From protest to power: Lessons from Kenya’s Gen-Z revolt

First published at Zabalaza for Socialism.

On June 25, 2024, Kenya witnessed a rupture in its post-2002 political consensus. What began as resistance to the Finance Bill — a set of regressive taxes backed by the IMF and marketed as “fiscal reform” — rapidly escalated into a nationwide revolt. The initial mobilizations, led primarily by young people outside of formal party structures, coalesced around a rejection of the rising cost of living, state corruption, and elite impunity. Within days, the protests spread from Nairobi to other urban centers. That afternoon, demonstrators breached the parliamentary compound. Security forces responded with lethal force. Dozens were killed, while hundreds were abducted, detained without trial, or tortured. Though President William Ruto ultimately withdrew the bill, that concession did not resolve the deeper political crisis. By then, the protests had evolved into a broader denunciation of the state’s coercive apparatus and the hollowness of the country’s democratic institutions.

The movement’s most striking feature was its lack of centralized leadership and formal political affiliation. What emerged was a diffuse but politically conscious network of youth-led organizing, facilitated by digital platforms and animated by a rejection of generational exclusion — what one account called a politically conscious network of youth-led organizing. While the protests eventually subsided, they left behind a politicized public — particularly among Gen Z — more attuned to the contradictions of the neoliberal state and more willing to contest them.

Over the following year, commemorations — both online and offline — kept the movement’s memory alive, from digital tributes to local organizing. Then the atmosphere shifted in June 2025, on the cusp of the uprising’s one-year anniversary. On June 8, 2025, Albert Omondi Ojwang — teacher, blogger, community activist — was arrested during a small Eastlands protest. Less than a day later, he was found dead in police custody. Officials claimed suicide; leaked photographs and an independent autopsy pointing to blunt-force trauma suggested otherwise. His death reignited public anger and catalyzed new mass demonstrations. Protests broke out across Nairobi and Kisumu on June 9, quickly spreading to Mombasa, Eldoret, and other regional centers.

By June 25, 2025 — exactly one year after the original peak — Kenya’s streets were again filled with demonstrators. But the emphasis had shifted. Where the 2024 protests centered material grievance and constitutional appeals, the 2025 actions focused squarely on state violence and police impunity, and on the political class’s instrumentalization of “law and order.” The killing of at least sixteen more protesters hardened the confrontation between state and society. The cry was no longer just for reform, but against the legitimacy of the current political order.

Weeks later, on July 7, the annual Saba Saba rallies — commemorating the pro-democracy struggles of the 1990s — drew similarly massive turnouts. What began as a confrontation around tax and policing had become something broader: an open challenge to political authority. These successive waves suggest June 2024 was not an isolated episode but a foundational rupture. The state’s failure to contain or co-opt dissent has exposed the limits of its current modes of governance and foregrounded a new political subjectivity — one that refuses deferential politics and is no longer oriented toward the promises of a compromised political class.

Kenya now sits in unresolved tension. The question is no longer whether this generation will engage in politics, but on what terms, and with what organizational vision.

The long betrayal

The June 2024 protests did not appear spontaneously. They were the consequence of long-standing political and economic grievances shaping Kenya’s post-authoritarian trajectory since the end of Daniel arap Moi’s rule in 2002. The early optimism of the National Rainbow Coalition quickly gave way to disillusionment as the new elite reproduced old practices. The 2010 Constitution introduced an expansive legal framework — extended rights, devolution — yet left intact a centralized, extractive, elite-serving state.

William Ruto’s presidency crystallized this pattern. Elected on a populist “hustler nation” platform — purporting to represent the poor against dynastic elites and promising to shield ordinary Kenyans from externally imposed austerity — Ruto’s government pushed the 2024 Finance Bill, imposing sweeping new taxes and burdening the working class and the poor, a turn charted in analyses of the “hustler nation” project. The bill became a flashpoint not only for its material effects, but for what it symbolized: the consolidation of an unaccountable technocratic state.

The protests that followed were not simply about taxation. They reflected a broader rejection of a political order that has persistently failed to deliver on its promises — what many described as Kenya’s “third liberation” moment. Years of high youth unemployment, surging prices, decaying public services, and routine police violence created the sense that the post-2010 settlement had lost legitimacy. Compounding the frustration was the perception that formal political actors — opposition parties, traditional civil society — had been neutralized or co-opted, leaving few channels for meaningful participation.

