There is a peculiar cruelty reserved for regimes that have exhausted all pretense of reason. It arrives not with a machete’s flourish but with a bureaucrat’s stamp; not with a dictator’s decree but with a regulator’s press release; not with the sudden violence of revolution but with the slow, methodical suffocation of those too exhausted to gasp. Kenya’s current political class has perfected this art. They have learned, with admirable precision, to tax the breath of the drowning.
As of last week, a liter of diesel in Nairobi now costs Sh242.92, petrol has climbed to Sh214.25, and kerosene, the indispensable fuel of the poor, the unemployed, the rural peasant, the slum dweller, has been frozen at Sh152.78 by a government subsidy. On its face, this might appear to be mercy. A subsidy for the poorest! A hand extended to the vulnerable! But to see this as compassion is to mistake a coroner’s autopsy for a surgeon’s healing. The kerosene subsidy is not charity. It is confiscation by another name.
The same government that “spares” kerosene has presided over a brutal VAT regime that has hammered the broader economy into submission. Imported diesel surged by 20.32 percent in a single month, and petrol by 10 percent; price shocks that have ricocheted through transport, manufacturing, and agriculture, driving up food prices, school fees, and the cost of every commodity a poor family touches. The kerosene subsidy is a poultice on a gangrenous wound. It soothes a square inch of skin while the rot consumes the body entirely.
But let us be perfectly clear about what is not being discussed. The government has discovered a perverse arithmetic: soak the productive sectors until they hemorrhage, then toss a coin to the poorest and call it justice. The unemployed kerosene user is being asked to applaud the very system that has immiserated them. This is not governance. It is gaslighting on an industrial scale.
The Hustler’s Gambit, Exposed
President William Ruto ascended to power on the back of a populist promise: “hustlers against dynasties,” a government for the common man, for the small-scale trader, for the woman frying mandazis by the roadside, for the young man in Kawangware scraping together bus fare for a job interview that may or may not exist. And what has that “hustler nation” received? A fuel tax regime so obscure that a liter of petrol now carries nearly a dozen taxes and levies: excise duty, road maintenance levy, petroleum development levy, anti-adulteration levy, and now a bewildering VAT that was slashed from 16 percent to 8 percent in April only after the public roared so loudly that Parliament could not pretend not to hear.
That VAT cut, by the way, was an emergency three-month intervention. The government framed it as magnanimity. In truth, it was a retreat. Citizens had protested. Businesses had shut down. The transport sector had ground to a halt. And the Treasury, having tested the limits of public patience, blinked. “I want to state that we are not looking at a possibility of increasing tax rates,” Treasury CS John Mbadi assured Parliament in March, as if this were a revelation rather than a surrender.
But the absence of new taxes is not the absence of cruelty. The Finance Bill 2026 has simply learned to hide its hand. It does not raise VAT rates; it imposes a 16 percent VAT on mobile money service fees, quietly siphoning coins from every M-Pesa transaction a slum dweller uses to buy charcoal, pay school fees, or receive remittances from a relative in the village. It does not raise income tax bands; it cracks down on the informal economy through digital surveillance, squeezing the very small traders who have nowhere else to turn. As strategic analyst Alex Munyua put it: “The Finance Bill 2026 is not wearing the angry mask of new taxes. It is wearing the polite smile of administrative reform.”
And now, the same government that praises the “hustler” wants to hike kerosene prices, the fuel that lights the shacks of Kibera, that boils water in Mathare, that keeps the rural grandmother from cooking over an open flame that fills her lungs with smoke. Kerosene consumption has already collapsed by 39 percent in recent years, crushed by high prices. Those who remain dependent on it are not choosing kerosene out of nostalgia. They are using it because every alternative: LPG, electricity, solar, remains financially out of reach. To tax kerosene is to tax the minimum possible existence.
The Adulteration Backfire: When “Compassion” Leads to Disaster
There is, however, an irony so rich it could fuel a thousand jokes, if anyone were still laughing. The government’s kerosene subsidy has created a perverse market distortion so severe that it is now actively undermining the economy it claims to protect.
The price gap between kerosene (Sh152.78) and diesel (Sh242.92) has widened to more than Sh 90 per liter. That gap is not just a number. It is an invitation. Unscrupulous fuel dealers have begun mixing subsidized kerosene with diesel, selling the adulterated mixture at the full diesel price, pocketing the difference, and leaving the country’s vehicles to choke on their own ruin. Independent mechanics in Nairobi’s Industrial Area report a “40 percent surge in engine failures, blown gaskets, destroyed fuel injectors, and compromised catalytic converters.”
