President Ruto didn't get the message despite conceding

 

Protesters chant anti-government slogans as some of them climb a Kenya Police water cannon truck while demonstrating during a nationwide strike to protest against tax hikes and the Finance Bill 2024 in downtown Nairobi, on June 25, 2024. [AFP]

When President William Ruto claimed those who voted for the Finance Bill 2024 were uncelebrated heroes, I gave up on him.

Every tinge of hope that he was going to ride on this crisis to demonstrate empathy and understanding, vanished. In that statement, the president was clearly insinuating that he could never be wrong.

The truth is young people did not just wake up one day and decide that the finance bill was faulty or the government needed to be jolted to reality. They have been watching from the sidelines since the government came to power. They were there when the VAT on fuel reverted to 16 from 8 per cent.

They were there when electricity costs shot up by nearly 70 per cent. They watched as the opposition waged a raging battle over the housing levy and other taxes. They even experienced first-hand pain of increased costs for higher education and the nearly 1,000 per cent increase in cost of accessing key government documents.

The way in which these changes were occasioned painted the government as being arrogant and insensitive.

The young people observed keenly as their representatives in Parliament were pocketed and the Judiciary was not being as useful when it mattered. What angered them most was seeing their elders in Generation X just complain without doing anything about it.

They knew if they waited until the next election, their elders would also be pocketed with two packets of Unga and a constant reminder of their last names as the basis for making political choices. That was when they decided to take matters into their own hands.

The greatest cancer in this country is that corruption is budgeted for. This is a country where a pen that goes for just Sh20 is bought for Sh200. The price must include kickbacks for everyone in the decision-making chain. That is how Sh1 billion would never do the same thing in government as it would in private hands.

It must first be made clear that the loss caused by not having Finance Bill 2024 in place is less than Sh200 billion and not Sh349 billion. The reason for this is that by the time the president was conceding by deleting all clauses on the bill, Parliament had already passed amendments that saw some outrageous taxes, such as the motor vehicle tax, removed. The amendments had been approved in a PG led by the president.

We all must remember that when President Ruto came into power, he embarked on cutting down the budget for the 2002–2023 cycle by $300 billion. The president believed a lot of the expenditures were unnecessary.

That is why it becomes hard to understand Ruto when he now says we cannot do without Sh200 billion in a budget nearly a trillion more than what he inherited. The message from young people is simple: cut expenditure, clamp down on corruption, and listen when Kenyans speak. That message will change soon to ‘we don’t trust you anymore’.