“The movement was much bigger than just the 2024 Finance Bill [Kenya]. Once the bill is passed in whatever form it’s passed in, the movement will continue, and importantly, not be limited to what’s happening in the halls of Parliament. The movement was about building a better life for Kenyans in Kenya…. The Sudanese speakers of our last teach-in episode showed us the many ways that these small, community-based voluntary actions (many of which don’t look “revolutionary” in themselves) were indeed revolution. Here in Kenya now, we are seeing wave after wave of emboldened workers’ strikes: we see striking university students and now university faculty protesting profit-centric fee structures, we see striking airport workers protesting JKIA’s privatization, we see Uber workers striking against exploitative gig economy working conditions. So the movement is continuing in myriad forms….
Towards the end of that discussion, Gussai looked at what’s happening now in Kenya from a pan-African lens and helped us see what parallels were to be drawn between Kenya’s experience and those of many other countries in Africa and elsewhere in the global south. We didn’t have much time to go into the details of that in the last teach-in, which really focused on Sudan’s revolutionary story, but Gussai [came back] to talk about debt, taxation, developmental states—from a pan-African perspective.”
In this episode (19 September 2024) of the Podcast ‘Until Everyone is Free’, we address issues surrounding the Kenya finance bill, through four main points:
- A very short history of post-colonial loans
- African states and neoliberalism: a developmental state perspective
- Taxation as contested political grounds
- A contextualization: Africa and development horizons
Links to listen to the episode: