Millennials coming for Ruto’s lunch

Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna headlined Sunday’s Linda Mwananchi rally in the city he represents – a political homecoming of sorts. The interesting thing about the rally may not have been Sifuna but the generation he increasingly appears to represent.

For a politician who until last year was only Raila Odinga’s mouthpiece, Sifuna has acquired an audience, a constituency and a political narrative with remarkable speed. He is now bigger than himself; he is the generation behind him.

Sifuna is not simply asking voters to choose another politician. He is testing whether a generation that has spent most of its adult life voting for other people’s political projects is ready to build one of its own. He will be 45 in 2027, and is therefore not a youth candidate in the conventional Kenyan sense. He belongs to the generation that came of age while Kenya’s politics was still being run by elders.

Millennials – broadly the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s – were educated to inherit the country. They acquired the qualifications, entered the professions, built businesses and raised families. They repeatedly heard that they were the leaders of tomorrow.

Tomorrow came, but the builders did not leave. Then Gen Z arrived and, rather inconveniently, refused to wait.

In 2016, Nnamdi Madichie and Margaret Nyakang’o examined demographic challenges in Kenya’s public service and identified an ageing workforce and the need for better recruitment, retention, succession planning and talent management. The implication was that institutions were not adequately preparing for the transfer of responsibility across generations.

2022 elections

Politics has been no better at succession. Research by the Consortium for Election Research and Advocacy makes the point brutally. In the 2022 elections, young people occupied 21.9 per cent of elective county assembly seats. At the Senate, their share fell to 8.5 per cent. In the National Assembly, it collapsed to 2.8 per cent. And 94.9 per cent of all elected young people were MCAs. It seems that the closer young people get to the centre of political power, the more completely they disappear. Kenya has therefore devised a peculiar form of political inclusion where the young may participate – as long they do not get too close to power.

The 2019 Census makes the generational imbalance even clearer. Nearly four in every 10 Kenyans were aged between 18 and 45 – the constituency from which Kenya’s next political leadership must eventually come. It is not a fringe constituency; it is, in fact, the country. And the Millennials within it are now entirely of voting age.

Millennials are now old enough to be running the institutions they entered as young professionals – as governors, Cabinet secretaries, MPs, senators and presidents. More importantly, they are old enough to ask why political leadership remains an extended family business of the older generations.

Gen Z refused to patiently wait in the queue. They looked at the queue and asked who had appointed the people at the front, then marched around it. The 2024 uprising was therefore more than a dispute over a Finance Bill. It was a generational revolt against the idea that young Kenyans must wait for political parties, elders or dynasties to give them permission to matter. Gen Z taught Kenya that the political establishment could be challenged, and reminded Millennials that they, too, had been waiting.

Millennials have the numbers, and they have grievances. What they have lacked until now is a political identity. For much of their adult lives, Millennials have been absorbed into other people’s political projects. They have been mobilised along ethnic, regional, ideological and personality lines. They have voted for older politicians who promised that their turn would come.

Political challenge

But what if they stopped waiting for their turn and began plotting to vote for their own generation?

Sifuna may or may not be the answer to Kenya’s presidential question. But he is an early expression of a generation finally coming for its inheritance. He represents something that has been largely absent from national politics: a serious political challenge coming from the generation that was supposed to inherit power but never quite received the keys.

The old political establishment may look at Sifuna’s age and see inexperience. His generation will look at it and see themselves being summoned for duty. For years, Kenya’s political class has used experience as a gate pass to power. But if experience has produced debt, unemployment, institutional decay and corruption while refusing to make room for successors, perhaps “experience” has become another word for a spent force.

If Millennials choose to behave like a political generation rather than as scattered voters in somebody else’s coalition, they have the numbers to produce the change they desire. The stone the builders rejected has grown up; it has a voter card, a family and a job or a business, and it pays taxes.

Gen Z took the microphone: the Millennials are coming for lunch – and they are bringing their own table.

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The writer is a board member of KHRC and writes in his individual capacity. @kwamchetsi; kwamchetsi@email.com.

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