What distinguished June 2024 was not only scale but method. Coordination happened through encrypted group chats, crowd-sourced posters, livestreams, even AirDrop networks — a pattern observed in accounts of the digital infrastructure of the protests. Protesters used constitutional language and legal argumentation to justify their actions even as they doubted the state’s willingness to honor the very framework they invoked.

In that sense, June marked a rupture: a generational verdict on post-liberal governance. Rather than engage the substance of the critique, the state combined symbolic gestures with violent repression. But the anger — rooted in structural exclusion — was not easily pacified. The crisis was not about a single policy but the legitimacy of the post-2002 political compact.

Between spontaneity and strategy

One defining feature of the protest cycle has been the absence of formal leadership. The 2024 wave was coordinated through decentralized, online networks with no single figurehead. Horizontal organization helped prevent co-optation and facilitated rapid mobilization — but it also left fewer avenues for strategic consolidation.

This dynamic was clearest in the 2025 commemorations. Demonstrations erupted rapidly in response to Ojwang’s death, mobilizing thousands without centralized coordination. Yet as the state retaliated, the question of “what next” remained open. Without organizing infrastructure or mass political vehicles beyond the NGOs and parties of the status quo, the energy of revolt risked dissipating — or being metabolized by the very elites it rejected.

There is a deeper strategic problem here. The movement has repeatedly shown it can mobilize on short notice. But it lacks institutions capable of translating spontaneous refusal into durable counter-power. That gap reflects both the heterogeneity of the uprising and the political education of a generation whose experience has been one of betrayal: party manifestos promising change, elections shuffling elites, and austerity wrapped in “reform.” The suspicion toward formal politics is grounded in lived reality.

Left unaddressed, though, that suspicion can curdle into anti-politics. When all representation is read as co-optation and ideology as manipulation, movements become vulnerable to burnout, fragmentation, and moralism. Worse, the field is left open for counter-mobilization by actors willing to mimic the aesthetic of rebellion while defending hierarchy. Kenya has already seen versions of this: state-aligned personalities adopting the idiom of dissent, and elements of the political class repackaging Gen Z rhetoric. Neoliberal governance excels at neutralizing critique not by censorship, but by simulation.

None of this diminishes the protests’ achievements. The 2024–25 cycle marked a profound shift in Kenyan political life. But sustaining that rupture demands more than defiance. It demands organization. Socialist politics has a particular responsibility here — not to discipline the movement into doctrinal conformity, but to help build infrastructures that retain its energy and articulate alternative futures.

This tension — between mass mobilization and political organization — has shaped what scholars now call the “mass protest decade,” the global wave of uprisings since the 2008 crisis. Across contexts — from Tahrir to São Paulo, Gezi Park to Ferguson, #FeesMustFall to #EndSARS — youth-led movements assembled with startling speed, often online, disavowing parties, unions, and labels. Moral clarity was a strength; horizontalism a method; spontaneity an aesthetic. But these same features proved liabilities over time. As Jodi Dean, Vincent Bevins, Anton Jäger and others have argued, the absence of durable organizational forms left many uprisings vulnerable to co-optation, repression, or exhaustion. The results were often not democratic breakthroughs but authoritarian reassertion or elite recalibration. Kenya now faces its own version of this pattern.

The lesson is not that protest is futile — far from it. But protest alone cannot substitute for strategy, and strategy requires organization. The Gen Z uprising has shown that collective action is possible in an age of cynicism, surveillance, and digital fragmentation; that ordinary people can coordinate across ethnic, class, and regional divides to confront state violence. What it has not yet produced — through no failure of courage — is the political infrastructure to sustain that energy beyond the flashpoint.

This is the left’s structural dilemma. Many institutions that once served as vehicles for socialist strategy — mass parties, trade unions, anti-colonial movements — have been hollowed out, folded into elite pacts, or made irrelevant to a new generation. In their absence, politics retreats into the moral, the aesthetic, the algorithmic: movements rich in affect but poor in staying power. Yet this is also a moment of possibility. If the state now governs through optics and platforms, counter-power must navigate that terrain without being absorbed by it. Socialist politics today cannot mean merely resurrecting old forms. It must mean constructing new ones — experimental, participatory, strategically clear, grounded in contemporary life. It must offer not only resistance to neoliberal violence but credible alternatives to its empty promises.

Kenya’s protest cycle does not lack leaders so much as containers. It does not lack ideology so much as channels where ideology can be debated, clarified, and enacted. If socialism is to matter here, it must step into that gap — not as a disciplinarian, but as an enabler. It must build the structures — educational, organizational, cultural — through which defiance becomes direction.

