The cost of disorganized resistance
and what must be done!
“ Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. ”
— Benson John Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution
The Co-optation Trap: From Streets to State House
One of the biggest challenges facing Kenyan activism today is the risk of political co-optation. With no organised leadership structure, movements become vulnerable to being influenced by groups that prioritise capitalist interests. This isn’t a new issue, it's something we've seen repeat itself over the years. For instance, the Gen Z protest movement often describes itself as "leaderless, partyless, and tribeless," framing it as a major shift away from the corruption of ethnic favouritism and personality-driven politics that have plagued Kenya. However, this idea of being leaderless misses an important truth: every movement inherently has leaders, whether we recognise them or not.
During the Finance Bill protests, there were indeed leaders at play—those who rallied people through social media, those whose voices resonated loudly, and those who shaped the movement’s message. The crucial difference is that this kind of leadership lacked the democratic accountability and transparency that are essential for a thriving, meaningful movement. When leadership goes unacknowledged and remains disorganised, movements become susceptible to two significant vulnerabilities.
First, the absence of a democratically determined program leaves movements ideologically adrift. Without clear, collectively agreed-upon demands and tactics, the movement becomes reactive rather than strategic. It can mobilise thousands to the streets but struggles to articulate what comes after the immediate victory or defeat. This programmatic vagueness makes it difficult to sustain momentum once the initial catalyst—in this case, the Finance Bill—is addressed.
Second, and more dangerously, informal leadership creates precisely the conditions for co-optation that “leaderlessness” supposedly prevents. When there are no democratic structures to hold leaders accountable, and no transparent process for determining the movement’s direction, opportunistic forces find it easier to infiltrate and redirect the movement’s energy toward their own ends.
The political events in July 2024 highlighted a deep vulnerability in the movement. When key opposition figures were brought into President Ruto’s cabinet, it created a rift within the ranks. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a strong organisational structure that caused this fracture, but rather a lack of one. The movement had no clear democratic process in place to help its members collectively decide whether to see these appointments as a betrayal or a legitimate form of representation. Without a way to hold leaders accountable for decisions that shaped the movement's future, confusion and division took hold.
Labelling a movement as “leaderless” doesn’t safeguard it from being taken over by powerful interests. In reality, it often leaves the movement vulnerable, without the means to defend itself. The true strength against these forces lies not in the absence of leadership, but in having leaders who are elected by the community, given clear roles, and held accountable by the members.
This approach requires creating structures that the idea of being “leaderless” often dismisses. We need transparent decision-making processes, representatives chosen by the people, and initiatives shaped through open discussion. It’s critical to understand that having an organisation isn’t the enemy of grassroots movements; instead, it can be their greatest ally in ensuring long-term success and resilience.
But co-optation only works when there is something to co-opt. leaders to compromise, structures to infiltrate, demands to partially satisfy. What happens when a movement claims to have none of these things? The answer, as the 2024 protests demonstrated, is that the absence of formal structure does not eliminate vulnerability to state power; it merely changes the nature of that vulnerability. Where organised movements can be co-opted, disorganised ones can be dismantled. And the Kenyan state proved exceptionally adept at dismantling.
The Brutality of State Repression: How Violence Exploits Disorganisation.
The numbers tell one story: 128 deaths, 3,000 arrests, 83 enforced disappearances. A 450% increase in people vanished. These are the metrics of repression.
But the individual cases tell another.
Billy Mwangi, twenty-four years old, was abducted while waiting for a haircut. They had watched his neighborhood for three days. They had planned. And when they moved, there was no organizational apparatus to sound the alarm, no security protocol to protect him, no rapid response team to mobilize. Just a young man, alone, getting a haircut.
Peter Muteti, twenty-two, was taken while buying milk and eggs. CCTV footage shows two men jumping from a moving vehicle, grabbing him as he resisted, bundling him into a car as residents watched. The residents watched. That detail bears repeating. They watched because there was nothing else they could do.
Bernard Kavuli was abducted at a petrol station, forcibly bundled into a white Probox by unidentified men. The targeting was deliberate. The state had identified the informal leaders—the social media voices who had become the movement’s de facto organizers—and was systematically removing them.
What makes these abductions particularly instructive is not that they happened, but how the movement could not respond. When the young men were released after fifteen days, they were dropped in Nyeri, each given two thousand shillings, threatened with re-abduction if they spoke about their ordeal or continued their activism. The intimidation worked precisely because there was no organizational structure to absorb it, no collective capacity to turn individual trauma into collective resistance.
Compare this to how organized movements handle repression: legal teams on standby, media strategies prepared, international solidarity networks activated, safe houses established, security protocols disseminated. The Gen Z protests had Twitter threads and hashtags. When people disappeared, their families were left to plead individually with a president who had already labeled the protesters criminals.
