On Monday, President Uhuru Kenyatta made a visit to the Internal Container Depot of the Kenya Ports Authority in Embakasi, Nairobi, a second one in as many days.
The President, who had been missing from the public eye for some time, was accompanied by the Deputy Head of Public Service Wanyama Musiambo, the man who, over the last year or so, has been leading the efforts of the government to rid the public market of counterfeit, illicit and substandard imports.
The presence of Mr Musiambo in that delegation was significant because, though the President’s visit was dubbed impromptu, there were events that made it necessary. Since Mr Musiambo’s appointment in January 2018, the career civil servant has made the war against illicit trade and products his main occupation.
And he has been, going by the standards of volumes seized, relatively successful. In just about a year, Musiambo and his team have confiscated over Sh8 billion worth of goods suspected to be counterfeit, substandard or illicit on other grounds. He has also taken hundreds of suspected counterfeiters to court and the cases are currently at various stages of prosecution.
And it is this vigour with which Musiambo and his team of inter-agency officials have tackled the war that has generated so much heat in the economy, so much so that many are burning out.
Reports have it that many small and medium entrepreneurs dealing in imported goods have suffered due to the State’s onslaught on contraband and counterfeit. Many have had to wind up their businesses and close shop not necessarily because they were dealing in illicit goods but because the whole chain of import trade has been interrupted as a direct consequence of the onslaught. The time it takes to clear a consignment at the port of entry, for instance, has been affected because there is increased thoroughness and search for detail. There are, also, more visits at the traders’ premises by officers from the inter-agency and this affects the flow of business.
At the end of it all, there have been genuine concerns that the trade in counterfeit and the war against it are both having a negative impact on the business community and the Kenyan consumer. There has been hue and cry emanating from the business community, especially in Nairobi’s Nyamakima and River Road areas where such imports are the backbone. It is these cries that seem to have reached State House and moved President Uhuru to convene a meeting with representatives of the traders last week. It is this meeting that eventually got the President and Musiambo to the ICD on Sunday and Monday to just have a personal feel of the relatively high value of the products being held there as businesses, licit and illicit, suffer.
The President must be commended for listening to a group of Kenyans that would be ordinarily dismissed and labelled beneficiaries of a criminal enterprise. In the meeting it emerged that most of those affected by the war against a crime, were actually hardworking genuine Kenyans who put in hours and shillings to earn a living. But there is also a cartel which deliberately seeks to beat the system and gain form an illegality.
It follows, therefore, that the President’s move should not be left to be an end in itself. It should be a beginning of a continuous consultative and collaborative effort between the government and the business community in whatever sector to make sure that a conducive environment to do legal trade is always maintained and misunderstandings are avoided by all means.
Like the President pointed out, every businessman must ensure they pay the requisite taxes to enable the government to run. Minimum standards must also always be maintained to protect the consumer from adverse effects that some products can cause.
But the State also needs to play its part.
From the deliberations at State House it is clear that most traders have no way of telling a counterfeit product from a genuine one. It would be a good place to start if the government through agencies such as the Anti-Counterfeit Agency and Kenya Bureau of Standards and embarked on a public awareness campaign to educate, especially the importers, on what to look out for. There was also the issue of some officials of the State agencies taking advantage of the onslaught to extort bribes from the traders or literally stealing some of the products they pretend to be inspecting and seizing. This, too, need to dealt with decisively.
At the end of the day, both the government and the business community need each other and are at the service of the citizens, hence the need to always work in harmony. The counterfeiter, however, must not be allowed to thrive.
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