Notes on Civic Agency

African politics is characterized by carefully curated political personas. Every election season, we have turned our campaigning legislators into messiahs, and, upon election, into our gods. When Mwai Kibaki ascended to Kenya's presidency in 2002, his campaign thrived on a single word: corruption. Here was a man anointed as a redeemer, a technocratic Moses who would lead the nation out of the desert of graft. Of course, as is the pattern in most African democracies, these expectations were betrayed in an almost flagrant manner, with the era being termed an orgy of corruption and looting. We fall for the same con, every single time.

Why? The answer lies in narrative—the stories we tell ourselves to survive. When reality becomes too grotesque to name, humans spin fables.^[1] Consider the myth of robodogs from Tanzania that gripped Kenya at the twilight of Daniel Arap Moi's 24-year rule.^[2] They were metaphors for a nameless dread: the terror of a dictator who refused to relinquish power, the violence lurking in unlit alleys, the psychic toll of disappearances and state-sanctioned murder. The same mechanism is what sees us fall in love with every smooth-tongued politico whose story reinforces our (arbitrary) narratives. We put trust in them convinced that "Finally! This one! This is the one who will save us!" Every cycle we put in someone who we feel is 'close to us' in some abstract way, for no other reason than that they weave a story around themselves that mirrors ours in some way. We lie to ourselves that they are “our guy” and we are always convinced that "our guy" is the one to save us.   

How does a society reconcile such betrayal? The answer is hope. Kenya's collective consciousness is sustained by hope.^[3] The light in our hearts that whispers to us, on the edge of despair, that the world we dream of—full of joy, peace, and serenity—is just around the corner. But hope can also be used against us. Politicians are essentially curators of collective delirium. They are similar to gods in that they perpetuate shared fictions that bind societies. We are no stranger to social fictions; we go to war over some of them in fact: money, nations, and human rights. These fictions are neither lies nor truths; they are tools. And like all tools, their morality depends on whose hands wield them. In Africa, the greatest arbiter of social fictions is the post-colonial state. A Leviathan built on inherited colonial machinery and grafted onto pre-existing moral universes. The civic public, embodied by institutions like the civil service or judiciary, operates in a moral vacuum, divorced from the ethical codes governing private life.^[4] Here, the president who steals billions for a Swiss villa is not a thief but a "strategic redistributor" in a system where loyalty to tribe or patron trumps civic duty.   

Corrupt politicians are not a bug, they're a feature. Because of general laziness, everyone can be (and often is) an armchair spectator to politics, but few have the willingness to create meaningful change. It doesn't help that professionals disdain political power, and the few who deign to immerse themselves in this bog pit are themselves disdained by the rest of their ilk. The result of these and many other factors is that those who decide to play the game of politics in a society are not its most qualified but rather those who are most adept at accumulating attention, at all costs. The end result is that our vaunted democratic governance system has been reduced to naught but glorified pageantry. Vanity and virtue are, in the end, two sides of the same coin.

What the political elite forget, however, is that there's a rhythm to democracy, a pulse that beats not in the marble halls of power, but in the dust of village footpaths, the hum of matatu stages, and the flicker of smartphone screens at midnight. It's a rhythm made of whispers and shouts, of mothers tallying school fees and boys coding in cyber cafés, of old men arguing under acacia trees about a road the county forgot. Think of it as a kind of alchemy. In Makueni, farmers gather under the brittle shade of mango trees, not just to curse the drought, but to decide which water pans to dig next. Their hands, cracked from years of fighting the soil, sketch maps in the dirt. This is Harry Boyte's "public work" stripped bare: democracy as calloused palms and shared sweat. 

When a woman stands to ask why the clinic still lacks drugs, she isn't protesting; she's auditing. This is citizenship as daily liturgy. This is Civic Agency. Consider Boyan Slat, the Dutch inventor who declared war on ocean plastic.^[5] He rejected helplessness, deploying technology to cleanse the seas. His lesson? Agency begins when someone says, "If not me, who?" Civic agency is essentially using every faculty available to you to get what you deserve from society and, as necessary, your state, government, or polity. This would entail convincing other individuals, influencing them, not through dominance, but through articulating your vision and your goals, and sometimes your disenchantment with what is, and collectively imagining a better way of being, collaborative labour by ordinary people to build the common good. 

Amartya Sen once wrote that poverty isn't just empty pockets—it's empty possibility. You see it in the eyes of a boda boda rider in Kibera, grinding through 16-hour shifts, too exhausted to care about the governor's scandals. His civic agency is mortgaged to survival. To him, the NGO workshops on "participation" feel like a cruel joke. Democracy can't eat, he mutters. But give him land, a clinic, a school for his kids, and watch—he'll become the meeting's loudest voice. Democracy thrives not when citizens merely vote, but when they own the process of shaping their society.   

The best part about being an agentic citizen is orienting yourself around just doing what you can. The absence of coercion allows you to dedicate the exact amount of energy, the specific skillset and social capital you are able to towards shaping the society you want to grow old in. In Mathare's labyrinthine alleys, this looks like boys who've never owned suits painting murals of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, their spray cans demanding: What about Rex Maasai? This looks like girls stitching code into apps that track maternal deaths, their keystrokes a quiet rebellion against the silence around women's bodies. These aren't "leaders of tomorrow." They're surgeons operating on democracy's rotting flesh, today. This is civic agency—not a noun, but a verb. It's the widow who plants trees on grabbed land, daring the bulldozers to run her over. The hacker anonymizing whistleblower emails in a dingy Nairobi attic. The imam and priest sharing a podium to denounce a land cartel. None wear capes; none make headlines. But together, they're stitching a safety net under the state's wobbly tightrope.   

Water can make a boat float, but it can also capsize it. The highest office in a democracy is the office of the citizen. True democracy isn't built in a day. It's built in the minutes stolen from survival, in the stubborn faith that a people who survived colonialism and austerity can outwit a few fat cats. It's messy, infuriating and achingly slow. This ecosystem thrives when trust replaces fear, when participation becomes habit, and when Kenyans see themselves not as victims of power but as its architects. "Water wears down rock not by force, but by persistence." When we feel ready to despair, we must always remember, the alchemy is working. Just not on our impatient clocks. 

Alex Tamei is a lawyer, legal researcher and fiction writer based in Nairobi. His work focuses on exploring how narratives shape our lived experiences.

Endnotes