The Kenyan youth is no longer just angry. He is boiling. Stewing. Simmering in the toxic broth of broken promises, inherited debt, and institutional betrayal. He walks around with his dreams packed in a polythene bag, not because plastic is back, but because hope is perishable. If revolutions had a fragrance, it would smell like sweat, frustration, and cheap chang’aa. We are in the endgame now. And the clock is not ticking – it’s sprinting.
Let us not delude ourselves. Kenya is not governed – it is supervised by economic vampires in Italian suits, pretending to understand policy while signing away the country’s future in high-end hotels funded by IMF loans. Our youth have become spectators in their own country, watching the few well-connected families share the national cake–no, scratch that – that-the national bakery, including the recipes and the ovens.
Unemployment in Kenya is a crisis that no press release can whitewash. According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, over 5.3 million youths are jobless. But don’t worry – the government says they’re “economically inactive”. You hear that? Inactive – as if they are a faulty remote. This phrase alone should be classified as hate speech against the future.
The streets are full of degree-holding beggars and diploma-holding hustlers selling socks, peanuts, and despair. Our universities are factories of frustration. We graduate them in gowns, parade them like trophies, and then offer them one job opening in the Ministry of Lies and Statistics with 8,400 applicants scrambling like vultures on a carcass.
But maybe we’re unfair. After all, the government tried. They gave us the Hustler Fund. A magnificent miracle of a loan that can’t buy you a full tank of fuel, but comes with a repayment deadline that would make the mafia blush. What a joke. Scratch that – what a tragedy performed as comedy.
Today’s youth can’t afford a wedding. Not because they don’t want love, but because even love in Kenya has been privatized. Dowry is now a tax. Relationships cost more than degrees. You fall in love, and you’re already in debt. The result? A generation of young men allergic to commitment and young women in relationships with sponsors whose arteries are one stroke away from freedom.
Meanwhile, in the ghettos and forgotten villages, dreams are dying faster than the moral compass of our leaders. Young boys are drowning in alcohol, their spirits crushed under the weight of generational poverty. Young girls are trading dignity for survival. It is not prostitution – it is economic realignment.
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You want to see hell? Visit Kariobangi, Mukuru, Mathare, or Kondele at night. It’s not dark because of the absence of light – it’s dark because hope has left the building. These areas are ticking grenades, and their pins have been halfway pulled by decades of marginalization and incompetence.
Let’s not kid ourselves – Kenya is not just corrupt. It is budgeted corruption. Every scandal has an allocation in the supplementary budget. Corruption is no longer theft; it is a department. It has uniform guards, board meetings, and annual retreats in Diani. Public theft is now so normalized that it qualifies for corporate sponsorship.
We are ruled by suits with Swiss accounts. They stage prayers at the State House, then leave to meet their cutmen for deals with Chinese debt merchants. They pray to God with one hand while signing away our ports with the other. And when they speak, they sound like ChatGPT trained by demons – empty words, big grammar, and zero empathy.
As youth grow angrier, the state grows more repressive. Police brutality has replaced youth policy. Tear gas is the new dialogue. Protesters are met not with answers but with bullets. The message is clear: Do not demand a future – inherit our failure and keep quiet.
What’s worse? We have normalized failure so deeply that the youth themselves believe their suffering is their fault. They blame their parents, their choices, their God – but not their government. That’s what sustained propaganda does. It converts victims into silent sufferers.
The education system? Oh, what a joke. CBC was implemented with the grace of a drunk giraffe. Kids are tested for 12 years, and then dumped into the streets like expired soda. The youth are not just unemployed – they are unemployable, trained for a world that exists only in outdated syllabi and ministry brochures.
Let’s talk money. The youth have none. Why? The top 1% of Kenyans control more than 50% of the country’s wealth. And our tax system is the ultimate joke – the poor are taxed to fund the lifestyle of their oppressors. It is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. You buy unga, you fund a billionaire’s next Range Rover.
But here’s the ticking bomb: Kenya’s median age is 19 years. That means the country is youthful – dangerously so. When the majority of the population has nothing to lose, the ruling class should sleep with one eye open. You can only push people so far before something gives.
Youths are now forming silent revolutions online. They speak in memes, tweet in sarcasm, and share trauma as content. But this is not just venting – it’s a storm brewing. And when it erupts, it will not be a protest. It will be an uprising – and it will be digital, physical, and spiritual.
Already, criminal gangs are replacing the government as sources of income. From Mombasa to Nairobi, from Kisumu to Eldoret, disenfranchised youth are turning to extortion, crime, and cyber fraud to survive. And why not? The state has shown them that lawfulness is punished, and criminality is rewarded with tenders.
We are a country where you can be jailed for stealing 3 eggs, but be elected after stealing 300 million. The youth have seen this – they’re not blind. They are just waiting for the right time to bite back. And trust me, when they do, it won’t be pretty. It will be biblical.
This government – if we can call it that – is not just incompetent. It is demonic. It smiles while it kills. It dances while it loots. It sings hymns while auctioning our nation. Its ministers are baptized in lies and confirmed in greed. And its president? He is a man who mistook a campaign for a coronation and now cannot distinguish between optics and governance.
Let’s stop pretending that things will get better. They won’t. Not under this regime. You cannot cure cancer with Panadol. You cannot reform termites – you fumigate them. Kenya needs fumigation. Deep, painful, and urgent. We need a leadership reboot. Not next election. Now.
The youth of Kenya are no longer seeds. They are landmines. Every corner of this country is a potential Sarajevo. And the next trigger could be another tax, another scandal, another botched promise. Our leaders are playing chess on a volcano, blindfolded.
The consequences? Civil unrest. Riots. Looting. Violence. An open war between the rich who stole and the poor who watched. And when that day comes – and it will – the very institutions we depend on will collapse under the weight of popular rage.
It won’t matter how many police the regime deploys. You cannot shoot your way out of economic collapse. You cannot tear gas despair. And you cannot detain hunger.
What we need is an emergency transition. A peaceful but radical reclamation of our nation. Not another election circus with recycled demons in new suits. No. We need new blood. Visionary, honest, and unafraid. We need leaders who live among the people, not above them.
Until that happens, the youth will continue to rot in silence. Their brains were wasted. Their potential is exported. Their bodies are imprisoned or buried too young. And the nation will continue to wobble, drunk on propaganda and debt.
And so, we must sound the alarm. Loudly. Because this government has failed. It cannot lead. It cannot govern. It cannot fix what it broke. And the cost of waiting is a civil explosion that will swallow everyone, including those currently laughing in boardrooms.
To the youth of Kenya: You are not lazy. You are not cursed. You are victims of a grand betrayal. But you are also the only hope we have left. Stand. Rise. Rebel – not with violence, but with vision. Because if you don’t, we will all perish in the smoke of apathy, just before the final bomb explodes. And when history asks what we did when Kenya burned, may your answer not be: “We were waiting.”