Category: Business Daily

Jackfruit production in Kenya jumped nearly 95-fold between 2023 and 2025, driven by expanding cultivation and growing interest in a fruit with multiple food uses and value-addition potential.

Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA) data shows output rose from 67 tonnes in 2023 to 1,018 tonnes in 2024, before reaching 6,364.1 tonnes last year.

The area under jackfruit also increased from 29 hectares in 2023 to 140.1 hectares in 2025, while the crop’s generated value rose from Sh6.7 million to Sh635.6 million.

The expansion comes as farmers and researchers increasingly explore underutilised fruits for food, income and processing, with jackfruit offering several uses beyond its traditional fresh consumption.

The ripe fruit is eaten fresh or processed into juice, jam, jelly, candies, dried chips and other products, while immature fruit can be cooked or pickled.

Its seeds are also edible after boiling or roasting and can be dried and milled into flour for bread, biscuits, cakes, noodles and other processed foods.

India is the world’s largest producer of jackfruit, growing about 1.4 million metric tonnes each year.

Other top producers include Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, and Nepal.

In Kenya, Busia County grows the highest amount of jackfruit, accounting for approximately 65 percent of the country’s total production.

Researchers say jackfruit seeds contain substantial starch, protein and dietary fibre, increasing interest in their use as ingredients while reducing waste from fruit-processing.

Kenya has previously explored commercialising the fruit through value addition, with authorities identifying processing as a way of reducing losses and transport costs associated with bulky fresh fruit.

The sharp increase in Kenya’s reported production, however, comes from a relatively small base, and will require sustained markets and processing capacity to scale.

The growth also comes as Kenya’s wider fruit industry continues expanding, with total fruit production value rising from Sh83.71 billion in 2021 to Sh111.88 billion in 2025.

Established crops continue to dominate the sector, with bananas generating Sh35.6 billion in 2025, followed by avocados at Sh25.2 billion and mangoes at Sh19.1 billion.

Pineapples generated Sh6.1 billion while oranges contributed Sh5.7 billion.

Meru led the country’s fruit production in 2025 with 738,317.7 tonnes, followed by Murang’a with 517,238.42 tonnes, Lamu with 318,746 tonnes and Kilifi with 225,252.3 tonnes.

Lenders are seeing a growing demand for salary advances and other payslip-backed short-term digital loans as workers increasingly turn to credit to bridge cash-flow gaps between paydays.

The trend is providing banks and digital lenders with a growing market as salaried customers seek quick access to funds for emergencies, bills, school fees and other financial obligations.

Fresh disclosures show that Co-operative Bank of Kenya disbursed Sh41billion on its short-term mobile credit platform, e-flexi, between January and July 2026, up from Sh35.75 billion in a similar period of 2025. Salary advances from the Co-operative Bank of Kenya form a major share of its digital lending.

The growth represents a 14.7 percent increase and points to the rising appetite for short-term credit among salaried workers.

Banks, including KCB, Equity and NCBA, also offer salary-linked credit products, although they do not publicly disclose disbursement figures for the products.

Disclosures by digital lenders such as Centum Investment’s subsidiary called Jafari Credit, and Little Pesa, founded by former banker Rakesh Kashyap, also point to a growing market for short-term salary-backed credit for consumption.

Co-op Bank says it offers salary advances ranging from Sh10,000 to Sh1 million and repayment periods of up to one year for customers who have operated salary accounts for at least three months.

The lender says demand for salary advances typically peaks between the 20th day of the month and the fifth day of the following month, coinciding with salary processing periods. It added that borrowing also tends to rise during back-to-school periods and the festive season.

‘The product’s popularity is driven by its ability to help customers meet short-term financial obligations, address emergencies, and complete transactions when account balances are insufficient. Customers also benefit from a seamless digital experience, with loan limits, borrowing, and repayments all digitized,’ said Co-op Bank.

The trend is also being seen among non-bank lenders targeting salaried customers. More digital lenders are also targeting salaried workers, attracted by the predictability of their income and the ability to use digital platforms to assess and disburse loans quickly.

Little Pesa, founded by former M-Oriental Bank Kenya CEO Rakesh Kashyap, focuses exclusively on short-term unsecured loans to salaried customers.

Mr Kashyap said the lender had seen increased demand for larger loans of up to Sh500,000, with borrowers preferring longer and more flexible repayment periods.

The shift towards larger loans and longer repayment periods points to changing borrowing patterns among salaried workers, with customers seeking more time to spread repayments as their financial obligations increase.

‘They are finding it difficult to take smaller loans and repay within a month. We are seeing more demand for relatively higher loans of up to Sh500,000 which come with flexible repayment periods of up to a year. We expect the appetite for loans with flexible repayment periods to continue rising,’ said Mr Kashyap.

