On March 21 and 22, the CAF Champions League enters its decisive phase: the quarter finals second legs are set to kick off. This is a test of fortitude, where there’s no room for mistakes. AfroPari takes a look at the upcoming weekend, when the tournament will eliminate the weaker teams and keep only those who are ready to fight for the trophy.
What to expect from the quarter-finals?
Each pair has already played the first leg and is now approaching the decisive second leg. It’s the aggregate score from the two legs that will determine who will continue their journey towards the trophy and who will be watching the semi-finals on TV.
The competition is still dominated by the top African football clubs: Pyramids, Al Ahly, Espérance de Tunis and AS FAR. However, those who have been following the match analysis on AfroPari know that the outcome isn’t that predictable.
Mamelodi Sundowns are still a strong team capable of upsetting the established balance, while RS Berkane have already made it clear they have serious ambitions, despite this being their debut season in the CAF Champions League. Stade Malien deserve a special mention – they are one of the standout stories in this season’s knockout stage.
March 21: Pyramids vs AS FAR
The first leg in Rabat ended in a 1-1 draw, keeping the intrigue alive. Pyramids are still the defending champions, but the first match has already shown that this status doesn’t necessarily give them an advantage on the pitch. The return leg will see two contrasting approaches clash: the home team’s strong, aggressive attack against the solid structure of AS FAR.
March 21: Al Ahly vs Espérance de Tunis
The main battle at this stage is between two sides with such a rich history that it would be a shame to focus solely on the present. The teams have met three times in the CAF Champions League finals, and on each occasion, the trophy has gone to Al Ahly.
Following their 1-0 victory in the first leg, Espérance de Tunis want more. The team will travel to Cairo with a narrow lead, but this is familiar territory for Al Ahly: the Egyptian giants traditionally play differently at home, and the fans are confident that their team can regain control of the tie. High hopes are pinned on Trézéguet – it was in Cairo that he scored 4 of his 5 goals in the current Champions League.
March 22: Stade Malien vs Mamelodi Sundowns
Having won the first leg 3-0, Sundowns are virtually through to the semi-finals – there’s no doubt that they are the clear favorites here. For the South African club, this is a chance to reach their third CAF Champions League semi-finals.
Stade Malien have already become the biggest sensation of this season’s knockout stage. Not only did the Malian club reach the quarter-finals for the first time in its history, but also comfortably won its group, conceding only 2 goals in 6 games. And yet the question remains: can the team that has already exceeded all expectations do so once again?
March 22: Al Hilal vs RS Berkane
After a 1-1 draw in the first leg, this match could prove to be the most intriguing fixture of the quarter-finals. Al Hilal are approaching the game as group winners and in good current form. An additional advantage for the home side is Abdel Raouf, who has scored 5 goals in this Champions League campaign and is among the tournament’s top scorers. But in decisive matches, these factors may not be enough.
RS Berkane play a different style – calmly and with no fuss. And this isn’t just a feeling: the club is playing its debut season in the CAF Champions League, yet has confidently reached the quarter-finals, having gained 10 points in the group stage, only surpassed by Pyramids. That’s why matches like this are particularly appreciated by those who like to bet on African football relying not on emotion but on analysis and dispassionate calculation.
CAF Champions League reaches its peak
Teams with different levels of experience and histories are set to face off in thrilling football battles very soon. Some are used to playing on such stages, while others are just learning how to turn their ambitions into results. To add even more excitement to the weekend, AfroPari has prepared a special CAF Champions League promo: a bet of at least 2 USD on a CAF Champions League match can bring you 1,000 USD or even 2,000 USD. Turn the moment into rewards!
The World Bank Group has barred Mauritius-based PricewaterhouseCoopers Associates Africa Ltd., along with PricewaterhouseCoopers Limited Kenya and PricewaterhouseCoopers Rwanda Limited, from its projects for 21 months, with the possibility of early reinstatement if certain conditions are met. The action follows findings of misconduct tied to a major cross-border electricity project linking Ethiopia and Kenya.
The sanctions relate to the Eastern Electricity Highway Project, which forms part of a wider regional effort to strengthen power integration across East Africa. The project is intended to enable Ethiopia to export surplus electricity to Kenya, while helping to lower energy costs across the region.
The move also comes against the backdrop of PwC’s history of regulatory scrutiny in different parts of the world, where it has faced penalties ranging from fines and reprimands to temporary bans and suspensions—making the latest sanction in Africa broadly in line with previous disciplinary actions.
According to the World Bank, the issues arose during the selection and execution of the Fixed Asset Inventory and Revaluation contract for the Ethiopian Electric Utility. It found that PwC Associates misrepresented the availability, qualifications, and employment status of key experts, and did not fully disclose all subconsultants involved in the project.
World Bank Bans 3 PwC African Subsidiaries for 21 Months
“The debarment makes PwC Associates, PwC Kenya, PwC Rwanda, and any affiliates they control ineligible to participate in Bank Group-financed projects and operations. It is part of a settlement agreement under which the three companies admit culpability for sanctionable practices.” the report added.
One of the entities provided misleading details on the expertise and availability of key personnel and did not release the full subcontracting arrangements, an action that didn’t meet World Bank’s integrity standards.
As part of a negotiated settlement, the companies acknowledged their role in the misconduct and agreed to corrective measures. These include internal disciplinary steps, compliance reforms, staff training, and cooperation with ongoing oversight processes. The reduced length of the ban reflects these remedial efforts.
On the morning of October 1, 2024, a day that will be remembered in Kenyan political history for the parliamentary theatre that stripped Rigathi Gachagua of the deputy presidency, a very different transaction was being concluded in the city’s commercial corridors. Officials of a company called Ultra Eureka Limited were finalising paperwork to hand over Sh45 million, a ten per cent deposit, to Garam Investments Auctioneers.
The object of their interest: a 6.8-acre leasehold in Karen, one of Nairobi’s most coveted postcodes, upon which former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju had built a luxury commercial and wellness complex worth, by his own account, no less than Sh3.5 billion.
The full purchase price was Sh450 million.
By December 2024, Ultra Eureka Limited had cleared the Sh405 million balance.
By February 2025, it was registered as the new proprietor of a 99-year leasehold over land that hosts the Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park. The buyer had acquired a trophy asset for less than thirteen cents on the shilling.
Ultra Eureka Limited is the sole property of Jackson Kiplimo Chebett, the dominant shareholder and board chairman of Stabex International Limited, one of Kenya’s fastest-rising petroleum marketing companies and a firm whose name has circulated for years in whispered conversations about the business interests of Kenya’s political class.
The Stabex-Ruto Shadow
Stabex International Limited was incorporated in 2009 and has since grown into a petroleum colossus with over 150 retail stations across Kenya and Uganda, twelve storage depots and annual sales volumes exceeding 300 million litres of fuel.
In the final quarter of 2025, the company commanded a 4.9 per cent market share in Kenya’s downstream petroleum sector, making it the fourth largest player in the industry behind Vivo Energy, Rubis and TotalEnergies.
In a sector long dominated by multinationals, Stabex’s ascent has been remarkable by any measure.
Registered ownership of Stabex places Jackson Kiplimo Chebett as the majority shareholder with 925,000 of the company’s one million ordinary shares. Abraham Kipkoech Korir, the director of projects and business development, holds 50,000 shares.
Stabex Group Chairman Jackson Kiplimo Chebett
The share register is thin, but the company’s trajectory is anything but: it has in recent years displaced established giants, won government-linked fuel supply contracts and expanded aggressively into landlocked markets in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Since at least 2022, public discourse in Kenya has linked Stabex to President William Ruto, with allegations circulating across social media platforms and investigative blogs that the company operates as a proxy vehicle for presidential business interests.
The allegations first gained traction through posts by political blogger Robert Alai and were amplified by journalist Saddique Shaban, who specifically linked Stabex to a multimillion-dollar petroleum supply contract with the Kenya Defence Forces, characterising the company as a Ruto proxy operation.
The company has never publicly addressed the claims, and no formal legal proceedings have been brought to challenge the allegations. Company records do not show President Ruto or any member of his immediate family as a shareholder.
What is documented is the pattern of access.
In August 2023, Chebett held a meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at which the latter personally committed to facilitating Stabex’s operations in Uganda by cutting through bureaucratic red tape.
That is not the kind of introduction a petroleum trader secures through ordinary commercial channels. It is the kind of introduction that flows from political architecture.
Chebett’s board at Stabex includes former Kenya Civil Aviation Authority Director Joseph Kiptoo Chebungei, a figure from the corridors of state.
Chebett is also the sole director and ultimate beneficial owner of Ultra Eureka Farm Limited, incorporated in 2002, which in turn wholly owns Ultra Eureka Limited, incorporated in 2018 and nominally classified as an agronomy and farming inputs enterprise.
It was this agronomy vehicle, carrying Chebett’s full chain of beneficial ownership, that walked into the Karen auction on the day of Gachagua’s impeachment and paid cash for Tuju’s life’s work.
The Debt That Swallowed a Dream
The origins of Tuju’s dispossession lie in a loan agreement signed a decade ago. In April 2015, Tuju’s company Dari Limited entered into a facility agreement with the East African Development Bank for a sum of nine point three million United States dollars, equivalent at the time to approximately Sh1.2 billion, though the figure has since ballooned with interest and penalties to over Sh4.5 billion in total claimed by EADB.
The purpose was to develop a thirty-room luxury retirement facility on the Karen land that Tuju had acquired in 2010 alongside the African Wildlife Foundation as co-tenant and over which he became the sole registered owner in December 2014.
Tuju maintains he was betrayed by the lender.
His case, aired across multiple courts on two continents, is that EADB failed to disburse the full loan amount, withholding what he says was Sh294 million in additional funding he had been promised, thereby frustrating the entire development model on which his repayment plan depended.
EADB has consistently denied this characterisation. In 2019, the High Court of Justice in England and Wales entered judgment against Tuju and ordered repayment of the debt. Kenyan courts recognised that foreign judgment in 2020.
Screenshot
The Court of Appeal upheld the decision in 2023. Each time Tuju sought to arrest the momentum of enforcement, the courts turned him away.
By the time EADB instructed Garam Investments Auctioneers to proceed with the sale in October 2024, Tuju had exhausted most of his options.
The Supreme Court had in 2023 dismissed his appeal, and an extraordinary episode unfolded at the apex bench when all five judges on the panel recused themselves after Tuju lodged a complaint with the Judicial Service Commission accusing them of predetermination.
The recusal was dramatic but ultimately unhelpful to Tuju: the Supreme Court simultaneously declined to suspend the Court of Appeal decision, leaving EADB with a clear runway to enforcement.
The Registrar Who Looked Away
The sale itself, however contentious, might have been legally unremarkable had it not been for what happened at Ardhi House in the weeks that followed. Court records and affidavits filed in subsequent proceedings reveal a remarkable sequence: a valid court order barring the transfer of the Karen property was physically presented to the Ministry of Lands for registration, and an advocate instructed to log the injunction was told by officials that the order was not registrable because it contained no explicit instruction directed to the Chief Land Registrar.
The property was transferred to Ultra Eureka Limited on February 18, 2025, ten days after the court order had been extended for a third time on February 6, 2025.
The Chief Land Registrar at the time was David Nyambasa Nyandoro, a figure already enmeshed in his own legal battle for survival.
The Employment and Labour Relations Court had in May 2024 revoked his appointment and directed Lands Cabinet Secretary Alice Wahome and Principal Secretary Nixon Korir to replace him with Peter Mburu Ng’ang’a.
Nyandoro and the Attorney General appealed and secured a stay order in July 2024, allowing him to continue in office pending the appeal. It was therefore a man whose tenure was itself judicially contested who presided over the registration of a transfer that critics say was executed in contempt of court.
Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah, who is a respondent in the Nyandoro appeal, has since moved to introduce fresh evidence at the Court of Appeal specifically linking Nyandoro’s conduct in the Tuju transfer to his fitness for office.
Omtatah argues that Nyandoro, as the only officer in Kenya empowered to register property transfers, had a clear statutory duty under Section 68 of the Land Registration Act to register the court order inhibiting dealings with the parcel, once it was formally presented. To ignore it, he contends, was not a clerical oversight but deliberate contempt.
“That despite being fully aware of the said orders, the appellant knowingly, wilfully and deliberately disobeyed them and on or about 18th February 2025, proceeded to register an unlawful transfer of the said property in favour of Ultra Eureka, in contempt of the orders,” Omtatah states in his court papers, adding that Nyandoro also caused the title to be converted from L.R. No. 1055/165 to a new title, Nairobi Block 47/1399, under which Ultra Eureka Limited is registered as proprietor for a 99-year term.
Dawn Raids and Locked Gates
For nearly a year after the October 2024 auction, Tuju and his tenants continued to occupy the Dari Business Park and its associated premises. The legal machinery was still grinding, and successive injunction applications kept enforcement tentatively at bay. That equilibrium collapsed violently in the early hours of March 14, 2026.
Photographs and video footage broadcast nationally showed Tuju outside his own property at three in the morning as heavily armed police officers sealed off Dari Business Park along Ngong Road in Karen. The operation, executed under darkness with a show of state force that left observers unsettled, locked out Tuju and his associates and handed physical possession to Ultra Eureka Limited’s new security deployment.
Tuju spoke to journalists by phone, conveying a message to his children that became one of the most striking images of his unravelling ordeal.
Chebett’s version of events, filed in a replying affidavit before the High Court, records that prior to the dawn operation, the situation had already turned volatile. He claims that a group of more than fifty men forced their way onto the premises after the High Court lifted interim injunction orders, physically assaulting the security guards Ultra Eureka had deployed and injuring several of them before police were called to restore order. Tuju’s camp disputes aspects of this account.
The courts have now produced a fresh restraining order, this time freezing further transfer or assignment of the title pending the determination of Tuju’s application before the High Court.
