Is this Kenya's lost generation?

Recently, Twitter was ablaze as some eager employers shared screenshots of their frustrations with their young employees—mostly of Generation Z and young millennials—lack of agility in the workplace. 

Most of those castigated for lack of seriousness in the workplace were those below 30, with accusations and counter-accusations being exchanged between the supporters of the young generation and their employers who are older. 

"I don't employ anyone below 24, someone who lives with their parents has no real needs, and others are just slay queens who are quite silly," disparaged one tweet. 

There were the defenders: "The new generation doesn't want to be pushed around in the workplace. If they feel they are being taken for granted, they just quit, and this is not sitting well with their employers," read another post. 

Are the young of today a lost generation? This is a topic that has been discussed both online and offline with varying conclusions. 

But first, what is a lost generation? "Lost" in this context was a term coined to refer to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period in the West. 

In the local context, many of today's young are seen as a generation that is struggling in record numbers to find work, leave home, and start a family. A group who refuse to settle down and take up responsibility, and who would rather go on partying into middle age. 

Nathaniel Otieno is jobless. The 24-year-old lives with his mom in Kitisuru. "I came to live with my mom after losing my job as a bank teller in January 2018," he says. Since then he has not bothered to search for another job. "My mom has found four banking jobs for me, but I am not interested. I am too young to be counting other people's money from 7 am to 7 pm. After all, I'll get paid the same amount I get for monthly upkeep from my mom," he says. 

His routine at home is simple. Most days, he wakes up between 10 am and 12 pm. After taking his breakfast, he logs into online gaming sites. "If I am not gaming, I invite my friends to come to play basketball or any of my girlfriends for some quality time," he says. 

In the last four years, Nathaniel has impregnated three women aged 18, 20, and 26. Two of the women dropped their babies at their home while the third opted to raise the baby by herself. "I have three kids aged two and one, two girls and a boy," he says. 

Nathaniel's mom, who is a widow, has employed a house help to take care of the babies. "I have grandkids. I have a future generation. I have hope," she says. 

Easy lifestyle

Upcountry, in Kitui Town, Kelvin Mwangi spends his days drinking at backstreet bars. "I only need Sh60 to get drunk," says the 23-year-old. Although he holds a diploma in clinical medicine, Kelvin works as a 'Beba Beba' cart puller. "I hate everyone who calls me Daktari or asks me to stop drinking," he says. "These are my brothers. I am more at home here because they don't judge me. We pool money together, buy vodka and share equally," he says pointing at his Beba Bebacolleagues.

On the other hand, many young women have turned to sponsors aka mubaba which are synonyms for older men who fund their lifestyles. 

According to the findings of a study by the Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics, of all girls aged 18 to 24 years from all universities in Nairobi, one in five openly admits to having a sponsor or a sugar daddy. 

This 2020 study also revealed that girls around this age expected sex to be exchanged with money, with Sh5,000 being the bare minimum they could accept. These girls expected their university boyfriends to provide gifts, outings, and meals. They expected their sponsors to provide rent, local and foreign trips, and financing for their beauty, makeup, and clothing. 

"Being married made men less attractive for the position of the boyfriend. But being married and moneyed was the ideal attribute young women were looking for in sponsors," the study said.

This sponsor mentality goes beyond life on campus. As the Saturday Magazine found out, young women who have reasonably good careers are also caught up in the web of Wababa relationships. 

This is the lifestyle Mary-Claret Atieno has adopted. Atieno works as an assistant auditor for a legal firm in Nairobi. "I like my job but I want more money. I spend Sh60,000 on rent alone. I need at least Sh200,000 to finance my monthly lifestyle," she says.

To achieve this figure, she has gotten into a relationship with two rich older married men. "One is a politician and the other is a roads contractor," she says. "They might be old but their money is young!" 

Young men too are keen to cash in on the trend by dating much older women in exchange for gifts. 

"Hello, I am 28, and from Nairobi. I wish to be hooked up with a sugar mummy for a serious relationship and good times," read this email received by the Saturday Magazine. 

"I have a Mumama and I have no regrets," says Peterson Rono, a 22-year-old who completed university in 2021. The arrangement is simple. He fulfills her sexually and she fulfills him financially. 

"I have a girlfriend, but I enjoy intimacy more with my Mumama. The money is the icing on the cake," he says. Since they started going out in mid-2021, Rono has moved out of the single house he was sharing with a fellow student in the Ngara area. 

"I now live on my own. I don't work, but I am never broke. My house is as well-furnished as that of a working bachelor working 9 to 5," he prides.

The changing mindsets and attitudes of those born between 1995 and 2005, have baffled many. 

Workplace issues

Psychologist Ken Munyua says the demands of living a conspicuous lifestyle are pushing the young to cut corners, as they demand to make it instantly, with little effort. 

"They don't believe in the process of job promotions and gradual salary increments. They want everything instantly," he says. 

Still, those from the generation say they are on the right track, albeit from new lenses. 

