I am Gacheke. In 2017 I first met my friend Antony Adoyo, today a community organizer and participatory action research coordinator with the Social Justice Center Working Group (SJCWG), a collective voice for the grassroots social justice movement in Kenya. During that time, he was preparing to graduate from the University of Nairobi with a Bachelor of Economics degree. He was a young man under 30 years, who had the great dream and vision of working with the Central Bank of Kenya. This was the dream career for many students in his class who studied finance and economics. They all hoped that after finishing university, they would get a well-paying job. As we exchanged notes one day, my comrade to be Antony asked me if I could help get him a job with mainstream human rights organization as he was about to graduate. I was greatly surprised that a university graduate from the University of Nairobi, the first university in the republic of Kenya, was seeking a job through me, a community organizer.

When Adoyo graduated in 2017, he invited me and other comrades to his graduation ceremony at his parents’ home. It was a two roomed dwelling in Dandora, one of the poor neighborhoods bordering Mathare. We celebrated his graduation with a humble meal of chapatis and beef stew. His father later led us in a prayer; may his son bring hope and rescue his family from poverty, and relief for the hopelessness of the struggles for livelihoods in Dandora. This created in me a very strong impression of how ordinary parents have invested heavily in their children’s education as part of struggles for social liberation from poverty. For many university graduates, liberating their parents from poverty or even helping to pay back the loans that their parents borrowed to pay their university school fees will not be possible. It is a question of social justice that many young university graduates are struggling, carrying university degree certificates—for medicine, engineering, economics, biotechnology and nursing—that remind them of the pain of toiling through a university education only to “tarmac” (remain unemployed)for the next five years or more. They are living the crisis of capitalism in daily life. One student who graduated with a degree in sociology told me that she stopped applying for jobs advertised in the newspaper as she feared that she would one day find a groundnut (peanuts) hawker selling the groundnuts wrapped with copies of her academic certificates and CV. She had sent out hundreds of application letters for jobs in Nairobi and suspected that these were thrown out and then picked up and used by groundnut hawkers.