This week, I came across a post on X by Farida Nabourema, a Togolese activist and scholar, summarising an address she had delivered at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies in Denver titled, “The Political Economy of Obedience.”
I read the post, then the full text, a forty-five-minute read. She was writing about Togo, but every paragraph sounded painfully familiar. It read like a description of the Kenyan state’s own operating manual. I owed it to the readers to place her argument inside our political reality.
The political economy of obedience is, at its core, a theory of incentive design.
Authoritarian systems do not survive only because they rule through terror, although terror remains one of their instruments.
They survive because they structure the relationship between political compliance and material survival in such a way that, for most people, obedience becomes the rational choice.
The state does not need to jail everyone. It only needs to make enough people understand that school fees, jobs, tenders, licences, scholarships, hospital access and even personal safety can depend on silence.
I know I often quote Frantz Fanon here, but in times of revolution, revolutionary ideas must be repeated until they are engraved in our hearts and minds.
In The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, Fanon argued that the class that inherited African states at independence was not a revolutionary class. It was a substitution class. It did not transform the colonial architecture; it simply moved into it.
It learned to speak the language of freedom while performing the function of control. Fanon gave the example of Jomo Kenyatta. In 1952, at a meeting of about 30,000 Gikuyu, Kenyatta publicly condemned the Mau Mau, the very fighters whose blood was purchasing the independence he would later inherit.
Independence arrived, but the colonial logic of command, surveillance, patronage and punishment remained intact.
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga too clocked it. In 1967, only four years after independence, he titled his autobiography ‘Not Yet Uhuru’. His central charge against the post-independence ruling class was that their interpretation of freedom was simply that they should move into the jobs, privileges and comforts previously held by the settler.
He called this the “prostitution” of uhuru. Political freedom, he argued, meant little without economic redistribution. By 1965, his alliance with Kenyatta had collapsed.
He was sidelined within the Cabinet, his supporters were transferred or dismissed, and in 1966 he resigned as Vice President and founded the Kenya People’s Union, the country’s first formal opposition party.
That is the unfinished business we still live with in Kenya today. Many elected members cannot defend the people who voted for them because their companies depend on contracts controlled by the executive.
Then there are the anti-corruption bodies, institutions that become active only when a person becomes a threat to the powers that be. The case they never had interest in suddenly acquires urgency the moment you step out of line. It’s because their business is often not corruption, but the management of dissent.
The family is the most effective political prison the state has built. When you consider dissent, you do not calculate only your own fate. You weigh your parents, siblings, cousins, friends, colleagues and business associates.
This is why obedience in Kenya is not always beaten into people. Sometimes it is negotiated through fear, dependency and love. A young person keeps quiet because their parent works for government.
A businessman keeps quiet because a tender is pending. A professional keeps quiet because a board appointment is possible. An MP keeps quiet because their road contract, hotel licence or parastatal connection could evaporate overnight. The system manufactures the conditions under which loyalty becomes survival.
But the good news is, on June 25, 2024, hundreds of thousands of Kenyans marched across the country in a leaderless movement with a decentralised organisation.
Protesters picket along Kimathi Street in Nairobi on June 25th 2025 during the commemoration of the 2024 Gen-Z protests.
Photo credit: Billy Ogada | Nation Media Group
They stormed Parliament and while more than 60 were killed by police in scenes that echoed the violence of the colonial state plus over 83 more abducted by agents of a government that calls itself democratic, they forced Ruto to withdraw it.
For once, the machine blinked, and the country saw that power is not as invincible as it pretends to be.
Two years on, the patronage systems have remained intact. The state still distributes opportunity as a political weapon. But something has shifted in this country.
Members of the youth-led ‘Niko Kadi’ initiative march through the streets of Kisumu City on March 26.
Photo credit: Alex Odhiambo| Nation Media Group
Enough young people have looked at the bargain and decided it is no longer worth taking. When that happens at scale, the system that depends on that bargain begins to crack. Gen Z has conquered the street, but the street is not enough. The goal cannot be simply to replace leaders.
The goal must be to conquer institutions and deliver systemic change that will create a merit-based society. The justice system must be fair enough to protect the powerless from the powerful.
The next frontier is therefore not just protest, but organisation. Can this generation carry the energy of June 2024 into the discipline of overhauling the entire political architecture? Can they organise, take power and refuse the usual trap of settling for the lesser evil?
The writer is a whistleblower, strategy consultant and startup mentor. www.nelsonamenya.com