Here is the sick joke: the government designed the subsidy to “protect the poor.” But the poor do not own diesel trucks. They do not operate manufacturing machinery. They do not run public transport fleets. The primary beneficiaries of the subsidy have turned out to be criminal cartels, who are now systematically defrauding the Kenya Revenue Authority of billions in expected Road Maintenance Levies and VAT.
The government is effectively “subsidizing the black market” while maintaining the fiction that it is protecting the poor. This is not merely incompetent. It is Kafkaesque. Because of its internal contradictions, the policy has become the enemy of the very population it was meant to serve. The Ministry of Energy can blame the Iran war, the US-Israel conflict, and instability in the Strait of Hormuz. But no war in the Middle East forced the government to design a subsidy regime that functionally rewards criminals and destroys engines. That was a domestic choice.
The Philosopher’s Scaffold: On the Cruelty of the “Good Enough”
What kind of political philosophy reduces the poor to a line item on a spreadsheet? Thomas Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But Hobbes did not anticipate the modern bureaucratic addendum: “and taxable”. The Kenyan poor are not merely poor; they are “predicted, modeled, and targeted.” The kerosene tax is not collateral damage of economic policy. It is a deliberate extraction from those whose marginal utility of a shilling is highest.
Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, warned that a government should never tax the “necessaries of life” because such taxes “fall finally upon the poor, who must generally bear the burden of them, whatever it may be.” Yet our Treasury has evidently never read Smith, or has read him and decided that his caution was merely advisory. Kerosene is not a luxury. It is not a discretionary purchase. It is “the fuel of survival.” To tax survival is to declare, in the language of policy, that the poor do not deserve to live cheaply. They do not deserve to eat warmly. They deserve to pay.
There is a distinctly medieval quality to this cruelty. During the reign of Louis XIV, his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously declared that taxation was “the art of plucking the goose so as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.” The modern Kenyan variant seems to be: pluck the goose until it stops moving, and when it hisses, call it a “stakeholder consultation.”
Yet the government will insist it has no choice. The IMF demands fiscal consolidation. The debt burden is crushing. Revenues must be raised. This is the language of “unavoidable necessity,” the same language every regime in history has used to justify its cruelties. But necessity is a convenient shield for cowardice. Kenya’s debt servicing now consumes more than half of all tax revenues. The interest payments alone could fund the entire health budget twice over. Whose fault is that? A political class that borrowed in dollars, spent in shillings, and left the bill for the next generation, specifically, the poorest among them.
The Peasant’s Revolt Is Already Here
There is a temptation to write about this tragedy in the past tense, as if the suffering were already over. But the story is still being written: in fuel queues, in protest marches, in the shuttered shops of Nairobi’s central business district. On the morning of May 15, 2026, Kenyans woke to record fuel prices and took to the streets. Police fired tear gas. Businesses stayed closed. Schools sent children home. The matatu sector, already bleeding from the diesel hike, simply refused to operate. Commuters walked. The city held its breath.
This was not a riot. It was a verdict.
The government’s response has been the usual mix of excuses and half-measures. Energy CS Opiyo Wandayi blames the Middle East. The Treasury points to global oil markets. President Ruto, who was conveniently out of the country, has yet to comment. The silence from the State House is deafening, the silence of a regime that has run out of promises, excuses, and credibility.
But the poor are not silent. The unemployed kerosene user in Korogocho is not silent. The peasant in Bomet who uses paraffin to light her home is not silent. They speak through their absence from official debates, their inability to lobby Parliament, and their quiet displacement from the centers of power. And yet, they have the one thing no Finance Bill can tax: numbers. Millions of them. And history teaches that when you push a million people to the edge, they do not fall off. They push back.
The Funeral Oration We Must Refuse to Deliver
Do not let anyone tell you this kerosene tax is “unfortunate but necessary.” Do not let anyone frame it as a “shared sacrifice” or “fiscal responsibility.” The word for taxing the fuel of the poorest while subsidizing corporate interests is not “policy.” It is plunder. What is required now is not polite journalism or measured analysis. What is required is moral outrage, translated into political action. The Finance Bill 2026 must be rejected. The kerosene tax must be repealed. The entire architecture of extractive taxation, including hidden levies, IMF-mandated adjustments, and digital surveillance of the informal economy, must be dismantled, piece by piece.
But beyond the immediate fight, Kenya needs something more fundamental: a political philosophy that recognizes that the purpose of a state is not to maximize revenue but to minimize suffering. A state that taxes the kerosene of the unemployed has forgotten its purpose. A state that calls itself pro-poor while engineering policies that immiserate the poor has lost its soul. The poor in Kenya do not need your subsidies, press releases, or promises. They need a government that stops treating them as a revenue stream and starts treating them as citizens with rights, dignity, and a claim on the state that goes beyond the calculus of extraction.
The torch is lit. The question is whether enough of us are willing to carry it, not to burn, but to light our way out of this darkness.