The state’s violence was not random. It was strategic, multi-layered, specifically designed to exploit the movement’s organizational weaknesses. Activists were picked up by hooded men in broad daylight, held incommunicado for days without charges, tortured, interrogated about their online activities. The message was clear: your digital presence makes you visible, and your lack of organization makes you vulnerable.
Physical violence was only one axis of attack. Young women reported misogynistic comments, body shaming, threats, doxxing, AI-generated pornographic images produced to shame and silence them. Government-paid bloggers spread dehumanizing language. Each individual faced the onslaught alone, left to independently calculate whether continued activism was worth the cost. And for most, the mathematics of fear led to silence.
The young protesters deserve acknowledgment for their courage. But courage alone cannot build the infrastructure needed to sustain resistance against a state apparatus designed for repression. The movement’s “leaderless” structure, celebrated as a strength, became its fatal vulnerability. There were no elected representatives who could negotiate from positions of legitimacy. No security committees. No legal teams to file habeas corpus petitions when people vanished. These structures exist not to bureaucratize movements but to create the capacity for collective defense.
What makes this particularly damning is that the vulnerabilities were predictable. Kenya has a long history of state violence against dissent. The Moi era established the blueprint: abductions, torture, disappearances, media intimidation. The 2007 post-election violence demonstrated the state’s capacity for coordinated brutality. Every generation of Kenyan activists has faced this reality. Yet the Gen Z movement proceeded as if enthusiasm and digital fluency could substitute for the unglamorous work of building defensive organizational capacity.
This is not to excuse the state’s violence. The High Court prohibited the National Police Service from using water cannons, tear gas, live ammunition, engaging in extrajudicial killings, arrests, abductions, harassment. The state violated its own constitution, defied court orders, murdered its own citizens. That moral failure belongs entirely to those who gave the orders and pulled the triggers.
But moral clarity about state criminality does not eliminate the strategic imperative for movements to protect themselves. The Gen Z protesters were right to be outraged. They were right to take to the streets. They were right to demand accountability. But they were catastrophically wrong to believe that righteousness alone would shield them from a state that has never hesitated to deploy violence against those who challenge its legitimacy.
The aftermath reveals the cost of that miscalculation. At least 82 cases of abduction since June 2024. The state learned it could break the movement by breaking the individuals within it, one by one. And it worked. The protests that drew hundreds of thousands in June had dwindled by August, not because grievances had been addressed, but because the cost of participation had become too high for those without organizational protection.
This is what happens when grassroots political movements exist without organizational infrastructure: they cannot create safe avenues for ordinary people to participate in democratic processes. The teacher who sees corruption, the matatu driver facing police harassment, the unemployed graduate demanding economic opportunity—these people looked at what happened to Billy Mwangi getting a haircut, to Peter Muteti buying groceries, to Bernard Kavuli at a petrol station, and they made the rational calculation that political participation was a death sentence.
Ask not what democracy requires of the state. Ask what it requires of those who would defend it. It requires more than the right to protest. It requires the capacity to organize safely, to build institutions that can withstand repression, to create structures that allow participation without martyrdom. The Gen Z movement’s failure was not in its courage or its demands but in its refusal to do the unglamorous, difficult work of building such structures. They wanted revolution without organization, transformation without institution-building, democracy without the tedious labor of creating democratic organizations.
The state understood this vulnerability immediately and exploited it with surgical precision. Safaricom unlawfully shared customers’ location data with law enforcement to aid in tracking suspects in operations that included enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Your phones, which had been tools of mobilization, became instruments of surveillance. And because there was no organizational infrastructure to develop secure communication protocols, activists continued using the same platforms that were feeding their locations directly to those hunting them.
This is not hindsight. These were foreseeable problems with foreseeable solutions. Organized movements use encrypted communication. They develop security cultures. They create buddy systems and check-in protocols. They establish legal support networks and medical response teams. They build the boring, bureaucratic infrastructure that keeps people alive when states decide that killing dissidents is cheaper than addressing their demands.
The Gen Z protests proved that Kenyans, particularly young Kenyans, are willing to risk everything for political change. But willingness to risk everything is not the same as capacity to sustain resistance. The movement mobilized hundreds of thousands but protected none of them. It created martyrs but not institutions. It generated headlines but not the organizational infrastructure that could transform outrage into enduring political power.
And so the state won. Not because it was morally right, not because it addressed the protesters’ grievances, but because it understood something the protesters did not: in a contest between organized state violence and disorganized popular resistance, organization wins. Every time.
The question, then, is not whether future movements will face similar repression—they will. The question is whether they will repeat the same organizational failures, or whether they will finally accept that democracy requires not just passion and justice on your side, but the tedious, difficult work of building organizations capable of protecting their members while they do the work of demanding change.
When Movements Mistake Symbolic Victories for Structural Change.
As we look at what's happening in Kenya today, it's not that the people lack courage; rather, there's a sense that the determination to organise effectively is missing. There's a fire in people’s hearts, but it feels like there hasn't been enough groundwork laid to channel that passion into meaningful action. It's not about being right or just; it's about committing to create the change that justice demands.
