Kenya Court Halts Rollout of New Gambling Licensing Rules

Kenya’s High Court has frozen the country’s new gambling licensing regime just weeks after it took effect, leaving one of Africa’s biggest betting markets without a working way to license operators. On July 20, 2026, Justice William Musyoka granted a stay order against the Gambling Control (Licensing) Regulations 2026 — the rulebook meant to carry Kenya’s overhauled gambling law into practice. Because those rules apply only to licensed businesses, the order effectively puts the entire licensed market on hold.

The regulations sit at the center of Kenya’s biggest gambling overhaul in decades. The Gambling Control Act 2025 replaced betting legislation dating to 1966 and handed oversight to a new regulator, the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Kenya, in place of the old Betting Control and Licensing Board. The Act itself took effect in August 2025; the detailed licensing rules were published on June 30, 2026 and came into force on July 3, 2026 — only for the court to suspend them just over two weeks later.

The challenge was filed by Thomas Buckley Opar Owuor, a Nairobi lawyer who spent close to three years as a business development director at betting operator Sportpesa, together with Ken Brance. They are asking the court to scrap the current licensing regime outright, contesting both the substance of the rules and the way they were made.

A fight over public participation

The heart of the case is constitutional. Kenya’s 2010 constitution makes public participation a founding principle of how laws and rules are written, and the applicants argue the government ignored it. Their claim is that the capital requirements in the final regulations were steeper than the figures put out for public consultation, so operators never got to comment on the numbers they are now expected to meet.

David Sarinke, a partner at Kenyan law firm McKay Advocates, told iGaming Business that the public-participation ground is likely to shape the case’s prospects, because the applicants say material provisions were added after the draft was published without further consultation. His firm has flagged one such late change: the removal of a planned combined online licence — meant for operators running both online betting and online casino — that earlier draft versions had carried through consultation.

The applicants also question who signed the rules at all. They contend the Act gives the power to make gambling regulations to the cabinet secretary responsible for the sector, not to Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi, who signed them — a second line of attack on the regulations’ validity.

Higher barriers, fewer operators

The disputed rules raise the cost of doing business sharply. Under McKay Advocates’ reading of the regulations, minimum gambling capital runs from 5 million Kenyan shillings for land-based bingo to 2 billion shillings for the national lottery, with online verticals such as online bookmaking and online casino each carrying a 100 million shilling capital floor. The applicants told the court some licence fees jumped by anywhere from 200% to nearly 50,000% — pointing, for example, to a land-based bookmaker renewal fee they say rose from 5,000 shillings to 2.5 million — alongside a new 6% charge on gambling advertising budgets.

Those thresholds are widely expected to thin the market. Industry representatives warned the court that the higher compliance costs could push many of Kenya’s roughly 188 licensed operators to close, taking jobs, investment and tax revenue with them. The stay also blocks the regulator from ordering mobile-money providers such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa and Airtel to cut off payments to operators that fail to comply — a step that would have given the new regime immediate bite.

The overhaul had been sold as a cleanup of a market that grew fast under light oversight. For well-capitalised international operators, higher capital floors and the Act’s requirement that Kenyan citizens hold at least 30% of any licensee promised a more consolidated, more credible field; for smaller local operators, the same numbers read as an existential threat. How Kenya settles the question will be watched across Africa’s wider iGaming market.

What happens next

The stay is interim, not final. Owuor and Brance have 14 days to file their substantive judicial review motion, after which the regulator, the government and the Association of Gaming Operators Kenya get 14 days to respond. The High Court has set September 21, 2026 to give directions on how the case will proceed, and until it says otherwise the licensing rules stay frozen. The Gambling Regulatory Authority had not publicly commented on the ruling.

Sarinke called the freeze “a big blow,” noting that the new law is already in force while the framework needed to license anyone under it now sits in limbo. The tighter capital and licensing rules meant to draw serious, well-funded operators — the same pitch other jurisdictions are making as they build out international licensing regimes — are also the ones now tied up in court. For now, Kenya has a new gambling law and no working way to license the operators it governs.