Gitobu Imanyara was on the frontlines of the Second Liberation, one of the few principled political streetfighters that Kenya actually deserved. Then he got elected to the National Assembly and it all turned to shit. He is not the first political radical to have forgotten the lessons of revolution, the most important being that while a revolution needs men and women to lead from the front, the revolution needs an institutional movement to make the gains of the revolution permanent.
In the Sunday Standard of the 5th October, 2025, Mr. Imanyara says what has become common knowledge: seven [honest] men will save Kenya. This is disappointing.
There are many men and women who have made sacrifices in the name of Kenya and for Kenyans. They have offered not just their bodies, but their intellect and influence to shape the politics of the country. For the most part, they have achieved many big and small gains. But they have singularly failed to alter the trajectory Kenya has been on since Independence. Kenya has entrenched a form of corrupt ethnic balkanisation that has all but guaranteed that the trajectory of the human development index is downwards.
There was a period, sometime in the 1980s and ending with the 1992 multiparty general election, when the Kenyan political revolution was truly organised. It not only established a broad cohort of men and women who would lead the revolution, it also generated a wealth of political discourse that shaped what would become the first draft of Harmonised Draft Constitution of 2010. The Mwakenya writing, the columnists who wrote for Society and Finance, the "opposition" lawyers who defended political prisoners, the Mothers of Political Prisoners who protested for months at Freedom Corner, the Green Belt Movement that challenged the anti-human environmental policies of the Moi government...the list is long...most of their work has been undermined, watered down, distorted and, in some cases, reversed in the decades since the 1992 general election.
Instead, we have been programmed to believe that what Kenya needs is a saviour, or a group of saviours, who will right the ship of state. We no longer speak of organising or institutionalising the revolution. We place enormous faith, and pressure, on individuals to reform the country without building the necessary infrastructure that will assure success. Political parties, newspaper and news magazine columnists, playwrights and filmmakers, musicians and novelists, public debates and intellectual tradition, everything that we need to institutionalise and organise the revolution is a for-profit arrangement that prioritises extremely short-term gains at the expense of the long-term development of the country.
It is why people are suddenly excited that Mr. Maraga has appointed the United Green Movement Party as his political party briefcase of choice to bring him to the highest seat of political power in Kenya. And why people haven't taken time to ask why a political party that seemed to have sprung to life in 2019 with a slate of registered members from all counties in Kenya did so without running a single recruitment exercise in the months before its establishment and registration. Who are these mysterious Kenyans who had not only heard of and agreed with the political message of the United Green Movement Party, but chose to register with the political party, hand over some of there personal information, and agreed to be entered as founder-members of the political party when it was registered by the Registrar of Political Parties?
Even the few saviours we have elected to Parliament don't seem to know how to understand how the government actually functions. They have ideas. Some of their ideas are great ones. But they seem confused about their role in the government. Indeed, many of them refuse to accept that they are in the government. Take Mr. Omtatah's obsession with public finance. As a senator, he has the power to summon the Cabinet Secretaries responsible for public money to appear before the Senate and account for how they have spent the public money entrusted to them. Mr. Omtatah has not done so even once.
He also has the power to introduce in the Senate legislative proposals (Bills) that would reform the public finance management framework. He has done so only once and the proposal itself was a miss-mash of confused musings about public debt and the public debt management office. Needless to say, beyond publishing the Bill Mr. Omtatah did little to promote it among his Senate colleagues, and ignored the vital role of the National Assembly in seeing to it that it was enacted by Parliament. Instead, Mr. Omtatah has not missed an opportunity to sue the sue government he's serves in whenever it has enacted a Finance Bill. His litigation victories since he became a parliamentarian have been on very narrow points of the law, and have done little to reform the government he serves in.
The point I am trying to make is that Mr. Imanyara's prescription for what ails Kenya is what we have practiced since 1992 without success. If he were to pay attention, even he would admit that the promulgation of a new constitution in 2010 did little to change the way Kenyan political institutions behaved; it just slapped a veneer of legitimacy on them. But, by and large, the corrupt ethnic balkanisation that prevailed in the 1990s continues to poison the body politic in 2025. Given his vast experience in the radical political opposition in the 1980s, what Mr. Imanyara should be helping us to do is to rethink everything we know about political organisation and institutionalisation of the not-yet-over revolution. We need to rebuild, from the ground up, political institutions, political ideologies, political thinking, and political streetfighting. Wow must eschew the narrative that we need Messiahs. No one is going to save us. Only we, the body of Kenyans, collectively, can save ourselves.
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