It started off in December as an unexpected question from a stranger. I had just made a brief stopover at Nyamasaria in the outskirts of Kisumu town when a man waylaid me. “Where do you offload next?
Well, being a rural area, ignoring people just because they don’t look familiar is out of question. So the man’s intrusive question became a natural talking point the moment I crossed into a makeshift eatery in the area. And true to village wisdom, I was in a school of sorts, listening to strange tales and gathering story leads.
First, the man had a perfect sense of what he was talking about, only that he had mistaken me for a truck driver after I parked at the wrong place.
Two, he could be hinting that some truck drivers offload untaxed imports at undesignated places from where ‘trusted agents” collected them.
Because nearly every speaker seemed to have just a fleeting sense of the subject matter, I would still have brushed them off as heresies had it been for news heard previously.
There were reports early last year that cars bearing Uganda registration numbers were being seized in western Kenya by police and customs officials. The agencies never quite made public what they gathered during the crackdown launched early last year. However, if cars in question were imports, as local dealers thought, then somebody apparently diverted them in the fashion suggested by the stranger in Kisumu.
Claims of sugar, rice or cement destined for landlocked States being dumped in the country have been heard before. However, you hardly come across hard evidence to put a finger on.
Why would you do so if the regional customs model has made it so easy for people to dump goods? A few years back, Kenya allowed Uganda and Rwanda to station their customs officials in Mombasa and Kisumu.
Under the so-called single customs territory (SCT), Kenya doesn’t have to know what is being cleared and transported across its territory. Neither do customs officials have any form of guarantee that what is cleared at the port will eventually cross the border to landlocked States.
Trust and honesty
The whole concept is built on trust and honesty. It follows that trust is such an important commodity in cross-border yet States hardly negotiate or set standards for it.
The Kenya Revenue Authority’s transit bonds, one way through which Kenya used to make dumping an expensive idea, was abolished to pave the way for SCT, those following trade politics can recall.
With bonds, importers deposited cash, bought insurance bond or obtained bank guarantee to cover taxes and other taxes when goods are diverted.
To get it out of the way, traders accused revenue agencies of slowing cross-border movement of goods and holding their working capital. Regional trade has to be seamless; they won.
Almost two years down the line, Kenya has moved to seal the gap. Last week, it convinced its neighbours to launch a common cargo tracking system. If a guarantee scheme tied up resources, goods will continue to move at breakneck speed now. From the radio signals, Kenya can easily tell where you are offloading next.
Source:
Business Daily
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of TradeMark Africa.