That hearing is scheduled for April 7, 2026. Tuju has also lodged a parallel appeal at the Court of Appeal, meaning the battle for the Karen properties is far from concluded. In the meantime, Ultra Eureka Limited has charged the same title to Kenya Commercial Bank for a two point five million dollar loan facility, a move Tuju’s lawyers characterise as compounding the alleged contempt by encumbering land that remains under judicial dispute.
The Question That Will Not Go Away
The case against the Stabex-Ruto connection rests on inference, on the architecture of proximity. There is no documentary evidence placing President Ruto within the ownership chain of either Stabex International or Ultra Eureka Limited.
The Registrar of Companies records are unambiguous: Chebett controls both entities absolutely. What cannot be dismissed so easily is the political environment in which these transactions occur.
Chebett is a Kalenjin businessman from the Rift Valley, operating in a sector that is acutely sensitive to government goodwill, where fuel import licences, open tender system allocations and infrastructure access depend fundamentally on the disposition of the executive.
Stabex’s rise from incorporated startup in 2009 to fourth-largest petroleum retailer in Kenya by late 2025 is a remarkable commercial achievement that has coincided precisely with the arc of Ruto’s political ascendancy, from deputy president to president.
The company’s aviation fuel launch at JKIA in October 2024, attended by Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi and Kenya Airports Authority chairman Caleb Kositany, was a statement of institutional embrace.
Tuju, for his part, is not simply a businessman who defaulted on a bank loan.
He is a senior political figure of the Raila Odinga era, a Luo politician who served as Cabinet Secretary under the Jubilee administration and who has since drifted to the opposition periphery.
The optics of a man from that political alignment losing a Sh3.5 billion property for Sh450 million to a businessman linked publicly to the presidency, through a process in which the Chief Land Registrar allegedly defied a court order, are not ones that any government eager to project rule of law should be comfortable inhabiting.
The Judiciary, through its communications office, has been unusually active in issuing public statements defending the chain of judicial decisions that culminated in Tuju’s eviction.
It has pointed to the 2019 London judgment, the 2020 Kenyan recognition of that judgment, the 2023 Court of Appeal upholding and the Supreme Court’s refusal of interim relief as an unbroken line of lawful process.
Justice Josephine Mongare, whose ruling of March 9, 2026 struck out Tuju’s latest suit as an abuse of process, found the case to be res judicata and a vexatious attempt to re-litigate a debt whose validity had been exhaustively determined. Her language was unsparing.
The legal analysis may be coherent.
The political symbolism is not so easily dissolved.
The Tuju affair is the story of a major transaction executed on the most politically charged day of Kenya’s recent history, by a company controlled by a man whose larger corporate vehicle has been publicly, if unproven, linked to the president.
It involves a land registrar who held office in defiance of a court order and who is alleged to have registered a property transfer in contempt of a judicial injunction.
And it ends, at least provisionally, with armed police locking a former Cabinet Secretary out of his own premises at three in the morning.
Those are not the hallmarks of an ordinary commercial debt recovery. They are the hallmarks of power.
Chebett did not respond to requests for comment beyond the affidavit filed in the High Court. Stabex International Limited did not issue a public statement on the Karen acquisition. The Office of the President declined to comment on the company’s alleged links to President Ruto.
Seven suspects linked to an alleged multi-million dollar fraud scheme involving a fake government contract have been arraigned before a Nairobi court and charged with multiple offences.
The 7 accused include Michafi Musyoki Ngumbi, Evans Simotwo, Geofrey Were Odondi, Allan Mutahi Kariuki, Purity Nieri Niamu, Muniaro Jared Masinde and Kororia Simatwa —appeared before Milimani Chief Magistrate Teresa Nyangena, where they denied all the charges.
However, their co-accused, Rose Mbuthia, failed to appear in court, prompting the magistrate to issue summons requiring her to appear before the court.
According to court documents, the eight are accused of conspiring to defraud a foreign national, Talal Yousef Yousef Zaitoun, of USD 470,750 (approximately KSh 60 million).
The prosecution alleges that between January 10 and February 25, 2026, the group falsely claimed they were in a position to secure a Kenyan government tender for the supply and delivery of 500 high-roof diesel Toyota Hiace ambulances.
The court heard that the suspects allegedly misrepresented themselves as capable of facilitating the contract purportedly from the Ministry of Interior and National Administration — claims investigators say were false.
In a separate charge co-accused Geofrey Were Odondi faces charges of obtaining money by false pretences, with prosecutors stating that he received the funds through Lianyungang Chanta International Wood Company Limited under the guise of facilitating the non-existent deal.
Odondi is also charged with acquisition of proceeds of crime after allegedly receiving USD 450,750 through an Equity Bank account registered under Damira Multiactivities, knowing or having reason to believe the funds were proceeds of crime.
Additionally, Michafi Musyoki Ngumbi faces two counts of forgery. He is accused of forging a contract agreement purportedly between the Ministry of Interior and a foreign firm, Jokara AB, for the ambulance supply, as well as a letter of notification of award to make the deal appear legitimate.
All the accused present in court denied the charges.
Magistrate Nyangena released each of the seven accused persons on a cash bail of Sh300,000 and directed that Rose Mbuthia appear before court as summoned. The case will be mentioned on a later date.
A retired teacher in Nairobi is fighting to save her home after a Sh500,000 loan she took to fund her children’s travel abroad ballooned into a Sh1.5 million debt, triggering an eviction threat and exposing what she describes as a predatory lending trap.
Lydia Wangare Mwangi, 64, says she is now at risk of losing her Kahawa Wendani property valued at more than Sh10 million after defaulting on the loan from Bashy African Credit Limited.
The property includes her family home and ten rental units built over four decades from her teaching salary.
“I wanted my children to go abroad and come back with something,” Mwangi told the media at her compound near the SDA church. “Now I am the one being chased away. At my age, where do I begin?”
Her warning is stark.
“They will eat you alive.”
Mwangi’s ordeal began about three years ago when she sought financial help to send her two children to the Middle East for work opportunities. She was referred by a friend to an agent identified as Brenda Achieng Onyango, who operated from an office in Adams Arcade in Nairobi.
According to Mwangi, the agent declined a deferred payment arrangement and instead directed her to Bashy African Credit Limited for a secured loan.
The money was disbursed. The travel plans collapsed. The agent disappeared.
Mwangi says repeated attempts to trace the agent were unsuccessful after the office was shut down and the phone numbers went off.
What remained was the loan.
Last week, representatives of the lender reportedly issued a two-week ultimatum demanding settlement of an outstanding balance now said to exceed Sh1.5 million. Failure to pay could see the lender take possession of the property.
Mwangi had used her title deed as collateral.
“I built this place room by room from my salary,” she said. “How does a loan meant to help my children become something that destroys everything?”
She is now considering selling the entire property to clear the debt and relocate to a smaller home.
“If someone can buy and settle the loan, let them come. I just want peace,” she said.
Efforts to seek intervention have yielded little. Mwangi says she reached out to a local church leader for assistance but received no tangible support.
Bashy African Credit Limited, which operates in Nairobi and offers title deed-backed loans, advertises fast processing and competitive interest rates. However, borrower complaints and court records point to a pattern of aggressive recovery practices and disputed transactions.
In one High Court matter involving the company, a lower court found that a vehicle repossession and sale linked to a loan dispute were marred by fraud and misrepresentation, declaring the transaction null and void. In another case, the High Court criticised a ruling that released a disputed vehicle to the lender, warning it undermined ongoing criminal proceedings.
The lender had not responded to queries from The Star by the time of publication.
Mwangi’s case reflects a wider crisis in Kenya’s lending sector, where complaints against digital and microfinance lenders have surged.
Data from the Competition Authority of Kenya shows the financial sector accounts for a significant share of consumer complaints, with borrowers citing high interest rates, non-disclosure of terms, and harsh recovery tactics.
Regulators have acknowledged growing concerns, including hidden charges and unilateral changes to loan terms, and say investigations are ongoing.
Legal experts warn that many borrowers fall into trouble through loosely structured agreements involving title deeds.
Under Kenyan law, an “informal charge” must meet strict requirements, including a clear written agreement indicating intent to create a security interest. However, in practice, borrowers often sign documents without fully understanding the implications.
This creates a legal grey area that lenders can exploit when enforcing recovery.
Mwangi now finds herself trapped in that system, racing against time to avoid losing everything she owns.
Her children, whose planned migration triggered the loan, have been unable to reverse the situation.
As the deadline approaches, she says her story should serve as a warning.
“It is better to live in a small house that is yours,” she said. “Do not risk everything for a loan you do not fully understand.”
The agent at the centre of the transaction remains untraceable. The lender is yet to publicly respond. And Mwangi continues to wait, hoping to salvage what remains of a lifetime’s work.
The afternoon of Sunday, December 30, 2007, was supposed to be the moment Kenya demonstrated to the world that it could manage a peaceful democratic transition.
Instead, it became the hour in which a group of powerful men gathered in a State House boardroom and decided that the will of the people was an obstacle to be managed rather than a verdict to be honoured.
What follows is drawn from NTV’s landmark investigative documentary Stolen Ballot, which aired this week to convulse a country still carrying the wounds of the violence that erupted hours after that stolen declaration, as well as from contemporaneous reporting, the public admission of Royal Media Services chairman Samuel Kamau Macharia in March 2025, international election observer records, and the findings of the Kriegler Commission.
Together, they construct an account so detailed, so corroborated, and so chilling in its institutional precision that it can no longer be described as allegation. It is history.
The Room Where It Was Decided
Inside a State House boardroom, five men knew everything. President Mwai Kibaki sat among them. Flanking him were his government spokesman Alfred Mutua, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff General Julius Karangi, Head of the Public Service Francis Muthaura, and Internal Security minister John Michuki, one of the most feared political operators in the country.
Each man had a role. Each man understood the stakes. And each man understood that what was being planned carried the seed of the violence that would follow.
Former Chief of the Defence Forces Gen (Rtd) Julius Karangi.
The operation was structured, according to those who later spoke on record, with the deliberate architecture of a military mission. Information was shared on a strict need-to-know basis. Different operatives were assigned isolated tasks. No one outside the five was permitted to see the full picture.
It was General Karangi, Kenya’s most celebrated tactical commander, the man who would later mastermind the bloodless recapture of the Somali port city of Kismayu from Al-Shabaab without losing a single soldier, who gave the operation its discipline.
His presence in that room was not incidental. He was there because what was being planned required the kind of precise, compartmentalised execution he had perfected on the battlefield.
“I was told: we do not know how the day will end, but we know Kibaki must remain president.” — Nimrod Mbai, Kitui East MP, then police sergeant
Mutua has since confirmed the composition of that room himself, speaking on national television in the days after Kibaki’s death in 2022.
He described the President’s anxiety, the calls being monitored, and the mood of controlled urgency that gripped State House as the hours wore on. He did not use the word fraud. But what he described was something far more deliberate than a disputed result.
The Tallying Centre in Chaos
To understand what happened in State House, one must first understand what was happening at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, where the Electoral Commission of Kenya was conducting the national tally. By the morning of December 30, the count had taken on a deeply suspicious character.
Former ECK commissioner Jack Tumwa told NTV that commissioners had expected results to begin arriving by 10pm on election night, December 27. They did not. The following morning, results were still trickling in at a pace that mystified officials who had run elections before.
More troublingly, some returning officers from constituencies in Nairobi itself could not be reached by telephone. Nairobi is not a remote constituency. There was no logistical excuse for the silence.
Early results showed Raila Odinga of the Orange Democratic Movement holding a commanding lead. Media houses running parallel tallies were reporting it.
The Nation Media Group had prepared a front page carrying the words “President-Elect” with Odinga’s photograph. It was never published.
Then, without explanation, the character of the count changed. Results from constituencies in the Mount Kenya region, which had been conspicuously absent, arrived in a cluster.
The numbers were startling.
ECK chairman Samuel Kivuitu himself had been overheard remarking that if the returning officers from Kiambaa had been cooking the results, they were now overcooking them, and that even if they had decided to walk to the tallying centre on foot they would already have arrived.
Commissioner Muturi Kigano later tried to characterise the remark as a tasteless joke. Commissioner Tumwa characterised it differently. “Really, there was something wrong,” he said. “We were very suspicious.”
Four commissioners issued a formal statement expressing reservations about the process. They asked for transparency. They were ignored.
Outside the hall, the government was furious with the media. Minister John Michuki convened an emergency meeting with media executives at Harambee House and accused broadcasters of inflaming tensions by reporting Odinga’s early lead from their own parallel tallies.
KBC editor-in-chief Waithaka Waihenya was present. He described Michuki as agitated.
The one person he recalled as calm was Muthaura, who spoke quietly. The contrast between the two men was telling. Muthaura, as events would show, already knew exactly how the situation was going to resolve.
The Phone Call to Cut the Power
By Sunday afternoon, the pace of events inside KICC had become unmanageable. The opposition was on the stage. William Ruto, then the Eldoret North MP, was pressing Kivuitu at close quarters, demanding verification of constituency tallies that did not match the forms signed by ODM agents.
Martha Karua and the late Mutula Kilonzo were pressing from the Kibaki side. GSU officers had been deployed to the floor. Someone passed word that one of the politicians present was armed with a grenade.
The government was watching and growing increasingly alarmed. The fear, Mutua later explained, was specific and legal. If Kibaki was declared the winner by the commission, Raila’s team would immediately seek a court injunction to block the swearing-in. The declaration had to happen, and it had to happen fast, and it had to happen under conditions where no judge could intervene in time.
Mutua picked up the phone and called Philip Kisia, the managing director of KICC. The instruction was direct: cut the power to the tallying hall. Kisia declined.
A second call came. This time, Mutua placed a cabinet minister on the line. Kisia later confirmed that the minister read out the names of officials sitting with the President at State House.
The message was unmistakable: this was a direct order from the highest level of government.
Kisia walked to the power room with a technician named Ombati. The rest of the staff had gone home. He threw the switch himself.
