Kenya protests soaring cost of living

 

Kenyans are experiencing the effects of both capitalism and the futility of trusting in ‘leaders’. The soaring cost of living has led to protests with extreme violence resulting, according to the United Nations human Rights Office, in protesters deaths and injuries. To protect its power, and those of the asset owning class, the State will always initially resort to those members of the working class who have undertaken to defend bourgeoisie interests even to the extent of beating and shooting fellow workers.

‘Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga has called for three days of anti-government protests starting on Wednesday.

The latest demonstrations are against tax hikes and follow two previous sets of protests this year against the soaring cost of living in East Africa’s economic hub and alleged malpractice in last year’s presidential election, which Odinga lost.

The new taxes were to take effect on July 1, but a Nairobi court halted their implementation pending further legal proceedings. Still, a tax increase on petroleum products was imposed, increasing fuel costs.

Odinga said more protests could be held after this week.

What are the latest protests about?

Odinga announced the protests on June 14 against a new finance bill, which introduced a 1.5 percent housing levy, a 16 percent tax on petroleum products and a 16 percent value-added tax (VAT) on money that policyholders receive as compensation from insurance companies.

“That finance bill will be the last nail in the coffin,” Odinga told his supporters. “If it is passed, it will make Kenyans slaves of paying taxes. …When they pass that bill, that will be the trumpet call. Will you be ready?”

The bill was signed into law on June 26.

On July 10, Kenya’s High Court extended an order barring Treasury Cabinet Secretary Njuguna Ndung’u from implementing it.

The government mostly obeyed the ruling except for the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority, which increased fuel prices, triggering an increase in public transport costs.

The price increases are from 182.04 shillings ($1.29) to 195.53 shillings ($1.38) per litre of petrol, 164.28 shillings ($1.16) to 176.67 shillings ($1.25) for a litre of diesel and from 161.48 shillings ($1.14) to 173.44 shillings ($1.22) per litre of kerosene.

What is the finance act about? 

During the presidential campaign,the eventual winner, William Ruto, promised to reduce the cost of living and positioned himself as a poor “hustler” eager to wrest power away from the ruling dynasties that President Uhuru Kenyatta and Odinga, sons of independent Kenya’s first president and vice president, represented. The younger Kenyatta endorsed the younger Odinga rather than his deputy, but Ruto was declared the winner and was sworn into office in September. President Ruto inherited an enormous government debt. At the time Kenyatta took office in 2013, it stood at 1.79 trillion shillings ($13bn). By the time Kenyatta left office, it had ballooned to 8.7 trillion shillings ($61bn).

Ruto then removed fuel subsidies, leading to a spike in the prices of basic commodities like bread and maize flour, which are directly affected by the cost of energy and transport.“In addition to being very costly, consumption subsidy interventions are prone to abuse, they distort markets and create uncertainty, including artificial shortages of the very products being subsidised,” he said in his inauguration speech.

New taxes followed. In addition to the housing levy, petroleum products tax and insurance compensation tax, digital assets taxes were also introduced. The government also imposed a 3 percent levy on transfer charges applied during the exchange of assets that cover non-fungible tokens (NFTs), cryptocurrencies, and digital currencies.

The finance act also introduced a 15 percent withholding tax for digital content creators, a 35 percent tax for people earning above 500,000 shillings ($3,536) annually and the VAT on petroleum products was increased from 8 percent to 16 percent.

According to economists, the law will increase tax revenues collected from high-income earners while shrinking individual net income for low-income earners because of increased tax burdens.

What have the effects of the protests been?

According to a statement by a spokesman for the United Nations Human Rights Office, up to 23 people were killed by the police and dozens were injured in demonstrations in the past week. A couple of opposition members were also arrested.

“The UN is very concerned by the widespread violence and allegations of disproportionate use of force, including the use of firearms by the police during protests in Kenya,” Jeremy Laurence said. “We call for prompt, thorough, independent and transparent investigations into the deaths and injuries.

”What happens next? 

Thousands of opposition supporters have protested in Nairobi and a number of other cities on back-to-back Mondays and Thursdays despite a strong pushback from law enforcement, so massive numbers are expected for the protests this week’.

https://www.aljazeeracom/news/2023/7/18/kenya-braces-for-3-days-of-anti-govt-protest-all-the-details

Class War - Fees Must End

Protests have raged on South African campuses in recent weeks as students demand free university tuition for all in a nation still riven by inequality and racial divisions. Bishop Ziphozihle Siwa, the head of the South African Council of Churches, says that the students’ grievances started well before they were born, even before he was born -- when the racist apartheid regime drew a hard line between black and white, rich and poor. Apartheid may have formally ended, but the fees make attending university impossible for many black youth.

