Kenya’s “Gen Z” protests have ignited again, with several major demonstrations taking place across the country over the past month. While the crowd at these protests is predominantly made up of young people, people of all ages have voiced their support and joined in the struggle, with some older protesters even referring to themselves as being part of “Gen Z”. It refers not just to when protesters were born, but to the circumstances under which a new wave of struggle was born.
Recent demonstrations represent a continuation of 2024’s #RejectFinanceBill protests, which aimed to scrap a draconian finance bill, sack president William Ruto, and shake off the IMF’s predatory control of the country’s finances. These protests brought out tens of thousands of primarily young Kenyans, with June 25 marking the largest street demonstrations in Kenya’s history. Thousands stormed the Kenyan Parliament Building. This pressure forced Ruto to withdraw the finance bill and dismiss nearly his whole cabinet.
Yet none of Ruto’s face-saving measures fundamentally changed the conditions that have been driving struggle. Since the finance bill protests, Kenya’s youth have taken to the streets repeatedly on a range of issues, including police brutality, extrajudicial killings, abductions of government critics, femicide, education reform, and poor conditions and lack of job placements for recent graduates in the fields of healthcare and education.
A recent survey found that more Kenyans are now concerned about state repression and violence than economic hardship. Nearly 160 cases of suspected extrajudicial killings and disappearances were reported across Kenya last year, according to the Kenya Human Rights Commission. People have been targeted for online speech criticizing President Ruto, with some facing abductions and torture for posting memes. On June 6, police abducted a blogger and former teacher, Albert Ojwang, over a post he made on X. He was found dead the next day. The police’s claim that he died of “self-inflicted wounds” was quickly disproven by an investigation showing that he was beaten to death in police custody.
Multiple days of protest in Nairobi followed Ojwang’s death, demanding accountability and an end to police brutality. Next came the anniversary of #RejectFinanceBill, with thousands protesting in cities across the country on June 25. Demands did not focus on the 2025 Finance Bill, but rather on justice for Albert Ojwang. At least 19 protesters were killed and about 400 injured. This added fuel to the country’s annual Saba Saba (Swahili for “7/7”) protests, which commemorate the July 7, 1990 demonstrations which helped establish multiparty democracy in Kenya after years of one-party rule. This year, Saba Saba protesters demanded Ruto’s resignation.
July 7 became this year’s deadliest day of protest in Kenya – at least 38 people have been killed and 130 injured after police opened fire on demonstrators and arrested more than 500 people. Kenya National Commission on Human Rights observed criminal gangs wielding weapons against protesters and collaborating with police during the protest. On July 9, President Ruto broke his silence to declare war on the protests, stating that police “should shoot [protesters’] legs so they break and they can go to hospital on their way to court.”
Understanding that the repression of protest itself has increasingly driven young people onto the streets, Ruto’s government attempted to cut across this by banning all live coverage of the protests, though this order was later revoked by judges. But this type of authoritarian media blackout can only hide so much from a generation who is witnessing the carnage firsthand and speaking about it online. Video of officers firing at point-blank range on 22-year-old mask vendor Boniface Kariuki at a June 17 protest has been shared widely across social media. Hundreds of mourners attended Kariuki’s funeral on July 11, including several mothers of those slain during the anti-tax bill protests. Fellow Gen Z protesters chanted anti-government slogans as they carried Kariuki’s coffin.
64% of Kenyans report being more afraid to join protests than they were in June 2024. But many feel they have no choice but to keep fighting. Some have prepared for protests by writing their own eulogies and posting them to their social media accounts, instructing their followers to notify their families and organize their burials in the event that they are murdered by the police for making their voices heard.
What is driving young Kenyans to directly confront the possibility of their own deaths and then choose to protest anyway? In a recent interview an unemployed 19-year-old in Nairobi reflected on the desperation which drove him and others to the streets: “I didn’t care if I died. We have no life as it is. There are no jobs, the cost of living is high, and Kenyans are really struggling.” Youth unemployment in Kenya sits at 67%. For those who have found work, about 85% are in the informal sector, making low and irregular incomes. State repression is an immediate concern, but the economy is not far behind.
New Opposition Attempts to Capitalize on Discontent
Recently a coalition of “former powerbrokers” has been cobbled together from six different political parties, calling itself the United Opposition. A cast of politicians who have themselves served in former administrations with blood on their hands are now pointing the finger at Ruto, demanding his resignation and impeachment for calling on police to shoot protesters. They’ve urged Kenyans to “take matters into their own hands”, engage in civil disobedience, and boycott Ruto’s administration.
The Gen Z protest movement has described itself as “leaderless, partyless and tribeless”, but a key lesson from recent struggles around the world is that such movements are never truly “leaderless”. In practice there is a de facto leadership: those who make the calls to action, or those who speak the most or the loudest. The fact that the leadership of the movement is not organized on a democratic basis makes for a less clear program, and also creates room for co-optation by those representing the interests of the capitalist class. Avoiding co-optation by forces like the United Opposition will require a much more organized approach, not simply declaring the movement “leaderless.” The best defense against co-optation is for the movement to democratically decide on what its demands and tactics should be, and what its decision-making structures and leadership should look like.
The danger of co-optation reared its head in August 2024, when Gen Z protesters attempted to organize “the mother of all mass protests” to oust the administration. Ruto cut across these plans by appointing four leading opposition figures to his new cabinet on the same day of the protest. Previous rounds of protest had taken on a national character, but the August 8 protest was confined to the capital Nairobi. Some young activists living on the coast explained that they did not protest that day because Ruto had brought politicians from their regions into the new cabinet, making them feel like “part of President William Ruto’s government.”
