Category: Business Daily

Gulf Energy has submitted a revised plan on how it intends to commercially tap oil in South Lokichar, Turkana with the State racing to ensure that it approves it by end of December this year.

Mr Daniel Kiptoo, the Director General of the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra), said Gulf presented a slightly amended Field Development Plan (FDP) on September 30, 2025.

Two pharmaceutical companies, one Kenyan and another from India, are locked in a Sh1.4 billion legal dispute concerning rights to manufacture and distribute 45 life-saving medicines in Kenya.

The case currently in the High Court, which also implicates Kenya’s Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB), centres on allegations of brand infringement and regulatory failures involving the essential medicines, exposing potential regulatory gaps in Kenya’s drug oversight.

Billionaire businessman and Equity Bank founder Peter Munga has won a long-running court dispute after the High Court dismissed a Sh150million against him by a long-time associate on claims of a botched TransCentury Limited (TCL) shares purchase deal.

Mr Munga had been accused of taking possession of TCL shares from a former friend-turned foe, Joseph Muturi Kamau but failing to pay for them.

The World Bank has warned of local job cuts and industry closures in the absence of an extension of the African Growth Opportunity Act (Agoa) which expired at the end of September.

In a new assessment of the impact of the withdrawal of the preferential market access to the US by African countries, the World Bank expects exporters of apparel and textiles in Kenya, Lesotho and Madagascar to face the worst consequences.

Did you know government bonds can give you a pay cheque every month? While the Treasury papers typically pay out interest just twice a year, smart investors use the bond laddering strategy for steady income each month.

In this episode, we’re climbing the ‘bond ladder’ with financial advisor and founder of Azara Wealth, Belinda Kiplimo. She breaks down how to build a bond portfolio – a ‘ladder’- where each step brings in reliable cash flow all year round.

Make Money, a podcast series, hosted by Kepha Muiruri, from Business Daily Africa unravels ways to be financially savvy. Get practical tips and advice on how to increase your income, build wealth, and achieve financial freedom in Kenya. Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned investor, we’ve got something for everyone.

Electric vehicles (EVs) dominate the motoring news, but there’s much less talk about hybrids, which you have predicted will be the dominant future choice in Kenya. What is the worldwide situation now? NJM

‘Terminology’ is to blame for the seemingly lower profile of hybrids, which are now produced and sold in roughly equal numbers to plug-in electric vehicles in major markets.

Between them, they are likely to soon equal sales of new vehicles with internal combustion engines, and thereafter dominate. Policy makers and the tax man will strongly support that trend. But dominant sales, even when they amount to tens of millions of units per year, will not transform the world overnight. There are well over a billion road-going vehicles, and it will take decades to replace them all.and reconfigure national infrastructures and markets.

Kenya is a minuscule part of all this, and only 10 percent of its modest renewal and replacement market is supplied by ‘new’ vehicles of any sort.

The other 90 percent are about eight years old.on arrival. Under the current circumstances of technical upheaval, that is not necessarily a bad thing!

There are just three main options on the menu – vehicles that have internal combustion engines (ICE) running on petrol or diesel, vehicles that run on electricity (EV) stored in batteries that have to be plug-in recharged, and Hybrids (that use both sources of power) – but there are dozens of different design configurations, and all are evolving within and between their different formats.

Meanwhile, bear in mind all the other things that need power to move themselves (trains, ships, submarines, construction equipment etc) and all the other things that produce power (fossil fuels, generators, sun, wind, tides, ocean currents, hydro dams, geothermal mines, nuclear power stations etc) and the capital investment and operational costs of harvesting, distributing and accessing energy (mains grids, storage depots, fuel stations, batteries etc).

All of these things are evolving within and between their fields – scientists, politicians, financiers, businessmen, and the general public have conflicting vested interests and influences, different timelines, resources, objectives, strategies – and there are more wars as there are alliances, more ignorance than knowledge, more scams than facts.

In those circumstances, there is no answer to which of the three (or other as yet unknown) options will finally dominate or when, elsewhere or here.

What we can recognise is that the answers are likely to vary significantly between markets with dramatically different levels of infrastructure, resources, national and personal affluence, climates, road conditions and traffic patterns, public transport options, social attitudes, etc.

The most highly developed markets – where vehicle volumes of all types are incomparably higher – are more able and inclined, and impelled to lead the transitions, and have the infrastructure, resources, and means to transition more quickly with full-time EVs.

But even in those markets, hybrids (in several different configurations) are ‘catching up’ and are likely to predominate as ICE vehicle sales drop into third place, and EVs (after an initial flush) await a technical breakthrough in battery design. There’s a multi-trillion-dollar pot of business gold at the end of that market rainbow, so the search is not underfunded.

In markets either unable or unwilling to take such a plunge, consumers are increasingly likely to take a more safety-first and wait-and-see approach.

Hybrids offer that, assure continued mobility in less than perfect infrastructures, and deliver performance/usage characteristics that best align with the fastest growing category of cars – SUVs.

An agricultural export promotion agency of the Indian government has lost its bid to stop a Kenyan trading company from branding its imported rice as ‘Basmati Rice’.

The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) wanted the Court of Appeal in Nairobi to overturn a decision by the High Court that allowed Krish Commodities Limited to register six trademarks bearing the word Basmati.

What’s the best way to buy a car – save up and pay cash, borrow from a bank, or lease hire? And is it better to sell and buy separately, or do a trade-in?

These are all valid and available options, with choice dictated on a case-by-case basis. Overall, there are five ways to get the things you want. Make them, steal them, barter them, pay cash, or get credit.

