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 difficult to find two-term Members of Parliament in large parts of Central Kenya. Electoral turnover is not an accident; it is a culture. MPs who disappoint, who vanish after elections, who fail to articulate constituency interests, who treat public office as personal reward, are often sent home after a single term. The message is brutal but clear: performance is not optional.
This pattern contrasts sharply with other regions where four-term and five-term MPs have become normalized, even when their constituencies remain trapped in underdevelopment, poor infrastructure, weak educational outcomes, and chronic marginalisation. Longevity in office, in these cases, is not earned through delivery but sustained through patronage networks, ethnic mobilisation, or the politics of grievance. Failure is recycled; incompetence is rebranded as experience.
The irony is striking. Some of the loudest voices lamenting “Kikuyu privilege” come from regions where political accountability is weakest. Leaders who have presided over stagnation for decades face little electoral consequence, yet their supporters demand access to opportunities in regions where public pressure has forced better outcomes, especially in education. When children from these regions seek schools in Central Kenya, the resentment is misdirected. The question is not why Central Kenya performs better; it is why other regions tolerate persistent underperformance from their leaders.
Education, in particular, exposes this contradiction. Central Kenya’s investment in education was not a gift of history alone; it was reinforced by relentless community pressure, competition, and expectations placed on both families and leaders. Schools that fail are confronted. Politicians who neglect education are punished. Over time, this creates ecosystems of performance.
Calling the result “privilege” avoids the harder task of replicating the accountability that produced it.
None of this is to romanticize Mt. Kenya politics. Far from it. The region today is deeply disillusioned. The current administration enjoys little goodwill there, not because of opposition politics or elite manipulation, but because of lived experience. Promises of economic revival have collapsed under the weight of corruption, punitive taxation, collapsing small businesses, and policy incoherence. Farmers feel abandoned, entrepreneurs feel squeezed, and households feel poorer. If accountability culture means anything, it is precisely this: disappointment translates into political anger.
Mt. Kenya’s problem with the current administration is therefore not mysterious or ethnic. It is structural and moral. Leaders were elected on explicit commitments to economic empowerment and ethical governance. Instead, citizens have witnessed scandal after scandal, policy capture by cartels, and a widening gap between rhetoric and reality. In a region conditioned to punish failure, such transgressions are not forgiven easily.
What Kenya must confront is this: leadership quality is not evenly distributed because accountability is not evenly enforced. Regions that normalize non-performance will continue to lag, regardless of who occupies State House. Regions that discipline their leaders, even harshly will continue to extract better outcomes, even under hostile national conditions.
The politics of envy is easier than the politics of reform. It is easier to accuse others of privilege than to ask why one’s own leaders are never held to account. It is easier to shout about historical injustices than to confront contemporary failures of representation. But nations do not develop on the currency of resentment; they develop on the discipline of responsibility.
If there is a lesson the Kikuyu Nation offers the rest of the country, it is not about ethnicity or entitlement. It is about civic culture. About voters who remember. About communities that ask uncomfortable questions. About the refusal to sentimentalize leaders who do not deliver.
Kenya does not need fewer demands on leadership; it needs more. It does not need regions competing in grievance; it needs regions competing in standards. Until citizens everywhere learn to send home leaders who fail them, after one term if necessary, no amount of constitutional reform, revenue sharing, or political realignment will rescue the country from stagnation.
Leadership is everything. And accountability is not privilege. It is citizenship exercised properly.
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