Cover Story
On The Tipping Point
Two months ago , what seemed to have been a spontaneous combustion of pentup fury sparked a fire in Kenya and for several weeks the refrain that rent the air was that ‘ Ruto must go ’ as he epitomizes the incompetence of the current administration .
The straw that broke the proverbial camel was the Finance Bill 2024 which sought to implement new punitive taxes that had become an onerous burden to the Kenyan public since the passing of the contentious Finance Bill 2023 .
The ensuing street demonstrations that rocked the country were historic in that they did not involve the doyen of opposition politics in Kenya , the contrarian ‘ Baba ’ who had led the initial demonstrations against the high cost of living .
The new sheriff in town was not a sleek charismatic politician who has lurched onto the grievances of the people and promised to take them to a new Nirvana but a horde of young people dubbed Gen- Zs who took up the mantle .
Interestingly the actor Harrison Ford had aptly described them as the new force of nature whom the world had let down , who are angry and organized and capable of making a difference and he called them a moral army .
Ford had warned that the best way to handle this new force is to get the hell out of their way but little did he know that the insidious force he so well described would
find expression on the Kenyan streets .
The Kenyan people had appealed to the legislature not to pass the bill but as had become characteristic on the Kenyan politics the legislature is not an independent institution but is beholden to the party whims and the president .
The legislature as expected since in Kenya they have always been a sell-out , ignored the people ’ s plea and went ahead and passed the bill and forwarded it to the president for the formal assent to make it into law .
The Kenyan youth had had enough and this group asked the veteran politicians to stay on the side as they marched in the capital and demanded that the politicians in power listen to them as the politicians were the ones systematically ruining their future .
What stood in sharp contrast with the business-as-usual Kenyan politics was that the demonstrations of these highly coordinated and tech savvy young people were leaderless , tribal-less and class-less and they engulfed all the main cities in Kenya .
In no time the political opportunists tried to hitch onto the apparently successful demonstrations but could not unravel the amorphous group that had as many spokesmen as there were young men and women with phones .
In fact , the one outstanding feature of these demonstrations was the sheer number of women on the streets and this was a new phenomenon in Kenya as young women are never usually seen as political activists .
What also stood out was the fact that demonstrations were issue based and unlike the Finance Bill 2023 where Senator Omtatah was the lone ranger seeking to assuage the tax burden on Kenyans , this time around the Gen-Zs lent their support .
These highly intelligent and eloquent demonstrators successfully engaged the media and prosecuted their case in the public domain so convincingly that the shocked political class looked like inexperienced dolts arguing against sheer logic .
Their protests had an ingenious angle to it in that rather than rail at a monolithic government these astute operators decided to vent their anger at the people directly responsible for their pain , their Members of Parliament .
Their argument was also flawless . They argued that the MPs are their direct representatives and therefore their primary duty in parliament is to aggregate their wishes and present them . They act on behalf of the people not on their own volition .
Those that voted yes for the bill , in total disregard of the people ’ s wishes , having been compromised by the executive and whipped into line by party hawks to pass the unpopular bill , were to be held
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