WITHOUT NICOTINE ALTERNATIVES KENYA’s TOBACCO INDUSTRY IS GROWING

31st May 2022

By Joseph Magero, Chair, Campaign for Safer Alternatives

This World No Tobacco Day, Kenya appears to be further than ever from reducing cigarette sales and smoking. Its decision not to have any smoking reduction plan or policy since 2015, is proving to be good news for the smoking industry. For, without it, the government’s cocktail of ignoring nicotine replacement therapies and banning tobacco alternatives is leading to a surge in cigarette sales, according to global market researchers, in an unexpected windfall for the country’s cigarette producers.
For those of us who clamour for nicotine alternatives, the irony is we are frequently silenced by campaigners who claim we are lobbying for tobacco firms – as if saving thousands of Kenyans dying every year could never be our sincere motive.
But it’s a journey of policy contradictions that as early as 2016 saw one group of academics conclude in Oxford University Press’s Health Policy and Planning Journal that the Kenyan experience in tobacco control ‘offers useful lessons in the pitfalls of institutional incoherence’.
At the time, the country had just concluded a five-year plan on tobacco control. The 2010-2015 plan set a target of a 30 per cent reduction in smokers. A year before its inception, in 2009, the World Health Organisation had classed as ‘essential medicines’ the tobacco alternatives that had been shown repeatedly to be the best and most certain way of turning smokers into ex-smokers.
As pastilles, patches, lozenges and even pouches, these nicotine replacements and smoking alternatives don’t have tobacco in them and are not combustible – people don’t burn or light them – but they do stop the craving and withdrawal symptoms that come as smokers try to stop smoking cigarettes.
Yet, despite the WHO’s moves, the 2010 Kenyan plan, in all its 30 pages, never once mentioned nicotine replacement. Instead, it covered banning smoking in public places and medics telling smokers that smoking is harming their health: in case they didn’t know.
Inevitably, the plan didn’t meet its smoking reduction targets.
It was followed, in 2015, by a five-year strategy to stop non-communicable diseases, which reiterated the 30% reduction target for smokers, now to 2020. The following year, in 2016, the WHO launched a Global Hearts Initiative which placed curbing smoking center-stage, supported with technical packages. But Kenya stayed with a caller line to advise smokers cigarettes were dangerous, and the maintenance of restrictions on ads and public smoking.
This limited program failed, once again, to meet its target, but smoking had at least fallen. By 2019, according to market researchers GlobalData, Kenyans were consuming an average of 160 cigarettes per head, down 39.4 per cent on the levels of 30 years earlier.
However, that rate of decline has now all but disappeared, with GlobalData forecasting that cigarette volumes will rise in Kenya by 22.2 per cent from 2020 to 2030, to reach 10.02bn cigarettes a year, while per capita consumption will fall by just 0.3 per cent over those 10 years, to an average 153 cigarettes per person per year.

This stasis has seen lone voices raised. Dr Jumaa Bwika of the Aga Khan University Medical College last year observed in the Nation that smoking kills more people every year than the Covid-19 pandemic killed worldwide and throughout its entirety.
For this reason, the WHO is working tirelessly to stop tobacco use, while also working to make nicotine replacements available to smokers who want to quit.
In Kenya, by contrast, the anti-tobacco lobby has fused tobacco and nicotine into one and decries any voice seeking tobacco harm reduction or reduced smoking as a paid party.
Thus, nicotine pouches are being produced in Kenya that are selling across Africa and globally, but, in Kenya itself, they are banned.
As reviewed at our recent Africa Tobacco Harm Reduction Forum, studies show an almost constant two-thirds of smokers want to stop smoking, and that nicotine substitutes are the most successful way of achieving that. Indeed, without them, barely 3 percent of smokers a year do manage to stop. In the UK, smokers can even now get e-cigarettes from the government for free, because they deliver such health savings.
Yet, when BAT’s Lyft pouches were banned in Kenya in October 2020, the health minister asked the Pharmacy and Poisons Board to explain the basis for approving them as a pharmaceutical product. The minister never shared the answer with the public. But the board may just have used the WHO’s classifications, as, in Kenya, there is no policy on smokers’ health gains – despite the fact that stopping smoking cigarettes, within 24 hours, starts reducing health risks and deaths.
Elsewhere in the world, tobacco harm reduction is seen as a cause worth pursuing. But as our rising cigarette sales and ongoing smoking deaths bear testament, in Kenya, it’s not about stopping deaths. It’s about stopping nicotine replacements.