"The aftermath of apartheid has not been sufficiently dealt with. You are allowed to go around, but economic marginalization hasn’t changed much and opportunity certainly isn’t equal," student council representative Thalo Mokoena explained. "It’s no way as bad as it was, but there are parallels with back then." 

The protests are showing no sign of stopping after they first emerged late last year. In recent weeks, protests have swept across most of South Africa’s 26 universities, with clashes between students and police at some campuses. Some universities have been forced to suspend classes, citing security concerns.

The latest round of protests was spurred by September’s announcement that universities could raise fees by as much as 8 percent. The government has been obliged to pledge to cover that increase for lower-income students, which is about 75 percent of the student population. The government says it does not have enough money to provide free higher education.

The issue is not exclusive to South Africa. Many students who graduate around the world end up doing so with huge amounts of debt. The protests are also a proxy against wider inequality that still persists in the country. The universities have become a class battle-field

Protest or Vote

The recent coup by the army and the ensuing massacres show that Egyptians are still struggling with the same challenges of injustice and inequality that pushed people to overthrow Mr. Mubarak.

The defining chant of the 2011 protests – bread, freedom, and social justice – showed that what Egyptians wanted wasn't just free elections, but a government that would address the entrenched issues that were pushing the country down. The rulers who came after Mubarak never solved those problems and cannot.

They never attempted to reform police and create security forces that could protect people without the rampant abuse and torture that exists now. They ignored the civil strife that is deepening in dangerous ways, failing to protect Egypt's minorities. They didn't address the inequality and growing economic crisis leaving millions of Egyptians without jobs and options.

The mass street protests duels represent a battle over how to define democratic legitimacy in the new Egypt. Some insist that the fundamental basis of democracy, or power by the people, is the street. But others see such protests as having overthrown the ballot box as much as Sisi’s military have.

June 30th protests brought millions of Egyptians to the street to protest Morsi’s excesses of power, his failure to engage other political factions in a meaningful way, and his inability to make headway on the considerable problems he inherited when he took office a year earlier with 51 percent of the vote. A coup is a coup regardless of its level of popularity. After the coup, Muslim Brotherhood supporters went to the streets to insist that Morsi be reinstated as the legitimately elected leader of the country. “They took our voting rights away” was the claim.

We may be viewed as cynics but the slaughter of the Muslim Brotherhood followers may be seen as the bloody dress rehearsal for the future liquidation of  workers struggling for democracy by the army.

See the Socialist Standard here 

Sudan's Spring Arrives

Protesters blocked roads in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital,  on Saturday, the eighth day of widening unrest sparked by rising prices. Inflation has risen each month, hitting 30.4 percent in May, before Finance Minister Ali Mahmud al-Rasul on Wednesday announced the scrapping of fuel subsidies, causing an immediate jump in the price of petrol. Bankrupt Sudan has lost billions of dollars in oil receipts since South Sudan gained independence last July leaving the north struggling for revenue, plagued by inflation, and with a severe shortage of dollars to pay for imports. The country's poverty rate is 46.5 percent, the United Nations says

Witnesses reported five separate demonstrations across the city after nightfall despite a police order to stamp out the unrest. Throughout the city, shouts against high food prices mixed with calls for freedom and an end to the 33-year regime of President Omar al-Bashir. The people are "fed up," said a taxi driver coping with a government-imposed fuel price increase of about 50 percent which took effect this week. Police and plain-clothed state intelligence agents have adopted a zero-tolerance policy, using tear gas, batons and whips against protesters.

The demonstrations symbolise "mass rejection of the regime's oppressive policies and its failure in governing this country," said Sudan Change Now, an activist youth movement. "The government must immediately retract the austerity measures it has adopted which reflect the distortion in its expenditure which continues to prioritise defence and security at the expense of social services,"

In Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman, an AFP reporter saw separate groups of about 100 protesters scattering when police arrived firing tear gas or wielding batons. Witnesses in the eastern city of Gedaref said that about 200 people gathered in the main market where they denounced the high cost of food before police dispersed them with batons. "We will not be governed by a dictatorship!" they shouted, the witnesses said. Poverty is endemic in Gedaref and the two other eastern states of Kassala and Red Sea.

Rebellion of the Poor

Minister of Police Nathi Mthetwa informed Parliament of the number of "crowd management incidents" that occurred during the three years from April 1 2009. In 2010-2011 there was a record number of crowd-management incidents (unrest and peaceful) and the final data for 2011-2012 are likely to show an even higher figure. Already, the number of gatherings involving unrest was higher in 2011-2012 than any previous year. During the past three years, 2009 to 2012, there has been an average of 2.9 unrest incidents a day. This is an increase of 40% over the average of 2.1 unrest incidents a day recorded for 2004-2009. The statistics show that what has been called the "rebellion of the poor" has intensified over the past three years.

