Over 4,000 licences issued to bar owners and operators are fake, Nacada chairman John Mututho has said.
Mututho claims that the National Authority for Campaign against Drug Abuse (Nacada) has discovered that some of the licences issued to the operators were forged and not genuine. Mututho said that this has forced anti-drugs agency to begin profiling all the facilities that either handle or distribute alcohol to ensure the right quality of drinks for Kenyans.
Speaking to the press in Naivasha, the former area MP lamented that increased cases of people forging licences had cheated the government out of a lot of revenue.
He said: “The report released by the auditor general indicated that majority of the premises have fake documents. We fear that in the process, this might have led to the licensing of illegal factories who end up jeopardising the health of Kenyans.”
“We now want to monitor who is selling what and its right contents since more than 50 percent of the alcohol sold in Kenya is bad,” added Mututho.
Mututho revealed that the Nacada is in the process of sanctioning all the authorities involved in alcohol distribution.
“We demand for all the legal documents but no one should worry if they obtained their papers genuinely. We also noticed that over 50 percent of the establishments here are illegal.”
Mututho blamed the increased cases of alcoholic drinks deaths to the illegal licences. He said it was a very hard task to trace the owners of the factories. He, however, added that Nacada will start profiling over 340 components on the local and international drinks in the market.
“We are aware that some drinks are laced with aflatoxins and herbicides. The factories doing this are among those using the 4,410 licences stolen from Nacada,” he added.