There is nothing more difficult than losing a child. There is nothing worse than losing our children as a result of treachery, ignorance, crime and short-sightedness, and this is what is happening in Sudan now. Dozens of young men and women are being killed by the bullets of the Sudanese military.

In the midst of this, it is important to acknowledge the contribution of the women of Sudan to the country’s civil transition.

Since the revolution’s instigation, Sudanese women brilliantly coordinated and effectively participated in the overthrow of the Bashir regime, with the proportion of women in the demonstrations in 2018-2019 estimated to have been at least 60%.

In the mid-1990s the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) stated that Sudan had more than 35% women-headed households. Fast-forward more than 23 years, the number of women-headed households in Sudan has probably doubled, if not more. While doing the lion’s share of care work and providing for their families, women have also, since 2019, made incredible strides to assert their agency and presence within households and public spheres. If this coup is allowed to last, Sudanese women will be dragged into a very dark corner.

We all know that the transitional period of the Sudanese revolution has not been ideal, and we are fully aware of the number of challenges and constraints that occurred, but we also fully understand the root causes of these challenges, starting with the disproportionally designed political agreement, which allowed remnants of the Omar al Bashir regime to remain in power. This faction of the transitional government has never been interested in anything other than keeping Sudan captive to the same cycles of violence and poverty that have long been hindering Sudan’s opportunities to achieve stability and peace.

And although there has been no clear progress on legal and institutional reform towards gender equality in Sudan, we cannot deny the achievements made by the Sudanese people, women and men, throughout the transitional period. In particular, the success of Sudanese women in increasing and consolidating their presence in public places.

Women founded sports teams, involved themselves in creative activities, and paved the way for professions that had been preserved for men during the previous regime, such as traffic police, technical professions, car mechanics, carpentry and public car driving. Sudanese women’s voices rose on all platforms, and through their participation in peaceful protests and marches, they demanded their human rights, while spreading awareness about the rights of women and girls.

Now, at this critical time in Sudan’s history, the women of Sudan are standing at the front lines, fighting once again to prevent their country from slipping back into dark times.

If this military coup succeeds in taking over the country, Sudanese women will face another cycle of obscurity and violence that may be much worse than the era of Bashir, especially since no legal reform has taken place in the country. Sudan is still not a member of CEDAW, and Sudan has not signed or ratified any of the international protocols or instruments that could have improved the status of women. In addition, Sudan still has active laws that allow gender-based violence and impunity for perpetrators of violence against women and girls.

Moreover, women continue to be arrested for so-called ‘moral transgressions,’ despite the repeal of the Public Order Law in Sudan. Punishments are harsh, including flogging, imprisonment and, in some cases, execution. Poor women and girls, internally displaced people, refugees, and those living in areas of armed conflict areas continue to be the most vulnerable to these penalties and organized violence.

A militant militarized system can only exist by eliminating any glimmer of hope towards accountability and the rule of law.

The reasons Sudanese women took part in the revolution in large numbers are the same reasons they are now part of the resistance against this treacherous coup. We are well aware that any military government will seriously jeopardize the rights, security and safety of women, especially with these fundamentalists and warlords at the helm.

The environment created by the presence of armed groups in civilian areas has time and again been accompanied by increases in sexual and gender-based violence. Already there are reports that a group of soldiers representing the coup stormed a hostel for girls in north Khartoum, and assaulted dozens of the female students there.

Sudanese women are well aware that their access to basic human rights and justice are conditioned upon the presence of a civil and democratic system of governance that respects women’s rights and humanity. Only under such a government can women be part of legal and political reform processes that will contribute to bringing about meaningful change. Until then, the women of Sudan remain on the front lines to resist any action that pushes them back or diminishes their humanity and the value of their contribution to society.

