I’m sitting at Nairobi international airport, waiting to board a plane to Uganda, and thought I’d take this moment to just jot down a few final reflections on my 10 days or so in Kenya.
From a project visit perspective, it’s been as wonderful as ever. Visiting Norbert and the permaculture project down on the coast, and then having time at Spugeons Academy , and catching up with Kenyanito and co regarding IDAK and the achievements of its inaugural year. Project visits never fail to inspire and uplift – just seeing the incredible work, the passion of the team, the lives changed. And having those wonderful conversations of review, reflection and strategic thinking about the next steps – I always feel like I’m right where God wants me at those times.
But the other aspect of this trip, which has taken over so much of the conversation space (and rightly so), have been the protests. There was another day of protests on Tuesday across the country, and more are planned for today (thankfully my flight is early enough that the guy who drove me to the airport can get home safely before the roads are closed). The intensity of them doesn’t seem to be abating, and the fear factor that apparently was one of the strategies that President Ruto wanted to utilise through the actions of police and army doesn’t seem to be working.
Despite protestors being maimed and killed, still the numbers at the protests stays high. The people are going down there peacefully with nothing that could be mistaken as a weapon. They just want to make their point that justice is not being done, and they demand an alternative, fairer and better way.
It started with the finance bill, but it has gone beyond that now. It is now a protest against the President and the government in total. They want the President out, as he has been shown time and again to be untrustworthy, and not putting the interests of the people at the heart of what he is doing. And the president has been caught off guard – none of his tactics or assumptions are working.
This is not a protest where one ethnic group can be played off against another. Nor where one demographic can be played off against another. If he and his cronies try to hide unpalatable truths behind brush-stroke rhetoric, the highly knowledgeable protestors call them out, and send it viral on social media. Time and again folks have been commenting on just how insightful and knowledgeable the protestors are on every fine detail of the finance bill. Apparently the older generations are learning loads from the insights that the younger ones are sharing!
Ruto is trying to get things sorted and presumably save face in doing so. He has offered to meet a few of the genZ leaders in person and discuss their requests. They turned him down – they say that they have seen too many times how leadership corrupts, and so they are wanting to be non- hierarchical and leaderless. They have heard too many times how leaders in the past have been paid off, how power and money have been the downfall. So instead of agreeing to meet Ruto in person in a room, they have offered to meet him in a virtual space – on X, where all who want to can enter the same space and be part of the meeting (I confess, I have no idea how that works, but apparently it does!).
Their demands are clear. The first is that Ruto steps down, and then that all the MPs and government officials take substantial pay cuts so that more of the public money is used on the public. Apparently at the moment, about 46% of Kenyan public money is spent on salaries for government MPs and officials, leaving on 54% for the rest of the nation. They are calling for a cancellation of the land levy tax which was introduced recently and means that on average it would now take 135 years for someone to be able to pay off the levy on their land. They are calling for the restoration of school feeding programmes, and for all government officials to use public trains, planes and vehicles rather than private ones. And they are calling for all government officials with criminal records and integrity issues to be fired.
I don’t think that any of those demands are particularly outrageous. What is outrageous is the tactics that were allegedly being used on Tuesday to try and turn the peaceful protests into violent confrontations. According to various sources, thugs and rabble-rousers were hired by officials to go into the protests and start fights, carry out lootings, and generally cause trouble that could then be attributed to the protestors. However, the power of social media resulted in the real identity of these ‘goons’ (Kenyan term for thugs) being made known, and the officials who instigated the action being outed for their actions.
Who knows what will happen today and in the coming days. There is no indication that the protestors will back down unless their demands are met. The movement for change is now spreading to other generations, and is strongly backed by the church, which carries a lot of clout in this country. It is also being watched by other nations as well, with cries from people in those countries for similar actions to take place, so who knows what this could overflow into.
I do still feel strongly that a cancellation of the international debt should be a response by the global north. After all, it is the requirement for those debt repayments to be made that is part of the reason why Kenya, and other global south countries are in such dire financial straits. So we in the north definitely have a part to play in the cause of this in the first place, and this is not being reported due to the distraction of various elections! I'll be following up on this with the Debt Campaign organisation in UK as a little additional part that I can do. But this is more than just to do with finance now, and it will be interesting to see how and when this uprising reaches a satisfactory outcome (and what 'sateisfactory' amounts to).
But now, I have a plane to catch!
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