“I told him, because I know how cameras work, to turn off the lights at KICC.” — Alfred Mutua, then Government Spokesman
The vast hall of the KICC plunged into darkness. Opposition politicians who had been monitoring the tally table were suddenly disoriented. In the confusion, the next phase of the plan moved.
The Secret Recording
Before the blackout, Kivuitu had been under sustained pressure from multiple directions. He had been refusing to take Mutua’s calls. Kisia eventually persuaded him to speak with the government spokesman, and the two men spoke in Kamba for approximately ten minutes. No one present understood what was said. When the call ended, Kivuitu asked Kisia for a desk.
Former Election Commission Chairman Samuel Kivuitu (right) addressing a press conference at KICC just before the announcement of the results of the disputed 2007 General Elections.
He was then walked to a separate room within KICC where a KBC camera crew was waiting. The recording was done there, away from the chaotic hall, away from the rival politicians, in a controlled environment that the government had arranged. Kisia took a deliberate decision that only the national broadcaster would record the moment.
Waihenya, receiving orders simultaneously from Mutua, Muthaura, Michuki, and a senior military officer, had already dispatched an Outside Broadcast van to State House before the declaration had even been made. He had not been told the result. He did not need to be.
Kivuitu’s voice on that tape declared Mwai Kibaki the winner of the 2007 presidential election. The tape was then placed inside a sock worn by a member of the KBC team, as Waihenya had instructed, and taken out of the building.
The opposition realised something was happening. They tried to break down the door of the room where the recording had been made. They were too late.
The Extraction
Police Sergeant Nimrod Mbai had been placed on standby since that afternoon. He had been called in from his day off by Mutua, who had brought him to the third floor of KICC and briefed him on a mission involving Kivuitu. His task was to ensure the ECK chairman could be evacuated safely if violence broke out inside the tallying centre.
Mbai was not selected at random. He was one of a small number of officers with a special access card that allowed movement through every section of the building.
He had been taken to a CID shooting range earlier that afternoon where his weapon, a Ceska pistol, was test-fired. Officers then offered him a second firearm in case the first jammed.
He declined the second gun. He had been told, in terms he found unmistakable, that what was about to happen was expected to be dangerous.
The two men, Mbai and Kivuitu, had met earlier and agreed on a coded password. When it was spoken, Kivuitu would know it was time to move.
The moment the lights went out, Mbai stepped forward, tapped Kivuitu on the shoulder, and said the word. He took a green file from the table, which he was told contained the electoral results.
The two men left through a side exit and descended to the basement parking. Kivuitu was elderly and asked to be taken slowly.
The walk that Mbai, an athlete, could have completed in one minute took four. His own description of what was running through his mind in those four minutes belongs to the historical record of what Kenya did to itself that evening: “This was war in my mind.”
Outside KICC, a vehicle was waiting. Alfred Mutua was driving. The car was immediately flanked by a security convoy. It moved through Nairobi toward State House at speed. At the gate, officers were already waiting.
Five Minutes to Air
Former Kenya Broadcasting Corporation Editor-in-Chief Waithaka Waihenya.
Back at KBC’s studios, Waihenya was surrounded by GSU officers. He could not move to the toilet without an armed escort. One of the calls he received that evening threatened him directly. He was told the situation was bigger than him and that he had better announce the results.
He refused to be pressured, but he had the tape, and he had his orders, and within five minutes of returning to the studio, Kivuitu’s pre-recorded declaration was broadcast on the national broadcaster.
Waihenya later revealed that as the broadcast went live, he could hear the President’s voice on a speakerphone that had not been switched off. Kibaki said, in Swahili, that he wanted to see it on television. He saw it.
Minutes later, at State House, Mutua walked into the room and told the President what had happened. “Kibaki hugged me,” Mutua said. “It was the first time he hugged me.” Muthaura and Michuki embraced. The relief was physical. Outside the compound, Kenya was beginning to burn.
The Macharia Confession
The NTV documentary did not emerge in a vacuum. Its most devastating corroboration came not from the documentary itself but from a speech delivered a year before it aired, at a funeral in Machakos on March 15, 2025.
Royal Media Services chairman Samuel Kamau Macharia stood up to honour a dead friend, retired Colonel James Gitahi, and fulfilled a pact they had made: whichever of them died first, the other would tell the truth about 2007.
Macharia told the mourners that his network’s parallel tallying system had given him complete data showing Odinga had won the election. His data showed a margin of 1.8 million votes in Odinga’s favour. He was then, he said, taken from his home at night. All the returning officers from the Mount Kenya region were rounded up.
Their official Forms 16A were taken. Macharia was transported to his own office, where he found men whose names he chose not to give. Together, they changed the figures. Kibaki won.
The Macharia statement was reported widely and dismissed by some as the grieving embellishments of an elderly political partisan. In light of the NTV documentary and the accounts of Mbai, Kisia, Waihenya, and the ECK commissioners, it is considerably harder to make that dismissal.
“Our data was showing Raila had won with 1.8 million votes. I was picked from my house at night… we changed all those figures, and Kibaki won.” — S.K. Macharia, RMS Chairman, March 2025
What the International Record Shows
Kenya did not conduct this operation unobserved. The European Union’s chief election observer, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, declared the elections flawed, finding that the ECK had failed to establish the credibility of the tallying process to the satisfaction of all parties.
The EU noted specific constituencies where results read out in the presence of their observers did not match the tallies later announced by the commission. In the Molo constituency, the discrepancy was flagged explicitly.
The Carter Center raised similar concerns. A diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy in Nairobi, declassified and published in 2012, showed that Ambassador Michael Ranneberger assessed the situation in five different scenarios and concluded that in all of them the margin of victory for either side was slim and ultimately unknowable.
His cable did note evidence of rigging on both sides, a qualification that has been cited by Kibaki’s defenders but which does not in any way address the specific sequence of institutional fraud described by the insiders who have now spoken.
ECK chairman Kivuitu himself, speaking on January 2, 2008, told journalists outside his Nairobi home that he did not know whether Kibaki had won the election. He said he had been pressured by the PNU to announce the results. He said he had contemplated resignation.
He did not resign. He went to a room in KICC, he spoke in Kamba for ten minutes with Mutua, he asked for a desk, and he read a result into a KBC camera.
The Kriegler Commission, established under the terms of the Kofi Annan-brokered peace deal, found that electoral fraud had been rampant and had begun at the polling station level.
Its central and devastating conclusion was that the errors and manipulations in the tallying process were so great and so widespread that it was impossible to reconstruct from the formal record who had actually won.
That conclusion has often been cited as grounds for ambiguity. It is more accurately read as a legal description of evidence destruction.
The Legal Vacuum and the Price Paid
The declaration triggered violence within minutes. Across Nairobi and in the Rift Valley, the Nyanza region, and Mombasa, communities that had voted for Odinga in overwhelming numbers took to the streets. Police opened fire with live ammunition.
In Eldoret, a church sheltering Kikuyu families was set alight. More than 1,000 Kenyans died. Six hundred thousand were displaced. The country did not recover its institutional confidence for years and arguably has not recovered it fully even now.
Kofi Annan brokered a power-sharing deal that installed Odinga as Prime Minister under a Grand Coalition Government. Kenya got a new constitution in 2010. The ECK was dissolved. But no one was charged with the theft of the election.
No one was prosecuted for the midnight roundup of returning officers in the Mount Kenya region.
No one answered in court for the switching of the KICC power supply, the pre-arranged recording, the pre-positioned OB van at State House, the password-activated extraction of Kivuitu through a darkened building by an armed officer who had been told this was war.
Commissioner Tumwa has since said plainly that he believes Odinga was denied the presidency by manipulation. He said, with the weight of having been in that hall, that he thinks Raila Odinga would have won.
A Reckoning Eighteen Years Late
What is remarkable about the week in which the NTV documentary Stolen Ballot has aired is not that new facts have emerged. Most of these facts have been in circulation in fragments for years. What is remarkable is that the men who were present have now spoken with a directness that the passage of time and the deaths of Kibaki and Kivuitu have made possible. Mutua confirmed the core of the operation on national television years ago.
Mbai, now a member of parliament, has given chapter-and-verse testimony. Kisia has confirmed he threw the switch. Waihenya has described the sock, the GSU escort, the speakerphone on which he heard the President’s voice. Macharia has described the night abduction and the altered forms.
Against this record, Commissioner Kigano’s insistence that the Electoral Commission simply announced whatever the returning officers delivered is not a defence. It is a description of the mechanism by which the fraud was laundered through an institution designed to provide it with legal cover.
What the country is owed is not merely acknowledgement but a formal reckoning: a truth process with legal authority, the ability to compel testimony, and the mandate to establish an official record. Kenya paid for the absence of such a process in blood.
It continues to pay for it in the corrosive distrust that attaches to every election result, every commission, every announcement from a podium about the people’s choice.
The lights at KICC went out at Mutua’s instruction. They have not fully come back on since.
The Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) has slapped Guaranty Trust Bank Kenya with a Sh33.18 million penalty after investigators established that the lender subjected ASL Limited, a long-standing corporate borrower, to false representations and unconscionable conduct during the troubled renewal of critical business facilities — conduct that ultimately forced the manufacturer to flee to a rival bank after clearing a staggering Sh417.85 million in overdraft balances under duress.
The ruling, dated January 29, 2026, and made public on February 24, is one of the most consequential consumer protection decisions in Kenya’s banking sector in recent memory.
CAK set the penalty at exactly two percent of GT Bank’s gross annual turnover for 2023 — a figure the regulator calculated at Sh33,180,000 — well below the ten percent statutory ceiling, a margin that signals the authority chose punishment over ruin, even as it described the bank’s behaviour in terms that left little room for charitable interpretation.
Beyond the headline fine, the regulator ordered GT Bank to refund ASL Sh13,211,285 within 30 days, a sum representing default interest and related charges the authority found were applied retroactively and without the notice the law demands.
GT Bank has since appealed the ruling to the Competition Tribunal, and the matter is now sub judice. The bank insists its conduct was fully consistent with its contractual obligations and applicable banking law, and has pledged to let the appellate process run its course before commenting further.
Two Decades of Loyalty, Then a Default Notice
ASL Limited is not a fly-by-night operation. The diversified manufacturer and distributor, which serves Kenya’s construction, electrical and industrial sectors, had banked with GT Bank since 2001 — a relationship stretching across more than two decades. In July 2021, the company secured a suite of credit facilities from the lender: overdrafts, letters of credit, asset financing, guarantees and working capital support.
These were backed by company assets and the personal guarantees of ASL’s directors, indicating the depth of commitment on both sides.
The facilities were due to expire in May 2022. ASL did the responsible thing: it applied for renewal as early as January 2022, well within the required timeline.
What followed, according to CAK’s findings, was not a straightforward renewal negotiation but a prolonged exercise in institutional ambiguity that left ASL in a state of suspended financial animation for the better part of eighteen months.
Despite months of back-and-forth engagement, GT Bank failed to communicate a clear position on the renewal. It was not until June 2023 — more than a year after the expiry date — that the bank offered a three-month extension. The offer came with strings: additional security requirements and reduced facility limits. ASL accepted.
“The bank leveraged its substantially higher negotiating power as a commercial lender to treat ASL unfairly by unilaterally recalling the facilities and backdating charges and fees.” — Competition Authority of Kenya
But the concessions did not end there. GT Bank subsequently issued a revised offer that cut the limits further still. That was the moment ASL began exploring a transfer of its facilities to I&M Bank. In the middle of those transition discussions — with the ink barely dry on preliminary arrangements — the company received a formal default notice on October 31, 2023, accompanied by a demand for Sh13.2 million in default interest that ASL said had been calculated back to August 2023, while the renewal process was still ostensibly ongoing.
To clear the path for the I&M Bank takeover and protect the continuity of its operations, ASL had little choice but to pay. It cleared outstanding overdrafts totalling Sh417,848,415 and a further USD 197,802.
GT Bank subsequently offered to refund Sh2.8 million as a goodwill gesture — a figure ASL rejected as wholly inadequate and lodged a formal complaint with CAK on October 5, 2024.
A Regulator Reads Between the Lines
The Competition Authority’s sixteen-month investigation parsed the facts with the rigour of a court of law.
Investigators found that GT Bank had violated Section 55(a)(ii) of the Competition Act on false or misleading representations and Section 57(1) on unconscionable conduct in business transactions — two distinct legal pillars that together frame a picture of a lender that knowingly exploited a client’s vulnerability.
On the question of misrepresentation, the authority found that the bank continued charging fees for facilities it had not formally approved, misled ASL on the status and availability of its banking services, and applied default interest retroactively without prior notice — thereby misrepresenting the state of ASL’s account to the company’s profound financial detriment.
Crucially, CAK also found that GT Bank dressed up materially altered facility offers as renewals, a characterisation that obscured from ASL the true nature and continuity of what was being offered.
The bank also made a partial refund without proper admission or transparency, a move the regulator said could confuse or mislead customers about the accuracy of service charges.
The unconscionable conduct finding cuts deeper still. CAK was unsparing in its assessment of the power dynamics at play.
As a commercial lender with substantial financial resources, GT Bank held vastly superior bargaining power relative to ASL.
The regulator found the bank exploited that asymmetry in three ways: it unilaterally reduced facility limits while demanding additional security; it recalled facilities during active negotiations rather than after a breakdown; and it backdated charges at a moment calculated to maximise pressure on the borrower.
GT Bank’s defence — that ASL’s failure to execute a July 2023 offer triggered legitimate contractual default provisions and that the interest was not backdated — was rejected.
A Pan-African Bank Under Scrutiny
The ruling falls on a lender that is both a regional heavyweight and a relative niche player within Kenya’s competitive banking landscape.
GT Bank Kenya is a subsidiary of Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO), the Lagos-headquartered financial conglomerate that owns one of Nigeria’s most valuable banking franchises, listed on both the Nigerian Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange. GTCO entered Kenya in 2013 through a US$100 million acquisition of the Fina Bank Group, rebranding the network the following year.