Since the signing of the 2019 power-sharing agreement between the Sudanese military and the civilian pro-democracy coalition, the Forces for the Declaration of Freedom and Change, there has been a consistent level of tension and conflict between the demands of the resistance on the one hand and the policies and decisions of the “power-sharing” government on the other. The resistance—organized in neighborhood resistance committees initially charged with field operations like organizing protests, building barricades, and distributing pamphlets—has since evolved to become the political voice of the streets over the past two years. In fact, the resistance committees’ work has led to several conflicts and protests against government policies, from the delay of investigations and trials for the victims of the June 2019 massacre, to economic liberalization policies. These protests always began with polite, reassuring support for the government, followed by the mention of protesters’ demands—a strategy  caused by the messaging of the government and the ruling block, which repeatedly asserted that any objection to the government would lead to handing power back to the military.

In the weeks leading up to the coup, tensions rose between the military and the civilian coalition in government. Military leaders gave speeches about the failure of the civilian government, citing the negative impacts of economic liberalization measures, which have led to increases of over 150% in costs of living in the last year alone. (It is worth noting that the head of the coup, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, would endorse the same policies in his first press conference the day after the coup.) Amid these tensions, resistance committees, labor unions, and other groups started preparing for the coup, with some unions issuing proactive strike announcements effective the moment a coup should occur. Resistance committees called for and successfully organized the October 21st Millions March, uniting under the slogan, “Down with the partnership of blood.” It was clear to them by then that power cannot be shared and that a partnership with the military is a partnership with criminals and, as such, a compromise on justice.

On the morning of October 25th, Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, woke up to clear signs of a coup: the scrambling of radio stations, an internet shutdown, more army vehicles in the streets than usual, and rumors that the prime minister and his cabinet had been detained. That same day, people occupied the streets and built barricades as early as 6 a.m., strike calls were activated, and the country was shut down. By the end of the day, four martyrs had been killed at the hands of the military coup. The coup would harden the position of the public and the resistance committees against the military, giving rise to the call for a total removal of the military from politics. This call, which had been widely seen as radical and idealistic until a few days before the coup, is now the mainstream position of the Sudanese people.

Resistance committees are currently leading the movement on the ground in Sudan. They are organizing protests, enabling civil disobedience inside neighborhoods by providing basic goods and services to their populations, and in some areas even working on electing and appointing local governments. The committees are also collaborating to produce joint sets of demands. This exercise has paved the path for revolutionary discussions that imagine different forms of governance and constitution making while also reviewing those scenarios, demands, and imaginations more critically. The committees are engaged in intellectual work as much as they are in protesting and building barricades.

Nevertheless, you can watch news about Sudan on regional and international networks for days without hearing a word about resistance committees. The media is both unable and unwilling to understand and reflect their real role. But the committees and their organizing is what stopped the coup from being successful, and they are the main tool that we as Sudanese people would like to share with revolutionaries around the world.

Sudan’s resistance committees are united against the coup, with a clear position—known as the “Three No’s”—against the military: “No negotiations, no partnership, no legitimacy.” The main obstacles to the fulfillment of these slogans are international mediators and others working to restore the pre-coup power-sharing situation. Major parties involved in or promoting mediation efforts include the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sudan, as well as the US Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, who has called the demand of removing the military from politics an unrealistic one. The US envoy has also described the military’s violent reaction as “exercising restraint,” despite the killing of tens of protesters. A number of Sudanese businessmen and regional players have also been involved in promoting mediation and a new compromise.

But these efforts have been publicly rejected by the resistance committees, and as a result, attempts have been made to control and co-opt their revolutionary work. This includes a recent invitation from the prime minister in detention (since released) to resistance committees to visit him for an “update on the status quo.” The committees publicly rejected the invitation, instead offering to arrange public meetings for the prime minister in which he would address his people in the streets. Moreover, they announced that they are not interested in such negotiation and mediation efforts. This rejection of closed-room politics is brand new to Sudan—as are many of the actions and decisions of resistance committees.

