By John Wesley Atetwe
There’s a certain bitter irony in being a Kenyan taxpayer today. You work hard, every shilling earned through sweat, sacrifice, and dreams of a better tomorrow. Yet, when it comes to fulfilling your duty to the nation ‘paying your taxes’ you find yourself trapped in a maze designed not to serve you, but to wear you down.
Gone are the days when you could simply walk into a bank, deposit your payment, and get on with your life. Today, everything must pass through eCitizen…a platform that was sold to us as convenience but feels more like a tollgate to our own money.
You log in, and suddenly, you’re met with charges stacked on charges. Transfer fees. Withdrawal fees. “Service” fees that feel like they’re charged simply for breathing while making the transaction. The government calls it efficiency. For the ordinary mwananchi, it’s extortion wearing a digital suit.
It’s like the system was built to make sure that before you can breathe, they’ve taxed the air. You wake up one morning and realize it’s not about service delivery, it’s about revenue collection at all costs. And the cost is you.
Think about the mama mboga who must now navigate online systems she barely understands. Or the boda boda rider who has to withdraw his day’s earnings from M-Pesa, only to lose a painful chunk of it in “transaction costs” before even paying the actual tax. What’s left for their children’s supper? For rent? For school fees?
We’ve been told digitization is progress. But progress for who? For the single mother selling mandazi in the early morning cold? For the young man juggling three hustles just to survive? Or for the invisible middlemen whose bank accounts fatten with every keystroke we make?
The government says, this is how the world works now. But in the real world, in the dusty streets of Kisumu, in the cramped kiosks of Nairobi, in the fishing villages along Lake Victoria, this “world” feels far away. What we see is our hard-earned money bleeding away silently, systematically…through a thousand small cuts.
This is not a resistance to taxation. It is a resistance to being punished for compliance. It is a call for a system that respects effort, preserves dignity, and serves the people it demands sacrifice from.
We are not against paying taxes. We are against being punished for it.
John Wesley Atetwe
Kisumu County
