Kenyans continue to face challenges during the current times from unemployment, lack of healthcare, to high cost of living among other issues.
Politicians continue to campaign as they try to woo more voters to align with their base, but are comprehensive issues addressed by the political parties?
During this campaign period, many leaders have come up with a lot of promises forgetting that they may not have fulfilled promises made in 2013 and 2017.
Holding leaders to account for the promises they make remains vital to ensure that our collective issues are addressed.
Are youths' holistic issues addressed by the parties? How are the parties proving they are in the pipeline addressing the issues?
Are they putting them into their manifestos? Are they verbally mentioning how to sort? Are they creating scenarios in the citizens' minds of what is the perfect Kenya and its citizens?
For instance, under the gender equality issue, the Azimio team has picked Martha Karua for the running mate position.
This is such good progress.
The progress that we as Kenyans have waited to see.
What this speaks to Kenya, to the girls and women is that it is possible to lead, now and in the future even in a heavily patriarchal society.
There is a difference between saying you value women and want to bring them into your government versus actually giving us a woman and ensuring that they get equal tasks, and opportunities just like the rest of the team.
Issues around unemployment must also be prioritised throughout the current campaigns.
Citizens must hold to account the leaders to their verbal promises, projected manifestos which inform policy and the current actions in terms of who gets what seat, even if it’s the now promises, it does inform the next administration if they win.
How to better improve access to employment in my view, would be by ensuring that the law, policy, legal frameworks and licensing are and remains favourable to the public by making them free or even affordable to ensure young people can make, start and sustain businesses.
The issue around taxing of income, businesses should also be looked at by revising the tax brackets, categories and figures to meet the current realities of people in the current hard times.
Within the current administration, issues of gender equality were not achieved that much and this saw cases heading to court to see how to better, improve this.
Corruption was also not addressed effectively and saw to it that a lot of resources were lost every day due to loopholes.
We are interested to see how the next administration will strengthen institutions to work independently.
How giving of positions within parastatals will remain inclusive, and diverse and ensure we are just not awarding local, used and reused incumbents with questionable characters but also to professionals.
We need to see the actual actions of the current political campaigns, within their manifestos.
How are they addressing the issues around democracy within their parties and proposing to be addressed?
Are they looking to respond to the issue of debts, debt ceiling and how to pay up, while ensuring economic growth and not impacting the costs of food and life in general?
Youth activist
Edited by Kiilu Damaris
