The Mask is Off. Why Kenyan #GenZs are Rising Against a Regime Stuck in its Colonial Past
#GenZs Redefine Kenyan politics: Protests challenge Kenya’s outdated colonial governance model.
July 21, 2025
By Mwalimu Mutemi wa Kiama
This Is Africa
A storm is sweeping through Kenya, and it is not the work of shadowy conspirators in dark, smoky backrooms. It is a reckoning long overdue — a rupture in the facade of a system that has ruled through brutal coercion, cooption, ethnic manipulation, and performative democracy since the advent of colonialism. Kenya’s #GenZ uprising that has taken root in the last one year, culminating in the events of recent weeks, is not just to protest finance bills but a national awakening, a rupture with the past. Mu people the Gīkūyū call it “ituīka”, which brings to mind the image of a landslide, a severing of an entire hillside or mountain hitherto standing tall and proud. Mapinduzi. It is the loud, collective refusal of a generation that sees everything clearly — and is no longer afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes!
For decades, the Kenyan state has operated under a thin democratic veil, disguising its violent, extractive roots. Borrowing heavily from its colonial predecessor, the post-independence state has (dis)functioned not as a servant of the people, but as a nyapara (colonial overseer) and gatekeeper for compandor elites — administering resources upward, and repression downward. The civil service, the police force (service?), and even education and infrastructure have been organized around the principle of control, not care. To extract.
This is not just about President Ruto or any single administration. The #GenZ protests are confronting something deeper: the continuity of a colonial governance model that has mutated, adapted, but never transformed. “KANU will rule for 100 years after Moi”, someone opined during the struggle for multipartyism in the 1990s. The British may have left, but their tools of domination — manipulation of ethnicity, brute policing, and exclusionary economics — remain firmly in place, now in the hands of African elites. The Kenyan regime has refused to change its software. Worse still, it is trying to run outdated code in a country that has completely evolved. A totally different demographic. It’s akin to running a modern computer using Windows 3.11 or Mac OS 1.
We are no longer in the Kenya of the ‘80s or ‘90s Mr. Ruto! Today’s Kenyan population is overwhelmingly young, urbanized, digitally connected, and fiercely literate in civic & political language. #GenZs doesn’t just read the Constitution — they code it. They livestream it. They dissect legislation on TikTok. They organize protests on X spaces and then go out into the streets with poetry, placards, water, phones, flags, and power. They are not loyal to tribal chiefs or regional kingpins either. Their identity is not beholden to where they were born, but to what they believe in, and what they firmly believe is that the status quo has failed — utterly and completely.
Yet this regime behaves as if it’s still operating in the single-party era, where silence was safety, and dissent meant death. The tactics of teargas, abductions, and extrajudicial killings might have worked in the Kenyatta 1 and Moi eras, but they are tone-deaf and self-defeating today. A smartphone is now more powerful than a VoK/KBC propaganda broadcast beginning with “mtukufu rais…”. A 20-year-old with a data of Wi-Fi connection can out-message a government with a billion-shilling PR budget. Ask Itumbi, this regime’s Goebbels. Brutality no longer breeds fear. It breeds fury. It breeds resoluteness.
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This new Kenyan generation has grown up watching their parents struggle under the weight of corruption, ethnic division, and economic betrayal. They have seen iconic opposition leaders turn into government apologists, seen once respected fiery reformers and human rights defenders, now seated at the table of the oppressor. The betrayal has been quite bipartisan, thankfully, making it easier for the #GenZ to clearly see the entire enemy landscape. Both government and opposition politicians have recycled the same promises, the same lies, and made the same excuses, even while they eat and fatten themselves from the same trough. They realize that there is no messianic saviour in sight, that they are on their own, which is precisely what makes this a movement so powerful.
The movement is “leaderless” because it is led by everyone.
In this moment, it is crucial to understand that the #GenZ uprising is not a prelude to a crisis. It is the crisis. It is the state shedding the last remnants of democratic theatre and responding with the only tool it has ever trusted: violence. But it is also the public shedding its illusions — the myth that democracy exists because we hold regular elections, the myth that politicians represent the people, the myth that national unity is real unless it is tested.