Toward a political vision

The most striking feature of the past two years is not the absence of political energy but the absence of a political vehicle capable of cohering it. Across 2024 and 2025, protesters displayed courage, clarity, ingenuity. They defied ethnic patronage, bypassed hostile media, and overwhelmed police. What they lacked was not imagination, but infrastructure — a mass political instrument with ideological clarity and organizational capacity to absorb that energy and move it forward.

There is no mass socialist project in Kenya (or, for that matter, most of the continent) with such capacity. Much “progressive” politics remains confined to NGO networks or elite policy circles. These actors do crucial rights-defense and documentation work, but they are structurally constrained: donor-dependent, program-bound, often disconnected from mass rhythms. The mainstream opposition, meanwhile, offers little beyond revolving-door neoliberalism — shuffling elites without challenging the architecture of inequality.

What socialism could offer now is not another faction in a tired party system, but a horizon: a way to connect immediate crises — taxation, police brutality, unemployment, femicide — to the deeper structures of capitalist domination. The Finance Bill was not simply unpopular; it functioned to discipline the poor while securing external debt repayments to institutions like the IMF. Police impunity is not accidental; it guarantees an order that cannot govern by consent. The cost of sanitary pads, the lack of public housing, collapsing healthcare and education — these are not policy mishaps, but the predictable outcomes of a system designed to extract, exclude, and abandon.

A socialist horizon insists these problems are connected. They are not moral outrages to be condemned, but political facts to organize against. And that organizing must be class-based — not narrowly economic, but structural: locating a shared position of subordination that links the precarious graduate, the informal worker, the evicted tenant, and the survivor of gendered violence. In this sense, socialism offers not just critique but a unifying frame: democratize the economy, expand public services, revalue reproductive labor, and break the power of finance — domestic and international — over democratic life.

Horizons do not walk themselves into being. They require strategy. Here the Kenyan left faces a generational challenge. Discredited party politics, weakened labor formations, and a retreat of radical intellectual life have left few ready-made instruments. What exists must be built from near-scratch: small formations, popular-education networks, workers’ associations, housing cooperatives, student caucuses. This work is slow and rarely visible. It is also indispensable.

To meet the moment, socialists must organize beyond elite NGO circuits and technocratic forums. They must build structures that can hold contradiction, foster debate, and endure repression. That includes recovering suppressed political traditions — Pan-Africanism, liberation theology, African Marxism — not as nostalgia, but as tools for present struggle. It also means crafting programs legible to the vast majority living these injustices daily: concrete, winnable demands rooted in lived conditions.

Start where people are, not where we wish them to be. Socialist politics should not begin with tired twentieth-century slogans but with plainspoken language that names familiar struggles and proposes achievable fights. If it cannot speak to the price of unga, the shortage of hospital beds, or school fees, it will be dismissed as irrelevant. But if it can show, through action, that collective struggle produces material gains — and that those gains point toward a different kind of society — it can expand the horizon of the possible. The task is not to impose a blueprint but to cultivate a common-sense socialism: building power by building confidence, and building confidence by delivering results.

There are faint but important beginnings. The formation of a National People’s Council by the Social Justice Movement — announced at Mathare Social Justice Centre in August 2025 — presents itself as a grassroots alternative to the discredited political establishment, with a clear commitment to political education and mass organizing. Its “road-map” document is already public: the Road Map to People’s Revolution in Kenya. While in its infancy and lacking institutional weight, the council signals an important effort to consolidate protest energy into structure. Whether it can grow beyond its urban base and avoid isolation and sectarianism remains to be seen; but its emergence suggests movements are beginning to ask not only what they oppose, but what they want to build.

Alongside this are electoral stirrings like the Kenya Left Alliance, a coalition of social-justice movements that has signaled intentions to contest widely in the 2027 general election. such efforts can navigate electoral politics without reproducing the traps of co-optation remains unclear. But if they can combine electoral ambition with movement-based organizing, resist the gravitational pull of elite compromise, and remain accountable downward rather than upward, they may begin to chart the political alternative this moment demands.

The moral clarity of the youth uprising is not in doubt. But clarity alone is not power. The vitality of meme culture, digital irony, and “vibe politics” has exposed the cynicism of the Kenyan political class — captured in readings of Kenya’s recent “vibe shift” — but cannot displace it. A movement capable of naming injustice must also be capable of transforming it. For that, it needs more than critique. It needs a plan.