Two years after Kenya’s streets shut down the Finance Bill 2024 and forced President William Ruto into one of the most humiliating policy reversals of any sitting Kenyan administration, Treasury has come back with another revenue plan and a familiar pitch. “No new taxes,” Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi told reporters earlier this month, even as the Finance Bill 2026 went out for public participation carrying a 25% excise levy on imported mobile phones, a now-shelved tax on mitumba imports, and fresh provisions on digital platforms and cryptocurrency transactions. Whatever the Treasury wants to call this, it is a tax increase by another name.
The mechanics of Mbadi’s position are easy enough to follow. The government collected less revenue than it projected for the 2025/26 fiscal year, the IMF programme remains on a tight leash, and the wage bill, debt service and county allocations keep climbing. Parliament killed the mitumba tax on Monday, May 11, after pushback from second-hand clothing dealers and consumer groups. That, the CS now says, removes the most politically toxic item in the bill. The 25% phone levy stays, with Treasury arguing it will not affect access to entry-level smartphones because the import value at the bottom of the market is already low. The argument is technically defensible. Politically, it is naive.
The reason it is naive is the same reason that the 2024 protests caught State House off guard. The Kenyan tax debate is no longer a debate about marginal rates. It is a debate about consent. After two years in which the Gen Z protest movement has watched senior officials acquire helicopters, while it has watched the cost of data, transport, school fees and basic food creep up, the government has run out of permission to add anything to anybody’s bill without a serious public conversation. A 25% surcharge on the device that the protest generation uses to organise is not, on its face, a smart political choice.
The Treasury’s defence is that this is no longer a soak-the-poor budget. Mbadi has been explicit that the government cannot yet scrap PAYE for low earners precisely because rampant tax evasion at the top of the income distribution forces the state to lean on middle and lower brackets. He has also revived plans to give the Kenya Revenue Authority deeper access to bank data so that the tax base can finally include the high-net-worth Kenyans who currently file as if they earned less than a primary school teacher. If that programme were to actually land, it would be a genuine reform. The question is whether the political coalition around Ruto — which depends on the very class the KRA is supposed to chase — will allow it.
Meanwhile, the digital platforms provisions and the new crypto framework are likely to define the next phase of the fight. Kenya’s gig workers, content creators and informal traders have spent the last decade migrating their income onto digital rails. Bringing those flows into the tax net is, in principle, what any modern revenue authority must do. In practice, it is the kind of measure that, badly explained, looks like the state finally catching up with the only sector young Kenyans believe still rewards them. If Treasury wants this to land without another June, it will need to invest in communication on a scale it has historically refused to fund.
For our money, the Finance Bill 2026 is neither the punitive monster that some opposition voices are already labelling it, nor the disciplined, technocratic exercise the CS is selling. It is a transitional bill written by a Treasury that knows it cannot afford another street rebellion but also cannot afford to widen the deficit. Mbadi is walking the tightrope his predecessor fell off. He has the advantage of a Parliament that is now politically allergic to obviously unfair clauses — hence the speed with which mitumba was cut. He has the disadvantage of a public that no longer takes ministerial reassurances at face value.
What to watch next: how aggressively the National Assembly’s Finance Committee uses public participation to strip or amend the phone levy; whether the crypto provisions are finalised with industry input or imposed cold; and whether Mbadi can credibly demonstrate a new wave of high-income enforcement before the budget is read in June. If those three boxes are ticked, this bill can pass. If they are not, the Gen Z protest infrastructure is still there, still online, and still very much in the mood.
