Kenya Bitter Truth

By Gitile Naituli In Kenya’s political vocabulary, few phrases are as casually deployed, and as poorly interrogated as “Kikuyu privilege.” It is invoked to explain electoral outcomes, economic disparities, and even educational mobility. Yet this phrase, repeated often enough, has become a convenient shortcut that obscures a more uncomfortable truth: what is described as “privilege” is, in many cases, citizens demanding leadership and punishing failure. Politics, at its core, is a contract. Leaders promise representation, development, and stewardship of public resources; citizens, in return, offer votes and legitimacy. Where this contract is enforced, leadership improves. Where it is not, mediocrity hardens into entitlement. The Kikuyu Nation, for all its internal contradictions and current frustrations, has historically enforced this contract with unusual severity. That enforcement, not ethnicity, is what many mistake for privilege. Consider a simple but telling fact: it is remarkably ...