Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it. —Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

In June 2024, Kenyan anti-state uprisings, popularly dubbed “Gen Z protests,” rocked the country as a continuous articulation against the state and the government that continues to ignore and kill Kenyans. This time round, the agitations were sparked by a pending/in motion punitive 2024/2025 finance bill. As Kenyans protested on the streets, social media, and in various other ways, I noted continuous grievances of unfulfilled and or failed infrastructures in protest chants and beyond. These articulations highlighted the unkept infrastructure promises and their expected attached benefits that regime after regime have served Kenyans with. In most cases, they were just political promises in a country where infrastructures are always at the centre of politics, if not the politics themselves as campaign tools. In the saturating neoliberal order that shapes the country, where, as Lyn Ossome (2015) reminds us that, neoliberalism is the technology of governance and not an ideological order, good governance, a favorite vocabulary of neoliberalism, as Kenyan feminist writer and mutual aid organiser Mumbi reminds us, finds ground in infrastructure saturation as what politicians and governments should do. Politicians are known to traverse the country launching, promising and re-promising infrastructures which they poeticise as evidence of their governance work. When they launch infrastructures, their names are always engraved on these infrastructures regardless of how weeny (small in budget size) the said infrastructure is. Sometimes, as if to ridicule us, they construct infrastructures such as roads and water connections that go only to their doorsteps.

The president, William Ruto, who is known for his lies, with several, if not most, of his nicknames capturing this during the protests, was called out for all the false infrastructure promises he continues to make (more on his nicknames here). A creative interactive portrait capturing over 5,000 of his lies as tweets was created during the protest period: Ruto Lies: A Portrait. Most of these lies are on the infrastructure he would or is creating. Several protest chants captured this, for example:

Chant: Ruto lies

All: All the time

Chant: And all the time

All: Ruto lies and that is in his blood

Morara Kebaso who rose to fame during the protest dedicated himself to exposing the infrastructural lies of the president. In what he termed “Vampire Diaries”, a series of social media videos, Kebaso went around the country exposing and de-launching stalled government projects and highlighting cases of corruption and continuous mismanagement of taxpayers' money. He did this dressed up in a Kaunda suit and mimicking the mannerism of the president to drive the irony home.  In some of the videos, Kebaso would show the project boards, which most often showed the project as completed on paper, but on the ground, nothing was done at all. Some ridiculous exposé includes one showing an area with cattle and goats grazing that was launched as an airstrip a few years back. In another video Kebaso went to a water supply project site the president had just launched hours before but the project board was already empty. The promised project had been erased. 

Kebaso, like a number of other ‘activists’ who rose to fame during that period, soon became a disappointment to the movement, for theirs was an ungrounded critique that the problem is the people in power and not the system itself. Theirs was a neoliberal articulation saturated and limited in vision by ideas of good governance, which they easily found a way to articulate their failure, bad governance, through infrastructures. After all, in the neoliberal order, infrastructures are the bedrock of governance. Our feelings and thoughts about what governance is have been directed to infrastructure. Our sense of alternative, our sense of what we can and should demand, our vision of what we should work towards, continues to be limited by developmental infrastructures. And for politicians, as economist David Ndii, chief economic advisor to the president and one of the figures behind the punitive finance bill tweeted, cutting ribbons as they launch these infrastructures has become the political equivalent of retail therapy. 

Infrastructure failures and manipulation as the norm

In a paper, my colleague, Mary Lawhon, and I researched and wrote way before the protests, we analysed a series of infrastructures in Nairobi that are in a state of always in formation in peculiar ways. We argued that the dominant infrastructure-led politics of the country leave them in this state, both literally and literary, whereby, as we argued, the state of being always in formation, includes in the narrativization of them. Though I have to mention here, it is our argument, together and guided by other critical urban scholars, that infrastructures are always in formation, incomplete, always in the making. 

In their 2021-2023 strategic plan, the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (NaMATA) conceptualised the creation of a Mass Rapid Transit system that would include BRT buses across Nairobi. As a start they envisioned the development of one line on the busy super highway that would be a 27 kilometres line. This line was designated to run from Kasarani to Kenyatta National Hospital and was anticipated to be launched by the then-president Uhuru Kenyatta on his 2018 Jamhuri Day celebrations. He envisioned the pomp of riding on one of the BRT buses to the venue of the celebration. However, only pink road markings were made marking the lane for BRT buses that year. No buses had been purchased, or any support infrastructures on the road constructed. Long delayed, occurred but tendering for designing and building services for the improvement of the highway to accommodate the BRT buses was announced in November 2019. A $ 51M contract was signed with STECOL corporation. The company started the works, but these were abandoned during the COVID-19 period and have never been resumed. A drive through the road, one sees the signs of the promised BRT infrastructure, with the unfinished support interchange platforms. As the different infrastructure construction steps were taken, politicians kept the infrastructure as rhetoric going on. For example, NAMATA’s chief executive in 2021 came out strongly to defend the progress of the project, stating it was 60-70 percent complete. The then Principal Secretary State Department for Housing and Urban Development from time to time posted photos from site visits on his social media. In some of these posts, he shared computer-generated models of the expected BRT infrastructure. As of today, the infrastructure is not complete, and it seems it never will.

