Lux Issue 11/12 features interviews and essays on the fight against fascism around the globe. Read more from India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, the U.K. and the U.S.
“Hustlers versus dynasty” was the unofficial tagline of William Ruto’s 2022 campaign for the Kenyan presidency. His opponent came from an established political family and he was here to represent a “hustler nation” of ordinary people trying to make it. He promised not to raise taxes and to confront crises of housing and food costs. Two years after his victory, he’s known as the “flying president” due to his penchant for foreign trips at the expense of domestic governance. As grain prices rise due to the war in Ukraine, and the fallout from the Covid pandemic continues, the country has sunk deeper into a cost of living crisis. The final straw for hundreds of thousands of Kenyans came in June. Ruto proposed a tax bill drafted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that had something for everyone to hate: increased taxes on bread, cooking oil, medicine, diapers, sanitary pads, and other basics, as well as phones, cameras, and other tools that ordinary people need to make a living.
“It’s not the people’s bill,” Wangui Kimari told me. Kimari is an organizer and academic who works with the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi and serves as an editor at the excellent online publication Africa Is a Country. Over recent months, she has been immersed in a veritable uprising as a cross-generational swath of her city has taken to the streets and been met with live bullets — 60 people have been killed — arrests, and now state kidnappings.
Criticisms of Ruto rarely take the form of left-versus-right — more often, they address his coziness with elites both foreign and domestic. Kimari told me “he’s really not that distinct from Trump right now,” citing his Zionism and his wife’s evangelical fundamentalism, which she has drawn on state funds to support. Ruto and Trump share a flashy authoritarianism that’s wrapped in a populist mythology.
Activists have recently confronted the administration with courage, as hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demand Ruto’s resignation, the withdrawal of the tax bill, and more. The protests peaked with an occupation of Parliament in June, and despite ruthless police violence organizers remain on the move. I spoke with Kimari about the growing movement.
Sarah Leonard I wanted to start by asking how you view the uprising from where you live in Nairobi.
Wangui Kimari I know lots of people who went, cross-class, cross-
religious, cross-ethnic, cross-generational demographics. And that certainly makes them unique because I hadn’t seen that before in protests that I had been to. And really, the scale of them was unprecedented. Even if, unfortunately, many people didn’t report on the numbers, I would say that there were at least a million people on the streets, especially on June 25.
Sometimes there’s that watershed moment and you’re not sure what causes it, even if there’s foundational organizing that took place.
SL Could you say a little bit more about the roots of the protest?
WK The running opinion is kind of: All of a sudden Gen Z gave a shit. But the protest has wide genealogies. I’m part of a social justice center called Mathare Social Justice Centre. At least since 2018 we’ve been organizing marches to stop police killings. Communities have been protesting for [clean and accessible] water since 2018. Social justice centers have been involved in citywide marches organized to demand various social justice interventions. It’s easy to mobilize people if you already know the people you’re mobilizing, if you already have an agenda, if they already trust your work, if they already know your work.
But people are also really aggrieved by the IMF. And so they’re like, this is the Mau Mau struggle [a resistance movement against the British colonizers in Kenya in the 1950s]. So this is another fight for our independence. The protests are also informed by struggles for multi-party democracy, which we had in the ‘90s, and in particular July 7, 1990 [when protesters across Kenya marched for free elections], which is called Saba Saba Day. So people say that if Saba Saba Day in 1990 was our second liberation [after decolonization], then this is our third liberation.
SL What do the people in the streets today need liberation from?
WK Young people want to belong in the country, but there’s nothing giving them belonging. They can’t get a job. Going to school is so much more expensive. So, for sure, the struggle of young people is at the forefront. Big organizations frame it as the discontent of the “youth bulge,” which is just bullshit. White people are not called a “youth bulge.” There was a time in the early 2000s when everyone was worried about whether the youth were going to be a bomb or a boon — so I see a reinvigoration of that discourse, but really the issue is that the country has not brought them along.
Then there’s also people who have had layers upon layers of violence done to them. There were some grandmothers in the protest on June 18 and June 25, who, after independence, never got land. And now the floods came and took their houses, and then the government said that to protect you we are going to prevent you from building [there] again. So now they’re literally living on the ruins of their homes.
But I think everyone saw themselves in this finance bill — it targeted every sphere of life. Health care — it was going to add 16 percent tax on different medicines. Young people are told, you need to be a entrepreneurs, so they’re like, okay, then let me use the digital sphere. But there was going to be an additional tax on phone credit, which is tied to internet access. So people are like: You don’t give me a job, I don’t have school, but then you’re going to tax my access to the internet as well. People whose land was going to be targeted with an additional levy were unhappy. People saw themselves in different ways in this finance bill and that was the entry point, but now it’s certainly gone beyond it.
SL If this was not a bill to benefit ordinary people, whose bill was it? Was it Ruto’s? The IMF’s?
WK If we were not building ridiculous expressways or having the second- highest-paid members of parliament in the region, if not the world, we could support our budget from our existing taxes. But because that budget that’s created in this government is not a budget for the people, then it has provisions where money is allocated to the wife of the vice president and all these ridiculous posts. And so people were not only pissed off that there are more taxes proposed by a government that came to power saying they wouldn’t add taxes, but the reality that they were being taxed to support really predatory expenses that had nothing to do with them, like the renovation of the deputy president’s house at 800 million Kenya shillings.
And so that really was quite enraging, but it wasn’t even written locally. I don’t think the IMF has ever denied writing this bill or sending the template for it. And the IMF, even in the recommendations they gave for increased taxes and increased revenue collection, indicated that this could cause unrest. It was never created for us — they were even taking money away from school lunches. Can you imagine?
SL Well, I’m American so I can imagine.
WK It’s very shameless.