Jafari Credit increased lending to civil servants by 10.1 percent to Sh413 million in the year ended March 2026 from Sh375 million a year earlier. Cumulative lending since its launch in 2022 has reached Sh1.4 billion.

The lender has focused on civil servants, including teachers, police officers and doctors, whose predictable incomes provide a basis for salary-backed lending.

Jafari Credit chief executive Edwin Munyiri said the lender was seeing continued demand for affordable and accessible credit among salaried workers.

‘Maintaining an NPL rate of five percent while growing our loan book shows that it is possible to scale sustainably without compromising credit quality,’ said Edwin Munyiri, CEO at Jafari.

Jafari is targeting further growth in the segment, with plans to deploy up to Sh800 million in civil servant loans in the year to March 2027.

Co-op says its E-Flexi product averages Sh6 billion in disbursements every month and has so far lent out Sh450 billion since launch in 2017. It expects monthly salary cycles, education-related expenses and seasonal spending to remain key drivers of demand.

Lenders use transaction histories, income patterns and digital credit scoring to determine borrowing limits and assess repayment capacity.

The strong uptake for salary advances comes as households face competing financial demands, with workers increasingly looking for flexible ways to manage expenses before the next salary.

Co-op and Jafari say they have stepped up the use of artificial intelligence in credit appraisal and customer engagement, helping them expand lending while maintaining credit quality.

‘A key differentiator is our robust AI-powered credit scoring engine, which uses customer transaction history and income patterns to allocate borrowing limits, enabling customers to access credit quickly without paperwork,’ said Co-op Bank.

In May this year the President William Ruto announced that the billion dollar data centre planned by Microsoft and G42 at Olkaria, Naivasha couldn’t proceed as designed, because turning it on would have meant switching off power to a large part of the country.

The first phase alone was to draw 100 megawatts from a grid whose peak demand already presses against its installed capacity.

Whatever one thinks of the decision, it told us something uncomfortable. The investment was announced, celebrated and timetabled before the most basic questions about what it would take from Kenya, and what Kenya would get in return, had been answered.

Technology is not new to us. It has been reorganising our economies, our work and our social lives for decades, from the mobile money revolution onwards. What is new is its ubiquity. Kenyans now talk to chatbots, borrow from apps whose algorithms score their creditworthiness in seconds, and file taxes through systems that decide, invisibly, who gets flagged for audit.

is a risk. All of this runs on physical infrastructure, on data centres and cloud services that consume land, water and electricity, and almost none of that infrastructure is ours.

Our data crosses borders to be stored and processed elsewhere, then sold back to us as services. If the coming decade of African life will be computed, the question of who owns and hosts the computation is a question of economic sovereignty, as consequential as the ownership of railways and ports was a century ago.

This is why I resist the notion of a foreign technology company arriving, building the infrastructure, collecting the incentives and owning the asset.

My research team has spent this year, under our Project TERRA work on technology, equality and regulatory risk assessment, mapping out data centres, their ownership, energy and water demands, and the tax treatment they enjoy to establish what has been given away, and to whom.

The pattern that emerges is familiar from the extractive industries. Host countries provide the land, the water, the power and the tax holidays. The value created from the data processed in these facilities is booked elsewhere.

A data centre can be an extraction site wearing the costume of development, and unless the fiscal terms are negotiated with open eyes, we will repeat with our data the history we lived with our minerals.

However, the answer is not to refuse the technology. It is to govern it before it hardens into infrastructure, and here Kenya already possesses an instrument it underuses, the regulatory sandbox. The Capital Markets Authority has operated one for financial products since 2019, and the Communications Authority published a framework for emerging technologies in 2023.

A sandbox allows the regulator and the innovator to test a product, and crucially to test the rules themselves, in a controlled environment before anything is rolled out at national scale. We should be doing precisely this for data infrastructure and for algorithmic systems. Before another data centre incentive is signed, its revenue cost, environmental burden and community benefit should be modelled and tested against evidence.

Before an algorithm is deployed in tax administration, credit scoring or social protection, it should be audited for bias inside a sandbox, with disclosure standards and a route to redress agreed in advance. This is how a country writes its own protocols for engaging technology rather than inheriting protocols written in California or Abu Dhabi.

Our legal architecture is not empty. The constitution demands public participation in policy, protects privacy, guarantees equality and requires openness and accountability in public finance. The Data Protection Act has been in force since 2019.

The National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025 to 2030 was launched last year, and the Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026 now before the Senate proposes a commissioner and a risk based classification of artificial intelligence systems.

These are necessary. None of them is sufficient, because they largely regulate the technology while remaining silent on the political economy beneath it, on who finances the infrastructure, who forgoes the revenue, who bears the environmental cost and whose interests the algorithms encode.

A commissioner who can audit an algorithm but cannot question the tax holiday granted to the data centre it runs on is governing half the problem.

