As finance ministers, Uhuru Kenyatta and Henry Rotich have one thing in common: they love women.
But how they show their love is as different as their names. Uhuru, as Finance minister in 2009, showed his love for women by cutting excise duty on cosmetics and beauty products by half to 5% to help women look prettier. “…recognition that beautiful women are the face of a healthy society,” he said amid cheers from MPs.
Seven years later, and now President, his own Tresury Cabinet Secretary has reversed the romantic gesture. Mr Rotich, it seems, loves women only as sponsors of his Ksh2.3 trillion budget for the 2016/17 and cares less how much they spend while doing that.
“I am proposing to impose a 10 per cent excise duty on cosmetic products,” Mr Rotich said, without elaborating or even throwing in some humour. Bad news to a woman is never delivered with a smile.
Women are the biggest consumers of cosmetics which will, beginning next month, attract a 10 per cent excise duty, meaning the cost of looking beautiful with go up by a similar margin or more. Kenya’s cosmetics industry is estimated to be worth Ksh6.4 billion, and the anticipated collections by KRA could be more than Ksh300 million.
If Uhuru believes beautiful women are the face of a healthy society, Rotich thinks not-so-pretty women will be the face of a healthy budget.
It’s understandable as witty Kenyans say being an outdoor person and politician, Uhuru hangs around a lot and appreciates what beauty is all about – and, perhaps, what it can achieve.
Mr Rotich, on the other hand, is a career economist who interacts most with numbers, derivatives and graphs and whose meaning of figure 8 is literal.
His wife should throw all the cosmetics and beauty expenses at him so he can also feel the ugly side of his tax directive.
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