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As protesters faced off against heavy-handed police in Kenya’s capital, members of parliament passed the tax bill that pushed them into the streets.
The financial bill will impose new levies on essential goods and push the burden of external debt repayment on the country’s increasingly unemployed and struggling citizens.
When the marchers made it into the parliament chambers they had vowed to occupy, their rage and betrayal was on full show.
Flags were flung, glass was shattered and the open buffet food was devoured.
Lawmakers hid in the building for two hours until the storm had passed.
Protesters attack Kenya parliament
The protesters’ peaceful calls for the bill to be thrown out – not amended as it has been – were dismissed by an open ballot in a National Assembly where the government has the majority.
This was now a reckoning.
To understand the outrage and upset, one must look at the audacity of a government asking its citizens to accept heavy taxation as corruption and a steady rise of unemployment continue.
The nerve of a president that tells Kenyans to tighten their belts and shows up to church with a Stefano Ricci crocodile-skin belt that costs €2,500 (£2,111).
The sanctimony of western embassies decrying violence while their home states empower and enrich the Kenyan security apparatus with defence partnerships.
The final hope rested on President William Ruto quelling the tension and calling for restraint. Instead, he doubled down – deploying the country’s military to support the police and condemning the day’s events as treasonous.
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Kenyan president vows to restore ‘normalcy’
“Today’s events mark a critical turning point on how we respond to grave threats to our national security,” he said with a stern face.
Hours before he addressed the nation a Kenya Airways flight landed in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince carrying an international peace-keeping force to combat gang violence, led by the Kenyan police.
This is the same police force currently being investigated by Kenya’s Independent Policing Oversight Authority for its violence against peaceful protesters.
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Young Kenyans have shown the world today that they have had enough of double standards.
And as we have seen across the world, when young people rise up and face the brute force of the state, it takes a lot more than a bullet to get them to stand down.
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