Sometime in 2022, we (some friends and I) were driving through a village in Kenya when I saw this giant billboard with the face of a presidential candidate named William Ruto. The tagline was, “Every hustle matters!” I thought it was a funny slogan for a presidential candidate, and a friend (who would vote Ruto) gave me a quick rundown of his candidacy. It boiled down to the usual platitude deployed to justify voting a candidate: he is on the side of the people, the masses, the common man (and whatever pejorative labels we assign). I recall thinking, I know how this ends. From Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s “I had no shoes” to Muhammadu Buhari’s claim of 150 cows, politicians like to frame what they have in common with the common man until they actually need to demonstrate it.
The belief was that Ruto who, having once hustled his way to the top, would empathise with the people eking out survival was punctured with the introduction of a tax bill that would increase taxes even on essential commodities such as bread, cooking oil, and diapers. During the stand-off between the leader and the led, it came to light how much Ruto had extended his legendary hustle to public funds. Out of the window flew the image of a man who, having once suffered, would innately understand what it meant to stretch the Kenyan Shilling until its frail edges cover up your nakedness. Ruto eventually backed down from signing the bill, but much had been lost. The protest took the lives of about two dozen protesters and fractured Ruto’s relationship with Kenyans.
Overall, the Kenyan protests should be a lesson for African leaders like Ruto and his Nigerian counterpart Bola Tinubu who think they can tax their way out of the economic troubles. To some extent, their resort to taxes is understandable. The prognosis of the post-COVID is—depending on the rung of the social ladder you occupy—a gloomy one. Africa, which was barely doing well before COVID, is now seriously reeling from the effects of the global pandemic. People are similarly facing dire times in countries around the world, and our social, political, and even spiritual lives are being rapidly upended by the reality of the economic crunches.
Even the United States, with its thriving economy, still presents the contrast of a post-COVID recovery. While the figures show that their economy is strong, millions (especially people of lower income range) are held down by inflation. African countries that were not doing that well before COVID are vertiginous from the global downturn. Countries are urgently looking to recapitalise, which is why leaders like Ruto came up with the very innovative idea of taxing people more. In Nigeria too, we have witnessed a similar strategy. In addition to abruptly withdrawing (at least going by official pronouncements) the subsidies on fuel and forex, the administration also stopped subsidies on electricity. Energy costs have since gone up, stratospherically increasing the cost of darkness. The same administration also introduced the Green Tax, Import Tax Adjustment Levy, Expatriate Tax, and the Cybersecurity tax, some of which had to be reversed either because it made no sense or was ill-timed.
Unfortunately, Africa cannot be taxed out of its economic morass. People are too poor—just too poor—and the national economic means are too singular for people to come up with the taxes necessary to bridge the gaps in revenue generation. The country has a lot of debt to repay, yes, but those borrowed monies never did anything for those being asked to contribute. If those loans had truly impacted their lives, we would not be groaning as much over the mounting tax regimes. Government officials are the ones who take hefty loans, mismanage them, make a public show of pursuing their cronies who stole the money, and after they deem everyone sufficiently amused by the drama of anti-corruption, they pass on the costs to those who had nothing to do with it. It is those who did not enjoy any part of the loans they took that are frequently squeezed to pay; never their friends, many of whom still living large from the stolen wealth.
In serious societies, taxes have meaning because they are used to fund public amenities. But in a society like ours, what good does it do? Our Nigerian public education system is comatose because we barely fund it. Consequently, “private schools” mushroom in every corner of the country. Cheap and unstandardised, they freely toy with the future of millions of children. The same applies to public health. In fact, every aspect of our lives now has to be privatised because the government that will squeeze taxes out of the hands of the dead does not make judicious use of them. Many communities across Nigeria provide their own electricity, security, water, sewage, and even the social governance system. It is an unfortunate truth that in Nigeria, every household is its own government. Amidst all these supplementing of governance, we still pay taxes to a government increasingly indifferent to our plight!
It is almost trite to point out that nobody in the world likes taxes, and Kenyans would likely have resisted anyway. The US is an example of how taxes influence democracy. Their wealthy class typically supports the Republican Party because those ones will cut their taxes and Democrats—when they win—will reinstate it. Presently, rich people are throwing money at the Republican candidate Donald Trump because of his promise to cut taxes. So, yes, while taxes are always political, what we have in our own societies is a case where the people who are already impoverished are still being taxed for simply existing. Taxes are useful when an economy is thriving, not when people are already scraping the bottom.
For Africa to boost its capital, our leaders will need to transcend the loans-and-taxes economies they presently run. We are impoverished because many of the countries on this continent operate extractive companies, solely relying on natural deposits. We are one of the most naturally resourced continents, yet our leaders lack the vision to utilise these resources for our own development, instead choosing to use them as collateral for foreign loans. This undervalues our resources and results in a lack of control over what should be enhancing our value. It requires significant innovation and hard work to act otherwise, but our complacent and unimaginative African leaders seem content with the bare minimum of borrowing. African countries have created a situation whereby they borrow money from China to build the public infrastructure that ultimately serves in transporting the finished products also imported from the same China!
Finally, several commentators on the Kenyan crisis have pointed out the role of international organisations such as the IMF in the tax bill. Indeed, Ruto purported the bill to cover Kenya’s approximately $80 billion of the country’s domestic and external debt. About half of that amount is owed to China, IMF, and the World Bank. It is easy to demonise foreign organisations for their role in taxing already burdened Africans, but the truth is that they do not owe us that much responsibility. Global capitalism is not founded on sentiments, and its administrators are not our elected leaders. They do not live among us, and they perhaps have only a remote idea how hard our lives are already. The people who should know better are our African leaders. Unfortunately, their actions always leave the impression that the only skill they have honed in the decades of interacting with global capitalist institutions is to beg. If they have no sense of obligation or duty of care to us enough to develop the sophistication and savviness to negotiate better deals, why should those institutions act any differently?