Technology governance, properly understood, is fiscal governance. It asks the oldest questions of public finance, who pays, who benefits and who decides, about the newest machinery of our lives.

Kenya has the constitutional values, the regulatory precedents and the intellectual capacity to answer those questions for itself. What it mustn’t do is answer them after the concrete has been poured.

The Olkaria pause was an accident of power supply. The next pause should be deliberate, a country taking the time to write its own rules.

Kenya targets to exchange information on cybercrime and child pornography with 76 countries including the US, UK, Israel and Germany amid escalated global crackdown on illegal access to computer systems, unlawful interception and interference with data and explicit content involving minors.

Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi said Kenya would accede to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime-the only binding international treaty on cybercrime-which enables co-operation on cross-border investigations and prosecutions by providing a consistent framework for defining computer crimes.

‘Cybercrime and cyber-attacks continue to evolve at unprecedented scale, volume and speed. The possibility of large-scale cyber-attacks is real. Such attacks may occur simultaneously across States and continents, hence the need for international cooperation,’ he said in a note to Parliament, urging it to endorse the plans.

The Cabinet approved Kenya’s accession to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime on February 12, 2026. The Budapest Convention currently has 76 members and has been force since 2004.

The network is expected to help Kenyan investigators obtain electronic evidence held in other jurisdictions and pursue transnational cybercrime, including through mutual legal assistance and extradition arrangements.

Kenya would, however, be required to protect human rights, including citizens’ right to privacy and fair trial, as part of the obligations imposed by the treaty.

The country is grappling with rising cyber threats amid widespread internet penetration and the adoption of digital banking.

‘The accession to the Budapest Convention will enhance cooperation with other countries… [which] is critical for accessing electronic evidence stored in other jurisdictions and investigating transnational cybercrime effectively,’ Mr Mudavadi said.

‘Kenya stands to benefit… [through] exchange of information and experiences from other State Parties in dealing with new and emerging trends in cybercrimes, hence enabling the development of appropriate strategies to deal with such crimes.’

Criminals are exploiting financial systems and telecommunications infrastructure to defraud users and businesses. For instance, Kenyans lost $3.8 million (Sh491.7 million) and cryptocurrency after cybercriminals hijacked victims’ mobile phone numbers in SIM-swap fraud in 2025, according to the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol).

Interpol said incidents of scammers tricking mobile network providers into moving phone numbers to new SIM cards they control rose by 327 percent in Kenya in 2025.

More than 123,000 fraudulent SIM cards were issued, enabling criminals to hijack victims’ phone numbers and steal the cash from mobile money wallets.

In 2024, Central Bank of Kenya data estimates that mobile banking was the hardest hit by cyber fraud, with criminals siphoning off Sh810.68 million, a 344 percent rise from Sh182.41 million in 2023.

The Budapest Convention requires parties to adopt domestic laws criminalising cyber and data-related offences and copyright infringement.

Kenya already has the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act and Data Protection Act, and accession will not require constitutional amendments.

Under the treaty, Nairobi would be required to maintain mechanisms for international cooperation, including mutual legal assistance, extradition and a full-time point of contact for urgent requests.

Mr Mudavadi said that Kenya would invoke certain reservations on the Budapest Convention to safeguard national interests and citizen rights.

‘In this regard, Kenya intends to enter the following reservation: -Pursuant to Article 42 of the Budapest Convention, the Republic of Kenya puts a reservation on Article 22(2) of the Budapest Convention on the extension of extra-territorial jurisdiction over Kenyan citizens,’ he said.

‘The implementation of Article22(2) shall be through the Kenyan mutual assistance and extradition framework’

The CS said that Kenya would seek a declaration to support the protection of citizens’ right to privacy.

‘The purpose of this declaration is to ensure prudent use of resources, avoid overburdening law enforcement officers and protect the right to privacy,’ he said.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the conflict in Iran sharply pushed up fertiliser prices in Africa, exposing farmers’ vulnerability to imported inputs but also giving governments a chance to rethink subsidies and invest in farming systems less exposed to global price shocks.

The Strait carries around a third of the world’s seaborne fertiliser trade, and urea prices doubled to more than $850 (Sh110,117) a tonne by April. Prices have since eased, but the World Bank still expects fertiliser prices to average more than 30 percent higher across 2026, with relief only in 2027.

Science tells us a system is weak long before it breaks, but history shows it often takes a crisis for that lesson to sink in. This year, the lesson arrived painfully. African nations cannot afford more crises of this kind.

When prices rose, governments moved to protect farmers, largely through subsidies, even as aid budgets shrink. Farmers need that support, and mineral fertiliser remains essential at the scale Africa requires. But subsidies that rise with import prices protect farmers without changing what makes their farms vulnerable.

Where soils are degraded or acidified, much of the applied nitrogen is never taken up by crops. Farmers pay for the whole bag but harvest only a fraction of its value. The subsidy absorbs the price shock; the soil still loses the nutrient.

