Kenya’s youth protests reopen a future of possibility

republic of – In June 2024, Kenya’s President William Ruto withdrew a finance bill after more than a month of biweekly nationwide street protests led largely by Gen Z across all 47 counties—an upheaval later shadowed by police violence, including at least 65 extrajudicial e

In June 2024. Kenya’s President William Ruto announced that he was going to withdraw a finance bill that. via tax increases. would have pushed the cost of basic commodities even further out of reach. It wasn’t a gentle climb-down. His hand was forced by more than a month of biweekly street protests—led primarily by Gen Z—across most of Kenya’s 47 counties. in an event described as unparalleled in the country’s post-independence history.

Then the air changed. Police violence. including the extrajudicial execution of at least 65 people and the abduction of dozens of others. stymied the mobilisations that had briefly made the streets feel like a national conversation. Even so, the wake of those protests has remained. Landscapes—political. economic. ecological and social—were hit all at once by a watershed moment in Kenya’s history. and the article’s author writes that they will never be the same.

Kenya’s moment didn’t arrive alone. Madagascar, Morocco, Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, and Nigeria have each recently seen waves of protests with young people at the forefront. The author frames these movements as part of a current of change unlikely to be halted. a struggle that could only grow larger. But the tone shifts when the article takes aim at a particular story being told about African youth: the apocalyptic “youth bulge” discourse associated with Robert D. Kaplan’s 1994 warning—about “overpopulation”, war, and “anarchy” steered by ungovernable African youth.

For leaders from Nairobi to Dakar, Antananarivo, Dar es Salaam, and Rabat, the article suggests, the panic is not abstract. These movements directly challenge rule maintained through militarised violence—rule described as unwanted and thus illegitimate—and the youth governments have labeled a “bulge” are the same youth refusing to accept that framing.

That “bulge” narrative has been in motion since at least the early 2000s, capturing the attention of governments and organisations. It has helped generate programmes meant to turn the “bulge” into a “demographic dividend” that boosts economic growth—often with the aim of producing economic utility by youth for the state. rather than substantive citizenship stewarded by youth themselves.

The article points to how deeply the idea has travelled across institutions. From the African Union to the World Bank; from regional policymakers to European research institutions—this African demographic is cast as a bogeyman for crime and terrorism, uprisings, “illegal migration”, and war.

And yet the author doesn’t dismiss the underlying facts used to justify such fears. At least 70 per cent of the African population is under 30. and the World Bank projects that by 2050 one in three young persons in the world will be African. With Africa’s urbanisation rate the fastest in the world. much of that population will be living in cities where services struggle—or are often unwilling—to keep up.

That helps explain why the recent Gen Z mobilisations, the article argues, have taken on an urban valence. Young people are choosing city streets to assemble. yes—but the author also treats these spaces as places where “generation-specific broken promises” are most visible. The continent’s “Africa rising” narrative has promised futures that haven’t arrived. The dreams remain—rendered. in the article’s reference to Langston Hughes’s poem “dreams deferred”—alongside unemployment. food and housing insecurity. and mental and physical health inequities.

The proof of how those promises feel comes through the writing of Frank Njugi. a young contributor to a The Elephant symposium on “structural adjustment 2.0”. In the piece Njugi describes a childhood belief that the country might be rising alongside them. that newly opened eras would deliver inheritance. He writes that they recited futures “for the taking”—aspiring to become policy thinkers who would one day walk into ministries in crisp suits and speak a language of national renewal.

But. Njugi continues. “as we grew. so did the contradictions.” Leaders once recited “like catechism” later became architects—by action and by neglect—of a system defined by entrenched corruption. An elite “nested close to the state” grew wealthier while the rest of them watched the gulf widen through their teenage years in the 2010s. with textbooks still heavy with promise.

Natasha Muhanji. another young Kenyan writer quoted from The Elephant. puts it more bluntly: “Graduates enter an economy with no hands to hold them and are told that. soon. things will stabilize.” The article places those lines beside a catalogue of political language that has long demanded youth become productive—or else.

Across years of pronouncements by state and multilateral organisations. the consequence of not making African youth productive is framed as either turning youth into “dividends” or treating them as “time bombs” or “tsunamis”. The author says that, in those arenas, African youth are often offered only neoliberal promise or disaster.

So formal interventions are launched under the banner of “youth inclusion”. pushing young people toward being “agripreneurs”. “entrepreneurs”. and “self-employed hustlers”—even as the article stresses that many have no access to land or capital and face shrinking access to quality and affordable education. In those schemes. the author says. structural conditions are rarely discussed—conditions that brought youth to a place where stability is promised later. but never honored.

