A generation after the 1980s debt crisis triggered the rebirth of democracy on the continent, will Kenya's youthful idealists spark a pan-African revolt?
The protests in Kenya mark a turning point in Kenya's, perhaps even Africa's, political trajectory. Changes were already apparent in Kenya's last elections, in which the William Ruto-led Kenya Kwanza campaign inserted a class element that disrupted decades of elite pacts that had been underpinned by ethnic-based voting. The tax protests take this a step further, giving voice to those who have felt ignored and disenfranchised by the government's decisions. Now the crowd, through their protests, have exerted an influence beyond the traditional patronage networks. How did this happen? Will it have a lasting impact? And will it spread to other African countries?
In 1971, the British historian E. P. Thompson published an article titled 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century'. It argued that the riots, especially bread riots, that plagued 18th century British politics reflected not so much the disorder of agitators, looters and hooligans, as contemporary politicians liked to paint them, but the attempt by ordinary poor people to enforce the laws and customs that protected their livelihoods and made life affordable for them. Their targets were traders and magistrates who ignored the rules for their own profit. The state nevertheless saw them as a threat and responded with repression. It took decades for the protesters to organise themselves politically and campaign successfully for the vote as a more effective way for their voice to be heard.
The recent Kenyan protests were linked to similar concerns, in this case to rising prices caused by tax increases, but with one big difference: it was not just the poor protesting but the middle classes, the mobile phone-owning, digitally-mobilised youth of Gen Z. This is much more politically threatening to the status quo.
While the immediate target was to rescind the proposed tax increases that would have impacted immediately on the cost of living for all Kenyans, the protests were focused as much on the endemic corruption amongst the political and business elite, including Ruto's immediate circle, as on the IMF, whose 2021 $2.3 billion bailout package was predicated on draconian tax measures and subsidy withdrawals to pay off the accumulated debts of the past. As ordinary citizens reeled from the cost-of-living crisis that predictably followed, the elite's affluent lifestyle, flaunted on social media and impervious to the tax hikes, simply rubbed salt in the wound.
Above all, protesters were making the point that the taxes proposed in the budget were unfair. Not only were they retrogressive, impacting more heavily on the poor, but they were also designed to raise money to repay loans from which the elite had grown fat and from which the middle and lower classes had derived little tangible benefit. Sure, there was now the Standard Gauge Railway from Mombasa to a place called Duka Moja, a very expensive white elephant that neither provided them with jobs nor helped them cover the rising cost of living.
President Ruto initially condemned the protests as the 'treasonous' actions of 'criminal' elements and sent in the army to 'restore order', killing some 39 protesters in the process. There is still argument over whether the looting of shops and burning of the Parliament building was caused by hired vandals brought in to discredit the protests and provide a justification for repression, or by some protesters simply expressing their anger or taking advantage of the situation. In practice, it doesn't matter: the damage was done, and the country was shocked.
Ruto is finding out that in a society with a degree of accountability, protest that deteriorates into disorder is what Thompson calls a 'social calamity': it destroys existing social and political relations on which political stability is built. Under an authoritarian government, those in power have little compunction in deploying force to repress dissent: they rule by fear, and this simply reinforces the intimidation of society. Opposition leaders and dissidents can be rounded up, beaten and imprisoned or killed without it threatening their dominance.
But where government is by consent, the authorities need to protect their legitimacy. The question is, whose consent? Kenya is a democracy, and Ruto became president in an election in 2022 declared adequately free and fair. The budget was approved by a democratically-elected Parliament. And yet people still took to the streets in protest.
As Peter Lockwood has argued, Kenyan politics appears to be moving away from ethnically-based voting towards interest-based voting. Ruto's success among Kikuyu voters was based partly on his appeal to the 'hustlers': the poor, the street vendors, the disadvantaged who wanted to believe he would help them. But it was also based on their disenchantment with Uhuru Kenyatta's 'elite capitalism' and Kenya's patron-client politics (neo-patrimonialism for political scientists), in which political support for the president buys access to lucrative business opportunities. It is worth pointing out that in the 2022 elections, eight million eligible voters did not vote - a figure bigger than the number who voted for Ruto - suggesting a profound disenchantment with the political establishment. In addition, close to four million more young Kenyans simply refused to register as voters, suggesting something of a collective boycott against an electoral system in which costs incurred during the campaigns, not least via voter bribery, were more than offset by salaries, perks and bribes in Parliament.