The Incident Regulation Information System classifies incidents either as crowd management (peaceful), during which the incident is managed in cooperation with the convenor and the police only monitor the gathering, or as crowd management (unrest), during which the police need to intervene to make arrests or need to use force when there is a risk to safety or possible damage to property. During 2007-2008 to 2009-2010, "the most common reason for conducting crowd management (peaceful) gatherings was labour-related demands for increases in salary or wages". For the same period, the most common reason for "crowd management (unrest) was related to service delivery issues".

The number of arrests that had occurred with crowd management (unrest) gatherings were given as 4 883 (2009-2010), 4 680 (2010-2011), 2967 (April 1 2011 to March 5 2012). These figures give the average number of arrests per unrest gathering as, respectively, 4.8 (2009-2010), 4.8 (2010-2011) and 2.7 (2011-2012).

Gauteng had the largest number of peaceful incidents and the largest number of unrest incidents, but it also has the largest population, so it is not surprising.

Government attempts to improve service delivery have not been sufficient to assuage the frustration and anger of poor people in South Africa. From press reports and our own research, it is clear that although service-delivery demands provide the principal focus for unrest incidents, many other issues are being raised, notably a lack of jobs. Service-delivery protests are part of a broader "rebellion of the poor". This rebellion is massive. South Africa can reasonably be described as the "protest capital of the world". It also has the highest levels of inequality and unemployment of any major country and it is not unreasonable to assume that the rebellion is, to a large degree, a consequence of these phenomena. There is no basis for assuming that the rebellion will subside. http://mg.co.za/article/2012-04-13-a-massive-rebellion-of-the-poor

Jacob Zuma celebrated his 70th birthday on Friday where Ngema and Zuma's three wives were on hand to help him cut a R12 500 birthday cake. The Sunday Times said the president's Nkandla homestead had been given a R64-million upgrade that included six new double-storey thatch rondavels for his wives and family

petrol protests

Protests all over Nigeria are against poverty. The new price of petrol gives a platform for the protest. Millions of Nigerians are managing to survive, in a situation easily blamed on the global economic crisis, but conveniently ignores the fact that poverty thrived in Nigeria when the global economy boomed.

With a minimum wage of N18, 000 (about $109) monthly, a Nigerian who spends all his salary on petrol will purchase about 124 litres of petrol. If he lives where it sells at N200 per litre, he can buy only 90 litres. Yet N18, 000 (N600 daily) is not enough for the Nigerian to generate his electricity needs, assuming that is all his monthly salary does. Maybe electricity is a luxury the poor should shun hence government refuses to provide it. Things are worse since millions of Nigerians are unemployed and there is no social security system. Those earning the minimum wage represent less than one per cent of the population.

Nigerians are too poor to bear additional burdens.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201201091388.html

The African Spring

Across North Africa protesters have toppled some of the most ruthless and well-resourced political strongmen on the planet. In sub-Saharan Africa, many are asking: will the Arab Spring spread south? Many insist that African societies are so fragmented along ethnic, sectarian and regional lines that it would be impossible today for a Tahrir Square ; instead, they believe, an outcome like Libya’s civil war or the messy departure of Yemen’s president is more likely.

Yet many of the underlying realities are the same. As food and fuel prices rise, inflation is driving millions of Africans below the poverty line just when the world’s economists and politicians have been preaching that growth will benefit all. Across the world, as growth has spread and accelerated, so has inequality. It is clear that growth is often not enough to guarantee stable, cohesive societies. Rather than create a rising tide that lifts all boats, it can actually increase inequality in a society. Steady economic growth and urbanization, combined with high levels of youth unemployment and conspicuous consumption on the part of the corrupt ruling elite, create a situation in which growth exacerbates political volatility instead of quelling it. Growth is taking place in a continent where the capacity to create jobs in the formal sector has been woefully inadequate; and elites have mastered the manipulation of ethnic, linguistic, religious and regional differences to maintain their grip on power. Their rule has turned systemic inequalities and, more important, perceptions of inequality, into potent triggers for violence. Growing economic inequality animated much of what was at stake in the various Arab uprisings, and it will play a major role in shaping African politics.

The "middle class" remains a tiny sliver of the population in most African countries largely dependent on state patronage for its survival. Africa’s middle class has grown in recent years, but its members are politically and economically vulnerable and their lives can be overturned by the whims of elites.

