Kenya Could Lose Sh1.7 Billion Yearly After Tanzanian Firm KEDA Ceramics Awarded Shady Glass Deal

NAIROBI, February 17, 2026

A Tanzanian-based Chinese ceramics conglomerate has been handed what rivals describe as an iron grip over Kenya’s glass supply chain, and the consequences are being felt in hardware shops, construction sites and government revenue accounts across the country.

Industry insiders and opposition politicians are now warning that Kenya is haemorrhaging an estimated Sh1.7 billion in taxes, port charges and logistics revenue every single year because of what they call a government-sanctioned monopoly that no one in authority wants to explain.

At the heart of the scandal sits KEDA Ceramics of Tanzania, a subsidiary of the Shanghai-listed KEDA Industrial Group, one of the biggest ceramic machinery and building materials conglomerates in the world.

Through its Kenyan arm, Twyford Ceramics Kenya, the company has cornered the supply of float glass into the Kenyan market, sources say, leaving local registered processors with no practical alternative but to buy from a single supplier at prices that industry documents show are more than double what the same product costs direct from China.

“This arrangement undermines fair competition, weakens local value addition and threatens Kenya’s industrial agenda”

The numbers are damning.

Kenyan processors are paying approximately USD 4.28 per square metre for float glass routed through Tanzania, according to figures cited by the Liberal Democratic Party.

The very same product, sourced directly from Chinese manufacturers, fetches around USD 2.00 per square metre, a price disparity of more than 114 per cent.

In a business where margins are tight and construction costs determine whether housing projects proceed or stall, that difference is the line between a viable industry and a gutted one.

“This price disparity has significantly increased production costs and eroded Kenya’s competitiveness,” LDP presidential aspirant Prof. Fred Ogola said outside Milimani Law Courts on February 10, where he issued a stinging press statement on the affair. “Instead of technocratic execution of policy, we are seeing the influence of vested commercial interests.”

The LDP leader estimates that Kenya is losing Sh1.7 billion annually, not in some abstract fiscal sense, but in concrete revenue that would otherwise flow through the Port of Mombasa, Nairobi’s warehousing sector, clearing and forwarding agents, and the Kenya Revenue Authority’s own tax collection machinery.

Because so much of the clearing and transport linked to the current arrangement is conducted outside Kenya, the country forfeits the economic multiplier effect of those transactions.

More than 24,000 jobs hang in the balance.

The glass processing sector directly employs 1,253 workers in Kenya, but the ripple effects extend to more than 23,000 people in construction, transport, hardware supply and related industries.

Every time a processor shuts a line or scales back because input costs make production unviable, a hardware retailer in Westlands or a glazier in Mombasa Road feels the pain first.

A PARLIAMENT-APPROVED EXEMPTION THAT NOBODY IMPLEMENTED

The deeper injustice, according to a petition now before the High Court, is that Parliament already acted to protect Kenyan processors.

Section 46 of the Finance Act 2025, which came into force on July 1, 2025, introduced a 35 per cent excise duty on imported float glass, while simultaneously providing that registered local processors would be exempted from the levy following verification by the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry.

The law was designed to tilt the playing field back in favour of Kenyan value-adders and reduce dependence on imported finished glass.

The Ministry of Industry duly conducted inspection visits in August 2025 and produced a verification report recommending approval of exemptions for ten registered processors.

That should have been the end of the story.

Instead, it was the beginning of a bureaucratic black hole. Four months after the verification report was completed, not a single one of the ten companies had received formal communication of their exemption.

Meanwhile, their consignments of float glass were being detained at the port, demurrage charges were mounting by the day, and businesses were teetering.

Peter Imbayi Indaso, a registered float glass processor trading as Glassmart Hardware and a member of the Kenya Association of Manufacturers, had had enough.

He filed a constitutional petition at the Milimani High Court, suing the Cabinet Secretary for Investment, Trade and Industry, the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Attorney General.

His case was straightforward: the government had conducted due diligence, confirmed the eligibility of processors, prepared a report and then done nothing with it.

The exemption Parliament had legislated was being strangled in the crib by administrative inaction that he argued violated Article 47 of the Constitution, the right to fair administrative action.

“For workers losing jobs today, economic pain is immediate, not a 2027 campaign issue” – Prof. Fred Ogola

The Kenya Association of Manufacturers joined the case as an interested party, confirming that it had written multiple letters to the Ministry and facilitated the very inspections that confirmed processor eligibility, only to be met with silence from officials.

