Mureithi Wa Lucy By a Concerned youth:
#ifikieUhuru
Hi Jackson, kindly hide my,identity am glad you copied a story on the Challenges the Young Film Makers go through to get licences and the post on Naivas Licenses on the Cost of doing business in Kenya. Our President is talking about Manufacturing as one of the Big Four Agenda yet he doesn’t know what the ground is like and his hostile Government officials and Wicked policies are what is making us an importing Nation.
Here is our Story,
We are a group of 7 youths and we decided to do something different in our area, you know all our agemates are doing the same thing like Selling Muguka, retail shops, Boda boda, selling clothes, some are in the illegal Ngeta business, Prostitution…… I came up with the idea of Recycling and Manufacturing and my group bought the idea. It took us almost a year to come up with money which we saved, sold some of our livestock and borrowed from our friends and family.
We bought machines of about 100k some manual and an electric one. Raw materials were old tyres and we collected plastic bottles choking our rivers. My parents let me use our 1 acre land and We got a license worth 6k from our county Government and started our bizness. We made Furniture from the old tyres, rubber granules for small playgrounds, akala shoes, from the tyre wires we made chain links while the plastic bottles we crushed them and sold to factories. Business was good until some Government officials from Multi Agency companies visited our site. They told us we were doing illegal business and we should visit their offices for licenses.
We travelled to Nairobi and visited KEBS where we were asked for 200 of each of our product and 5,800/- for inspection fee. Getting all our products to KEBS required about 300k. Then we visited NEMA where we were told that for such a business we need to do it in a Go Down and the licenses for recycling and Manufacturing would cost us about 80k. The cheapest Go down we got was going for 70k per month and the owner needed us to pay for four months. When we visited the owner to negotiate for the Go Down he saw we were youth and he changed his mind and told us he needed a year payment. We were then told to visit two music corporations, KRA, Fire inspection……. Almost twenty offices! For us to get all this licenses and inspections it needed over a million shillings. We closed down our business, counted our losses and sold all our stock. Our dream was shattered just like that.
I came to understand why youth unemployment was so high in Kenya but I hope and pray one day we will have a leader who would have the Youth in their heart. Ni hayo tu kwa sasa.
Very demoralizing …..