In the paper with Lawhon, we also looked at the politicking of what can be termed mundane infrastructures in a neighbourhood in Kasarani. In this neighbourhood, we followed the constant building and rebuilding of an estate road, the sewage line below it and the network cables passing under the sidewalk. This caused disruption for the business and livelihood in the area, which were explained in billboards and by the area’s politicians as necessary for the infrastructure and the rejuvenation of the area, which would come as a result. We noticed a billboard showing earlier road work on a section of another neighbourhood road with the name and photo of the politician. The billboards and information boards were strategically put up at the neighbourhood entrance with the name of the project, duration of the construction phase, as well as the name and photo of the responsible political “patron.” When construction is done, these billboards are left there for years to come, solidifying their political legacies and ‘good governance’ through the infrastructure. 

Infrastructures as a vocabulary of neoliberalism

In 2012, during the inauguration ceremony of the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSET) corridor, the then Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki proclaimed, “I have no doubt that this day will go down in history as one of the defining moments – when we made a major stride to connect our people to the many socio-economic opportunities that lie ahead” (BBC, 2012). 

In the screenshot opening this piece, the economist David Ndii, chief economic advisor to the president, tweeted, “cutting ribbons is the political equivalent of retail therapy.” Infrastructure launches in Kenya are a spectacle, sometimes estimated to cost more than the infrastructure being launched itself. Politicians in the launches attach the neo-liberal development that these infrastructures will usher in, with estimates and statements such as those by the former president at the launch of LAPSET. These statements are not only given in political speeches but also on billboards, newspapers and government press releases, meant to narrate success and cement politicians’ names, most of them have their photos or names on infrastructure. Infrastructures are narrated as essential for enabling material flows and economic development, as part of an aesthetic project, as well as crucial to modern statecraft. These depictions of future infrastructures through billboards and computer-generated models aim to allow residents to experience the future as something close at hand thus to enchant them. 

In her blog showing us “how ‘good governance’ came to dominate our discourse and demands” Kanyogo shows that the Bretton Wood institutions that set SAPs policies created the idea of good governance as a tool to redirect scrutiny from the failures and suffering in the wake of the implementation of SAPs across the global south. The problem they narrativised was bad leaders with bad governance and not their policies. In a world and a country saturated with ideas of looking and demanding good governance, as directed to, Kenyans such as Kebaso, in a protest, found a perfect space to set their limited agenda that would be picked up as activism on infrastructure. The idea of infrastructure as work of governance, where elected leaders showcase their work by how many infrastructures they inaugurate and not the systems they put in place for a liberated geography, ungrounded ‘organisers’ easily focus on infrastructure as their critique. There is a demand for an infrastructure for elected leaders who construct infrastructures and plaster their name on them. The buy-out of these ‘organisers’ is easy, like we have seen with Kebaso and others who are currently yappers for the regime. As they accompany the regime leaders around the country as they launch construction of different projects and share more infrastructure lies they are satisfied to be on the other side, as for them the system was not the problem, it was their absence from it as Kenyan writer and journalist Mohamed Amin Abdishukri articulated in his piece “first win the mind’: the Need for a war of position in Kenya”. 

Conclusion

Lynn Ossome and Mumbi Kanyogo push us to think of the over-saturation of neoliberal vocabularies around us, particularly at moments such as the Kenyan Gen Z protests, where solidarity was felt and focus was directed to narratives of change, change that we see now was limited in vision. In this short blog, I have sought to contribute to this conversation by highlighting how developmental infrastructure as a symbol of governance has become the norm used to trick, trap and limit Kenyans' vision. A good leader is one who constructs so and so infrastructure regardless of the wastage, theft and unnecessary nature of that infrastructure. Our protests continue to be limited by this vocabulary of good governance that, as I show, is easily attached to infrastructures. 

Mwangi Mwaura is a Kenyan DPhil (PhD) student in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. 

References

BBC. (2012). Lamu port project launched for South Sudan and Ethiopia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-17231889 

Ossome, Lyn. ‘In Search of the State? Neoliberalism and the Labour Question for Pan-African Feminism’, 2015. http://www.agi.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/429/feminist_africa_journals/archive/20/2_fa20_feature_1.pdf.

Kanyogo, M (Feb 2025). How “good governance” came to dominate our discourses and demands. Notes on Solidarity Substack. https://mumbikanyogo.substack.com/p/how-good-governance-came-to-dominate 

Abdishukri, M. A (Feb 2025). ‘First Win the Mind’: The Need for a War of Position in Kenya. Ukombozi Review. https://ukombozireview.com/2025/02/03/first-win-the-mind-the-need-for-a-war-of-position-in-kenya/ 

Mwaura, Mwangi, and Mary Lawhon. ‘Infrastructure in Formation: The Politics and Practices of Making Progress with Infrastructure’. Urban Geography 0, no. 0 (August 2024): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2387992.

Rukanga, B (May 2025). El Chapo & Deputy Jesus - why Kenya's president has so many nicknames. BBC Africa.  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewdl20d8lxo