As of December 2022, GT Bank Kenya held total assets of Sh54.23 billion and reported a profit of Sh753.29 million — solid numbers that make the Sh33 million penalty sting in symbolic rather than financial terms.
The bank is led in East Africa by Managing Director Jubril Adeniji, a veteran Nigerian banker who previously established GT Bank’s Tanzania franchise before being posted to Nairobi in July 2022.
The institution markets itself on eight core principles branded as the Orange Rules, promising excellence, integrity and a culture in which the customer is king. That brand promise now sits in uncomfortable tension with a regulatory finding that the bank’s most senior conduct toward one customer was neither fair nor transparent.
Why This Ruling Matters
For Kenya’s banking sector, the CAK decision carries implications that extend well beyond ASL Limited and Guaranty Trust Bank.
The ruling arrives at a moment when regulators across East Africa are sharpening their scrutiny of how financial institutions behave during credit renewal negotiations — a phase in the lending cycle where the power imbalance between bank and borrower is at its most acute.
Borrowers whose facilities are under review often cannot simply walk away; their operations, payroll and supplier relationships depend on the continuation of credit lines. It is precisely this vulnerability that CAK found GT Bank exploited.
The authority was deliberate in its choice of language. It defined unconscionable conduct expansively to include situations where a business coerces a consumer into contracts they do not fully understand, withholds material information, or uses ambiguous wording to influence decisions — conduct it said applies as much in corporate lending as in consumer retail banking.
That framing matters because it signals that CAK is prepared to apply consumer protection principles to the boardroom, not only the counter.
The penalty computation is equally instructive. By pegging the fine to two percent of gross annual turnover rather than a fixed sum, CAK has established a precedent for scaling punishment to the size of the offender — a methodology familiar from competition law enforcement in Europe and which concentrates the minds of larger institutions more effectively than flat fines.
Whether the Competition Tribunal will uphold the ruling remains to be seen. GT Bank has signalled it will mount a full defence, arguing the authority’s findings do not reflect the evidence.
The matter is now sub judice and the refund order is, for the moment, in abeyance. But whatever outcome emerges from the appellate process, the CAK’s initial findings have already drawn a line in the sand: in Kenya, a bank that holds all the cards is not free to play them any way it pleases.
NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 16 – Kenyan companies have recently attracted growing interest from Tanzanian billionaires, with several high-profile acquisitions raising questions about why investors from the neighbouring country are increasingly targeting local firms.
In 2024, Tanzanian businessman Edha Nahdi, the Managing Director of Amsons Group, acquired Bamburi Cement in a deal that strengthened the group’s presence in Kenya’s construction sector.
Following the takeover, Bamburi reported a double-digit increase in EBITDA, supported by group-level efficiencies. Through Bamburi, Amsons has also begun construction of a 5,000 tonnes-per-day clinker facility—equivalent to about 1.6 million tonnes annually—in Kwale County. The project is expected to create more than 1,000 direct jobs.
Nahdi has also expanded his presence in the Kenyan cement industry through Kalahari Cement Ltd, which last year acquired an additional 27 percent stake in East African Portland Cement Company from the National Social Security Fund. The transaction increased his stake in the company to 69 percent.
In another major development last week, Tanzanian billionaire Rostam Azizi acquired control of Nation Media Group from the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development.
Under the deal, AKFED sold its entire shareholding in NPRT Holdings Africa Limited—the entity that holds a 54.08 percent controlling stake in Nation Media Group—to Taarifa Ltd.
The transaction gave Azizi majority ownership of Nation Media Group through the acquisition of 92,618,177 ordinary shares. However, the company’s shares will continue trading on the Nairobi Securities Exchange and other cross-listed platforms.
Brookhurst International Schools delivered an outstanding performance at the World Scholars Cup Nairobi Light Round held on February 22, securing its fifth championship title and further cementing its reputation as a leading academic institution in global competitions.
The school emerged as one of the top performers in the prestigious competition, which brings together students from different countries to compete in debate, collaborative writing, and quiz-based challenges focused on global issues. Brookhurst scholars collectively won 33 trophies along with numerous gold and silver medals across the junior and senior divisions.
From the Kiserian campus, Brookhurst secured second place in the junior division and first place in the senior division. The Lavington campus also delivered impressive results, emerging first in the Senior Scholar’s Bowl, fourth overall in the senior division, and placing among the top ten in the junior division.
The victory marks a remarkable milestone for the school, which has maintained the top position in the senior division for five consecutive years since 2021. The scholars excelled across all competition categories including debate, collaborative writing, the Scholar’s Challenge, and the Scholar’s Bowl.
Among the standout performers were Darvin Nato, a Year 7 student, and Denzyl Siele, a Year 10 student from the Kiserian campus, who were ranked among the top scholars in their respective divisions. Their efforts played a key role in helping their teams secure second place in the junior division and first place in the senior division.
Denzyl described the experience as unforgettable.
“Representing Brookhurst was an amazing experience. I have participated in World Scholars before, but nothing quite compared to seeing my name ranked among the top scholars and realizing that our team, Team 630, had won the Nairobi Round 2026. Preparing for the competition wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. I’m grateful for the support from my parents and teachers and look forward to the Global Round in Malaysia and later the Tournament of Champions at Yale,” he said.
Darvin, who was among the top performers in the junior division, highlighted the importance of teamwork and determination.
“At Brookhurst International Schools we are always encouraged to aim high. This experience showed me that teamwork, confidence and hard work can take you far. Next time we’re aiming even higher as we prepare for the next round in Malaysia,” he said.
Teachers at the school also expressed pride in the scholars’ achievements.
Mildred Wambui, a teacher from the Lavington campus, said the victory was a moment of great pride after months of preparation.
“Hearing our school announced among the top winners after months of training and sacrifice was truly unforgettable. The extra training sessions, debate practice and writing challenges really paid off. Our slogan was teamwork, and that spirit clearly reflected in our results,” she said.
She added that the school is already preparing for the Global Round with even greater focus and determination.
Sandra Soti, a Year 10 student from the Lavington campus, also celebrated her team’s performance after finishing among the top ten overall.
“This was my second time participating in World Scholars. Last year I learned the game, and this year I was ready to play it. I’m excited to see what we can achieve next at the global stage in Malaysia,” she said.
The teams from Brookhurst have now qualified for the World Scholars Cup Global Round to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in June. Successful participants will then advance to the prestigious Tournament of Champions at Yale University in the United States later in the year.
Brookhurst International Schools have consistently performed strongly in global competitions. In 2025, one of its scholars, Hope Wanjiku, advanced to the Tournament of Champions at Yale University where she competed with top students from around the world and ranked among the top thirty gold medalists globally.
Haju Yun, a Year 9 student from the Lavington campus, encouraged more students to participate in future competitions.
“World Scholars Cup is a great opportunity to meet new people, learn new ideas and build confidence. It opens doors to global experiences,” she said.
Dennis Nyaoro, a teacher at the Kiserian campus, emphasized that the competition provides students with opportunities beyond the traditional curriculum.
“World Scholars Cup allows learners to explore global issues through debate, writing and teamwork. It helps students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills while interacting with peers from around the world,” he said.
With another impressive performance at the Nairobi Round, Brookhurst International Schools continue to strengthen their reputation as a centre of academic excellence and global competitiveness.
According to the Daily Nation, two politicians were overheard at a restaurant in Nairobi’s upscale Kilimani district discussing in hushed tones their desperate hope that properties they own in Dubai would escape the barrage of rockets and drones now pounding the Gulf region .
The panic follows escalating Middle East tensions after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Tehran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of Revolutionary Guard commanders . Iran retaliated fiercely, launching ballistic missiles across the region, including into the UAE, where drone debris triggered a massive fire at the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone.
Saboti MP Caleb Amisi has thrown gasoline on the fire, publicly alleging that President William Ruto’s swift condemnation of Iran wasn’t motivated by diplomatic principle:: but by personal financial exposure.
Amisi claimed that Kenyan leaders have “channeled billions of shillings into real estate” in Dubai, the UAE, Cyprus, and South Africa using “stolen public funds” . In a blistering attack on X, the MP suggested Ruto’s panic was driven by fear that his own Dubai assets could go up in smoke.
“This is why they panic,” Amisi wrote, accusing the political class of caring more about their foreign luxury portfolios than the Kenyan voters they plundered.
Dubai has long been a favorite offshore haven for Kenya’s wealthy elite, offering stability, anonymity, and glittering returns on real estate investment . But the recent Iranian strikes have shattered that illusion of safety.
Housing TV Africa reports that the attacks have sent jitters through foreign investors with Gulf assets, as airports, oil facilities, and critical infrastructure now find themselves in the crosshairs of a widening regional war .
While UAE authorities insist operations have largely resumed and air defenses intercepted most threats, the psychological damage is done: Kenyan politicians who once toasted their ill-gotten gains in Dubai’s champagne bars are now watching the news with white knuckles.
The Daily Nation also reports that one unnamed presidential hopeful has quietly relocated his family abroad even as he campaigns to lead Kenya: triggering murmurs among allies who now label him a “perpetual frequent flier” with “one foot firmly planted at home and the other already outside the country” .
Supporters fear they’re backing a “flight risk” who would abandon them at the first sign of trouble .
As Iranian missiles light up Middle East skies, they’ve also illuminated a uncomfortable truth about Kenya’s political class: while preaching service at home, many have stashed fortunes in the very war zones now under fire. And as their Dubai dream burns, Kenyans are left asking one question: whose money built those mansions in the first place?
A Nairobi woman has lost Sh540,000 she paid into Britam Holdings’ Akiba Savings Plan after her policy lapsed when a sudden job loss left her unable to keep up with monthly premiums of Sh90,000, according to a video she posted on social media.
In the six-minute clip, the woman says a friend who had invested in the same product convinced her it was a safe, long-term savings vehicle for her children’s future, with life cover attached.
When she lost her job and could no longer make payments, her agent told her she would have to clear the arrears in full before the policy could be reinstated.
When she escalated the matter to Britam’s customer care desk, she was told her entire Sh540,000 had been forfeited. “Where did it go? This was supposed to be an investment that makes profit,” she says in the recording.
Britam Holdings Plc, listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, is Kenya’s largest life insurer by market share, holding a 25 per cent share of the life insurance market for the eighteenth consecutive year as at December 2024.
The group posted a pre-tax profit of Sh7.33 billion in the year ended December 31 2024, a 52 per cent increase from Sh4.82 billion the year before, on total assets of Sh208.5 billion.
The Akiba plan is an endowment product that combines a savings element with life cover. Britam markets it as a “risk-free” instrument that pays a guaranteed lump sum at maturity, with policy terms of between five and twelve years and a minimum monthly premium of Sh5,000.
According to the product’s terms, a surrender benefit is available only from the end of the twenty-fifth policy month. A policy that lapses before that point carries no cash surrender value, meaning premiums already paid are absorbed into the insurer’s reserves to cover administrative charges, agent commissions and mortality costs.
The distinction matters because endowment products are routinely sold by agents to customers who may not fully understand that the product is a long-term contractual commitment, not a liquid savings account.
Industry practitioners say the consequences of a lapse before the two-year threshold are rarely explained in plain language at the point of sale.
A STRUCTURAL MISMATCH
The viral case sits against a difficult economic backdrop. Formal employment accounts for only 15 per cent of Kenya’s total workforce of 20.8 million, with the informal sector employing an estimated 17.4 million people, according to KNBS data from the 2025 Economic Survey.
Real wages in the private sector declined in inflation-adjusted terms for the fifth consecutive year in 2024, with real average annual earnings falling to Sh689,300 against Sh694,000 the year before.
For workers in the formal sector, income shocks such as sudden retrenchment are not covered by endowment policies, which protect only against death during the policy term.
Premium waiver on disability is a separate optional rider, and unemployment is not covered under standard terms.
Consumer advocacy groups have for years argued that endowment products sold to lower-to-middle income earners carry a structural mismatch: the payment discipline they demand is inconsistent with the income volatility that characterises much of Kenya’s workforce.
Comments under the viral video reflect similar experiences. Several users said they had also been unable to access any refund after defaulting on Britam Akiba policies, with one noting that even an attempt to surrender the policy mid-term would result in the loss of most premiums paid to date.
Another said Britam’s statements showed unexplained deductions that had not been adequately explained by the insurer.
WHAT THE POLICY ACTUALLY PROVIDES
The Akiba plan’s maturity benefit is the sum assured, paid as a lump sum at the end of the term. In the event of the policyholder’s death before maturity, a waiver of premium provision keeps the policy in force and guarantees payment of the maturity benefit. An optional lump sum death rider can be added, up to a maximum equal to the sum assured on the main benefit. Policy loans are available from the twenty-fifth month. Tax relief on premiums of up to Sh60,000 annually is available under the Income Tax Act.
The plan does not cover retrenchment, salary cuts, or any other income disruption short of death or disability.
The product literature does not include an illustration of what a policyholder would recover if they were forced to exit before completing twenty-five months of payments, a scenario that for many savers on volatile incomes is a realistic risk.
The Insurance Regulatory Authority, which supervises all licensed underwriters under the Insurance Act Cap 487, has a statutory consumer disputes mechanism under Section 204A of the Act. Aggrieved policyholders can lodge a written complaint with the Commissioner of Insurance, whose determination is subject to appeal to the Insurance Tribunal within thirty days. In recent years the IRA has issued fines to several insurers for failure to honour claims, but has not published any specific directive on endowment lapse disclosure standards.
BRITAM DECLINES TO COMMENT
Kenya Insights sent written queries to Britam’s head of communications and to the group’s corporate affairs department seeking comment on the specific complaint, the company’s reinstatement policy for lapsed Akiba policies, and whether the group was reviewing how lapse consequences are disclosed at point of sale. No response was received before publication time.