The more useful debate is therefore how to spend the same money on making farms less vulnerable in the first place.

Governments are paying far more for the same protection while the underlying vulnerability remains. The choice is no longer reform or the status quo. It is paying more each year for the same result or spending the same budget on what each farmer’s land actually needs.

Farmers keep their support; the money buys more.

First, reduce dependence on imports. Healthy soil holds nutrients where roots can reach them, while precision application raises the share of nitrogen crops absorb. We have seen this work in Ethiopia.

Crop choice matters too. Legumes fix nitrogen from the air and leave it for the crop that follows. Across sub-Saharan Africa, maize after a legume consistently outyields maize after maize, while millet, sorghum and pulses can thrive with little or no nitrogen fertiliser.

Second, redesign incentives. Public money shapes farming through what governments subsidise and what they buy. Subsidies work best when they follow the farmer rather than the product, widening what the same money can buy: soil amendments, lime and better seed. Zambia has already done this.

Public procurement is the other half. School meals, hospitals and public canteens create steady demand. Anchoring that demand to diverse local production can build markets for crops requiring fewer imported inputs while improving diets.

Third, build African supply capacity. Nigeria’s Dangote refinery has been exporting fuel and urea to Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Tanzania, Ghana, and Togo, helping soften disruption for neighbours.

Morocco supplies more than half of Africa’s phosphate, while gas reserves in Nigeria, Mozambique, Tanzania and Senegal could support more fertiliser production. Regional production, blending and trade can turn one supply route into several.

The stakes go beyond farm economics. In 2025, our scientists traced the road from a warming climate to conflict in Nigeria and found that it runs through the food system.

Heat reduces harvests, incomes fall, and children are the first to show it through rising wasting, the acute malnutrition that occurs when a child’s weight falls too low for their height. Where wasting rose, violence became more likely to follow. It emerged as an early warning signal for conflict before violence escalated.

This year’s price shock works the same way. When food costs rise, households buy cheaper and starchier food and diets narrow. Prices may recover, but a child can carry the developmental cost for life. Four of the 10 countries accounting for two-thirds of the world’s acute hunger are African. A working food system is therefore a foundation for stability.

President William Ruto’s administration channelled 61 percent of the increase in national development spending into roads and housing last financial year, signalling a shift in government’s investment priorities towards highly visible projects ahead of the 2027 election.

National Treasury data shows development expenditure rose by Sh148.6 billion to Sh731.5 billion in the year ended June 2026, from Sh582.9 billion a year earlier.

Roads, and Housing and Urban Development accounted for more than three-fifths, or Sh91.4 billion, of the additional spending. The cash pumped into roads and housing rose to Sh269.2 billion from Sh177.9 billion.

Road spending increased by Sh34.9 billion to Sh139.3 billion, while housing expenditure surged by Sh56.5 billion to Sh130 billion.

The shift has made the two sectors the clearest beneficiaries of the government’s expansion in development spending as the administration enters the final full financial year before the August 2027 General Election.

The concentration is particularly striking in housing, which has evolved from a relatively small development item into one of the government’s largest investment priorities.

Housing spending has risen from Sh4.8 billion in 2022/23 to Sh9.4 billion in 2023/24, before jumping to Sh73.5 billion in 2024/25 and Sh130 billion last year. Over the four financial years under the Ruto administration, housing development expenditure reached Sh217.6 billion in June 2026.

That compares with about Sh39.1 billion spent during the final two financial years of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration, making housing one of the spending shifts between the two regimes.

However, unlike housing, roads were already a major development spending item under Mr Kenyatta, receiving Sh129.8 billion in 2020/21 and Sh128.6 billion in 2021/22.

Spending subsequently collapsed to Sh43.1 billion in 2022/23, the first financial year of the Ruto administration, before rallying to Sh90.8 billion in 2023/24 and Sh104.4 billion in 2024/25.

Last year’s Sh139.3 billion, therefore, represented a return to, and eventual surpassing of, the spending levels recorded during the final two years of the previous administration.

The rebound followed an early period of fiscal tightening in, which the new government sought to rationalise projects inherited from its predecessor.

President Ruto said in May 2023 that he had been confronted with about Sh900 billion in road-sector commitments in the budget inherited from the Uhuru administration.

‘We have tried to cut it down; we have tried to cut some of the roads that have not started. But we still remain with about Sh680 billion that we have to manage,’ Dr Ruto said at the time.

The fiscal squeeze on projects initiated by the predecessor regime had a visible effect on road construction.

Before the 2022/23 financial year, Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA), Kenya Urban Roads Authority (Kura) and Kenya Rural Roads Authority (KeRRA) were delivering more than 1,500 kilometres of new roads annually on average, according to government figures.

Output plunged to 495 kilometres in 2022/23 and 542 kilometres in 2023/24 as the government rationalised projects and contractors faced mounting arrears.

