Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Tough times begun one day after Kenya's new president was sworn in
A removal of fuel subsidy has sent petrol and electricity prices to the roof as the country's tax authority hikes excise taxes in an inflation adjustment plan.
For many Kenyans, life was unbearable during former president Uhuru Kenyatta’s reign. But just one day after new president William Ruto’s inauguration, life is getting more onerous, after the lifting of a fuel subsidy that had kept the price of petrol, diesel and kerosene the lowest in eastern Africa.
“On fuel subsidy alone, taxpayers have spent a total of $1.2 billion [since 2020],” Ruto said during his inauguration before projecting that if it continues till June next year, it will cost Kenyans $2.4 billion. To cushion manufacturers and processors against high production costs, the government has spent $74 million in fuel subsidies since April last year.
The move is seen as Ruto bowing to pressure from the International Monetary Fund, which in July set a new condition for the Kenyan government, requiring a removal of the fuel subsidy by October under a 38-month $2.34 billion loan.
Motorists could be seen queuing at petrol stations in Nairobi on the night of Sept.14, scrambling to fuel their cars before new prices take effect on Sept. 15 and last till Oct. 15.
The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) has raised the price of petrol, diesel and kerosene by 12.7%, 17.8%, and 16.4% respectively.
Epra has also increased the cost of electricity by 15.7%. Industrial power consumers will now pay even more as the pass-through costs now account for more than a third of power bills.https://twitter.com/johnallannamu/status/1570104951094890500?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1570104951094890500%7Ctwgr%5E4d6d99db11dfbb6a8571e12fab91aab514e83fb9%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2Fembed%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-1570104951094890500autosize%3D1
Content creators in Kenya fault govt’s 15% tax, call for formation of union to fight exploitation
Kenya-based content creators have faulted the William Ruto-led government’s plan to introduce a 15% withholding tax on income generated from digital content monetization. The proposal to tax content creators in Kenya is part of the many revisions intended for the Finance Bill. If approved by the nation’s legislature, any income obtained from the monetisation of a creator’s content will be subject to the 15% tax.
Although this move will help the East African country widen its tax base, it’s worth exploring the potential implications for those directly affected. The creator economy in Africa is booming with young individuals leveraging platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to advertise products and get paid. Many brands have also signed some of the popular creators, turning them into influencers for products and services.
Interestingly, a Selar report found that 66.9% of digital content creators “hire one staff or more in the first six months of their journey.” Aside from offering jobs which translate into income, the creator market can give Africa’s economy a much-needed boost.
Popular comedian and content creator, Alex Mathenge said he does not have a problem with being taxed, however, the government hasn’t done anything for content creators to earn the right to demand taxes. “You cannot milk a cow which you’ve not given grass,” he said.
He went ahead to state that before the government moves to tax content creators, it must first build an environment that supports the efforts of those in the digital economy.
Another content creator, Mohammed Assad Alby – a TikTok star backed his colleague. According to him, quality jobs are difficult to find in Kenya which is why many youths have shifted to content creation because it offers an innovative way to make money. He however warned that making money in the industry isn’t easy
One thing people don’t know is that before we get to a point where we can earn money from content, we spend so much from our own pockets with a slim chance of making it in the competitive industry. Cameras, laptops, editing software, microphones, lighting, all this equipment is expensive in Kenya.
Alby took it a notch further to blame a section of their industry, especially those known to flood social media with photos of newly-bought luxurious cars and majestic homes for the reason why the government is casting its spotlight on the industry. He pointed out that such lifestyles may have contributed to the mindset that there’s plenty of money in the industry even though this isn’t so.
Another content generator, Kevin Maina believes the policy will further strain the market and possibly discourage other individuals from entering the field. “It is likely to affect the quality of work. Because higher taxes on the same income only strain your capacity to invest more in the craft,” he says.
