The Anti-Counterfeit Authority (ACA) has admitted it lacks the capacity to effectively police the growing spread of counterfeit alcoholic drinks in Kenya, even as new evidence shows some of the country’s best-known drinks brands are also among the most heavily targeted by counterfeiters.
Appearing before the Senate Standing Committee on Information, Communication and Technology on Thursday, September 10, ACA Chief Executive Dr Robi King’a said drinks from East African Breweries Limited (EABL), Kenya Wines Agency Limited (KWAL), Zheng Hong Kenya Limited and Partiala Distiller (K) Ltd, including vodka and cane spirit products, were among those most susceptible to counterfeiting in the local market.
“About 67 per cent of locally manufactured alcoholic drinks are counterfeited. We are working with EABL, Zheng Hong Kenya Limited and Kwal to detect and arrest counterfeit products disguised as being manufactured by these entities,” King’a told the committee.
King’a attributed the surge in counterfeit and illicit alcohol to a wide range of factors, but was candid about the agency’s own limitations, pointing to understaffing, underfunding and the absence of a legal framework mandating the ACA to inspect locally made drinks. The scale of the staffing gap is stark; the authority has only 120 members of staff in total, of whom just 38 are counterfeit inspectors tasked with covering the entire country.
“We are having issues with human capacity. We, however, do have a multi-agency framework engagement with institutions such as NACADA, KRA and KEBS, and we are currently conducting an operation on illicit and counterfeit alcohol across the country,” he said.
The staffing shortage, King’a explained, traces back to recommendations made in 2013 by a taskforce led by former presidential adviser Abdikadir Mohamed, which proposed merging various state agencies. Those recommendations triggered a freeze on recruitment and promotions at ACA that remains in effect, leaving the authority unable to hire additional officers even as the scale of the problem grows.
Senators pressed King’a on whether most illicit or counterfeit drinks were sourced locally or from outside the country, and how ordinary members of the public were meant to tell legitimate products apart from fake ones.
On the first question, King’a said the evidence pointed clearly toward local production as the dominant source of the problem. Counterfeit goods seized last year were valued at Sh1.4 billion in total, of which alcoholic drinks accounted for Sh400 million.
Of the counterfeit alcohol seized, 77 per cent was locally manufactured, 15 per cent imported and the origin of the remaining 8 per cent could not be established. “Available evidence indicates the dominant illicit-alcohol volume problem is locally produced rather than imported,” King’a said, though the authority separately cautioned that this seizure breakdown reflects what enforcement action has actually uncovered rather than a fully representative picture of the market as a whole.
On how counterfeiters manage to fool consumers, King’a detailed a range of increasingly sophisticated methods being used to defeat existing authentication measures. These include identifier cloning, where genuine QR codes are copied or photographed and applied to illicit packaging, and the reuse of genuine bottles, caps or labels filled with substituted contents.
Other tactics include generating false verification web pages, shortened links, cloned mobile applications and deceptive text messages, as well as product-identifier mismatch, where a genuine code is deliberately placed on a different product, batch or pack size than the one it was originally issued for.
Counterfeiters also reuse a single valid code across multiple bottles or locations to evade detection, and increasingly rely on online concealment, selling counterfeit products through social media and closed messaging platforms rather than open retail channels.
“It is not easy for a common person to identify counterfeited or illicit drinks, but as an authority we are doing our best to nab the rogue dealers,” King’a said.
To address the problem, ACA is proposing the introduction of a new authentication device in the form of a digitally verifiable certification mark carrying a unique identifier for each product, a measure the authority believes would make it significantly harder for counterfeiters to pass off illicit alcohol as genuine.
The scale of what is at stake extends well beyond seized stock values; a 2023 industry-commissioned study found that illicit alcohol made up around 59 per cent of total alcohol volume sold in Kenya in 2022, while ACA has separately estimated the resulting fiscal loss to the country from the illegal alcohol economy at approximately Sh71 billion annually, underscoring both the financial and public health stakes riding on the authority’s ability to close the capacity gaps it has now openly acknowledged.
