All car and motorbike owners in Kenya, even non-residents, have 18 months to convert their number plates to the new digital number plates ordered by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The decision came after a very long parliamentary process, which was also prolonged by opposition from companies that had been going to the Kenyan High Court since 2013 in order not to lose their previous contracts to print the vehicle identification plates used until now.
In the end, the government, which has always considered the new digital number plates an important tool for the identification of vehicle owners and the impossibility of cloning them or producing plates for non-legal uses, won the battle and was able to activate the process whereby the institutions themselves will produce and distribute the new plates.

The current system, as national media have pointed out in recent days, is subject to abuse by criminals and unscrupulous car dealers who use a single registration document for several cars and divert vehicles in transit to neighbouring countries to the local market without paying the duty.
"The court ruling only prevents us from awarding a tender to a company to produce the number plates on our behalf, as was the plan all along, but it does not prevent us from doing it ourselves," said a senior security official on condition of anonymity, so that the matter, still pending in court, could be freely discussed. Motorists have the next 18 months to buy new number plates at a cost of 3,000 shillings per vehicle. The new plan saves taxpayers billions of shillings that the government would have paid to contractors.

The new number plates will have anti-counterfeiting features including holograms, watermarks and laser markers. They will be part of a broader security system that includes next-generation driving licences and an Integrated Transport Management System (TIMS) used to manage the acquisition and transfer of vehicles.

This system will not only control the dual registration of vehicles, but also make it easy for security agencies to obtain, on the spot, all the necessary details on any vehicle through a link to a central government database managed by the National Intelligence Service.

By simply scanning a number plate with a handheld digital device, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies and the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) will instantly obtain the vehicle owner's name, registration number, engine and chassis numbers, and previous owners' history.

The Kenya Bureau of Statistics KNBS estimates that just under five million vehicles are currently on the road in Kenya and 126,000 were imported in 2021 alone, a steady annual increase of about 14 per cent, from 2015 to date.

"The National Transport and Safety Authority NTSA will invite Kenyans to change their number plates, it will then be compulsory to do so within these 18 months," said Transport Minister Joe Mucheru during the launch of the new number plates, "the decision is part of the reforms initiated by President Uhuru Kenyatta.

The new digital number plates will therefore have to be displayed on all vehicles, trailers, tractors, heavy mobile machinery and motorbikes registered in Kenya by the end of 2023.