- Honourable, Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi, thank you for hosting us here at home, as we all know Kenya is renown as a destination that warmly opens its heart and hearth, especially to young people to meet, innovate, collaborate and co-create.
2. Your Excellency Ambassador Heikka, Mr. Hori, Honourable Senator Asige, your presence here tells these young people something important: the world is watching, and the world is invested.
3. Your Excellency Dr. Workneh Gebeyehu, my dear brother and friend, thank you for stewarding this vision. The IGAD Secretariat and the entire ILA team have done more than train leaders. You’ve created a family. And to the IGAD Secretariat staff who work behind the scenes making the impossible possible, asanteni sana .
4. But mostly, I’m here because of you. The eighty alumni in this room. The first three cohorts. The brave ones who said yes to something that didn’t have a track record yet.
5. Can I be honest with you? I have been practicing this speech for days. Writing. Rewriting. My family finally said, “Just talk to them like you’d talk to y our children. ” So that’s what I am going to do. Because looking at you, eighty of you from across this region, I see you as my daughters. I look at you as my sons. I see young people I’ve watched grow up thinking about Africa differently than I did at yourcage.6.
6. You know what keeps me up lately? It’s the silence that follows when I ask young people, “When did you last feel hope?” and it breaks something in me.
7. I remember something about your age that we seem to have forgotten. When the founding fathers were building this dream called Kenya, the late Tom Mboya was thirty-three when he became Minister of Justice. Thirty-three. Some even called him “too young” at thirty-seven, imagine that.
8. Our first cabinets across this region? They averaged in their forties. The liberation movements were led by people your age. It was young people who imagined nations that didn’t exist at that time and then negotiated them into being.
9. They believed recklessly, brilliantly, that they could build anything. That promises weren’t just words but blueprints. That the sweat of their generation would grow directly into institutions that would outlast them.
10. You have inherited that same reckless brilliance. But you are growing up watching systems that were built start to calcify. The youth movement today exists not because you don’t believe in institutions, but because you refuse to let them fossilize. You are raging against their extinction. You are defying the death of your grandparent’s dreams.
11. Some people called you entitled. Disrespectful. Said you don’t understand how things work. I saw something different. I saw you teaching us . Showing us, what accountability looks like when everyone has a camera.
12.What transparency means when everything is screenshotted. What courage sounds like when it’s hash-tagged and won’t disappear from the record.
13. They call you Gen Z. I think of you as Generation Zero-Tolerance. Zero patience for the excuses that have been making for decades. Zero appetite for the inertia that has become normalized. Zero willingness to smile politely while inheriting a mess. And honestly? There are those who are terrified of you. Not because you’re wrong. Because you’re right .
14. But let me share something I’m still learning: Your rage is earned. Your impatience is actually wisdom. But neither will your dissatisfaction build what comes next, not on its own. They say that the hottest fire begets the coldest ash.
15. Throughout history, we have all seen leaders ride anger to power. But governing? That slow, frustrating, sometimes boring work of making things function? That needs something more. It needs what many previous generations never quite mastered: holding two truths at once without your head imploding.
Truth one: Yes, the systems are deficient and the art of government and governance is imperfect. Some systems, especially here in Africa were designed to fail, to continue serving an old and decaying international order that often lay beyond our borders. Institutions were built to serve and preserve ageing power structures and then calibrated to deliver the barest minimum of basic services.
Truth two: You’re the only ones who can fix it. Not because that’scfair, I absolutely agree with you that it’s not fair. But because you’recfluent in both languages: the old politics of handshakes and the new democracy of hashtags.
16. This Academy didn’t train you to wait for permission. The older generation used to say “vijana ni kesho” , the time for the youth is tomorrow. But here’s what leading taught me: Tomorrow is a trap. It never arrives for those waiting to be invited.
17. Look at the numbers with me. Your age group are the most in this region, yet you are having fewer and fewer jobs. I’m not even sure what that mathematics is trying to tell us, but it is saying something .
18. They say you job-hop. That you expect too much too fast. That you don’t understand sacrifice. Let me translate that: You make us uncomfortable because you refuse to play along. You’d rather leave than lose yourself. You’d rather protest than pretend everything’s fine. I don’t think that’s weakness; I think that’s integrity that knows it’s worth.
19. But now, and here I need to be straight with you, comes the harder question. You’ve proven you can tear it down. Now: Can you build it back; bigger and better? Because our region and continent don’t need more critics. Heaven knows we have enough, even among ourselves. It needs Architects. Engineers. People willing to do unglamorous work when the cameras are off and the crowd goes home.
20.You want transparency? Design it. You want accountability? Code it. You want better governance? Don’t just demand it, show us what it looks like. Demonstrate what twenty-first century African leadership can be.
21. The eighty of you here; you’re carrying something I don’t want you to lose. Not your degrees or your networks. You’re carrying possibility that hasn’t been compromised or surrendered yet. You’re not cynical. You’re not bought. You’re not tired. That window closes. I’ve watched it happen.
22. So here’s what I’m asking, not as a former president, just as someone who has been in leadership long enough to know: Decide now what you won’t compromise. Before the pressure comes. Before it is decided for you. Because it will come.
23. Someone will offer you the shortcut. The connection. The envelope. And you’ll have good reasons to say yes. You’ll tell yourself it’s just this once. That you need it to help your family. That everyone does it.
24. I’m going to ask you to write something down today, write it right now as I’m speaking if you can. Write what you refuse to become. In fact, tell it to someone who’ll remind you when you forget. Because as we grow older and colder, we all forget.
25. You’re the first generation with tools to repair and transform our malfunctioning systems entirely. You don’t need to use the old methods. You have your own new ones. And you have a set of powerful tools in your hands especially in this age of AI. Your imagination and your own natural intelligence
26. The older generation’s legacy? It’s the one that they chose to build. Yours? It’ll be what you refuse to repeat. Our communities aren’t waiting for someday. They’re counting on you now. Today.
Tungoje nini? Twende Ka zi. Let’s build this new dream together.
Download the attached speech in PDF.
H.E. Uhuru Kenyatta -Draft Keynote Speech – IGAD Leadership Academy Alumni Conference 16.12.2025