The IRA was similarly contacted for comment on whether existing regulations require insurers to provide a surrender value projection at point of sale for endowment products. No response was received.
Financial sector practitioners say the complaint is unlikely to be isolated. Because Britam has more than 2,500 financial advisors selling products across the country, the Akiba plan has penetrated deep into the middle-income and lower-middle-income segments where income volatility is highest.
Industry insiders say agents are incentivised on new business written, with limited accountability for policy persistency, creating a structural incentive to sell without adequately stress-testing a prospective client’s ability to sustain premiums over a five-to-twelve year horizon.
OPTIONS AVAILABLE TO AFFECTED POLICYHOLDERS
Policyholders who have passed the twenty-fifth month threshold can surrender their policies for a cash value, though the amount recovered will be substantially less than total premiums paid, particularly in the early years of the contract. Those who believe they were not adequately informed of lapse terms at point of sale can file a written complaint with Britam’s customer service department, and if unsatisfied, escalate to the IRA’s dispute resolution desk. The IRA’s complaints line is 0800 723 225.
Alternative savings products in the Kenyan market that carry daily liquidity and no minimum commitment period include money market funds. Britam itself operates a money market fund under its asset management division. Other providers include Sanlam, ICEA Lion, CIC, and the Co-operative Bank unit trust platform, among others.
On a night that Rwandan banking officials are still reluctant to discuss openly, unknown operatives gained access to the digital nerve centre of Equity Bank Rwanda and began moving money. Not in trickles, but in avalanches. SIM cards with no prior transaction history were suddenly purchasing mobile money float worth Rwf100 million apiece.
At the daily transfer cap of Rwf2 million, moving Rwf4.7 billion through legitimate channels would have required more than 2,000 individual transactions over multiple days.
Instead, it vanished in what investigators now believe was a single coordinated offensive through bulk float purchases, a channel that sits outside the strict withdrawal limits governing conventional banking and that, until now, nobody had thought to weaponise at this scale.
Equity Bank Rwanda confirmed on March 15, 2026 that it had detected and contained irregular transactions within its systems, triggering internal security and incident response procedures and reversing the majority of the transactions within 24 hours.
The bank was careful with its language. It did not name a figure. It did not say it had been hacked. It said its monitoring systems had worked. “Our internal monitoring systems detected the irregular transaction activity and immediately triggered the security and incident response protocols in line with operational and risk management procedures,” the Kigali-based lender said in its public announcement.
What the statement did not say was that the fraud operation had apparently already succeeded in moving close to Rwf4.7 billion, equivalent to roughly USD3 million to USD4 million, before those protocols closed the door.
A bank official who spoke to Taarifa Rwanda, the Kigali-based outlet that first broke the story, confirmed the figure and the partial recovery. Investigators have so far retrieved approximately Rwf1.2 billion.
That leaves Rwf3.5 billion still unaccounted for, scattered across mobile wallets, agent accounts and the accounts of dozens of individuals who may or may not have known what they were receiving.
Attempts by this publication to obtain comment from the National Bank of Rwanda were unsuccessful. Rwanda Investigation Bureau spokesperson Dr Thierry Murangira said he had no information on the case. The office of the Finance Minister did not respond.
THE VENDOR AT THE CENTRE
The suspected entry point into Equity Bank Rwanda’s systems was not through the bank itself but through a third-party platform.
Investigators have zeroed in on ESICIA Ltd, a Kigali-based technology company that has provided internet banking solutions to financial institutions in Rwanda since 2005. ESICIA, which markets itself as ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certified and holds contracts across the banking, government and telecoms sectors in the region, supplies Equity Bank Rwanda with a vendor-managed internet banking platform that the bank operates under licence.
Investigators are now examining whether the ESICIA platform was exploited to gain unauthorised access to the bank’s infrastructure or to manipulate transactions.
The Rwanda Investigation Bureau has moved to obtain system access logs that would show who entered the platform, at what time and what actions were performed.
Digital forensic specialists are simultaneously reviewing server records and user activity trails. ESICIA Chief Executive Officer Innocent Kaneza declined to comment when contacted by Taarifa. He did not respond to this publication’s enquiries either.
The implications of a vendor-side breach, if confirmed, would be severe. It would mean that the security of a Tier-1 bank’s digital operations had been compromised not from within its own walls but through a contractor’s system, one that sits between the bank and its customers.
It would also raise uncomfortable questions about how Rwanda’s central bank supervises the third-party technology arrangements of supervised institutions, and whether ESICIA’s ISO certifications accurately reflected the real-world security of its systems.
THE MOBILE MONEY TRAP
To understand how Rwf4.7 billion could move so quickly without triggering alarms, investigators have had to examine a gap buried inside Rwanda’s digital payments architecture.
The mechanism is called float. In Rwanda’s mobile money ecosystem, registered agents who facilitate transactions for customers obtain their operating balances by depositing equivalent cash into trust accounts held at banks.
The telecom operator, in this case MoMo Rwanda, then credits the agent’s mobile wallet with digital value that mirrors the deposit. That float is the working capital of Rwanda’s mobile economy. Without it, agents cannot transact.
The fraud appears to have weaponised this mechanism. Rather than moving funds through the bank’s normal transfer channels, where daily limits would have made bulk movement impossible, the perpetrators are believed to have used the internet banking platform to generate float purchases of extraordinary size.
SIM cards that had never previously received even Rwf1,000 were suddenly credited with Rwf100 million apiece in float.
Some of those SIM cards were registered outside Rwanda and were not recognised agents within the mobile money ecosystem. Nobody has yet explained how they were allowed to make such purchases. “That is where the biggest question arises,” a source familiar with the investigation said. “Who issued those SIM cards, who owns them and how were they allowed to purchase such large amounts of float?”
A senior official at MoMo Rwanda told Taarifa that he had learned of the matter from press reports and declined to provide details.
Neither MoMo Rwanda nor the National Bank of Rwanda has issued any public statement on the fraud. The silence from key institutions has drawn sharp comment from financial sector observers, who say it reflects a troubling pattern of opacity around major incidents in Rwanda’s financial system.
THIRTY-FIVE IN CUSTODY, SIX IN UGANDA
As of March 15, 35 people were in custody in Rwanda. The Rwanda Investigation Bureau is leading the probe, conducting forensic analysis of digital systems, financial records and electronic devices seized from suspects.
Most of those detained are believed to be individuals whose bank or mobile money accounts received suspicious transfers linked to the fraudulent transactions.
Investigators are working to determine whether the recipients knowingly participated or whether their accounts were used without their full understanding by whoever orchestrated the scheme.
“You cannot receive Rwf100 million in your account and claim you don’t know where it came from,” an official said. “Investigators want to know who sent the money and why it landed there.”
The human mule architecture of the fraud, in which stolen funds are dispersed rapidly across hundreds of accounts, is consistent with sophisticated cybercrime operations seen in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa over the past decade.
Once money is fragmented across multiple wallets, recovering it requires either the willing cooperation of every account holder or a court process to freeze and claw back each deposit separately.
Among those detained are two Equity Bank Rwanda employees from the IT department, both connected to data centre operations. Their detention does not necessarily establish guilt, bank officials have been careful to note. Investigators are examining whether perpetrators may have gained physical or technical access to the bank’s systems from inside.
“The suspicion was that there must have been physical access to the data centre,” a source said. “But even that I cannot confirm. RIB needs to complete the forensic investigation.” Simultaneously, six suspects were arrested in Uganda.
Police forensic teams are extracting and analysing digital images from devices seized in the Ugandan arrests to determine whether those individuals were directly involved or were themselves used by a wider network.
THE MWANGI CRACKDOWN THAT WASN’T ENOUGH
The timing of the Rwanda breach is as damaging as its scale. It lands less than a year after Equity Group CEO Dr James Mwangi launched the most aggressive anti-fraud purge in East African banking history, one in which more than 1,500 Equity employees across the group’s operations were dismissed in successive waves between May and July 2025 after internal audits uncovered a culture of staff collusion, unauthorised transaction facilitation and conflicts of interest.
The trigger was a Sh1.5 billion payroll fraud in Kenya, in which the IT system credentials of a Group Processing Centre manager were used to process over 40 transactions totalling nearly Sh1.5 billion before the money was transferred to rival banks.
Mwangi, who told Business Daily in May 2025 that he would be “consistently ruthless” in the purge, extended the clean-up to Uganda in June 2025 and pledged to sweep through all seven of the group’s operating markets. Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo were explicitly named as jurisdictions where similar integrity audits would follow.
Eight months after that pledge, fraudsters have apparently struck the Rwanda subsidiary in what investigators believe was an externally orchestrated attack rather than the insider collusion that drove the Kenyan losses.
But the distinction offers limited comfort to a bank that had staked its regional reputation on having cleaned house.
The Rwanda fraud raises the harder question: whether a determined, technically capable external adversary could still defeat a bank’s defences even after its internal vulnerabilities had been addressed, and whether the audit of human integrity had distracted attention from the robustness of the digital infrastructure and the third-party systems that run it.
A PATTERN ACROSS KIGALI
The Equity incident is not an isolated event. Banking sector sources have told this publication and sister outlets in Kigali that at least three other Rwandan financial institutions have been targeted in comparable attacks in recent months.
BPR Bank Rwanda, the KCB Group subsidiary that is the country’s largest commercial bank by branch network with over 154 outlets, was reportedly struck by a similar fraud scheme involving approximately Rwf1.2 billion.
NCBA Bank Rwanda faced a related incident involving around Rwf400 million, although the bank reportedly managed to recover about Rwf250 million.
Bank of Kigali, the country’s dominant lender controlling more than 30 per cent of all banking assets, has also been affected by a comparable incident in recent months, though the precise amount has not been independently confirmed.
Most striking of all, sources within the banking sector have told Taarifa that even the National Bank of Rwanda itself has recently experienced attempted cyber intrusions.
In the most brazen reported case, the suspected perpetrators allegedly operated from a hotel located less than 50 metres from the central bank’s premises, attempting to penetrate the BNR’s network from a position virtually within its shadow.
The frequency and ambition of the attacks suggest a level of organised criminal capability that has not previously been publicly acknowledged in Rwanda, a country that has invested heavily in positioning Kigali as a digital finance hub and that is currently implementing a Financial Sector Development Strategy 2025-2030 explicitly aimed at accelerating the growth of digital banking and fintech.
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME
Equity Bank Rwanda has been targeted before. In November 2019, Rwandan authorities arrested 12 people, including eight Kenyans, three Rwandans and a Ugandan, in an attempted cyber-fraud operation targeting the bank. They were convicted and sentenced to eight-year jail terms in 2021.
The 2026 attack appears far more sophisticated in its exploitation of the mobile money float mechanism, its cross-border architecture and its apparent use of a vendor’s system as the entry point rather than a direct assault on the bank’s own network. It is a reminder that the criminal ecosystem learns, adapts and probes for new gaps even as institutions patch the ones already known.
Equity Bank Rwanda, in a statement released alongside its confirmation of the fraud, said it maintains a zero-tolerance approach to financial crime and is continuing to strengthen its cybersecurity infrastructure, transaction monitoring systems and internal controls.
The bank insisted that no customer funds had been lost and that any unrecovered amounts would be absorbed by the institution.
The assurance, standard in such circumstances, means that Equity Group’s balance sheet will ultimately bear the exposure even as RIB works to recover the Rwf3.5 billion still outstanding.
For now, Rwanda’s financial sector regulator has said nothing. MoMo Rwanda has said nothing. The bank itself has said as little as it legally must.
The silence, investigators and observers agree, is itself an answer of sorts, one that says the full dimensions of what happened that night are still being mapped, and that the institutions responsible for oversight are not yet ready to explain how the maps came to have such large blank spaces in them.
The first sign that something was wrong came just after midnight. Vehicles without registration plates began assembling on the access roads near Karen’s Ngong Road junction.
By 2am, a force of more than 50 armed men, some in police uniform and others in balaclavas, had pushed through the gates of Dari Business Park and locked every employee of Tamarind Restaurant outside the premises.
Former Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju, roused from sleep at his adjacent home, walked out to find a small army in possession of his property. The army refused to say who had sent them.
It was a spectacular, and violent, ending to a legal saga that has consumed the former Jubilee Party secretary-general for the better part of a decade.
Tuju filmed himself from outside his own gate at 3:30am, speaking directly to the camera in a video that spread across social media before most of Nairobi had woken up.
“I have been kicked out by armed police officers who came in six unidentified vehicles. This is pure impunity because they have no court orders to conduct such a raid.”
Tuju said the officers communicated with each other in their mother tongue, shielded their faces each time he raised his phone, and told him only that they were following orders from above. When he demanded to see court documents authorising the eviction, he was told there were none. “This is not law,” he said. “If it is law, it is the law of the jungle.”
To understand what happened in the darkness of Karen on Saturday morning one must go back to 2014, when Raphael Tuju, then a media millionaire with ambitions that matched the size of his real estate dreams, fixed his eye on a 22-acre forested estate along Tree Lane in Karen.
At the heart of the property stood a Victorian-era bungalow built by Scottish missionary Dr Albert Patterson more than a century earlier.
The building had been preserved with almost religious care, its 60-year-old refrigerator still running, a gramophone in the parlour, Dr Patterson’s original furniture in place and the forest canopy unbroken overhead. Rooms were let at Sh43,000 a night for honeymooners.
Tuju’s plan was to transform the estate into the kind of establishment that would rival Windsor Golf Hotel or Hemingways on Mbagathi Ridge: boutique accommodation, a high-end restaurant named Tamarind Karen, a wellness sanctuary called Entim Sidai, and a ring of luxury residential villas at Sh100 million each.
The vehicle was his company Dari Limited, and the financier was the East African Development Bank.
On April 10, 2015, EADB disbursed Sh943.9 million, the equivalent of 9.3 million US dollars, to Dari Limited under a facility agreement that named Tuju, his three children Mano, Alma and Yma, and a related company, S.A.M Company Limited, as guarantors.
