The new chairman is a tax-and-value-chain man inheriting a sector whose share of the economy has quietly slid to a decade low. His CV fits the problem. The harder question is whether advocacy can finally become delivery.
When the Kenya Association of Manufacturers board announced the election of Hitesh Mediratta as its chairperson on Thursday, the press release did what press releases do — reaffirmed commitments, championed competitiveness, invoked the industrialization agenda. The more interesting story sits behind the ceremony. Mediratta is taking the helm of Kenya’s most influential industrial lobby at arguably the toughest moment the sector has faced in years.
The data tells it plainly. Manufacturing accounted for KSh 1.25 trillion, or 7.1% of GDP, in 2025, growing just 2.0% in real terms — its slowest pace in the current series, according to the KNBS Economic Survey 2026. That is a slight drop from 7.3 per cent in 2024, and part of a longer slide: manufacturing has fallen from 11.5% of GDP in 2009 to 7.1% in 2025, the most significant compositional shift in the economy over that period. Set against the national ambition to increase manufacturing’s contribution to GDP to 20% by 2030, the arithmetic is unforgiving. Four years remain to almost triple a share that is currently going the wrong way.
To KAM’s credit, the sector’s own framing has long been that the shrinking share masks real growth — factories are expanding, just more slowly than finance, telecoms and retail. That is defensible. Output still rose, and employment in the sector increased by 5.2 per cent to 388,564 persons in 2025, accounting for 11.7 per cent of total formal wage employment. But the pressures underneath are real. Total manufacturing output was constrained by slowed activity in food-related segments, with sugar production declining by 24.8 per cent. The Stanbic Bank Kenya PMI fell to 47.7 in March 2026, indicating a contraction in private-sector activity — the first in months.
This is where Mediratta’s profile becomes worth reading closely. He is the managing director of PG Bison Kenya, a furniture manufacturer — meaning he has run a business that competes head-on with cheap imports, one of the sector’s loudest complaints. Within KAM he has chaired the Timber and Furniture Sector and, tellingly, served as vice chair of the Trade and Tax Board Committee. That last credential matters, because tax and regulation are precisely where the sector says the pain is concentrated.
Consider what he inherits in his own portfolio area. Manufacturers are struggling with cash flow amid VAT refund arrears that stood at KSh 35 billion by the end of February 2026. The regulatory burden keeps climbing: the Standards Levy Order of 2025 set the KEBS levy at 0.2 per cent of a manufacturer’s monthly turnover, capped at KSh 4 million annually. And perhaps the most damning figure of all — a 2025 KAM regulatory audit found that illicit trade accounted for between 8.9 and 9.3 per cent of GDP, exceeding the manufacturing sector’s own contribution of roughly seven per cent. In other words, the shadow economy competing with legitimate industry is now larger than legitimate industry itself.
Mediratta already knows this terrain. In his previous role as KAM board vice chair, he framed the coming year in exactly these terms, noting the sector needs to work out how the private sector and government can collaborate over the next year to ensure that manufacturing increases and jobs are created. His stated priorities as chairman — a level playing field, equitable value chains, evidence-based solutions to tax and policy challenges — read less like boilerplate and more like a direct response to the audit findings.
The transition also carries a continuity signal. He succeeds Jane Karuku, EABL’s group managing director, who remains on the board as an ex-officio member. His deputy, Mary-Ann Musangi of HACO Industries, chairs KAM’s Women in Manufacturing programme — a leadership pairing that keeps institutional memory in the room while broadening the association’s public face.
So the appointment is well-matched on paper: a tax-and-value-chain operator taking over a tax-and-cost crisis, backed by an experienced deputy. The genuine question — the one no press release will pose — is whether that match produces different results. KAM has been making broadly the same asks for years: lower power tariffs, predictable taxes, relief on industrial inputs, a crackdown on illicit trade. Successive chairs have championed them with conviction. The reforms remain largely unwon.
Mediratta’s two-year term will be judged not on the eloquence of the advocacy, which KAM has never lacked, but on whether any of these long-standing demands finally move. On that measure, the clock — and the 2030 target — are already running against him.