Nearly 4,000 used vehicles are stuck at
the port of Mombasa after their importers failed to secure local number
plates needed to operate on Kenyan roads.
Motor
industry insiders said the country has been experiencing an acute
shortage of number plates arising from the manual production at the
Kamiti Maximum Prisons.
Car Importers Association (CIA)
said the shortage, which is costing them thousands of shillings in
demurrage charges at the port, has persisted since September last year.
The
National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA), the sector regulator,
has registered 3,996 units whose number plates are yet to be delivered,
importers said.
CIA chairman Peter Otieno said the NTSA’s February’s
pledge that supply will be stable by April, which was later pushed back
to July 1, failed to materialise, resulting in increased storage and
demurrage costs for importers.
Mr Otieno added that the
NTSA has also failed to honour its promise to issue stickers with
details of the vehicles at the time of registration to allow the Kenya
Revenue Authority to release them and save the importers mounting
storage costs.
“We accepted that and we have been very
quiet, but July has started, nothing has changed, there are no stickers,
the actual number plates are not there, we don’t know what to do and we
are incurring storage (charges),” he told the Business Daily on the
phone. “Why should we incur storage for somebody’s inefficiency?”
The
storage costs for the smallest unit at Container Freight Station is as
much as Sh3,000 a day, Mr Otieno said, translating to Sh11.988 million
for the units presently at the port.
NTSA director for
registration and licensing Jacqueline Githinji admitted the country can
only produce about 1,000 plates against a demand of more than 3,000
vehicles. She, however, said that supply has only outstripped demand in
the last two months.
“The registrations are ahead of
the number plates and, therefore, that causes a problem. The supply is
affected by the technology of producing the old plates which is manual
and they (Kamiti Prisons) can’t use machines,” Ms Githinji told the Business Daily on phone.
“With the modern technology, they should use an automated machine to emboss the number.”
Dutch
firm J Knieriem in March won a court case where it had in December
challenged last September’s award of Sh1 billion tender to Ugandan and
Kenyan firms for supply of materials for proposed new generation number
plates.
The firm had argued that it had been excluded
from the re-evaluation of bids where the Kenyan firm Tropical
Technologies won the Sh1 billion deal to supply blank plates, while the
hot stamping foil deal went to Uganda’s MIG International, which bid
Sh140 million.
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