Two years is a short memory in Kenyan politics. On June 25, 2024, demonstrators breached the perimeter of Parliament Buildings, sections of the National Assembly were set on fire, and President William Ruto was forced to decline assent to a Finance Bill that had been negotiated, marketed and whipped through with the full weight of Kenya Kwanza’s parliamentary majority. At least 60 Kenyans were killed in the crackdown that followed. The bill was withdrawn. The grievance was not.
The Finance Bill 2026, now before the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning, reads in places as if 2024 never happened. It proposes to treat five percent of the customs value of imported mitumba as taxable income — a measure that will hit the second-hand clothing trade that clothes most of urban Kenya and employs hundreds of thousands of small traders from Gikomba to Kongowea. It revives a tax on mobile phones at a time when over 60 percent of Kenya’s adult population transacts daily on M-Pesa. It taxes bottled water, plastic basins, coal and, by some readings, every credit card swipe. Treasury estimates the total haul at Sh120.3 billion, or roughly $931 million.
Parliament has invited written memoranda from the public, due by 5pm on May 25. The constitutional theatre is familiar. The Departmental Committee will travel, take views, return to Nairobi, table a report, and the House will vote on largely the same bill. What changed in 2024 was not the parliamentary mechanics — those still favour the government. What changed was that an unstructured, leaderless, smartphone-organised generation of Kenyans treated the Finance Bill not as a technical document but as a referendum on the social contract.
The political calculation inside Kenya Kwanza appears to be that 2024 was a one-off, a perfect storm of pandemic-era youth grievance, social media organising and an unpopular set of proposals — and that the storm has passed. There are reasons to question that calculation. The cost of living has not improved. The shilling has stabilised but at a level that still squeezes importers. Youth unemployment remains stuck above 13 percent, with the broader picture significantly worse if underemployment is counted. The mitumba and mobile-phone proposals in particular target precisely the sectors where Gen Z survives — second-hand retail, the digital economy, and small-scale trade. To this audience, the new bill does not look like a routine fiscal adjustment. It looks like the State coming back for a second helping.
There is also a more uncomfortable structural problem. Kenya’s revenue base has not expanded in the way Treasury projected. The Kenya Revenue Authority has consistently fallen short of its collection targets. External borrowing remains expensive and politically delicate. Domestic borrowing crowds out the private sector. That leaves Treasury few options other than reaching for the same overstretched consumer base — which is the same base that the President’s “hustler” pitch promised to protect. The contradiction was tolerable in 2022. By 2026 it is doing visible damage to the government’s coherence.
For Kenya, the implications go beyond fiscal year 2026/27. The Finance Bill is the moment each year when the executive and the citizen meet over money. The 2024 protests demonstrated that this annual ritual can no longer be assumed to pass quietly. Any government that wants to govern past the 2027 election will have to learn to negotiate it openly, not legislate through it. The Departmental Committee’s hearings this month are the first real test of whether Kenya Kwanza has internalised that lesson or simply waited for the news cycle to move on.
The opposition’s role here is also being scrutinised. So far, the responses from the various factions of the former Azimio coalition and the splinter movements that emerged after the Gen Z protests have been calibrated — strong statements, fewer concrete proposals. The TIFA Research data showing a fragmented opposition is reflected in the absence of a unified counter-budget, which would be the most effective tool for shifting the public debate from outrage to alternative.
What to watch next is the May 25 cut-off for public memoranda, followed by the Departmental Committee’s report. If the committee strips out the mitumba, mobile phone and credit card swipe provisions before bringing the bill back to the floor, the government will have read the warning signs. If it does not, Kenya will have another long June ahead. The State should not need a body count to remember that Gen Z does not forget.
