The Bale That Began in Manchester: How Kenya's Mitumba Tax Retreat Reaches the Diaspora Donors and Importers Behind Gikomba

The bale weighed forty-five kilos and had been pressed shut in a warehouse outside Leeds three weeks earlier. By the time a woman called Phyllis cut its plastic strap open inside her Gikomba stall on a Saturday morning in May, the clothes inside had crossed six borders, sat on two ships, paid duties in Mombasa, and travelled on the back of a matatu through Nairobi traffic that does not move quickly even at dawn. The bale cost her seventeen thousand shillings. The cardigan she pulled from the top of it, soft grey wool with a small Marks and Spencer label sewn into the collar, would later sell for three hundred. The arithmetic of mitumba, Kenya's second-hand clothing trade, runs on margins that thin.

This week that arithmetic almost changed. National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi had proposed, in the Finance Bill 2026, a five percent tax levied directly at the port on the customs value of every imported mitumba bale. He withdrew the proposal on Friday after sustained pushback from market traders and consumer groups. By Saturday morning, traders at Gikomba and at Toi Market in Kibera said they had heard the news and were relieved. But the proposal has not really gone away, and the people who watched it most closely were not all in Nairobi. Many of them were nine time zones west, in Texas and New Jersey and Maryland, where Kenyan-American small business owners run the import end of a trade that almost no one outside it talks about.

How a Cardigan Travels From a Hospice Shop to Gikomba

The bale Phyllis bought began life in a hospice charity shop in Greater Manchester. A retired teacher, sorting through her late husband's wardrobe, dropped off the cardigan along with six other woollens in a black bin liner. The shop kept three of the items for its window display and bundled the rest into a textile bank operated by a recycling contractor. Within ten days the cardigan was inside a forty-foot container at Felixstowe port, headed for Mombasa via Dubai. Charity-shop overstock and curbside textile-bank donations from the United Kingdom alone produce roughly seven hundred thousand tonnes of used clothing every year, and Kenya is one of the largest single buyers of what cannot be resold inside Europe.

According to the Mitumba Consortium Association of Kenya, the country imported one hundred and eighty-five thousand tonnes of second-hand clothing in 2019, the most recent year for which a full audit exists, and the number has grown since. Roughly two million Kenyans earn a living somewhere in the chain, sorters, hawkers, tailors who recut Western suits to Nairobi shoulders, the boys with handcarts who move bales from Mombasa rail siding to wholesale lots in Eastleigh.

Why Treasury Wanted the Tax, and Why It Backed Off

Mr Mbadi's proposal in the Finance Bill 2026 was framed as a simplification. Under the current regime, mitumba importers face sixteen percent VAT plus an income-tax exposure that, in theory, could climb past thirty percent, although enforcement is patchy and most small importers settle a lower negotiated bill. The Treasury argued that a clean five percent deemed-profit charge collected at the port would be easier to administer and would close the gap with formal retailers who pay tax in full.

What the proposal did not account for was the speed at which traders organised. The Mitumba Consortium said in a statement quoted by Capital FM and the Daily Nation that a flat port-level tax would land hardest on the smallest sellers, the women who buy one or two bales a week and resell from a tarpaulin in Toi or Kongowea. By Wednesday Mbadi had hinted he would withdraw. By Friday the clause was gone. He told reporters at Treasury Building that the principle of broadening the tax base on imported textiles was still alive, and that a revised version would be brought back in a future bill.

The Diaspora Importers Few People Talk About

Roughly nine thousand kilometres away, in an industrial park in Irving, Texas, a Kenyan-American businesswoman named Mary runs a small warehouse that buys credentialed textile waste from American charity networks, presses it into bales, and ships containers to Mombasa twice a month. She is one of perhaps three dozen Kenyan diaspora business owners in the United States who do something similar, mostly out of Texas, Georgia, New Jersey and Maryland. Their margins are tight too. A container costs her about nine thousand dollars to ship and clear. A five percent tax at Mombasa would not have ended her business, she said in a telephone interview with a Kenyan diaspora podcast last week, but it would have forced a price increase that her wholesale buyers in Gikomba would not absorb.

That detail matters because the mitumba trade is one of the quieter ways the Kenyan diaspora touches everyday life back home. It is not as visible as remittances or as photogenic as a Diaspora Summit at State House. But the people who choose the bales sitting on pallets in Dallas, who decide whether to ship more wool or more denim that month, are answering to a market four thousand miles away that they grew up shopping in. Several of the larger US-side importers send a portion of profits back to Kenyan church and school groups in the same loop as remittances.

Why the UK Watches the Vote

In the United Kingdom, where roughly one hundred and twenty thousand Kenyans live and where the charity-sector textile pipeline is the densest in Europe, the Treasury proposal was read with surprising attention. Industry groups representing British charity shops have warned for years that East African import restrictions on second-hand clothing would leave them holding stockpiles they cannot otherwise place. When Rwanda raised mitumba duties sharply in 2018, charity-shop chains in the Midlands reported six-figure losses inside a single fiscal quarter. A Kenyan five percent levy is much smaller, but the trade body Textile Recycling Association noted this week that any cumulative tightening across the East African Community pushes more clothing into landfill on the UK end too.

The Argument That Is Not Settled

Mr Mbadi has not abandoned the broader case. In remarks reported by Nairobi Wire and the Standard, he told a Treasury briefing on Thursday that mitumba imports remain a structural drag on Kenya's textile manufacturing, including the Export Processing Zones in Athi River that employ several thousand mostly young women stitching uniforms and basic apparel. His argument is the one African finance ministries have been making for a decade: that a country importing a hundred and eighty thousand tonnes of used Western clothes a year cannot also build a domestic garment industry that produces those same items at competitive prices. The counter-argument, which Kenyan consumers and traders made loudly enough to force a retreat this week, is that the local industry does not yet exist at the scale needed, and that taxing the cheapest clothing available to a working-class household will be felt long before any new factory opens.

For Phyllis at Gikomba, the question is more immediate. She has two daughters in secondary school and a brother in Dubai who sends three hundred dollars on the first of every month. The cardigan from Manchester is folded now on her display table. By midday, she said, it will be wrapped in newspaper and gone.