Journaling the GEN Z complete Protests

In an increasingly digitized public economy, Kenyans are the latest to leverage digital platforms to steer a social movement and have expanded the field of digital activism in innovative ways.
  
What began as social media users expressing their frustration by wielding the #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #RutoMustGo hashtags has evolved into one of the largest movements against corruption and poor governance in Kenyan history. Opinion polls as early as June 2023 revealed that 75 percent of Kenyans did not approve of the Finance Bill, giving the government a year’s notice to rework the bill. Economists also opposed it, as taxation on essential services for a population of which 40 percent live under the poverty line is typically ill-advised. Once the government blatantly defied public opinion and implemented it anyway, mass unrest was certain.
As the movement quickly gained momentum, generating over 600,000 impressions on X within the first week of protests, the Kenyan political class was clear in their belief that the online calls to action would yield no tangible results. David Ndii, the president’s economic advisor and a notorious rabble-rouser, mocked the Kenyan “keyboard warriors,” tweeting, “Politics is a contact sport. Digital activism is just wanking.” Other MPs joined Ndii’s taunting, like Karen Nyamu, who suggested TikTok users were joining the protests only for views. 
There is a glaring irony in Ndii jeering at social media users despite his own keyboard warrior origin story—beyond being a renowned economist, his long-standing criticism of corrupt Kenyan politicians gained him fame as a personality on Twitter (now X). At the height of his popularity, the current president of Kenya, William Ruto, was the deputy president under former President Uhuru Kenyatta, a regime infamous for its obsessive borrowing, rife corruption, and high cost of living. “Have you ever found anything positive with @WilliamSRuto?” one Twitter user asked Ndii in 2018, during one of Ndii’s many online rants. In response, Ndii tweeted, “@WilliamSRuto is a megalomaniac psychopath with no good needs, just an endless trail of death and destruction that will not end until he is stopped.”
Only six years later, Ndii willfully accepted a seat at the table to dine alongside the “psychopaths” he once criticized, like Ruto. Ndii represents an archetypal Kenyan bureaucrat that rivals rogue comic book villains akin to Batman’s Harvey Dent (a.k.a Two-Face)—the longer leaders enmesh themselves in the intoxicating power of national politicking, the easier it is to rationalize joining the same rigged system that enables corruption. This is far from fiction, however, and Ndii’s actions have real consequences. In his role as economic advisor, Ndii is one of the main masterminds behind the punitive IMF-backed Finance Bill, which increases taxation on basic goods and services, including cancer treatment and more—a dystopian future disproportionately affecting the poorest Kenyans, while these politicians continue their insatiable consumption as the second-highest-earning MPs per capita. 
The Kenyan government’s initial stance of underestimating the power of online mobilization was dubious. Digital activism is not new—the impact and reach of the Arab Spring protests relied on Twitter, due to social media’s ability to rapidly disseminate information globally, unlike traditional activism; the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising in the US marked a significant new era expanding our conception of digital protest, as visual platforms like Instagram took center stage. These protests showcased the impact of digital activism, leveraging the internet and social media as key platforms for mass mobilization and political action, setting the foundation for innovative means of digital activism in Kenya. As a result, when the Kenyan government provoked Kenyans to prove whether digital activism could truly work in the realm of crooked politics, keyboard warriors, myself included, swiftly used whatever tools or resources were at our disposal—including articles like this one—not because we had anything to prove to politicians, but for the sake of Kenya’s democratic future. 
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