The streets of Nairobi and major towns across Kenya are echoing with a familiar, painful cry. The recent hikes in pump prices by the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA), driven by global supply chain disruptions and volatile geopolitical tensions, have triggered nationwide strikes, gridlocked transport sectors, and pushed the ordinary mwananchi to the brink. To the casual observer, this is purely a macroeconomic or fiscal crisis. But as legal minds and environmental advocates, we must look deeper. The unrest on Kenyan streets is a symptom of a much larger, systemic failure: our collective, stubborn dependence on a volatile fossil-fuel economy, and the absence of a legally mandated, equitable transition to green alternatives.
The statistics underpinning this wave of protests paint a stark picture of Kenya’s vulnerability to global markets. In its latest pricing cycle, EPRA announced an unprecedented surge, pushing Super Petrol in Nairobi to KSh 214.25 per litre and sending Diesel to a historic record of KSh 242.92 per litre. These sharp adjustments are heavily tied to soaring international landed costs, with diesel landed costs jumping over 20% in a single month due to critical trade bottlenecks along the Strait of Hormuz. Despite the government deploying KSh 5 billion from the Petroleum Development Levy Fund to cushion consumers, and past legislative efforts to manage the Value Added Tax on fuel, domestic interventions are consistently outpaced by global volatility. This demonstrates a harsh structural truth: we cannot simply tax or subsidize our way out of an inherently unstable fossil-fuel paradigm.
It is critical to recognize that fuel is the invisible thread woven into the fabric of every Kenyan household; it touches absolutely everyone. When diesel surges, it operates as a regressive tax on the entire economy. It instantly inflates the cost of farming inputs, processing, and manufacturing. Most painfully, it dictates the price of food on the mama mboga’s stall, as the cost of transporting fresh produce from agricultural hubs to ur ban centers skyrockets. Even the cost of electricity reacts to these shifts due to fuel cost adjustments on thermal generation. For low-income families, expensive fossil fuels trigger a desperate downward slide on the energy ladder; households unable to afford basic commodities often revert heavily to charcoal and biomass, accelerating local deforestation and worsening urban air pollution.
This brings us to a crucial legal nexus, connecting Article 42 of the Constitution of Kenya—which guarantees every citizen the right to a clean and healthy environment, directly to our national energy realities. Historically, environmental rights have been litigated through narrow lenses like localized industrial dumping or illegal logging. True thought leadership, however, demands that we treat systemic fossil-fuel dependence as a core environmental rights issue. Under the Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act (EMCA) and the Climate Change Act (2016), Kenya is legally obligated to mainstream climate resilience and low-carbon pathways. The current crisis exposes a severe legal disconnect: while our environmental statutes demand mitigation, our fiscal and energy practices remain entirely hostage to foreign oil imports. Governments often justify heavy fuel levies under the guise of eco-taxation, arguing that high prices act as a natural deterrent to carbon emissions based on the “polluter pays” principle. Yet, in a developing economy, a tax can only function as an environmental deterrent if the consumer possesses a viable choice. Without a reliable, electrified public transit network or accessible e-mobility infrastructure, a fuel levy is not a progressive green tax—it is a punitive fiscal instrument that directly violates the constitutional principles of Intergenerational Equity and Social Justice enshrined in Article 10.
To cushion Kenyans from ongoing market shocks while honoring our statutory environmental obligations, we must transition from reactive protest to structural reform, focusing heavily on reshaping our vulnerable public transport sector. The public transport industry, dominated by the matatu sector, is the lifeblood of Kenyan mobility and must be the primary staging ground for sustainable solutions.
First, the government must enact a dedicated Just Transition Act to legally ring-fence a portion of the Petroleum Development Levy exclusively for green public transport infrastructure rather than absorbing it into general budget deficits. This framework should fund the rapid deployment of a fully electrified Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in major cities, creating an alternative that protects commuters from fluctuating global oil margins.
Second, we need strategic eco-fiscal swaps within our tax laws. The National Treasury should permanently eliminate import duties, VAT, and corporate taxes on commercial electric vehicles (EVs), high-capacity electric buses, and charging station components, actively resisting any legislative attempts to roll back green tax incentives.
Third, instead of penalizing the transport sector, the Ministry of Transport and the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) should introduce phased legal mandates requiring public transport Saccos to transition a set percentage of their fleets to electric power over the next decade. To make this actionable, the state must partner with local financial institutions to provide low-interest green lines of credit and asset-financing frameworks, allowing matatu owners to transition to e-mobility without passing capital costs onto commuters.
Finally, we must democratize energy governance through radical transparency, ensuring that government fuel-import arrangements are subjected to mandatory, publicly accessible climate risk and socio-economic impact assessments in line with constitutional requirements for public participation.
The protests on our streets serve as an urgent warning that a nation cannot build a sustainable economic future on a volatile, carbon-heavy foundation. True thought leadership demands that we stop treating environmental law as an isolated, academic pursuit and start wielding it as a practical tool for macroeconomic resilience. It is time to structurally shift the national debate. The critical question is no longer “How do we temporarily lower the price of fossil fuels?” It is “How do we legally and strategically break free from them?” Only by decoupling our transport and agricultural sectors from the uncertainties of foreign oil can we fulfill the constitutional promise of a clean, healthy, and economically secure future for all Kenyans.
