The June and July protests in Kenya that started out against the proposed finance bill of 2024 and have now expanded to demand the resignation of President William Ruto is a culmination of the dissatisfaction most citizens have had with his government since he got into power in 2022. At least 60 people have died as a result of police brutality during the protests, hundreds have been injured and others are still reported missing despite President Ruto promising an end to police brutality. In the two and a half years of Ruto’s presidency, there has been a surge in corruption, overtaxation and inflation and the Finance Bill seemed to have struck the last nerve for most Kenyans. By ignoring calls for his stepping down and instead including members of the opposition into his cabinet, he fails to treat the public uproar with the seriousness it deserves.
There are narratives and individuals that seem to be benefitting from Ruto staying in power, working hard to make sure he still is president and hoping that the wave of resistance will be quenched or reduced to murmurs that amount to nothing at least until 2027 when the usual presidential propaganda campaigns can be employed. If the constitution gives all sovereign power to the people, who gains when an unpopular president is in power at the expense of the police using teargas and live ammunition in residential areas? What narratives are working against the Anti-Ruto sentiments?
The Online Town Square
On Tuesday 25th June, the Finance Bill of 2024 was voted into law by 195 Members of the National Assembly. The opposition led the protests against the finance bill in 2023 where at least six people lost their lives due to police brutality. This time round, Kenyans have led the leaderless, partyless and tribeless movement to advocate against the punitive bill and to speak out against the corrupt leadership of the country.Thousands of Kenyans marched in many parts of the country including in Nairobi where Parliament was occupied by peaceful demonstrators a few moments after the bill was passed. Those who could not attend physically were online, amplifying against this law as well as against selfish leaders.
On the backdrop of well organized marches against femicide in January 2024, Kenyans pulled their resources and skills together to show up as medics offering first aid, lawyers advocating for release of unlawfully detained citizens and raising funds for medical bills for those injured. They also engaged in civic education like the Civic Rise movement who summarized the Finance Bill in different vernacular languages.
As the hashtag #RejectFinanceBill2024 became popular across social media platforms from mid June, the pressure increased for individuals with a platform on social media to add their voice against the bill. There were campaigns to sabotage this hashtag by either misspelling some characters in the tag, writing out the year as 2023 and not 2024 or using completely different hashtags altogether. Charlene Ruto, President Ruto’s daughter also went online to share the dilemma she was in as a self-appointed youth champion.
The most vocal of her siblings, Charlene has had her fair share of internet trolls who have bashed her fashion sense. This time round, the public did not spare her and called her out for her tone-deaf remarks while still making jokes about her outfit. By this point, Rex Maina had already lost his life and others had been injured during the anti-tax bill demonstrations and for Charlene to post about the faith she had in her father angered a lot of folk. In her June 25th post, she is seen wearing a t-shirt written ‘born in the 90s’ which seems to delineate her from the revolution, termed the Gen Z revolution mostly because these are the youngest to join a myriad of protesters that have been fighting for a better Kenya since the colonial era.
There already exists a global tension between GenZs and millennials and for her to adorn her being born in the 90s seems to say that she is so far removed from the people who are protesting in the streets, people who her father would later that day call treasonous criminals in his national address. Charlene’s stunt resembles one pulled by a Congresswoman in the Netflix TV show The Bold Type who would show up in terrible outfits on days when controversial bills were being passed into law. In order to divert attention from American politics, this woman would use her outfits to spark outrage thereby baiting voters from pressing issues. Mr Ruto sees the importance of diffusing the online town squares that Kenyans use to organize. He himself asked to engage with fellow Kenyans in a Space on X(formerly Twitter). By taking advantage of the weak links in online platforms who can be paid to push a narrative or through distractions like Charlene’s outfits, the online discourse shifts to whatever can water down his ousting, thereby working in his favour.
A Misaligned Debt Plan
In a forewarning of how tough things would be when elected into office, President Ruto would allude in his campaigns to the debt burden that Uhuru’s government had left claiming that even though he was Deputy President, the handshake with Raila Odinga sidelined him and despite inheriting a broke country, he would work to ensure his bottom up approach would prioritize the economically disadvantaged.David Graeber’s book Debt: The first 5000 years brings to light the morality of paying what one owes. The book starts with David explaining to an attorney at a party that he worked to ‘almost completely destroy the IMF’ which extorts third world countries by offering them expensive loans and profiting off of them.
The attorney is taken aback because ‘surely one has to pay one’s debts’. Historically, humanity has shunned those who fail to pay back their debtors. It is subconsciously obvious to Kenyans therefore that what was borrowed from creditors, IMF and the World Bank being the largest of them, be paid back. The discordance comes in when reports show that while the loans were taken for development of the country, they have largely enriched few individuals in leadership positions and left the bulk of the country worse off, scraping by to pay off the loans.
Activists and leaders like Professor Okiya Omtata have been calling for an audit of the debt that exists as we may be paying off non-existent loans. Amidst all the confusion of the actual financial situation, the biggest beneficiaries end up being exorbitant partners like the IMF who would profit off of Ruto staying in power and ignoring the theft alarms going off in every sector. Mr Ruto has positioned himself as a diplomatic leader, friendly with the US and their allies, and would probably never consider a loan default as recommended by the late Thomas Sankara who said, ‘Debt cannot be repaid, first because if we don’t repay, lenders will not die, that is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die.
‘The IMF also felt the heat when Kenyans in the diaspora showed up at their gate with placards and flags decrying economic interference as far as being influential in drafting the Finance Bill. They apologized to the people who have died and those injured but with the cabinet reconstituted to reinstate rogue CSs and greedy opposition leaders, the current politics is conducive for them save for what they hope is a slight hiccup.
The Political Class
Lastly, we’ll explore the political class, a group of individuals keeping the Ruto dream alive. From reports of goons hired by politicians to disrupt peaceful demonstrations to MPs ridiculing their constituents when asked to reject the Finance Bill, it seems the country is run by a group of bullies and thugs. There is no right or left wing politics in Kenya, only a means to an end, exchanging goodwill for a slice of the pie at the expense of whatever crisis is happening.
It seems the politicians have not yet grasped that Kenyan politics is far beyond tribalism. While the leaders might have their own selfish desires to sit as Commander in Chief, it would be much harder to sanctify themselves before a voting elite that can call out their compromised past than to collaborate with whoever is in power to get a paycheck. After all, no one wants to earn an honest living only to lose their wages to a thankless country, where public services are nonexistent.