"This is a generation of smart, competitive, adaptable, and semi-rebellious individuals who sometimes come across as rant machines on social media because deep down, we are fed up of the system trying to bog us down. We are the largest, most well-educated, culturally diverse, globally aware, technologically savvy, and socially engaged generation our world has ever seen," Dominic Opaka writes in a local daily, in defense of the young. 

The ripples of the generation are also being felt in the corporate world. According to Perminus Wainaina, the head of recruitment and managing partner at the human resource firm Corporate Staffing Limited, young job seekers are the toughest to recruit. They are not self-aware and do not appreciate gradual career progression, he says. 

"Today's young job seekers don't hold the career process in the same regard. They have seen people like Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of college and became a billionaire by the age of 23. They want this type of instantaneous success," Wainana says. 

Wainaina singles out situations where young job seekers are demanding salaries that are equivalent to what top multinational executives earn. "I have interviewed candidates who asked for triple the amount of salary we had listed in the job ads," he says. 

"If the 20 to 30 generation doesn't get a cognitive restructuring, it might get to 40s qualified but unskilled for management," cautions career coach Kenneth Oduor. 

Employers might opt to bypass this generation in favour of those younger when the time comes.

Quick Cash

Inability to hold jobs and the lack of patience towards career growth has also pushed many young people into illegal businesses that promise to make them overnight millionaires. These businesses include online scams and money laundering. In some cases, the results of such ventures have ended as fatally as they did for Kevin Omwenga. He was 28 when his life was cut short by a bullet at an apartment in Kilimani Estate, Nairobi in May 2020. Two months after his death, Omwenga had quit his job as a car broker along Ngong Road. This left him broke to a point of struggling with rent. 

But between March and May 2020, Omwenga's life changed instantly. He moved into the expensive Galana Suites where he rented a Sh150,000 per month furnished apartment. He then changed his friends and started purchasing high-end cars that had an estimated collective worth of more than Sh20 million. 

Apparently, Omwenga's sudden lavish lifestyle was claimed to have been the result of fake gold and money-laundering deals.

According to sociologist Johnstone Miriti, the generations born after 2000 will find it hard to navigate through the challenges of life. 

"The hallmark of this generation is their casual approach to sex, YOLO (You Only Live Once) philosophy, deals and shortcuts in making money, and their mantra that they deserve a soft life," he says. 

There is an economic angle to this as well. According to economic analyst Geoffrey Ngetich, many of those in this generation was born just as the Moi era was ending and the economy was rebounding. "The economy performed well from 2003. As the urban population rose, university and post-secondary education boomed, poverty rates fell, and making money became a little easier. This enabled parents of children born post-2000 to provide a much better life," he says. 

Ngetich says that this generation schooled in a time when the education system also experienced some changes. "This was the time when 4K clubs were abolished when subjects like Music, Agriculture, Art, and Craft were abandoned. Some of those subjects were very efficient in instilling work-life values that are lacking in this generation," he says.

According to Miriti, unlike the generation before this which matured around the time the AIDS pandemic was ravaging the country, the current generation has matured at a time when HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are manageable or treatable. 

"This has created a safe space for them to lower their sexual guards," he says. This mirrors the findings of a survey by Population Services International (PSI) which found out that up to 80 per cent of young women between the ages of 19 and 27 years in Kenya were mostly afraid of falling pregnant than contracting HIV through unprotected sex.

Parenting limitations

Sociologist Christina Chanya Lenjou points out that the setup for this generation can be traced to postcolonial parenting. "Postcolonial generation parents raised their kids differently. They were the 'achievers' working in government and private circles who adopted an exotic lifestyle. They introduced partying like the white man whose happy valley lifestyle was dominated by partying and sexual relations," she says.

Because children learn by observation and imitation, this adoption of a happy-go-lucky lifestyle has been gradually trickling down from children born in the 70s to children born in the 90s, and finally burst into a full storm on children born in the 2000s. 

"We now have a scenario where the attraction for hard work has been replaced by that of a lifestyle," she says. 

Christina is however quick to point out that this generation may not be lost. But rather, it could just be different from what society has been used to. "Because of cultural diffusion, the societal fabric has become too loose to control. This has created the permeability of foreign culture in terms of general behaviour, value and belief systems, and substance use," she says. This liberalism has given rise to independent behavioural adaptations that go against the conservatism that dominated the 20th-century generations.

The style of education, examination spoon-feeding, cosset-parenting, and the large extent parents will go to ensure their children get it easy in school and in life is also a factor. 

Take Rachel Mutungi who stays at home surfing through Netflix because she can't hold any job. "I have vowed to never go out in search of a job. It is too tough out there for me. I can't survive being rejected or getting fired again," she says. 

Asked about how she grew up, the 26-year-old says that she had an easy life. "My mom was protective. I never lacked anything. She never allowed me to experience any failure at school or in the neighbourhood," she says, adding that she went to a national girls' high school because her parents bought the exam papers for her. From high school, she immediately enrolled at a private university. "My mom has always made success in life happen for me. All I needed, all I wanted, and all I deserved she made sure I got. Now I am at an age where I could face the world alone. I am afraid and it freaks me out completely," she says.

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