The Kenyan government wants to charge you more to access its own services, and it’s trying to use new regulations to make that stick after courts twice told it the fee was illegal.
Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi has published draft regulations, the Public Finance Management (e-Citizen System Management) Regulations, 2026, that would replace the flat KES 50 convenience fee currently charged on eCitizen transactions with a tiered structure.
Under the new proposal as per Business Daily, services costing between KES 100 and KES 499 would attract a KES 5 fee.
Those priced between KES 10,000 and KES 99,999 would cost an extra KES 70. And for any service costing more than KES 100,000, Kenyans would pay KES 100 as a convenience fee on top of the service cost itself.
Services priced below KES 99, and those offered free of charge, would not attract any fee.
What this means is that accessing any of the more than 30,000 government services now on eCitizen, everything from passport applications to business registrations to birth certificate amendments, would cost more.
President William Ruto has said the platform collects about KES 2 billion daily, which gives you a sense of the scale.
Why Did the Courts Kill the Original Fee?
The KES 50 fee didn’t start with a law. It was introduced via a gazette notice and had no clear statutory backing. That became a problem in April 2025 when Justice Chacha Mwita of the High Court struck it down, finding it had no legal basis, was discriminatory, and had been imposed without public participation.
READ: Parents No Longer Forced to Pay School Fees Via eCitizen
Mwita described the charge as “irrational and unconscionable,” noting there was no explanation of who would receive the fee or what it would be used for.
The government tried to get the Court of Appeal to suspend that ruling while it filed an appeal. The appellate bench, led by Justice Daniel Musinga, dismissed the application, ruling that the potential harm alleged by the government was speculative and reversible. That was in November 2025.
Following the Court of Appeal’s decision, Attorney General Dorcas Oduor directed Treasury CS Mbadi to comply with the High Court order halting the collection of the KES 50 fee.
That directive came after a contempt of court application was filed against senior government officials who were accused of ignoring the judgment and continuing to collect the fee regardless.
The Private Companies Behind eCitizen
This is where things get interesting. eCitizen is presented as a government platform, and the government says it took full ownership in 2023, but in reality, three private companies run it.
Pesaflow Limited handles payment aggregation. Webmasters Kenya, which originally built the platform, manages technical operations. Olivetree Limited handles communications like bulk SMS.
Together, they earn an estimated KES 100 million to KES 200 million a month under a maintenance contract with the government.
According to the Auditor-General’s latest report, these firms collected KES 15.9 billion in convenience fees and an additional KES 8.57 billion in maintenance fees for the financial year ending June 2024.
Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu flagged serious concerns about the government’s actual control over the platform, warning that the absence of a backup system means a cyberattack could halt government services outright.
She also raised concerns about private firms holding sensitive citizen data with limited oversight.
Sources indicate Webmasters Kenya was initially contracted to develop eCitizen but later entrenched itself, complicating the government’s efforts to take full control of the system.
What Are the New Regulations Trying to Accomplish?
The draft regulations are a workaround. Since the courts struck down the fee for lacking a legal foundation, the government is now trying to anchor it in law through formal regulations under the Public Finance Management Act.
The regulations would also require all national and county government entities on eCitizen to stop operating their own revenue bank accounts, and all collections would flow through the platform.
Whether the courts will view regulations differently from a gazette notice remains to be seen. Critics had challenged the original fee partly because no one could clearly explain where the money went or what it was for.
READ: e-Citizen to Display Commercial Ads in Aggressive Revenue Drive
The new regulations don’t resolve that opacity entirely; they just give the fee a legal home. The three companies behind the platform stand to benefit directly from any increase in the fee volume, given how their contracts are structured.
For ordinary Kenyans, the more immediate concern is the creeping cost. The convenience fee was always controversial, not just because of the principle but because in some cases it approached the cost of the service itself.
A tiered system sounds more rational on paper, but doubling the top-end fee while the underlying legal disputes are still live in court is, at the very least, getting ahead of yourself.
The regulations are currently open for public comment in the same process whose absence got the original fee thrown out.
