Two presidents, two currencies, one memo. In April 2024, William Ruto sat down with the IMF and agreed to raise $2.7 billion by taxing bread, sanitary pads, and mobile money transfers. Months earlier, Abiy Ahmed had floated the birr and watched it lose more than three-quarters of its value overnight, on the same institution's insistence. Different capitals, different currencies, the same signature at the bottom of the page. This is not a coincidence of bad governance. It is a franchise.
The IMF Puppets: How Ruto and Abiy Use the Same Playbook to Starve the Youth
One Fund, Two Governments, One Script
Strip away the flags and the two economic "reform" packages are close to identical. Kenya's Extended Fund Facility, running since 2021, demanded new revenue-raising tax measures, subsidy withdrawals on fuel and fertilizer, and a public wage freeze — conditions that produced the Finance Bill 2024, a $2.7 billion tax package that would have raised the price of bread, cooking oil, and menstrual products in a country where youth make up 67 percent of all jobless Kenyans. Ethiopia's Extended Credit Facility, agreed the same year, demanded the same category of medicine: currency liberalization, subsidy removal, and fiscal consolidation — a package that sent the birr from roughly 57 to over 130 per dollar within months and dragged fuel, rent, and food prices up behind it. Both loans arrived with the same cover story: temporary pain for structural health. Both delivered the pain on schedule and left the health part for later, indefinitely.
This is not two countries independently discovering austerity. This is one lender running the same structural adjustment template through two different presidents, in two different election cycles, timed so that neither electorate gets the chance to compare notes with the other.
The Distraction Machine
Here is the mechanism both governments lean on once the bill comes due: when the treasury has been hollowed out, you do not explain the debt schedule. You point sideways.
In Kenya, Ruto rode into office in 2022 on "hustler" populism explicitly built to submerge the country's real class divide under a friendlier language — "hustlers" versus "dynasties" — while quietly negotiating the same IMF terms his predecessors had. When the Finance Bill 2024 protests exploded, the response from sections of the political class reached immediately for ethnic and regional framing, the oldest tool in Kenyan electoral politics, the same one used to fracture opposition coalitions since the 1990s. It did not work — and that failure is the most important data point in this entire piece, covered below. In Ethiopia, the pattern is cruder but the function is identical: a government fighting wars on three fronts, in Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia, has every incentive to keep the national conversation locked on ethnic federalism and armed insurgency rather than on a $69 billion debt load, a defaulted Eurobond, and an IMF program that dictated the terms of the currency collapse. A population arguing about who its enemy is doesn't have time to ask who's holding the loan documents.
The One Thing Kenya's Youth Got Right
This is where the comparison actually matters, and where Kenya's Gen Z movement earned the attention it got. When the Finance Bill 2024 protests erupted in June, organizers explicitly built the movement to reject the very tool the political class reaches for — describing themselves, deliberately, as leaderless and tribeless, refusing to let the protest be captured by any single ethnic bloc, party, or godfather. It worked well enough to force Ruto to publicly withdraw the bill within days, after security forces had already killed dozens of protesters in the street. Kenya's Communist Party Marxist (CPM-K), a Marxist-Leninist party re-founded in 2024 and tracing its political lineage back to Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi's anti-colonial Land and Freedom Army, has been one of the clearest organized voices explicitly naming the IMF program, rather than tribal scapegoats, as the actual target — consistent with the analysis in this piece. But intellectual honesty requires saying plainly what the protest's own organizers said about themselves: this was not a vanguard-led uprising, and no single party, CPM-K included, ran it. It was leaderless by design, and that design is exactly what made it too diffuse for the state's usual ethnic-wedge playbook to fracture.
That is the lesson worth exporting north, more than any single organization's name: the state can co-opt a tribe or a party. It cannot as easily co-opt a movement that refuses to hand it a single face to attack.
Why Ethiopia Hasn't Had Its Own Version — Yet
Ethiopia's structural conditions for the same kind of revolt are, if anything, worse: a 43 percent poverty rate, 85 percent informal urban employment, a currency that's lost most of its value in two years. What Ethiopia has that Kenya in 2024 did not is an active, multi-front war, which gives the state a ready-made justification for surveillance, mobilization, and the ethnic mistrust that keeps a Tigrayan renter in Mekelle and an Oromo delivery driver in Adama from recognizing that the IMF letter sent to Addis Ababa and the one sent to Nairobi were written by the same desk. Kenya's protesters found the throughline because nothing yet required them to see each other as the enemy. Ethiopia's youth mostly haven't, because the war supplies that enemy for them, free of charge, every day.
The Honest Complication
To be fair to the other side of the ledger: not every element of either country's debt crisis was written in Washington. Kenya's own pre-2022 borrowing spree on infrastructure — much of it now widely regarded as poorly costed — and Ethiopia's decade of megaproject debt before any IMF program existed are domestic decisions, made by domestic governments, that created the vulnerability the IMF later stepped into. The Fund's defenders would also argue, not unreasonably, that Kenya's debt-to-GDP ratio above 70 percent and Ethiopia's default were not manufactured by the IMF but inherited by it, and that the alternative to a program, for either country, was likely a harder default with even less negotiating room. That argument deserves a hearing. It does not, however, explain why the burden of resolving both crises has landed overwhelmingly on bread, fuel, and transit costs for the poorest half of both populations, while the debts themselves were contracted by governments neither electorate fully consented to at the time.
What the Comparison Actually Proves
Put the two programs side by side and the coincidence stops looking like coincidence. Same institution, same sequence — devalue, deregulate, tax the essentials, freeze the wages — same two-year window, same result: youth unemployment near 27 percent in Ethiopia and Kenyan youth making up more than two-thirds of the jobless, in both cases dressed up as the price of "resetting the economic trajectory," in Ruto's own words. The trajectory being reset was never pointed at the treasury. It was pointed at you.
Kenya's youth found, briefly, that refusing the ethnic frame was strong enough to force a retreat. Ethiopia's youth are still being handed the frame instead of the receipt. The first step toward changing that isn't picking a party. It's reading the two loan agreements side by side and noticing they were never really about two different countries at all.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, follow Sidoc Haytu on Instagram at @sirapressnews.