Joseph Magero, Chair, Campaign for Safer Alternatives. Images courtesy

KANU UNVEILS CANDIDATE FOR NAIROBI SENATOR

Nairobi, Kenya 28th May

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has cleared John Ochoti of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) to vie for the Nairobi Senatorial seat in the forthcoming general elections. Mr Ochoti has vowed to focus on Development, Youth and women Empowerment and ensure equity in sharing of government resources.

Mr Ochoti (In red) chats moments after getting cleared. Images courtesy Ken Okaka

In a post in his official Facebook platform Mr Ochoti wrote; “The race has now officially kicked-off, I’ve been to the ground and talked to the youth, women, the disabled, business community about my intentions to vie and now that I have been cleared I will now traverse Nairobi in a vote hunting mission.
Ochoti challenged his rivals in Azimio La Umoja-One Kenya Alliance to stop hanging on to the coalition’s presidential candidate Raila Odinga by using his name in their campaigns to get votes. He further added; “Nairobians are wondering why those interested for the Senate in Nairobi are busy campaigning in caravans with the Raila who is seeking for the presidency instead of going to the grassroots to talk about their agenda for Nairobi,” he said.
Ochoti said the candidates are not confident about winning that’s why they are in Raila’s campaign trail with the hope that the former Prime Minister will campaign for them too bt mentioning their names and asking voters to vote them in.

TRAVELLER CENTRE OPENS IN NAIVASHA WITH ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHARGING PORTS

NAIVASHA Kenya 19th May 2022

5 Mins Read

Kenyan real estate company Dowgate Properties has today opened its first Safari Centre highway service
station, on the A104 at Naivasha, in a new servicing model for motorists and travellers, offering facilities
from electric vehicle charging stations to children’s play areas, rest rooms, restaurants, and retail stores,
right beside the highway.
The centre’s electric charging points are the first outside Nairobi and will make it possible for high-end
electric vehicles to drive from Nairobi to Kisumu and back, by charging each way at the Naivasha Safari
Centre. This is the biggest expansion yet to the distance electric vehicles can cover in Kenya and comes
ahead of government plans to add charging stations countrywide.

“Car ownership and travelling have changed completely in the last decade and are set to change even
more as Kenyans, who now register seven times as many cars each year as they did 15 years ago, also
begin to shift towards electric vehicles (EVs). All these trends have created demand for a new kind of
service station for travellers on the country’s vastly expanded and upgraded highway network,” said
James Hoddell, Founder and Director of Dowgate Properties.
Hundreds of thousands of travellers now use Kenya’s trunk highways travelling much longer, continuous
distances than was normal when the roads were poorly surfaced and car ownership was less
widespread. However, this has made tiredness a real danger for drivers, without adequate stops. Kenya
has one of the highest rates in the world of lethal road accidents, with the majority taking place on the
three major highways of Nairobi to Thika, Nairobi to Mombasa and Nairobi to Nakuru and Eldoret. These
roads also account for most of the country’s 80-plus accident hotspots.
Tiredness causes around a quarter of all fatal and serious road accidents, with tiredness-related crashes
most likely to occur on long journeys on monotonous roads or highways, according to The Royal Society
for the Prevention of Accidents in the UK. Stopping the vehicle in a safe place, drinking a caffeinated
drink and taking a short nap are the only ways to relieve dangerous levels of tiredness while driving, the
society reports.
“Drivers need to be well rested and refreshed, in order to be vigilant, alert and safe,” said Derrick
Ngokonyo, the Naivasha Safari Centre Manager.
The Naivasha Safari Centre is being anchored by supermarket Naivas and a wide range of eateries,
including ArtCaffe, Chicken Inn, Creamy Inn, Galitos, and Pizza Inn. It also offers a car wash, pharmacy

children’s play areas and events, as well as an entirely new kind of designer-rest room, under Dowgate’s
high-tech rest-room brand, Loo4U, a petrol station, curio shops and a Dr Mattress store.
Naivas has opened at the Safari Centre with plans to service some of the 400,000 local shoppers in and
around Naivasha, as well as the estimated 200,000 travellers a month who are expected to stop at the
service centre.
The Safari Centre is the first of many, now at various stages of construction by Dowgate Properties, with
the next due to be built on the Nairobi to Nyeri road at Makutano in Kirinyaga. With further electric
charging stations at Makutano, the developer’s second centre will ensure it is possible to travel from
Nairobi to the Mount Kenya region by electric vehicle