Construction subsequently recovered to 761 kilometres in the year ended June 2025, although this remained less than half the average annual output recorded before the change of administration.

A key intervention was President Ruto government’s decision to securitise part of the Road Maintenance Fuel Levy to raise money for settling contractors’ outstanding bills.

The government added Sh7 to every litre of petrol and diesel from July 2024, with the extra levy used to support securitisation programme and provide funds for road-related obligations.

Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu said the government raised about Sh175 billion through securitisation of the fuel levy in the first year of its implementation.

KeNHA was allocated Sh90 billion of the proceeds, while KeRRA received Sh69 billion and Kura Sh13.77 billion, according to the audit report for the year ended June 2025. ‘The outstanding bills had accumulated interest and penalties totalling approximately Sh20 billion,’ Ms Gathungu wrote in the audit report.

The intervention has helped restore activity on stalled projects while also allowing the State to up spending on roads without relying entirely on ordinary budgetary allocations.

Housing, funded from payroll deduction at the rate of 1.5 percent and matched by employers, has generated a different political debate.

Critics, including opposition leaders, have questioned whether the programme represents the right economic priority, particularly in rural areas where home ownership is more widespread than in urban centres.

Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna, a prominent critic of the administration, has argued that the central problem in urban informal settlements is low incomes rather than a shortage of physical houses.

‘As long as people don’t have money, there will always be slums,’ he said during opposition campaigns.

His argument is that households need stronger incomes and purchasing power to escape informal settlements, rather than government simply increasing supply of houses.

The government has rejected the criticism, maintaining that Kenya faces a housing shortage of close to ‘2.5 million units’ and that the deficit continues to grow.

Dr Ruto has also defended use of public land for affordable housing, arguing that State-owned land can either remain idle, become vulnerable to grabbing and informal settlements, or be used to provide decent homes.

‘Between the national government land and county government land being used to build houses which benefit Kenyans and that same land being left to grabbers to take it or to own it, which is better?’ the President posed on August 10.

‘Alternatively, between that land being ‘squattered’ and slums developing into those pieces of land, and for it being converted into decent affordable dwelling for Kenyans, which is better?’

He has similarly defended the decision to sell units developed through the project rather than allot them for free.

His argument is that the housing levy and public land belong collectively to Kenyans, while proceeds from completed houses must be recycled into new construction.

The model, he says, creates a revolving fund capable of financing additional units as the government attempts to close the housing deficit.

‘Until and unless each and every one of us has got a house, we will continue with a revolving fund because in any case we have a shortage of close to 2.5 million houses and that shortage is growing,’ Dr Ruto said. ‘That is why we must continue building on whatever land that is available and selling to whoever Kenyan wants to be an owner.’

The debate comes as housing’s share of national development expenditure has increased sharply in recent years.

Roads and housing together accounted for about 10 percent of total development spending in 2022/23. Their combined share rose to 18.3 percent in 2023/24, 30.5 percent in 2024/25 and 36.8 percent last year.

Treasury expects the concentration to continue in the current financial year ending June 2027.

Roads have been allocated a projected Sh167.1 billion in fiscal year 2026/27, while Housing and Urban Development is expected to receive Sh132.7 billion.

The combined Sh299.7 billion represents about 36 percent of projected national development expenditure of Sh844.4 billion.

The allocation places roads and housing at the centre of the government’s development programme as it heads into the final stretch before the 2027 election on August 10, 2027.

The two sectors also offer unusually visible evidence of government spending.

A completed road can be seen and used by thousands of households, while housing projects provide physical developments that can be counted in units, estates and construction sites.

That visibility makes the spending politically significant even without establishing that the allocations were made specifically for electoral purposes.

Treasury data shows a change in composition of development spending during Ruto’s first term, with roads recovering their position as the biggest development spending item and housing emerging as a new heavyweight.

The political test for the President now will be whether the larger allocations translate into completed roads and occupied affordable homes before voters go to the polls in August 2027.

For taxpayers and investors, however, the bigger question will be whether acceleration can be sustained without adding further pressure to already constrained public finances.

Households and businesses face the risk of electricity rationing and blackouts as consumption nears overtaking supply in what could trigger economic disruptions and costly use of diesel generators.

Kenya’s reserve margin – the extra generation capacity available above demand – has shrunk to less than 3.3 percent, which contrasts sharply to the range of between 20 percent and 35 percent that is recommended by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

This exposes the country to blackouts or power outages during maintenance of plants or during breakdowns of the electricity generators.

Kenya’s electricity demand has been rising steadily in recent months, but local generation capacity remains constrained.

Increased imports from Ethiopia and Uganda have also failed to keep pace with demand, narrowing the reserve margin from a peak of 20.73 percent in January to 3.34 percent in June, data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) shows.

