Thank you, William. It’s been long overdue, and I know we’ve really tried to arrange for this conversation. I’m glad it’s finally happening.

My name is Sungu Oyoo. I’m a Kenyan writer, activist, and community organizer—and by extension, a Pan-Africanist. I’m a member of Mwamko, the Pan-African popular pedagogy collective, which I co-founded with other comrades a few years ago. But more relevant to this discussion, I’m a member of Kongamano La Mapinduzi, which translates to Congress of the Revolution. It’s a political movement here in Kenya, and I currently serve as its national spokesperson. Kongamano itself emerged as a culmination—or perhaps a renewal—born out of our experiences organizing within the student movement and social movements more broadly. At some point, we did our analysis and realized that many of the problems we were experiencing in our communities were, at root, political—and therefore required political solutions. That is how we embarked on a process to form Kongamano La Mapinduzi, which is today part of the Kenya Left Alliance, the broader coalition bringing together all progressive forces. And as you mentioned, I’m also running for president in the 2027 elections.

I think I was first politicized as a student, through the student movement. At that time, our organizing was mostly around immediate issues and concerns within what I’d call the geography of the school. But after school, once I became immersed in social movements and began to better understand Kenyan society—its structures and how it functions—I saw more clearly that people aren’t necessarily poor because they aren’t working hard. Rather, the system is designed in such a way that it keeps people in those conditions. That realization deepened my politicization. I met some comrades who introduced me to left politics, and I went through a period of great confusion, trying to figure out—at a higher, ideological level—how we arrive at real solutions to the challenges we see in society. What ultimately made the most sense to me were the ideas and proposals coming from the left. So that’s the short version of how I got politicized and found myself in left politics.

I think it was both. On the one hand, there was a prolonged period of learning—of trying to understand society and build up my analysis over time. But there were also moments of particular significance. For example, in 2013 I was part of a movement called Kenyans for Tax Justice. We were essentially making the same demands that today’s youth have been making since 2024. We were advocating for progressive tax policies and for exempting basic commodities from taxation. We were able to push back against the system for a while and link up with other organized groups like the Unga Revolution. We conducted political education in different settlements across Nairobi and campaigned against a bill before Parliament at the time—the Value Added Tax Bill of 2013. That bill would have imposed taxes on bread, milk, sugar, disability mobility aids, books, and many other basic commodities. We managed to push back.

At the time, I thought we had won. I relaxed and went back to my normal life. But the following year, Parliament passed the same bill again. That’s when I realized our struggle is a continuous one. Even when we extract concessions from power, we can’t afford to retreat. We have to keep pushing—not just to defend those gains, but to achieve even greater ones. We must remain eternally vigilant. Organizing, I came to understand, is an eternal process.

I think it probably was one of the most optimistic periods in Kenya’s political history. The struggle for a new constitution had been ongoing for decades, and finally reaching a point where genuinely progressive clauses had been passed—guaranteeing basic needs like the right to food, housing, water, a strong bill of rights, and establishing independent commissions that were supposed to serve as checks on executive power—many Kenyans were hopeful. But one of the most unfortunate things, as Kenya’s former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga often says, is that we birthed a new constitution—we birthed a baby—and then handed it over to child traffickers to raise. Many of the politicians who inherited the responsibility of implementing the new constitution had no interest in its progressive provisions.

Look at William Ruto. He is now the president of Kenya, having sworn to uphold this constitution—but he was a leader of the “No” campaign back in 2010. He argued that the constitution was flawed and pushed to retain the old order. That’s why, in the years following 2010, we’ve seen the systematic erosion of the constitution by the political elite—through illegal acts of Parliament aimed at watering it down, by openly disobeying its provisions, and by doing everything possible to subvert it. They were never interested in full implementation. So yes, 2010 was a high point, a really promising moment. But within a few years, most Kenyans could already see that things weren’t turning out the way we had hoped.

For me, the key realization was that struggle is a protracted process. It’s not like flipping a light switch—where once the struggle is “won,” everything is immediately illuminated. Just because we achieved a progressive document didn’t mean its implementation was guaranteed. That realization—that we would have to stay vigilant and keep organizing to fight for implementation—is one of the things that pulled me deeper into the work.

