The capacity problem, road safety question and how NTSA is morphing into a revenue collector

It was to consolidate the fragmented functions then scattered across the Transport Licensing Board, the Traffic Department, the Kenya Roads Board's safety unit and several other bodies into one agency capable of "harmonizing the operations" of Kenya's road transport departments and instituting an effective, coordinated management system for the sector.

Road safety was the animating purpose

Thirteen years later, that purpose is barely recognizable in the agency's day-to-day conduct. What Kenyans now encounter is an NTSA whose most visible energy goes into designing new fee structures, new mandatory products and new compliance regimes, often with revenue projections attached before the safety case has been made.

The clearest illustration is the mandatory vehicle inspection saga of 2026.

A mandate quietly redefined

Under the Traffic (Motor Vehicle Inspection) Rules, 2026, gazetted in February as Legal Notice No. 13; NTSA sought to compel every privately owned vehicle older than four years to undergo annual roadworthiness testing, backed by fines of up to Ksh.20,000 or six months in jail for non-compliance.

NTSA Director-General Nashon Kondiwa framed the policy as both a safety and, strangely, as a "national security" measure, arguing it would tighten the integrity of Kenya's vehicle registry.

Officials also disclosed, almost as an aside, that full compliance across the country's more than six million registered vehicles could generate roughly Sh12 billion a year in booking and inspection fees.

That figure did more to shape public reaction than any safety statistic did. Within days of the rules taking effect on 1st July 2026, the High Court in Kiambu suspended enforcement against private non-commercial vehicles pending a constitutional challenge, one of at least three separate petitions filed against the regulations.

The Senate's Committee on Delegated Legislation went further, recommending the outright annulment of the inspection rules along with parallel regulations on school transport and commercial vehicle operations, because NTSA had bypassed the Senate's constitutional role in scrutinizing legislation affecting counties.

NTSA itself then retreated, telling traffic officers not to demand inspection certificates from private motorists "until further notice," with Kondiwa conceding that mandatory enforcement would be deferred until the agency has built adequate capacity.

How many cars would actually be affected?

Here, the record is thinner than the scale the policy suggests. Kenya's total registered vehicle fleet stood at 4,973,017 as of December 2024, according to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics data, of which roughly 2.43 million were non-motorcycle vehicles, that is, cars, buses and trucks.

The remainder is made up of motorcycles (private and boda-bodas) and three-wheelers locally known as “Tuk-tuks”.

NTSA's own public messaging has instead used the rounder, larger figure of "over six million registered vehicles," and because most of Kenya's private fleet is composed of older second-hand imports, commentators have estimated that somewhere in the region of 90–95 percent of vehicles on the road are more than four years old and would therefore fall under the new rules.

Tellingly, Kondiwa himself admitted before the Senate that the authority does not know the precise number of vehicles currently on Kenyan roads. Could it be that motorists in Kenya might have to pay the government, under the guise of inspection, for the NTSA to know the number of private vehicles on Kenyan roads?

A yawning gap for a regulator asking the public to accept criminal liability for non-compliance with a scheme it cannot yet size accurately.

The capacity problem and the cost claims

NTSA has conceded it operates only 17 government-owned inspection centers nationwide to serve 47 counties, and by December 2026, according to Kondiwa's own timeline in court-related filings, it plans to expand to somewhere between 47 for government-run inspection points, 70 for licensed private-run inspection points, totalling over 100 inspection centers.

On the cost of building this capacity, the public record is inconsistent.

Cabinet Secretary for Roads and Transport, Davis Chirchir, told legislators in May 2026 that establishing a single government inspection center costs approximately Ksh.3 million, a figure that, extrapolated across even 30 new centers, is still a lot of money before staffing and operating costs are added.

Kondiwa gave a different cost per inspection center which is extremely high, at around 100 M shillings to realize one licensed inspection center. The conflicting information is confusing and further driving down the reliability of the agency.

NTSA's gazetted license fees for private operators wishing to run inspection centers range from Ksh.300,000 for a mobile unit to Ksh.1 million for a fixed center in a high-demand county cluster.

