KEBS stands its ground on raw sugar imports as parliament demands stricter checks at the border
The Mt Kenya Times 
Esther Ngari
The standards agency says its South Africa-appointed inspectors cleared the consignment — but MPs insist that is not good enough
By John Kariuki
The Kenya Bureau of Standards appeared before a parliamentary committee this week to defend one of the more contentious import decisions to have crossed its desk in recent memory — and left the room with its position intact but its procedures under fresh scrutiny.
KEBS Managing Director Esther Ngari told the National Assembly Departmental Committee on Trade, Industry and Cooperatives that the agency had acted within established protocol when it cleared a disputed consignment of imported raw sugar, relying on certification issued by a contracted inspection firm operating in South Africa under Kenya’s Pre-Export Verification of Conformity programme.
Under the PVoC framework, goods destined for Kenya are inspected and certified at the point of origin by firms appointed and supervised by KEBS itself. Ngari explained that the bureau only steps in to conduct its own independent analysis when credible intelligence points to non-compliance or foul play — otherwise, the contracted firm’s findings are treated as sufficient for clearance.
The raw sugar in question, she stressed, was never intended for supermarket shelves. It was imported strictly for industrial processing, and KEBS had already collected samples from a portion of the refined output, run laboratory tests, and issued a clearance certificate confirming the finished product met Kenya’s quality and safety standards. In the bureau’s framing, the system had worked as designed.
Lawmakers on the committee were less convinced. Several members questioned the logic of accepting inspection results generated thousands of kilometres away, arguing that contamination, tampering, or deterioration during the long transit from South Africa could not be ruled out on the basis of a pre-shipment certificate alone. The committee urged KEBS to introduce mandatory independent testing of consignments at the port of entry — a step, they argued, that would close an obvious gap in the country’s quality assurance chain and align local findings with those produced by the contracted inspector abroad.
The concern is not merely procedural. Sugar has repeatedly surfaced as a flashpoint in Kenya’s trade and food-safety debates, with past scandals over adulterated or substandard consignments eroding public trust in import oversight. Parliamentarians appeared acutely aware of that history, framing their push for arrival-point testing as a matter of consumer protection rather than bureaucratic overreach.
KEBS, for its part, maintained that the safeguards already in place were robust enough to prevent raw sugar from leaking into the retail market, and that Ngari’s assurance of laboratory certification of the refined product provided the necessary guarantee to the public.
The exchange drew a clear fault line: the bureau defending the integrity of a pre-export system it has long operated, and lawmakers insisting that system alone cannot be the last word when public health is at stake. Whether KEBS will be compelled to add a mandatory domestic verification layer remains to be seen, but the committee’s position left little doubt that the pressure will not ease until it does.
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