Kenya police use tear gas, water cannon as hundreds protest over tax hikes

Al Jazeera :
The tax increases were projected to raise 346.7 billion shillings ($2.7bn), equivalent to 1.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and reduce the budget deficit from 5.7 percent to 3.3 percent of GDP.
The cash-strapped government of President William Ruto agreed to make concessions on Tuesday, watering down the bill after hundreds of mostly young protesters clashed with police.
But the government will still go ahead with some tax increases and has defended the proposed hikes as necessary for filling its coffers and cutting reliance on external borrowing.
Protesters have decided to stage demonstrations across the country, including in the Indian Ocean city of Mombasa and the lakeside city of Kisumu, both opposition bastions.
In Nairobi, lawmakers were debating the bill on Thursday in its second reading before parliament. The final version must pass before June 30. Meanwhile, authorities blocked several roads near parliament and made a heavy police deployment.
Reporting from Nairobi’s city centre, Al Jazeera’s Malcolm Webb said demonstrators outnumbered the police in the streets.
“Police are firing a lot of tear gas here this morning … and there is a thick smell of tear gas in the air where we are,” he said. Around him, some people chanted: “Ruto must go!”
“A lot of protesters here are young people, social media users. It looks very different from the kinds of protests that we saw in Kenya just over a year ago called for by the political opposition also about the rising cost of living,” Webb said. “The cost of living has been going up, on and off, since the global [COVID-19] pandemic.”
Kenyans are “fed up of the increased taxation”, Stella Agara, a Kenyan tax justice activist, told Al Jazeera, adding it “especially increased austerity measures that keep on targeting the poorest of citizens and is becoming very uncomfortable for most of them”.
“But there is now a very interesting group that has been brought to the fore, which is Generation Z … They have been extremely disinterested in the elections, in voting, etc. But for some reason, this time they are very keen and are the ones on the streets protesting increased taxation – especially because of some of the taxes that are going to be imposed on digital content creation, which is a space that they dominate.”