Public hearings on Finance Bill 2025 start across the counties

Public hearings on the Finance Bill 2025 have kick started today in the 47 devolved units with the National Assembly Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning urging Kenyans to actively engage in the process.

The committee’s Vice Chairperson, Ainamoi MP Benjamin Langat, said the process is essential in shaping the final version of the important Bill.

He urged citizens to evaluate the bill alongside the proposed 2025/26 budget estimates.

The budget statement would be presented in the National Assembly on June 12 by National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi.

“This is a very important exercise. This Finance Bill is a proposal to the National Assembly, and it has to undergo the necessary legislative process, including public participation to become law,” the lawmaker explained.

The legislator urged Kenyans to look into the bill as a whole and not in parts as it is important in creating some funds which will drive the future of the country.

“I want to implore the public to desist from looking at the Finance Bill in isolation. When you tell us to employ junior secondary school teachers, or even more nurses, the money to cater for that must come from somewhere. This Bill is the instrument we use to raise such funds,” Langat stated.

Last week, the committee was in Nairobi and today they’re expected in Busia and Migori before moving to Trans Nzoia and Nandi in Wednesday.

The Bill has already attracted a wide range of views from Kenyans and interest groups.

Among those who have raiseD concerns on the Bill are the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM), which wants clause 2 that seeks to broaden the definition of royalty removed.

According to KAM Chief Executive Tobias Alando the expanded definition would conflict with global standards.

“Under the right-based approach, only payment for the right of use, right to use, and copyrights qualify as royalties. The proposed expansion of the definition of ‘royalty’ deviates from the globally accepted definition that borrows heavily from the OECD’s rights-based approach under which only payments for the use of, or the right to use, copyrights qualify as royalties,” Alando said.

He added that payments for software sold off-the-shelf should not be classified as royalties under OECD rules.
KAM also called for industrial and medical gas cylinders to be exempt from the proposed 35 per cent excise duty on imported

gas cylinders.
The manufacturers have noted that these products, vital to sectors such as healthcare, are not produced locally and therefore should not be penalized.

“Importing this kind of gas cylinder attracts a 35 per cent excise duty, which was introduced in Kenya in 2019, primarily aimed at promoting local manufacturing and reducing reliance on imports for LPG cylinders, which at that time, under the EAC Common External Tariff (CET), has no distinct description from other compressed gas cylinders,” they explained.