A year ago, President Kibaki accented to the Anti Counterfeits Act as Kenya's manufacturing sector buckled under the weight of fake and cheaply priced goods, especially from Asia.

Kenya's sole battery-maker Eveready East Africa has now attributed its poor showing in the past three years to substandard dry cells from India and China.

This Act could not come into force without an agency to implement it.

But the Minister for Industrialisation Henry Kosgey has now put the board in place and signalled the government's intention to take the war to the goods pirates. That is the way forward.

Counterfeiting of goods has been rife in Kenya.

About 37 brands of counterfeit and substandard batteries were early this year banned from the Kenyan market.

And recently, with the help of police, medicines manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline raided a residential home in Nairobi's Donholm estate and confiscated counterfeited and substandard drugs worth Sh5 million that had been targeted at unsuspecting consumers.

Obviously, the medicines would have posed health hazards to consumers had they reached stores across the country.

Other than posing health risk to consumers and denying the government the much needed tax revenue, the substandard goods are slowly killing Kenya's manufacturing sector that has been struggling to repair the knocks it got from the post-election violence in 2008.

Kenya's manufacturing sector has been wobbling.

According to the Economic Survey 2009, the sector recorded negative growth as it suffered under the weight of counterfeits that trade freely in the local market.

This is not good for an economy which prides itself as the largest in east Africa.

Such is the gravity of quality and standards situation in Kenya that the appointment of members to the Anti Counterfeit Agency Board will serve to stop the bleeding of our manufacturing sector so as to save jobs and the country's reputation as a manufacturing giant in east Africa -- a preferential trading bloc that has just signed a protocol for a seamless trade across the borders.

But the free flow of goods across the borders comes with its own challenges including the proliferation of pirated goods.

We hope that the new board, which is to be inaugurated in December, will work hard to stop fake goods from draining the potential of Kenya's manufacturing sector.

But the government also needs to move with speed to provide the new board with facilities needed for operations.

First, to achieve its independence, the agency should be housed differently from its parent ministry and secondly the government needs to enhance its budgetary allocation to enable it hire its own staff.

But the agency also needs to have its own law enforcement arms.

If this is not possible, it could help if police officers were attached to the organisation to help it with its investigations and enforcement of the law.

We also hope that the government will move fast in inaugurating so that it can start working immediately.