Most Kenyans know something is wrong. Very few are allowed to say exactly what it is.
There is a story Kenyans were taught in school about Jomo Kenyatta — the fearless father of the nation, imprisoned by the British, released because of his people’s struggle, and handed the reins of a free country. The story is moving. It is also strategically incomplete. Because the part left out — the part that explains everything that has happened in Kenya since 1963 — is the part about who actually benefited from the version of independence that was delivered.
Kenyatta did not terrify the British. He was useful to them. The Lancaster House negotiations that determined what independent Kenya would look like happened while Kenyatta was still in detention — which should, if you think about it carefully, tell you something about how central he actually was to the resistance. The men and women who were central to the resistance — the Mau Mau fighters who operated in the forests of Mount Kenya, who were hanged, tortured, detained in pipeline camps, and buried without ceremony — those people were not at Lancaster House. They were not at the independence celebrations. They were being quietly pushed out of the story that was being written about their own war.
Dedan Kimathi was hanged in 1957. Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima spent decades petitioning for recognition. The Mau Mau were declared a criminal organization not by the British at the height of empire — but by the Kenyatta government after independence. The men and women who had fought hardest for this country were the first people the new government moved against. That is not an accident. That is a policy.
The Land That Was Never Returned
The single most important promise of the independence struggle was land. The land that British settlers had seized from African communities — the fertile highlands, the ranches, the farms — was the reason hundreds of thousands of people had been willing to fight and die. The expectation was clear: when the British left, the land would come back.
What actually happened is documented in land registry records, in parliamentary debates, in academic research that has been available for decades if anyone wanted to look. The best settler land was purchased through the Settlement Fund Trustee scheme — which meant the landless poor were being asked to buy back the land that had been stolen from their grandparents. And the allocation of that land was not managed equitably. The people with political connections — the people in and around the Kenyatta government — ended up with the best plots, the largest acreages, the most productive farms. By the time Kenyatta died in 1978, his family controlled land holdings in multiple counties that dwarfed what most Kenyan families could dream of owning in several generations combined.
This pattern did not stop with the first president. It became the operating logic of every administration that followed. Daniel arap Moi used land as a patronage tool for twenty-four years. Kibaki’s government faced land-related violence in 2007-2008 that killed over a thousand people and displaced hundreds of thousands — violence rooted directly in unresolved land grievances that went back to the Kenyatta era. Uhuru Kenyatta, whose family’s land wealth was itself a product of the original colonial-to-independence transition, presided over a National Land Commission that was regularly described by its own commissioners as undermined and underfunded. Ruto came from a different ethnic background but the same political class, and the land question remains exactly where it has been since 1963.
The Constitution That Changed Nothing Essential
In 2010, Kenyans voted overwhelmingly for a new constitution. The celebrations were genuine. The document is impressive — a bill of rights, a devolved system of government, independent commissions, a two-thirds gender rule, specific protections for marginalized communities. People who had spent years advocating for constitutional reform wept with relief. A country that had been governed by a document designed to concentrate executive power was now going to operate under one that spread power outward and downward.
And then the people who had always run Kenya started running Kenya under the new constitution. Devolution sent money to the counties. County governors used it to build personal political empires with the same techniques the national government had always used — patronage appointments, inflated tenders, opaque procurement. The IEBC, designed to deliver credible elections, became the institution at the center of Kenya’s most bitter and violent electoral disputes. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission became a place where files went to age. The two-thirds gender rule was never implemented despite multiple court orders demanding it.
A constitution is a set of instructions. What determines whether those instructions get followed is the power of the people insisting on compliance versus the power of those who benefit from ignoring it. In Kenya, the second group has always been stronger — not because Kenyans are weak, but because the system was built specifically to keep that group strong and every challenger fragmented and distracted by ethnic politics.
The Election Cycle That Costs Everything and Changes Nothing
Kenya spends billions on elections. Tens of billions of shillings — taxpayer money, borrowed money, donor money — go into the production of a process that is supposed to be the mechanism through which ordinary citizens hold power accountable. The 2017 election cycle alone cost over 40 billion shillings. The 2022 cycle was comparable. This is not money that produces hospitals or pays teachers. It is money that produces a government — and the government it produces is selected from a pool of candidates who have already been financially vetted by the people and networks that fund campaigns.
