While Ruto stutters, unemployment threatens to fuel a youth revolution

The long queues wound several times across the sprawling compound of the Kenyatta International Convention Centre.

Thousands of desperate young Kenyans hoped they would cash in on the free money offered to anyone who would have their eyeballs scanned. And many would exchange what they considered meaningless personal data for some Sh7,000.

Many had been searching and waiting for jobs for years. The queues featured university graduates and form 4 leavers, and dropouts who were desperate for the money.

That was in August 2023, months after President William Ruto had weathered waves of opposition protests, resisting what he had termed a plot by the opposition to join his administration through the backdoor.

A year later, his administration would crumble under the weight of youth-led protests against contentious proposals to increase taxes, needing the Raila Odinga-led opposition to hold it up.

One of the young men who queued up on the day, who said he did not want his name disclosed for personal reasons, was a university student at the time. He had downloaded an application and earned two dollars (about Sh260) when his eyeball was scanned, claiming a dollar every week for seven weeks.

“I was after the money only to later realise that it couldn’t be withdrawn,” he said.

Alarmed by the long queues, politicians would oppose Worldcoin, owned by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as infringing on privacy rights, ignoring the deeper problem of unemployment that had led many young Kenyans into this desperation.

The politicians seemed less concerned about similar lines by Kenyans seeking jobs abroad in recruitment drives announced by Ruto’s administration as part of a strategy to shore up employment.

The queues were equally long last October, when the government announced that it had secured 8,000 jobs for Kenyans in Qatar, drawing the most interest from those seeking an escape from a country that had no jobs for them.

In the months that followed, some of them would tell a Senate committee that the government had scammed them into paying money to secure non-existent jobs, driving them deeper into desperation.

Before a hired crowd of cheerleaders, women ferried to offer an illusion of support for the ruling administration, Dr Ruto on Wednesday laid his frustrations about Kenya’s unemployment crisis bare.

Youth unemployment remained a challenge, he would admit, but he had not created the problem, which Ruto blamed on poor planning for previous jobs.

“Kwani vijana wote Kenya hii walikuwa na kazi kabla ya mimi kuwa rais? (Were all young Kenyans employed before I became president?” Ruto, evidently dejected, posed to a crowd in Nairobi’s Kilimani. “Hawa watu waache upuzi (These people should stop their nonsense).”

The President would go on to praise government initiatives he said had led to jobs for many young Kenyans, such as his controversial affordable housing project for which he had “paid a political price.”

Ruto bulldozed a housing tax through Parliament, which consumes 1.5 per cent of the gross incomes of salaried Kenyans, despite near-unanimous opposition. To popularise it among the masses, the 58-year-old President sought to pit unemployed Kenyans against those with jobs, claiming the latter were mostly driven by selfishness in their opposition to the housing tax.

On Wednesday, the President said the programme had created 320,000 jobs through 200 projects across the country, hiring “engineers, surveyors and architects”, among other skilled and unskilled labourers. A separate digital employment programme had produced 180,000 jobs, with 400,000 opportunities created in the diaspora market, Ruto said.

The reality of unemployment has been more stark during the deadly anti-government protests that have claimed nearly 60 lives since June 25, which are populated mostly by unemployed Kenyans, who, amid last year’s uprising, pushed back against policies that would have mostly hurt those with jobs.

Kelly Robert, who will graduate in October with a degree in Business Information Technology, also attended last year’s protests because he felt the “punitive taxes” Ruto introduced were “too much of a burden considering we’re already struggling economically.”

“It has been hard for me to find an internship opportunity, let alone a job that the president promised during his campaigns under the Bottom-up Manifesto. As a youth, I’m open to work anywhere, be it abroad or locally, because our final and ultimate goal in life is to create wealth. Right?” Robert, who said he works at an auto spares shop, posed.

Lines like those witnessed whenever job openings are announced, as few as 150, advertised by a security firm in June 2023, often empty into the massive protests that have rattled Kenya since last year.

Most protesters are Generation Z and Millennials, a segment of the population that accounts for the most unemployed Kenyans. The Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) puts the youth unemployment rate at a staggering 67 per cent, five times the national rate of 12.7 per cent.

During the burial of Boniface Kariuki, recently shot in the head by a police officer, Murang’a Governor Irungu Kang’ata said unemployment was “fuelling the Gen Z protests”.

