Kenya's National Assembly will redo its debate on the Tea (Amendment) Bill after the Speaker found a lawmaker took part without declaring three tea-sector directorships.

Speaker Moses Wetang'ula ruled that Gatundu South MP Gabriel Kagombe participated in the bill's Committee of the Whole House debate on March 12 without disclosing his directorships in Theta Tea Factory Company Limited, KTDA Holdings Limited, and Majani Insurance Brokers Limited, according to The Star and The Standard. Wetang'ula ordered the committee stage held afresh and said the March 12 proceedings should not be relied on.

The ruling followed a complaint from Nyeri tea farmer John Kennedy Omanga, who asked that the earlier proceedings be declared null and void, the Daily Nation reported. Wetang'ula said Kagombe's failure to declare his interest risked casting any decisions on the bill in an unfavorable light.

The Tea (Amendment) Bill, 2023, sponsored by Sen. Hillary Sigei and Hon. Brighton Yegon, would add a levy of Sh3.85 per kilogram of sold tea, a cost the bill's opponents say would run to roughly Sh31 million a year for each smallholder factory, or at least Sh2 billion across Kenya's 71 smallholder factories. The bill would also exempt value-added tea from the levy and loosen rules so factories can sell directly overseas. The Senate passed it on Oct. 8, 2024, before it moved to the National Assembly.

KTDA Zone Six board member Enos Njeru and other smallholder-factory directors have opposed the bill publicly, saying Parliament drafted it without consulting factory directors and that it would disrupt factory investment and supply agreements, including fertilizer procurement.

The bill is separate from the Tea (Levy) Regulations 2026, the Sh2.28-per-kilo export levy that took effect May 1 and has already pushed buyers toward untaxed Rwandan and Ugandan tea at the Mombasa auction, as this publication reported this week. Both measures add cost at different points in the chain: the export levy applies at the point tea leaves the country, while the proposed Sh3.85 levy would apply to tea sold through the smallholder factory system that supplies most of Kenya's crop.

KTDA-managed factories process tea grown by roughly 700,000 smallholder farmers, the bulk of Kenya's tea sector by volume. A levy layered onto that system, on top of the export levy already in force, would compound costs already squeezing the margin between the auction floor and the farmer's payout.

Sources: The Star, Speaker orders fresh debate on tea Bill over conflict of interest; The Standard, Why Speaker Wetang'ula has ordered fresh debate on tea Bill; Daily Nation, Conflicted: How MP Kagombe got colleagues to shelve Tea Amendment Bill.