During President Daniel arap Moi’s Kenya of the 1980s, young people, especially university students, wanted dialogue with the government. But the government wasn’t interested in dialogue.
About 40 years later, the William Ruto government is calling for dialogue, which young people have rejected. A section of the opposition that loves to ride on boardroom deals, too, is undecided on dialogue.
The rejectionists demand immediate action to diffuse anger floating ominously across the land. The young rebels are educated, intelligent and focused on their cause. They want actions that will reconfigure public governance. They want accountability. They want corruption made a capital offence.
Theirs is patriotic rage. They want jobs and opportunities, which have not been priorities for the hubristic power elite. The youth are angry because they are alienated.
A month of demonstrations has illustrated their rage and the depth of their anger. They are ready to confront traditional political structures that favour a few at the expense of the majority.
But the demonstrations have also created another layer of anger: these are businesses that suffer huge financial losses every time goons infiltrate Gen Z ranks. Thousands of jobs are lost when businesses are vandalised. But the diversions have backfired. The anger of the youth could easily be the tipping point to anarchy.
Then there is the selfish anger of the political elite: They accuse the youth of disrupting their party. They have turned public offices into platforms of self-aggrandisement. Their tax-to-loot tendencies have inspired widespread public rage.
The inebriated political class is scouting for excuses to malign the righteous rage of Gen Z. They see foreign hands in the sprawling unrest. They have blamed the opposition, former President Uhuru Kenyatta, the Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin, the president of South Korea, the Illuminati and, lately, the Ford Foundation.
Meanwhile, the key message from the protests – demand for integrity and accountability in public governance – is largely ignored. Action is slow and half-hearted, largely calculated to buy time.
These layers of anger, floating freely across the land, have the potential to push Kenya off the cliff, unless necessary actions are taken, even as a genuine dialogue gear is engaged.
Behind the student’s clamour for dialogue in the 1980s were key issues that ranged from call for political plurality, release of political prisoners and rejection of neocolonialism, as reflected in the pervasive Western influences on the Moi regime.
It was treasonous to walk along Kipande Road, which then housed the Libyan Embassy. Across the road was Nyati House, which housed the Moi regime’s espionage and surveillance apparatus.
The location was within earshot of the University of Nairobi, home of radicalised young citizens. It was the citadel of anti-Moi intelligentsia.
These young people wanted dialogue with the Moi regime on pressing public concerns of the time. But Kariuki Chotora, a Moi loyalist from Nakuru, was reported saying if students wanted ‘dialogue’ to end campus unrest, then the government would have to give it to them. Since then chapati became ‘dialogue’.
The Moi autocracy was at its peak then, with one party – Kanu – controlling nearly every aspect of public life. Even private dreams, aspirations, toilet graffiti, Church sermons and education curricula, among others, were not spared the scrutiny of invasive leadership.
Political science was renamed government to accommodate ‘Nyayo philosophy’ in the school syllabus. Maendeleo ya Wanawake became a wing of the ruling Kenya National African Union. In 1990, Moi gave in when the pressure for change became unbearable.
Dialogue, now a maligned word, is back but in a different constitutional dispensation. In 2024, the second year of the Kenya Kwanza reign, and 14 years into the 2010 Constitution, dialogue is still being treated with suspicions.
Trust once lost is hard to regain. Yet Kenyans must talk to Kenyans to diffuse shades of anger to save the country from self-immolation.