Kenya Protests Continue, Ruto Withdraws Tax Bill

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Female suicide bombers strike in Nigeria, South Africa announces a new cabinet, and RSF rebels gain ground in Sudan.

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Kenyan protesters have demanded the resignation of President William Ruto after at least 39 people were killed and 361 injured in anti-tax demonstrations over the past two weeks. The country’s military was deployed by the evening of June 25, and live ammunition was used against demonstrators. Ruto’s announcement that he would scrap the tax-heavy finance bill that initially drew the fury of citizens does not seem to have quelled the wave of discontent.

Nationwide protests continued into a third week on Tuesday, with tear gas canisters used on demonstrators and reports emerging of police beatings in the capital, Nairobi, and the coastal city of Mombasa. Kenya’s young activists say they will not be dissuaded by police brutality and have demanded that corrupt officials be fired. Further marches are planned for Thursday.

Last week, around 35 people suspected of leading demonstrations against the finance bill were reportedly picked up by a specialized police unit. Most were released after protests subsided.

Kenya’s deputy president, Rigathi Gachagua, blamed the National Intelligence Service for the abductions and issued a plea for further demonstrations to be called off. Ruto has defended his handling of the protests. “I have no blood on my hands,” he said in a televised roundtable with Kenyan media on Sunday night. The president said that there would be an investigation into the officers’ conduct.

The president said 2.4 billion shillings ($18.7 million) worth of property was destroyed by criminals who took advantage when demonstrators stormed parliament. The legislature buildings, the chief justice’s offices, and Nairobi City Hall were partly burned.

Ruto disputed the death toll and added that all persons detained had been released, but local rights groups say some people are still missing. “We maintain that the force used against the protestors was excessive and disproportionate,” said Roseline Odede, the chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

Around 80 percent of the Kenyan population is below 35 years old, and most who voted for Ruto did so due to his campaign promise of being a self-styled “hustler-in-chief” who would create jobs and lower the cost of living for ordinary people.

Young Kenyans are among the most educated on the continent, but the country’s 5 percent growth rate has not resulted in an abundance of highly skilled jobs.

The withdrawn bill sought to raise $2.7 billion in taxes to reduce the country’s debt burden of more than $80 billion. It is part of a fiscal pledge to keep in line with a $3.6 billion International Monetary Fund program agreed in April 2021 as well as a $1.2 billion World Bank loan approved in May this year. Ruto’s proposed reforms included several tax hikes, such as a digital tax (impacting many, since more than 80 percent of Kenyans use mobile money—or digital payment services accessed via cellphones); hiked wage taxes; a social health tax; and taxes on bread, fuel, specialist hospital care, and small businesses.

About 60 percent of Kenya’s collected tax revenues go to servicing debt. The National Treasury had to borrow additional money for allocations to counties and for school education, Ruto said.

The anger among young Kenyans is also directed at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which they argue are making decisions for the country that are worsening hardship and creating slower-than-average growth. They perceive alleged corruption and wasteful spending in government as a greater priority in tackling the country’s debt. “Kenyan legislators are the second-highest paid in the world relative to GDP,” writes Nanjala Nyabola in the Guardian. “The finance bill was described as austerity, but this is not austerity: this is a cash grab from the poor to sustain the lifestyles of the rich.”

But Ruto insists that the withdrawal of his finance bill will only bring further economic pain for Kenyans, as the government will be forced to borrow 1 trillion shillings ($7.6 billion)—a 67 percent increase on what had been planned. “What we have done with the finance bill going down, is that instead of borrowing 600 billion, we are going to borrow 600 billion plus 346 billion—that is close to a trillion,” Ruto said. “We are in a very difficult financial position. This is something that the people of Kenya must understand.”

Kenyans lashed out on social media, drawing again on the failure to provide teacher wages and other public spending. In April, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai warned that state graft was hampering efforts to attract more U.S. investment. “Kenya has not effectively implemented its anticorruption laws. U.S. firms routinely report direct requests for bribes from all levels of the Kenyan Government,” flagged a 2024 U.S. report on foreign trade barriers.

For months, there had been an increasing divide in international and domestic opinion regarding Ruto, with a clear disconnect between the U.S. government’s embrace of the president and his extremely low approval ratings at home. Ruto’s political career began murkily—the International Criminal Court once charged him with crimes against humanity, accusing him of inciting the ethnic violence that followed Kenya’s 2007 election, but it abandoned the case. Ruto has since reinvented himself as a key U.S. ally.

Ruto will need to convince young Kenyans that he has listened to them on government graft and that he is willing to take action. Otherwise, his position looks increasingly untenable.

Thursday, July 4: Tanzania releases an interest-rate decision.

Monday, July 8: The U.N. Security Council discusses its mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Monday, July 15: Rwanda will hold parliamentary elections.

