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Kenya is facing its second wave of austerity measures, dictated by international lenders, chiefly the IMF and the World Bank. It is a reality so stark that younger generations of Kenyans have been forced to accept the inevitability of the death of a standard life in adulthood, despite their academic qualifications and their best efforts at “hustling.” Young Kenyans, in particular, are not just mourning fiscal state pressure, but the reality that education is no longer a ladder but a one‑way street to arrested development.
For a generation defined by their resistance to a punitive Finance Bill and tax hikes, the loss of possibility is compounded by a haunting sense of déjà vu. History teaches them that they are reliving their parents’ traumas caused by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the 1990s, which dismantled the middle class and decimated social services. That grief is lodged in their DNA. These are the children of the retrenched, now facing the second coming of an old ghost.
The Kenya Kwanza ruling regime appropriated the word “hustle” and then gaslit a population that questioned corrupt practices as they engaged in systemic theft. This disenfranchised grief is what this series gives language.
In this “Fuliza Republic,” the economy is digital and predatory. To live under SAP 2.0 is to start every day in the negative with a text notification of a debt balance that must be cleared just to survive the next 24 hours. Technology has stripped the citizenry of dignity, replacing the social contract with short‑term survival loans and exploitative labour.
Today’s villains are bureaucratic and pervasive as a result of technological surveillance. The citizenry is entrapped in a hostile tax regime that offers no services in return, while the ruling class gaslights the public with the language of “hope and resilience.” But the younger generations are tired of being “strong” and prioritise mental health. They see resilience as the romanticisation of suffering in a country where pragmatism and survival entail shrinking the scope of one’s dreams.
Many in Kenya are approaching the “fuliza limit” and they are mourning the possibility of what could have been. They question the logic of trading state responsibility for private, high‑interest debt, and in their voices, we hear the loud demand for the right to a dignified life.
This particular stasis, the stalled mobility becomes the subject of a searching inquiry this April, as a series of writers take up the question of how a cohort so vividly aware of its own momentum finds itself so systematically thwarted. Natasha Muhanji and Akal Mohan open the proceedings by examining the Structural Adjustment Programs —those cyclical, punishing architectures of conditionality —and trace their lasting imprint on the Kenyan psyche—a kind of inherited exhaustion, passed down like a recessive trait. Elsewhere, Lewis-Miller Kaphira, Frank Njugi, Keith Angana, Ivan Mayabi, Kamau Wairuri, and Mwangi Githahu turn their attention to the frayed contract between the citizen and successive governments, exploring what it means to seek accountability from a state that has, again and again, rendered itself unaccountable. Together, they assemble a portrait of a people navigating the space between what was promised and what remains. Read the series here.
From The Elephant Desk.