I think the starting point is to look at what exactly Kenya is. Kenya started off as a business—through the Imperial British East Africa Company—and in many ways, it has remained a business. The Kenyan state neither sees nor listens to the majority of its citizens. Kenya is a neocolonial state, as I’m sure you know, and the neocolonial state is created in the image of the colonial state. Every day, it subjects our people to poverty, to humiliation, to death—whether through police bullets, through inadequate health care, or through failures in any number of systems. Often you’ll hear people say, “The system is not working,” but I would argue the opposite: The system is working exactly as it was designed to. It just wasn’t designed to work for the people.

After independence in 1963, many fundamental questions remained unresolved—questions of land, national identity, and cohesion. Even post-2010, with the new constitution, there was a short period where things seemed to be working. But after 2013, the economy slowly but steadily took a nosedive. Unemployment rose. Public institutions were eroded. By 2022, youth unemployment had hit 67 percent. And when you have such staggering levels of joblessness among young people, and the only response politicians can offer is empty rhetoric—promises that “we will do this, we will do that,” but without anything concrete—then you’re looking at an explosive situation. Homelessness in Nairobi had surged. The cost of basic commodities continued to rise over the past decade.

That’s how Ruto came to power in 2022—on the backs of the working class. He campaigned using the so-called hustler narrative, claiming to speak for and be one of them. But by 2023, his government increased the cost of university education fourfold in public universities, claiming it could no longer afford to subsidize education. In 2024, we witnessed large-scale demolitions of settlements across Nairobi. Between 400,000 and 500,000 people were rendered homeless in just a few months. The government justified this by saying people had settled along riverbanks and needed to move to protect the rivers. But the truth is, these people didn’t settle near rivers by choice. They were forced to live there because the state failed to provide housing. These demolitions created a massive wave of displacement, especially in Nairobi and other urban centers.

So you had all of this happening at once: youth unemployment, evictions, a crumbling health-care system, and public universities in crisis. It was a confluence of crises. Then, in 2024, the Finance Bill was introduced, and in public discourse Kenyans were clear: Reject the bill. The state came back and said, no, not reject—just amend. But the people insisted: Reject. Because the bill proposed to increase taxes that would fall on working people, while exempting the rich—for instance, through things like helicopter spare parts. People said: If you pass this bill, we will die. And when the state refused to listen, the movement strategically escalated. It moved from rejecting the Finance Bill to saying: Ruto must go.

One thing that must be made clear is that Kenyan youth were not just talking about Ruto the individual. They were talking about Ruto as a symbol, and about the broader system that surrounds and enables him—the institutions that carry out economic violence against ordinary people. That’s why, for the first time in a long while, we saw protests raising demands around the IMF, around the World Bank, around Kenya’s debt crisis. There were demands about police brutality. But “Ruto Must Go” became the rallying cry that unified them all. And while protests against the Finance Bill and budget have happened in years past, they were smaller. What changed in 2024 was the sheer level of public anger and discontent. Anyone who had been studying the political landscape in Kenya over the last several years could see this explosion coming—and I think we’re still in the thick of it.

That’s a really important question. As you mentioned, the state has never truly acted in the interests of the Kenyan people. For over sixty years, the Kenyan state has remained a neocolonial formation, modeled in the image of the colonial state. Our war for national liberation was led by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army—the Mau Mau. And, as their name suggests, they were fighting for two things: land and freedom. But what we got in 1963 was independence, not liberation. The Mau Mau had taken up arms because Kenya was a settler colony—land had been seized from the people by force. But during the independence negotiations at Lancaster House, the Mau Mau were not invited. It was the moderates from the dominant political parties, and a few radicals, who were included. And one of the key decisions taken at Lancaster was that Kenya, this newly independent state, would buy back land from departing British settlers—the very same land those settlers had stolen at gunpoint.

That’s how the so-called Million Acre Scheme came about. Under this scheme, the new Kenyan state would purchase one million acres from the settlers using a loan of £2 million, sourced from West Germany, the British government, and the World Bank. That’s how we began our journey as a sovereign nation—with a massive debt to repay for land that had been violently stolen from us. Kenya only finished paying back that debt sometime in the 1980s. Think about what those resources could have done—resources that should have gone toward education, health care, housing. But even worse, once the land was purchased, the vast majority of it ended up in the hands of the ruling class. Those who had actually fought for liberation—those who had been dispossessed—were left out once again.