“We have to think as leaders about ways of creating employment for the young people. Thinking outside the box. What progress can we come up with to create a better enabling environment for the young people to get employment?” said Kang’ata. Economists agree.

“I have just come from Kabete and I was surprised to see the Kangemi flyover packed with young men looking at cars,” Prof XN Iraki, an economist, told the Sunday Standard yesterday over the phone. “All we need to do is create jobs for our young people, and they would have no time to demonstrate. These protests are all about economics.”

Prof Iraki estimates that about 70 per cent of those who attend protests are unemployed, but noted that the job of creating jobs was not the government’s, but “yours and mine.”

“The government’s job is to facilitate job creation by creating a conducive environment for investment,” he would add, pointing out that Ruto’s administration had largely failed to do so.

Dr Timothy Njagi, also an economist, agreed that unemployment was fuelling the revolt.

“If you listen to what the young people have been saying, the biggest challenge is the broken promises,’ said Dr Njagi. “People are suffering at home, and hence they have the time to see the ills they are not happy about, unlike our fathers, who were mostly occupied.”

Daniel Farajah, 28, concurred, saying: “The Government is unwilling to create a conducive environment for investors and has instead embarked on building churches and buying off the church as compared to investing in building factories and companies for job creation.”

As he campaigned to be President in 2022, Ruto promised a million jobs for the youth yearly, an exaggeration by any standard. These opportunities would mostly target hustlers, the “mama mboga and boda boda riders of this world”, on whose backs Ruto rode to power.

That has been easier said than done. While the government has placed many job seekers in gainful formal employment, more than 100,000 in the 2023/24 financial year, Kenya’s debt-ridden economy is bleeding jobs.

The 108,338 jobs created last year, according to the Labour Ministry, hardly cater to the demand by the youth, who make up 35 per cent of Kenya’s population. That 67 per cent of them are unemployed means more than 10 million are out of a job.

Bernard Mwangi, a taxi driver, believed Ruto’s promises for jobs and prosperity, and said he voted for the President because the Head of State spoke their language.

“Ruto came with a very sweet tongue,” said Mwangi. “He was better than the others who were more interested in history lectures.”

Indeed, Ruto would easily mingle with the youth, many of whom now want him out. Many of whom only attend his rallies if mobilised. Mwangi participated at the June 25 protests that commemorated last year’s demonstrations that saw more than 60 people killed.

Dozens of companies have left Kenya or reduced operations, resulting in more than 5,500 job losses, according to the FKE.

“When people see companies closing down, they ask themselves what could be happening, and start relating it to the bad governance we are experiencing,” said Dr Njagi. “And they will have no option but to speak out.”

He argued that the government ought to engage young Kenyans, noting that Ruto enjoyed goodwill when he assumed office, but failed to explain why he had yet to fix the economy as he had promised to.

Akoth Opiyo, in her twenties and unemployed, said she joined last year’s protests to end corruption and leadership, which she believes has led to the lack of jobs among the youth and pushed the cost of everything else, such as education, beyond the reach of many Kenyans.

“Instead of giving us funerals, the government should be giving us jobs,” said Opiyo. “We didn’t get everything we wanted, but at least our voices were heard.”

She, too, said she would not mind the opportunity for a job abroad, such as the government has promised to young Kenyans.

 “I want to build my life and help my family,” Opiyo said, adding that she feels hurt whenever she sees politicians flaunting opulence amid an economy that has been unforgiving to them.

Joshua Kinda, a laboratory science graduate who is equally unemployed, shunned the idea of moving abroad for a job.

“I’ll fix Kenya before moving abroad,” he stated. Kinda said he had tried to find an online job, but cannot afford a constant internet connection, which Ruto promised to provide free in different spots through a last-mile internet connectivity programme.

Beverlyn Amojong, a student working an online job, said she had applied to many of the foreign jobs advertised, even though they did not match her “skills and interests.” 

“The recruitment process has been slow, and I’m still waiting to hear back,” Amojong said, adding that the government could do more to support digital workers like her through initiatives that promote innovation and fund digital startups.

Henry Juma, a 22-year-old online trader, said he had “little confidence in the government’s ability to create jobs”, lamenting that many government jobs are dished out to connected individuals.