Let the word go forth: partial victories have become the graveyard of Kenya’s movements.
When President Ruto withdrew the Finance Bill in June 2024, the streets erupted in celebration. Victory, they declared. Triumph, they proclaimed. By October 2025, the contentious Finance Bill had been divided into sections, each of which, except for those previously rejected, was passed into law. The system absorbed the protest and defused the anger. It then proceeded as planned. In the 1990s, key human rights activists elected to Parliament continued pursuing political freedoms, but many former activists later just wanted accommodation rather than being real reformers.
They celebrated the moment the president blinked. They did not ask whether he had truly changed direction. They claimed triumph when politicians made promises. They did not build the institutions to hold those promises accountable. They won the battle. They lost the war.
This is the pattern that repeats itself because movements have not learned the first lesson of enduring change: symbolic victories without structural transformation are not victories at all. They are invitations to defeat.
And yet some say: What does it matter? The people are hungry. The people are unemployed. The people need relief now, not organisation later.
To them I say: Poverty, youth unemployment, and political disillusionment created fertile ground for Mungiki, with young men regarding themselves as a “no future” generation. Mungiki moved from protecting Kikuyu farmers to dominating the matatu industry, rubbish collection, construction, and protection racketeering. When movements fail to provide immediate relief to desperate members facing unemployment and a bleak future, those individuals will seek alternative means of survival. Even if it means transforming resistance into racketeering. Even if it means trading the movement for goonism. Even if it means becoming the very corruption they once condemned.
Economic desperation does not excuse the absence of organisation. It demands it. Only organised movements can negotiate collective economic gains. Only structured institutions can distribute resources fairly. Only democratic organisations can prevent the strong from preying upon the weak when hunger stalks the land.
And then there is the question of unity, or rather, the myth of unity.
The youthful protesters that the media coined as “Gen Z” proudly declared themselves tribeless. Yet when coastal activists felt they had become part of Ruto’s government after opposition leaders joined the cabinet, the fault lines appeared. Political movements in Kenya have remained stunted, hostage to the pervasiveness of coalitions-cum-political movements that parade as parties but lack organisational coherence and ideologies.
These divisions have always been there. These tensions have always existed. These fractures have always waited to be exploited. And they will continue to be exploited until movements build democratic structures stronger than ethnic allegiances, ideological commitments deeper than regional identities, organizational bonds more powerful than tribal ties.
For we face a choice. Not between action and inaction—that choice has been made. Not between courage and cowardice—that question has been answered in the streets, in the blood, in the bodies of those who gave everything. The choice we face is between building institutions that can sustain resistance or watching each wave of protest crash against the rocks of state power and recede, leaving nothing behind but memory and mourning.
Let us be clear about what history demands of this moment.
History does not ask: Did you take to the streets? The streets have been filled before. The streets will be filled again.
History asks: Did you build institutions that outlasted the immediate crisis? Did you create organisations that could channel the energy of the streets into the corridors of power? Did you establish structures that could transform outrage into policy, protest into governance, resistance into reconstruction?
And to those who say this work is too slow, too tedious, too removed from the urgency of now, I say: Look at what speed without structure has achieved. Look at the movements that burned bright and disappeared. Look at the activists who became politicians, the resisters who became collaborators, the revolutionaries who settled for seats at the table instead of changing what is on the table.
We choose to build these institutions. We choose to do this difficult work. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
For what profits a movement to gain the whole country’s attention and lose its own soul? What good is it to mobilise hundreds of thousands if you cannot protect a single one? What victory is won when the state counts its casualties, and the movement cannot even count its members?
The torch has been passed to a new generation of Kenyans, tempered by state violence, disciplined by repression, proud of their courage but hungry for something more than moral satisfaction. A generation that knows the cost of disorganisation. A generation that has paid the price of structural weakness. A generation that must now choose: Will we repeat the patterns that have failed every movement before us, or will we finally build what those movements never built?
Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those differences which divide us. Let both those who have organised and those who have only protested come together to build institutions worthy of the sacrifices already made. Let both the impatient young and the weary old recognise that the work ahead requires not choosing between their wisdom and their energy, but combining both.
And so, to Kenya’s young activists, let me say this: All this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this movement, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. The responsibility has fallen to you. Do not shrink from it. Do not merely celebrate it with hashtags and headlines. Build it. Organise it. Structure it. Make it permanent.
For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small country. We all face the same state violence. We all suffer the same corruption. We all want the same better future. And we will all fail to achieve it if we continue to believe that courage alone can substitute for the unglamorous work of building democratic institutions.
The choice is ours. The time is now. And the question is not whether we will take to the streets again—we will. The question is whether, when we do, we will finally have built the institutions that can turn those streets into pathways to power.
Let us begin.
Umenipa mengi ya kuwaza kuhusu. Asante