The same logic can be seen in the article’s description of regional decarbonisation fora. It cites the Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change, emerging from heads of state discussions at the 2023 African Climate Summit. In the declaration. Africa’s “potential and ambition” are framed around being a vital component of the global solution—anchored to the idea that home to the world’s youngest and fastest-growing workforce. plus massive untapped renewable energy potential. abundant natural assets. and an entrepreneurial spirit. the continent can become a thriving. cost-competitive industrial hub supporting other regions’ net zero ambitions.

The author’s argument is that young people’s aspirations do not sit at the centre of these claims. Instead. the “green transition” continues to promote a “dividend” discourse that leverages the “youth bulge” as one more resource—“riches”—to be directed elsewhere rather than to young people’s becoming.

Kenya’s President William Ruto. also described as Chair of the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change. writes in a foreword to a recent report focused on a continental just transition that “Africa is bursting with possibilities and a vast endowment of natural resources.” He says the continent’s renewable energy potential is 50 times greater than the anticipated global electricity demand for the year 2040. He also writes that Africa has over 40% of the global reserves of key minerals for batteries and hydrogen technologies. and that the continent has the largest tracts of arable land and is young. with 70% of the people under 30 years of age.

Ruto’s foreword continues: “It is time to tap these riches to achieve the aspirations of the people.” He also writes that opportunity beckons for Africa to make this century the African Century. where economies leapfrog by harnessing clean energy resources. and where the continent can industrialize in a low carbon and sustainable manner. “leap into a future powered by Africa.”.

But the article insists again: in neither of these assertions are young people’s aspirations centered. Youth appear in the “African Century” narrative as fuel—important as a workforce—while the author argues that thoughts, embodiments, and other forms of becoming are treated as peripheral.

Still, the protests—especially in Kenya—show young people have other ideas about their location in the present and the shape of their tomorrows.

When Kenya experienced flooding in April 2024. shortly before the mobilisations against Ruto’s Finance Bill. the suffering was measured in deaths and displacement: deaths of over 200 people and the displacement of close to 60. 000. During that period. low-lying settlements in Nairobi—“slums” such as Mathare—saw households literally swept away. carrying everything from kith and kin to school books and uniforms. to shelter walls and gas stoves. The fast-moving flood currents, the article writes, were not selective.

Relief, the author says, didn’t come first. Weeks later, the government arrived to destroy houses that residents had rebuilt after the floods. Motivated ostensibly by the need to “protect” residents from further mercurial weather patterns. bulldozers tore down homes that sat in the path of the previous month’s flood waters.

The article connects that sequence directly to the politics that followed. Many of the young Mathare residents who later participated in the 2024 protests. it says. were motivated by the converging effects of anthropogenic climate change on neglected communities and by militarised abandonment that was supposedly responding to that phenomenon. In the article’s framing, these events were inseparable.

Grievances also sharpened with high food prices. The article links those prices to both IMF and World Bank debts and unpredictable weather. Water and electricity shortages became key flashpoints for the 2025 Gen Z protests in Madagascar. The author also places these realities inside a wider ecological argument: that all African countries where protests have taken place are ranked as “highly vulnerable” to climate change. even as Africa as a whole contributes less than four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Between droughts and famine. flooding and high temperatures. cyclones and desertification. shifting weather patterns compound corruption. the decline of services. and cost of living crises that keep bringing young people to the streets. Digital tools helped spread these protests, the article says—while stressing that their ecological dimensions are rarely foregrounded.

The piece closes not with a declaration of victory, but with uncertainty that still feels heavy. “As I write this in the spring of 2026. ” the author says. following the deepening of a fuel and cost of living crisis in Kenya. more protests are being organised. Outcomes from the 2024 and 2025 Gen Z uprisings remain inconclusive.

Yet their calls—breaking from business as usual. refraining from systemic violence that intersects with and prompts ecological pressures and creates “youth bulges”—are treated as seeds for other political. environmental. and economic tomorrows. That “republic of possibility” returns here through Njugi’s words.

It’s not the “African Century” described as instrumentalising this demographic. and the article rejects the alternatives often offered in advance: “tsunami” or “time bomb.” Instead. it suggests that in how these movements respond to the present—more people-centered articulations—young people may be pointing toward the possibility of something else.

“This could be our only chance,” the author writes.

The article was first published on 8 June 2026 in Green European Journal, Life Lines: Navigating Demographic Shifts, Vol 31.

Kenya William Ruto finance bill Gen Z protests street protests police violence extrajudicial execution Mathare flooding 2024 youth bulge demographic dividend Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change African Climate Summit 2023 structural adjustment 2.0 Frank Njugi Natasha Muhanji ecological futures Madagascar protests 2025