Online spaces have lost much of the utility they offered when they were first popularised in the early 2010s. They have become spaces where highly motivated agitators will go to wage wars that, on closer inspection, advance no fresh ideas or address any matters of contemporary notoriety. Trolls have taken over, and trollish behaviour is encouraged. Complex software algorithms channel the worst trends o your timeline and it is only an active curation of your timeline that will ensure that you do not fall prey to the machinations of the trolls, though this doesn't always work.
In Kenya, the social media space is dominated by young people, classified in the popular lexicon as GenZ. Some are thoughtful and wise beyond their years. The vast majority, though, are badly educated and aren't shy about flaunting their bad education for all the world to see. What they are interested in, it seems, is the total number of likes and retweets they will receive for the stuff they spout. In short, they seek widespread notoriety, if not fame or infamy, no matter what.
What is increasingly noticeable about them is how very little they read about the things they purport to speak about. Few of them have taken the time to review the documents of their civic life, whether it is the Constitution or the Laws of Kenya, or the foundational documents of the various societies, organisations and associations they happen to be members of. They extract a sentence from these documents, apply their own biased lenses to any analysis of those sentences, and then publish their half-baked views for all the world to see and when they are called out for it, instead of taking lessons from the criticism, they double down and invite hordes of equally-uninformed trolls to support their viewpoints.
These people are, as a result, easily manipulated. You can tell by how easy it has been for the 527/= gangs to hijack hashtags and promote reactionary views that are contrary to the stated desires of GenZ agitators. Instead of prosecuting their ideas, GenZs are forced to counter the subversion of their agenda by the 527/= gangs, and in the end, their GenZ agenda is never implemented and the movement of the day fizzles out.
This is apparent in the way GenZ have been outmanoeuvred when it comes to public finances. The victory they won at such terrible cost in 2024 with the withdrawal of the Finance Bill has not been replicated. Though a valiant effort was mounted in 2025, and the same terrible outcome for GenZ was visited not hem once more, they have not fundamentally altered the structure of public finance or how public money is collected, spent, ad accounted for. This was recently revealed by their utter lack of understanding of what it means for the Government to borrow.
Many of us, whether GenZ, Gent, Millennial or Boomer, are motivated with deeply selfish interests and nowadays, we are not shy about stating this upfront. It is no longer about the commonweal; what matters is the individual stomach. Because reactionary forces, whether political, professional, social or cultural, have spent the decades since Mwai Kibaki's presidential electoral victory in 2002 subverting the common good, and promoting selfish person interests, the structures that would have built resilience among and for the people have withered and atrophied. Brief spurts of harambees for Genz protest victims only starkly reveal how far apart we are as peoples.
If rational discussions cannot be held among people, regardless of the stated desire for reform and change, little will occur, and shattered dreams will litter the online spaces, where performative wailing and gnashing of teeth will take place. The irony of faster and wider telecommunications among the largest proportion of the population being used to divide them and poison the civic bonds among them is not lost on me. Social media, it turns out, is dangerously antisocial.
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