Video of Kenyan minister rejecting ‘old’ housing levy in 2019 shared out of context

The clip was published on TikTok on May 10, 2023.

"Musalia Just join the opposition we kick Ruto out of Government (sic)," reads a text box in the video.

At the top appear the Swahili words "Kimeanza Kuwaramba", which means "it has started to crumble". The phrase is a reference to alleged cracks emerging in President William Ruto’s eight-month-old administration.

Image

Screenshot showing the misleading clip, taken on May 12, 2023

The post has been shared more than 600 times.

In the 1'15" minute-long clip, Mudavadi says: "The newly introduced 1.5 percent house tax on Kenyan workers purports to be an intervention that will provide comfort and shelter, yet it is at once insensitive, burdensome because you are taxing an already overloaded worker."

Mudavadi, the holder of the newly created position of prime cabinet secretary (archived here), is a former vice president who broke ranks with opposition leader Raila Odinga to back Ruto during the 2022 election campaigns.

Ruto defeated Odinga by a margin of less than two percentage points in the polls.

Finance Bill 2023

Kenya’s Finance Bill 2023 (archived here), which is currently under consideration in parliament, seeks to amend various laws relating to taxes and duties to increase revenue collection.

It proposes a three-percent deduction from workers' gross earnings to finance the National Housing Development Fund.

A similar law attempted under former leader Uhuru Kenyatta was overturned in court, forcing the government to abandon it altogether (archived here).

Although the video of Mudavadi doesn’t say when his words were recorded, the timing of its publication gives the misleading impression he was speaking out against the latest housing levy proposal contained in the 2023 Finance Bill drafted by a government he is a part of.

Missing context

Using the InVID-WeVerify video verification tool, AFP Fact Check performed reverse image searches on keyframes from the clip and found that it has been online since April 2019.

The original footage (archived here) was part of a news bulletin broadcast by KTN News - a local Kenyan TV station.

At the time, Mudavadi was a member of the country’s opposition. He opposed Kenyatta’s proposal to fund the building of low-cost houses for Kenyan workers with compulsory salary deductions of 1.5 percent from taxpayers.

“The newly introduced 1.5-percent house tax on the Kenyan worker purports to be an intervention that will provide comfort in shelter,” he said in an interview in 2019. “Yet it is at once insensitive, burdensome and not altogether lawful. It is burdensome and insensitive because you are taxing an already overloaded worker. This worker is already burdened with just about the highest income tax in the world today.”

The deduction became law following the enactment of the Finance Act of 2018 (archived here) but was suspended by Kenya's Employment and Labour Relations Court on the grounds that no public participation was undertaken and that transparency in its implementation was not guaranteed (archived here).

The affordable-housing project was conceptualised when Kenyatta introduced the country’s Big 4 Agenda (archived here) which was anchored on four pillars namely: affordable housing, food security, universal health care and manufacturing.

Mudavadi has not spoken publicly about the latest proposal – twice the figure he once opposed – under Ruto.