Unstable supplies from wind and solar plants have also created a deficit that cannot be offset by the other plants, notably during peak evening hours.

Three wind plants, including the 310 megawatt (MW) Lake Turkana plant, and five solar plants account for 20 percent of the electricity supplied to Kenya Power.

The wind and solar plants currently lack battery storage to store electricity generated during their peak production, when wind speeds and solar radiation are highest, putting pressure on supplies during high consumption hours between 6 pm and 10 pm.

Kenya Power CEO Joseph Siror declined to comment on the trend and its implications, saying the utility was in a closed period or a period before the company publicly releases its financial results.

Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi did not respond to our calls and messages by the time of going to press.

Kenya Power has on some occasions been forced to ration electricity in the wake of supply hitches from the wind and solar plants.

The forced rationing may put pressure on the government to compel wind and solar to install batteries to store excess power and when demand surges in the evening.

Restrictions on power purchase agreements (PPAs) since 2021 have also ground procurement of new power plants to a halt, forcing the country to rely on imports.

Kenya has been exchanging electricity with Uganda for decades.

The supply from Uganda is pivotal in supplying the Western region, which does not get supply from the country’s main power generation hub at Olkaria in Naivasha.

Kenya also started to import 200MW from Ethiopia in December 2022 following the signing of a PPA between their two utilities, which will double the imports from December.

Ethiopia generates surplus power from its 5,000MW Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

Power rationing increases the cost of doing business as firms and households seek generators to ease the inadequate electricity.

Economists reckon that prolonged rationing could hit growth as the electricity curbs running for hours on alternating days would squeeze productivity, triggering job cuts and pay freezes.

The country’s peak demand-the highest load on the electricity grid-has been rising over the past six years, hitting 2,316MW in the year ended June 2025 from 2,177MW a year earlier. Peak demand stood at 1,926MW six years ago.

The peak demand has continued to rise, with Kenya Power data putting the figure at 2,514 MW and 2,549 MW in June and July this year.

On December 4 last year, when demand peaked at the then high of 2,439.06MW, Kenya Power appealed for increased generation to ‘secure our reserve margins’ as customer numbers and consumption rose.

Kenya Power’s 2025-2030 medium-term plan projects peak demand to grow at an average annual rate of five percent between 2026 and 2027, reaching 2,680 MW by 2027.

The difference between locally generated electricity and Kenya Power sales has moved from a surplus of 177.87 million kWh in January into a deficit of 21.21 million kWh and 99.85 million kWh in May and June this year, marking a rare occurrence in the country.

This underlines the importance of Ethiopia’s power for Kenya’s energy security.

Kenya Power has raised an alarm over the rapid uptake of variable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, arguing that it was affecting the stability and reliability of the country’s electricity grid.

The utility says the share of variable renewable energy sources is more than 20 percent of total grid capacity, whereas global benchmarks recommend an upper limit of 15 percent.

During peak day demand, variable renewable energy can account ?for 34 percent of the energy mix, it added.

This mirrors the situation in other regions such as Europe, which have a high amount of renewable energy on the grid.

Elsewhere, operators can ?ask for less renewable power generation in a process called curtailment to keep the grid frequency stable and avoid transmission bottlenecks.

But under Kenya’s “take or pay” model, it has no choice but to pay for and ?dispatch the wind and solar.

A Tax Appeals Tribunal has overturned a Sh211.4 million tax demand against a road contractor, Nyoro Construction, faulting the taxman for ignoring evidence and double-taxing rental income.

The tribunal set aside the Commissioner of Domestic Taxes’ April 1, 2025 decision after finding that some assessments were outside the five years in review.

The dispute stemmed from additional VAT and income tax assessments issued on January 29, 2024, covering Nyoro’s tax affairs for 2017 to 2021. Nyoro objected and later appealed after KRA confirmed the assessments.

The construction company owned by businessman Josiah Njoroge Njuguna was founded in 1983 and works on highways, civil works, real estate, and hotel projects.

While challenging the tax assessment, the company argued that the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) had reopened years that were already outside the legal window, disallowed genuine business expenses, rejected input VAT despite supporting invoices, and failed to account for casual labour costs.

KRA maintained that Nyoro had failed to provide documents supporting some expenses and that the law allowed it to assess older years where there was fraud, tax evasion or wilful neglect.

The tribunal rejected that justification for the older assessments, saying KRA had to produce evidence supporting those allegations.

‘It would be most unfair to cause a party to respond to mere averments and accusations not supported by any thread of evidence,’ the tribunal said, allowing Nyoro’s appeal.

It found that the 2017 income tax assessment and VAT assessments for 2017 and 2018 were time-barred. The tribunal said VAT assessments could run back only to December 2018, while income tax assessments could reach back only that year.

It held that KRA could not go back beyond five years to assess Nyoro for 2017 income tax and 2017-2018 VAT because it produced no evidence to substantiate its claim that the company had engaged in fraud, tax evasion or willful neglect.

