The politics you claim to hate is the landlord of your life: Kenya’s expensive delusion of apolitical purity
The Mt Kenya Times 
BY Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
In the 2022 general election, only 64.77 percent of Kenya’s 22.1 million registered voters bothered to cast a ballot. That figure marked a sharp fall from 78 percent in 2017 and a steeper plunge from 86 percent in 2013. Among the youngest registered voters, the numbers were even more damning: barely four in ten of those aged 18 to 25 showed up. Over three million young Kenyans who had taken the trouble to register stayed home. This is not a minor statistical footnote. It is the measurable face of a national self-deception that has become almost fashionable: the loud, almost pious declaration that “I hate politics.”
That declaration is a lie told with a straight face, and the lie is costing us dearly.
Politics is not a distant theatre reserved for the loud men in suits and the women in colourful headscarves on campaign trail. Politics is the invisible architecture of everyday existence. It decides whether the road outside your gate is motorable or a seasonal swamp. It determines whether the hospital you rush to at midnight has drugs or only empty shelves and exhausted nurses. It sets the price of unga, the quality of the water that comes (or does not come) from your tap, the security of the land title your father left you, and the prospects of the child you are raising. When you declare politics dirty and therefore unworthy of your attention, you are not rising above the fray. You are simply handing the remote control of your life to whoever is willing to seize it.
The cognitive dissonance is almost artistic. A man will complain bitterly that “these politicians are thieves,” then refuse to vote, refuse to attend an essential civic meeting, refuse even to read a manifesto, and still expect the thieves to govern him with integrity. A woman will curse the state of public schools while teaching her children that politics is for the corrupt. An office worker will lament the high cost of living while treating the ballot as optional entertainment. The same person who navigates office politics with the cunning of a seasoned diplomat will claim that national politics is somehow beneath him. The hypocrisy is not subtle. It is loud, and it is lethal.
History has never been kind to societies that confuse disengagement with purity. In colonial Kenya, the refusal of many to engage with the emerging political structures of the time left the field open to those who later used power without restraint. After independence, the culture of silence and fear under one-party rule did not protect the ordinary citizen; it entrenched patronage networks that still choke public institutions today. The 2007–2008 post-election violence did not erupt because too many people voted. It erupted, in part, because too many had already surrendered the political process to ethnic entrepreneurs and power brokers who treated the nation as a private estate. The low turnout of 2022 did not produce cleaner politics. It produced a thinner mandate, a quieter public, and a thicker sense of impunity.
The correlation is not abstract. Research conducted in Nairobi has shown a strong positive relationship between political apathy and citizen quiescence the quiet acceptance of poor service delivery and public theft. When people stop participating, they also stop demanding. Hospitals remain under-equipped. Schools remain overcrowded. Youth unemployment continues to hover at levels that make a mockery of every campaign promise. Official figures put youth unemployment around 15 percent, but broader measures of joblessness and underemployment among those aged 15–34 climb far higher, into the ranges that breed despair. That despair does not remain private. It spills into the streets as protest, into criminal gangs as recruitment, into the digital space as rage without strategy. The 2024 Gen Z uprising was not the product of too much political engagement. It was the delayed explosion of a generation that had been told, for years, that politics was dirty and therefore best avoided until the dirt reached their own throats.
Consider the family dinner table. The same parents who warn their children against “getting involved in politics” will spend evenings arguing about county allocations, about who “ate” the bursary money, about the governor’s latest project that somehow never reaches their ward. The office is no different. Promotion, contracts, and even the allocation of parking spaces are negotiated through alliances, favours, and quiet deals. Business is politics by another name: licences, taxes, regulatory capture, access to credit. To claim that one can live outside politics while living inside these structures is to practise a refined form of self-deception. The politics you refuse to own will own you.
The irony is particularly sharp in a country that fought so hard for multiparty democracy. The generation that forced the repeal of Section 2A, that marched for the 2010 Constitution, that buried friends after 2007, did not do so, so that their children could treat the ballot as optional. Yet here we are: a nation that registers voters with enthusiasm and then stays home on election day, that fills social media with righteous anger and empties the polling stations of youthful energy. The result is a democracy that is formally intact and substantively hollowed out. Participation rankings have slipped. Trust in institutions continues to erode. Criminal networks are already being watched for their potential use in the next electoral cycle. These are not the symptoms of a healthy republic. They are the symptoms of a people who have decided that politics is someone else’s problem—until the bill arrives at their door.
There is no moral high ground in abstention when the cost of abstention is paid by the most vulnerable. The child in the overcrowded classroom, the patient in the understaffed clinic, the young graduate who cannot find work these are not abstract victims of “the system.” They are the direct consequences of a citizenry that has chosen convenience over responsibility. Politics will not pause because you find it distasteful. It will simply continue without you, and it will continue in ways that serve those who remain in the room.
The call, therefore, is not to romanticize politics or to pretend that every politician is a saint. It is to recognise that politics is the only language through which collective power is organised. If you hate the current dialect, then learn it, reshape it, contest it. Register. Vote. Organise. Demand accountability between elections, not only during campaigns. Support candidates who have records rather than slogans. Attend the baraza even when it is boring. Read the budget. Follow the money. Treat civic duty with the same seriousness you treat your family obligations and your professional ambitions, because the three are inseparable.
Kenyans have begun to shift. Recent registration drives have drawn large numbers of new voters, many of them young. That energy must not dissipate into another cycle of disillusionment. The alternative is clear and already visible: a politics that does you, repeatedly, efficiently, and without apology. The house does not become cleaner because the tenants refuse to clean it. It simply becomes dirtier, until the dirt is all that remains.
Get used to doing politics. Otherwise politics will continue doing you. Stay guided.
The writer is a social commentator
Similar Posts by The Mt Kenya Times:
- Kenyatta steps back — but never away
- Kenya’s public universities shut as lecturers’ strike enters sixth day
- When the mirror becomes a threat
- We did not fall yesterday. We are falling today
- Arteta commits to Arsenal until 2030
About the Author
