IN SUMMARY Mining secretary Dan Kazungu said his ministry would push for a change in the law during the next budget to rein in the black market. Mr Kazungu said the country is losing unquantified but monumental taxes as a smuggling gateway and hub. Kenya is moving to curb illegal mineral trade fuelled by smuggling syndicates through roping in key agencies including the central bank and Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) as well as granting generous tax incentives to traders. Mining secretary Dan Kazungu said his ministry would push for a change in the law during the next budget to rein in the black market. “We are working round the clock to ensure that the next Finance Bill that accompanies Budget 2017/2018 has provisions that gives the mining sector a lot of incentives and leeway to help it leapfrog,” he said. “The plan is to advocate zero-rating mineral inflows and fast tracking entry of mineral inflows at border points by working closely with the taxman. We want to make the black market an unattractive option.” Mr Kazungu said the country is losing unquantified but monumental taxes as a smuggling gateway and hub. The Ministry of Mining on Wednesday announced a high level multiagency committee to clamp down on the illicit trade and come up with ways of openly trading in the commodity. The team includes the ministry officials, the Treasury, Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis, the KRA, Kenya Airports Authority, Kenya Ports...

Supported by the African Agri Council, and hosted by Hypenica, the inaugural Agri Logistics and e-Agri East Africa Summits 2017 are taking place in Nairobi, Kenya from 28 February to 1 March 2017. A delegation of international ICT, logistics and transport infrastructure professionals, together with a line-up of East African agricultural thought leaders, will address the challenges faced by the agricultural sector in the region and to look at ways to unlock the region’s potential. Growing trade volumes in the East African region provides both opportunities and challenges for the agriculture sector. Perishable products often suffer from supply-chain delays and post-harvest losses in remote areas, mostly due to poor infrastructure, lack of appropriate transport systems and a lack of refrigerated transport and storage. Furthermore, the innovative utilisation of African-appropriate technologies and solutions for improved production and increased productivity is often neglected. According to Nico Loretz, Programme Manager, the Agri Logistics and e-Agri East Africa Summits 2017, “It is against this background that the African Agri Council and Hypenica are hosting these two co-located events: It is the only platform of its kind in Africa that brings together proven innovative e-agriculture solutions for preventing post-harvest losses, improved production and increased productivity to improve the supply chain process from farmer to market and to enhance food security in the region.” The joint keynote plenary session, chaired by Ali Mufuruki, Chairman, TradeMark Africa (TMA) and CEO of Infotech Investment Group Ltd will look at a regulatory framework, opportunities in trade agreements, investment needs...

East African Community (EAC) states cannot collectively or individually afford to neglect the development of their manufacturing sector, a UN official has said. In his publication on the challenges of industrialisation within the EAC, Andrew Mold, officer-in-charge of the Sub-regional Office for Eastern Africa (SRO-EA) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ENECA), says the best option for the development of EAC industry is to focus on both ‘recapturing domestic markets’ and simultaneously exploiting better the potential of regional markets.” He observes that there are indeed a lot of promising developments across the region that could potentially facilitate greater industrial and manufacturing production. Speaking to The New Times, yesterday,, Mold said the research paper tries to acknowledge the difficulty in terms of industrialisation in the East African Community, adding that the EAC does not have the budget “to make things happen” but individual countries do. “All five countries are suffering similar constraints in terms of industrialisation. The way forward is not the international market but they need to look more at the regional market, including the wider region such as the market in DR Congo,” he said. The EAC industrialisation strategy – whose vision is a globally competitive, environment-friendly and sustainable industrial sector, capable of significantly improving the living standards of the people of East Africa by 2032 – identifies sectors in which the region has potential. However, the paper indicates that the principal problem is that the region on its own has no way of implementing the policies...