The properties along Tree Lane, Ngong Road and Mwitu Road in Karen were charged as security. The first interest payment fell due in October 2015. Dari paid it. It would be the only payment EADB ever received.
What followed, in Tuju’s telling, was a cascade of broken promises. EADB had committed to a second tranche of Sh294 million for the construction of the residential units but declined to release those funds, Tuju has alleged, because the bank wanted additional security over an Upper Hill property already pledged to the Bank of Africa.
Without the second disbursement, he argued, the project unravelled and with it his ability to service the debt. EADB disputes the account and courts in London agreed with the bank, ruling that the second facility was discussed but never formally agreed and therefore never owed.
In December 2018 EADB invoked the dispute resolution clause in the original facility agreement and sued Dari Limited and its guarantors before the High Court of Justice in London. Judge Daniel Toledano ruled against Tuju in July 2019, ordering repayment of more than 15.1 million US dollars, equivalent at the time to well over Sh1.5 billion.
Tuju’s appeal before Lord Justice Leggatt was dismissed. By the time the Kenyan courts adopted the UK judgment in February 2020, the debt had grown further through accumulated interest and currency movements.
Tuju responded by opening every legal front available to him. He challenged the adoption of the UK judgment in the Kenyan High Court and lost. He fought at the Court of Appeal and lost again. He petitioned the Supreme Court, sought to have Supreme Court judges removed before the Judicial Service Commission, was barred from the apex court on procedural grounds, and eventually filed a case at the East African Court of Justice in Arusha.
In Nairobi he accused senior advocates of fabricating affidavits and colluding with the bank’s former Kenya country manager to deceive multiple courts. He filed criminal complaints with the DCI and the ODPP. He told courts that a Dubai investor identified as ZLivia had been willing to inject fresh equity into the project but that EADB had blocked the deal, and that KCB Group had been ready to take over the loan but was similarly obstructed.
Through every round of litigation, temporary court orders and injunctions kept auctioneers at bay. EADB fought back, seeking to have Tuju and his three children jailed or fined for contempt of court, and filing bankruptcy proceedings against them individually.
PricewaterhouseCoopers partners Muniu Thoithi and George Weru were appointed receiver managers over Dari Limited in December 2019, though that appointment was successfully contested for a period. The debt, which started at 9.3 million dollars, had by 2026 grown to the equivalent of Sh4.5 billion according to EADB.
Tuju disputes the figure and argues the bank’s running total is inflated by punitive default interest applied in bad faith.
The final chapter opened on Monday, March 9. Justice Josephine Wayua Mong’are of the Milimani Commercial Court struck out Dari Limited’s amended plaint, ruling that the issues raised had already been determined across multiple forums and were substantially res judicata.
The court vacated the injunctions that had since October 2024 barred Garam Investment Auctioneers and Knight Frank Kenya from advertising, attaching or selling the Karen properties. The road to auction was open.
On Wednesday night, March 11, more than 100 men arrived at Dari Business Park on motorbikes. Tuju, who had received no notice, walked out to find strangers claiming the property had a new owner and demanding he vacate immediately.
He stood his ground, filmed the confrontation and called Karen Police Station. Officers arrived and restored order. He filed a report, returned inside and believed the matter would be addressed in court. Then came Saturday.
The force that arrived in the early hours of March 14 was a different kind of operation altogether. Tuju has suggested, based on the equipment carried and the coordination on display, that the unit included elements of the Rapid Response Unit, the elite GSU formation based at Ruiru that handles the most sensitive internal security operations in the country.
The Kenya Police Service had not confirmed which unit carried out the operation by the time of publication, and no statement had emerged from the Inspector General’s office.
According to Tuju’s account, corroborated by videos he recorded at the scene, the officers arrived in at least seven vehicles, several without registration plates. Some wore full police uniform.
Others had covered their faces with balaclavas. When Tuju approached, officers turned away from his camera. When he asked for court orders, he was told there were none. When he asked who had given the orders, he was told only that the orders came from above.
Restaurant staff and security guards employed at Tamarind Karen were pushed outside the gates. The officers locked themselves inside the compound. Tuju stood at his own perimeter wall in the dark as more vehicles arrived and dawn was still hours away.
“They will have to kill me and bury me in Rarieda. Entim Sidai, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park will only change hands over my dead body.”
In the video Tuju addressed his children Mano, Alma and Yma by name, telling them he was protecting the family business and would not give way to what he described as state-backed criminality. “First of all, I would like to encourage my children, who I know will be watching this video, that I am only protecting my family business which belongs to my family,” he said.
The Karen raid did not occur in isolation. Earlier on Wednesday evening, Fairways Hotel in Kisumu, owned by former Principal Secretary Irungu Nyakera, was attacked by a group of men who caused damage worth millions of shillings and assaulted security staff. Nyakera attributed the attack to political opponents and fired warning shots into the air to disperse the intruders.
DCI Director Amin Mohammed, speaking at the Police Leadership Academy in Nairobi on Thursday during a national security commanders meeting, confirmed that several suspects from both incidents had been arrested. “Goons are criminals, and we have no place for criminals,” Amin said, adding that those already identified had been arraigned in court while efforts to identify others were continuing.
Internal Security Principal Secretary Raymond Omollo echoed the position, saying the government would not tolerate violence or hooliganism and promising legal accountability for perpetrators. Neither official addressed the Saturday operation at Dari Business Park, which by all accounts involved uniformed officers rather than private goons.
On Friday, March 13, the day before the raid, Tuju walked to the Supreme Court building and delivered a letter personally addressed to Chief Justice Martha Koome.
Speaking to journalists outside, he said he had chosen institutions over retaliation. “I have come to the judiciary today only with a letter and not with goons,” he said. “If you allow our country to go the goons way then we will be heading to anarchy, chaos, in other words, a failed state.”
The letter, copies of which were submitted simultaneously to the DCI, the EACC and the ODPP, alleged that a sitting judge in the Commercial Division of the High Court had been approached by a broker, a former judge and a lawyer who sought Sh10 million in exchange for influencing the outcome of his pending appeal.
Tuju said the three individuals were arrested after they visited his Karen home and made the bribery pitch. He named them in separate communications to investigative agencies.
On March 12, Justice Mong’are, leaving the division on transfer, declined to grant interim conservatory orders that would have halted the auction pending the appeal but certified the matter as urgent and granted leave to appeal.
The next hearing before the presiding judge of the division was scheduled for March 17. With his property already occupied by officers who arrived in the night and declined to leave, it is not immediately clear what relief that hearing can provide.
Tuju’s legal resistance has been nothing short of exhausting to document. He has fought in courts in London, Nairobi and Arusha. He has used every procedural mechanism available: injunctions, stays, contempt applications, constitutional petitions, criminal complaints and judicial integrity petitions.
He has accused lawyers of fabricating affidavits, accused judges of soliciting bribes, accused the bank of predatory lending and accused auctioneers of operating without proper authority. He has prevailed in isolated procedural battles while losing the broader war of attrition. What he had never done, until Saturday morning, was physically lost possession of the property.
The question being asked across Kenya’s legal and political establishment on Saturday is whether the operation was a lawful enforcement of a judgment obtained across multiple courts over eleven years, or whether the deployment of what appeared to be state security forces to execute a commercial debt recovery in the dead of night, without presenting court orders to the registered owner, amounts to an extrajudicial action that should alarm every property holder in the country. Tuju himself has framed the issue as nothing less than a constitutional test. “This is not law,” he said, standing alone outside his locked gate in the dark. “If it is law, it is the law of the jungle.”
A Nairobi court has issued warrant of arrest against two businessmen for failing to appear in court to plead to fraud charges.
Milimani Principal Magistrate Teressia Nyangena issued arrest warrant against Mohamed Annour Sadate and Gilbert Omollo Orwe alias David Gweth after they failed to appear in court to answer to charges related to gold fraud.
Magistrate Nyangena rejected an application by a lawyer representing one of the suspects, who claimed that they were ambushed with the case and that his client was unwell.
Sadate and Orwe are accused of committing the offence on diverse dates between 6 April and 30 June 2022 in Nairobi City County.
It is further alleged that they committed the fraud jointly with others not before court, with intent to defraud and allegedly obtained USD 101,400 from Sardar Mohamad Tabraiz by falsely pretending that they were in a position to sell to him 2,000kgs of gold.
The charge sheet registered in court stated that they allegedly forged a rejection letter for export purporting it to be a valid and genuine document issued by Kenya Revenue Authority.
It is alleged that they forged the document on or before 7 day of march 2022 at an unknown place and time within the country, Orwe jointly in the country.
Orwe is also accused of making a certificate of origin No. 8796, purporting it to be a valid and genuine document issued by East African Community Customs COMESA, without lawful authority.
The document, passed as genuine, was meant to defraud Tabraiz.
NAIROBI, Kenya Mar 13 – More than 5,500 Kenyans have signed up to join the Linda Mwananchi movement shortly after Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna launched its official website on Friday.
The Nairobi Senator unveiled the online platform on March 13, urging supporters to register and connect with the movement through its website and social media platforms.
According to information shared by the organisers, thousands of supporters had already followed the movement across Facebook, X, TikTok and Instagram within hours of the launch.
Last month,Sifuna insisted on a Linda Mwananchi census in the quest to send President William Ruto home saying it will only succeed if it is backed by clear numbers, proper planning and a strong grassroots structure.
Sifuna said members of the Linda Mwananchi movement have consistently told supporters, including at rallies in Kakamega, that they can remove President Ruto from office. However, he stressed that certain steps must come first which include knowing the actual figures or building the systems needed to organise them.
Those seeking to join the initiative are required to complete a brief registration process on the website, which includes confirming their voter registration status. Registrants are also asked to pay a Ksh10 fee, a step the organisers say is intended to filter out automated or fake accounts.
During the sign-up process, a message explains that the small fee is meant to help the movement verify genuine supporters and determine its actual membership numbers.
Once the payment is completed, new members receive a confirmation message welcoming them to the movement.
The website also outlines several ways supporters can participate, including volunteering their time or making donations starting from as little as Ksh10 to support the initiative’s activities.
Organisers say the funds will help sustain the campaign as it mobilises supporters across the country.
In addition, the platform features an events calendar where members can track upcoming meetings and rallies organised by the movement.
The next gathering is scheduled to take place in Mombasa County on March 22.
The group has also announced plans to convene a delegates’ convention later in the month dubbed “The People’s NDC,” which is expected to outline the movement’s next political steps.
Last week,the Linda Mwananchi faction of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party rejected a plan to register the caucus’ movement name as a political party.
The Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna-led faction says it has not approved any plan or authorised any person to register the Linda Mwananchi party following an application to the Office of Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP).
Already, the faction has written to the ORPP seeking to block the attempt by an individual identified as Charles Wanyonyi, citing the likelihood of infringement of images and symbols associated with the caucus.
The group says it has not approved the use of the slogan “Linda Mwananchi,” arguing that if registered, it will provide an avenue for the public to be conned.
“The political party is likely to use our clients’ names, images, and goodwill to fraudulently get financing either from members of the public or other entities,” the faction stated through lawyer Duncan Anzala of Henia Anzala & Associates.
The faction informed the ORPP that they were apprehensive over the plan to register the party after reading about the move in one of the dailies.
“In view of the foregoing, our clients urge your office to shun upon and thwart the attempt to defraud Kenyans through political conmanship by declining the application to register “Linda Mwananchi” as a political party,” the letter received at the ORPP on March 4, 2026 states.
There is a moment that will outlive every gazette notice, every ceremonial swearing-in, and every press release that the new National Land Commission will ever issue.
It happened in a committee room in Parliament on the morning of Monday, March 9, 2026, when Dr Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy — President William Ruto’s personal choice to chair the commission that oversees Kenya’s 70-million-acre public land estate — looked at a panel of MPs and said: ‘I am a bit shaky.’
It was not a throwaway admission. It was a diagnosis.
The MPs had stripped away Alawy’s crib sheets. Committee chairman Joash Nyamoko, the North Mugirango MP who chaired the Departmental Committee on Lands, had already ordered the nominee to set aside the notes he was reading from after suspecting that questions had been leaked to him in advance.
Without his prepared script, Alawy could not field basic interrogation about the commission he had been nominated to lead. He sought permission to answer questions one by one because, in his own words, he found it difficult to recall them.
The committee refused. Kaloleni MP Paul Katana asked the question that hung over the entire session: ‘NLC is a huge responsibility. Will he manage the storm?’ Nobody has yet answered it.
The committee gave him a five-minute breather after Bahati MP Irene Njoki proposed it. When he returned, Alawy thanked the committee for its patience and confessed: ‘This is a new environment for me. I am already feeling the weight of NLC on my back. Usually, I am a very composed and listening person.’ It was the most revealing sentence of the entire vetting exercise.
The weight of the NLC — an institution charged with managing public land on behalf of 55 million Kenyans, investigating historical land injustices stretching back to colonial dispossession, and recommending national land policy — was apparently something Alawy encountered for the first time in that committee room. Despite all of this, the committee still recommended his approval. Parliament voted him through. President Ruto gazetted him within 24 hours.
“Are we serious as a country? Are we perpetuating land malpractices in the land sector? What kind of disservice are we doing to this country? It is a sad day.” — Dr Wilberforce Oundo, Funyula MP
TWICE REJECTED, THRICE LUCKY
This is not Alawy’s first parliamentary ordeal. In February 2014, former President Uhuru Kenyatta nominated him for appointment as a member of the National Gender and Equality Commission — a different constitutional body, but the same pattern.
The Labour and Social Welfare Committee, chaired by then Matungu MP David Were, vetted him and concluded bluntly that he was ‘out of touch with gender and equality challenges in Kenya to an extent that he could not identify even one minority group in Kenya.’
The committee found him unsuitable and rejected his nomination outright.
There was a further, more fundamental problem in 2014. The committee found that Alawy had lost his Kenyan citizenship in 2005 when he acquired American citizenship under the old constitution, which did not permit dual nationality.
