KRA published fifteen approved vendors on 11 September 2026. Every one of them fits a device built to the same technical specification, because KRA wrote that specification. This makes the usual procurement instinct — compare the hardware — close to useless.

What follows is what we would ask if we were on the buying side.

1. Both cargo categories, or one?

The framework separates eSeal, for containerised and general cargo, from eFuel, for petroleum products and tankers. Not every approved vendor carries both. A mixed fleet that contracts a single-category vendor ends up managing two agreements, two accounts and two monitoring relationships for one operation.

If your fleet has tankers, establish this in the first conversation. It eliminates candidates quickly.

2. What is the replacement commitment, and is it contractual?

Every vendor will tell you their devices are reliable. Devices fail anyway — batteries, antennae, physical damage at a rough loading point. The question is what happens next.

Push for specifics: how many hours, measured from what event, at whose cost, and is it written into the service schedule or is it a sales promise. A commitment that appears in the agreement is a commitment. One that appears only in a presentation is a hope.

3. Where are the technicians?

Service geography cannot be discounted into existence. A vendor with technicians at Mombasa, on the Nairobi stretch and near the western border points can honour a short replacement window. A vendor with one Nairobi team cannot, whatever the contract says.

Ask for the list of service points. Then ask how many technicians are at each one, because a “service point” can mean a desk.

4. How does the seal event reach iCMS?

If sealing and de-sealing events do not reconcile automatically against the customs entry, someone on your side reconciles them by hand. For a transporter running a handful of transits a week this is an irritation. For a clearing agent running entries for multiple principals it is a headcount.

Ask to see how an exception is handled, not just how the happy path works.

5. Has the vendor run this at national scale before?

Customs tracking at corridor scale is an operations business wearing a technology badge. Monitoring centres need rosters. Alerts need escalation paths. Technicians need spares in the right place.

A vendor with a live deployment for a revenue authority has been through the parts of this that do not appear in a proposal. Ask which authority, which country, which phase, and whether it is in production or still a pilot.

6. What does the pricing actually cover?

Few vendors publish rates, and for good reason: price turns on corridor, volume and category, so a published figure would be wrong for most fleets. That is not a reason to accept vagueness.

Establish whether the rate is per transit or per device per month, who owns the device, what happens to an unreturned unit, whether fitting and de-fitting are included, and what a replacement costs you when the fault is not yours. The last one is where the difference between vendors shows up on an invoice.

7. How fast can they actually start?

Every remaining week before 26 October compresses the fitting queue. A vendor quoting a four-week onboarding in early October is quoting you a gap in operations.

A workable sequence looks like this: registration, a short discovery call, a proposal within three working days, an agreement inside ten days, and fitting within five days of signature. Roughly two weeks, with the fitting slot as the real constraint.

Questions that do not help

Battery chemistry. Ingress protection ratings. Screenshots of dashboards. All of it is governed by the same specification, and none of it predicts whether your truck moves on a Sunday night.

Where we sit

Keshi Holdings and Leavitt Holdings operate as a joint venture on the KRA approved schedule, covering eSeal and eFuel under one agreement, with a two-hour in-transit replacement commitment lodged at prequalification and a live customs authority deployment in the DRC.

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