The poor are assaulted daily by the symbols of rising inequality: glitzy malls filled with status enhancing designer goods that cost 10 times the monthly minimum wage. Globalization has changed the aspirations of the poor, and their expectations will follow. The Arab Spring occurred at a moment when economic development had outpaced political development in much of the region; ossified political systems no longer satisfied a population yearning for modern freedoms.

By 2025, sub-Saharan Africa will be home to a quarter of the world’s people under the age of 24, and their anger is growing. For Africa’s youth, many of them educated and unemployed, the future seemingly holds no hope under the current arrangement. The idea of revolution has arrived, among the minority of youth with access to social media but also among the masses.

Adapted from here

Food Price Protests

People across West Africa, and elsewhere in the world, have taken to the streets to protest price hikes in fuel, staple foods and other basic necessities.

A crackdown by police against Senegalese citizens who gathered in the capital Dakar on 30 March to protest the high cost of living was “brutal”, say human rights groups. Police used tear gas and batons to disperse a demonstration organised by the national consumers' union to protest recent hikes in the prices of rice, oil and soap. Security forces also allegedly brutalised journalists and confiscated cameramen’s video.

The Dakar-based African human rights coalition RADDHO (Rencontre Africaine pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme) said in a statement on 30 March that it firmly condemns "unspeakable" acts by security forces which "violate" people's rights. It likened alleged beatings with electric prods to "torture" and called for an investigation into "all acts of violence and poor treatment suffered by demonstrators".

"The interior ministry or at least the police force believe that maintaining order means stepping up repression," Leonard Vincent, Africa director of the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders

Opposition political leader Abdoulaye Bathily recently told reporters that rising poverty and a disregard for human rights has made Senegal "a bomb that could explode at any moment."

Meantime

At least a dozen protestors in COTE D'IVOIRE were wounded during several hours of clashes with police on 31 March as they demanded government action to curb food prices.

The demonstrations took place in Cocody, where Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo has a residence, and in Yopougon, a thriving area for shopping and nightlife. Ivorian police used tear gas and batons to disperse protestors who were burning tires and overturning parked cars.

At the height of the demonstration, before riot police started firing tear gas, IRIN saw around 1,500 protestors chanting “we are hungry” and “life is too expensive, you are going to kill us.”

A kilo of beef has increased from 700 CFA (US$1.68) to 900 CFA (US$2.16) in just three days One litre of oil has increased from 600 CFA (US$1.44) to 850 CFA (US$2.04) in the same time.

“We only eat once during the day now,” said another protestor, Alimata Camara. “If food prices increase more, what will we give our children to eat and how will they go to school?”

Elsewhere , in Cameroon protests against food prices in late February turned violent and in Burkina Faso this year there have been food riots in all the major towns in the country in which hundreds of protestors have been arrested. In Mauritania the high price of imported wheat and rice products brought people onto the streets in late 2007.

The Class Struggle in Senegal

Police in Senegal's capital, Dakar, have fired teargas at hundreds of protesting street vendors . The clashes came in response to police enforcing a new government policy to remove the vendors. Thousands of people earn a living peddling goods on Dakar's streets. The violence broke out shortly after trades unions held their own demonstration against rising food and fuel prices. Both demonstrations came down to one thing: poverty. The World Bank considers that one in three Senegalese is poor. Unemployment rate estimates are as high as 40 percent, and the vast majority of jobs are in the informal sector.

Police began evicting the thousands of street vendors on Thursday, three days after President Abdoulaye Wade sought an end to informal trading in the city. He said uncontrolled street vending had cost the country some 125m Euros because traffic jams were putting off investors. annd the vendors were protesting a move by President Abdoulaye Wade to force them off Dakar’s busy streets in an effort to improve traffic flow. For months, the government has been giving Dakar a facelift, building new roads and hotels, as it prepares to host an international Islamic conference in March. The authorities in Senegal's capital, Dakar, have now offered concessions to street vendors after violent protests. Several officials moved swiftly to announce measures, including the provision of market areas and reopening some streets for roadside sales .

“Prices of basic commodities have reached incomprehensible levels,” Mademba Sock, coordinator of the United Front of Central Unions representing 14 of Senegal’s unions

Union representatives had been demanding a reduction in food and housing prices, an increase in salaries, and support for struggling businesses. Demonstrators included teachers complaining of empty government promises, public servants let go without pay and average citizens who simply cannot afford to feed their families.

“Senegalese people do not eat three meals a day,” said Fatou Samba, a former teacher. “The president spends millions of dollars here and there while his people are suffering and dying of hunger.”

“In my home, there are eight people,” said teacher Cissé Sow. “I pay the water, electricity, phone, medical care and food. It’s one salary…. And there are 30 or 40 other people who depend on me...Meanwhile, the people in power are all driving fancy American cars