Heightened Political Consciousness: Why?

July 2025

Something has shifted in Kenya.

Of course, something has always been shifting – since independence. Here we are talking about the velocity of heightened political consciousness and agitation (HPCA). Velocity being a product of many things, the following are the key drivers:

1. The speed of the digital revolution (DG) – accelerates and amplifies narratives.
2. Literate digital generation (LDG) – they have a higher impatience quotient. They are the cyber warriors raised on the ‘click-next’ digital diet.
3. A universal constant called human greed and selfishness (HGS) – unquenchable thirst for power by both internal and external players.
4. Inbuilt human foibles and biases (HFB) – Performance evaluation, for example, occurs within a complex milieu of cognitive biases, felt experiences, political opportunism, socio-ethnic and economic orientations, etc.

Here is your basic ‘equation’: HPCA = DG+LDG+HGS+HFB.

We could add the 2010 Constitution and its enabling freedoms as the denominator.

It is through the above lenses that the current heightened political consciousness and agitation should be examined.

But there is something else: ambition, ability and ambience (used here to mean the context of political economy).

The scale of the president’s ambition is breathtaking, historic and overdue:

1. Health – Universal Health Coverage. Besides Rwanda and Ghana who have made big strides, no country in Africa has achieved UHC.
2. Education – Update the curriculum while ensuring sustainable financing.
3. Food – Subsidize agricultural production and value-addition to ensure food self-sufficiency, exports, and job creation.
4. Housing – Provide affordable housing while creating jobs.
5. Digitalization – Policy framework, infrastructure and skills
6. Hard Infrastructure – Including trunk roads (Mombasa to Nairobi to Mau Summit; Isiolo to Mandera; Lesseru to Nadapal onward to Juba), and rail (Suswa to Malaba); ports (Mombasa, Lamu, Kisumu upgrades); airports (JKIA upgrade being main one); Conference facilities (Bomas project); Sports stadia (Talanta Stadium being the flagship). The list is long.

All these, including many delicate but consequential policies and legislative initiatives (e.g. merging/dissolving and privatizing some parastatals; digitalizing public procurement), are being attempted ALL-AT-ONCE at a time of national debt repayment challenges, expectant public, unresolved political contests and grievances!

Finally, there are time and science-tested truisms and aphorisms:

• “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!” — Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline.
• “Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.” — James Belasco and Ralph Stayer in Teaching the Elephant to Dance.
• “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it” Jonathan Swift in The Examiner.
• “Promises of gain delayed amidst more pain, leads to a crisis of ” Anonymous
• Confirmation Bias – People seek information (whether factually false or not) that confirm how they feel.
• False Consensus Effect – People overestimate how many people share their conclusions. e. Wakenya wamesema…Wakenya wamekataa, etc…not based on scientific opinion polling.
• Availability Heuristic – People put more weight on information that is easily recalled, or that happened more recently. They ‘forget’ easily.

Lesson 1: The scale of ambition must match the capacity to deliver and communicate.

Lesson 2: Understand the context of delivery of promises, adjust the pacing and communicate convincingly.