Where a political system is sewn up through patronage, the only way for those outside the system to make their voices heard is in the street.
What fuelled the protests of the crowds in Nairobi and throughout the country was that Ruto had not changed this political process but simply shifted the benefit to his friends and political allies. Not just the hustlers but Kenya's middle classes are suffering from the inflation that debt-fuelled spending and the falling shilling have brought. They see no reason to suffer higher taxes to pay off the debts that were accumulated without their consent, and which are against their objective interests. Ruto had done little to prepare the political ground for his debt strategy - either through the tax-and-pay approach approved by the IMF or the cut-and-pay policy he now proposes.
The imprudent borrowing and incompetent investment by the previous government (in which Ruto was Deputy President) was the cause of the debt crisis that now dominates budget policy. To better informed observers, the international financial system is just as complicit in it. The IMF was deaf to the pleas of activists to deny the Kenyatta government a bailout. And once again, its debt repayment package not only victimises ordinary Kenyans, but going by the failure of similar reforms in the 1990s, it is medicine that could well prove more harmful than the cure.
Being forced first to withdraw the budget and now to restructure his whole cabinet shows that Ruto has registered the need to re-establish his legitimacy by bringing in a wider range of political forces to the government. But until the policy issue is debated honestly in public, Ruto's government will remain vulnerable to popular protest, regardless of whoever is co-opted into the cabinet. The moral authority of the crowd has been asserted: it will not disappear, even if it is no longer on the street.
Kenya is not alone in facing this kind of economic crunch over debt, but others have handled it differently. Ghana and Zambia were unable to avoid defaulting on debt payments, and could not restructure their debt obligations to meet the unaffordable repayments that would involve drastically raising taxes or cutting spending. The cost has been exclusion from global capital markets and weakened currencies - but they have so far avoided riots. The issue is already a critical one in the Ghanaian elections due in December 2024, so the debate there cannot be avoided.
Senegal's elections earlier this year posed a political rather than economic challenge, but it was as much the people on the street as the phone calls from global leaders that finally persuaded Macky Sall to allow the elections to go ahead and hand over the Presidency peacefully to opposition leader, Diomaye Faye.
The African country most vulnerable to such popular protests is currently Nigeria. The #EndSARS protests in October 2020 already demonstrated the ability of young Nigerians to mobilise public protest against what was seen as the recurrent injustice of arbitrary police arrests. Though it came to an abrupt end after the 'Lekki Gate massacre' - the state has taken extensive steps to discourage such protests since - the mobilisation of middle class opinion fed through into Peter Obi's strong showing in the 2022 Nigerian elections.
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The Nigerian state, even more than the Kenyan, revolves around patronage networks lubricated by access to state funds. The dependence on oil revenue has meant that personal and trade taxation in Nigeria is negligible. Tax collection is reported to have risen from 6.7% of GDP in 2021 (OECD) to 10.8% in 2023 (government adviser), but this is just as likely an indication of Nigeria's economic contraction; taxation in Nigeria still remains amongst the lowest in the world. But people do care about the cost of living, the removal of fuel subsidies, and the falling value of the Naira - all of which underpinned the general strikes called by Nigerian unions in May and June this year, demanding a raise in the minimum wage. If nothing is done about it sooner rather than later, the Nigerian crowd could take to the streets once more to demand action from a government that has so far failed to deliver.
For now, the Tinubu government seems to believe that maintaining the patronage networks is more important for its political survival than fending off public protest, and that the corruption underpinning those networks can be left in place. Given the size, diversity and devolution of Nigeria's political system, that may be right - for now. The legitimacy of the Nigerian state, eroded by the jihadi insurgency in the North, and buffeted by banditry and abductions almost everywhere else, remains precarious. The risk is that if things do not improve soon, protests will break out. The authorities may lose political control completely in some areas, which in the prevailing circumstances, they will find very hard to restore without more drastic political and economic reform.
Only time will tell.
Nick Westcott is Professor of Practice in Diplomacy at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London.
