Protesters display a Kenyan flag next to a bonfire along Tom Mboya Street in Nairobi on 16 July 16, 2024, during anti-government protests.
It’s been said times without number. That every generation must find its historical purpose, and either fulfil or betray it. But because the family is the microcosm and the smallest unit in society, the struggle for change usually starts there.
Many family units, like states, are corrupt and conservative institutions. They reinforce obedience to established order, tradition, gender roles, and social hierarchies. They drum religion into kids and inculcate political ideologies in them. In many cases, families mentally enslave their young.
Usually, the rebellion of the youth against society and the state begins here by challenging parental authority. The anatomy of the Gen Z revolt isn’t different. Their target is the totality of Kenya’s social, political, and economic order.
This is how societies and states are reborn. This is especially true for states and nations in embryo in the post-colonial world. I have written before, and repeat, that African post-colonial states – of which Kenya is a variant – are not historic creations of Africans. They were imposed on us by European imperialists.
This means that post-colonial states start with a huge deficit of legitimacy. In many cases, they lack any legitimacy at all. That’s why many have collapsed and others have stunted, failing to achieve a national consciousness.
National consciousness
No state can survive and prosper without the zeitgeist of national consciousness at the lowest rungs of society. Who, or what, is a Kenyan, for example? Does such a creature exist?
Part of the Gen Z tumult is a crisis of the soul, of identity. Their parents have failed to pass on to them any credible moral compass or a legitimate organizing philosophy. Instead, the parents have sold Gen Zs a philosophy of poverty and a poverty of philosophy.
What we see in the streets are young people who want a purpose in life and a society and state they can believe in. Right now, they see none of that in Kenya. Instead what they see is a society of maggots, a man-eat-man society. And they’ve rejected that way of life because it simply eats its young. What they want is a holistic society, a society of empathy, not antipathy.
What started several weeks ago as an anti-tax protest has blown the lid wide open on all the things that ail Kenya. It’s now an existential struggle about the type of society Kenya should become. The Gen Zs want to uproot the whole branch and tree to create a new society. They may not know how to get there, but they surely know what they don’t want.
This is a takedown of an order that’s been defined by corruption, impunity, and intellectual decay. It’s more than that – it’s a struggle to create a new society that’s centered on the value of a single human being. That none of us is less than the other. That none of us should enjoy the largesse of society at the expense of any of us.
What Gen Zs want is the re-inscription and the re-consecration of a new Kenya. A Kenya where tribe becomes an odious byword for silos of discrimination and lack of merit. For far too long, Kenyan parents have sold their kids a bill of goods, a fake world devoid of humanity. A country where you grab what you can at the expense of country and neighbour. A country where conspicuous, gaudy, and primitive consumption and accumulation are celebrated in the midst of penury.
In Kenya, you are nobody if you don’t deploy the vices of materialism in their fullest iteration. Worse yet, we live in a society where officials serve themselves, not the people. These are wrong moral foci for Kenya.
Of course the Gen Zs can’t fix Kenya alone. No one or group can. We all need each other. We need expertise and experience. We need learned people to think through the reformulation of our post-colonial state. You must theorise change to make it possible. A lawyer can’t fly a plane on legal training.
Nor can an accountant be a cancer surgeon without going to a school of medicine. A society of merit needs men and women who know their stuff for the jobs they’ve been given. Part of the failure of the impugned cabinet was in some cases the utter absence of knowledge in the ministry of deployment. I think we can all agree that’s not the way going forward.
I end where I started. Let’s remember that our children aren’t evil simply because they’ve pointed out our nakedness. Let’s not vilify and castigate them for pointing out the obvious. Unless we are tone deaf, as many in the previous cabinet were, we must course correct. President William Ruto has a herculean task ahead of himself. Appointing a competent cabinet that’s legitimate and represents Kenya is just the beginning. He can’t stop there. He must lead the country in the process of re-engineering itself. If not, we will all sink and drown together.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. @makaumutua
