It is June 2022. Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for the Treasury Ukur Yatani has presented President Uhuru Kenyatta’s final budget to Parliament. To finance the ambitious KSh 3.3 trillion budget (a 10 percent increase from the previous one), Yatani, through the Finance Bill 2022, has proposed an avalanche of new taxes – including a 3 percent tax on digital services.
Far from the city, William Ruto, Kenyatta’s estranged deputy at the time, is out there doing what he had spent the better part of his second term perfecting – campaigning to the hustlers, what his boss called tangatanga-ing. Atop his armoured SUV (which was invisible to the naked eye owing to the throngs of hustlers rallying around him), Ruto rises to the people in a spirited protest against Kenyatta’s budget, pronouncing in Kiswahili:
“Nyinyi mnajua budget imesomwa juzi. Hiyo budget inataka kuongeza bei ya maji, sijui iongeze bei ya mkate, sijui iongeze bei ya unga, sijui iongeze bei ya nduthi. Sisi tunataka kuwaambia hiyo budget haiwezi kupita kwa bunge na ikipita kwa bunge, miezi mitatu baadaye tutaibadilisha iwe ni budget ya mtu wa kawaida.”
[“You all know that the budget was tabled the other day. That budget wants to tax your water, tax your bread, tax your flour, tax your motorcycle… We want to tell you that we will not allow that budget to sail through and if it does, we will overturn it in the next three months to ensure it is the common man’s budget.”]
On the vehicle next to him, a fiery Ndindi Nyoro, then a pivotal mobiliser for Ruto in Central Kenya and today the Chairperson of the Budget and Appropriations Committee in the National Assembly, adds fuel to the flames of the hustler campaign, proclaiming;
“Sisi kama Kenya Kwanza, sisi kama UDA, kitu ya kwanza tutafanya ni supplementary budget ambayo itapeleka maisha ya Wakenya, bei ya bidhaa ikuwe chini.”
[“The first thing that we, as Kenya Kwanza, we, as UDA will do, is to pass a supplementary budget which will alleviate the lives of Kenyans and that will lower the price of basic commodities.”]
The hustlers cheer. Ruto is going to save them.
As fate would have it, three months later, William Ruto would become president, and in the classic David Ndii-esque did-you-really-take-the-campaign-promises-seriously attitude, Ruto makes an about-turn on his promise of a mwananchi-friendly budget.
In 2023, President Ruto’s first Finance Bill which aimed to underwrite an even bigger budget (KSh 3.7 trillion), introduced even harsher taxes, including the housing levy and a 16 percent Value Added Tax (VAT) on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and other petroleum products – a move leading to the rise in the price of food and other commodities.
In 2024, Ruto pushed even further – this time going right to the doorstep of the hustler – demanding more taxes to fund his KSh 3.9 trillion budget. Before public uproar forced him to reconsider, there was a proposal to introduce 15 percent VAT on bread, an eco-levy on diapers and sanitary towels, and an inexplicable 2.5 percent annual motor vehicle tax, among others, signals that Ruto the president is a total and complete stranger from Ruto the man campaigning to hustlers two years earlier (or was it always a charade, he a masquerade?).
Then came 18 June 2024. Young Kenyans are on the streets protesting against Ruto’s new taxes. Across the country, hustlers are complaining. Enters President William Ruto, standing pensively at a press conference at State House following a Parliamentary group meeting with MPs from his ruling party. His Leader of Majority in the National Assembly, and his counterpart, the Chairperson of the Budget Committee, announce that they have “listened to Kenyans” and declare an abandonment of the earlier mentioned VAT on bread, the motor vehicle tax, the eco-levy on locally manufactured goods.
Here was Ruto again, sweeping in to save the hustlers.
Only difference is that this time, Ruto was saving hustlers from himself.
Granted, as the president’s advisors continue to claim, the Ruto government inherited a heavy public debt burden from the previous regime (to which Ruto was Deputy President for a decade). But for a president who campaigned on the promise of providing a better, more affordable life for one of the country’s most economically vulnerable groups – the hustlers, it is a disgrace that he could even consider taxing the most basic food item in a hustler’s household – bread.
Judging by the President’s feeble attempts at saving face following public uproar over proposals contained in the Finance Bill 2024, one would like to imagine that perhaps in a last-minute reflection, the President remembered one of his many milk-and-honey promises to the hustlers. Or perhaps he has remembered that not too long ago, a long-sitting president in a country not too far from his was toppled (by his own hustlers) over the price of bread and fuel.
PS: As Ruto campaigned to the hustlers, the then National Assembly Minority Whip, John Mbadi, an MP from Raila Odinga’s opposition party, called him out as a ‘‘rogue Deputy President’’ and a ‘‘ghost worker’’. Mbadi was at the time supporting Uhuru Kenyatta’s controversial tax proposals in the Finance Bill 2022 (Raila’s ODM was aligned with the ruling party following Odinga’s infamous handshake with Kenyatta in 2018). Today, as Ruto proposes his punitive taxes, Mbadi sings a different tune – demanding that Ruto lessen the tax burden on Kenyans. In the wise words of Eminem – can the real John Mbadi please stand up?