Nigerian suicide bombings. Coordinated suicide attacks carried out by women—including on a hospital and a wedding reception—killed at least 32 people and injured 42 others in the state of Borno in northeastern Nigeria on Saturday. The incidents were reminiscent of attacks by terrorist group Boko Haram, although the group has not claimed responsibility for the explosions.

Boko Haram often kidnaps women and forces them to carry out suicide attacks against their own communities. The group became infamous in April 2014 after it kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, also in Borno. The group carried out an attack shortly after using their first female suicide bomber. Violence in northeast Nigeria has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced around 2 million over the course of a 15-year insurgency.

Saturday’s attacks happened in the town of Gwoza, which is close to the border with Cameroon. Gwoza was seized by Boko Haram in 2014 and recaptured by Nigeria’s army in 2015, and there are fears among Nigerian authorities that the group is looking to reinvent itself after falling off the world’s radar for several years. Another terrorist group, the Islamic State West Africa Province, is also known to operate in the region.

“The military is aware that in this phase of their ending life-cycle, the terrorists are desperate to attract attention, bolster relevancy, mobilize new recruits, reduce support for the armed forces, and reduce support for the government,” said Nigeria’s military spokesperson, Maj.-Gen. Edward Buba, on Tuesday. Worsening poverty—seen as a result of economic reforms by President Bola Tinubu—appears to have exacerbated systemic insecurity problems in the country.

South Africa’s new cabinet. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed a new cabinet late on Sunday that includes six members from an opposition party-turned-coalition partner, the Democratic Alliance. The party’s leader, John Steenhuisen, will become the country’s agriculture minister, which has been separated from the ministry of land reform and rural development to avoid any potential ideological clashes on land ownership reforms. The Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), anti-immigration party Patriotic Alliance, right-wing Afrikaans party Freedom-Front Plus, and other smaller parties got six cabinet seats between them.

Overall, the African National Congress kept 20 out of 32 cabinet positions. Enoch Godongwana will stay on as finance minister. Meanwhile, Ronald Lamola will replace Naledi Pandor as foreign minister after Pandor failed to win a seat in parliament.

Mauritania’s elections. Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani has been reelected for a second term after gaining 56 percent of votes, the country’s electoral commission announced on Monday, following presidential elections held June 29. It was widely expected that the ballot would hand the 67-year-old Ghazouani a comfortable win against six opposition candidates due to his ruling Equity party’s dominance in local elections in 2023. Opposition members labeled the ballot a “fraud.”

His main rival was anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, who came second after Ghazouani in the 2019 polls, and received 22.1 percent of the votes this time. The 2019 election marked the first transition between two elected presidents since the country’s independence from France in 1960. Ghazouani has a close alliance with the United States that has facilitated military training conducted by U.S. special forces, one of Washington’s few remaining alliances in the Sahel. The country’s constitutional court will review the vote numbers and then announce final results.

Sudan conflict. Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are increasing control of territories as a new report warns of famine. The RSF announced on Saturday that it had captured Singa, a town in the southeast, moving nearer to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where U.N. agencies are now based. An estimated 25.6 million people—more than half of the country’s population—are at risk of famine between June and September, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification  data. The 2024 Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, launched by the United Nations at the end of last year, asked for $2.7 billion to address the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, but so far has reached less than 17 percent of the target.

Washington had attempted to facilitate a deal for Swiss energy and commodity group Mercuria to acquire copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a transaction that hinged on Washington lifting sanctions against controversial Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, reported the Financial Times. A critical minerals railway project running through the DRC is a key plan of U.S. President Joe Biden’s bid to counter China in Africa.

The deal fell through last year because Mercuria and Kazakh-controlled Eurasian Resources Group (ERG), the current owners, could not agree on the value of the assets. Gertler was sanctioned by the U.S Treasury Department in 2017 but retains royalty streams from three mines in Congo, including ERG’s Metalkol. Under the proposed deal with Gertler, the United States would grant him licenses to sell his royalty streams back to the Congolese government for at least $300 million and restore his access to the U.S. financial system once he had relinquished all his Congolese investments.

Kenya’s social contract. In Foreign Policy, Binaifer Nowrojee argues that Kenyan President William Ruto’s actions should give Washington pause. Kenya was designated in May by the United States as a “major non-NATO ally,” and Ruto recently became the first African head of state to be received with a formal state visit in Washington in more than 15 years. However, “this past week has demonstrated that trade and security interests cannot be promoted at the expense of democracy and the rule of law in Kenya,” Nowrojee writes.

France’s unlikely new African ally. In the New York Times, Abdi Latif Dahir and Guillem Sartorio, report that while France has lost allies across the Sahel, French companies are scaling up their investments in Rwanda, despite more than three decades of deep-seated animosity in the country over France’s role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.