Divergent demands threaten to stall Kenya’s new anti-tobacco push Government agencies and stakeholders are offering conflicting paths for overhauled tobacco laws. Health Just now

The Bill would also raise pictorial health warnings from 40 per cent to 75 per cent of the front and back surfaces, mandate plain packaging, ban hawking and mobile vending, prohibit all online sales of tobacco products, e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches, ban single-use plastics in tobacco packaging and disposable vapes, extend advertising bans to social media and influencer marketing, and require county governments to license local tobacco dealers alongside a new national dealer-registration system run by the Ministry of Health.

Its most consequential proposal is a statutory requirement that not less than 30 per cent of all tobacco and nicotine-related tax, licensing fee and penalty revenue be ring-fenced by law for cancer prevention, tobacco cessation services, treatment support, health promotion and research, channelled through a new, parliamentarily accountable Tobacco and Nicotine Harm Reduction Fund the institute wants created from scratch.

Kenya's push to rein in cigarettes, shisha, e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches came under intense scrutiny last week as the National Assembly's Departmental Committee on Health convened a stakeholders' forum on the Tobacco Control (Amendment) Bill, 2024, drawing competing memoranda from government agencies, with each pulling the legislation in a different direction.