By Mungoa Maungu
Many Kenyan consumers are asking themselves so many questions about the exorbitant cost of living in their country, many are not aware that Kenya is a net importer, which means that about 80 percent of goods and essential commodities they use at their homes are imported into the country.
And yes of late, the shelf price of goods at supermarkets and other retail outlets have sharply risen. I can only explain this through my experience as a Clearing and Forwarding agent who understands the rule and procurers of importation.
Most times we deal with Kenya Revenue Authority as our role involves payments of duties on behalf of Kenyan importers. Our work is not a walk in the park, it is one of the most tedious work in the logistics sector, one of the few that will occasionally send shivers down your spine.
Dealing with Kenyan Customs officials is the most obnoxious thing in this industry that drives a huge percentage of Kenya’s economy. In customs you will find the most conceited decisions, the most delayed consequences and penalties of duties that are so irregular and irrelevant.
Let me take you through the rough road of clearing a 20ft container from the dreaded port of Mombasa. Through this you will understand why you have to pay more for less for a box of imported match-stick at your local supermarket.
Together with KRA we use the Simba system, an online duty payment systems that is controlled at Nairobi’s Times Towers, hundreds of kilometers away from the port facilities in Mombasa. This system allows the imported commodities to be micromanaged by many armchair KRA officers sited in times towers and who barely understand and appreciate the role of Kenyan importers.
The first thing the clearing agent does is to generate an entry through the Simba system and pays the duty at a preferred bank. From here, the entry has to pass as a sign of acceptance from KRA. This is an online procedure that is supposed to take a few seconds with a click of computer mouse .However, this is usually not the case, if you are lucky the entry for your 20ft container will take two to three days, if not weeks.
The passing of the entry at Times Towers is the beginning of a long wait for your 20ft container that perhaps contains a few metric tones of tiles. If you are lucky and it has passed, you move on to the next level of physical verification of the container, a nightmare of its own that involves sometimes 100 percent verification of the goods.
From time to time, goods are stripped and removed for customs verification with the least consideration of protecting the importer’s goods. In peculiar circumstances when your 20 ft container is targeted by more than 10 KRA customs departmental officers, this procedure becomes a real nightmarish, with each one of these officers wanting to verify the same thing over and over again.
Like a fatherless child, the clearing agent becomes so desperate and disappointed trading between an anxious importer and a punch of hardnosed customs officers. The verification of the container is so frustrating that some clearings agents have developed high blood pressures as a result of repeated coercions through endless customs procedures.
KRA has so many duplicating customs departments that are notorious for delaying the clearance of goods at the port. The NTC, the V&T, the PVOC, the I&E among many others. All these departments cannot give you a timely decision to release your 20ft container. They end up putting up duplicating messages online that can make a clearing agent to run like headless chicken sometimes for more than a month.
These departments are notorious for adding exorbitant duties into consignments using very weird and with the aid of highly misused valuation means. In the past two months after KRA introduced new duty tariffs, prices of commodities have sky rocketed and import businesses are going up against a brick wall.
One wonders, whether the men at these departments really care about the ordinary Kenyan consumer, perhaps that old single mother who is struggling to put food on the table for her poor family. It is not a bolt from the blue that many families in Kenya today are living in life of abject poverty with over 1.6million glaring a devastating drought.
Such is the experience of finding your imported goods into Kenyan markets that are teetering on the edge as a result of endless and merciless customs red tapes.
You may say that it is only patience and prayers that you have cleared your 20ft container and once it is out of the port, it is has already turned very expensive, the customs delays and the extra duties means you may not sell your goods in a competitive market. It also means the poor old mother will have to pay more for less.
Editor’s Note: This article is of the writer’s opinion and does not represent the views of The Plu
