By Kinuthia Ndung’u and Wanjira Wanjiru
Kenya’s protests demonstrated that a movement without a single publicly identifiable leader can still be organized and coordinated, and can achieve immediate demands. But such a movement may struggle to preserve its gains and build institutions capable of lasting after the protests subside. In an article published by the Journal of Democracy, Kinuthia Ndung’u and Wanjira Wanjiru draw on their experience as organizers of the Kenyan uprising to explain how distributed leadership helped counter attempts at co-optation and repression, while also revealing challenges involving decision-making, accountability and the conversion of digital mobilization into lasting organization.
When Kenya’s Gen Z uprising forced President William Ruto to withdraw the controversial 2024 Finance Bill, the world took notice. Within weeks, the story was everywhere: a horizontal movement with no visible leader, apparently driven by young people, had achieved what traditional opposition leaders had failed to accomplish. Commentators saw it as evidence that organizing rooted in social media could match — and perhaps surpass — the power of political parties, trade unions and formally organized civil society.
But describing the movement as “leaderless” became a frame that obscured more than it revealed. The uprising was not without leadership; it was deliberately organized without a single public leader to whom the movement could be attributed. That distinction matters, and we want to make it explicit from the outset: a movement can be genuinely decentralized and genuinely coordinated at the same time. The more difficult question, which we address here as organizers who participated in the uprising from within, is whether that combination is sufficient not only to extract concessions from the government, but also to preserve what has been won and build the capacity to fight the next battle from a stronger position.
This is not uniquely a Kenyan issue. Youth-led movements have forced governments to make concessions in Bangladesh, challenged state authority in Indonesia and begun to take shape in India. All of these movements have organized through digital networks, and all confront the same problem that appears the morning after a protest: how can the energy of protest be transformed into sustainable political power?
We write this account as practitioners rather than theorists. What follows is a clear-eyed assessment of what the model of having no single leader achieved over three years, the price it exacted, and what we would do differently.
Denying the State Its Usual Tools
June 2024 marked a turning point in Kenya’s post-independence history. Although the uprising came to be known as the “Gen Z protests” — a label we use here only as shorthand, because the uprising was never simply the story of one generation — the term offers an incomplete picture of what happened.
It reduces a struggle against debt, corruption, imperialism and state violence to a generational story, while obscuring the deeper issue: the colonial foundations of Kenya’s political economy and the still-unfinished project of national liberation.
The 2024 Finance Bill proposed steep new taxes to help the government manage its growing public debt. The protests forced the government to withdraw it, but the underlying fiscal pressure did not disappear; a new Finance Bill was enacted in 2025.
The bill did not create Kenya’s debt crisis or the inequality underpinning it. Rather, it brought both into public view and triggered a confrontation with the same political and economic system that had already failed millions of Kenyans.
Both of us entered the protests as community organizers within Kenya’s Social Justice Movement, a grassroots organizing network of which we had been part for years. Government propaganda and sections of the media had long branded us “career activists,” accusing us of protesting for money. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of community organizers live from day to day and work from moral and political conviction, not for wages.
We had participated in demonstrations before, but we had never seen political consciousness spread so quickly. Within days, the slogan “Reject the Finance Bill” evolved into “Ruto Must Go” and “Reject the IMF.”
That speed was real, but it was not spontaneous. What looked like an uprising that erupted overnight was the product of years of grassroots organizing and political education that had never before converged on such a national scale.
Decades of structural adjustment and privatization driven by International Monetary Fund policies had weakened, depoliticized or dismantled trade unions, cooperatives and civic institutions that had previously organized popular struggles in Kenya.
Our generation therefore faced a dual task: resisting the state while building new spaces in which political organizing could take place. Many of those spaces were digital.
Much of the international commentary focused on the apparent absence of leaders. In reality, leadership was deliberately distributed.
We used horizontal organizing to bypass Kenya’s elite-driven political hierarchies. By presenting the movement as leaderless, tribeless and partyless, we denied the state its familiar tools: co-optation, ethnic mobilization and backroom deals with a handful of leaders.
Coordination took place across interconnected digital platforms. X Spaces hosted strategic discussions and real-time coordination. WhatsApp and Telegram groups handled protest logistics and movement routes as police positions shifted. Content creators on TikTok and Instagram translated complicated fiscal policies into plain-language explanations that millions could understand.