This is why I hesitate to use the term “informal settlements” when describing places like Kibera. That label implies that the people living there are somehow themselves informal or illegitimate. But human beings cannot be informal. These are simply settlements. And many of the people who live in them today are descendants of those who went to the forests to fight colonialism. So we can already see that post-independence Kenya was built on a logic of dispossession. It was built on the logic of poverty for the majority. That’s why, by 1975, a politician named J. M. Kariuki could describe Kenya as “a land of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars.” And today, that formula could be updated: maybe 50 billionaires, 50 million beggars. The inequality has only deepened.

In Nairobi, over 80 percent of the population lives on just 6 percent of the city’s land. They are crammed into settlements, while a small elite enjoy dignified, spacious lives. When Jomo Kenyatta took power in 1963, he said the state would fight maradhi, ujinga, and umaskini—disease, ignorance, and poverty. But if you look at the manifestos of major political parties in the most recent election, 60 years later, they’re still promising to fight disease, ignorance, and poverty. That tells you something. It tells you that in terms of the material conditions of ordinary people, very little has changed in six decades.

Of course, many things have happened in the intervening years. But fundamentally, the structures of economic domination remain intact. Land is still controlled by foreign concerns. The Nairobi Stock Exchange is still largely in the hands of British and European companies. Mining rights are dominated by foreign corporations. Fishing rights along the coast are not controlled by local enterprises. And in recent years, we’ve seen an aggressive return to privatization—more and more public entities being sold off.

What happened last year, in my view, was a leap in the collective consciousness. At an instinctive level, people already knew they were oppressed—that something was deeply wrong. But in 2024, many began to reach a more rational understanding of that oppression. They could see the institutions involved. They could identify the comprador class—the local elite acting on behalf of foreign masters across the ocean, in Europe and America. People began making those linkages and formulating demands with more clarity. I’m not sure if I’ve fully answered your question, but I hope that gives a sense of how we’ve arrived at this moment.

I think one of the first things to say is that yes, the majority of those on the streets were Gen Zs—both last year and this year. But they weren’t the only generation present. Millennials were also out in large numbers. And one area where I have to give Gen Zs a lot of credit is in their capacity for mobilization. They were able to bring people onto the streets who wouldn’t normally show up—including their parents. They presented these economic issues—housing, unemployment, health care—as affecting everyone. For a long time, it was mostly people from social movements or other organized groups who came out to protest. But Gen Z managed to expand the base. That’s significant.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that there was a deliberate attempt—by the state and by sections of the media—to frame the protests narrowly around age. To say it was “just” a Gen Z revolt. But Gen Z is not a political category—it’s an age category. Framing the movement this way flattens its political complexity and erases the diversity of people involved. That said, I still want to emphasize that Gen Zs made an immense contribution. The new strategies and tactics they brought into the broader progressive movement—especially in how to organize and mobilize—deserve recognition.

In terms of class character, the people on the streets were overwhelmingly those who have been excluded from economic participation: the working class, the unemployed, people from poor and neglected neighborhoods in Nairobi and other parts of the country. But there was also a surprising presence from the middle class—people who, for a long time, have not been part of mass protests in significant numbers. I think that’s because they, too, realized how precarious their position had become. Their lives were no longer secure. When you’re one paycheck away from poverty, when you can’t afford decent health care, when a single illness like cancer can bankrupt your entire household—that’s when you begin to understand that you’re not exempt from the struggle.

So yes, there was a real shift in class consciousness. The middle class began analyzing their situation and concluded that they, too, needed to be part of a broader fight for a better Kenya. But the vast majority of protestors were still unemployed youth and the working poor. They were in the streets because of the material conditions they live under. Housing is either poor or nonexistent. Food prices are rising. Youth unemployment remains over 60 percent, with no social relief in sight. These young people were, in essence, fighting for the creation of new worlds—worlds of love, of joy, of laughter. They were demanding a life that the current system has denied them, even the basic dignity of dreaming.

That’s why we saw a shift within the ruling class as well. When they saw this force from below organizing and mobilizing, they came together overnight. The opposition, led by Raila Odinga, entered into an arrangement with Ruto’s government. Key opposition leaders were given ministerial appointments. It was a realignment driven by class interest. The ruling class recognized that its collective position was under threat, and so they acted in concert to protect their privileges. What the opposition did, in my view, was a deep betrayal of the people’s march toward history. They essentially danced on the graves of those martyred by the state.

