In what has become a weapon to fight back against criticism, the government has once again trained its guns against activist and politician Reuben Kigame, who has been challenging its policies and vices. Just days after Kigame filed a court petition seeking to prosecute security chiefs, the Kenya Revenue Authority has slapped him with a Sh20 million tax demand. Terming the move a witch-hunt to silence him, Kigame questioned the motive behind the KRA demand, even as he expressed that it pointed to a retaliation plot to silence him. "So I filed the case on Thursday, and believe you me, the next day I had an email from KRA indicating, among other things, that I owed the government over Sh20 million Kenya shillings," he said on Saturday during an exclusive interview with The Standard.
In the case that has since been approved by the court and certified as urgent, Kigame is seeking to initiate a private prosecution of top security officials, including Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja, National Intelligence Service Director General Noordin Haji and Director of Criminal Investigations Mohamed Amin. He is accusing the security bosses of sanctioning extra-judicial killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, torture and systemic suppression of peaceful protests that have left more than 100 dead and dozens of others nursing gunshot wounds. He laughed off the KRA letter, saying, "I don't make that kind of money that can attract that kind of tax," expressing that "it is evil and vindictive for KRA to be treating me like a tax evader, like a tax criminal." "I'm a very open book person, because on any good month I would be making maybe just under 200,000, and this is from music royalties, from small businesses that I do here and there," he said. And what's more baffling is the fact that people with disabilities in the country, according to the laws of the land, are entitled to tax exemption.
However, out of what he termed goodwill, he has never chosen to apply for tax exemption, and he has been religiously filing his tax returns promptly without fail. "There is what I call the voice of conscience that makes me look at a policeman earning 18,000 or 20,000, or a mama mboga and they pay tax.
So if I make slightly more than they do, why shouldn't I pay tax?
