Kenya is building. The Rironi–Mau Summit highway is being widened, the Standard Gauge Railway is pushing towards Kisumu and Malaba, and affordable houses are going up in the name of ordinary Kenyans.
These projects promise movement, trade, jobs and homes. A question the cranes cannot answer is: what will those doing the building inherit when the work is done?
The generation that won independence and its successors may have misunderstood what independence was for. Independent Kenya expanded education, Africanised public institutions and built a nation.
Somewhere along the way, political independence came to stand in for economic emancipation. The doors of the State opened to Africans, but the economy did not open widely enough to those who would come after them. Kenya produced graduates but not owners, and employees who did not have a stake in the means of production.
The construction boom extends that pathology. Roads, railways and houses are presented as evidence of progress, but the old question of who owns what is built, who captures the wealth it generates, and what will be left for the next generation, still lingers.
A young Kenyan can help build a highway, lay the foundations of a railway or put up an affordable house and still lack the capital to buy land, establish a business or own a home. The infrastructure is necessary and the expenditure justified. But a country could build its physical infrastructure while leaving the economic inheritance of its youth in ruins.
The political system runs on youth votes, energy and anger, but rarely gives young people much say when power and resources are distributed. Youth are told to work hard, get educated, become entrepreneurs and embrace agriculture.
They take empowerment loans, learn digital skills and hustle. Kenya has turned the hustle into a national development philosophy. Yet jobs remain scarce, land is out of reach, and start-up capital is expensive. Lasting wealth remains concentrated in the hands that were there first.
Kenya has given its young people advice without ensuring that effort can be converted into assets. Poverty is also the absence of productive capacity, capital and economic power.
Construction jobs are real, but many last only as long as the project. A young person can spend months on a site without enough to buy land, start an enterprise or secure a home. Digital skills promise little when they lead only to an unpaid internship.
In the financial year to June 2026, the affordable housing programme spent Sh122.18 billion, while 1,836 units were completed and handed over, according to figures reported by the Controller of Budget. These figures expose the distance between spending and delivery. Construction activity is not a completed home, much less proof that workers leave with assets of their own.
A graduate at 23, applies for jobs and watches a few classmates disappear into banks, government offices and corporations while the majority remain outside. They survive through freelancing, driving taxis, riding motorcycles or selling smochas. They become “entrepreneurs” of last resort because the economy has run out of respectable words for unemployment. Some reach retirement age without ever having had formal employment.
Without a first job, wealth accumulation is delayed or never begins. There is no salary from which to save, contribute to a pension, build credit or benefit from compounding returns. By 55, a person may be asset-poor not through lack of effort, but because steady income remained out of reach for decades.
Generations were trained to qualify for jobs without asking who owned the payroll. A company can employ thousands while its capital and returns remain offshore. When its investment is withdrawn or relocated, jobs evaporate.
The generation now in its 50s, 60s and 70s occupied much of the commanding heights of Kenyan life, dominating politics, professions and business. Some acquired land, houses, pensions and influence; others did not.
The indictment is not that age assigns guilt or that every older Kenyan prospered. It is that those who controlled institutions and opportunity too often treated the next generation’s turn as something that could be postponed indefinitely.
Many young people now say old people are the enemy. Crude as the accusation sounds, it is not entirely unfounded. Political inheritance has become almost as powerful as economic inheritance. Some inherit land, others businesses; some inherit political networks — and others inherit nothing but advice.
The June 2024 protests exposed the political dimension of this inheritance. Young people refused to remain passive recipients of decisions made on their behalf and challenged the assumption that the State could dictate public participation and expect gratitude in return. Has government learnt to recognise this demand for agency, or merely acquired a more elaborate vocabulary of paternalism?
The youth do not want the State to disappear. They want the power to shape the country in which they must live — and to own a stake in the economy they are helping to build.
After more than six decades of independence, political freedom needs to be matched by a serious project to broaden economic ownership. The generation that inherited independence expanded opportunity, but presided over a settlement in which inherited names, networks and privilege could substitute for renewal.
The impatience of Kenya’s youth is not ingratitude. It is accumulated years spent qualifying, waiting, hustling and being told that the future belongs to them, while the assets that make a future secure remain beyond reach.
That is why the young say old people are the enemy — not because they are old but because, when their time came, they followed the wrong god home.
The writer is a board member of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; [email protected]