What is not in dispute is the revenue arithmetic. Applying the gazetted fee structure, Ksh.1,000 booking plus up to Ksh.1,000 inspection charge for an ordinary saloon car, doubled from the roughly Ksh.1,000 flat fee that had stood for years, across the eligible fleet yields a projected annual take running from a conservative Ksh.6 billion to the authority's own headline figure of Ksh.12 billion.

That is a substantial fiscal expectation to build around a policy whose implementing agency admits it lacks the infrastructure, the precise vehicle count, and, pending the outcome of ongoing litigation, arguably the legal standing to enforce it.

A pattern, not an isolated episode

The inspection rules are the most dramatic example, but they sit inside a broader pattern. NTSA's rollout of second-generation "smart" driving licenses, contracted through a 21-year public-private partnership with Pesa Print Limited at a cost of Ksh.3,050 per license, was itself suspended by the High Court in May 2026 after the Road Safety Association of Kenya challenged its legality.

An associated automated traffic enforcement system, built around 1,000 planned surveillance cameras, and a linked instant-fines regime were separately halted by the Kerugoya High Court over constitutional and data-protection concerns.

NTSA has also pushed motorists toward electronic logbooks, justified publicly because the paper system was vulnerable to forgery, a legitimate concern, but one that, like the new-format number plates rolled out in recent years, arrived bundled with fresh charges rather than as a free administrative upgrade.

Each of these initiatives shares a structure: a stated safety or integrity rationale, a compulsory compliance requirement with penalties attached, a new fee, and recurrently a court challenge citing inadequate public participation.

The Law Society of Kenya's petition against the inspection rules argued explicitly that motorists faced "considerable hardship" from fines and arrests over provisions they were neither consulted on nor adequately informed about.

That the same objection, insufficient public participation under Article 10 of the Constitution, has now been raised against multiple NTSA programs in succession suggests an institutional habit rather than a one-off oversight.

Road safety: the numbers NTSA cannot find its way out of

The irony sharpens when set against NTSA's actual safety record. Kenya's National Bureau of Statistics reported 5,009 road deaths in 2025, up 5.5 per cent from 4,748 in 2024, continuing a rise that has been essentially unbroken since 2021, when the country recorded 10,210 crashes; by 2025, that figure had climbed to 11,638.

Early data for 2026 shows the trend continuing: NTSA itself recorded 2,150 road deaths in the first half of the year, an 11 per cent increase over the same period in 2025, with pedestrians and motorcyclists, and not private car occupants, accounting for the overwhelming majority of fatalities.

NTSA's own economic modelling puts the annual cost of this carnage at roughly Sh450 billion in lost GDP, with some estimates reaching Ksh.800 billion, and warns the toll could reach 10 per cent of GDP by 2030 without intervention.

Kondiwa has defended the private-vehicle inspection push by citing a statistic that private vehicles and motorcycles account for 62 per cent of accidents nationally.

But NTSA's own fatality breakdowns tell a different story about who actually dies: pedestrians consistently top the list, followed by motorcyclists and passengers, categories whose deaths are more plausibly linked to road design, enforcement of speed limits, matatu overloading, and driver behavior than to whether a privately owned saloon car has a current inspection sticker.

No published, peer-reviewed research accompanying the 2026 rules demonstrates that annual roadworthiness testing of private cars would meaningfully reduce pedestrian or motorcyclist deaths, the two categories driving the mortality trend. Nor has NTSA published the cost-benefit analysis that opposition figures and civil society groups have demanded before imposing a nationwide compliance obligation.

Meanwhile, NTSA's own acknowledgment that Kenya's ageing public transport fleet persists largely because operators lack affordable financing, not because inspection regimes are absent, since commercial and PSV inspections have existed for years, points to root causes the authority has shown little appetite to address.

Speed governors are already mandatory on public passenger and heavy commercial vehicles and are already routinely tampered with under existing inspection regimes; adding private cars to a system that has not stopped that abuse does not obviously fix the underlying enforcement gap.

