Smokes and mirrors game in rice imports

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

We are watching, in real time, the anatomy of a grand procurement scandal unfold. The latest scheme? The duty-free rice importation programme. The sums at stake are staggering: 500,000 metric tons of rice -- nearly 40 percent of annual national consumption -- worth Sh42 billion, to be shipped in before year-end.

Where does culpability lie? The familiar script is already in play: spread responsibility thinly across multiple actors so no single hand is caught in the till. Is it the Kenya National Trading Corporation (KNTC)? The Ministry of Agriculture? The Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA)? This is the classic smokes-and-mirrors game.

Here are the hard facts. On July 29, 2025, AFA wrote to KNTC, explicitly authorising the imports. That letter cited a June Cabinet decision creating a "duty-free importation framework" for 500,000 metric tons of rice to cover looming production shortfalls.

KNTC acted on those instructions. It floated a restricted tender, unleashing a rugby-style scrum among politically connected firms scrambling for the golden prize. On September 9, KNTC issued formal letters of intention to award contracts.

Then, the anti-climax. Barely 24 hours later, on September 10, AFA directed KNTC to cancel the very tender it had authorised, nullifying awards that bidders were already brandishing as binding contractual documents.

Read: State-to-State deals returning Kenya to dark days of opaque procurement

On September 17, KNTC wrote to the Commissioner, Customs and Border Control, notifying the office that the allocations had been cancelled on orders by AFA.

But the real scandal is in what happened next. The very same contracts resurfaced in the hands of a different set of well-connected insiders. The original awardees, now cut out, have now rushed to court, waving their cancelled documents and crying foul.

This is not a case of bureaucratic misunderstanding. It is a classic elite capture play: when the first scramble produced the "wrong" winners, the game was reset to hand the prize to the "right" networks.

The inconvertible truth is this: culpability does not rest with KNTC but squarely with the Agriculture and Food Authority -- the agency that first sanctioned the imports, then cynically pulled the rug, and finally redirected the spoils to another clique.

Yet, while it may indeed be unfair to those who were elbowed out, let's be clear what we are witnessing. This is not a battle between saints and villains, but simply a quarrel among rival factions inside Ali Baba's cave -- a fight over who gets to plunder, not a fight over principle.

This fiasco is not about rice, or tenders, or KNTC. It is vicious infighting within the power-broking networks clustered around the presidency.

Today, they are clawing at one another in public, each faction desperate to corner a share of the spoils.

But this is only the noisy part of the drama. Sooner or later, they will close ranks again. And when that happens, the system will demand scapegoats.

A few expendable figures -- often the most junior or least protected -- will be paraded as culprits. Meanwhile, the true masterminds will walk away unscathed, and the real victims will be the innocent bystanders who find themselves crushed in the settling of scores.

If the government is serious about restoring credibility and protecting the public interest, it must do more than shuffle blame across agencies. The current and tainted tender awards should be cancelled outright.

Read: Tender fraud passes bribery on Kenya's economic crimes list

A clear, competitive, and fresh tendering process for duty-free imported rice is the only way to clean up this fiasco and assure Kenyans that food security decisions are being handled with integrity rather than intrigue.

The government must move to restore order and signal that public interest, not insider cartels, will drive food security policy.

In a sense, the rugby-style scrum over the rice import scheme should surprise no one. With fiscal space shrinking and the state doing little to inject liquidity through development spending, the duty-free trade regime has become one of the few remaining frontiers for rent-seeking elites.

It is against this backdrop that the earlier promise of transforming the Kenya National Trading Corporation into a genuine price-stabilisation agency now rings hollow.

Not long ago, KNTC was little more than a shell, living off rent from warehouses it inherited in the 1970s and 80s under the old command-and-control economy of import licences, price caps and foreign exchange committees.

There was even a moment of ambition: during a visit to Nairobi, Afreximbank's then president, Prof Benedict Oramah, pledged support for turning KNTC into an export trading powerhouse.

In today's circumstances, a well-funded, professional agency of that sort might have cut sharper deals with Pakistan on behalf of Kenyan consumers. Instead, what we have is another free-for-all, where policy is captured and public interest takes the scrum's hardest knocks.