As Author Sakwah Ongoma aptly put it: “We always live as brothers and sisters until politicians are asked to be accountable… Suddenly, we become Luhyas, Kikuyus, Luos, Kalenjins, Somalis…” This is the oldest trick in the colonial playbook — divide and rule. But, lo and behold, for the first time in living memory, that trick is failing. It’s kaput. Kwisha! Kenyan streets are filled with young Kenyans from all communities, all shades of economic backgrounds, chanting in unity, creating new songs of freedom, refusing to be fragmented.
And this is what scares the colonial regime.
For the first time since Kenya’s “independence”, there is a mass movement that cannot be bought, co-opted, or silenced. Not even by mass deaths. It is not driven by NGOs, political parties or tribal kingpins. It is not seeking political office or promising voters wheelbarrows or “empowerment” handouts. It is demanding something far more dangerous and nefarious: utu, dignity, truth, and accountability. And our politicians have no answer for it!
A Kenya police officer kicks a tear gas canister during protests in Nairobi against tax hikes on 25 June 2024. Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images
So the colonial state has responded the only way it knows how: with brute, unadulterated force. Unfortunately for it, each bullet fired and each abduction reveals its cluelessness and desperation. Each #GenZ killing peels back its mask. The “open recklessness” is not madness — it is strategy. As @0xChura put it on Twitter, the regime’s calculus has changed: it no longer needs consent, only submission. It is no longer invested in the myth of legitimacy, only the naked loyalty of its security forces.
But this is a fatal miscalculation.
What we are witnessing is not just protests — it is the dirge at the funeral of an era. The sun is setting (pun intended) on the generation of KANU scions who inherited their power from the British Empire, not through merit or service, but through betrayal of their people and proximity to the so-called founding fathers. They believed they could rule forever, recycling old slogans and weaponizing nostalgia and old hurts, real or imagined. But history has caught up with them. #GenZs are not beholden to the ghosts of independence heroes. They are seeking leaders who speak to their present reality — joblessness, indignity, injustice, and hopelessness.
The KANU-era style of governance — with its gatekeeping tribal elders and kingpins, its patriarchal arrogance, and its disdain for youth calling the “kids” — is dying. But like all dying monsters, it is violent in its death throes. The danger now is that in its desperation to cling to power, the regime may escalate its repression. Already, we have seen the bodies. The state has killed our young in broad daylight. Not in a dark, underground detention centre. Not in the shadows of Nyayo House and Nyati House. But in the open, in front of cameras, in the age of livestreams and hashtags. The revolution is being livestreamed.
And still, they keep coming. Like dust, they keep rising.
Still, #GenZ marches on. With placards made from manila paper. With hands raised high. With phone recording. With flags waving. With songs on their lips and courage in their chests. Because something irreversible has happened: the people are no longer afraid. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
This moment is historic not because of the finance bills, but because of the firewall that has been broken. A generation has finally realized that their voice matters — and that they are many. That they are powerful. That the people in power are a few scared, clueless lot. That no messianic saviour is coming — and so they must save each other or perish.
A Conclave?
Let the Kenyan political class take heed. The solutions of yesterday will not work. Conclaves, ethnic coalitions and alliances, and recycled opposition rhetoric are useless against a generation that demands nothing short of total transformation. #GenZs do not want to be “ruled” better — they want to be governed differently. With respect. With dignity. With purpose. They do not want a kinder slave master — they want their freedom.
And so the political elite have but one choice left: evolve or perish!
Message to the public, to civil society, to religious leaders, and to the diaspora watching from afar — know this: neutrality is complicity. If we do not stand with our young people in their hour of courage, we’ll have no moral authority left to claim patriotism. If our voices are not raised in defense of their right to protest, to live, to breathe, then we are siding with the tyrant.
Kenya is at a proverbial crossroads. One road leads back to repression, fear, arrested development, and economic servitude. The other births a new republic — one founded not on inherited trauma or elite pacts, but on utu, justice, truth, and dignity for all.
WaKenya Watahiri Heshima.
This is not just the funeral of an era; it is the birthing of something beautiful.
Mzalendo Mutemi wa Kiama is the Founder of Mzalendo Halisi Foundation and a Community Organizer with Kongamano La Mapinduzi Movement.
