Gen Z Kenya protests defeat IMF backed debt spending and taxation!

[jmdrake]

The announcement of victory:



The background of the problem:

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...overnment-debt

The world is scrambling to understand Kenya’s historic protests – this is what too many are missing
Nanjala Nyabola
Nanjala Nyabola
A finance bill was the trigger, but the backdrop is government debt and blinkered interventions from western institutions

Mon 1 Jul 2024 07.52 EDT
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There is as yet no resolution after an unprecedented week in Kenyan politics. What began as protests against a rushed-through finance bill has revealed a crisis of legitimacy within the executive, the legislature and the police that were sent to do the government’s bidding. And while the protesters have been very clear about their demands – reject the finance bill – outsiders who are accustomed to simplistic narratives about African politics have been scrambling and failing to understand what these events really mean.

Kenya is experiencing a polycrisis of sorts. The finance bill is the immediate trigger: an annually produced document that lays out the government’s fiscal strategy, and which normally passes without much comment. But this year it attracted an unprecedented level of attention because it contained several proposals for the taxation of everyday goods, including bread, sanitary towels and more. Kenyans were already struggling with the effects of a collapsing currency and the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.[B] However, the government was not merely looking to meet its financial obligations but to increase year-on-year spending from the last finance bill, which had already introduced a number of new taxes.

The challenge facing Kenya’s treasury is that the previous administration, of which the current president William Ruto was a part, went on a decade-long borrowing and spending spree, incurring massive debts for ill-advised infrastructure projects that were over budget, poorly executed and behind schedule. For example, rather than renovate the existing railway line that connects the coastal city of Mombasa to the Ugandan capital, it borrowed a great deal of money from China to build a new railway line that only runs across half the country, and which cargo companies have been reluctant to use.

A similar story can be told of the new overpass in Nairobi for which hundreds of trees across what was once Africa’s greenest capital were cut down. The road was built but the tolls were too expensive, so it remains underutilised. Yet the nation remains on the hook for the debt. In 2013, when Uhuru Kenyatta and Ruto came into office, Kenya’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 43%. In 2019 it was 61.7%, and so far in 2024 it is running above 70%.

All this would be bad enough even if Ruto was not also spending a fortune on an unprecedented expansion in the executive. Although Kenya has ministers and cabinet secretaries, the administration attempted to create 50 positions known as chief administrative secretaries distributed across the various ministries, as well as an office of the prime cabinet secretary. Not only is this an expensive duplication of roles, it is also illegal, and a court ruling has held that the positions are unconstitutional - leading to Ruto delaying some of the chief administrative secretary positions.

In addition, the offices of the first lady, the deputy first lady, and the spouse of the prime secretary – each with a budget, an office and staff – were created to great public fanfare. Many elected legislators in the country routinely flaunt their wealth on social media, sharing videos on TikTok of expensive cars and homes, or giving obscenely large donations to religious organisations and charities. Kenyan legislators are the second-highest paid in the world relative to GDP, and would be exempt from many of the new taxes because of their status. The finance bill was described as austerity, but this is not austerity: this is a cash grab from the poor to sustain the lifestyles of the rich.

Moreover, it has emerged that these finance bill measures were not suggested by Kenyans, but were demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in return for a financing programme. The fact that the measures have destabilised the country should not surprise anyone – IMF measures consistently result in these outcomes in the global majority because they are prepared by people with little to no understanding of the social and political context, and under the pretext that economics is a rational science instead of highly qualified guesswork. Indeed, in its own risk assessment of the implementation of the measures, the organisation foresaw that there would be protests but urged the government to ignore them and pass the measures anyway.

One government official said he would have handled this by killing 5,000 Gen Z protestors a day.

https://www.citizen.digital/news/upr...sident-n345491

Kenyans are demanding the arrest and prosecution of Daadab Member of Parliament Farah Maalim after a video of him making inflammatory remarks against the young Kenyan protesters surfaced.

In the undated video which has since gone viral, Maalim, while speaking in the Somali dialect, said that if he were the President of Kenya he would have "slaughtered" 5,000 young protesters every day.

A verified video translation reveals that the legislator was censuring the Kenyan Gen Zs for their attempt to march to State House during the anti-finance Bill 2024 protests.

He claimed that the young people who took the streets were from wealthy backgrounds and were dropped off in the capital with the sole purpose of causing mayhem.


"This was an attempted coup, a clear attempted coup. Children of wealthy business owners, wealthy parents and kids raised on ill-gotten wealth, 80% from one tribe were dropped off in downtown and told to riot and take over State House and Parliament buildings," he said.

Maalim blatantly noted that if he reigned over the nation he would have wiped them out in their thousands.

"God forbid if I was president I would have slaughtered them, 5,000 of them daily. Serious, there is no two ways about it," he said.

Despite keen observations clearly showing that the video was not tampered with, Maalim has claimed that the video has been doctored and is misinforming.