Kenyan youths weigh the future
“They say that, ideally, emigration abroad is often a preserve of the misfits, the outliers, the mavericks, the adventurers, the renegades, and the fugitives…True or false?”
In Kenya, two major events defined the first half of 2018. On Tuesday March 6, Finance Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich wrote a letter to the IMF appealing for an extension on a US$ 1.5 billion Stand-by Credit Facility, and on Wednesday March 7th declared to the Senate Finance committee that the Kenyan government is broke, effectively putting Kenya back into an IMF austerity program. IMF-induced austerity measures are not new in Africa given their rampant use across West, East and Southern Africa in the 1990s.
Secondly, a month after that, in mid-April a major poll indicated that three out of every five youths or an estimated 10 million youths wish to leave Kenya. The study was conducted among 4000 respondents aged 15-24, by the British Council, and dubbed ‘Next Generation Kenya’.
“Three out of five youths or an estimated 10 million youths wish to leave Kenya”
These young souls, just like their counterparts across the continent from Angola and Zimbabwe to Uganda and even Mali, are increasingly aware that they live in a regressing nation defined by poverty-stricken communities, a cartel-ized economy and political dysfunction in which only a very tiny minority among them will eke a decent living, and they wish to try their luck elsewhere.
Is the grass really greener on the other side?
The report echoes a scary and sad phenomenon from barely twenty years ago when the first wave of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) instituted by-again the IMF-struck in the 1990s. The S.A.P. found majority of these current millennials as (then) young, spry souls thriving through the single-digit ages as either infants, babies, or toddlers who’d just started school. Their parents-who were mostly twenty something year olds then-had to soak in the negative effects of the SAPs and watch as the economic sustenance of the towns they lived in shrunk or collapsed.
Twenty years down the line and the Structural Adjustment Program II has hit landfall just as the government-bankrupted by unbelievable stealing-is trying to scrap together coins to keep the lights on and critical programs running. Meanwhile those children, are now walking into their mid and late twenties right in the middle of another economic meltdown precipitated by SAPs II; who said lighting doesn’t strike twice?
For these millennials, just like their uncles and parents two decades ago, are willing to flee abroad-in an eerily déjà vu moment-at a point where a combination of stalled upward mobility, a flailing labor market, a bandit economy and shrinking opportunity makes it virtually impossible for a young person to thrive in Kenya.
These kids believe that they belong here, in Kenya, but they have tacitly accepted-and rightly so-that a decent life is far harder to achieve here at home.
Unfortunately for these young souls-unlike their parents and elder siblings-they are trying to flee abroad in the midst of a rising global right-wing, fascist and nationalist pride that’s inspired racist attacks on immigrants in Europe, xenophobia is South Africa, religious tensions in as far as India and Australia, and tightening visa rules in nations like Canada, United States, and the UK.
Despite the allure of life abroad, it’s much easier to succeed at home given that you already have the advantage of language, social networks, local education, as well as a geographical and ethnic familiarity. This staggering numbers of the country’s youth wishing to flee abroad portrays a nation overwhelmed by a warp-speed downward spiral into economic despondency and risking a ruptured social system just as the young, brilliant, potential industry pioneers head abroad for what’s potentially greener pastures.
The more hopeful dynamic in this mess is the fact that most of these young people, still have a strong sense of pride in Kenya, with 91% of respondents to a national survey saying they love their country, and 86% agreeing that both the heritage and identity are important to them, even though their country hasn't shown them any love and more importantly, economic opportunity.
Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat.
These youths just like majority of their continental counterparts see nationality as their strongest source of identity, ahead of family, religion and even ethnicity. The tragedy of being scorned by their primary identity (patriotism) partly explains their current imposed rootlessness. Based on contemporary accounts, it appears that the emigration craze of the late 1990s was obviously less intense and under far much more tolerable immigration dynamics and far less hostilities, than today’s.
In the 1990s, a fair share of those locked out of the economic machine could move back to the rural communities where life was cheap and in the villages where it was perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any home. The largely non-monetized rural life allowed many young folks to escape the harsh economic realities through opting out of the monetized financial systems embedded in the urban centres.
However since 2003, the rise of the rural modernity powered by the motorbike transportation and the mobile money transfer platforms, has monetized rural life bringing with them the modern sensibilities of individualized existence, mass social and cultural dislocation, collapse of communal existences, erosion of social virtues, and the increase in rural poverty.
This economic distress has fed into an already existing generational tension in the country, reflected in the recent millennial conversations in which the young feel that the older generations are playing entitled gatekeepers, who horde dreams, with no sense of generational thinking and whose lives are defined by narrow, selfish careerist ambitions.
The least one can deduce is that these kids are decrying and pushing back at this erosion of opportunities and gate keeping, that's done by those who should know better. Thankfully many of them are using their online voices to push back against these issues key among them corruption, violence, rampant insecurity and unemployment.
“If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.” ”
One can’t help but sense the psychic pain of these young souls on one hand and on the other hand applaud the fact that although they might want to leave the nation, given their energy, talent, youthful spirit and ingenuity these youths are willing to fight to create a meaningful life, equitable society, and achieve the social marks of adulthood.
Meanwhile, a sizeable number of Kenyan millennials abroad, well attuned to the rising voices of youthful self-determination back at home, are heading to the air terminuses of overseas capitals on their way back to Nairobi well aware of the socioeconomic challenges that await them.
These Kenyan, Rwandan, Somalian, Nigerian and Ghanaian youths in the diaspora believe that Africa is rising; that Africa is the future. They know that their future and that of the world in many ways is here. For example, they see the rise of African music and fashion to the global stage as indication of what is happening here and they are risking their comfort to come back home and be part of this movement.
Their hopes are backed by the number of global (IBM. Google, McDonalds) conglomerates who are setting up offices in Nairobi, Kigali and Lagos. These diaspora youths are fully convinced that they have come of age and it’s time to step up and guide their countries into an equitable future. If these two sets of youths’ work hand in hand, our dreams will truly be realized. Here, in Kenya, and across Africa.
Darius Okolla is a writer and a social critic based in Nairobi, Kenya.