#RejectFinanceBill2024: Kenya’s Gen-Zs, New Media, Actionable Civic Education, and Calls for Response-ability

• In Event: Civic Education in the Afrikan Context

Proposal

New media and digital spaces are emergent sites for actionable civic education and political activism for citizens demanding response-ability from political establishments and international actors. In particular, hashtag movements have become significant vehicles for new forms of education and world-making within gendered, racializing, oppressive, and dehumanizing systems and structures. From the recent student-led-protests in Bangladesh leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina; Kenya’s Gen-Zs push for #RejectFinanceBill2024 and demands for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to keep off the affairs of Kenya; Uganda’s youth agitating for accountability from its autocratic regime; Ghana’s protests for reforms, new media is emerging as a potent force demonstrating “heightened level of political awareness, organization, and engagement that has made them a powerful, political constituency” (Nyabola 2018, p. 97). With a focus on the intersections of new media, Kenya’s Gen-Zs, actionable civic education, and calls for response-ability, this paper turns to the recent ‘leaderless’ movement in Kenya; its goals and strategic actions mainly articulated through digital platforms.

The paper conceptualizes leaderless youth movements as a relational praxis of being; a collaborative and organic form of organizing that refuses conformity and bureaucratic order fomenting oppression. The leaderless protests primarily organized online via social platforms shook the political establishment ushering in new forms of digital activism, actionable civic education, and calls for political and fiscal response-ability in the country. Triggered by Kenya’s Finance Bill 2024 that Gen-Zs argued had largely been crafted to meet IMF’s loan conditionalities, and the wastefulness of President Ruto’s government, the Gen-Zs leaderless movement demonstrated how digital activism can open up spaces for organic, spontaneous, and actionable civic education within the country and in the diaspora on a country’s political and economic well-being. In addition, the movement illuminated how digital activism can be used as conduits for holding leaders (political) and the IMF to task. Conversely, the digital activism illuminated the power of different social media platforms in educating the masses in ethnic languages other than English—the language in which all governmental documents are written.


To that end, this paper seeks to illuminate the relevance and criticality of new media and digital spaces in (re)igniting and (re)awakening a different kind of actionable civic education by Kenya’s Gen-Zs. The paper draws on Nanjala Nyabola’s (2018) text “Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics” to excavate how Gen-Zs marshaled Kenyans across the country and in the diaspora to pressure the Kenya’s president to reject the IMF-backed draconian Finance Bill 2024, including suspending his entire cabinet. In addition, the paper utilizes data scraped from X (formally known as Twitter), Facebook, and TikTok to illustrate how the leaderless movement began to gain momentum and the role the movement played in the reawakening of political response-ability in Kenya.

Author

• Mariam Rashid, Vassar College