“The Finance Bill, 2023 wants to raise revenue through tax, but Kenyans are being crushed by the high cost of living,stagnant and limited income,” it stated. On specific proposals in the Bill, 94 percent of respondents indicated they completely do not support a plan to raiseValue Added Tax (VAT) on fuel products from 8 percent to 16 percent, as 2.2 percent said they slightly do not support the proposal. This was the proposal rejected by most Kenyans, among the respondents. Only 1.7 percent of the respondents indicated that they completely support the proposal. At least 92.4 percent of the respondents completely do not support the proposed 3 percent house levy (which was revised downwards to 1.5 percent by the National Assembly’s Finance committee), with only 3 percent of respondents indicating complete support. Also, 90 percent of the respondents completely do not support a proposal to raise the excise tax on mobile money transfer services from 12 per cent to 15 per cent, but 2.5 per cent said they completely support it. Eighty-one per cent of the respondents completely don’t support the planned raise of turnover tax to 3 percent, while 47.1 percent also said they completely don’t support a proposal to lower the Turnover Tax band from businesses with annual revenue of Sh1 million to Sh500,000, the survey stated. But interestingly, more than 38 percent of the respondents indicated support for the proposal to bring in small businesses (with daily revenues averaging Sh1,370) into the Turnover Tax band, where they will pay 3 per cent of revenues irrespective of whether they make profits, should the Bill pass. While not in the Finance Bill, 66 percent of the respondents also said they don’t support a plan to set a standard National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) contributions at 2.7 percent of salary, on grounds of corruption at the fund that has seen hospitals continue to offer poor services despite citizens’ contributions to the Fund.
90 percent of Kenyans reject Finance Bill 2023
“The Finance Bill, 2023 wants to raise revenue through tax, but Kenyans are being crushed by the high cost of living, stagnant and limited income,” it stated.
On specific proposals in the Bill, 94 percent of respondents indicated they completely do not support a plan to raise Value Added Tax (VAT) on fuel products from 8 percent to 16 percent, as 2.2 percent said they slightly do not support the proposal.
This was the proposal rejected by most Kenyans, among the respondents. Only 1.7 percent of the respondents indicated that they completely support the proposal. At least 92.4 percent of the respondents completely do not support the proposed 3 percent house levy (which was revised downwards to 1.5 percent by the National Assembly’s Finance committee), with only 3 percent of respondents indicating complete support.
Also, 90 percent of the respondents completely do not support a proposal to raise the excise tax on mobile money transfer services from 12 percent to 15 percent, but 2.5 percent said they completely support it.
Eighty-one percent of the respondents completely don’t support the planned raise of turnover tax to 3 percent, while 47.1 percent also said they completely don’t support a proposal to lower the Turnover Tax band from businesses with annual revenue of Sh1 million to Sh500,000, the survey stated.
But interestingly, more than 38 percent of the respondents indicated support for the proposal to bring in small businesses (with daily revenues averaging Sh1,370) into the Turnover Tax band, where they will pay 3 percent of revenues irrespective of whether they make profits, should the Bill pass.
While not in the Finance Bill, 66 percent of the respondents also said they don’t support a plan to set a standard National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) contributions at 2.7 percent of salary, on grounds of corruption at the fund that has seen hospitals continue to offer poor services despite citizens contributions to the Fund.
Friday, May 26, 2023
How an LGBTQ court ruling sent Kenya into a moral panic
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/3/15/how-an-lgbtq-court-ruling-sent-kenya-into-a-moral-panic
The legal pushback against Kenya’s anti-LGBTQ colonial-era laws has unleashed vicious homophobia in the public space.
Kenya is in the throes of a full-blown
existential moral panic. If the country’s politicians, clergy, self-anointed
defenders of “traditional culture” and media are to be believed, the
long-dreaded gay zombie apocalypse is upon us, bringing hordes of insatiable
homosexuals hungry for our children’s impressionable brains.
A February ruling by the Supreme Court that the constitution
barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has sparked weeks of
hysterical breast-beating across the country, with many fearful that it could
open Pandora’s closet and precipitate the end of civilisation as we know it.
A February ruling by the Supreme Court
that the constitution barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation
has sparked weeks of hysterical breast-beating across the country, with many
fearful that it could open Pandora’s closet and precipitate the end of
civilisation as we know it.
Egged on by news anchors and editors keen to serve up drama and
gore in an effort to retain audiences, everyone from President William Ruto to
political pundits has been lining up to condemn the court for upholding
verdicts by lower courts that the government could not lawfully refuse to
register an organisation calling itself the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights
Commission (NGLHRC).
The jeremiads dominating the airwaves and social media proclaim
this as the beginning of the end.
In an interview with one of the
most-watched local TV stations, Citizen TV, Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit of the
Anglican Church of Kenya speculated – to approving noises from the anchors –
that this was a sinister ploy by environmentalists to depopulate the globe in
an effort to address climate change. The Ministry of Education has also
announced that it is deploying chaplains to schools to prevent
“infiltration” by the nefarious Western-backed LGBTQ brigade.
Meanwhile, during a parliamentary session, MP Joshua
Kimilu condemned the decision of the court as violating Kenyan law
and warned that Kenyan culture can “be ruined by the West”.
