Just like a school pupil being praised for doing well in class, President Ruto of Kenya was given the ‘honor’ of sitting in the seat of President Biden of US during his state visit to the US last month. This month, protests broke out in Kenya over a Finance Bill about to be passed by the Kenyan parliament as part of a tax reform in the Medium-Term Revenue Strategy (MRTS) of the Kenyan government. The strategy aims to increase the tax-to-GDP ratio in Kenya to a whooping 20% and this was initiated because (you guessed right!) the IMF prescribed that Kenya has a potential to increase their tax-to-GDP ratio to 25% – meaning that one quarter of the labor of Kenyan citizens should be given to the government for the common good.
Like in Nigeria and everywhere else where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has influence, increased taxation of the people and austerity policies like removal of subsidies have been the order of the day. This order of penury for the masses is being preserved by stooge leaders. Just like in Nigeria, these policies are packaged as fiscal goals to address fiscal deficits (read as debts owed to the World Bank and other friends of IMF) and fund development goals, like education and healthcare which have remained in shambles, or even deteriorated, since IMF started prescribing these policies many decades ago. The people of these countries are presented as selfish masses who are incapable of making sacrifices for development while government officials like Ruto and Tinubu spend millions of dollars on luxury foreign trips.
These policies are carried out without considering the fact that citizens of countries like Kenya and Nigeria are already struggling with high cost of living. The promise of future economic stability inspires these policies, but this Gen Z generation of young adults are the future of the same policies of sacrificing the social welfare of the masses for future economic development. Our parents were the first victims of these IMF policies in Africa and the Global South yet there is no development. It’s obvious to the blind that those policies are not working! The blackmail that the masses only care about their short-term and immediate needs no longer work, because the long-term is here already.
From now on, the public reaction to IMF policy impositions will be the same all over Africa and the Global South, because the people are fed up. Economic objectives of stabilizing and growing the economy might have made infinitesimal sense about forty years ago when the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) and its austerity policies was introduced in Nigeria. Forty years later, such IMF policies are just abstract explanations with no evidence of practical workability. A 2004 article by the IMF about policy reforms in emerging market economies was titled ‘MEANT WELL, TRIED LITTLE, FAILED MUCH!’ Even the IMF admitted that their austerity policies have failed, while maintaining their paternalistic and condescending blame-the-victim attitude that is common in imperialist neoliberalism. Another 2016 paper by the IMF admitted that neoliberalism was oversold and it has failed.
Policy decisions and the socio-economic repercussions on the lives of the people are directly interconnected, and something that will work in the long-term must have a way of working in the short-term. Well begun is half done. Policies that do not begin well for the people will not work well for them in the long term. Development is not a destination, it is an orientation, and the process is as important as the outcome, especially for the masses who will bear the cost of any sacrifice the most. In the same way, democracy is also not a destination, but an orientation. If the protests in Kenya against the finance bill are successfully quelled with violence against protesters in favor of some parliamentary ‘majority’, then there is no way to convince the masses that democracy works. There is no way to convince them that the freedom of protest and public dissent (an important part of democracy) works. This is the consciousness that has created military coups in the Sahel and other parts of Africa and if the Kenyan government does not reconsider and adjust on this bill in the short term while evolving their democratic governance model past the IMF-puppet model in the long-term, another democracy might be about to fall in Africa.
It’s easy for government leaders to blackmail protesters as puppets of opposition politicians, in defense of their own puppetry to the IMF and the policies they prescribe. It’s easy for government leaders to blackmail protesters by greenwashing the bill with an Eco Levy or the motor vehicle tax. But one thing the Kenyan government must remember is that these protests will keep recurring. This present protest echoes last year’s anti-government protests in Kenya against the same tax reforms. It echoes the Labour protests in Nigeria against such policies. This is a pattern that should show the government that no amount of propaganda about sacrifice can reshape public response to these kinds of policies. The resistance is going to keep growing. No amount of amendments will stop that resistance. The people will not adapt to austerity. They might only adapt their method of resisting austerity. African leaders must know that this problem will not go away, unless they stop letting imperialism determine the pace of our democracy and unless they stop letting neoliberalism determine the pace of our development. So even if the protests stop tomorrow, the grievances of each protesters are still there. Even if the streets and social media are shut down by the government, the anger will remain. The only problem is that without democratic outlets and a listening government, the anger on the streets will turn to crime, corruption and coups, and that is not good for anybody, including the politicians.
Omole Ibukun is a socialist activist who writes from Abuja, Nigeria
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