The introduction of one-stop border posts has been hailed for improving trade among East African Community (EAC) member countries. The border posts have also made EAC a major economic bloc in Africa, according East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) member and Kenya chapter secretary Judith Pareno. Ms Pareno made the remarks during an EALA sensitisation forum in Isiolo on Tuesday. She lauded the assembly for removing trade barriers at border points, saying the changes had resulted in faster and more efficient movement of people and goods. Nine Kenyan members of the EALA visited a post in Moyale, Marsabit County, on the Kenya-Ethiopia border on Monday while on their sensitisation mission on the importance of the assembly. “Instead of stamping goods and paying taxes [at] every border point in EAC countries, we have ensured they are inspected at one border point,” said Ms Pareno. Although Ethiopia is not a member of the EAC, it enjoys the benefits of trade owing to its border with Kenya. The EALA members regretted that in the 27 counties they had visited, many Kenyans they met did not seem to know much about the regional assembly. BORDER POSTS Border posts within the EAC include Namanga, Taveta/Holili, Lunga Lunga/Hororo, Moyale on the Ethiopia-Kenya border, and Isebania/Sirari on the border of Kenya and Tanzania. Others are Busia and Malaba on the Kenya-Uganda boundary; Kanyaru/Akanyaru and Nemba on the border between Burundi and Rwanda; and Mutukula on the Tanzania-Uganda border. On implementation of laws by member states passed by the...

The year 2014 started on a good note in the annals of EAC integration. This is because it started with a new travel experience for EAC citizens. This is the use of the national Identity Card as an authentic travel document between Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. The development was a result of initiatives agreed upon under the Northern Corridor Integration Projects (NCIP). The NCIP started as a tripartite engagement of three Presidents, Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), Paul Kagame (Rwanda) and Uhuru Kenyatta (Kenya) at Entebbe, Uganda on June 25, 2013, to discuss how to co-operate and expedite implementation of commitments agreed upon under the EAC arrangement. It was initially meant to speed up the flow of cargo, construction of the Standard Gauge Railway, crude oil pipeline and refined petroleum products pipeline. It later, however, expanded to include extra clusters that handle ICT, Oil Refinery, Political Federation, Financing, Power Generation, Transmission and Interconnectivity, Commodity Exchanges, Human Resource Capacity Building and Land.  In addition, there are also Clusters that handle Immigration, Trade, Tourism, Labour and Services, Single Customs Territory, Mutual Defence Cooperation, Mutual Peace and Security Cooperation and Airspace Management. It was against this background that the three Heads of State agreed to recognise the National Identity Card as a travel document within the EAC in addition to the national passports and the EAC passport. (The EAC passport has since been upgraded to a new generation e-passport to replace national passports and its issuance has been planned to commence this year). Thus, in...

Foreign Affairs secretary Amina Mohamed has said abolishing travel visas in the continent will be among her top priorities in her latest bid to head the African Union Commission (AUC). Ms Mohamed said she would also address the infrastructure gap, defend industrialisation and encourage intra-Africa trade if elected AUC chairperson. “We need to remove bottlenecks such as visas,” she said, adding she would push for free movement of goods and services across states. The minister is competing with candidates from Botswana, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Senegal for the AUC job. In July, the African Union’s 54 members unveiled a single continental visa intended to grant citizens easy access to all member states. Some of the common electronic passports were issued to heads of state and senior officials at the AU summit in Kigali with bloc officials saying all citizens would get them by 2020. Ms Mohamed has lined up expediting the common visa distribution, industrialisation and fixing infrastructure gap as key planks of her campaign. “Industrialisation can reduce poverty and create jobs while trade is unifying factor, but we need to fill our infrastructure gaps and facilitate the mobility of people, capital and goods so that our young people can move across borders, exchange ideas, but also find jobs,” she said during a CNBC TV interview. “The 13 per cent intra-African trade is unacceptable. We should at least reach 30 per cent and eventually aim at 60 per cent. “Africa has to stop exporting raw products and jobs while our...

University students from the East African region will be able to transfer credits from one university to another within the five member states of the East African Community from February, if the region’s heads of state endorse a plan to create a common higher education area. Under the proposal presented in a harmonisation document by the community’s higher education body, the Inter-University Council of East Africa, and already approved by education ministers of the trading bloc, students will be able to move from any of the more than 100 public and private universities in the region at any stage of learning, without having to sit a special entry examination. The community, with an estimated population of 150 million citizens, consists of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi and is in the process of admitting a new member, Africa’s youngest state, South Sudan. “Under the proposed harmonised higher education framework, student mobility will be made seamless enabling learners to move from one institution to the other at will,” said Cosam Chawanga, IUCEA’s head of quality assurance. Universities in the region will recognise qualifications from any chartered university and from every programme accredited by individual higher education authorities in the countries of origin, said Chawanga. The creation of a common higher education region was slated to have been completed in 2016 but bureaucratic procedures delayed the process, the officer noted. Last December though, education ministers met in Arusha, Tanzania, the bloc’s headquarters, and approved the proposed harmonisation document ahead of February’s heads of state summit...

