By Arch. Dr. D.K. Gitau | The Diaspora Times

“They will spend their energy fighting dialects while their future is auctioned to Chinese contractors and local cartels. They will become linguistically colonized, politically misled, and economically irrelevant. Let them know: In a country where injustice speaks all languages, no one should be condemned for speaking their own.” © The Diaspora Times 2025.

To be clear, there is a genuine segment of Kenya’s Gen Z that is politically conscious, issue-based, and courageous in confronting injustice. But they are not the ones making noise about language. They are the ones demanding healthcare reform, free university education, police accountability, and an end to runaway corruption. These youth are not threatened by Gachagua’s Kikuyu. They are threatened by the collapse of the country.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When Rigathi Gachagua toured Central Kenya in 2022, speaking Kikuyu while campaigning for William Ruto, he was lauded as a cultural mobilizer and a loyal lieutenant. His speeches, laced with folklore, proverbs, and grounded idioms with slogans, were received with ululations from the villages of Nyeri to the streets of Karatina. No one questioned his language then. It was considered an act of loyalty. His Kikuyu tongue was the sound of political machinery in motion.

But in 2025, the same tongue, now wielded on a different stage—diaspora forums in the United States—is suddenly being called out as tribalistic. And ironically, the accusations are not coming from only rival politicians or rights watchdogs, but from a section of Kenya’s so-called Gen Z movement. These youth, many of whom were toddlers during the Kibaki era, have crowned themselves as moral arbiters of language and identity, wielding outrage not against injustice or corruption, but against cultural expression. They will not applaud when the same Gachagua tours Machakos, Mombasa, Kajiando, Malaba, while speaking in Swahili, but will wait till he starts speaking Kikuyu to his community.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about tribalism. It’s about silencing a man who no longer serves the regime.

There is growing evidence—albeit discreet and whispered—that a segment of these so-called Gen Z crusaders are not acting out of ideological clarity, but out of strategic alignment with the state. Some have been spotted at government-sponsored events, flown into diaspora gatherings, or conveniently platformed by digital media spaces known to be sympathetic to the Kenya Kwanza administration. These are not youth activists; they are state-sanctioned influencers, masquerading as revolutionaries while doing the dirty work of a regime threatened by Gachagua’s growing popularity.

This is not new. African regimes have long infiltrated youth movements—co-opting dissent, sponsoring misinformation, and manufacturing outrage to discredit political opponents. What is new is the form: TikTok activists with rehearsed hashtags, Instagram intellectuals fluent in cancel culture, and keyboard warriors deployed to monitor, clip, and frame every Kikuyu word uttered by Gachagua as a crime against national unity.

But here is the irony: the government they are defending is itself built on ethnic stacking. President Ruto’s administration is one of the most tribally skewed in Kenya’s history. State corporations, security agencies, and procurement tenders have disproportionately favored the Rift Valley elite. Yet these Gen Z watchdogs are conspicuously silent on that. They only bark when Gachagua opens his mouth in Kikuyu. They form TikTok hearings and waste hours discussing the same tribal script. They appear on Diaspora TV debating the same topic, and yet there are other pressing issues, such as pressuring the Government to release abducted Genz. What is more critical: Advocating for the release of Genz’s or attacking Gachagua after addressing his community in a language they understand?

What does that tell us?

It tells us that the war on Gachagua is not about language. It is about loyalty. It is about power. It is about controlling narrative. The Kikuyu tongue, when spoken in service of Ruto, is acceptable. But when it begins to question the throne, it must be censored—even if it means using fellow Kikuyus and a few naïve diaspora youth to do it.

To be clear, there is a genuine segment of Kenya’s Gen Z that is politically conscious, issue-based, and courageous in confronting injustice. But they are not the ones making noise about language. They are the ones demanding healthcare reform, free university education, police accountability, and an end to runaway corruption. These youth are not threatened by Gachagua’s Kikuyu. They are threatened by the collapse of the country.

The tragedy, therefore, is not that Gachagua is being attacked. The tragedy is that the voices being weaponized against him are the very youth who should be demanding better governance for themselves.

Language is not our enemy. Kikuyu is not the threat. Swahili, Dholuo, Kikamba, and Kalenjin have never been the enemy. The enemy is elite capture. The enemy is a regime that uses ethnicity to divide and rule—and now uses a section of its youth to clean up the mess.

If the youth of Kenya are not careful, they will become the footnotes of the very tyranny they claim to oppose. They will spend their energy fighting dialects while their future is auctioned to Chinese contractors and local cartels. They will become linguistically colonized, politically misled, and economically irrelevant.

Let them know: In a country where injustice speaks all languages, no one should be condemned for speaking their own.

© The Diaspora Times 2025 | Written by Arch. Dr. D.K. Gitau | Atlanta, Georgia

DISCLAIMER:
This article is an opinion piece authored by Arch. Dr. D.K. Gitau, a political analyst, human rights advocate, and founder of “The Diaspora Times”. The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or editorial position of The Diaspora Times, its affiliates, or its editorial board. Readers are encouraged to engage critically and independently with the issues raised.