The Global Stakes of Kenya’s Protests

Protests in Kenya that began last month over higher taxes continue to rock the country. They have exposed the fissures running through its facade of stability, from its massive debts to the role it plays in upholding Western imperialism in the region.

Kenyan police officers intervene in people protesting against the tax hikes in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 25, 2024. (Gerald Anderson / Anadolu via Getty Images)

BYSAMAR AL-BULUSHI

JACOBIN
07.24.2024

In mid-June, tens of thousands of predominately young people took to the streets across Kenya. The focus of what commentators have dubbed the Gen Z–led revolt — which has now entered its sixth week and spanned at least twenty-three of Kenya’s forty-seven counties including the capital Nairobi, Kisumu, Nakuru, and Mombasa — was a controversial finance bill that would have raised taxes on a range of basic goods, exacerbating an already existing cost-of-living crisis in the country.


As part of the largest-scale direct challenge to the Kenyan state in decades, protesters stormed Parliament, triggering a brutal police crackdown that has left over fifty dead and hundreds injured. President William Ruto was forced to withdraw the controversial bill, originally introduced in response to pressure by the International Monetary Fund to raise two hundred billion Kenya shillings ($1.55 billion) for debt servicing. According to Ruto, sixty-on out of every hundred shillings paid in taxes goes toward outstanding bills.

Just last year, Kenyans took to the streets en masse in response to the skyrocketing costs of food and fuel. During former president Uhuru Kenyatta’s term in office (2013–2022), public debt had more than quadrupled. It now stands at 68 percent of GDP. The introduction of taxes on basic goods — originally pitched to the population as a means to fund schools, hospitals, and other public services — was in reality needed to repay debtors.

While the costs of Kenya’s debts have increased along with global interests rates, the pressure on poor Kenyans, who spend 60 percent of their income on food products that have doubled in cost over the past two years, has only worsened. Although Kenya’s economy has grown significantly faster than its neighbors, both in gross and per capita terms, throughout this century, pressure to service debts has forced it to cut public spending, which has exacerbated inequality.

Prominent opposition figure Raila Odinga championed last year’s protests, calculating (as he has done repeatedly in the past) that he stood to gain by adding his voice to popular grievances about basic everyday needs. This year was different for two reasons: First, Odinga now needs Ruto to support his bid for the chairmanship of the African Union and second, the protesters have explicitly rejected a politics of dissent traditionally organized around tribe — one of Odinga’s hallmarks — and political parties. Instead, protesters have embraced a bottom-up, decentralized approach that is “leaderless, tribeless, and fearless.” Disillusioned by the ruling class altogether, they aim to bypass elite insider deal-making and to reimagine politics anew.

This shift represents a substantial threat to the ruling elite who have historically framed political and economic grievances in the language of tribe rather than class, with the goal of divide and rule. In stark contrast to a politics long dominated by division and hierarchy, the youth espouse a spirit of solidarity and mutual care: as the Kenyan journalist Patrick Gathara has observed, “The movement has been able to rely on volunteers organizing themselves to provide support for the protests, whether it is food, medical attention, blood banks, legal representation, or raising money to support families of victims and to pay medical bills, without having a central leadership that can be targeted or compromised.”


While Ruto showed some signs of responsiveness to the protesters’ demands — withdrawing the bill, firing nearly his entire cabinet, (only to then reappoint six of them) and calling for national dialogue — his administration deployed the Kenya Defence Forces in armored military vehicles to patrol the streets and sought to ban protests across Nairobi. Writing in the Kenyan magazine the Elephant, Maryanne Nduati anticipates that the hubris of Ruto and his Kenya Kwanza political party will ensure “a continuation and entrenchment of a top-down, tribal management style, patriarchal in attitude, self-centred in intent and destructive in effect.”

Indeed, the man who once appealed to the Kenyan youth on the basis of his humble origins, and who campaigned for the presidency as a self-proclaimed champion of Kenya’s “hustler” nation, now speaks condescendingly of the same young people’s purported ignorance and inexperience. Ruto talks simultaneously of “criminal elements” having infiltrated the protests to spark chaos and of foreign meddlers (specifically the Ford Foundation). In short, Ruto is desperate to deflect responsibility, to distract from the core issues, and to discredit those who are risking their lives in the push for what the Malawian scholar Thandika Mkandawire would call substantive democracy, which attends to questions of equality and material well-being, and requires the active participation of citizens in a system of deliberative governance.
Geopolitical Stakes

Thus far, the bulk of critical analysis has focused on what recent developments mean for Ruto’s ability to remain in office. Even if he were to be successfully pushed out, the pressures imposed on Kenya by its debtors are real and would not go away under new leadership. Furthermore, the stakes of these protests extend far beyond the boundaries of Kenya, and of Africa more broadly.

