How protests erode Kenya Kwanza's legitimacy and plan

Protestors barricade a section of the road during anti-government protests in Nakuru city on July 12, 2023. [Kipsang Joseph, Standard]

In politics, legitimacy is a currency. It allows losers of elections to accept to be governed by their competitors.

It also facilitates delegation of governing powers by voters to a specific set of public officers in-between elections. And perhaps most importantly, legitimacy lowers the cost of government through cultivation of implicit consent to government policies provided the processes through which they are achieved are themselves legitimate.

With that in mind, most reasonable people would agree that the ongoing protests are eroding the Kenya Kwanza administration’s legitimacy. While the origins of the protests were undoubtedly partisan and related to the 2022 elections, the content has long since morphed to include all manner of grievances – most prominently the cost-of-living crisis that is wreaking havoc to household budgets across the country.

The articulation of those grievances and the government’s apparent inability to signal that it is listening has resulted in a dynamic where more protests mean greater erosion of the administration’s legitimacy. To be clear, the cost-of-living crisis arose due to factors well beyond the control of the Kenya Kwanza administration. They inherited an economy already creaking under the weight of ten years of mismanagement and global shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, and monetary policy tightening in key economies.

As administration officials like to remind us, the crisis is not limited to Kenya. Yet it is also true that the administration should be doing better to address the grievances highlighted in the protests.

First, the cynical attempt to cast protesters as ethnic opposition vandals will not work. Kenyans are smart and know the grievances and their expression are national and not ethnic/partisan.

Second, the government cannot hope to resuscitate the economy without transparently squaring with the country on the exact details of the plan. Kenyans want to know the administration understands their pain, and that any sacrifices they are asked to make are a means to specific public-spirited ends.

As a country, we are entering a dangerous phase where the old ethnic census form of political mobilisation is dying, but the new transactional performance-based model is yet to congeal.

One hopes that our politicians, and especially senior members of the Kenya Kwanza administration know this. It is through that lens that they should seek to respond to ongoing street protests.

Otherwise, they might inadvertently shred the administration’s legitimacy and destroy any chance of achieving their campaign promises over the next four years.

The writer is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University