Throughout the last 25 years of the twentieth century, Kenya’s student movement emerged as one of the most vibrant and militant in all of Africa. By the end of the 1990s, however, the strength, unity and national orientation of Kenyan student activists began to dissipate, as troubling trends afflicting the country’s body politic began to intrude upon life at Kenyan universities in a forceful, new way. Some scholars have attempted to attribute the weakening of student activism in Kenya to implementation neoliberal austerity reforms, suggesting that political factors were of diminishing importance in producing such outcomes (Federici 2000; Caffenzis 2000; Amutabi 2002; Zeilig 2007).
In this essay, I take a different approach, contending that dramatic changes in the experiences, expectations, patterns and objectives of student activism at the University of Nairobi in the late-1990s were closely related to the effects of political liberalization in Kenya’s national political scene during this time. Specifically, I argue that the return of multiparty politics (i.e the novel presence of opposition parties vying for support on campus) produced a number of significant consequences, including: new, internal divisions within the leadership of the student union along ethnic/party lines; the commercialization of student politics (i.e. ‘jackpotting’), which was a product of students’ ability to now manipulate the electoral competition of multiparty politics for their own ends; and the emergence of ‘good squads’, co-ethnic gangs of university students, sometimes armed, who provided protection for student leaders and were funded by politically connected individuals. These ‘goon squads’ often behaved as vigilantes, harassing student activists, disrupting campaign events, interfering in student elections, and terrorizing sections of the student population. By the end of the 1990s, this essay will show that the fragmentation of student leadership along party lines, the increasing commercialization of student politics and the emerging presence of ‘goon’ squads, like Kosovo, on Kenyan university campuses were all evidence of the ways in which university politics continued to be deeply embedded within, and primarily shaped by, Kenya’s national political system.