He was asked to prove that he had lawfully resumed Kenyan citizenship.
The documents he presented — a declaration made the day after his vetting — were ruled ‘irrelevant to his case’ by the committee. He was unable to demonstrate, to the committee’s satisfaction, that due diligence was followed in regaining the citizenship that Article 14(5) of the 2010 Constitution entitles him to reclaim.
The full House overturned the committee’s rejection and Alawy served a six-year term on the gender commission.
His citizenship questions have not disappeared: during his NLC vetting this month, the issue resurfaced, with Alawy confirming he had at some point held American citizenship and had since renounced it.
What the record therefore shows is a man who carries a 12-year paper trail of parliamentary unease about his suitability for constitutional office.
That trail includes a formal rejection by a House committee, a disputed citizenship file, and a vetting performance so poor that even the committee that recommended him recorded in its official report that he was ‘shaky in responding.’ In any functioning meritocracy, this dossier would disqualify a candidate from the chairmanship of a ward development committee, let alone a constitutional commission. In Kenya in March 2026, it was apparently sufficient.
THE CONFLICT THAT PARLIAMENT NOTED AND THEN IGNORED
Perhaps the most explosive dimension of the Alawy nomination is not his academic credentials or his shakiness before MPs. It is what his family has been doing to the people of Wasini Island in Kwale County for the past four decades — and what it means for any community that finds itself in a land dispute with the Saggaf Alawy family while Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy chairs the institution that has jurisdiction over exactly such disputes.
The backstory is long and bitter. Wasini is a five-square-kilometre coral island off Kenya’s southern coast, home to some 1,700 residents who depend on fishing and tourism.
In 1979, the patriarch of the Saggaf Alawy family — Abdulrahman Saggaf Alawy, a former school teacher on the island — began a legal campaign to reclaim communal farmland known as the Puma, which he asserted the family owned by virtue of a 1908 land title ordinance issued during the era of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
What followed was nearly five decades of litigation, government commissions, surveys, injunctions, eviction threats, and community protests that have left the island in a state of perpetual anxiety.
In September 2025 — just five months before Ruto nominated Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy to chair the NLC — the government issued the Saggaf Alawy family a freehold title deed for 610 acres of Wasini Island, representing nearly half the island.
The National Land Commission, the very institution Alawy now chairs, had previously recognised the family as victims of historical injustice. Within weeks of receiving that title, the family issued formal eviction notices to hotel and cottage owners on the island.
Local leaders and residents, many of whom have lived on the land for generations, insist the land is ancestral and communal. MPs from the Coast had previously passed resolutions questioning the survey process and ordering residents to stay put. None of that stopped the eviction machinery.
During his NLC vetting, MPs pressed Alawy on whether he would recuse himself should Wasini Island matters come before the commission. He said he would. But the institutional problem runs deeper than one vote or one recusal.
The Saggaf family’s claim to nearly half of Wasini Island was processed through the NLC. The NLC issued gazette notices affirming their ownership. The NLC’s own historical injustice committee was the vehicle through which the family secured its legal victories.
A man whose family has already benefited from NLC decisions to the tune of Sh3.9 billion in prime coastal land — and who has himself declared a net worth of Sh62 million — is now the chairman of the body that will adjudicate the next generation of such disputes.
The Institute of Surveyors of Kenya and Kituo Cha Sheria both raised this concern in formal memoranda to the vetting committee. The committee noted their concerns in its report. Parliament then voted Alawy through.
“His family is involved in a land dispute in Wasini Island against the locals. Will you be fair to the residents if you are appointed?” — MP Paul Katana
THE CHAIR’S RECORD AT ADC: A DRESS REHEARSAL FOR FAILURE
Alawy’s defenders will point to his academic credentials — a PhD in Agricultural Education from Ohio State University, a background in monitoring and evaluation, decades of work in international development spanning 43 countries.
But credentials on paper and performance in office are different things, and the parliamentary record of his stewardship of the Agricultural Development Corporation is instructive.
Alawy has served as chairman of the ADC board, a state agency that manages some of Kenya’s most strategically important agricultural land, including the 1.7-million-acre Galana Kulalu ranch in Kilifi and Tana River counties.
The Galana Kulalu project is arguably the most catastrophically mismanaged land asset in modern Kenyan history.
The project consumed more than Sh14 billion in public funds while putting fewer than 10,000 of its projected million acres under cultivation. Parliament described it as a ‘spectacular fiasco.’ Under Alawy’s tenure as ADC chairman, 52,000 acres of ADC land were allocated to a cement factory in Mombasa even as landless communities in Tana River continued to wait for resettlement that had been promised since the presidency of Mwai Kibaki. A parliamentary resolution specifically directed that 250,000 acres of ADC land be allocated to landless residents in Tana River. Alawy did not implement it.
MPs during his NLC vetting also raised the matter of a parliamentary fact-finding visit to ADC offices in Tana River County, during which Alawy was reportedly absent.
Legislators described having travelled at taxpayer expense to ADC facilities only to find the ADC chairman unavailable to meet them. This is the man now entrusted with the chairmanship of the constitutional body mandated to manage all public land in Kenya.
THE COMMISSION’S SIX: A GALLERY OF THE UNQUALIFIED
The problem with Kenya’s new NLC is not limited to its chairman.
It is structural. Section 8 of the NLC Act sets a clear threshold: commissioners must hold a degree and have at least 15 years of knowledge and experience in land management and administration, natural resource management, land adjudication, land law, land surveying, spatial planning, land economics, public administration, or related social sciences. The seven nominees Ruto sent to Parliament are, by the assessment of multiple professional bodies, substantially incapable of meeting that statutory bar.
Susan Khakasa Oyatsi, designated vice-chairperson, is an accountant who served for approximately six years in an acting capacity as finance director at the Judiciary.
She has no background in land law, land surveying, spatial planning, or any of the core technical disciplines listed in Section 8.
Even Funyula MP Wilberforce Oundo, the most outspoken critic of the nominees during the House debate, conceded he had no objection to Oyatsi — a diplomatic hedge that nonetheless signals she is the closest thing to a technically defensible appointment in the batch.
Daniel Murithi Muriungi, nominated from Meru County, is described as a property lawyer and aviation practitioner.
Property law has tangential relevance to land administration, but the NLC’s mandate extends to adjudication, historical injustice investigations, compulsory acquisition, national land policy, and the oversight of county land management boards. Aviation practice contributes nothing to that mandate.
Kigen Vincent Cheruiyot, from Kericho County, is a certified human resource professional and former chairman of the National Employment Authority. Human resources is a management discipline. It has no connection to land governance.
Cheruiyot’s appointment to a body whose core technical functions are inherently spatial and legal in character is, on its face, a Section 8 anomaly.
The ISK’s president Eric Nyadimo put it plainly: the NLC’s statutory work involves land survey, valuation, physical planning, environmental management, and land administration. ‘How will the team that has been proposed carry out these core functions when all these matters are alien to them?’ he asked. Nobody answered him.
Mohamed Abdi Haji Mohamed, former Banissa MP, brings a legislative background to the commission. His constituency lies in the pastoral northeast, a region with acute and historically under-served land tenure problems.
Haji’s political experience is not nothing — commissioners who understand community land tensions in arid and semi-arid regions serve a genuine function.
But his is not a technical appointment, and the NLC is, above all else, a technical institution.
Mary Yiane Seneta, former Kajiado County Women Representative, holds a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Nairobi. She was among nominees shortlisted for the Salaries and Remuneration Commission in 2025 and did not make the final cut.
She brings no evident land expertise to an institution that will resolve title disputes, compulsory acquisitions, and resource allocation decisions affecting millions of Kenyans.
Dr Julie Ouma Oseko, from Siaya County, is described as an advocate and senior legal consultant. Of all six commissioners, she comes closest to the legal competencies the NLC requires. Her confirmation of legal standing would depend on the nature of her practice, but at minimum she represents a partial exception to the broader pattern.
“We are populating the commission with Kenyans who have no qualifications at all, as clearly outlined in this Act.” — Dr Wilberforce Oundo, MP, on the floor of the National Assembly
THE PROFESSIONALS WHO WERE PASSED OVER
The Institution of Surveyors of Kenya, the Architectural Association of Kenya, and Kituo Cha Sheria all submitted formal memoranda opposing the nominations before vetting began. ISK president Nyadimo’s public statement raised a question that the selection panel has not answered: was there a scoring system? Qualified land surveyors, spatial planners, land economists, and land lawyers applied for positions on the NLC.
The selection panel, whose proceedings are not transparent to the public, passed them over in favour of a human resources professional, a finance officer, a former MP, and a woman with a degree in education.
Section 8 of the NLC Act was not drafted idly. It was designed by the architects of Kenya’s 2010 constitutional settlement to ensure that the body charged with addressing one of Africa’s most complex inherited land problems — colonial dispossession, adjudication irregularities, historical injustice, compulsory acquisition and compensation — would be staffed by people who understand what they are doing.
The current selection process has produced a commission where the dominant expertise appears to be loyalty.
PARLIAMENT: A SIDESHOW WITH OFFICIAL STATIONERY
The most dispiriting element of this episode is not what the President did. Presidents appoint allies. That is a political constant. The most dispiriting element is what Parliament did. The Departmental Committee on Lands heard the evidence.
MPs questioned Alawy’s citizenship history, his conflict of interest in Wasini Island, his failure at ADC, his inability to answer questions without a cheat sheet, and his visible breakdown under routine interrogation.
The committee chairperson told him on the record that his shakiness would be noted in the official report. It was noted. The committee then recommended his approval.
The full House adopted the report. Parliament discharged its constitutional function of vetting presidential nominees by noting every reason the nominees should be rejected, writing those reasons into its official record, and voting yes.
Oundo, who delivered the most searing indictment of the nominations on the floor of the House, captured the capitulation in a single sentence: ‘I would have easily stood here and said I oppose this motion, but the commission has to run.’ The commission has to run. It is the oldest and most reliable justification for institutional surrender in Kenyan public life. The commission has to run, therefore the unqualified must be confirmed.
The state house has spoken, therefore the oversight mechanism must perform its ritual and stand aside. Leader of Majority Kimani Ichung’wah even attempted to silence Oundo, demanding he substantiate his criticisms or withdraw and apologise. Oundo declined.
He told his colleagues they should have had the courage to return the nominations to the appointing authority. They did not.
The swearing-in of the new NLC commissioners was deferred on the day the gazette notice was published because Chief Justice Martha Koome and Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu were unavailable. It was, perhaps, an unintentional metaphor.
The republic’s most senior judicial officer was not present to witness the formal installation of the commission that will adjudicate land rights for the next six years.
WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN ANY OTHER BAD APPOINTMENT
Kenya is a country in which the word ‘land’ has triggered ethnic conflict, electoral violence, mass displacement, judicial corruption, and political assassination. The National Land Commission is not a decorative constitutional body. It manages public land on behalf of national and county governments. It investigates historical injustices.
It recommends compulsory acquisition of private land for public purpose. It advises on national land policy. It monitors land use planning. Its decisions determine whether communities are settled or evicted, whether infrastructure projects proceed or stall, whether colonial-era grievances are addressed or compounded.
A commission staffed by people who, in the words of the ISK, find the commission’s ‘core functions alien to them’ is not merely an ineffective commission. It is a dangerous one.
And at the head of that commission sits a man whose family has a Sh3.9 billion stake in a land dispute that passed through the very institution he now chairs, who struggled to answer questions without a script, who was rejected by a parliamentary committee twelve years ago, and who told the nation’s elected representatives that he was feeling the weight of the NLC on his back in the room where he was supposed to demonstrate he could carry it.
Ruto has had his skunk. Parliament has accepted delivery. Six years is a long time for an island community to wait.
Section 8 of the National Land Commission Act (Cap. 281) requires that all commissioners hold a degree and possess at least 15 years of knowledge and experience in: public administration, land management and administration, natural resource management, land adjudication and settlement, land law, land surveying, spatial planning, land economics, or social sciences — in addition to satisfying the Chapter Six integrity requirements of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.
Section 5 confers on the commission the mandate to manage public land, recommend national land policy, investigate historical injustices, and monitor land use planning across all 47 counties.
Nelson Havi has been practising Kenyan law for three decades. He has stood before every court the country possesses. He has served as president of the Law Society of Kenya and, by general consensus across the bar, has no institutional territory left to protect that would require him to moderate what he says in public.
When Havi speaks in the language of accusation, the legal profession listens, because he has shown no hesitation in putting his name to things that others only say in their cars.
In the past 72 hours, he has put his name to the most concentrated series of judicial corruption allegations to emerge from a single dispute in Kenya’s post-independence legal history. He has named a sitting High Court judge as the intended recipient of a bribe. He has alleged that one of the arrested men claims to share a child with that judge.
He has pointed to forgery of documents filed in court by a Senior Counsel at a leading Nairobi law firm. He has alleged that the English arbitration award forming the foundation of the entire debt recovery exercise was itself corruptly procured. And he has accused the Judicial Service Commission not merely of inaction but of active participation in protecting corrupt judges by accepting bribes to dismiss formal complaints.
Each allegation is serious on its own.
Together they constitute a theory of total institutional capture: a commercial dispute in which the corruption did not begin with the Karen auctioneers who showed up on Monday morning, but with the original deal, ran through the London arbitration, infected the Kenyan court proceedings, enlisted the document process, co-opted the disciplinary commission, and finally placed a disgraced former judge at the gate of a former Cabinet secretary’s property to collect one last payment for the judge now presiding over the case.
“The level of corruption in the Judiciary in general, and in this matter in particular, is so egregious that I cannot agree to be persuaded by the popular but uninformed narrative that this is a case of a defaulter debtor abusing the legal process not to pay. It is not.”
