You are young at what seems to be the worst possible time. Five years ago, COVID-19 struck, and you watched your parents and older siblings struggle to survive financially. You learned that we live in a fickle world where a single calamity could erase gains made over years.
You have seen how everyone struggles when there is an illness in the family, because public healthcare in your country is in shambles, as is public education and public everything. Two years ago, during the Finance Bill protests, you paid attention to what people were saying, and you discovered that this has something to do with structural adjustment programs from the IMF, something called neoliberalism that you don’t quite understand yet. All you know is that when your parents were in school, their parents did not have the heavy burden that parents today have. That once upon a time, public institutions worked and people did not have to rely on exorbitant private schools and private hospitals and private insurance.
When the war in Ukraine started, you observed how that led to fuel shortages and a drastic rise in fuel prices in your country. You also saw how it led to a hike in the prices of fertilisers and wheat. You don’t yet completely understand how global supply chains work, but you now know that globalisation has created a dangerous butterfly effect where if one strategic country sneezes, the whole world will catch a cold.
For example, look at what is happening right now. Just because there is a war in the Middle East between Iran and Israel-USA, fuel prices in your country are up. Now you have to budget for an extra fifty shillings of fare daily for commuting to and from your job. Your personal budget was already strained, and now you don’t even have anything left for sherehe. You feel like you are no longer living. You are simply existing.
And now you can’t breathe. You are struggling with anxiety. You have tried guided meditation apps but they are not helping. You can’t stop thinking about the bleak future. The thought of starting a family scares you, scars you even. If you can’t even take care of yourself, how can you be expected to take care of children? You will never marry. But on the other hand, you keep thinking about how your parents already had children when they were your age. You are in your mid twenties, perhaps, having already lived a quarter of a century, but you barely feel like an adult. Or perhaps you are approaching thirty, and you still haven’t figured out life the way you thought you would have by now. Or you are fresh out of high school or campus, and the road ahead of you has so many forks but you don’t know which path to head towards. You might even be in your early thirties, with over a decade lost thanks to poor electoral choices by Kenyan voters.
As if things aren’t already bad, AI is here, and everyone has warned you that your job won’t exist five years from now. Do they know that this scares you? Do they know that there is nothing inspiring about knowing you now live in a world where humans are increasingly disposable, where labour as a factor of production is being made unnecessary? What happens when your skills cease to be necessary and you can’t find new work? How will you take care of yourself? How can you even imagine starting a family? How will you take care of your parents in their old age?
I will give you a quote from Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary Psychologist and thinker. He said, "Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it."
The problems that exist today are structural. They are artificial. These problems exist because the system is designed that way. Inequality is baked into the system. It is your responsibility to understand this system and dismantle it. Start reading. Read economics, find out how the economy works, the local economy and the global economy. Find out how globalisation works. Educate yourself on the long history of the underdevelopment of Africa. Is Africa truly free? You saw what happened to Venezuela’s President and Iran’s Supreme Leader – does that look like sovereignty? If it can happen to Iran, strong as it is, what does that say about the sovereignty of African countries like Kenya, especially the ones that have foreign military bases on their soil?
If you understand the way the system is set up, you might be able to do something about it. Two years ago, the youth of this country successfully blocked the passing of a Finance Bill full of poison clauses that came straight from the IMF. Had those laws been passed, your current situation would be even more precarious. That the youth, people in their twenties and thirties, were collectively able to stop it says something about the power you wield.
They say weak men create hard times, and hard times forge strong men who then create good times. Our leaders are weak men and women who could not control their destructive appetite for corruption. They binged on public resources and impoverished our country. That’s why they had to turn to external debtors. They binged on the debt too, and ultimately had to turn to the IMF which then gave them strict conditionalities like raising taxes, privatisation, and drastically reducing government support of education and healthcare. These weak men have created hard times. It is our mission as two generations (Gen Z, Millennials) to discover our mission and fulfil it. We have no choice but to become strong men and women forged by the fire of these hard times, and create good times for the generations that come after us. And to ensure we don’t end up creating future weak men who will undo our work, we must pass on the knowledge and lessons learned. If countries like China and India were successfully able to lift millions out of poverty and transform themselves into superpowers, countries that were in the third world with us fifty years ago, so can we.
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