A week ago, NTSA Director General Nashon Kondiwa gave himself a deadline. On Monday 15 June, on Citizen TV, he said the authority would clear its backlog of unprinted number plates “within the next three days.” He had inherited more than 30,000 plates that Kenyans paid for but never received, and his team had cleared 5,000 in three months.
That window closed around 18 June. As of today, there is no public confirmation the backlog is gone. No statement, no fresh figure. The plates may be moving, but the pledge that made headlines has lapsed without an update.
The bigger news from that interview was overshadowed, and it deserves a harder look. NTSA’s proposed answer to the backlog is not to fund the current system properly. It is to stop making plates itself and bring in private firms.
NTSA’s argument, and why it does not hold up
Kondiwa told viewers the government should not be in the business of producing and selling plates and licences, that Kenya has done so since independence, and that NTSA would license private producers “in the coming days,” as Kenyans.co.ke reported. The plan leans on a private investor to finance production and run up to 290 walk-in licence centres.
The claim underneath this is that the state cannot do the job, so the private sector should. The record does not support that. Under the public model, NTSA issued documents at a clear profit. MPs reviewing the licence system noted it returned KES 6.7 billion on a KES 1.2 billion investment between 2017 and 2024. A service that makes more than five times what it costs is not a failing operation. It is a profitable one.
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The money problem is self-inflicted
So why the backlog? Follow the money. You pay KES 3,050 for a plate. Importers pay heavy excise duty at the port. The cash exists. The problem is where it goes.
Kondiwa himself supplied the answer to MPs. He said 60 per cent of NTSA’s revenue is remitted to the National Treasury, leaving the authority too little to reinvest. He said NTSA is “not even negotiating our own money,” because the revenue goes elsewhere. When Treasury is slow to release funds back, suppliers go unpaid, materials run out, and plates do not get printed. The Motorists Association of Kenya made the same point in February.
That reframes everything. The plates are not stuck because making them is impossible. They are stuck because the government collects the money, keeps most of it, and returns it late. The obvious fix is to let NTSA retain enough of its own revenue to pay suppliers on time. Privatisation does not do that. It does not return a shilling to the public. It moves a money-making public service into private hands while motorists keep paying the same fees.
What privatisation would actually hand over
We do not have to guess how this goes, because NTSA already runs a version of it. A 21-year partnership covering smart driving licences and traffic automation is under scrutiny in Parliament right now. The National Assembly’s Public Debt and Privatisation Committee found the private partners would keep roughly 77 per cent of projected revenue, leaving the government with less than a quarter. The committee called the split unfair to the public, flagged how the deal was procured, and asked to summon Treasury’s PPP unit.
There is also a legal cloud. Court orders from the Kiambu Law Courts have suspended the partnership component of NTSA’s instant-fines camera programme, the same plan we covered when NTSA proposed 1,000 new road cameras. That is the template now being proposed for plates. A profitable public service, handed out on terms where the public keeps the smaller share.
What this means if you are still waiting
For motorists in the queue, nothing has changed today. Check your status at servicestatus.ntsa.go.ke. Keep your payment receipt. Do not improvise with printed paper or cardboard plates. NTSA has said the law makes no allowance for them, and a vehicle without valid plates still carries legal risk.
It helps to see where this sits in NTSA’s wider digital push. We already explained how the authority retired the paper logbook for a digital eLogbook on 10 June. The online parts work well. The parts that need steady funding, like printing a physical plate, are where things jam, and that is a budget choice, not a technology limit.
Bottom line
The backlog is real and motorists are right to be angry. But the cause is a funding decision, not evidence that the state cannot make a number plate. NTSA collects the money. Treasury keeps most of it. The cheaper fix is to let the authority keep enough of its own revenue to pay its suppliers. Instead, the plan on the table hands a profitable public function to private investors, on the kind of terms Parliament has already called unfair. Before anyone celebrates faster plates, the question to ask is who ends up owning the pipeline, and who keeps the money you pay into it.