I think, at the most fundamental level, the Kenya Left Alliance is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and Pan-Africanist. That shapes both its worldview and its organizing practices—including how it engages in solidarity work and grassroots action. For us, 2027 is just a moment. The project is much larger. The Kenya Left Alliance was born from the recognition that, while there are many progressive organizations in Kenya, individually they’re all relatively small. None of them, on their own, can shake the system at a structural level. But when these groups come together—and when the people join them, like we’ve seen in the streets—then the system begins to shift.

That’s what necessitated the creation of a broader umbrella: to unite these organizations around a shared minimum program. Because at the end of the day, oppressed people have never won without organization. We can have protests, we can have spontaneous uprisings—but without organization and a long-term strategy, whether to capture political power or bring about deep social transformation, it becomes nearly impossible to sustain gains. That’s why the Kenya Left Alliance was formed.

The groups that make up the alliance have agreed on a draft minimum program—a unifying document that outlines our common priorities. First, we have to address the most urgent social and economic issues: employment, housing, food sovereignty. Take the example of seeds. Right now in Kenya, it’s illegal to share indigenous seeds. Companies like Monsanto have successfully lobbied Parliament to pass laws that criminalize this. So our sovereignty is under attack at the most basic level. The right to grow and share food has been taken away.

So our unity is built around addressing these fundamental needs. But beyond that, we are also concerned with broader questions of national sovereignty. Kenya currently hosts at least three foreign military bases—American, British, and others. There’s the issue of debt, which has become unmanageable. There’s the land question. Article 68 of the Kenyan Constitution mandates Parliament to set a ceiling on land ownership—so no one person can own more than a certain amount of land. But Parliament has refused to pass this legislation for over a decade. If we implemented that ceiling and carried out land reform, we could begin to solve the housing crisis. We could produce more food. We could shift the structure of our society.

So for us, the core of the project is the restoration of dignity for the Kenyan people. That begins with education, health care, housing, clean drinking water. Imagine—a country like Kenya, sixty years after independence, and people are still dying from malaria. Our public hospitals barely function. So the starting point is not lofty abstractions—it’s the urgent, material needs of ordinary people.

That’s the orientation of the Kenyan left. And the Kenya Left Alliance continues to organize. Every day, new progressive groups are joining and strengthening the coalition. We believe that by 2027, we will be in a formidable position to contest for political power. And we’ll do so under the three guiding principles inscribed in our logo: land, food, and freedom.

I don’t think they’re completely wrong. Whether or not to engage in elections depends on the analysis we do and the tactics we choose to pursue our strategic goals. Strategically, we’re working toward building a more dignified society—and in our context, we see elections as a tactic, one of the many possible pathways to get there. At the same time, we’re fully aware of the limitations of electoral processes. Kenya today is a country where the dominant political parties don’t really offer political leadership—they offer ethnic wallets. What I mean is that many so-called leaders use their ethnic bases as bargaining chips to secure elite interests. So the challenge is: How do we create a new kind of politics that is organized around ideas? How do we create vehicles through which we can test and implement those ideas in real time?

Yes, we’re organizing. But there are also municipalities in this country where progressive forces could take control and make minimal but meaningful gains for the people. That’s not enough, of course, but it’s a start. There are towns where people don’t have access to drinking water. You can’t tell them to wait ten years for the revolution to arrive—dust can kill you in two weeks. So for me, what we’re trying to do in this moment must be understood in context.

Let me give you an example. In the last general election in 2022, Kenya had just over 20 million registered voters. William Ruto won with around 6.2 million votes, defeating Raila Odinga by less than 200,000 votes. Both candidates had slightly over 6 million votes. But over 8 million registered voters didn’t show up to vote. That’s massive. And this wasn’t always the case. In previous elections, Kenya’s voter turnout has been extremely high—sometimes even hitting 80 percent. But in 2022, turnout dropped significantly. And those who didn’t vote weren’t simply apathetic. Their refusal to vote was, in itself, a political statement. They were saying: We know the system is rigged. We know this so-called multiparty democracy does not yield democratic outcomes. And so they opted out.

Within the Kenya Left Alliance, we’re asking: How do we organize and mobilize those people—the ones who didn’t vote? How do we also reach those who did vote for the dominant parties, but might be open to supporting a progressive agenda? Based on our analysis, we believe that in this particular historical moment, choosing not to participate in elections would be a serious mistake.

