A total of 1,021 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of consolidated goods belonging to small-scale traders have been cleared at Kenya Railways Boma Line (National De-consolidation Centre) in the last nine months.
All consolidated cargo imported by sea and transported to Nairobi through the Standard Gauge Railway, is deconsolidated, cleared, and collected by the owners at the Transit Shed.
Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) Commissioner General Mr. Githii Mburu, in a recent statement, said that the establishment collected KShs 1,046,719, 812 in customs revenue. The deconsolidation centre has seen an increase from clearing six containers in November 2020 to 106 in June 2021.
Mr. Mburu, together with the management from other government agencies hosted the Principal Secretaries who are members of the National Development Implementation Committee at the Kenya Railways Transit Shed during a tour of the facility recently.
Since its establishment last year, no trader has lost his/her goods and complaints relating to delayed cargo clearance significantly reduced. This means the de-consolidation of cargo is secure.
The Boma Line transit shed has been expanded to handle up to 30 TEUs in a day from four containers last year. The government through KRA gazetted the Shed among other various facilities to be used for deconsolidation to ease and speed clearance of cargo imported by small-scale traders.
The facility has significantly reduced the cost of doing business for small-scale traders. Currently, it takes less than 24 hours for cargo to be transported from the Port to Boma Line where it is immediately cleared and released for pick up by the traders. Traders in Nairobi CBD pick their goods on carts or Pick Up trucks and hence avoid last mile costs.
KRA intends to further simplify the process by introducing mobile apps for both clearance and payment of taxes.
The transit shed is expected to serve approximately 7,500 small traders in Nairobi and its environs and has capacity to accommodate approximately 100-40-foot containers per month, raking in an approximately Sh110 million in revenue.
It is estimated that there are approximately 7.41 million Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) contributing approximately 30 per cent of the country’s GDP growth.
The facility will complement the ICDN which has been critical in KRA’s revenue basket, with a monthly average revenue collection of Sh10.32 billion last year.
