By OTIENO OTIENO

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A pretty strange protest march happened in the streets of Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, on Thursday.

The protesters identified themselves in placards as slum dwellers and informal building contractors, voiced support for a highly unpopular housing tax imposed by the government that was in November declared unconstitutional by a court.

A rare police escort for them as they marched to and from parliament buildings sparked social media speculation that some ruling party operatives were involved in organising the demo to create an impression of widespread support for the controversial tax among the country’s poor ahead of the next round of legal battles over it in the new year.

High Court judges in November gave the state 45 days, lapsing on January 10, to appeal or make the tax enforced from July to fund President William Ruto’s affordable housing programme compliant with the law.

Read: Kenya High Court quashes housing levy

A defiant President Ruto has publicly vowed he will do whatever it takes to have the housing programme implemented.

The main petitioner in the case, Senator Okiya Omtatah, has recently expressed fears for his life in the wake of the President’s remarks reminding critics of his government’s development agenda that he has the instruments of power to deal with them.

But Thursday’s apparently stage-managed demonstration in support of the housing tax betrayed deeper concerns within the ranks of the Ruto administration about the public trust deficit that it has battled throughout its first full year.

The findings of a year-end perception survey by the polling firm TIFA Research released on Friday show that the vast majority of Kenyans believe 2023 was a bad year, with the economic conditions deemed far worse than they were in 2022 when President Ruto took over power promising to bring down the cost of living within the first 100 days, create jobs and lift the underprivileged ‘hustlers’ out of poverty.

Close to 90 percent of the respondents in the survey felt that the cost of living – underlined by surging prices of essential household goods, electricity and fuel – in 2023 was worse than in 2022.

The proportion of Kenyans who felt that the economy and the employment prospects have deteriorated in the past one year were found to be similarly large at 81 percent and 65 percent respectively.

That sinking public feeling about President Ruto’s first full year in office is a stark contrast to his often-bullish personal assessment of his administration performance on the economy.

Read: Disappointments, high living cost cloud Ruto’s 1 year in office

In his State of the Nation Address in November, he declared that he had stabilised the economy, playing up the impact of his government’s unpopular tax policies in pulling Kenya out of the debt hole, for instance.

“Our efforts to stabilise the situation have yielded such progress that next month, in December, we will be able to settle the first $300 million instalment of the $2 billion Eurobond debt that falls due next year. I can now state with confidence that we will and shall pay the debt that has become a source of much concern to citizens, markets and partners,” he said in his speech delivered in Parliament on November 9.