The math of Kenyan politics is brutal and simple. Running for a parliamentary seat costs between five and thirty million shillings in most constituencies. Running for a gubernatorial seat costs several times more. Running for president requires resources that are only accessible to people who are already deeply embedded in networks of wealth accumulation. This means that the person you vote for — regardless of which party they represent — has already been filtered through a financial process that guarantees they are not fundamentally opposed to the system that allowed them to accumulate the money to run. You get to choose between candidates who have already been approved by the people the system was built to protect.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is arithmetic. Follow the campaign funding, trace the post-election procurement contracts, and you will find the same names and networks rotating through positions of advantage across every administration. The voter’s job is to provide the legitimacy. The system’s job is to ensure that legitimacy does not translate into accountability.
The Farmer, the Teacher, the Doctor
Tea farmers in the highlands of Kenya produce one of the country’s most important export commodities. Their daily reality — the prices paid per kilogram, the cost of inputs, the quality of the roads to the factory, the transparency of the KTDA — is shaped entirely by political decisions made by people who do not farm. When those decisions consistently produce outcomes that keep smallholder farmers below a dignified income threshold while the processing and export margins accumulate elsewhere, that is not market forces. That is a policy choice.
Teachers in Kenya have been on strike more often than any public sector workers in the country’s history. The TSC negotiates, commits, delays, and fails to pay — repeatedly, predictably, across every administration. Meanwhile, the same government finds money for things that benefit the political class directly. The priorities are not hidden. They are written into every budget allocation. Education gets a percentage. The percentage is not enough. The people responsible for the percentage are the same people who send their own children to private schools and have never once depended on a public school to determine their family’s future.
Kenya’s medical brain drain is one of the most documented and least addressed problems in the country. Thousands of doctors and nurses trained at public expense have relocated to the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The reasons are well known: low pay, inadequate facilities, lack of equipment, poor working conditions. A government that is genuinely committed to keeping its health workforce would address these conditions urgently. Kenya’s government has known about this problem for two decades and has managed it, not solved it. Because the people who control the government use private hospitals, medical evacuations, and overseas treatment. The deterioration of public health infrastructure is an inconvenience for the poor and irrelevant to the rich. That is why it persists.
The Generation That Has to End This
The 2023 protests in Kenya were remarkable for what they were not. They were not organized around a political party. They were not organized around an ethnic community. They were not organized around a personality. Young Kenyans — the generation that grew up with smartphones and social media and a much clearer view of how other countries treat their citizens — organized around a grievance and a demand. They marched on parliament. They marched when they were shot at. They kept marching.
The Ruto government made concessions it had previously said were impossible. Cabinet members were fired. The Finance Bill that had ignited the protests was withdrawn. This did not fundamentally restructure Kenya’s political economy. But it proved something that the political class has always tried to obscure: the system is not invincible. When pressure is sustained, organized, and refuses to be absorbed into the existing party structures, it can produce outcomes that the system did not plan for. The 2023 protests were a beginning, not a conclusion.
The diaspora has a role to play that it has not yet played collectively. Remittances that currently function as a private substitute for public services could — in part — be redirected into civic infrastructure: accountability journalism, legal funds for land rights cases, organizational support for cross-ethnic movements. Diaspora Kenyans have resources and networks that can amplify pressure on the Kenyan state in international arenas. The question is whether that energy gets organized or remains a collection of individual generosity and individual nostalgia.
What Actually Needs to Happen
Kenya does not need a better politician. Kenya needs a fundamental reorganization of who benefits from the state and who pays for it. That reorganization will not come through a party, through an election, through a constitutional amendment, or through an appeal to the goodwill of people who have built their entire lives on the system as it currently functions. It will come through the kind of organized, sustained, cross-ethnic, cross-class pressure that makes the system too costly to maintain in its current form.
That means farmers in Kericho and farmers in Siaya recognizing that they are being managed by the same logic. It means teachers in Nairobi and teachers in Kakamega recognizing that their salary struggle is the same struggle. It means diaspora Kenyans in the United Kingdom, USA, Canada and in many other countries recognizing that the brain drain they are part of is not a personal story of ambition — it is a structural story of abandonment, and that the response to abandonment is not just individual escape but collective return of a different kind.
The system that was installed in 1963 — designed to serve colonial capital through a local managerial class, sustained through ethnic division, legitimized through regular elections, and insulated from challenge by the concentration of land and economic power — that system has had sixty years. It has produced the outcomes it was designed to produce. Changing those outcomes requires changing the system. Not managing it differently. Not reforming it at the edges. Ending it, and building something in its place that is actually accountable to the people who grow the food, teach the children, and treat the sick.
Kenya is not a poor country. It is a country that has been told it is poor by people who are paid to keep it that way. The first step toward anything better is refusing to believe that lie.
Share this article if you believe Kenya’s conversation about power and inequality needs to be louder. The system benefits from silence. Your share breaks that silence.
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