The Gen Z movement has taken great leaps forward in bridging ethnic divisions, mobilizing demonstrations across historically-divided regions. But six decades of politicians whipping up tribalism and the marginalization of various regions across the country cannot be undone so easily. On July 7 of this year, protests took place in just over a third of Kenya’s 47 counties, compared with 70% of counties that participated in the finance bill protests last year. Only a truly nationwide, organized mass movement will be capable of ousting not just Ruto, but the whole class of politicians who would replace him in his role as Kenya’s loyal servant of global finance capital. One “opposition” politician after the other has sought to prop up ethnic divisions to make the interests of the Kenyan working class appear hopelessly divided, then claim that they alone will defend the interests of a given group. These politicians do this to disguise the fundamental divide that exists between the super-rich and the ordinary Kenyans who are exploited for their benefit.
Building a nation-wide movement on the basis of what unites all Kenyans struggling to get by will require closer collaboration of workers and youth across regional and ethnic lines, as well as incorporation of existing workers’ organizations. Forums should be created for working people all across the country – protesters, members of trade unions and informal worker associations, feminist activists, farmers, and the unemployed – to discuss what issues are most pressing in their communities, share lessons from local struggles, and collectively decide what sort of demands and strategy can unite these struggles.
These democratic structures can form the basis of a new political party that genuinely represents the interests of working people across Kenya, not those of billionaires. Such a party would need to have robust grassroots participation that actively seeks to involve working class and poor Kenyans from all walks of life in its decision-making. Its work must be funded by working people, not businesses or NGOs which would seek to dictate the party’s program. Any elected officials within the party should take only the average wage of the workers they represent, and party members must have the right to recall any elected official. The problem isn’t political parties in and of themselves, but the fact that all the options on offer are wedded to the capitalist class, not just in Kenya but internationally.
Wider Struggle Needed
The last year has shown how effectively the anger and desperation of Kenyan youth can be mobilized into protest through decentralized calls on social media, and that the situation will not be resolved after a single protest, or even after a year of protests. But the energy of any given protest wave can only be sustained for so long, especially as repression continues to intensify. Protests rage for a few days or weeks and then lose steam. Protesters return to their daily routines, waiting for the next atrocity to spark another round of protests. A sustained movement will require more organization between these waves of protest, with a set of far-reaching demands to rally around, not just reactive ones.
A mass struggle must be waged for good jobs, better wages, free and high-quality healthcare and education for all, improved infrastructure and public transit, gender equality, LGBTQ liberation, and action to address climate change – just to name a few!
Beyond street protests, the movement needs to harness one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of working people: strike action. The capitalist profit-machine runs off of the labor of workers, and thus grinds to a halt when we walk off the job. A general strike of workers, both formally and informally employed, linked up with mobilizations of the unemployed, would mount tremendous pressure on the government to concede to the movement’s demands. It could also topple Ruto’s rule.
But in order to put an end to the state’s brutality once and for all and to truly secure a livable future for all Kenyans, demands must go beyond securing reforms and replacing Ruto. Kenya’s economy has been deliberately under-developed and destabilized through decades of colonization and its modern equivalent, the debt traps of capitalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund as well as from Chinese imperialism. Nearly two thirds of Kenya’s annual revenue is spent on interest payments on its debt. Public services have been slashed and national industries have been privatized to make interest payments, though these actions hardly make a dent as the overall national debt keeps ballooning. Any administration would face the same budget crisis as Ruto’s. What’s needed is to take a stand against all these parasitic capitalist lenders. The movement should demand for all foreign debts to be canceled, and for a reversal of all privatizations.
Financial institutions like the IMF are central to capitalism’s functioning. Removing their stranglehold on Kenya would require dismantling the global capitalist system as a whole and replacing it with a socialist system, run in the interests of working people not just in Kenya, but of workers worldwide. In the same way that a higher degree of organization is required to bridge the capitalists’ divide-and-rule tactics across Kenya, workers and young people need to organize struggle across national borders.
Not Just Kenya
In many ways, the situation facing the working class in various countries is becoming increasingly similar. As the rich get richer, the cost of living rises, infrastructure crumbles, and the earth’s climate grows more deadly, governments the world round have lost credibility. Capitalist politicians are increasingly relying on authoritarian measures to cling to power and maintain their economic system.
In the Ruto’s administration’s latest attempt to paralyze protests, one of Kenya’s most prominent human rights campaigners has been arrested on terror charges for participating in June’s protests. Similar attacks on the right to protest are taking place around the world. President Tinubu in Nigeria wants to make an example of the “Abuja 11” who are still awaiting trial for treason and other charges which carry a possible death sentence. Labour in Britain has moved to classify the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.
In the United States, Biden’s repression of pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses followed by Trump’s abductions of foreign students, including activists like Mahmoud Khalil, has produced a chilling effect on protest against the massacre in Gaza. But just as it has in Kenya, we’ve also seen heavy-handed repression encourage struggle in the US, when Trump’s attacks on immigrants and calling of the national guard to contain protests in LA led to the largest single day of protest in the country’s history.
This global crackdown on protest is the sign of a system in decay, not a show of strength. The ruling class has watched with dread as struggles in one country have inspired workers in others, such as last year when Kenya’s finance bill protests were followed by a wave of protest across the African continent. They are attempting to decisively crush class struggle wherever it emerges, to send the message that any resistance is futile. That is far from the case. But in order to finally put an end to imperialism and the exploitation that all workers suffer under the capitalist system, the mass struggles in Kenya and elsewhere need to be linked together with a clear revolutionary socialist program.