SL The IMF may have written the bill, but Ruto is accusing activists of being under foreign influence — Russia, the Ford Foundation, and so forth.
WK It’s the most boring and obvious clapback when you are trying to deflect. It used to be used quite severely 10 years ago when civil society would be called “evil society” because their money was from foreign governments. It was a bid to delegitimize work that was questioning the government, even if it didn’t question [deeper] structures. [This time] it was a very lame delegitimizing tool which has absolutely no purchase because the protests were not just urban, they happened in at least 31 counties, and who is going to pay for two million people to be on the streets?
SL Politicians have also tried to discredit Gen Z protesters specifically.
WK One said after the June 18 protest that these kids left their parents’ home in Ubers and they have iPhones. At the same time, even if many people on the streets are middle class, they also are no longer blinded by this fake narrative of meritocracy, that they just have to work hard and get a job. They see that they will never in their lifetime be able to buy a house.
SL Ruto’s hustler identity seems ill-timed given these conditions.
WK Especially when the so-called hustlers are wearing $60,000 watches. There’s no reflexivity at all. And people were really disgusted by that reality, especially when these same people are saying we need to tighten our purses because it’s going to be a hard few years.
SL There have been a lot of media narratives celebrating the role of Twitter in the protests. This seems to happen every time there’s a big uprising involving young people, from Cairo to Ferguson. How important is it?
WK Of course Twitter plays a role in dissemination, but it can only work if there’s already a foundation of discontent. Of maybe 40 members of the Mathare Social Justice Centre, maybe two have an Twitter account; they were going because they already had organizing relationships. There was already political education happening. So Elon Musk should not take any credit for having a platform that is said to have delivered Kenyans to the streets. It’s Kenyans who delivered Kenyans to the street.
These conversations are happening on the radio, still. They’re happening when people meet. They’re happening in churches, universities, community halls, mostly away from X.
SL Are there influential personalities who’ve emerged online?
WK Of the people who are now quite influential, they were doing work. Lots of women and lots of young women including Muslim women, who are on the front lines. The demographics of the protest definitely tip towards women, I think because everything falls on their bodies. At the same time, it’s funny, the people who were sellouts were men. After one month, the men who were the most vocal online just got a small check from government forces and changed direction.
SL Could you talk about the risks these activists face? Police brutality has been relentless.
WK The police were never made for us. They are a force that were created even before Kenya was a country. The Imperial British East African Company got Kenya after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 divided up Africa, but when they started their operations, they just enrolled the police to guard their goods. It wasn’t for people. And I think we’ve continued on with that. Lots of foreign governments have given money so that Kenyan police can learn human rights and it’s never worked, and I don’t think it’s meant to work. In every human rights appraisal of Kenya, police are top violators now. They’ve been sent to Haiti and they’re just going to do the same thing they do to Kenyans. They’re even asking for more firepower right now. But they’re there to shore up governments that have no legitimacy in the face of people. They’re not there to function for us.
The ones who are doing the abductions are special forces who are kind of ghost police officers. They wear no uniform. They’re probably trained by the U.S., by Israel, and even the arms they’re using are different, that’s a whole different ball game.
SL In these protests, they’ve been so quick to shoot. How common is that?
WK Everyone is used to teargas and being beaten. But I need to say this use of live bullets was a little bit surprising. Partially probably bolstered by the fact that the president called us treasonous.
SL The occupation of Parliament was an extraordinary moment, especially in light of the similar occupation in Bangladesh, and the anti-democratic version that took place in the U.S. after Trump lost the 2020 election. How important do you think occupations of these government spaces are now, and what did it mean to people?
WK I would say that people were surprised that they got that far. But you don’t need to shoot someone in the head exploding their brains on the tarmac to stop it. [Police shot and killed at least three protesters.] And it remains a continuous rallying cry: Occupy State House [where the president lives] or occupy churches, or occupy Parliament, not always in a literal sense. You don’t need to live there, but you need to make sure that the politics that happen there are yours. At the same time, I think people just wanted the state to see their collective power. And that power is most explicit when you breach these so-called sacred institutions. The government had not been listening before.
SL During the Occupy movement in the U.S., we resisted creating a list of demands that could be easily satisfied or dismissed by those in power, and there was a lot of skepticism around dealing with politicians. How are Kenyans grappling with demands to articulate a positive vision should they manage to get Ruto out of office?
WK I think the question [of demands] is often put to young people in a very condescending way. We’ve started to plant the seeds for a new Kenya where everyone can live with dignity. We already have a constitution that can guide us, which is actually a really progressive instrument, and young people have continued to create new tools like apps where you can follow corruption scandals and learn how to recall your member of parliament.
One reason why young people didn’t want to meet with Ruto was they’d say, “We are leaderless.” If we meet, you’ll co-opt two random people and then they will be the face of our movement. Also many people are like, Why are we meeting you when you’re abducting us? One activist said, “Why are we going to political tables when there are young people on autopsy tables?”
SL What do you make of the idea that Kenyans are inspiring other protests, in Uganda and Nigeria, for example?
WK One other thing I like about this generation is that they’re more borderless than us, not just in the romantic way that the internet collapses borders, but like, Nigerian students are our students. Their struggles are our struggles. Ugandan struggles are our struggles. And I think the core inspiration, rather than particular strategies, has been courage. Everyone is giving each other courage for sure. I mean, Uganda — I can’t even imagine the last time that a protest not led by [politician and Afrobeat star] Bobi Wine has allowed for other people and demographics to emerge. Nigeria has the history of the #EndSARS protest, but that this [a new round of protests] occurred within a month of each other shows that they’re really supporting each other’s struggles and learning from each other, giving each other courage.
Sarah Leonard is editor in chief of Lux.
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