The tribunal then examined the assessments that remained within time and found problems with KRA’s treatment of Nyoro’s records.

Supplementary statement

On input VAT, the tribunal said Nyoro had produced invoices from Harmony Enterprises, Gosteen Enterprises, Dakimah Hardware and Paints, Super Deal and Colas East Africa.

KRA had maintained that the documents had not been provided, but the tribunal found that they were in Nyoro’s supplementary statement of facts.

The Tribunal said KRA was allowed to respond to those documents but did not file a supplementary statement.

‘The respondent’s failure to provide a plausible reason why it disregarded these invoices meant that the appellant had discharged its burden of proof,’ the tribunal ruled.

The same issue arose over business expenses. The tribunal found that Nyoro had provided receipts supporting business expenses, but KRA ignored the documents and instead relied on an alternative ‘best judgment’ assessment method.

The tribunal said KRA’s alternative assessment method was lawful only where relevant documents had not been provided or were irrelevant.

‘The respondent is, however, not at liberty to invoke and apply its best judgment option arbitrarily and in a manner that suits it,’ it said.

In relation to rental income, Nyoro had declared net rental income in its 2017 financial statements and paid tax at 30 per cent, which KRA did not dispute.

The tribunal found that KRA later included the same income in its calculations and subjected it to further tax.

‘Naturally, therefore, causing it to pay tax, inclusive of rental income tax that had already been accounted for and paid, would amount to double taxation of the same income,’ the tribunal said.

In regard to casual workers, the company said it supplied signed wage records running to more than 755 pages.

The tribunal found that KRA ignored the records without giving a plausible reason and ordered that the casual labour costs be considered.

It found that Nyoro had proved its claim and KRA’s assessment could not stand.

The tribunal, however, did not determine Nyoro’s argument that construction work-in-progress should not attract VAT because the issue had not been raised during the objection process.

Kenya Airways’ net loss for the six months to June 2026 jumped 31.9 percent to Sh16 billion after its costs grew exponentially to a record level due to the Middle East conflict.

The national flag carrier’s costs during the period surged by 12 percent to a record Sh97.7 billion, up from last year’s Sh86.7 billion, pushing up its losses from the Sh12.2 billion reported in the first half of 2025.

This was largely due to a surge in fuel costs, which rose to Sh29 billion, accounting for roughly 32 percent of its operating costs, up 66 percent from Sh17.47 billion, which was 22 percent of operating costs.

‘Our costs increased significantly because of the Middle East crisis, which increased our fuel costs,’ said Mary Mwenga, KQ’s chief financial officer.

According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), jet fuel prices in Africa rose to the second-highest due to the Middle East crisis, peaking at about $220 (Sh28,470) per barrel in April, before cooling down to $150 (Sh19,411), which still remains above historical averages.

Had it not been for the jump in fuel prices, the carrier’s losses would have remained stable at Sh12.2 billion, Ms Mwega said, noting that the carrier’s turnover defied the global slump in aviation to post a nine percent jump.

The revenues rose to Sh81.2 billion from Sh74.5 billion, supported by growing passenger numbers and demand on key routes, with several international travellers being rerouted through African routes amidst the Middle East shutdown.

Last year, the carrier’s losses were primarily caused by a capacity shortage due to the prolonged grounding of at least two of its widebody aircraft and several others.

The capacity challenge has persisted this year, with two of its 248-seater Boeing 787 Dreamliners and 149-seater Boeing 737s being down for maintenance, in addition to some of its Embraers, which it uses for regional routes.

According to George Kamal, KQ’s acting CEO, the carrier is facing capacity challenges because many of its aircraft were delivered around the same time, making them due for long-term maintenance at the same time.

‘There has also been a shortage of spare parts because original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are struggling to meet demand for parts,’ said Mr Kamal.

The capacity shortfall denied KQ an opportunity to capitalise on demand on key routes, especially long-haul networks like London and New York, which recorded load factors of over 90 percent.

Load factor is the percentage of seats in a plane taken up by paying passengers. Overall, KQ’s load factor for the period improved by 3.9 percentage points to 76.3 percent, highlighting rising demand.

However, KQ’s capacity did not grow to meet the surging demand. Its available seat kilometres (ASKs), which measure passenger carrying capacity, declined by 9 percent to 6 million from 6.7 million. Its block hours – the total flight time its planes flew- also declined by 8 percent to 65,978 hours, from last year’s 72,040 hours.

‘What Kenya Airways faces today is not a demand problem but a capacity problem. Kenya Airways has been through an exceptionally difficult period,’ said KQ’s board chairman Kiprono Kittony.

The carrier is now banking on increased cargo volume and income from Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul Operations to shore up revenues in its efforts to return to profit. During the period, its cargo revenues rose by 18 percent to Sh8.8 billion, accounting for 11 percent of its revenues.

