IBRAHIM: A year since anti-finance bill demos and ruling class is still tone deaf

One year ago, Kenya’s streets erupted in unprecedented protest. Generation Z, armed with smartphones and an unshakeable belief in their right to good governance, took to the streets to reject the Finance Bill, 2024.

Their message was clear: enough with the excessive taxation, tone-deaf policies and a government that seemed determined to squeeze every last shilling from an already struggling population.

Fast forward to June 25, 2025, and the irony is as bitter as it is telling.

While millions of Kenyans commemorated the anniversary of those historic protests on the streets, the National Assembly sat behind barricades—literal and metaphorical—approving the Finance Bill, 2025 and Supplementary Budget III of 2024-2025. 

The symbolism could not be starker: the people on one side of the barricades, their representatives on the other, worlds apart in their understanding of Kenya’s priorities.

The last time Kenya had three supplementary budgets in one financial year was 2019-2020, driven by genuine crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, which created unprecedented economic disruption requiring emergency government response.

Fast forward to 2024-25, and we face a different scenario entirely. The collapse of a Sh103 billion IMF programme and a $750 million World Bank Development Policy Operation created the need for Supplementary Budget III due to undisbursed funds from both institutions after Kenya failed to meet programme conditions—including the World Bank’s requirement for signing the Conflict of Interest Bill into law.

PFM experts had foreseen this situation, making it hardly the “unforeseen circumstance” that constitutional provisions require.

What’s particularly damning is that this “emergency” budget was delayed until June 25, 2025—just five days before the close of the financial year.

This timing was not coincidental; it was a strategic move to make expenses legal as the fiscal year technically ended, circumventing proper scrutiny of what PFM experts knew was a foreseeable situation. But despite revenue shortfalls that should have prompted fiscal restraint, the government is increasing expenditure. 

The National Treasury initially proposed a Sh37.58 billion increase in recurrent spending, but the National Assembly approved Sh39.11 billion.

While Treasury wanted to cut development spending by Sh18.63 billion, Parliament approved a much smaller reduction of Sh3.38 billion. The result? An overall budget increase of Sh35.74 billion, pushing the total budget to Sh4.042 trillion.

This represents a dangerous precedent: using constitutional provisions as convenient backdoors to alter the budget and reduce much-needed development expenditure without the robust public participation that our democracy demands.

These are not emergency adjustments but rather evidence of systematic planning failures and a legislature that has abandoned fiscal responsibility. 

The timing of this year’s parliamentary session—coinciding with the anniversary of those protests—sends a message that the government either does not understand or does not care about the symbolism.

While young Kenyans reflected on their demands for better governance, their elected representatives were busy expanding government spending without adequate justification or consultation.

The most damning aspect of this entire episode is the tone-deafness it reveals.

A government that was truly listening to its people would have approached this anniversary with humility, perhaps using it as an opportunity to demonstrate reformed fiscal practices and genuine commitment to the principles that drove the protests.

Instead, we witnessed business as usual: supplementary budgets that stretch constitutional provisions, increased spending without clear justification and a parliament that seems more interested in expanding government expenditure than in addressing the economic pressures facing ordinary Kenyans.

As we reflect on this anniversary, the question is not whether Gen Z will continue to hold their leaders accountable and demand justice for the young lives lost—they have already proven they will.

The question is whether Kenya’s political class will finally listen, or whether they will continue to govern from behind barricades, both literal and metaphorical, while the people they are meant to serve watch from the streets.

Secondly, the supplementary budget process may be legal, but it has become an unintended performance metric for government competence—and by that measure, Kenya’s leadership is failing spectacularly. Each supplementary budget should be seen as an admission of planning failure by the National Treasury and Cabinet secretaries. 

When a government consistently requires multiple budget revisions within a single fiscal year, it reveals an administration that either cannot accurately forecast its needs or deliberately lowballs initial budgets to secure approval.

They have become routine Band-Aids for systemic incompetence, representing everything that is wrong with how our government operates: poor planning disguised as emergency response, constitutional manipulation presented as normal procedure and a fundamental disconnect between those who govern and those who are governed.

A year later, the only question is how long they can hold?

The writer works at a PFM-focused think tank