COURT STEPS IN WHERE GOVERNMENT WOULD NOT

On December 22, 2025, Justice Bahati Mwamuye of the Milimani High Court intervened.

In interim orders, the judge directed the KRA to temporarily and conditionally release registered processors from the obligation to pay excise duty on their detained consignments, provided they secured the amounts through bank or insurance bond guarantees.

The court further ordered KRA to maintain meticulous records of all taxes and statutory charges foregone under the order, a requirement that signals the judiciary does not intend to let the government off lightly if the petition ultimately succeeds.

In a subsequent order that moved the legal needle even further, the High Court issued a writ of mandamus compelling KRA to communicate the necessary clearance to the Kenya Association of Manufacturers, enabling registered processors to clear their float glass imports without paying excise duty at all pending the full hearing of the petition.

The court declared that the statutory exemption under the Finance Act 2025 was self-executing once statutory conditions were met, and that it could not be frustrated by administrative inaction. In plain terms, the judge said the government had no legal cover for what it had been doing to the industry.

WHO IS KEDA, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

KEDA Industrial Group, listed on both the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the SIX Swiss Exchange, is not a small player.

Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Guangdong, China, the company operates more than 100 subsidiaries and 30 production bases worldwide, with products sold in over 100 countries. In Africa, it has established ceramic factories in Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Senegal and Zambia, positioning itself as the continent’s largest ceramic company.

Its Tanzanian subsidiary, KEDA (Tanzania) Ceramics Company Limited, began construction of a float glass plant in 2022, a development that attracted high-level attention from Tanzania’s government.

That plant now sits at the centre of Kenya’s glass supply crisis.

KEDA’s Kenya operation, Twyford Ceramics Kenya, located at Sameer Business Park in Nairobi and at a factory in Kajiado County, already controls around 60 per cent of Kenya’s ceramics tile market by some estimates, and critics allege the company is now attempting to extend that dominance into glass.

Trade data shows that KEDA (Tanzania) Ceramics’ primary export markets are Kenya, Uganda and Zambia, with Twyford Kenya being its biggest buyer.

The concern raised by the LDP and processors is not merely about price gouging.

It is about a deliberate structural arrangement, allegedly facilitated by government inaction, that locks competing glass suppliers out of the Kenyan market and hands a foreign-controlled entity a captive customer base of local manufacturers who have no other options.

“This is not just an industry dispute,” Prof. Ogola said. “It directly affects the cost of living and livelihoods of Kenyans.” He warned that inflated glass input costs cascade into higher housing and construction prices, making the government’s affordable housing agenda harder to achieve even as the President stakes political capital on it.

QUESTIONS THE GOVERNMENT MUST ANSWER

The LDP has demanded that the government publicly disclose the policy rationale behind the supply arrangement, name the individuals and entities who have benefited from the monopolistic structure, and outline concrete safeguards to protect local industry and public revenue.

These are not unreasonable demands given the stakes involved.

What is particularly striking about this case is the gap between stated policy and actual execution. The government has spoken loudly about industrialisation, local value addition and manufacturing competitiveness.

It passed a Finance Act with a specific provision to give local glass processors a fighting chance against cheaper imported products.

Then, for reasons that have not been explained to the public, the relevant ministries and agencies failed to implement that very provision for months on end, while the processors whose businesses the law was meant to protect watched their goods pile up at the port.

The Cabinet Secretary for Investment, Trade and Industry, the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Attorney General had not publicly responded to the specific allegations of administrative failure detailed in the petition at the time of publication.

The High Court has directed the ministry to respond to the case, a requirement that should bring some clarity to what exactly happened between August 2025, when the verification report was completed, and December 2025, when the courts had to step in.

Prof. Ogola, who frames his involvement in the issue through the lens of his presidential aspirations, was pointed in his message to the administration.

“For workers losing jobs today, economic pain is immediate, not a 2027 campaign issue,” he said, in what amounted to an early warning shot that he intends to weaponise the government’s perceived failures on industrialisation as election season approaches.

But beyond the politics, the substance of the complaint deserves serious attention.

A single Tanzanian-based supplier charging more than double the prevailing global rate for a critical manufacturing input, a government exemption collecting dust in an office somewhere in Nairobi, thousands of jobs at risk, and Sh1.7 billion in annual revenue haemorrhaging out of the economy are not the ingredients of a minor administrative hiccup.

They are the hallmarks of systemic failure, one that the courts appear to have taken more seriously than the regulators tasked with preventing it in the first place.