Kenya’s Gen Z movement is moving beyond street protests to focus on voter mobilisation. The Tuko Kadi campaign, launched in March 2026, reflects a broader shift in political engagement as young people use digital platforms, social networks and popular culture to counter voter apathy and build electoral power ahead of the 2027 elections.

This new stage in the movement’s evolution draws on what Sydney Tarrow terms “contentious collective action” to confront a long-identified pitfall in democratic processes among young Africans: voter apathy. As Professor Tarrow argues in Power in Movement External link., contentious collective action encapsulates the foundational resolve of all social movements, riots, strike waves, rebellions or revolutions. Contentious actions are naturally conflictive because they represent the primary alternative which common masses of people deploy to “demonstrate their claims against better-equipped opponents or more powerful states”.

This is the case of the ongoing Tuko Kadi (We Have the Vote) campaign in Kenya, described by one Gen Z participant I spoke with as the country’s largest voting bloc. It represents a Gen Z-led mass mobilization initiative to register young voters en masse – as many as 18 million – ahead of the 2027 general and presidential elections. Just as social media paved the way for the emergence of leaderless forms of mass mobilization on the streets of Kenya during the June 2024 protests against a government finance bill, social media is once again paving the way for one of the most wide-reaching voter mobilization campaigns in the history of Kenya. In less than a week, Kenya’s Gen Zs managed to mobilize thousands of other Gen Zs. The results they have achieved in weeks have been unprecedented – particularly in comparison to those from the official Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) tasked External link. with the same assignment.

Door-to-door campaigning

The Tuko Kadi campaign can be seen as a strategic response from Kenyan Gen Zs to the IEBC’s budgetary External link. and operational shortfall in the area of civic awareness and voter education. A post on X on March 28 called for a “door-to-door” campaign approach to ensure that the campaign sustains its momentum. Any close follower of African politics will agree that the term “door-to-door” readily describes a powerful campaign strategy used by politicians to sway their electorate to their favor as elections approach. In my analysis of the Kenyan Gen Z social media spaces, these Gen Zs are now in pursuit of 18 million voters to be registered by 2027. Successfully armed with such political power, they could become “king makers” or “king breakers” in the 2027 elections. One of my Gen Z research participants on the ground succinctly summarized the essence of the campaign:

Internet activism

This new revolutionary Gen Z ethos is harnessing the power of high internet use in Kenya and elsewhere on the continent. According to an Afrobarometer report External link. polling people aged 18-35, Kenya was ranked second at 69% internet use and 14% posting about politics – just behind Morocco (with 88% internet use and 16% posting about politics). The report also noted that 2024 was a “record year for government-imposed internet blackouts across the continent…”. And 2024 was the same year that Gen Zs led an uprising against the government of Kenya for its attempt to pass a contentious finance bill in parliament.

Following a viral video by a young Kenyan on social media calling for protests against the alleged embezzlement of 1.1 billion Kenyan shillings assigned for Kenyan student scholarships in Canada and Finland External link., the Gen Zs embarked on an intense civic education campaign on TikTok predominantly, but also on X. They created short-form videos analyzing multiple angles of government bills and policies passed or about to be passed in parliament, to the extent that content on civic education became the most viral kind of content in Kenya’s social media ecosystems. This momentum online would translate into leaderless mobilization in the streets in ways that would overwhelm the government and Kenya’s security forces.

Africa-wide voter apathy

The Tuko Kadi campaign has built on that same momentum. But now, rather than a confrontation against a particular policy or bill passed by the government using short-form videos on social media, the Gen Zs in Kenya are confronting an age-old problem, long identified as endemic among Africa’s youth, and aptly captured in the 2024 Afrobarometer report: voter apathy.

The report noted that across 39 African countries surveyed, 53% of respondents said they would accept the military seizing control of government when elected leaders abuse power for personal gain. Only 42% held the position that the military should never intervene in politics under any circumstances. African youth are measurably more open to this than their elders. 56% of young people endorse military takeovers under such conditions, compared to just 47% of those aged 55 and above. This is not an abstraction. It is a democratic alarm bell, sounding across a continent where trust in elected institutions is hemorrhaging in real time.

Democracy and disillusion

Young Africans are acutely frustrated with what they perceive as bad governance. Yet paradoxically, they are the least likely to act on it through conventional channels. Only 63% of African youth eligible to vote in their country's last election say they actually did so, against 78% to 84% of older cohorts. They also trail their elders by 7 to 12 percentage points in other forms of civic engagement, including joining collective efforts to raise community issues and contacting local government representatives. Nearly two-thirds – 64% of African youth – say they prefer democracy over any other system of government, and large majorities reject both dictatorship (80%) and military rule (65%). Yet 40% of young people perceive most or all officials as corrupt, and 60% express dissatisfaction with the state of democracy External link. in their countries.