Under these circumstances, it must be highlighted that the best support that the Sudanese revolution can get from international revolutionary allies is for them to reject and fight their own governments’ efforts to force a government of killers on Sudan for the second time. Ask where and what your government is spending money on in Sudan, and call out any efforts toward another “compromise” and any other attempts to legitimize military rule.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

A coherence check is an evaluation of the extent to which legal instruments such as the Digital Service Tax (DST) achieve their own stated objectives with efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency. As the economic slump bites and Kenya’s debtors start calling, the extent to which the Kenyan government is coherent in its regulation is directly linked to Kenya’s social and economic stability. While government regulation can be convoluted, the coherence check framework makes clear what the meaning of regulation is to you.

The DST, which came into effect on the 1st of January 2021, is a 1.5 per cent tax on the gross transaction value of all digital products and services in Kenya. The inexhaustible scope of products and services covered by this tax ranges from downloadable content to data analytics services.  Stripped down to its core regulatory intent, the DST is a transfer of wealth from private actors in the digital sector to the government. The short-run purpose of the DST is to grow the tax base while the long-run objective can be considered as to boost tax revenue. How coherent then, is a 1.5 per cent tax on digital products, services and marketplaces to its own objectives?

I meet Ndunge at her second-hand clothes stall in a busy part of the city, as I collect a piece. Since the first COVID-19 lockdown, she has had to create an account on a popular social media application to find new markets, ensure that she doesn’t lose her long-term clients and most importantly, to survive the slump in demand in her sector. Ndunge’s online clothing sales are technically subject to the DST. She dismisses my questions about the DST with “vile itakam” (whatever will be). Ndunge is required to submit DST returns by the 20th of each month but she will not be doing so. She is strikingly disengaged from a fiscal rule that is imbued with the potential to destroy a business she has painstakingly built. Our digital service provider explains that the government is not justified in its pursuit of 1.5 per cent of all her business, a view that she assures me is almost ubiquitous amongst her colleagues. The dismissive bitterness that frames her opinion of the government and its taxes is a sign that her political disillusionment is morphing into something altogether more sinister.

The DST is a transfer of wealth from private actors in the digital sector to the government.

At the philosophical level, Ndunge entered into a social contract with the Government of Kenya when she started her business. She wittingly or unwittingly expected to receive a public services bundle – political decision-making access and a voice in the distribution of the tax burden in exchange for her taxes. Her perceived imbalances in this transaction, coupled with the persistent allegations of corruption within government have created a legitimacy gap. Legitimacy is the key ingredient in the administration of tax or any coercive law. It motivates compliance, encourages group discipline in rule following and significantly reduces enforcement and monitoring costs for regulators. Without legitimacy, the incumbent government must use violence, legal or otherwise to achieve its compliance objectives, and I guess in Ndunge’s case, they will have to.

To violently compel Ndunge and the 86 per cent of Kenya’s informal sector workforce to comply with the DST, the government will undoubtedly need to invest significant resources in the requisite tax infrastructure to register, motivate and monitor compliance. As the DST is an experimental tax, even in jurisdictions with robust tax infrastructure and legitimacy, this significant public investment will have to be undertaken without a clear return on investment.

Based on the foregoing, the first question that arises about the DST is its efficacy. The decision to regulate must first be informed by the evaluation of how much coercive force is required to achieve the objective of a greater tax reach and an increase in tax revenue. As illustrated by the above, the government’s legitimacy gap, the required investment in tax infrastructure and the unclear return on investment raise questions on the feasibility of the DST. 

The DST is designed as a prescriptive rule by the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) that requires the regulatory target (digital products and service providers) to register and submit their monthly DST returns in compliance with the Finance Act 2020. However, a glaring design flaw is the DST’s blanket provision of 1.5 per cent of the transaction value for all digital business, without the differentiation of income/turnover thresholds. The KRA’s inability to prioritize regulatory targets or identify classes of digital services/products to earmark is, first and foremost, punitive to local micro, small and medium-sized (MSMEs) digital enterprises. Pitting the compliance capacity of multinational digital content providers against the limited resources of MSMEs is not only amoral, but it sabotage’s the KRA’s objectives.

