The cartel’s banquet: How Kenya’s market masters feast on the bones of the poor
The Mt Kenya Times 
By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
Nearly two in every five Kenyans 39.8 percent of the population, roughly twenty million souls live below the national poverty line, unable to meet basic food and non-food needs. Rural counties in the arid and semi-arid lands record rates above 70 percent; Turkana alone stands at 82.7 percent. Meanwhile, the Competition Authority of Kenya has in recent years uncovered price-fixing, output restriction and market allocation among steel manufacturers, imposing penalties exceeding 338 million shillings, and continues to probe suspected collusion in bread, sugar and mattress markets. These numbers do not merely sit side by side. They form a single, brutal equation: when cartels dictate the price of steel, sugar, fertilizer and cooking oil, they impose an invisible tax that extracts the last coin from households already drowning.
This extraction is no accident of the market. It is the continuation of a long historical pattern. Colonial rule organised the economy around extraction for distant masters; post-independence elites merely changed the accents and the boardrooms. Land concentration, control of commodity chains and the quiet capture of licensing and import regimes created structural inequality that competition law was meant to dismantle. Instead, cartels have perfected the art of looking respectable while strangling the very competition that would allow ordinary producers and consumers to breathe. The steel cartel’s coordinated price lists and import restrictions raised the cost of housing and public works in a country that claims to prioritise affordable homes. Fertilizer mark-ups and sugar manipulations keep maize meal and bread out of reach of the same children the state claims to educate. The correlation is clinical: every percentage point of collusive overcharge deepens the poverty trap, widens the Gini coefficient that still hovers near 38.5, and converts economic growth into a private banquet for the few.
Consider the lived texture of this violence. A mother in Kitui watches the price of a two-kilogramme packet of maize flour climb because millers and traders have learned the profitable language of coordination. A smallholder in Trans Nzoia calculates that the cost of fertilizer has erased the slim margin that once kept the family above the line. A construction worker in Nairobi discovers that the iron sheets and rods he needs for a modest house now carry the silent surcharge of a cartel that treats the national housing agenda as an inconvenience. These are not abstract market failures. They are daily amputations of dignity. Cartels do not merely raise prices; they ration hope. They convert the constitutional promise of a decent standard of living into a cruel joke told in boardrooms where competitors become co-conspirators and the public becomes the paying audience.
The Competition Act arms the Authority with the power to impose fines of up to ten percent of turnover and to refer cases for criminal prosecution. Leniency programmes and forensic laboratories exist on paper. Enforcement, however, remains episodic and under-deterrent. Fines rarely approach the statutory ceiling. Dawn raids are infrequent. Settlements that avoid full admission of liability dilute the public record and weaken the deterrent signal. Probes into sugar and bread drag while households continue to bleed. The irony is exquisite: an institution created to protect the competitive process has become, through under-resourcing and political hesitation, an occasional spectator at the very feast it was meant to interrupt.
Structural inequality and cartel power feed each other. Concentrated ownership of key value chains from milling to steel fabrication creates both the capacity and the incentive to collude. Weak competition enforcement then entrenches that concentration, which in turn reproduces poverty across generations. The child denied adequate nutrition because of inflated food prices enters school already behind; the young adult who cannot afford materials for a small enterprise remains locked in informal survival. The human-rights dimension is inescapable. The right to food, the right to housing, the right to economic participation all are hollowed out when markets are captured. Competition policy is therefore not a technocratic luxury; it is a frontline instrument of social justice. To treat it as anything less is to declare that the Constitution’s transformative vision stops at the factory gate.
What, then, must be done? The Competition Authority requires more than ceremonial support. It needs sustained budgetary independence, expanded forensic capacity, and political cover to pursue high-profile cases without quiet interference. Parliament must strengthen the statute so that criminal liability is more readily triggered and that directors face personal consequences. The Judiciary must treat cartel appeals with the urgency reserved for threats to public welfare, refusing procedural gymnastics that delay justice for years. County governments and the national executive must stop treating trade associations as sacred cows and begin demanding transparency in pricing data across essential commodities. Civil society and the media must keep the names and the numbers in public view until the banquet is disrupted. Citizens themselves must refuse the fatalism that says “this is how things are.” Every complaint lodged, every whistle blown under protection, every refusal to accept the inflated price as natural law chips at the edifice.
History offers no gentle exit. The colonial extractive logic was never fully buried; it merely learned new languages of corporate governance, of industry associations, of “market realities.” Cartels are the contemporary expression of that logic. They thrive where enforcement is timid and inequality is treated as an unfortunate background condition rather than an engineered outcome. To rethink competition enforcement is therefore to confront the deeper architecture of poverty. It is to insist that the market serve the many rather than the coordinated few. It is to recognise that every collusive overcharge is a theft from the national project of human flourishing.
The numbers remain stubborn: twenty million Kenyans below the line, cartels still probing the edges of detection, growth that fails to translate into broad-based escape from want. The choice is categorical. Either competition law becomes a sharp instrument of economic justice, or it remains a decorative shield behind which the banquet continues. The poor cannot wait for polite incrementalism. They require the full force of the state investigative, prosecutorial, judicial and political directed against the quiet architects of scarcity. Only then does the fight against poverty move from rhetoric to material reality. Only then does the market cease to be a private hunting ground and become what the Constitution intended: a common space in which dignity is possible.
The writer is a social commentator
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