From Paris, where I live, I have spent this month watching school blockades grow into a confrontation over the cost of living, with about 550,000 people marching across France on 17 October by the interior minister’s count and curfews ordered in parts of Paris and Lille.
That same week a household in Kayole that cooks on kerosene began paying Sh28.49 more for every litre. The two countries differ hugely in capacity, but face the same question of how much people can bear before their anger turns against the political order itself, and Kenya’s answer will weigh on whoever governs after 2027.
Last week I argued that populism flourishes where widening wealth, values and political gaps meet governments that no longer deliver. The opposition would have voters believe that removing President William Ruto resolves that contradiction, yet a successor could inherit the conditions for an even greater confrontation, because an election changes who exercises power far faster than it changes how power works.
Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order traces how financial strain, internal division and international conflict reinforce one another, leaving governments with the least room to manoeuvre precisely when citizens demand the most, and it treats revolution as a rising probability under those pressures.
In Kenya, the mechanism runs through the budget. In this financial year’s first quarter the Treasury spent Sh490.5 billion servicing debt out of Sh631.8 billion collected in tax, or 77.6%, leaving Sh22 in every Sh100 for the nurse, the teacher and the road.
Debt squeezes spending, higher taxes and thinner services deepen resentment wherever citizens watch politically connected wealth expand alongside their own hardship, and leaders who cannot defend their positions through performance retreat into ethnic loyalty.
Campaigns promise relief without confronting these arrangements, so expectations rise while the capacity to meet them stays where it was, until disappointment hardens into a verdict on the system.
The war the United States and Israel launched against Iran on 28 February has choked shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and in Nairobi, October’s regulated prices reached Sh226.96 for petrol and Sh227.76 for diesel. September inflation had already reached 6.8%, with transport up 15.6% and food up 9.5%. No government controls every external shock, but its earlier decisions determine how exposed its citizens are when one arrives.
The next president will inherit debt contracts, public expectations and institutions shaped by years of political bargaining, and a new portrait on the wall alters none of those obligations, any more than recycling familiar politicians dismantles the networks through which public resources become private fortunes. Those who previously controlled budgets, appointments or legislation should account for their records before presenting themselves as innocent rescuers.
The greatest danger lies in the distance between what a campaign promises and what its government subsequently protects. People will accept that rebuilding institutions takes time if they see sacrifice shared and wrongdoing punished, but not patience as a national duty while leaders keep expensive privileges, reward allies and demand further taxes, and a successor elected on public anger may discover that the anger was never his property.
Other countries show that a ruler’s departure does not settle what follows. Bangladesh’s uprising ended in an election won by Tarique Rahman, son of a former prime minister. In Madagascar, soldiers helped displace the president, a colonel took power, and young activists say they were betrayed, while Nepal elected the former Kathmandu mayor Balendra Shah. The outcomes differ, and in each the contest over succession was decided by whoever was organised beyond the protest itself.
For ordinary Kenyans the lesson begins with the questions we put to those seeking power: how their promises will be financed once debt obligations are met, which privileges they will surrender, how they will widen opportunity beyond their supporters, and what they did the last time they held authority. A coalition assembled from ethnic voting blocs must explain how it will govern through equal citizenship once the positions have been divided.
Enforcing those questions after the election requires organisation. Residents’ associations, professional bodies, unions and civic groups can track budgets and scrutinise appointments, and their independence matters most when their preferred candidate wins, because citizens who suspend scrutiny once “our person” enters State House help rebuild the machinery they once opposed.
Until a government earns that patience, the same arithmetic governs the household, where a phone loan taken to buy food is a claim on wages that inflation is already shrinking, savings held in one sacco or one tin under the bed are exposed to whichever shock arrives first, and the most durable asset a young Kenyan can own is a skill that employers in Nairobi, Kigali or Dubai will pay for whatever happens to the shilling.
Winning an election will not extinguish the pressures that made victory possible. If the next administration preserves the same exclusions under a fresh vocabulary of hope, it could face an upheaval that demands more than another president, and Kenyans may stop asking who should occupy State House and start asking why the political order keeps producing the same result.