It is also worth noting NTSA's own admission, delivered on national television, that officers are required to verify inspection stickers using a mobile app precisely because the sticker system is vulnerable to manipulation, a tacit concession that the certificate itself is not what keeps unsafe vehicles off the road.

The corruption question and the missing partners

Kenya's transport bureaucracy has long carried a reputation, fairly or not, for informal "facilitation" at weighbridges, inspection yards and roadblocks.

Commentators reviewing the 2026 inspection rules have pointed out that Kenya already inspects its public service and commercial vehicles, the categories most associated with speeding, overloading and fatal crashes, and that this existing regime has not visibly curbed the abuse. Buses and matatus that cause fatal accidents typically carry valid inspection stickers.

Extending the same regime to millions of additional private vehicles, critics argue, multiplies the opportunities for the kind of informal roadside transactions the current system has failed to eliminate, without first demonstrating that the underlying enforcement problem has been fixed.

Equally conspicuous is what NTSA has not prioritised: coordinated action with the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) and the Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA) regarding the physical condition of the roads themselves.

Road design and infrastructure gaps are cited by officials, including KeNHA's own regional leadership, as a significant contributors to crashes, alongside human factors such as distraction and fatigue.

Yet NTSA's public communications and enforcement drives are overwhelmingly oriented toward motorist-facing compliance products, inspections, licenses, logbooks, and plates, rather than toward joint infrastructure audits, blackspot remediation, or published data pinpointing how many of Kenya's road deaths are attributable to vehicle mechanical failure as opposed to poor road design, absent lighting, or missing pedestrian infrastructure.

The International Road Assessment Program star-rating system, NTSA says it is piloting with road agencies, is a step in that direction, but it remains an emerging initiative rather than the center of the authority's public agenda.

What would sticking to the mandate look like…?

None of this means vehicle inspection, safer licensing, or digital records are illegitimate goals, every one of them has a plausible safety rationale, and Kondiwa's point that the inspection fee had not moved in decades while other costs rose is a fair one on its own terms.

The problem is sequencing and proof. A regulator that wants public trust for a nationwide compliance regime needs to first publish the data on how many vehicles are actually involved, what mechanical failure contributes to fatal crashes as distinct from human error and road conditions, what the realistic implementation timeline and cost actually are, and to run the constitutionally required public participation process before gazetting rules with criminal penalties attached.

It needs a credible, audited plan for the money already collected under existing fee structures, since critics have pointed out that the financial and legal framework governing the custody and use of projected billions in inspection revenue has not been disclosed.

And it needs to treat KURA and KeNHA as partners in a single safety strategy rather than operate inspection and licensing policy in isolation from road-condition policy.

The NTSA Director General’s offhand dismissal of claims that the inspection program is primarily intended to generate revenue for the authority is, at best, limp.

He argues that NTSA has several other avenues for raising income, so why would it continue on a revenue-raising campaign for the government, as their lives depended on it?

To show they still have more avenues for revenue collection, Kondiwa revealed that the authority is also exploring the possibility of introducing an auction system for premium vehicle number plates as an avenue to generate funds, no problem at all, as they would be targeting the “rich-boys” club and not a compulsory payment with harsh penalties if not paid.

The government, not to be beaten in its quest to collect more revenue from the public, has published a new Bill in the Senate which proposes to require motorists to subject their vehicles to mandatory annual emissions tests before renewing insurance, licensing or inspection certificates. Those who fail to comply could face fines of up to Ksh.500,000 or one year in jail.

The same questions facing the NTSA should be addressed by the government. Fuel quality in the country is controlled by government agencies and having lowered the quality of fuel imports over the last three months, it is anybody’s guess why they want to compel the public to yet another debacle of revenue collection dressed as a safety matter; or is this also a security matter?

Kenya's 2030 target of halving road deaths is achievable only if the agency charged with road safety spends its political capital on interventions with demonstrated impact, pedestrian infrastructure, speed enforcement, driver competency retesting for flagged offenders, PSV operator financing reform, rather than on expanding the list of things motorists must pay NTSA for.

Until that reordering happens, the public's suspicion that NTSA has drifted from safety regulator toward a second revenue authority will keep finding fresh evidence to feed on.