Recently I had the opportunity to listen to a conversation between two people.

One of them started by saying: ‘Is this my responsibility?’ ‘Has this been escalated?’ or ‘Did I follow the procedure? And who approved of this?’ By contrast, the other person quickly asked: ‘What outcome is the institution trying to achieve with this action?’ ‘And what is happening to the customer?’ ‘By the way, what responsibility do I carry here?’ ‘And out of all these, what action protects the mission and integrity of the organisation?’

As I walked out of the conversation, my thoughts were running wild. But one thing kept on ringing in my mind, ‘Does the mission and vision of an organisation or an institute defines the types of leaders that heads that organisation.’

The discussion I listened to just confirmed one thing. Currently in Africa, most modern organisations are increasingly characterised by sophistication without coherence. They possess strategy documents, dashboards, reporting systems, governance structures, data analytics, performance indicators, and highly educated professionals. And to affirm that, meetings occur continuously.

And while reports are circulated zealously, the dashboards remain populated. Yet despite the intense activities, reports indicate that many organisations continue to experience execution fatigue. Strategic initiatives are slowed, frustration increases. And most of the time, individuals begin protecting functional boundaries rather than advancing shared mission.

And the key question is always asked is: ‘What have we lost it when it comes to ‘Leadership Role.’

This paradox raises an important question. We cannot all be leaders. The instinctive response is often attributed to failure to poor leadership. This has also made leadership become the dominant language of organisational discourse. Institutions have continued to invest heavily in leadership development.

Many bookshelves overflow with leadership literature. Conferences continue to celebrate visionary leaders. who have been celebrated. On the other hand, all employees are encouraged to become leaders. Yet this intense focus on leadership frequently obscures a more fundamental organisational reality.

Because of these challenges, we are now forced to look into scholarly ways of leadership. And what is coming out clearly is that ‘Leadership Execution’ is complex in many organisations. And it depends less on isolated acts of leadership, but more on the collective quality of followership distributed throughout the institution.

According to studies, this involves turning high-level strategies, plans, and institutional visions into actual, measurable results. It also focuses on aligning staff, resources, and daily workflows so that decisions are reliably converted into outcomes.

While it is truly clear that a strategic vision without organisational followership remains an aspiration rather than an operational reality, many institutions do not rise or collapse solely because of their leaders.

But experts argue that they rise or collapse because of the extent to which ordinary professionals throughout the system assume meaningful ownership of institutional purpose as opposed to enhancing leadership in the system.

And while mission ownership is fundamentally different from task completion, many institutions unintentionally create cultures of compliance rather than cultures of ownership. The difference therefore arises because compliance is externally regulated. It depends on supervision, enforcement, and monitoring.

And ownership, however, is internally regulated. It persists even when direct oversight is absent. The compliant employee performs assigned duties. An individual with mission ownership assumes responsibility for outcomes beyond formal obligation and this is what is called true leadership.

This distinction becomes particularly important in large, complex, and matrixed organisations. In such environments, execution failures rarely emerge because people are inactive.

More commonly, they emerge because organisational responsibility becomes fragmented. Individuals perform their assigned roles competently while losing sight of the larger mission connecting their efforts. Functions optimise locally while institutional coherence deteriorates globally.

And departments pursue metrics while organisational purpose weakens. While on the other hand, institutions become active yet strategically disjointed.

And within large matrix organisations where no senior leader can directly supervise every interaction, operational handoff, customer experience, or emerging problems, such institutions survive not because leaders’ control everything, but because enough individuals throughout the system exercise intelligent judgment aligned to mission.

Indeed, some of the most influential individuals within organisations possess limited formal authority yet exert enormous executional influence. They coordinate teams, stabilise relationships, sustain operational continuity, identify emerging problems, protect organisational culture, and preserve customer trust.

Often, these individuals are not the most visible members of the institution. Yet without them, organisational coherence deteriorates rapidly.

This insight reveals another important organisational truth. Institutions frequently overestimate the role of formal leadership while underestimating the importance of distributed stewardship.

Organisational resilience depends less on isolated heroic figures and more on whether enough individuals throughout the system experience themselves as custodians of mission rather than merely occupants of roles.

Yet human beings rarely sustain ownership indefinitely for missions they experience psychologically empty. This introduces the profound importance of meaningful work.

Execution excellence cannot therefore be reduced merely to strategy, structure, or managerial oversight. This reveals a critically important developmental insight that the purpose of organisational leadership is not permanent dependence. And as maturity develops, leadership itself must evolve.

And most important of all, time has come for many organisations in Africa to start adopting Mark O’Donnel theory of leadership where he describes that great leadership is not a personality trait.

And that the first meaning of the word leadership is how you show up, whereas the last ones are what you build. The whole thing points in one direction: away from you as a leader.