UDA battles must not distract us from the Finance Bill

UDA logo during the party's National Governing Council meeting at the Bomas of Kenya in September 2023. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

Organisationally strong parties have never been our thing. President Jomo Kenyatta infamously kept Kanu weak in order to prevent it from challenging the Provincial Administration.

President Daniel Moi’s attempt to remake the party in his own image failed spectacularly, culminating in the mlolongo elections of 1988 and the advent of multiparty politics.

The demise of Kanu spawned a barrage of organisationally weak Kanu-lings. The ongoing wrangles within UDA are a reminder of this legacy of Potemkin parties.

The organisational weakness of our parties is very costly. It raises the cost of doing politics by necessitating a graft-based intra-elite coalition building.

Everyone eats, and so no one gets punished for eating too much or inefficiently. In more organised jurisdictions with strong parties, elites still eat but efficiently.

Speaking of eating, the Finance Bill 2024 promises to extract even more money from Kenyans.

A lot has already been said about the crudity with which the government continues to grab cash from our wallets – from the aborted plan to tax bread, to the hare-brained taxation of electronic and mobile financial transactions that will force people back to cash, to the new car tax.

However, it is also important to understand the administrative and political motivations behind the intensity of taxation.

The administrative reason why the government is going after more taxes tied to consumption is that we have very few high-paying formal jobs.

Barely 3 million Kenyans are in formal employment, out of a total work force of over 17 million. There is only so much payroll tax we can raise.

Meanwhile, our major corporations have either carved out exemptions for themselves or convinced tax officials that they could die if taxed more.

Tax evasion at the top is effectively institutionalised. Those are the hard administrative facts.

On the political front, the government has proved to be utterly incapable of reducing waste and theft in the public sector. There is absolutely no elite-level political support for a more rationalised spending pattern.

And since we have debts to pay, the only option is to intensify extraction.

All this to say Kenyans will only find relief if the administration sees the light and seriously invests in expanding the tax base by growing the economy and reducing wastage and theft.

Sadly, that is highly unlikely in a context where intra-elite coalitions live on theft of public funds.

-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University