中文Ruto Wants Kenya to Stop Importing Shoes in Three Years. The Hides Say Otherwise.
Kenyan President William Ruto has set a deadline that would terrify most trade ministries: he wants Kenya to stop importing shoes within the next two to three years. The declaration, made at the Agriculture and Food Security Presidential Town Hall at Jamhuri Park in Nairobi, is the most explicit statement yet of his government’s intent to shift leather and footwear from a raw-material export business into domestic manufacturing.
It is also, on the available evidence, a target the country’s supply chain cannot currently meet.
What was actually said
Two commitments came out of the Nairobi session, and they are worth separating because they have very different feasibility profiles.
The first is the footwear import substitution goal — an end to shoe imports within two to three years as the government seeks to expand local manufacturing, reduce reliance on imported leather products, and generate jobs from the country’s livestock resources.
The second is more immediately actionable: Ruto called for tighter controls on hides and skins being smuggled to West Africa, and for a reduction in exports of unprocessed materials. He also called for greater investment in the collection, handling and processing of hides and skins.
That second set of measures is where the real work sits — and where a genuinely strange market failure is visible.
The hides are being eaten, not tanned
The detail that should stop any tanner in their tracks: large quantities of Kenyan hides are being smuggled through unofficial routes to West Africa, where they are consumed as food.
This is not a tanning problem, it is a by-product economics problem. When the food value of a hide in one regional market exceeds the leather value a processor is willing to pay at origin, the material leaves the formal chain. Once that arbitrage opens, no amount of export paperwork closes it quickly. The smuggled hides never reach a tannery, never enter a traceability system, and never generate a single unit of value-added export. Kenya loses on both counts — the raw material and the manufacturing job that should have followed it.
Ruto’s emphasis on collection, handling and processing infrastructure is therefore well aimed. Kenya’s chronic weakness has never been the absence of cattle; it is the cold chain, the flaying quality, the curing and the aggregation that determine whether a hide arrives at a tannery in a state worth processing. Poor flay marks and delayed salting destroy value before any commercial decision is made.
Why three years is not a plan
The import substitution target deserves scrutiny rather than applause.
Kenya does not currently have the installed tanning and footwear manufacturing capacity to serve its domestic shoe market. The country’s footwear demand spans formal leather shoes, school shoes, security and uniform footwear, safety boots, sandals and a very large volume of low-cost synthetic and second-hand footwear. Replacing that basket in three years would require simultaneous expansion in wet-blue and finished leather capacity, component supply — soles, linings, threads, adhesives, hardware — and a workforce trained in lasting, stitching and finishing.
Those are not political variables. They are capital and skills variables, and both move on multi-year cycles. A tannery takes two to three years from decision to commissioning. A footwear line takes months but needs trained operators who do not exist in sufficient numbers yet.
There is also a consumer price problem. Imported footwear occupies price points that domestic production cannot match at launch volumes, particularly in children’s and budget segments. Where governments have imposed abrupt footwear import restrictions, the result has typically been a price shock at the bottom of the market and a surge in informal cross-border inflows that undercut the very manufacturers the policy was meant to protect.
What would actually work
The credible sequence runs the other way round: secure the raw material, build tanning capacity, then substitute imports.
First, make hides valuable enough to stay. That means formalising collection, paying competitive prices at origin, and enforcing export controls specifically on raw and wet-salted material — the same instruments Eswatini, Nigeria and Ghana are now debating. Kenya should be pricing hides against their finished-leather potential, not against a West African food market.
Second, invest in tanning quality before quantity. Buyers in Italy, Turkey, India and China will pay for consistent Kenyan wet-blue and crust. That export revenue funds the next stage far more reliably than protection does.
Third, integrate the public buyer. School shoes, police and military footwear, and hospital clogs are predictable, tendered volumes that let a domestic manufacturer plan capacity. Several African states have used uniform procurement as the anchor order that makes a factory viable. Kenya has the same lever and has not used it at scale.
Ruto’s instinct — that a livestock country should not import its own shoes — is correct, and it is the same instinct driving leather strategies from Nigeria to Eswatini. But three years is a slogan, not a supply chain. The hides currently crossing into West Africa as food are the clearest evidence that the first battle is not against imports at the border, but against value leakage at the abattoir.
Source: Leather News (leathernews.org)