We’ve learned from history. In the 1980s, underground organizers—groups like Mwakenya—decided not to participate in elections. During the 1992 elections and others, they lent their best organizers to other parties and formations. But those organizers couldn’t create real change, because they entered those parties as individuals, not as part of a coherent, organized front. Their movements had taken the position of staying out of the electoral process altogether, and so the individuals had no institutional backing, no political instrument of their own.

That’s why, today, we believe we must come together to build our own political instrument—an organization that can engage the electoral terrain not as a shortcut to power, but as one tactic among many. A way to win some basic improvements in people’s lives. But the most important thing to remember is that elections are only a tactic. They are not the strategy.

The truth is, the state’s failure to provide basic services is not because it lacks resources—it’s because it lacks the political will. The state has made public projects into vehicles for theft. Take the Office of the Auditor General, which is an independent state institution that audits government spending. A few years ago, they reported that roughly KES 2 billion are lost to corruption every single day. That’s about USD 2 million. Daily. That’s money that just disappears. And when then President Uhuru Kenyatta was asked about it, he shrugged and said, “Mnataka nifanye nini?—What do you want me to do?”

So the first step, honestly, is just to stop the theft. Think about how much money KES 2 billion a day amounts to over the course of a year. That alone could fund major improvements in education, health, water infrastructure. Before we even talk about radically transforming the economy, just stemming the daily looting would be a huge step forward. Yes, there are cartels and bureaucrats embedded in the system who would resist such efforts—but that’s another conversation. Beyond corruption, there’s also massive waste.

Let me give you a current example: The president recently traveled abroad—he passed through Addis and then continued on to the US. He took a private jet that cost more than $30,000 an hour. Every hour he’s out of the country, taxpayers are paying that amount for the jet alone—not including all the other expenses. And mind you, Kenya already has a presidential plane. That’s the kind of blatant, unnecessary spending we’re talking about.

So again, before we even get to big structural changes, just addressing corruption and reducing waste would free up significant public funds. And we have to remember: What people are asking for is not extravagant. They’re asking for education, for health care, for clean drinking water. No one’s demanding a holiday in the Bahamas. It’s not like someone’s going to show up at the Ministry and say, “Give me a plane ticket to the Bahamas, I demand it in the name of the revolution.” These are basic human needs.

Haha—maybe one day! We’ll have to go to the Bahamas to extend Pan-African solidarity to our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean.

But that’s all I’ll say on that for now.

Yes, we will be contesting every seat—from president to MCA, which is the Member of County Assembly, similar to a councilor. Personally, I’ll be contesting the presidency under the banner of the Kenya Left Alliance. One of our primary objectives is to engage in a different kind of politics—not necessarily a new kind, but one that has been pushed to the margins. It still exists in other parts of the world, but here in Kenya, it’s been suppressed by the intense monetization of politics. Today, if you don’t have money and resources, it’s almost impossible to compete. So we’re trying to reintroduce ideas into politics.

In the Arusha Declaration, Julius Nyerere said that when he asked his ministers how to solve some of the country’s most pressing social issues, they answered, “We need more money.” And he replied, “But we are a poor country. A poor person does not use money as their weapon. If we have chosen money to be our weapon, then we have chosen the wrong weapon for our struggle.” That insight resonates deeply with us. We’re going into this electoral process with a firm commitment to anchor it in progressive ideas. This isn’t just a contest for votes—it’s a broader political process.

First, it’s a process for consolidating the forces of the left in Kenya. Second, it’s a way to deepen political education, building on the work that many progressive organizations have already been doing. And third, it’s a moment to test our ideas and assess our collective strength as progressive forces. In that sense, this election will be a defining moment for the Kenyan left. Of course, our goal is to win. But even if we don’t, we aim to use the opportunity to prefigure what is possible—to show, in municipalities or counties or other institutions where the Kenya Left may gain control, that change is not only necessary, but doable.

Right now, politics in Kenya is treated like rocket science. Just getting malaria medicine is made to seem as complex as nuclear engineering. We want to break that myth. We want to establish liberated territories—spaces where we can implement real, tangible reforms and provide concrete examples of a better society. If we can do that, we believe it will push people in other areas to begin making new demands of their own, and to reimagine what is politically possible.

It was a pleasure to be on the podcast, Shoki. Hopefully we’ll have a chance for another conversation in the future.