Operations at the Mombasa port have been affected by outages on the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) system over the past five days, leaving consignments of tea for export worth more than Ksh3.25 billion ($25 million) stuck at the different port facilities.
Traders in other sectors are also counting losses due to persistent downtime of the KRA’s integrated Customs Management System (iCMS), the sole system to lodge documents for goods' importation and exportation.
The situation is expected to worsen in the coming days after the KRA acknowledged the failure urging traders to suspend any lodging of documents until the system is restored.
“This is to notify all our esteemed stakeholders that our online services are unavailable due to technical challenges. We apologise for the inconvenience caused and kindly request for your patience as our technical team works to restore normal operations," read a notice from KRA to clients.
At the Mombasa tea auction, traders failed to export the tea traded last week, resulting in huge losses with some consignment missing scheduled shipments.
“The KRA system downtime has resulted in enormous losses incurred by the tea exporters and further halting of exports will have negative ripple effects at the Mombasa Tea Auction, which may further depress tea prices that have recently shown improvements since the removal of tea reserve prices by the government," said East African Tea Trade Association (EATTA) chairman Arthur Sawe.
Mr Sawe said that if the system is not restored and maintained, Kenya is likely to lose billions of shillings for export and the nine countries that trade at the Mombasa tea auction.
The chairman of the Tea Buyers Association, Peter Kimanga said a number of vessels have returned without cargo due to hitches with the KRA clearing system.
EATTA Managing Director George Omuga said if the government does not resolve the matter on time, Kenya might be categorised as a non-reliable supplier due to frequent system failure.
“We are incurring storage costs since cargo cannot leave warehouses since last week while those at the port, cannot be loaded as documents cannot be processed. This has resulted in huge loss from our end,” said Mr Kimanga.
“There is a need to have an alternative cargo clearance system apart from iCMS as a fallback plan as there is an information exchange problem between PGAs. We also request the government to facilitate billing be done on a monthly basis,” said Mr Omuga.
