In the twilight of Kenya’s legislative calendar, buried within a proposed legislation masquerading as liberation for artists, lies one of the most audacious acts of exclusion in the nation’s creative history. The Creative Economy Bill, 2026, thrust before Parliament with the promise of transforming Kenya into a cultural powerhouse is, upon closer examination, not a framework for the creative economy at all. It is a audiovisual concession, dressed in inclusive language, designed to serve one sector while systematically marginalizing every other.
This is the great deception.
The Bill carries a title that promises everything to every creative Kenyan — musician, painter, actor, playwright, fashion designer, digital innovator, writer. Its operative clauses deliver nothing to most of them.
The Anatomy of a Lie “Seems Good, But its Bad”
Clause 2 of the Bill defines creative industries, and Clause 5(1) sets the scope. On paper, the Bill appears to embrace visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, design, and digital arts. But this is theatrical inclusion. The institutional architecture, the machinery that actually implements the law, tells an entirely different story.
Part II of the Bill establishes two new state bodies: the Kenya Audio-Visual and Cinema Commission, and the Kenya Audio-Visual Regulatory Authority. The names leave no ambiguity. These are film institutions. The Kenya School of Film and Creative Arts (Clause 37) is not a school of dance, not a school of music, not a school of literature. It is a film school.
Every shilling budgeted, every officer employed, every regulation flows toward one destination: the screen. Musicians, theatre practitioners, fashion designers, and visual artists who create outside the audiovisual domain have no institutional champion within this law.
The Colonial Mirror
The Bill’s approach mirrors the very colonial instruments it purports to replace. The Films and Stage Plays Act (Cap. 222), which this legislation seeks to repeal, was criticized for its narrow focus on film and theatrical regulation. The Creative Economy Bill, in creating an institutional architecture so audiovisual-specific that it effectively excludes non-screen creative sectors, does not break from that tradition, it modernizes it.
The Numbers That Tell the Story
Kenya’s creative economy employs hundreds of thousands of practitioners across disciplines far broader than film. The music industry generates billions annually, yet receives no dedicated promotional institution within this Bill. Theatre, a cultural cornerstone in communities from Nakuru to Nairobi, is consigned to the same bureaucratic category as a feature film production. Visual arts, crafts, and fashion, sectors that could drive rural economic development and youth employment, are afterthoughts in legislation that claims to champion the creative economy.
A Question of Credibility
Kenyan artists are not naive. They recognize legislative poetry when they see it, the inclusive preamble, the broad language, the progressive promises. They also recognize legislative practice: the narrow mandates, the sector-specific institutions, the budgetary realities that follow institutional mandates.
The Creative Economy Bill, 2026, continues this tradition. Its promise of a creative economy is false. Its promise of institutional support for all creatives is false. Its promise of a framework that embraces the full breadth of Kenya’s cultural practice is false.
The question before Parliament is not whether to amend this Bill. The question is whether to believe the deception one more time.
Kenyan creatives deserve better. They deserve a law that means what it says and says what it means, a law that establishes genuine promotional architecture for all creative sectors, not just the ones with access to corridors of power.
The Creative Economy Bill, in its current form, should be abandoned entirely. Not amended. Not committee-reviewed. Abandoned.
By Alex Gakuru – Director Center for Law in Information Technology (“Claw-IT”) is a a consultant on technology policy, cyber law and governance at the intersection of technology and society.