Generation Z (people born between 1995 and 2010) Kenyans last week pulled off a rare feat.
After several days of protests against what they said were extreme taxes in the Finance Bill, and “budgeted corruption”, they got the government to withdraw the bill passed by Parliament (with some limited concessions). President William Ruto announced a series of cutbacks in the areas the Gen Z protestors had argued were wasteful.
It was unique because it was Africa’s successful protest targeting high taxes and a budget in decades. Ugandans are planning their own #March2Parliament for July 23, to protest corruption. Unusually, the Uganda Parliament has become the disgraceful symbol of political greed and graft.
Protests in Uganda have never led to the political climbdown witnessed in Kenya, so while #March2Parliament can achieve something, it will likely be relatively modest.
Many things account for the differences in protest outcomes between Kenya and Uganda. To begin, Kenya is a near-liberal democracy in ways Uganda is not, and there are still some constitutional and political restraints on the government in Nairobi that are largely absent in Uganda.
Because it has presidential term limits and hotly contested elections won by small margins, the president and ruling party of the day almost always govern with an eye on the next vote.
In August 2022, President William Ruto received 50.49 per cent of the votes, narrowly beating his rival, Raila Odinga, who managed (48.85 per cent, a difference of 233,211 votes.
How small is that? It is about half the number of motor fans who attended the Formula One United States Grand Prix in Texas in October 2022. Kenyan presidents therefore have to make compromises, the only question being how small, or how big.
Their courts, though not consistently assertive, exercise their independence, especially against the executive, in ways that are totally alien in Uganda. It doesn’t matter the crime, in Kenya it would be impossible to have those 32 opposition National Unity Party (NUP) who have been in jail and denied bail since 2021.
Crucially too, the Kenyan state is far less menacing than Uganda’s. Nationwide, in two weeks of protests 19 people (according to the government), and 23 (according to the Gen Z activists) were killed.
This, in a protest where police lorries were burnt, part of City Hall (the seat of Nairobi County and city) was torched, and Parliament was overrun, trashed, partially burnt, and the Speakers’ mace seized – apparently by criminal elements who infiltrated the protest late to loot and further a wider political agenda. Protestors were riding on police water cannons, and when military pick-ups came through the city, they took selfies with the soldiers.
With all-day protests, and that level of wreckage, in Uganda, we would have counted at least 230 bodies. And those arrested would be sure to spend years in jail as their trial before a military tribunal crawls along, like the NUP supporters. The risk of protest in Kenya compared to Uganda, is quite low.
But above all, one thing fundamentally is different about Kenya. It is a product of a history of its heavily tribal politics. Since independence, ethnicity has been at the centre of elections and government in Kenya, in ways Uganda, even in the last 15 years when political tribalism has been taking root, has never been.
A key turning point came after the annulled 2017 election when President Uhuru Kenyatta made the proverbial handshake with rival and veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga. President Ruto, in turn, was carried to victory by a strong youth vote, and perhaps the least ethnic coalition ever in Kenyan election history.
A year after he took office, and in disaffection, the youth element seceded and joined up with other currents in a broad-based loose and multicultural grievance movement of middle-class and upper-working-class young people, organised not around a party, but social media platforms – especially Tik Tok and X (formerly Twitter).
The power of this non-ethnic cosmopolitan movement, and its novelty, needed extreme tribal politics to organise against as a counterpoint. It’s like the very successful child, who needed an evil stepmother or stepfather to drive him out and force him to grasp the world with both hands. That extreme is coming for Uganda, but it hasn’t fully matured.
The rest are dry technical issues. Consider some of the data. Kenya’s youth literacy rate is 90 percent. Uganda’s is 84 percent. Youth unemployment in Kenya is 13 percent, and Uganda’s is 5 percent (other data shows double the figure for each country).
Uganda’s informal sector is 51 percent of the economy. Kenya’s is 32.8 per cent. Smartphone penetration in Kenya is 62 percent. Uganda’s is 22 per ent. We are, as President Yoweri Museveni would say, more “backward”, and our livelihood crisis is smaller. That makes a huge difference.