Rattoose Ratundu

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[Randiki @RandikiS]

It is end month. Thighs must be shown.

[Silas Nyanchwani @nyanchwani]

Kenyan Millennial Men Have No Plan B

Kenyan men die young. The average male life expectancy is about 62, and healthy life expectancy, the years you actually live in good health, is closer to 57. So even the so-called average man spends his final years unwell.

Pick a random sample of twenty men in their thirties, and a startling number are already fatherless. Their old men are long dead, or they were never there to begin with: present but deadbeat, or absent and deadbeat, take your pick. Very few men have the privilege of seeing their fathers live into their 80s and 90s.

If I show up in my village right now, the men in their 40s and 50s have already begun to thin out. Between 60 and 75, there are almost none, and the rare one who reaches his mid-70s suddenly has a real shot at 85 and beyond. It is a silent crisis, and you never notice it until you are 40, marrying again, needing uncles to escort you, only to realize there are no uncles left, only cousins.

Our fathers’ generation was wasted by HIV/AIDS and by the economic collapse of the late 1980s and 1990s, a collapse engineered in part by World Bank and IMF prescriptions, the structural adjustment programs, not unlike what is being done to us now. Many in Gen Z may not know this, but there was a time when this country actually made things. The Western Kenya belt ran on sugar: Chemelil, Muhoroni, Nzoia, Mumias, Sony.

Webuye had Pan Paper. There were cotton ginneries and pyrethrum, and coffee farming spread as far as Kisii. Nakuru was busy as hell. So was Kitale, and even small outposts like Kilgoris. Thika was big, big, and industrial. Then, within a decade, the factories went quiet, the parastatals were privatized, and every plant that shut, every institution that was sold off, took real livelihoods and real families down with it.

People retreated to the countryside. I still remember the prettiest girl who transferred to our school. I would vote for Ruto if that is what it takes to find out how her life turned out. She looked like she had lived a cushioned life somewhere, only to land in rural Kisii, in a jigger-infested classroom. Those were the real-time adjustments that millennials rarely talk about. Maybe that is part of why so many of us are quietly traumatized.

As I said, our fathers at least had a Plan B: ancestral land, and our mothers.

As men, we romanticize our independence now, and some treat marriage as a woman’s backup plan, but in the 1980s and 90s, it was often a wife’s ingenuity that kept the whole family alive. And for the many men who died early, leaving behind young, bewildered widows, it was the women who carried the weight of raising everyone, without taking anything away from the men who did their part.

For a while, between roughly 2005 and 2015, I honestly believed millennial men would escape our fathers’ fate. Now I am not so sure. More and more millennial men are walking into something worse than what their fathers faced.

Where the late 1980s and 1990s lost a generation of productive men and women to HIV/AIDS, the late 2010s and 2020s are killing men with something quieter: a broken economy, made worse by terrible political choices, a shaky global situation, and a future nobody can read. As Darius Okolla has argued, millennials are the first generation here to enter adulthood under this much uncertainty.

For our parents, marriage and a home of your own, even a badly built one, were realistic dreams. Plenty of millennials did manage to put up decent houses in the towns ringing Nairobi. But far more never accumulated enough to reach escape velocity from poverty. It is those born in the late 1980s and 1990s who hurt the most: bright enough to get into college and raised to believe that education was the key to everything. What a cruel joke that has turned out to be.

A huge share of graduates since 2014 have never held a properly structured formal job, the kind you keep consistently for five years, long enough to set yourself up for the basics. So instead of marrying, a man in this position ends up with a baby mama, and often cannot even provide for the baby. Just yesterday, I was talking with a younger Gen Z cousin about the recent spike in new HIV infections, and she told me, plainly, that she keeps condoms on her because some of the young men she meets cannot even afford one. That is not a joke, man.

And here is the part that should frighten you: this is the same machine that took our fathers. After years of steady decline, from about 94,000 new HIV infections at the peak down to roughly 16,000 in 2024, new infections jumped again in 2025, past 20,000, the first reversal in years. The cause is almost insultingly familiar. When the United States froze PEPFAR and USAID funding, prevention collapsed almost overnight. Testing fell, PrEP uptake halved, and young people aged 15 to 24 now account for about four in every ten new infections. Donor money built the wall that held the disease back, and the moment it was pulled, the disease started walking back through. History is not repeating. It is rhyming, and it is rhyming in our generation. Worse, our government, like so many across Africa, rarely wants to solve some of these basic problems.

