Kenyan police have intercepted a consignment of illegally imported Brazilian sugar at the Lunga Lunga One Stop Border Post in Kwale County.
The consignment was concealed in crates carrying fresh orange fruits.
Insider sources say that following a tip-off a team of multi-agency security enforcers led by the Kenya Police swooped on the syndicate Saturday night arresting the driver, Musakawa Hamadi and a second unidentified person.
The operation recovered 144 bags of sugar weighing 50 kilograms each. Such illegally imported sugar enters Kenya through porous border points with her East African neighbors and is repackaged and sold cheaply, undermining the local sugar industry.
Police are pursuing leads on the owners of the Isuzu NPR lorry, registration number T199 BHP that was transporting the sugar from a neighbouring country. They’ve also released a statement indicating the swoop was only part of an ongoing crackdown involving multi-agency security organs.
The lorry has been impounded while its cargo was confined at a nearby Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) facility.
“This is a serious breach of our customs laws,” said an officer involved in the sting. “These smugglers want to dodge taxes, harm our economy, and put consumers at risk.”
The current Chairman of the Kenya Sugar Board Authority, Engineer Nicholas Odero Gumbo has vowed to stop the entry of contraband sugar into the country.
However, according to the 2014 Annual Crime Report, the police noted that the black market is a very lucrative sector that deals a lot in contraband goods from Somalia, Uganda and Tanzania. According to police, the smuggling has benefited a clique of millionaire Somali-Kenyan traders they refer to as ‘the untouchable.’
A case in point is when in 2018 the government forced Darasa Limited to ship back 40,000 tonnes of sugar imported from Brazil after quality checks by the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) failed. The sugar was linked to a company owned by a Cabinet Minister and even when the Bureau ordered its destruction no clear action was taken.
Recently DCI detectives arrested a high-profile suspect in an intricate scam that saw four businessmen pay KES 100 million for a consignment of 15,000 bags of Brazilian sugar that was never delivered.
Such cases of business-turned-sour may reach the DCI but deep down in the smuggling underworld importation of contraband Brazilian sugar continues in hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes.
Kenya’s Parliament made some noises during the Darasa case but were either unable or unwilling to carry through with prosecution of the known offenders.
The police too seem unable to curb the contraband sugar importation menace.
Could the Lunga Lunga swoop be a turning point in the war against sugar barons?
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