Registering as voters is not enough, Gen Zs

Audio By Vocalize

Against every accusation of apathy, against every tired claim that we do not care, we have shown up. The queues at voter registration centres across the country, under the #NikoKadi campaign are long, growing and undeniable. We are doing what many before us did not expect us to do: Choosing to participate. And for a moment, it feels like that is enough. Get your voter’s card. Wait for 2027. It is not enough.

It feels like we are finally doing something that matters, and we are, but feeling like winning is not the same as winning. I say this as one of us, standing in the same lines, having the same conversations and feeling that same mix of hope, anger and urgency that has defined the past three years. We are in the middle of something far larger than voter registration.

We are forming our civic identity as a generation, not only deciding whether we will vote, but how we will engage power, how we will organise, and ultimately, whether we will win. Right now, we are winning the moment, but we can still lose to the system if we do not plug the holes in our boat.

The secret is in the numbers. We have sloganeered around it and proven it true. Yet, we must recognise that numbers must work within a system, and many numbers do not a voting bloc make. A crowd can be co-opted, split, exhausted and redirected at the last minute.

A voting bloc, on the other hand, cannot be dismantled so easily because it is coordinated, directed and has defined stakes in the game. Currently, our numbers are spread across the board, structurally unorganised and therefore closer to a crowd than a bloc. This is not a comfortable thing to admit, but it is a necessary one.

In our numbers, we have the posture of a wildcard in a stacked political deck. A wildcard, played well, changes the game intentionally. But without consolidated agenda or defined candidates, we are an unpredictable card that has not yet decided what game it is playing. We may be tempted to lean into that unpredictability, especially because it is appealing and it feels like power.

However, unpredictability favours established players, not disruptors. With close to 15 months to the general election, the window to build a candidate pipeline — recognition, ground networks, resource mobilisation, protection against elite pushback — is not wide. It is narrowing. The question of who we are backing and when we decide to back them has become urgent.

Ballot boxes

To win nationally, we will need to build a big tent. Gen Z alone cannot win a Kenyan general election. The demographics do not support it and neither does history. Power in this country has always been negotiated across generations, regions and classes. That negotiation is not a betrayal of the movement, rather, it signals maturity.

While we are exceptional at organising online, the ground is where movements are won or lost. Tweets do not guard ballot boxes. Memes do not consolidate votes. We will need to put more effort into polling agents, rural penetration, and consolidated ward-level presence. The infrastructure of winning is unglamorous, and we need to begin building it.

We are at a precipice not just politically, but generationally. The decisions made in the next 15 months will define not only who sits in office in 2027 but who we are as a political generation for the next two decades. Civic identities are not formed at the ballot. They are formed in the organising, the negotiating, the structuring that happens long before election day.

In the political calendar, a month is a very long time. However, in the grand scheme of politics, 15 months is a short time for us to build new wine skins and make new wine. We have already answered the question of whether we will show up. Now we must answer the harder one: Show up to do what, exactly?

-The writer is a governance and political analyst examining youth political behaviour, civic participation, and state–citizen dynamics