The most worrying part of these responses is that inanimate property is equated to human life. 

The fifth was the statement presented minutes before his sixth (the X engagement).  All of these responses were in words, not actions.  One assumes the whole point is we want to see action. 

In other words show us, don’t tell us.  Do something, not nothing.  That’s one of the four guiding principles that has driven the tribeless, partyless, leaderless, borderless Gen Z revolt he faces. 

It isn’t just the style of response that is a concern, it’s the content too. There is a clear reluctance to accept that Finance Bill 2024 is no more, unless it actually isn’t. More disturbingly, we are not hearing anything close to political will in dealing with our expenditure, not revenue, problem.  In his third response (the interview) he spoke about a trillion shilling deficit, which contradicted his second response directing the Treasury to oversee spending cuts to reduce this exact deficit.  

Then his fifth response now tells us that we’ll do a mix of spending cuts and more borrowing.  What are these immovable spending objects in government that cannot simply be slashed and done away with given the sheer extravagance we observe on a daily basis? 

Not hiring Chief Administrative Secretaries is not a spending cut, because there is no budget in the first place; and the positions, in any event, are unconstitutional as our courts have found, and unwarranted. 

When we cut advisors and renovations by 50 per cent, what is the baseline we are starting from?  Oh, might it be that some advisors have contracts which are expiring in any case?  Aren’t many of these advisors donor-contracted anyway? On renovations, why do we have all these state lodges as relics of our colonial times?  Halting motor vehicle purchases for a year is a band-aid, especially when couched with the promise to develop a transport policy for the umpteenth time. 

Let’s go further on this most recent statement.  Don’t contractual questions apply to the over 60?  Hey, why do we have a confidential budget in the first place?  Or spousal offices? 

How many times will we ban non-essential travel, because this is not the first announcement? Didn’t we ban harambees, not just politicians and public servants at harambees, a generation ago?  Is the fact that we still have them an indication of state failure, or a sign of our community spirit? 

Then there’s the idea of dissolving 47 state corporations without necessarily deleting their functions.  Of the hundreds of questions that could be asked (including the cost saving to be achieved), two stand out. 

Aren’t these corporations established through Acts of Parliament, meaning this is Parliament’s and not the President’s job to dissolve them?  Second, where’s this administration’s big picture on public enterprise reform and privatization as a policy statement? 

What of the forensic audit of our public debt (register)?  What’s the Auditor-General’s job?  Didn’t we read a while back that there were problems accessing this register and verifying the debt?  What changes when a Task Force is appointed?  Why not just let our institutions work? 

That the entire Finance Bill shortfall cannot be met through spending cuts is not a credible tale, as we shall test in the next article.  It is rather populist to suggest that the critical government services that must be met include JSS teachers, stalled roads, fertilizer subsidies, higher education, county, CDF and pension debt obligations and write-offs for coffee and sugar farmers. 

At some point in time we need to get our leaders, from the President to the rest, to quantify the impact of their statements.  What is the effect of each measure, and the sum of the measures? Until we push our leadership into consequential thinking, we will be bombarded with bombast. 

But this is all detail.  The real question for President Ruto is this.  What happened to “The Plan”?  As in, the “Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA)” with its six objectives (cost of living, food security, jobs etc.), five pillars (agro, healthcare, housing etc.), nine value chains (leather, dairy etc.), five clusters and four thematic areas (human capital, markets, digital evolution etc.)?  Or as Gen Z has documented for us to track, over 400 promises he has made to Kenyans? 

Indeed, why would we need further engagement, when there’s a list of known things to be done. To repeat, show us what you have done, don’t tell us what you are doing, will do or want to do. 

To be honest, this simply isn’t good enough.  The answer to tough public questions, and actions, should not be words upon words especially when the overall response never really adds up. 

In a nutshell, it is simply not good enough to provide easy transactional answers to the heavy policy questions that Gen Z, and Kenyans at large, are asking.  Our transactional presidency needs to graduate itself to a policy presidency. But it’s more than this. 

No number of X spaces, however brave and innovative, will address the demand for action that Kenyans seek.  Enough is enough.