Landlords On KRA’s Radar

Good evening. It’s Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street.  In today’s newsletter, the markets staged a tidy rebound in April even as inflation lurked beneath.

Also, after Sebastian Sawe’s record-breaking race on the roads of London, a columnist weighs how much of the feat was engineered and how much was endured.

But first…landlords, for a long time half-seen by the taxman, are now firmly in his sight.

Landlords On KRA’s Radar

By Harry Njuguna

For years, Kenya’s rental market has lived in a comfortable ambiguity; visible enough to tax in theory, but porous enough to evade in practice. That looseness is now being closed, as the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) moves to end the voluntary regime and force landlords onto a digital register under the eRITS system, a shift driven by an estimated KSh 83 billion annual revenue gap.

What began as a modest 7.5% tax experiment on rental income has, in the state’s accounting, become a story of under-declaration on a national scale, with enforcement now replacing persuasion as the organizing principle. The draft rules extend beyond compliance mechanics such as mandatory registration, penalties for opt-outs, and strict reporting thresholds, but also expose a more basic tension between formal taxation and an informally structured property economy.

As a quiet corner of Kenya’s real estate economy is being folded into the state’s digital gaze, landlords could turn to their tenants to meet the costs. 

Read the article here >>>>>

Manufacturing : Modest Gains in a Struggling Sector

By Brian Nzomo

Kenya’s manufacturing sector inched forward in 2025 with a modest 2.1% expansion, its gains carried less by breadth than by a narrow surge in construction-linked output. Cement and related industrial materials led the advance, riding a building cycle that masked a deeper retreat in agro-processing, where declines in sugar, tea, and fruit quietly pulled against the headline growth.

The result is a sector that is expanding in volume but shrinking in economic weight, its share of GDP slipping further even as output rises. Employment and credit ticked upward, and export-oriented zones showed renewed life, yet the internal composition tells a more uneven story of what is actually being made. What emerges is not quite a revival but a redistribution, with manufacturing increasingly tethered to construction demand rather than agricultural value chains that once defined it.

Read the analysis here »»»»»

How the Stock Market Performed in April

By Harry Njuguna

April opened with a sharp rebound on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), recovering KSh 174 billion in market value after March’s sell-off. The rally, as usual, was led by banks and key blue-chip stocks, and held through most of the month before fading in the final weeks, when losses returned and liquidity began to thin.

Meanwhile, inflation surged to 5.6%, driven by a fuel shock that pushed energy costs through transport and utilities and into everyday prices. Treasury bill yields climbed, foreign investors remained net sellers, and rising oil prices tightened the conditions beneath the surface of the equity recovery.

By the time April closed, the market stood higher on paper but caught between a recovering index and an economy tightening under geopolitical shocks. 

Read the full market analysis here >>>>>

Was Sebastian Sawe’s London Marathon Feat a Product of Technology?

By Maxwell Muttai, Sports PhD researcher

Sebastian Sawe’s sub-two-hour performance at the London Marathon was a clean rupture in the Kenyan record books. Another Kenyan runner bending the limits of distance running. Almost immediately, the debate shifted away from the athlete and toward the apparatus around him: carbon-plated “super-shoes,” refined foam engineering, and carbohydrate strategies that now push the boundaries of human fuelling. In this article, long-distance races are no longer solitary acts of endurance but have evolved into a calibrated meeting point between physiology and industrial design. The argument against technology as the true author of the feat falters against the longer history of the sport, from Eliud Kipchoge’s own engineered breakthroughs to the steady escalation of training science that has always accompanied faster times. What remains is not a contradiction between man and machine, but a continuity in which Sawe’s performance stands as both personal mastery and the latest expression of an increasingly optimized era.

Read the full article here >>>>>

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