Many must have caught the comments by the East African Community’s outgoing Director-General in charge of Trade and Customs, Peter Kiguta, when he said in The EastAfrican last week that the earlier enthusiasm among member states to move the region towards higher levels of integration “seems to have waned over the past two years.” He is right. Things like regional integration are no different from a successful music album. Not all the songs on it have to be a hit. You need only need one big one, and the album achieves greatness. But just being a hit is not enough. Thus Ghanaian hip hop artist Fuse ODG’s song Azonto was a big hit, but what turned it into a phenomenon was that it became wildly danceable too. Likewise, the EAC has some big hits – the One Stop Border Posts (OSBP) initiative, the Kenya-Uganda-Rwanda Single Tourist Visa, the dramatic reductions in port delays at Mombasa, the increased ease of travel using IDs, and so on. The problem is that they are not danceable. They are the sausage without the sizzle. In this day and age, when the distractions on social media are endless, the memorable things, and the ones that form their own reality, are the hashtags that trend. The EAC’s problem then is not that it hasn’t done great things. Rather, it has done nothing that is hashtag worthy. For something to be hashtag worthy, it doesn’t have to create 10,000 jobs. It just has to be razzle-dazzle. Something...

Experts confirm potential of the Programme for Infrastructure Development in African (PIDA) to contribute jobs and GDP growth When the Lamu Port, South Sudan, Ethiopia Transport Corridor Project (LAPSSET) won the prestigious Global Infrastructure Leadership Forum Award in Washington DC on March 10, 2016, the project was up against equally critical multi-billion dollar programmes including Mexico City New International airport and Seine-Nord Europe Canal, connecting northern European countries such as Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. LAPSSET’s award in the job creation category honours leaders “driving the next generation’s most transformative global infrastructure projects.” Since inception in 2012, LAPSSET has created an estimated 5,000 direct jobs for the 500- kilometre road between Isiolo in Kenya and Moyale, a market town on the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. Opportunities in engineering designs around the Port of Lamu, banking, telecommunications, and energy generation are still available. LAPSSET, a flagship project of the Programme for Infrastructure Development in African (PIDA) and highlighted at the 2016 PIDA week has set the path. Once completed the project is anticipated to inject 2 to 3% in Kenya’s GDP but also position the country as an economic hub in East Africa. We are convinced that the 51 priority projects identified under PIDA in the areas of energy, transport, ICT and trans-boundary water will follow suit. Creating productive jobs remains a key challenge in sub-Saharan Africa where nine out of ten workers in both rural and urban areas are estimated to hold only informal jobs (ILO, 2009). By 2050,...

Dar es Salaam — China has pledged more development support for Tanzania to enable the country meet targets set in the 2016/20 National Development Plan and achieve the ambition to build the industrial economy. The Chinese minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Wang Yi, issued the promise during official talks with his Tanzanian counterpart, Dr Augustine Mahiga in the city. Mr Yi had paid a day-long official visit. He said, China was ready to assist Tanzania in its development projects particularly roads, railway and the construction of ports in Bagamoyo and Zanzibar. "The cooperation will continue to go deeper and extensively, and China will always stand shoulder to shoulder in the making of Tanzania development and for the wellbeing of it's people," he said. This was among the issues which dominated the one-hour discussions between the two delegations at the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Convention Centre in Dar es Salaam. "We also promise to pump industrial investment as a way to support the government mission of building an industrial economy,"he said. Moreover, he assured continued support for Tanzania in the latter's bid to improve industries and infrastructure. For his part, Dr Mahiga welcomed the support, saying that the government was ready for the move, as part of efforts to improve lives of of the people. "We encourage many Chinese companies to invest in Tanzania and again, they have shown interest to build us new structures in Dodoma," he said. According to him, China is committed to pose comprehensive reforms at Tazara to...