Platforms previously used for memes and sports discussions became infrastructure for political education and coordinated action.
None of this was funded by NGO money. Ordinary Kenyans financed it directly through M-Pesa accounts — Kenya’s mobile-money system — managed by trusted organizers.
The funds covered hospital bills, bail and support for bereaved families, with public accounting for every shilling spent. Volunteer doctors, nurses and lawyers also provided emergency medical care and legal defense free of charge.
As the state flooded the same platforms with disinformation and false protest routes and abducted prominent organizers, we came to rely on organizers who had built credibility over years rather than those with the largest follower counts.
When police blocked a route, protesters changed direction within minutes, guided by trusted networks. When one organizer was arrested or disappeared, another stepped forward to take over.
But that resilience came at a devastating price.
Kenya’s police oversight authority recorded 62 deaths linked to the 2024 protests. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented 60 deaths and 601 injuries in a single month. Amnesty International Kenya recorded 83 abductions and more than 2,000 arbitrary arrests.
Nearly two years later, only three cases involving those extrajudicial killings had reached a courtroom.
The violence did not end with the withdrawal of the Finance Bill.
The first anniversary in 2025 saw another 27 deaths, while the July 2025 Saba Saba protests — commemorating Kenya’s 1990 pro-democracy demonstrations — resulted in a further 38 deaths.
Eighteen bodies were later recovered from a dumpsite in one of Nairobi’s settlements. The bodies were never officially linked to the protests, but residents widely regarded them as further evidence of state violence.
By the second anniversary in June 2026, the repression had not eased. Police confronted mothers of those killed, who were laying flowers outside parliament, with barricades and force.
Rogue officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations also abducted one of the movement’s best-known organizers and held him for five days before releasing him after fellow organizers threatened to return to the streets.
Our movement also overturned long-standing assumptions about leadership.
Kenya’s political history is filled with elite bargains concluded behind the backs of popular movements. These include the coalition government formed in 2008 after post-election violence and the 2018 “handshake” between two rival leaders. Those deals left fundamental demands for justice unresolved.
We feared history would repeat itself: politicians would absorb or appropriate the energy of the uprising and trade popular anger for government positions, leaving the underlying grievances unaddressed.
In our experience, that fear proved justified, and the movement faced two tests.
The first came when opposition leader Raila Odinga reached a private understanding with Ruto that culminated in opposition figures joining the government.
We rejected the deal outright, and preserving political independence became one of our most important collective principles.
The second test came when one member of our movement — a young organizer with genuine standing inside it — publicly aligned himself with Odinga and the Ruto government.
The movement simply withdrew its trust from him. He lost his platform almost overnight, while others assumed his responsibilities.
The lesson was that legitimacy belonged to the collective, not to any individual, and the movement did not have to collapse merely because a highly visible figure had been co-opted.
The Limits of the “Leaderless” Model
Horizontal organizing, however, also has real limits.
After the historic storming of parliament on June 25, 2024, the challenge shifted from mobilizing people in the streets to building something sustainable without reproducing the hierarchy we had rejected.
The same structures that had made us resilient against repression also made it difficult to resolve strategic disagreements, hold anyone accountable, secure funding or build institutions capable of surviving the departure of any single organizer.
Our first attempt to solve this problem was the National Coordinating Committee of People’s Assemblies (NCCPA), a coalition of grassroots organizations, political parties and organizers formed to carry the lessons of the uprising into the next phase.
Its founding argument was that Kenyan independence had not truly ended foreign economic domination; instead, it had transferred the day-to-day administration of the state to a local elite serving global capital.
For a brief period, we succeeded in coordinating another nationwide mobilization.
But the experiment fractured under deep ideological tensions. The committee brought together a volatile mix of liberals, anarchists and Marxists, alongside long-standing personal rivalries.
This led many people to act in bad faith, actively refusing to promote or build the assemblies within their local communities.
Opportunism further exploited this structural weakness. Key representatives fought over the limited financial resources raised for local assemblies, while a small number of prominent members joined the camps of reactionary traditional politicians.
The lesson was harsh: agreeing on what we opposed proved far easier than agreeing on what we wanted to build together.
What followed did not produce a single organization to succeed the movement. Instead, several parallel experiments emerged, each betting on a different organizational structure.
