Let’s get one thing out of the way, Kenyan youth are not lazy, apathetic or uninterested in the country’s future. They are exhausted and if you listen closely not to politicians but to the murmurs in halls, the rants on TikTok, the sarcasm on X and the silence at IEBC registration centers you will hear a generation that hasn’t stopped caring. It has simply stopped believing.
Every election cycle, you will hear the same accusation, “Young people don’t vote. Young people don’t participate. Young people are too addicted to social media to engage in real politics.” But what these critiques fail to understand is that disengagement isn’t a sign of absence. It’s a sign of injury.
For two decades now, Kenya has been selling its youth a dream with one hand and snatching it away with the other. The betrayal has been so consistent, so unrelenting, that disengagement has become a defense mechanism.
When the government announces a new youth fund, a job initiative or a digital innovation hub, many don’t rush to celebrate. Not because it’s a bad thing but because they have seen this movie one too many times and it always ends the same way, applications that go nowhere, money that disappears, programs that collapse into scandal before the ink on the press release dries. A generation raised on election season promises has learned to watch leaders speak the way a mechanic watches a leaking engine, a stare with deep suspicion and zero shock when it fails again.
Disillusionment isn’t apathy. It’s the residue of promises broken long enough for hope to rot. Another thing people forget, the youth didn’t build the corrupt systems they are accused of “not participating” in. They inherited them. They inherited the bribe at every desk culture. They inherited the idea that success depends not on talent but on who you know. They inherited leaders who preach morality in the daytime but the latter in darkness.
When a young graduate watches someone with half their education and none of their qualifications get a job because they have a godfather in the system, you expect them to still appear enthusiastic about politics? When the same leaders mismanage billions meant for youth employment, what exactly should the youth be excited to vote for? Their disengagement is not from a lack of interest. It is from a lack of trust.
Kenya loves to parade the idea of youth inclusion. We appoint a 35 year old to a board and declare the youth represented. We choose a youthful MC for a rally and act like that translates into real power. At election time, politicians arrive on social media, suddenly fluent in Gen Z slang, swearing they are relatable. But none of this changes the simple truth. Young people are rarely invited to influence policy, shape budgets or question decisions. They are accessories and decorations and not decision makers.
The political class isn’t afraid of youth apathy it is afraid of youth power. Because youth power would demand a redistribution of opportunity, resources and truth. So instead, the system convinces them that they don’t matter. That their absence is because they don’t care. That politics is a grown man’s game. But the truth is Kenyan youth are tired of seats at the table that are only for show.
When a young person chooses not to vote, not to attend rallies or not to join a political party, it is not a sign of emptiness. It is a quiet protest. It is a refusal to validate a process that they know is stacked against them. Disengagement is not the collapse of political consciousness. It’s the evolution of political self respect.
Young Kenyans express their politics through digital activism, through satire, through art and through street protests when the stakes are high. They mobilize faster than any generation before them. They are deeply aware of governance failures. They simply refuse to invest emotionally in leaders who treat them as statistics and not citizens.
Kenya is on a dangerous ledge not because the youth are missing but because they are present and wounded. A generation that feels misrepresented will withdraw. A generation that feels betrayed will resist and a generation that feels invisible will stop participating altogether.
The danger is not youth apathy it is youth abandonment. If Kenya wants its youth back in politics, it must repair what broke them. Deliver promised opportunities. Punish corruption rather than recycle it. Let young people shape decisions not just decorate manifestos.
They are not asking for miracles. They are asking for honesty, dignity and a country that remembers it owes them a future. Kenyan youth are not apolitical. They are simply tired and they have every right to be.