Now that we are in our 40s, economic depression is a silent killer. No amount of motivation, no think piece, no pep talk will bail a man out. At some point, you need the only thing that actually works: money.

Our economy began its slow collapse around 2015. Some of the rot traces back to the 2008-09 global crash; the West never fully recovered, and when America sneezes, the rest of us still catch the cold. But the deeper wounds were self-inflicted. We raised a Eurobond of roughly Sh 200 billion, and to this day the Auditor General cannot fully account for it; by the official reckoning, around a billion dollars has never been traced to any actual project. We built a wildly overpriced SGR. The effects were immediate. As Eurobond repayments and other loans came due, cash drained out of the economy. The banks that used to hawk loans to us before 2015 found a far better customer in the government itself, and what little credit remained for ordinary people dried up.

Before long, counties stopped paying on time. Today, the unpaid bills are staggering: national government pending bills alone have exceeded Sh 500 billion, and the total, including counties, sits north of Sh 690 billion, much of it owed to small suppliers who have since folded. Taxes climbed, inflation climbed, companies issued profit warnings after profit warnings, and many shut, exactly as they did in the 1990s.

The economy kept shrinking, and in the meantime, we handed the keys to a thieving elite, the kind of arrangement where only they get to steal, so the money pools in fewer and fewer hands.

In real life, this is what it looks like: if you run a business, the stock does not move. A friend who sells electronics in Luthuli told me that in his good years, back in the 2010s, he shifted serious volume and was, in real terms, a millionaire. These days, he is lucky to sell one cheap Chinese TV a week. Last I heard, he may close shop.
You can see it in black tax too, which keeps climbing. I told Gordon Opiyo recently that we should be careful about celebrating the rise in diaspora remittances. That money is not flowing home to buy Treasury bonds or build anything; it is flowing home to plug the holes that government irresponsibility keeps tearing open in people’s lives, something both the Central Bank and the Kenyan Demographic Health Survey admit.

Ruto did not kill the Kenyan economy. It was already on life support by the time he inherited it. Whatever little resuscitation he managed, he did for himself and his cronies. Now, standing over a dead economy, all he does is dance and piss on the grave while his bloggers cheer.

None of this is to say women are not suffering. They are, and their story is theirs to tell. But what I am certain of is this: in the coming decade, a lot of men’s deaths will be hastened by the collapsing economy. Whether we lose them to drugs, to suicide, to slow depression, or to plain loss of hope, the direction is grim. If things keep tanking, I would not be shocked to see male life expectancy slide back toward the mid-50s. Broke men cannot afford decent healthcare or good food. And broke men, more than anyone, tend to lose their networks and their relationships, even within their own families. That isolation is its own quiet killer.

So, educated millennials and Gen Z men, hear me clearly.

The point of laying all this out is not to bury you. It is to get you to stop waiting for the economy, or the government, or some motivational speaker, to come and rescue you. They are not coming. The men who make it through the next ten years will be the ones who saw the storm early and built for it: who learned a skill the market actually pays for, who pooled resources with other men instead of competing in misery, who kept their bodies and their minds intact, and who refused to let shame cut them off from the people who love them. Money is the goal, yes, but the things that keep a broke man alive long enough to go and make it are boring and unglamorous: a few real friends, a reason to wake up, and the stubbornness to not check out early.

Our fathers had land and our mothers to fall back on. We were handed no Plan B. We have to become our own. Build it now, while you still can, because the times are bad, and they will get worse before they get better. The men who understand this and move will not merely survive. They will be the ones still standing when the dust settles, and the ones who get to rebuild.
Nothing messes with a man like a bad economy. And this, my friends, is not a wantam or tutam thing. This one outlasts whoever is sitting in State House

[Rattoose Ratundu @Randyskid]

Eei... 😂

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

There is no other generation that has its identity firmly rooted in money as are the millennials. Its men are convinced that money is a substitute for being actual human beings. Its women are convinced that money absolves men of their sins. Both pay severely for it.

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

Some people have the mannerisms of wild animals. My job as a partner is not to validate every feeling you conjure in the course of the relationship. I can listen but my default answer cannot always be “I understand”. Sometimes, I will not understand. And that is okay.

