Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) officials wait for voters at Sabaki Polling Station in Magarini, Kilifi County on November 27, 2025.
If you listen carefully to word on the streets (kuskiza ground)—TikTok Lives, X posts and other social media platforms—you will hear a very clear message: We want nothing to do with these leaders. Not this party or that coalition. All of them.
After the 2024 protests, that feeling is understandable. We stormed Parliament. We forced the Finance Bill withdrawal. We paid with lives lost to police bullets, abductions, and tear gas. Now, many want to cut off completely from the political class. That impulse looks like political autarky. A clean break. No voting, no dialogue with anyone who has ever held office.
Emotionally, it is self-defense. Politically, it is a dead end. The real project is not political autarky. It is political strategic autonomy. We already know how to do this.
Remember the Adani Jomo Kenyatta International Airport deal? A year ago, a Sh325 billion scheme to hand our airport and power infrastructure to a foreign conglomerate was being negotiated in secret. By November 2024, it was dead. That did not happen because we walked away. It happened because we attacked the system from every angle.
I broke the story online. Kenyans turned it into a national conversation. Airport workers organised strikes. Lawyers and patriotic Kenyans went to court. MPs summoned ministers before committees. International media amplified the story and gave it a global perspective. The story reached the Indian Congress. When the United States indictment dropped, President William Ruto had no room left. He cancelled it.
Unipolar power by absence
That was strategic autonomy. We engaged courts, parliaments, unions, international allies and digital platforms, all at once, on our terms. We did not trust any single institution. We used them all as pressure points.
Now look at the by-elections two weeks ago. In Baringo, Samuel Letasio, a sharp Gen Z in his twenties, ran for Senate with no money, few posters, no agents at polling stations. He campaigned by foot and boda boda while opponents rolled in convoys. He got 488 votes. The ruling party candidate got 55,000. In Mbeere North, UDA won by just 494 votes. In Malava, by about 1,300. A few hundred young voters in each constituency could have changed everything.
Here is what those numbers reveal: Gen Z is holding the power. We just refuse to use it. In international relations, scholars argue that unipolar dominance is incompatible with justice. When one actor dictates all the rules, everyone else suffers. Multipolarity ensures diverse voices are heard and balance is maintained.
The same logic applies domestically. When Gen Z sits out, we hand one side unipolar control. When we show up as an independent force, we create multipolarity. No coalition can ignore us. Both sides must compete for our votes, address our demands, fear our judgement. We become the swing vote. We tip the scales.
The deeper problem in these by-elections: we were not there. While we debated online whether voting matters, the old machinery scraped through by margins we could have erased. We gifted them unipolar power by absence.
Holding the government accountable
You cannot wall yourself off from politics and expect politics to leave you alone. You may opt out of the system, but the system does not opt out of you. Taxes rise. Deals get signed. Your future gets mortgaged. The only question is whether you are at the table or on the menu.
Strategic autonomy means engaging with institutions on your own terms, building power bases that cannot be bought or silenced. It means using digital tools not just to mobilise protests but to build lasting organisations and community structures that outlive a single hashtag. It means converting street power into negotiating power with clear demands and accountability mechanisms.
Boycotting every election forever is autarky. Building movements, fielding candidates, and holding any government accountable is strategic autonomy. It also means refusing capture from all sides. Old elites use “sovereignty” as cover for opaque deals with whoever asks the fewest questions about corruption. Strategic autonomy insists that sovereignty belongs to citizens, not politicians.
Our emotional stance right now is refusal. Refusal to be gaslit while friends are buried. Refusal to believe there are only two choices: blind loyalty to the regime or nostalgic loyalty to an opposition eating from the same plate. That refusal is raw political energy. The danger is confusing it with permanent exit. Letasio understood this. In his concession, he wrote: “Let us get ready early, let us organise, and let us build the leadership that reflects our hopes, not our fears.” He is preparing for 2027.
The Adani victory showed what is possible. The by-elections showed the cost of retreat. The streets have answered once. Now we must turn that answer into durable architecture. The question is not whether we will have anything to do with politics. It is whether we leave it in the hands of those who failed us, or organise our anger into institutions that make capture, foreign or domestic, much harder. There is no outside. The only way out is through.
The writer is a whistleblower, strategy consultant and startup mentor. www.nelsonamenya.com
