She squeezes into school uniforms, parades minor schoolgirls across social media, dances for TikTok clout and waves packs of sanitary pads around as though she is single-handedly rescuing Kenyan women from poverty. The internet calls her out over concerns about violating children’s privacy and reducing systemic gender issues to a circus for optics.
Yet she remains unfazed, plastering children across social media and dancing with them in uniform because, in the patronising minds of our political elite, a Woman Representative’s job begins and ends with handing out hygiene products and performing for cameras.
No policy proposals, economic empowerment or legislative fights against gender-based violence — just photo-ops.
We have entered the stomach-churning electoral season when the ruling class loses whatever sanity it had left and moves like street performers. Suddenly, men and women who haven’t left tinted, air-conditioned vehicles in four years are trekking through muddy informal settlements, cosplaying the harsh reality of ordinary citizens.
Watch them on the campaign trail. They throw up “ngumi mbwekse” (double fist) signs, contort their faces into forced street-tough expressions, speak Sheng they barely understand and pretend to know what it feels like to sleep on an empty stomach. It is performative cringe — a tragicomic theatre in which politicians abandon dignity not to serve citizens but to secure another five years in power.
Look at Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja. He saw a capital choking on uncollected garbage, overflowing sewers, broken services and gridlocked roads and decided the governance response was a podcast. Playing host and chief guest, he talks to his own reflection in a high-end studio, trying to look “cool” and attuned to Gen Z while Nairobians wade through neglect.
And check your local MP. The man who ignored your emails, skipped community meetings and blocked your calls for four years is suddenly at the neighbourhood kibanda, drinking cheap tea and acting like your lifelong brother. He sponsors football tournaments, buys liquor for unemployed youths and expects applause for three mandazis and a crisp Sh1,000 note.
Millions of educated, innovative and capable youths are locked out of economic opportunities, watching their potential rot while sending out unanswered job applications. Youth unemployment is not an abstract statistic; it is a daily, soul-crushing nightmare. For four and a half years, you do not exist to these politicians. You are invisible and disposable.
But when election season rolls around, the script flips. Suddenly, young people become a valuable political commodity. Your desperation is monetised, your hunger bribed with pocket change, and your energy harnessed to fuel rallies, act as bodyguards or cause chaos at rivals’ events. Then you are dumped back into unemployment until the next cycle.
This parade of cringe — the podcasts, school uniform, fake street lingo and forced camaraderie — is proof of collective power. They are humiliating themselves because the youth represent a demographic tsunami capable of wiping out entrenched careers. They are terrified of losing power, not acting from respect for you or your future. If millions of young Kenyans organise themselves, the political establishment in Kenya is dead on its feet.
The game only works if we remain passive spectators in our own disenfranchisement. Making memes about embarrassing politicians changes nothing in the real world.
Continuous Voter Registration is an active battleground for the soul of the country. Showing up in massive numbers to register as voters is the bare minimum against this circus.
Registering, however, is merely the baseline. We must move beyond choosing which old-guard politician gets to loot the public treasury next. The real structural shift happens when we stop being the audience and start becoming the leadership. It is time to be intentionally radical about taking political power by running for office at various levels.
The clowns have taken over the stage and turned our everyday misery into their personal comedy routine. You can keep buying tickets to their performance, or tear the tent down, clear out the circus and take the country back.
