International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Renewed protests in Kenya

Paul Martial — 2025-07-11T06:58:00Z

One year after the major demonstrations against the budget, Kenyan youths are taking to the streets again, despite increased repression.

- IVP606 - July 2025 / Kenya

Kenya: Youth against the Ruto regime

Paul Martial — 2025-04-19T07:23:40Z

Last spring, huge demonstrations took place across Kenya against the finance bill under the slogan “#RejectFinanceBill2024”. This IMF-backed project aimed to impose new taxes on the population in order to pay off debts amounting to $79 billion. The mobilization, mainly by young people, forced President William Ruto to cancel the bill.

- IVP603 - April 2025 / Kenya

How Kenya's Youth, Middle Classes and Working Poor Joined Forces

Caroline Kimeu — 2024-10-11T06:44:29Z

I remember Kenya's June 25 protests like they were yesterday. The energy on the streets of Nairobi was frenetic, filled with the sound of whistles, motorcycle honks, vuvuzelas (long horns used to cheer in soccer games) and loud blasts of teargas.

- IV597 - October 2024 / Kenya

The Kenyan Uprising

Zachary J. Patterson — 2024-09-04T16:25:37Z

More than two months after its government's controversial Finance Bill 2024 sparked widespread unrest, the flame of resistance remains bright across Kenya. The youth-led struggle—largely forged on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and WhatsApp by Generation-Z Kenyans—has ignited years of smoldering frustration into fresh demands for accountable governance, dignity, and justice. Following the government's cancellation of the bill, the rallying call shifted from #RejectFinanceBill2024 to #RutoMustGo—a shift from opposition to a tax increase that would disproportionately impact the poorest of Kenyans to a rejection of the neocolonial political arrangement, a public indictment of both elite colonial agents and the comprador class, and a mandate to renegotiate the broken social contract between Kenyan citizens and leadership. Kenyan youth are rejecting the poverty and humiliation perpetuated through the inequitable power relations of the global capitalist system, which have left Kenya vulnerable to aggressive foreign interests and the shadowy manipulation common within the imperial global agenda.

- IV596-September 2024 / Youth and student movements, Kenya

In Kenya, a whiff of revolution

Paul Martial — 2024-07-28T10:43:57Z

For the past two months, Kenya has been shaken by severe turbulence. With a debt of more than 76 billion dollars, Kenya is under attack from the IMF, which has demanded far-reaching economic reforms that President Ruto hastened to implement. These include the introduction of multiple taxes on basic necessities. Measures considered by the international financial institution to have ‘medium risk' social consequences. A serious mistake!

- IV594 - July 2024 / Kenya

A look back at the doctors' strike in Kenya

Paul Martial — 2024-05-17T18:51:00Z

“These demands are part of a wider popular protest movement against the austerity policy that William Ruto, the new president elected in September 2022, is trying to implement.”

- IV592 - May 2024 / Kenya, Public services

Addressing crisis and building counter power through new African ecofeminist movement

Samantha Hargreaves — 2019-08-30T07:10:59Z

Africa is reeling through multiple crises – economic, ecological and social. The continent is carrying the most substantial impacts of the growing climate crisis. Women in peasant and working-class communities carry the double burden of oppression. Firstly, they are located in the periphery of the world, which is subject to ongoing neo-colonial capitalist exploitation. And secondly, they are burdened by patriarchy, which serves the interests of capital and all men.

- iV535 - August 2019 / Women, Africa, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo

China to take over Kenya's main port over unpaid huge Chinese Loan

Henry — 2018-12-31T06:03:02Z

The Kenyan government risks losing the lucrative Mombasa port to China should the country fail to repay huge loans advanced by Chinese lenders.

- IV527 - December 2018 / Economy, China, Kenya

A tradition of stolen elections

Firoze Manji — 2017-11-27T08:37:47Z

This article was written for the October issue of Amandla, so before the second Presendential election was scheduled for October 17. This was then postponed to October 26. Odinga announced that he was withdrawing on October 10 - seemingly in the hope that the October elections, in which he had no confidence, would have to be postponed. The election went ahead with a much lower turn out than in August and some violence. The international press has had very little coverage of the situation in Kenya since, for the reasons that Firoze explains below.

- IV514 - November 2017 / Kenya

What's Left in Africa?

Firoze Manji — 2015-02-05T18:28:39Z

The early 1950s witnessed an extraordinary sweep of popular mobilisations across the continent inspired by aspirations for emancipatory freedom – an end to the colonial yoke. Across the continent, nationalist parties convinced people that the path to freedom was through political independence.
Since then, many of the gains of independence, which cost the blood and lives of millions in Africa, have been reversed with the privatisation of the commons and public utilities, as well as by dispossessions of land, by unemployment and by the increasing costs of food, rent and other necessities of life. In response, discontent has been growing across the continent, with spontaneous eruptions and mass uprisings that have in some cases resulted in the overthrow of regimes nurtured and nourished by imperialism (e.g. in Tunisia, Egypt and Burkina Faso). In such circumstances, one would have thought that there would have been fertile grounds for the emergence of strong left working class movements across the continent. But why has this not happened?

- IV481 - February 2015 / Africa, South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Congo, Guinea-Bissau