Protesters picket along Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi on June 25, 2025 during the commemoration of the 2024 Gen-Z protests.
Niko Kadi! Something happened this week that Frantz Fanon would have recognised immediately, and not just as a good sign.
Over 600 young Kenyans showed up in Kasarani to register as voters in a single day, driven there not by an IEBC press release but by a social media challenge called Niko Kadi.
Couples are treating it as a date. Students are asking each other before anything else: are you registered? For a generation that stormed Parliament in June 2024 and bled for it, choosing to now fight at the ballot is a form of political maturity that deserves to be taken seriously.
But Fanon's warning in his book, The Wretched of the Earth, is not about whether the conscious ones are ready. His concern is about who is organising the ones who have not made any real progress along the road of knowledge.
The Gen Z that took to the streets in 2024 did so with a clarity about power that previous generations of Kenyan protesters never quite reached. They could name the comprador class, the local elite managing Kenya's poverty on behalf of foreign creditors.
They understood that the Finance Bill was not a budgeting error but a deliberate transfer of pain downward. That is a people waking up to their own political reality with great urgency.
Now look at the young man who accepted Sh2,000 and a baton to beat those same protesters on Moi Avenue last June. He was not from the political class.
He was from Mathare or Kibera or Korogocho. He is what Fanon calls the lumpen-proletariat. He describes them as the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminals, the prostitutes and the maids paid two pounds a month, all the helpless dregs of humanity who turn in circles between suicide and madness.
It’s not a moral judgment but rather a structural one. These are people that the economy was specifically designed to produce, pulled off the land and deposited at the edges of cities with nothing to sell except their bodies and their desperation.
With youth unemployment sitting at 67 per cent, Kenya has built an enormous reserve of exactly this formation. And the political class, which has far more money and far more practice than any protest movement, knows precisely how to reach them.
Gang leaders were paid between Sh500,000 and 1 million to deploy their members on June 25, 2025. The members themselves got Sh2,000 upfront and the right to loot.
The Law Society of Kenya called it the deliberate re-emergence of radicalised militia sponsored by the political class.
‘‘The oppressor, who never loses a chance of setting the natives against each other, will be extremely skilful in using that ignorance and incomprehension which are the weaknesses of the lumpen-proletariat. If this available reserve of human effort is not immediately organised by the forces of rebellion, it will find itself fighting as hired soldiers side by side with the colonial troops.’’ — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.109
What makes this possible is not the wickedness of the individual gang member. It is a consciousness that colonialism deliberately arrested and independence chose not to rehabilitate.
Fanon understood that colonial rule does not just extract wealth.
It interrupts political development across generations. The colonised person learns to obey, fear the chief, revere the pastor, follow the patron. That consciousness does not just disappear when the flag changes.
Fanon watched it survive independence across the continent and he called it rudimentary consciousness.
Colonialism maintained this suppression through its pensioned intermediaries. Chiefs, religious leaders, tribal authorities, all kept loyal at a ransom price, their positions secured, their children study abroad, in exchange for keeping the masses manageable.
In Kenya today those intermediaries are the MPs who fall silent after the Cabinet appointment, the clergy who pray at State House, the elders who counsel patience while the political class funding their events remains untouched. The mechanism is identical.
So when Niko Kadi trends, the real question it raises is not whether the registered voters will show up in 2027. The question is whether the movement is prepared to do the unglamorous work of reaching the Kenyans whose political consciousness has never been invited to evolve. Because the ballot only shifts power if the voter is not for sale by the time they cast it.
The lumpen-proletariat does not need to be the enemy of the Gen Z movement. Fanon's point is that they cannot afford to be strangers to it. Every Kenyan left politically unorganised by the forces of change is a Kenyan available to be organised by the forces that benefit from things staying exactly as they are.
Niko Kadi is a good start. A genuinely good start. But Fanon was writing his warning for movements that had already started well and still lost the plot because they underestimated this. Who will get to the wretched of the earth first?
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The writer is a whistleblower, strategy consultant, and a startup mentor, www.nelsonamenya.com