At the heart of the national hatefest
is the increasing visibility and assertiveness of the country’s sexual
minorities. Long suppressed by colonial-era edicts that criminalised sex
“against the order of nature” and Western ideas about “African culture” that engendered vicious
homophobia, in recent decades, queer Kenyans have been pushing back, refusing
to be forced back into the national closet.
This has included a push to have the British-imposed local
versions of the 19th-century Indian Penal Code outlawing sexual acts “against
the order of nature” – colonial code for homosexuality – struck out as contrary
to Kenya’s 2010 constitution, the country’s first supreme law to be wholly
drafted, negotiated and adopted by Kenyans.
The registration of the NGLHRC was one
of two cases concerning LGBTQ rights that have been making their way through
the courts. The reaction to the February ruling may actually be an effort to
influence the second case, which more directly challenges the constitutionality
of the sections of the penal code banning sex “against the order of nature”.
It is important to note, as upheld by both the High Court and the
Supreme Court, and contrary to the assertions of some, that the arcane text of
these laws does not actually criminalise homosexuality or homosexual
relationships or even homosexual orientation.
Rather it sanctions
certain undisclosed sexual acts deemed to be “against the order of nature”
regardless of the sexual orientation of the person committing them. Under the
same laws, for example, heterosexual couples could be conceivably prosecuted
for practising oral or anal sex. However, the laws are almost exclusively used
to target gay people.
In May 2019, a high court upheld the laws in
a convoluted judgement in which judges equated sex to marriage. They insisted
that the constitution’s definition of marriage as a union between people of the
opposite sex required the criminalisation of same-sex relationships while
arguing that the laws did not specifically target LGBTQ people but people in
general and therefore are not discriminatory.
The
case is at the Court of Appeal, and all indications are that it will end up at
the Supreme Court. Thus, the reaction to the NGLHRC verdict can be seen as an
attempt to intimidate the judges, to pressure them into maintaining the status
quo.
Interestingly,
the February ruling by the Supreme Court only echoes what the country’s
attorney general argued openly in court in 2017. While defending the
constitutionality of the colonial sex laws, he nonetheless admitted that the
“Constitution protects individuals against all forms of discrimination,
including on the basis of sexual orientation”.
So what comes next? Even prior to the ruling, MP Peter Kaluma had
declared his intention to introduce a law explicitly criminalising
homosexuality with penalties, including life imprisonment. He remains
undeterred by the court’s upholding of the constitution’s prohibition on
discrimination.
Like
the young Roper in Robert Bolt’s two-act play, A Man For All Seasons, it seems
the Kenyan elite are happy to “cut a great road through the law to get after
the [gay] Devil”. Churches are already proposing that Parliament enact
laws further limiting Kenyans’ freedom of association, singling out groups that
promote illegal practices.
Clearly,
the churchmen are happy to drag the country back to the days when Kenya’s
government could criminalise stuff like dissent and then lock up people who
dared to come together to challenge it. They would do well to consider the
question Thomas More asked Roper: “This country’s planted thick with laws from
coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down – and you’re
just the man to do it – do you really think you could stand upright in the
winds that would blow then?”
The irony of using colonial laws to defend “African culture”
against the spectre of corruption by whites is evidently lost on the anti-gay
brigade, who mistakenly insist that LGBTQ rights are a uniquely Western
invention. Yet manufactured panics about European threats to African sexuality
are nothing new – they were invented by the whites themselves.
In
her PhD thesis, gender studies scholar Elizabeth Williams argues that “in
order to maintain their political dominance in the colony, Kenyan settlers
needed to find a way to present white supremacy as a boon to African welfare.
The solution to this problem lay in the production of a vision of African
sexuality that needed to be protected from contamination by more deviant
settler populations.”
That vision of African sexuality was born of Victorian imaginings
of noble savagery. “The average native is simply an unmoral creature, and as a
general rule, he becomes immoral only after contact with certain forms of
civilization, either Eastern or Western,” one settler wrote in 1920.
Today’s
African elites, who inherited the colonial kingdom, are replicating the same
naked assertion of power. They too declare themselves, and their thievery and
brutality, as justified by the need to protect “African” mores from Western decadence.
Still,
while it may be tempting to dismiss these as the rantings of ignorant and
power-hungry bigots, which they are, we must not forget that they have
real-life consequences.
They
provide justification for the oppression of thousands of Kenyans who find
themselves the victims of violence, rape and imprisonment at the hands of the
state and local communities. Between 2013 and 2017, more than 500 people were
prosecuted under colonial laws and artistic works have
been banned for showing homosexual relationships.
We
must also keep in mind that by undermining the protections in the constitution,
the self-appointed defenders of “African culture” are endangering all of us,
regardless of sexual orientation.
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