After the 2025 protest commemorations, the National People’s Council began building popular-power councils from the grassroots upward.
It brought together a number of grassroots organizers, but we moved too quickly without grounding the effort in extensive grassroots debate, and it stalled after a single conference.
The Kenya Left Alliance, which brings together anti-capitalist and social-democratic organizations, is still trying to build durable political capacity rooted among workers and the unemployed.
The Pan-African Socialist Alliance, founded years before 2024, offers its own cautionary lesson about how revolutionary politics can turn inward and undermine itself when it ceases to remain firmly rooted in everyday struggles.
We also joined the Niko Kadi campaign, a youth-led mass voter-registration movement aimed at converting the political awareness generated by the uprising into an organized youth voting bloc ahead of 2027 and exercising the most basic constitutional power available: electing leaders who respect human rights and the rule of law.
Many young Kenyans were killed, abducted or arrested for demanding exactly that.
We need leaders whom we do not have to die in order to be heard by.
Niko Kadi has already registered more than two million new voters.
The absence of a single visible leader also created a vacuum in national politics that individual figures have begun to fill.
Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna, the ousted secretary-general of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), has emerged as a source of hope.
He strongly opposed his party’s alignment with President William Ruto’s administration and the framework of the “broad-based government.”
While ODM’s central leadership embraced the coalition, Sifuna sided with protesters rather than joining the arrangement reached between Raila Odinga and Ruto.
He repeatedly criticized the government over abductions linked to the Gen Z protests and the excessive taxation of citizens.
Many young people have since joined Linda Mwananchi and its mass rallies across the country.
What Did Kenya Teach Us?
The movement that filled the streets in 2024 no longer exists today in the same form.
Many WhatsApp and Telegram groups have gone quiet. Some organizers withdrew after being exhausted financially, emotionally and psychologically.
But the digital infrastructure has not disappeared.
We still use X Spaces and TikTok for organizing and discussion, and most organizers have returned to grassroots work while preparing for the next electoral cycle — some as candidates, others as voters.
Kenya’s uprising was one manifestation of a much broader crisis across the Global South: debt, austerity, shrinking democratic space, governments responding to resistance with force, and international lenders continuing to prescribe the same market reforms.
The Kenyan experience tests specific claims about what distributed organizing can and cannot accomplish.
The answer matters for every movement now confronting the same problem that emerges the morning after a protest.
The model did exactly what it was designed to do: it denied the state its usual tools of containment, prevented opposition politicians from absorbing the uprising’s energy, and demonstrated in practical terms what it looks like when legitimacy belongs to the collective rather than to an individual.
But the same fracture that ultimately broke apart the National Coordinating Committee of People’s Assemblies represents a limitation repeated throughout the history of movements everywhere: agreeing on what must be opposed is far easier than agreeing on what the future should look like and how to build it.
The student-led uprising in Bangladesh, which toppled a government in 2024, now faces the same question, although at a more advanced stage.
Movements in Indonesia and India, still at earlier points in their trajectories, have Kenya’s three-year experience from which to learn before they reach that stage.
What Kenya adds to this picture is the specific price paid for remaining organizationally weak while repression continues.
When 127 deaths result in almost no accountability, and when organizers disappear for days at a time, organizational questions cease to be abstract.
Historically, movements that solved this problem — such as South Africa’s anti-apartheid United Democratic Front or the clandestine federal regional networks of Poland’s Solidarity movement — did not do so through rigid hierarchy, but through federated structures: popular councils and local bodies that distributed power without dissipating it.
Our Kenyan experiments — the National People’s Council, the Kenya Left Alliance and Niko Kadi — represent different bets on what such a structure should look like.
None has fully succeeded.
But the fact that organizers continue experimenting with these models, two years after the streets emptied, is itself a form of resilience.
Three years of practicing the “leaderless” model taught us both its strength and its limitations.
If we could do it again, we would build mechanisms for collective decision-making and accountability earlier, strengthen the connection between digital mobilization and permanent grassroots structures, and establish meaningful systems of care for organizers facing repression and psychological trauma.
The movement has changed, but the questions that drove people into the streets have not disappeared.
Anger over debt, corruption, inequality and state violence remains.
We carry with us the memory of those who were killed, tortured and abducted, and of those who simply could no longer continue.
We honor them by building the political power required for the birth of a just and equitable Kenya.
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