New antigovernment protests kick off in Kenya with calls for Ruto to quit

Police fire tear gas to disperse demonstrators in Nairobi and other cities as casualties reported.

Hundreds of antigovernment protesters have taken to the streets of Kenya demanding that embattled President William Ruto resign.

Tuesday’s demonstrations, spanning from the capital, Nairobi to the southern coastal town of Mombasa, are the latest bout of unrest since government-planned tax hikes prompted mass anger in mid-June.

Reporting from Nairobi, Al Jazeera’s Malcolm Webb, said police were firing tear gas “abundantly” in the city centre, trying to stop any crowds from forming.

In the nearby town of Kitengala, some 200 protesters burned tyres and chanted “Ruto must go”. At least one person was killed, according to a witness quoted by the Reuters news agency.

In Mombasa, in the south, more protesters marched waving palm fronds, footage from Kenyan media showed.

‘Total shutdown’

Kenyan activists, unmoved by Ruto’s concession to axe the $2.7bn in planned tax hikes to ease the initial protests, are threatening a “total shutdown” of the country on Tuesday.

They are frustrated by years of stagnating wages and corruption seen as worse than ever, said Webb, noting that the tax plan was merely the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.

The demonstrations that started peacefully last month soon spiralled into violence, with some protesters even briefly storming parliament and police opening fire.

More than 50 people were killed during the protests, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, with police accused of using excessive force.

Another 59 people have been abducted or are missing and 628 others were arbitrarily arrested, the commission said.

To help calm the earlier unrest, Ruto scrapped the planned tax increase on June 26 and dismissed almost his entire cabinet. He also announced “multi-sectoral” talks to address protesters’ grievances.

However, most leading activists have rejected Ruto’s invitation to dialogue, instead urging immediate action on issues like corruption.

Stella Agara, a Nairobi-based security analyst, told Al Jazeera the protests would intensify and become more frequent as long as Ruto refuses to listen to the demonstrators’ grievances.

“Since the beginning of the protests, these have been blamed on the opposition, on the former president, on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, of the president of South Korea … and yesterday on the Ford Foundation,” Agara said.

“It seems to Kenyans that he doesn’t understand that these protests are being driven by Kenyans who are telling him they are fed up.”

Ruto on Monday accused the Ford Foundation, an American philanthropic organisation, of sponsoring those who had caused “violence and mayhem” in Kenya, without providing evidence.

The Ford Foundation rejected the allegation, saying it did not fund or sponsor the protests and has a strictly non-partisan policy for its grant-making.

The message that Ruto is sending Kenyans “is that he doesn’t hear them, he doesn’t see them, and this is not going to go down well”, Agara said.