Under Kenyan law as it stands, a company becomes the competition regulator’s problem mainly by being big. The Competition Act treats a firm as dominant once it controls half the goods or services supplied in Kenya, and section 23 pulls the threshold down to firms holding 40% to 50%, or below 40% where the firm has market power anyway, but every route to a finding begins with a share of a market.

The Competition (Amendment) Bill, 2026, published in February as National Assembly Bill No. 4 and sponsored by the Leader of the Majority Party, Kimani Ichung’wah, adds two ways of being powerful that have nothing to do with share.

The first it calls a strategic market position. Under a new section 4(4), a person holds one where they influence prices, quality, service, output or innovation to an appreciable extent, independently of competitors, suppliers, users or consumers. For digital markets, section 4(5) tells the Competition Authority of Kenya to weigh network effects and the entry barriers they build, economies of scale including access to data, the cost of switching and whether users can run rival apps side by side, pressure from innovation, and how far businesses depend on the company to reach their customers.

The second, a superior bargaining position, is the one that reaches ride-hailing. Section 4(6) says a person holds one where they create an imbalance in the rights and obligations of a commercial relationship and the counterparty cannot find a viable and satisfactory alternative. Section 4(7) then strips out the hard part, because the Authority would not have to establish dominance or market power at all.

What it would cover

The bill names no company and does not use the words ride-hailing anywhere. The link runs through a new Part IIIA, which turns abuse of a superior bargaining position into an offence and offers eleven examples without confining the prohibition to them. Several read like grievances Kenyan drivers have been airing for years:

varying contract terms without notice to the other party
failing to give terms and conditions before the service starts
transferring costs or commercial risk onto the other party
charging service fees above competitive levels
unreasonable collection or processing of the other party’s data
imposing unduly difficult conditions for ending a service

Deactivation lives in that last item. We have written before about how algorithmic management sits in a legal grey area in Kenya, where a driver answers to software rather than a supervisor and the software can end their access to work.

The net widens elsewhere too. Clause 2 counts a natural person as an undertaking, which makes a driver one in their own right, and Clause 6 adds “intermediates a transaction” to the definition of a dominant undertaking, so that facilitating deals between buyers and sellers counts alongside producing, supplying and distributing.

Nobody would have to go to court over any of it. The Competition Authority of Kenya, which handles everything from merger approvals to consumer complaints, could open an investigation under a new section 40C on its own initiative or on a complaint from any person, agency, ministry or consumer body, and Clause 5 would let it run an inquiry across an entire sector. Whether it uses any of that is left to its discretion.

The money

Both new offences carry up to KES 10 million, five years in prison, or both. That figure has led most of the coverage, and it is the smaller of the two numbers worth knowing. A new section 91A would let the Authority levy an administrative penalty worth up to 10% of a company’s gross annual turnover in Kenya for the preceding year, recoverable as a civil debt once the company has had a hearing. Clause 13 sets the same percentage for anyone who ignores a lawful order, but drops the words “in Kenya”, so that one reads as a share of total turnover.

The banks spotted it.

In memoranda to the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning, reported by People Daily on 22 July, the Kenya Bankers Association argued that a penalty pegged to total turnover would punish large institutions out of all proportion to the breach, and asked for a ceiling of 1% of the turnover from the affected service or KES 100 million, whichever came out lower. The association also wants the Authority to demonstrate “substantial and durable market influence” before it labels anyone as holding a strategic market position, on the argument that a financial product should not attract the label merely by becoming popular. The committee’s chairperson, Kuria Kimani, said the recommendations would be weighed as it writes its report.

Techweez reported on 24 July that the KES 10 million penalty attaches to abuse of a strategic market position, but the bill creates no such offence. That concept feeds the test for dominance, while the penalties sit on buyer power and superior bargaining position. Nor is the buyer power penalty new, whatever its billing: section 24A of the current Act already carries the same fine and the same prison term, and already lets the Authority order a sector to draw up a binding code of practice. Clause 7 deletes that section and Clause 9 puts it back under a different heading, because the memorandum concluded its old home among restrictive trade practices had never made sense.

The rules already there

Kenya has regulated ride-hailing economics twice already. The NTSA regulations of 2022 capped platform commission at 18% of trip earnings and made companies file the procedures by which they activate and deactivate drivers, and Uber brought its commission down from 25% to comply. When we looked at what that cap produced, the platforms had not left the country; they had rebuilt around vehicle financing and bundled services to keep drivers attached. The Ministry of Roads and Transport is now drafting rules for a minimum payment per trip, and Business Daily reported in July that when the ministry asked 18 licensed platforms to propose rates, the companies refused, on the grounds that the government would not say what figure it had in mind.

Competition law would be the third layer and the narrowest of the three. It fixes no fares and orders nobody to pay drivers more, and does little beyond giving a regulator grounds to ask how terms are written and when they change.

Whether the country needs a third layer is a fair argument. Ride-hailing is already the most heavily governed corner of the gig economy while making up about a fifth of it, against 42% for e-commerce, which Ipsos measured in March 2026 and which nothing comparable governs. Against that, the bill was plainly not drafted with ride-hailing in mind: its definitions sweep in app stores, online marketplaces, search, cloud services and online advertising, the same territory the Authority has been circling in delivery, and the objection on the record so far has come from banking rather than transport.

Where it stands

Second reading opened on Tuesday 30 June, ran out of time, and was relisted for the following afternoon. The National Assembly is on recess until 30 July. Public participation has finished, so the next document worth reading is the Finance and National Planning committee’s report, still being written on 22 July, which should show whether the 10% penalty survived the banks and whether any driver association put anything in writing.

One drafting problem deserves attention before then. Clause 6 adds a paragraph deeming a company dominant where it holds under 40% of a digital market but has “market power including a significant market position”. Since the Act already deems a sub-40% firm with market power dominant, that closing phrase is the whole of what the new paragraph contributes, and the bill defines it nowhere. What it defines, in section 2 and again in section 4(4), is “strategic market position”, while section 4(5) reaches for a third formulation, “a strategic market”. The same clause puts “intermediates a transaction” into the paragraph about goods rather than the one about services, which is where a ride-hailing app or a delivery app would sit. The clause deciding which companies the law applies to rests on a term that appears nowhere else in the bill, and it should be tidied up before this goes further.