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

Run. Just run. You accomplish a few things.

1) You come out into the sunlight. Escape the darkness inside.
2) Vicariously live through other people you encounter. Escape your damning mind.
3) You accomplish something through exertion. Good for the mind's belief system.

Run!

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

Love may be selfless but the decision to marry is selfish. You asses a partner's viability through: education, earning potential, trustworthiness, shared interests, and philosophy of life. These standards then build an expectation, which you refer to when the marriage dissolves

[Malvin @ManOfFocus_]

A man becomes dangerous the day he learns, he needs nothing. No approval, no applause, no safety net. Just his willpower and fire within himself. Get to that point, bro!

[Bosco @Mandela_O1]

Those who tell us that the citizens of Kenya do not know David Maraga are LYING.

They are simply looking for an excuse to vote for their favorite political thugs.

Anyone who was 18+ years old and above in September 2017 knows Maraga too well.

I was 15. And I still remember how adults heaved a sigh of relief that day.

Stop lying. Do not hide behind charisma and aura to blunder and plunder the nation for another cycle of five years.

[George T. Diano @georgediano]

Real men aren't defined by easy days. They are forged in hard seasons, shaped by pressure, and proven by how they rise after they fall.

[George T. Diano @georgediano]

As a man, after you cross 30, sit down and study the patterns in your family. Look at what distracted, delayed, or derailed the men before you. Look at what destroyed them. Your father, his brothers, your uncles, older cousins etc... is it booze, is it gambling, is it women, is it recklessly siring everywhere, is it poor financial decisions, did they struggle with deep anger issues, domestic terrorists, did they practice witchcraft and all that.

Sit down and study those patterns,, then make intentional decisions to break those cycles. Remember some of these things are normal vices. Look for a recurring or deep recognizable patterns that are plastered all over men in your family. What brought them down. Do you see a pattern? Now that!

As Joshua Selman always says “As a man, number one thing that will help you live to your potential is knowing what can bring you down”. And you may not run away from your family tree. Refuse to be a victim of repeated patterns. Because they are there.

Whether you know it or not. Whether you recognize them or you don’t. They exist. They didn’t have the knowledge and resources we now have. Honor your progeny. Break out of them. Be made of Gold.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

It is humbling to consider that if we harness just 1 millionth of the Sun’s power for AI, that will be much more than a million times the intelligence of all of humanity

[NTV Kenya @ntvkenya]

David Maraga: Fellow Kenyans, this is my personal pledge to you. I will not steal from you. I will not allow my family or friends to steal from you... If we succeed in confronting impunity and recovering stolen assets, we will reduce the cost of living.

[Nasdaq @Nasdaq]

Mission: @SpaceX.
Objective: Make life multiplanetary.
Exchange: @NasdaqExchange.
Status: Initial Public Offering. $SPCX

[Eric @amerix]

Men,

The tears of a man are not seen because they silently drip into his stomach,

He bleeds silently in places his family cannot see,

This is so that the people he loves never have to cry or bleed.

So, work,

Keep going.

#MasculinitySaturday

[Eric @amerix]

Men,

Keep working,

You are a WARRIOR,

Your children may never see the storms you fought, but they will live under the shelter you built.

#MasculinitySaturday

[Eric @amerix]

Failure is an option. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

— Elon Musk.

[Eric @amerix]

Fatherlessness is a far bigger crisis than Ebola.

Nobody seems keen to see this.

A fatherless generation is a dangerous generation. It kills, steals, destroys, and degrades a society.

Let women continue pushing their stupid "women empowerment" slogans but they will be the victims of a dysfunctional generation.

[Kaka @ShockValueXX]

@kmpdu You had the whole country with you until page 2.
You can’t scream “Kenya is NOT America’s biohazard dumping ground” in bold letters… then immediately pivot to “but if you build it anyway, make sure Kenyan doctors get the jobs and the hazard pay.”
That’s not a principled stand. That’s negotiating your cut of the apocalypse.
Either the facility is an existential threat to Kenyan lives and sovereignty…in which case you reject it outright….or it isn’t. Pick one.
You don’t get to oppose Ebola on Kenyan soil and then audition to run the Ebola ward.
The people aren’t stupid.

[𝓓𝓾𝓴𝓮 🧃 @fwsodiq]

its important to remember that your goal is to do well, not to convince other people that your doing well.