A note on time – there is no tomorrow, no 2027, only today.

Two days ago, on June 17th 2025, Boniface Kariuki, a 22-year-old hawker, was shot, point blank in the head by two Kenyan police officers. In the video, which has since circulated on social media as well as on mainstream media, you can see Kariuki tensing when they hit him with their guns, and then he uses his hands to shield himself, and dissuade them from what I imagine he could already sense they were about to do: attempt a public execution, in broad daylight, televised for the whole county to see. The gun shots - which the state has always used to discipline dissenters and young working-class men – they ring, Kariuki’s body falls to the ground and a man nearby shouts, “wamemmaliza” - they’ve finished him.

In an interview outside the hospital where Boniface is being treated, his father Jonah Kariuki tells us that he is a hawker too - just like Boniface. He goes on:

“Nimemlea kwa shida sana, lakini sasa niko na huzuni kulingana na mahali ako. Lakini si mbaya sana, nitaomba bado atakuwa sawa” (“I’ve raised him amidst many challenges, but now I’m feeling pained by the situation he is in. It’s not that bad, but I will continue praying that he will be alright”).

Here, Kariuki demonstrates that despite western conceptions of time as always linear, as always already angled in the directio of progress – under the violence of capitalism and neocolonialism, time overwhelmingly means the consistent reassertion of oppression and pain for those who are dispossessed. Here, the neocolonial state not only has dominance over the way the most vulnerable live and how they (almost) die, but it also dominates time and how it is experienced.

If time is a metric of change, the state uses its dominance to construct dispossession, underemployment - Kariuki’s “challenges” - as historical continuities of suffering that are felt as business as usual, that are assumed to be inevitable. If time exists as a method for remembering, the state uses its power to enact the kind of violence that ensures that life itself - its phases, its milestones – becomes a banal memorial to a long, generational pain. If most people keep holding onto life because of the possibility that time might yield change - “hope” - then under the state’s attempt to monopolise the meaning of time, the past converges with the present, it’s become divisions dissolved and hope repositioned as naïveté.

The state aims to subsume time’s possibilities under the weight of its urgent, colonial violence.

So, what do we learn about time from how the state conducts itself when it takes up space on protest streets? We learn that state takes advantage of brief moments of dissent to end years of difficult, unsupported child rearing with a single, terse bullet? We learn that that across all sectors of life, the neocolonial state is seeking to insert itself as the arbiter of time. We learn that when it specifically mobilises its arsenal against the working and under classes, when it presses the butt of its gun against a young man, whose family it has dispossessed across generations, the neocolonial state is seeking to quickly bring historical continuities to bear, that immediately erase whatever alternative timelines of joy, hope, experience, expertise and/or love people may have been constructing. The state aims to subsume time’s possibilities under the weight of its urgent, colonial violence.

Yet, even as this horror unfolds, Kenyans are being told to wait for the 2027 general election to experience and create change. The urgency Kenyans are demonstrating on the streets and online in demanding that #RutoMustGoNOW in the face of abductions, worsening economic conditions and police violence, is reimagined as “youthful impatience” and “restlessness”. We are told repeatedly, that if we do not wait for the elections and instead attempt to remove the president through other means, today, NOW, “the country will burn”. Apparently “we will lose our country”.

The state and its apologists selectively invoke the law, which mandates elections every 5 years, to situate the state as the sole arbiter of change – determining when change can occur, and when it must wait. In her essay, “Time and the Colonial State,” Maryem-Bahia Arfaoui argues that the law exists as a “political metronome of the state’s daily rhythms”. Here Arfaoui is surfacing the way in which at the scale of everyday life legal rules or state time are mundanely, non-violently integrated into our lives – we rarely ever actively go about our daily routines with the intent to follow the law – but we just do. To unintentionally follow state time is typically an innocuous action, but at a time when the everyday of this current regime’s time in power yields death, we have to understand that the state is repurposing the forceful banality of everyday life under capitalism as a means of pacifying us.

The state and its allies do this by excluding what Arfaoui calls “illegal temporalities” from our public discourses, by telling us that liberal democratic timelines are the only things that guarantee change. This in turn erases the alternative, resurgent timeline Kenyan people have been collectively developing together in street protests, mutual aid organising and consciousness raising: the timeline that says that Ruto and the entire political class must go now. Put another way, the state is attempting to control time in the same way that it might control a state border – screening migrants to determine who to gets to enter its territory and who is turned away. But what we learn those who live in one place but undetectably cross borders to school their children and trade their wares in another is that borders can be made porous; there are ways to force them open or at least construct alternative sites for entry and exit. So, what can this mean for how we treat time in this critical?

We must construct an alternative theory of time that is disciplined by our demands and needs. We need police violence to end now, we need universal access to free education to be secured now, we need to be able to breathe now – so it means that Ruto (and the entire political class) must go today, not tomorrow, or in 2027 - TODAY. Any political candidate that does not share this same urgency and defers our desire for change to a later date to consolidate their candidacy, should be treated with suspicion. We need to treat our need for change and safety with a righteous urgency and reinterpret this insistence on waiting or allowing “democracy to take its course” as a signal that the political class is harnessing every moment, they have left in government to consolidate their power and annihilate ours.

There is no tomorrow, no 2027, only today.