With no clear regulatory priorities, the KRA is faced with a system capacity overload, where regulatory resources are spread too thinly to successfully target, motivate and monitor compliance. The natural, resulting equilibrium is the committed non-compliance of MSMEs, the bedrock of Kenya’s economy and the main regulatory target. Simply put, there is no incentive for a middling Kenyan lifestyle blogger with no technical capacity to calculate and engage with the regulatory requirements of the DST and comply. Moreover, the expectation that it should cost the same amount for the blogger as for Netflix is preposterous. The DST here is demonstrably ineffective in the pursuit of its own objectives.

In addition to alienating the core tax revenue-generating actors in this jurisdiction, the DST is bound to have a “chilling effect” on the sector. First, in the short term, there is loss of consumer welfare as those digital actors who can transfer the cost of the DST to consumers, have and will. The more perverse effect of the DST however, is the loss of the “silicon savannah”, the unregulated space of digital innovation, with global recognition and ramifications.

Pitting the compliance capacity of multinational digital content providers against the limited resources of MSMEs is not only amoral, but it sabotage’s the KRA’s objectives.

There is a sickening but almost comforting familiarity to the ruination of exceptional things, people and spaces in this country. The sequence is clear: A new and disruptive idea, technology, market or product is created and the novelty is exploited by those most disenfranchised to create capital. The now productive sector catches the attention of the government, which directs its monopoly power to regulate. Gradually, the inefficiencies of “the Kenyan experience” emerge while incentives to innovate, grow and create are strangled. The capital previously owned and generated by the innovators, finds its way back to the political class and the sector withers, the status quo is maintained. This unfortunately is how “the cookie crumbles” in the digital products/services sector – the inefficiencies that have dogged other sectors are finally in the digital space. The distributive injustice of the DST to the youth, MSMEs and other disenfranchised groups is only more compelling when viewed in light of the rampant distortionary effects of corruption in this jurisdiction. In effect, this tax is a perverse re-distribution of resources from the most efficient interest group – disenfranchised private sector actors – to the government. The DST is in this case manifestly predatory while retarding growth in the sector.

As a policy analyst, I wonder what the strategic regulatory intent of the DST was when considering its cost/benefit spread. While the benefits of the DST accrue to the government, digital financial services providers are beneficiaries by exemption. It is noteworthy that digital financial service providers are the primary beneficiaries of a previously unregulated digital sector. Digital financial services providers developed their products in a regulatory vacuum and created the economies of scale that now allow them to compete internationally. As the most profitable economic entities in Kenya and possibly in the East-African Community, why should they be exempt from the DST?  The economic rationale of this exemption is unclear as these financial service providers are experiencing profit gluts after recouping their digital infrastructure investments. Unmistakable interest group politics are at play here, bringing into question the regulatory intent of this tax.

The more perverse effect of the DST however, is the loss of the “silicon savannah”, the unregulated space of digital innovation, with global recognition and ramifications.

A coherence check on the Digital Services Tax illustrates the inefficacy, ineffectiveness and inefficiency of its intent, design and effects.  I find that the government’s legitimacy gap is likely to promote committed non-compliance among the regulatory targets. Therefore, in order for the KRA to achieve its regulatory targets, it must employ legal violence. Additionally, the DST’s blanket provision is a limiting design feature that discourages compliance, creates perverse incentives and retards growth and innovation in the sector. These distorted outcomes all ensure that the fervent attempts by the KRA to substantively increase tax reach, fail. Finally, the exemption of digital financial service providers from the scope of the DST is indicative of interest group politics in the sector that are destructive to growth and innovation.

Given the adverse effects of the DST, MSMEs and other interested stakeholders in the sector need to confront the rising tide of incoherent regulation by urgently organizing and engaging with the regulatory process. The recent increase in internet taxes (Finance Act 2021) is an indication that the government will not relent in its redistributive efforts. Digital service providers must form a clearly defined interest group because only by pre-emptive engagement with the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology on its policies, positions and instruments can they have the analytical and relational capacity to insulate themselves from predation, in line with their contemporaries in the digital financial services sector.