Those are life’s deals. There are no others. There is always a price to pay – the only option is in how and when you choose to pay it. This has been the case since Adam whittled woman out of a rib (make it), since club-wielding cave-man invented matrimony with violence (steal it), since JJ Hughes swapped Model T Fords for wheat crops in Uasin Gishu (barter), since the clink of the first cowrie shell in Gedi (cash), and since Dr Faust went on tick with Old Nick (credit).

Lawyers, accountants and salesmen have invented hundreds of different words to describe each of these processes in an attempt to bewilder, beguile and finally bedevil and behoof the benighted public to bethink them beneficent and by these parts to ensure the party of the second part has to pay the party of the first part such a huge part of his last part he’s got nothing left to part or party with.

“Make” embraces grow, manufacture, assemble, fabricate, construct…

“Steal” includes rob, burgle, thieve, defraud, embezzle, hijack, half-hinch, and some types of bribe/gift.

“Barter”, meaning swap, has been given fancy titles like trade-exchange; the word ‘inducement’ is in the vicinity.

And even plain-simple cash has notes and coins and cheques and debit cards and direct debits and standing orders and whatnot.

But the greatest creative skills have been reserved for different ways to describe credit.

The business of usury – so famously championed by Shakespeare’s trader of east Mediterranean extraction in an Italian town with wet streets – has been euphemised, bastardised, legalised and otherwise disguised by all manner of pecuniary poetry.

Colleagues borrow and give loans. There is I owe you [IOUs], and small things can be got “on tick” or on account. Bigger items require mortgages, lease hire, hire purchase, otherwise known as the “never-never” (leaving us unsure of whether the pain never starts or the paying never stops). The instruments of credit include pawn shops, overdrafts, credit cards, commercial papers, promisory notes, advances, drawing rights, loan sharks, refer-to-drawer scribbles, failure to get a second signature, the accountant is out at the moment, could you please send me another copy of the invoice, our computer crashed and we’re doing everything by hand, we’re waiting for a tax refund…

Call it what you like. Credit is credit. A get-now-pay-later system. And pay later must, by definition, mean pay more to finance the cost and the profit of a credit facility. It is that extra cost that distinguishes legitimate credit from theft or charity.

There is nothing new about the credit idea, nor the over-riding principle that it increases the price. Kenya’s motorists have been well aware of that for some time (approximately one century). However, they have been most familiar with the idea of buying a car from one person and borrowing the money to pay for it from somebody else.

That keeps things relatively simple. One deal on the price of the car. A separate deal on the price of the money. All clear-cut and clean from everybody’s point of view.

However, as almost everybody depends on credit to buy a car, motor companies could become dependent on finance companies to secure their sales levels and margins.

So, globally, the trend is for motor companies to offer their own finance schemes (they use their own resources or their huge corporate creditworthiness to borrow the money from financiers, and pass that on to their customers, at cost plus.)

So the motorist gets the car, and the credit from the same seller.

And that greatly increases the number of different ways credit can be packaged and promoted. Hot on the heels of come-ons applied to the car – like real discounts, or hidden discounts through inflated trade-ins, cashback, or such nonsense as “free” service – come gimmicks applied to the finance like no-deposit and low-deposit, zero interest periods, and pay-back deferrals; different names and games that affect tax liability, and so on.

In some ways, the co-ordination of all these elements by just one company maximises the potential for a special deal; but it also makes evaluation of that deal much more difficult because it is almost impossible to distinguish which part of what you are paying is covering which part of what you are getting, and therefore to calculate what’s a bargain and what’s a rip-off.

And the more bits and pieces that are rolled into the package, the better the bargain or the bigger the rip-off can be. The most all-inclusive motor package could, in theory, be the cheapest form of motoring. In practice, the most all-inclusive system is called car hire, and it is usually the most expensive form of motoring.

There are dozens of “new” schemes on the Kenyan market. None of them reinvent the credit wheel – but they all spin it in different ways. While the options proliferate and evolve, I offer no judgment, but here are a few principles to be going on with.

One: You are out there to buy a car, not a fancy finance scheme or bonus extras. So above all, select the vehicle first, on the vehicle’s merits. Your usage, your needs and values, your preferences.

Two: When you have chosen the right vehicle for your purposes, only then look at your different options for paying for it. Salesmen are often poor advisors – competitors make better research assistants.

Three: Whatever the sales pitch calls it, if you don’t pay in full and up-front, you are on a credit scheme. You are therefore buying not only the car, but the money with which to pay for it. Evaluate both purchases, separately, with equal care.

Four: There are some very good deals out there. But any deal that looks too good to be true, probably is. Caveat Emptor (Let the Buyer Beware) is not just a legal principle. It is good advice.

Finally, if it has anything to do with motoring (or any commercial human being, for that matter) mistrust the word “Free”. What the word actually means (‘you do not have to pay anything’) and what marketers mean when they use it (‘the cost has already been added to something you do have to pay for’) are not the same thing.

Investors in Kenya’s $1.5 billion (Sh193.8 billion) Eurobond issued last week were given a discount of Sh4.3 billion on the face value of the securities as the government sought to keep the interest rate on the securities below the initial levels demanded by investors.

A discount on a bond represents the additional return an investor will get on redemption of the security, assuming the paper is held to maturity.

Imagine stepping into a restaurant where you cannot rely on your sight to walk to your table or pick up your fork or knife, and instead, the aroma of food and the feel of cutlery guide you.

That was the experience at Dining in the Dark at Nairobi’s Karen Country Club – an event that let diners experience what it is like to eat out as a blind person.