Will Ruto’s long-game gamble with taxes pay off?

This week’s official visit to Japan offered Kenyan President William Ruto a welcome break from the negative public sentiment that has surged back home in recent months over his administration’s aggressive tax policies and perceived failure to bring down the cost of living.

At a meeting with the Kenyan diaspora in Tokyo, President Ruto looked fairly cheerful, even calming himself at some point to make a joke at his own expense over his new moniker “Zakayo”—a comparison to the biblical Zacchaeus the tax collector.

“What I will not do as president is say there will be free lunch, that the country is going to be developed by borrowing from other people and that it is going to cost us nothing to develop our country. 

“That is why I don’t mind people calling me names… 

I will do the right thing for our country irrespective of what names people call me, including Zakayo,” he said amid applause and chuckles from the audience on Wednesday. The atmosphere in the room contrasted sharply to the pockets of hostility his entourage has recently encountered at public rallies organised for the President to try to explain his social and economic agenda.

While the hostility has mostly been directed at local political allies, it has given a glimpse of the souring sentiment about the President and his administration, including in his perceived political support bases. Ahead of his State of the Nation Address in Parliament in November last year, a number of MPs at a parliamentary group meeting for the ruling Kenya Kwanza were reported to have warned him about negative perceptions of the government on the ground. Ruto is said to have rejected the legislators’ proposal for a review of taxes, telling them, “you cannot be popular all the time; there is a time to be unpopular”. – The East African