The marketplace mirage: Kenya’s dual mandate and the persistent carnival of deception

By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo

In the financial year ending June 2025, the Competition Authority of Kenya received and investigated 915 consumer complaints across twenty sectors of the economy, a sharp 37 percent rise from the 668 cases of the previous year. That single statistic exposes the raw nerve of our markets. It is not a quiet administrative detail. It is a public declaration that Kenyan households continue to walk into shops, banks, and digital platforms only to leave poorer, angrier, and more betrayed than when they entered.

The Competition Act of 2010, Cap 504, gifted the Authority a dual mandate of unusual ambition: to promote and protect effective competition while simultaneously shielding consumers from unfair and misleading market conduct. Article 46 of the Constitution had already declared that every person has the right to goods and services of reasonable quality, to the information necessary to gain full benefit from them, and to the protection of their health, safety, and economic interests. Parliament answered by placing both the sword of competition enforcement and the shield of consumer protection into the same pair of hands. Fifteen years later the hands remain busy, the sword is occasionally drawn, and the shield too often hangs on the wall while citizens bleed.

Consider the everyday theatre of the supermarket aisle. A shopper selects a five-kilogramme bag of rice clearly marked with a promotional price. At the till the machine demands a higher sum. The shelf and the scanner speak different languages. Carrefour, Naivas, and Quickmart have all faced such complaints. The Authority records the refunds, issues warnings, and moves on. The same pattern repeats with “100 percent pure honey” that laboratory tests reveal to be adulterated, with fruit juices labelled as natural while containing only a fraction of the claimed fruit content, and with phones sold as brand-new that reveal themselves, within weeks, as refurbished machines. Each case is investigated. Some offenders pay modest penalties. The underlying culture of calculated ambiguity survives.

Financial services supply even richer examples of the same disease. Digital lenders and asset financiers have been found calculating interest in one currency while disbursing in another, unilaterally altering repayment methods from flat rate to reducing balance, and imposing charges never disclosed at the moment of agreement. One company paid over ten million shillings in settlement and refunded a handful of customers. Banks have been ordered to reverse millions in unilaterally imposed default interest. The numbers look decisive on paper. In the lived experience of the borrower, the damage is already done: school fees unpaid, business capital eroded, dignity eroded further still.

These are not isolated excesses of a few rogue traders. They form a coherent pattern. Where market power concentrates, the incentive to extract value through opacity grows. Abuse of buyer power by large retailers against small suppliers produces the same outcome from the opposite direction: suppliers squeezed until they exit, product variety shrinks, and the consumer ultimately pays through reduced choice and higher long-term prices. The Authority has secured refunds for some suppliers and imposed penalties. The structural imbalance that makes such extraction profitable remains largely undisturbed.

History supplies the necessary perspective. Kenya inherited a weak competition regime at independence and operated for decades under the limited 1989 statute. Liberalisation in the 1990s opened markets faster than institutions could police them. The 2010 Act and the creation of the Authority in 2011 represented a deliberate attempt to catch up. The dual mandate was presented as sophistication, a recognition that competition and consumer welfare are two sides of the same coin. In practice the coin has frequently landed on its edge. The Authority’s resources are finite. Merger reviews, cartel investigations, and abuse-of-dominance cases compete for attention with the daily flood of consumer grievances. When 915 complaints arrive in a single year, prioritisation becomes inevitable. Prioritisation becomes delay. Delay becomes a quiet form of permission.

The correlation is stark. Sectors with high complaint volumes financial services and retail are precisely those in which information asymmetry is greatest and switching costs highest. Consumers cannot easily detect adulterated honey at the point of purchase. A borrower cannot easily renegotiate after the funds have already been disbursed. A small supplier cannot easily walk away from a dominant retailer that controls shelf space. In each case the legal prohibition exists. Enforcement arrives after the harm has crystallized. Deterrence remains partial because the expected penalty is still smaller than the expected gain from the practice.

This is not a failure of individual officers. It is a systemic underestimation of the scale of everyday predation. The Authority has delivered tangible results: consumer savings of 21.4 million shillings in one year through refunds and replacements, recovery of tens of millions owed to suppliers, and penalties running into billions against certain cartels and dominant players. Those achievements deserve recognition. They do not erase the larger truth that the volume of harm continues to outpace the volume of remedy. Awareness campaigns have increased complaints. Increased complaints have revealed the depth of the problem rather than its resolution.

What is required now is not another strategic plan or another modest amendment. The dual mandate must be resourced and sharpened until it cuts. Parliament must decide whether the Authority is to remain the primary consumer protection body or whether the creation of parallel institutions will only fragment responsibility further. Sector regulators in banking, telecommunications, and energy must treat consumer harm as a competition issue rather than a customer-service inconvenience. The judiciary must treat delays in enforcement as matters of constitutional urgency. Civil society and the media must refuse to treat each new scandal as a one-day story. Most critically, businesses themselves must abandon the quiet calculation that the probability of detection multiplied by the size of the fine remains an acceptable cost of doing business.

The Kenyan consumer is not a statistic. She is the mother who discovers that the “pure” honey she bought for her child’s health is diluted. He is the small trader whose product is returned days before expiry with no explanation and no payment. They are the young professionals whose loan balances grow in ways the original agreement never contemplated. Each of these experiences is a small act of economic violence. Collectively they corrode trust in the very markets that are supposed to deliver shared prosperity.

The dual mandate was never meant to be a decorative phrase. It was meant to be a living instrument of justice in the marketplace. Until the instrument is wielded with consistency, speed, and sufficient force, the carnival of deception will continue under the bright lights of official regulation. The Authority has the legal tools. The Constitution has given the moral command. What remains is the collective will to close the gap between the promise written in statute and the reality lived at the till, at the bank counter, and on the digital screen. Anything less is an abdication dressed in the language of progress.

The writer is a social commentator

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