It is precisely this contradiction between democratic preference and democratic disillusionment, between political awareness and political withdrawal, that defines the terrain on which the Gen Z Tuko Kadi campaign has emerged. The 2024 protests were not a rejection of democracy. They were a rejection of its counterfeit. A generation that believes in the system but no longer trusts those running it has discovered that the streets are no more responsive than the ballot box. They have come to realize that protests might shake the streets, but the ballot will shake the system. Consequently, the Tuko Kadi campaign bears all the trappings of a digital pseudo-linguistic catalyst poised to inspire various vehicles and machineries of democratic realignment that could rewrite the rules of civic engagement for the entire African continent, starting from Kenya.

In line with the concept of “serious play External link.”, whereby people engage in playful behaviors to achieve serious objectives, Gen Z-led social media civic education erupted into the emergence of new political identities, namely #tribeless, #fearless, #partyless and #leaderless. Gen Zs are now deploying “joy” as a tool of resistance under the Tuko Kadi campaign. Some argue that the government might infiltrate their leaderless mobilization campaigns, as in the past, but one of my participants asks “How can you infiltrate Joy?”.

Joyful resistance and erratic momentum

This strategic use of joy coupled with creativity and popular culture as instruments of political participation and resistance has resulted in an initiative led by a popular Kenyan comedian, Eric Omondi, who proposed a voter registration concert External link. under the Tuko Kadi campaign. Rather than relying on traditional civic education models, this approach reframes political participation as a cultural and social experience. By requiring a voter’s card as entry and featuring popular artists, the initiative transforms voter registration into a desirable, collective, and even celebratory act.

Backed by several Gen Zs leaders, the concert reflects a broader shift in how Gen Z engages with politics. Civic action is no longer confined to formal spaces of protest or institutional dialogue. Instead, it is embedded within entertainment, music and social gatherings that resonate with youth identity and everyday life. This development can be interpreted as a form of “joyful resistance”, where participation is driven not solely by grievance or dissent, but by the deliberate creation of energizing, community-centered experiences. With this initiative, the Gen Zs in Kenya have made joy a form of political capital which sustains engagement, lowers barriers to entry and expands participation beyond traditionally politicized actors.

Consequently, following the long hiatus by the Gen Z after the June 2024 protests, they have shown through the Tuko Kadi campaign that they are not disengaged, rather they command erratic momentum in constantly redefining the modalities of engagement. By fusing civic responsibility with cultural expression, they are constructing alternative pathways to political inclusion during which registering to vote is not just a duty, but a shared and affirming social act.

Peer support

The #TukoKadi campaign began in March 2026 when Ademba Allans, a Kenyan Gen Z, made a video depicting Gen Zs who had registered as voters with an image from Kenya’s IEBC portal showing their voter identification. After the video went viral on social media, Ademba posted it on his WhatsApp status and other social media platforms. Upon observing the requests he received from other Gen Zs in need of assistance to help them register as voters, Ademba later made a post on X asking for another 100,000 non-registered voters in a constituency called Kasarani who might also need help to register.

Many Gen Zs responded to his call and with peer-thinking strongly valued among youth External link., the Tuko Kadi campaign would later morph into an appendage #NikoKadi. The linguistic construction of these hashtags and their translation in English can be summarized thus: Tuko = we have/we are armed/we are ready; Kadi = voter's card; Tuko Kadi, we have the vote or we are armed with the voter card; “Niko kadi” is a singular form which translates to “I am ready with the voter card”. These linguistic mechanics subtly capture the pseudo-linguistic character of a form of communication which these Gen Zs understand without hesitation.

Previously, especially during the events surrounding the 2024 finance bill protests, such short videos which captured individuals displaying different angles of civic participation or political mobilization would be created with and posted on TikTok External link.. However, Instagram became popular for the #Tukokadi campaign because it built on a socio-technological affordance – the “Add Yours” feature – offered by Instagram stories. The role of this feature on Instagram stories is to replicate a particular action template originally created by an individual but designed to collate multiple individuals replicating the same template but with different variants of the same theme. Thus, a few Gen Zs in Kenya started adding the “Voter Found” template from the IEBC’s portal on Instagram's “Add Yours” in their stories showing their names and pictures as captured in the IEBC voter registration portal, thus heightening the popularity of the Tuko Kadi campaign.

The Tuko Kadi momentum later spread to Facebook where many millennials were then co-opted into the campaign.

Regarding the question of whether the Gen Zs are working for or with any political party in Kenya, one interview participant had a resounding message which unequivocally conveyed the general Gen Z position with party politics in Kenya: