Call your Member of Parliament: A letter of solidarity with all Gen Zs in Kenya

This is a letter to all the Generation Z’s in Kenya who stood their ground the past week and brought the country to a standstill.

This week, we take a deserved break from the bad jokes and light touches to pay homage to your courageous gang.

Do not let anyone lie to you; you already have the entire political class on the run - all you need is to tighten the screw and before you know it, you will see magic with your own two eyes.

While you retreat to strategise on how to bring down the walls of Babylon, our only advice is never to make the same mistakes the millennials made when they were exactly at the place where you are right now.

The political class you are up against are a cunning lot. They have survived in the game for that long because they have scanned the landscape long ago, got it all sewn up in their favour, and anyone posing a threat to their existence will either be co-opted into regime apologists or silenced for refusing to sacrifice their ideology; whichever comes first.

Whatever you do, do not make the mistake that the millennials made by giving up on politics and sinking their heads inside their professions thinking that by disengaging from politics, politics will return the favour and leave them alone – because it will not.

Hindsight has taught us the cruelest lesson of all; that politics will invade your personal space and deal and get involved with the food you eat, the clothes you wear and neighbourhood you live.

If you do not learn this lesson early and keep it on the leash, politics will come breaking down your door in the form of rogue police, clobber your child to death and go out to celebrate how weak you are.

Dream of our generation

The only way out of this is to create the politics of Kenya in your own image. If you want a country that is governed by the rule of law and guarantees natural progression of every citizen under its care, you will have to go out and change it yourself.

When the generation before you were your age mates, they also sent the best of their lot to those offices to ask questions on our behalf, and you know what response they came back with?

We were told that we should chill under the tree because we are the leaders of tomorrow and when the time comes they shall hand over the leadership torch to us.

We are still waiting to be called up to the door to be given what was promised to us, as they drain the public treasury and pamper themselves well.

In the many instances we have sent some of us who got inside to check for us why it was taking long to actualize the dream of our generation, they have been sent back to tell us that they cannot hear us well.

After a sustained period of being ignored and left to our own devices, we decided not to lose hope and return to school, after some government court jesters were sponsored to record patriotic songs encouraging our generation to go to school as it was the only key to unlocking a bright future.

Being the obedient lot that was keen to demonstrate that our parents raised us well, we took that elderly wisdom like a duck to water and immersed ourselves in books.

We read everything we came across – from quantum physics to voodoo dolls. We are the generation that can stand up and debate intellectual subjects on our feet without reference to any prewritten text.

After topping our classes back-to-back and finishing school with flying colours, we came back to the generation of our parents and asked them about the jobs they promised us after we were through with school.

Patriotic to our country

Lo and behold, they lowered their thick-rimmed eyeglasses to look at us well, before announcing to us that the world owes us nothing and we should live with that hard reality, and when we tried to interject by asking why they were lying to us all along, they reminded us not to forget that we should respect authority and elders.

Ever since, we have been at a loss what we ever did wrong to deserve the generational contempt and lifelong scorn. All my generation ever did was to be obedient to our elders, respecting higher authority and being patriotic to our country.

We never put a foot wrong. We even stretched the patriotism to adopt the culture of wearing that Kenyan flag wristband even when Kenya had given us nothing in return hoping we would finally be absolved of wrong doing and be given was rightfully ours as was promised to us from the beginning.

We have forced Kenya into our hearts because we were informed that the country needed proof of our love and that was the only gate pass to being a government insider.

We are coming back to you to let you know that we were wrong to trust these people all along. They never meant well and we should have known earlier enough to stand up and take up what was rightfully our by the scruff of the neck.

We have been shy to admit our folly in public because we are afraid your generation may mock us to death, and that will increase the risk of having mental health conditions, and because our health sector is still not yet prepared to lift us from drowning, we would rather chase the illusion of following these guys who have taken us for a ride for so long than going back to start life anew when our bones cannot even manage a jog anymore.

Dear Gen Z’s, those people lied to us that we were the leaders of tomorrow, only to go back to them the following day to be told that tomorrow is always a day away.

Do not make the same mistake we made by hinging your future on their word. We got our fingers burnt by them so you can get yours clean to wipe the surface of our politics and take us home where we all desire. We you have our full support all the way. Go, get ‘em!

[email protected]