Kenya currently hosts the largest US embassy in Africa and is among the top recipients of US security assistance on the continent: between 2010 and 2020, the US Department of Defense provided $400 million in counterterrorism “train and equip” support, enabling it to vastly expand its security infrastructure. The US military operates from several bases in the country, including the naval base in Manda Bay, which has served as a launch pad for drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Kenya in September 2023, where he signed a five-year joint defense cooperation agreement with the Kenyan government focused primarily on the ongoing fight against the Somali militant group al-Shabaab.

There is perhaps no better indication of Kenya’s growing geopolitical significance than the recent state visit by President Ruto to the White House in late May of this year, where President Joe Biden announced that the country had been designated a major non-NATO ally. At the time of the visit, most analysts attributed this designation to Kenya’s willingness to lead a US-backed police intervention in Haiti. Few highlighted the equally relevant decision by the Kenyan government to join Operation Prosperity Guardian, a US-led multinational coalition designed to protect the flow of global trade in the Red Sea amidst the blockade led by Yemen’s de facto Houthi government. The fact that other states in the region —including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Djibouti — have all refused to join this coalition makes Kenya’s participation all the more significant.

Kenya’s growing relevance to the United States and NATO means that these powers cannot risk an uncertain political situation within Kenya itself. This is, perhaps, the one source of leverage the African nation, which has for a long time been seen as a paragon of stability in the region, has over its creditors. It is worth noting that while US officials have condemned the police violence against protesters in Kenya, they have strategically avoided going as far as to call the country a “failed state.”

But US officials have long been aware of the sordid history of police repression and human rights abuse in Kenya — including at the hands of US-trained police units, and this has not deterred them from deepening their security partnership with the Kenyan government. In fact, the Biden administration announced during President Ruto’s trip to Washington that it would be providing $7 million in new aid to the east African nation’s police force.
The Road Ahead

While Kenya is in theory a civilian-led democratic state, blurred boundaries between civilian and military power have been the norm throughout its post-independence history, a carryover from the colonial era. Its participation in the so-called “war on terror” has further eroded clear distinctions between these two realms, as Kenyan security forces have been trained and equipped for counterinsurgent warfare. If the recent disappearances, abductions, and extra-judicial killing of protesters is any indication, we can expect to see an expansion of Kenya’s war on “terror” to encompass the dissenting public as a whole.

With help from Washington, DC–based public relations firms, the Kenyan state has become adept at shielding itself from international scrutiny, presenting itself as a stable democracy and reliable partner that stands apart from the “typical” African country plagued by violence and instability. This investment (spanning over the past decade plus) seems to have paid off, and likely explains why the US mainstream media has barely covered the protests. It was in the aftermath of Kenya’s last major political crisis — the post-election violence of 2007–2008 which resulted in eleven hundred dead and over half a million people displaced — that the Kenyan government established Brand Kenya and hired US lobby firms for damage control.

Given the roles that Kenya is now playing in Somalia, Haiti, and the Red Sea, the US political establishment will likely be more than willing to work alongside Ruto in the effort to quell the protests and to maintain an image of the country as peaceful and stable. In the midst of US anxieties about competition from China and Russia, the souring of US-Ethiopia relations, and the recent loss of Niger as a security partner in the Sahel, the United States will be all the more desperate to protect its existing partnerships on the continent.

Alongside questions of debt cancellation and food, financial, and renewable energy sovereignty, these are the broader dynamics that are likely to shape the situation on the ground. The challenges facing Kenya’s new generation of protesters are therefore multidimensional, encompassing both internal and external forces. One thing, however, is clear: Kenyan youth have sparked a new spirit of revolt across the continent, and they are giving substantive meaning to otherwise bankrupt rhetoric about “democracy.” As long as the conditions giving rise to inequality persist, so too will the uprisings.

CONTRIBUTOR

Samar Al-Bulushi is on the faculty at UC Irvine and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.