Eighteen months after a Finance Bill drove young Kenyans to storm Parliament and forced a humiliating presidential climbdown, the Treasury has done something remarkable: it has written almost the same bill, with the same instincts, and dared the country to do something about it.
The Finance Bill 2026, tabled in the National Assembly this month, proposes a 25 per cent excise duty on smartphones and communication devices, assessed not at importation but at the point of activation — a clever piece of fiscal engineering that means even devices already in shops will get more expensive overnight. Bottled water, plastic basins, coal and second-hand clothes (the mitumba that clothe most of urban Kenya) are all on the menu. Betting winnings will be hit with a 20 per cent withholding tax. Digital payments — the very rails that the Hustler narrative was supposed to be built on — face new charges. And the Kenya Revenue Authority is being handed sweeping new powers to inspect, freeze and recover.
This is not a stealth document. The Treasury Cabinet Secretary has defended each line item as necessary to plug a yawning fiscal hole, with debt service now consuming roughly two-thirds of every shilling KRA collects. The IMF, ahead of a fresh programme negotiation, has separately urged Nairobi to count its Sh684 billion stock of pending bills and its Sh335 billion of securitised tax flows as debt — pushing already-bleak headline numbers into territory that will frighten the bond market unless taxes rise.
So the arithmetic is real. The politics, however, is suicidal.
In June 2024, the Finance Bill protests turned Nairobi’s central business district into a battlefield. Parliament was set on fire. At least dozens of young Kenyans were killed — the exact figure is still disputed and underreported — and President William Ruto eventually pulled the bill, dissolved his Cabinet, and pivoted to a “broad-based government” that absorbed Raila Odinga’s ODM. The lesson the political class appeared to draw from that bruising encounter was that the next bill would have to be radically gentler. Instead, what is in Parliament now is the same impulse, painted a slightly different shade.
The opposition has been late to the field but is sharpening up. Civil society groups have begun publishing line-by-line trackers. Tech founders have warned that a phone activation levy will throttle the smartphone-driven digital economy that the government keeps citing as its growth engine. Even the matatu and boda boda sectors, which Ruto courted relentlessly in 2022, are quietly furious about how a digital payments tax bites into M-PESA-mediated daily incomes.
The most interesting fault line, though, runs through Kenya Kwanza itself. Kang’ata’s defection from UDA — which we cover separately — and the gathering Mt Kenya restlessness mean that Ruto cannot count on his own backbench to absorb a re-run of June 2024. Several first-term UDA MPs in Central and the Coast have privately told constituents they will not vote for the most controversial clauses. The leadership of finance committees in both Houses understands that another televised retreat would not survive politically.
The deeper question is what this bill says about the Kenyan state’s understanding of consent. The Constitution requires meaningful public participation. The Treasury has scheduled hearings, but the timetable is tight and the technical complexity of the bill — especially around securitisation, withholding tax and KRA enforcement powers — is calibrated to defeat ordinary scrutiny. This is the budget as fait accompli, with public participation reduced to ritual.
It need not be this way. A serious revenue conversation would start by widening the base — pulling the informal sector, ground rent, idle land and undeclared wealth into the net — rather than squeezing the small group of Kenyans who already pay PAYE, VAT, NSSF, NHIF/SHA and a fuel levy on every litre. It would also tackle the elephant in the Treasury: the Sh11 billion fraudulent SHA claims, the Sh10 billion fertiliser scandal, the Sh3.7 billion Kemsa mosquito-net tender. Recovering even a fraction of that money would obviate at least one of the new taxes.
What to watch next: the Finance Committee’s report and the timing of the second reading. If the second reading slides past the IMF mission’s June checkpoint without significant carve-outs, Ruto will be daring the country to take to the streets in the same week the World Bank publishes its mid-year growth update. He has bet that 2024 was a unique convergence of grievance, technology and youth energy that will not repeat. That is an extremely brave bet to place with someone else’s economy.