The Confession and the Child
Havi’s most incendiary disclosure is not the naming of Lady Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mongare as the alleged beneficiary of the Sh10.4 million bribery scheme. It is what he added about the personal relationship alleged between the judge and one of the men arrested on March 9, 2026 by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.
“One of the men arrested on Monday soliciting for a bribe represented that he has a child with the judge on whose behalf he was soliciting,” Havi wrote. He did not name which of the four arrested suspects made this claim. The EACC has confirmed that former High Court judge Joseph Mutava, advocate Kimani Wachira and two other individuals were taken into custody and processed at the Integrity Centre Police Station in Nairobi. The commission has said the matter will be forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions for charging. It has not addressed the claim about the child.
Havi has separately stated, in what amounts to direct attribution, that Mutava confessed to investigators that he was collecting the money on behalf of Mongare.
The significance of this claim is structural. Mutava was removed from the High Court bench in 2016 following a tribunal chaired by David Maraga that found him to have improperly handled cases, including a matter involving businessman Kamlesh Pattni. His removal was upheld by the Supreme Court.
A man with that record, allegedly dispatched by a sitting judge to collect money from a litigant on the day that judge delivers her ruling in his case, is not a peripheral detail in the story of how the Kenyan judiciary functions. It is the story.
Mongare has not commented. Her chambers have issued no statement. The Chief Justice’s office has been silent. The JSC has produced nothing. Mongare continues to sit as a judge of the Commercial and Tax Division at Milimani, her cases proceeding on schedule, as if none of this exists.
The Forgery Allegation: A Senior Counsel and a Leading Law Firm
The second strand of Havi’s expanded statement concerns the integrity of the documents on which the entire case was built. Addressing those who frame the Tuju dispute as a simple matter of debt evasion, he asked: “Why are you disregarding the forgery of documents filed in Court by a Senior Counsel in a leading Ivy League Law Firm?”
He did not name the firm or the counsel in this particular post.
But the identity of the Senior Counsel concerned is already a matter of public record, established by Tuju himself in a formal complaint submitted to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations in February 2026.
Tuju named Senior Counsel Fred Ojiambo of Kaplan and Stratton Advocates as the subject of his report, accusing Ojiambo of fabricating evidence and filing false affidavits in cases linked to the East Africa Development Bank.
Tuju’s complaint to the DCI alleged that Ojiambo’s conduct amounted to fabricating evidence contrary to Section 113 of the Penal Code, conspiracy to defeat justice contrary to Section 117 and providing false information to a public servant contrary to Section 129.
He accused Ojiambo of invoking what he characterised as a non-existent diplomatic immunity for the EADB at the High Court, a manoeuvre Tuju alleged had caused proceedings in a related Magistrates Court matter to stall for over a year. He also alleged that the false affidavits filed in the EADB dispute bore resemblance to documents previously submitted at the Supreme Court level in the proceedings against him and his company, Dari Limited.
Ojiambo denied the allegations when contacted by media, stating that he had never forged court documents or affidavits. The DCI confirmed it had received Tuju’s complaint and would make recommendations to the DPP. No charges have been filed.
But the complaint sits on the public record, now amplified by Havi’s platform, and it answers the specific question that commentators and legal bloggers have persistently raised: if Tuju’s dispute is simply a debt he cannot pay, why is he making allegations about forged documents? According to Havi, and now according to a DCI complaint with specific penal code references, the answer is that the documents may not all be genuine.
The timing of this allegation is notable because of what else was happening inside the courtroom during the same period.
In November 2025, before Justice Mongare in an application by Dari Limited seeking to reopen the enforcement question, the EADB’s own former Kenya Country Manager, David Odongo, took the stand and, according to Tuju’s account of his testimony, completely recanted the affidavit evidence he had previously filed.
Tuju described this as newly discovered material capable of altering the entire outcome of the matter. Justice Mongare dismissed the application on March 9, 2026, ruling that the recanted evidence was neither new nor capable of altering her earlier findings and that the matter was barred by res judicata and sub judice principles.
For Havi, the sequence in which a bank officer recants his sworn evidence, a Senior Counsel is accused of forgery, and the court nevertheless proceeds to grant the bank’s position in full on the same day that the presiding judge’s alleged bagman is arrested outside does not resolve as a coincidence. It resolves as a system.
The Arbitration: Corrupting the Foundation
The third element of Havi’s argument is the most legally sophisticated, and the one with the largest structural consequences if pursued. He asked, with visible impatience, why commentators were “ignoring the uncontested allegations of corruption between the arbitrator and one of the parties together with its Advocate” in the English proceedings that produced the foundational award.
The dispute’s genesis in English courts is well established in the public record. The East African Development Bank obtained a judgment from the High Court of Justice in England in June 2019, after arbitration proceedings, ordering repayment of over USD 15 million arising from a loan facility agreement signed in April 2015 between the bank and Tuju’s company, Dari Limited.
That judgment was recognised and registered in Kenya in 2020, upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2023, and allowed to stand by the Supreme Court’s refusal to suspend enforcement. Every Kenyan court to have considered the matter has treated the English award as valid, final and enforceable.
Havi’s position, delivered without qualification, is that the award is not valid. His legal basis for that position is elementary and well-established in international arbitration jurisprudence: an award or judgment obtained by corruption is null and void. This is not a controversial proposition.
The principle that corruption vitiates an arbitral award is deeply embedded in the public policy exception to enforcement recognised in the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, which Kenya has ratified.
It is the principle on which Nigeria succeeded in the English High Court in 2023 in overturning an USD 11 billion arbitration award in the P&ID case, where the court found that the award had been obtained through the most severe abuses of the arbitral process.
Havi has further pointed to what he described as cases where securities given for lending have been exempted from realisation through auctions or private treaties on account of corruption, fraud, unfairness and unconscionableness on the part of the bank.
He grounded this in a reference to the Supreme Court Act, noting that it initially contained a section for the invalidation of a judgment of a judge removed from office for unsuitability to serve, a section that was, in his words, “removed mysteriously.”
The implication is that the legislative architecture which would have provided a direct remedy for a corrupted judgment was deliberately dismantled, and that the absence of that provision now forces the courts to rely on more cumbersome paths to the same destination.
Whether Tuju’s legal team can produce the evidence necessary to ground a corruption challenge to the English award is a question that will determine the future of this litigation. But Havi’s point is prior to that evidentiary question. He is asking why the institutional commentators, the bar association, the Judiciary, the media, are treating the award as sacrosanct when its procurement has been publicly alleged to be corrupt and those allegations have not been contested on the merits.
The Debt Argument: ‘Sisi Siyo Wajinga’
Havi addressed directly the popular framing that Tuju is simply a debtor evading his obligations. He did not dispute that Tuju and his companies owe money. He made a more provocative and more interesting argument.
“Listen friends and enemies, the issue is not whether Raphael Tuju and his companies are in debt or default. Everyone is. In fact, the Government of Kenya is in debt and in default,” he wrote. He asked whether the conclusion to be drawn is that goons should be sent to government offices, and everyone in debt should face corruptly obtained auction orders.
He turned to the specific buyers who allegedly arrived at the Karen property claiming to have purchased it: Mr Chebet, Mr Kiprono and Mr Kiprop, named by Tuju himself. “You want to tell me that it is only Kiprono, Kiprop and Chebet who have billions of shillings in the collapsed economy to buy someone’s hotels in an auction when everyone, including the Government of Kenya where they serve and/or are doing business with, are broke? Sisi siyo wajinga ma Fren.”
The argument is not legally technical. It is politically shrewd. In an economy where the government has repeatedly acknowledged its own fiscal distress, where debt service consumes the majority of the national budget and Treasury bills are sold to bridge monthly salary obligations, the emergence of private buyers with the immediate liquidity to acquire multi-billion shilling properties at distressed auction prices invites questions about the origin of that capital that no court in the country is currently asking. Havi is asking them in public.
His framing also serves a secondary purpose. By establishing that debt and default are universal conditions in the current Kenyan economy, he dissolves the moral framework in which the bank, the auctioneers and the court are cast as enforcers of legitimate commercial order against an unworthy debtor.
If the enforcement mechanism is itself corrupt, from the arbitration through the documents through the judge through the commission, then the identity of Tuju as a debtor becomes irrelevant to the question of whether the process is legitimate.
The JSC: A Commission That Watches and Does Nothing
The Judicial Service Commission received a public allegation from a Senior Counsel on a verified social media platform stating that a sitting judge was the intended recipient of a criminal bribe in an active case. It has said nothing. This is not unusual. The commission has a documented history of inaction in the face of specific, evidenced complaints about individual judges, including complaints filed by Havi himself.
In July 2025, Havi filed a formal sworn petition seeking the removal of Lady Justice Mongare over her conduct in a separate commercial matter.
In January 2025, he filed a formal petition seeking the removal of Justice Alfred Mabeya over a pattern of conduct in the Commercial Division that Havi described as gross misconduct and misbehaviour. In August 2025, the JSC dismissed the Mabeya petition on jurisdictional grounds.
The Mongare petition produced no recorded outcome. Havi’s allegation this week is that both judges bribed their way clear of formal accountability, rendering the commission not a safeguard against judicial corruption but its most reliable protection.
The Mabeya complaint record adds texture that the JSC has not been required to account for publicly. A 2015 complaint against Mabeya was withdrawn after the complainant was, according to reporting at the time, financially induced to abandon it.
A 2020 petition seeking his removal was similarly withdrawn in circumstances that were never explained. In December 2024, Havi named specific Senior Counsel who he alleged had never lost a case before Mabeya, suggesting a structured commercial relationship between the judge and certain practitioners in the Commercial Division.
The JSC received Havi’s formal petition in January 2025 and disposed of it in August 2025 on grounds that kept the substance of the allegations entirely unexamined.
If Havi’s characterisation of the commission is accurate, then the body constitutionally charged with maintaining judicial integrity has been converted into a mechanism for laundering judicial corruption. Complaints enter. Money changes hands. Complaints exit, classified as jurisdictionally defective or lacking in merit. The judges return to their benches. The cases continue. The auctioneers arrive.
Tuju at the Wall
Raphael Tuju stood at the gate of his Dari Business Park on Ngong Road this week and delivered the statement of a man who has decided that the language of law cannot reach him any further. “They will have to kill me first and organise a big burial for me in Rarieda before they take this property.” He has litigated in London.
He has appealed in Nairobi. He has petitioned the Supreme Court. He has filed complaints with the Land Registrar, the DCI, the EACC. He has watched his applications dismissed. He has watched property transfers proceed through what he alleges were subsisting court orders.
He has watched a DCI officer escort buyers from Ultra Eureka Limited to his premises in January 2025. He has watched a bank official who swore affidavits against him recant those same affidavits on the witness stand, only for the recantation to be classified as evidence that could not alter the outcome.
And now he has watched a former judge be arrested at his gate, claiming to collect money for the judge inside.
Nelson Havi’s warning is the one that the legal establishment most needs to hear, even if it is the one least likely to be acknowledged.
When a man who has exhausted every available legal remedy concludes that the institutions are not failing him by accident but by design, and when a Senior Counsel with three decades of standing says publicly that he agrees, the conversation has moved beyond procedural reform and entered the territory of constitutional emergency.
The Judicial Service Commission has not spoken. Lady Justice Mongare has not spoken. The Chief Justice has not spoken.
Kenya’s courts have a long tradition of demanding that litigants trust the process. Raphael Tuju has trusted the process. He trusted it in London in 2019. He trusted it in Nairobi in 2020. He trusted it before the Court of Appeal in 2023.
He trusted it before Justice Mongare’s bench on March 9, 2026, the day she dismissed his case and the day the EACC arrested the man who allegedly told investigators he was collecting money for her. Whatever the process has been doing with that trust, it has not been using it to produce justice.
The Public Service Commission has issued new retirement age guidelines for academic, research and non-teaching staff in public universities and research institutions, setting different limits based on rank, employment type and disability status.
Under the new framework, academic and research staff will retire between the ages of 60 and 75, depending on their position and whether they are registered as persons living with disability.
In a circular addressed to cabinet secretaries, principal secretaries, university councils, vice chancellors, state corporations, the registrar of the Judiciary and the Auditor General, PSC CEO Paul Famba said the changes are intended to streamline retirement policies.
“The Constitution places the mantle of human resource management in the Public Service on the Public Service Commission. This includes ensuring the public service is efficient and effective, reviewing and making recommendations to the national government on conditions of service and qualifications for public officers,” Famba said.
He said Section 70(1)(c) of the Public Service Commission Regulations, 2020 gives the commission the authority to determine the mandatory retirement age for lecturers and research scientists in public universities and research institutions in consultation with the institutions.
“The mandatory retirement age in the public service shall be determined by the commission for lecturers and research scientists serving in public universities, research institutions or equivalent institutions,” Famba said.
According to the new guidelines, professors and research professors employed on permanent and pensionable terms will retire at the age of 70, while those living with disability will retire at 75.
Associate professors, associate research professors, senior lecturers and senior research fellows will retire at 65 years or 70 years for those registered as persons with disability.
Lecturers, research fellows, assistant lecturers, tutorial fellows and junior research fellows—whether serving on permanent, pensionable or contractual terms will retire at 60 years. Those living with disabilities will retire at 65 years.
For research scientists working in research institutions, those holding PhDs will retire at 65 years, with an extension to 70 years for persons living with disability.
Scientists with master’s degrees and relevant publications will also retire at 65 years or 70 years if registered as persons with disability.
Non-teaching staff in universities and research institutions will continue to retire at 60 years, while those living with disability will retire at 65 years in line with Regulation 70(1)(b) of the PSC Regulations.
The commission said the circular takes effect immediately and replaces earlier guidelines issued under circular Ref OPCAB 2/7A dated March 20, 2009, along with any other policies that previously governed retirement in public institutions.
Famba directed all public institutions to comply fully with the revised retirement framework.
However, the move has sparked debate among university students and education stakeholders who fear that extending the retirement age for senior academics could slow the entry of young professionals into the academic workforce.
Some students argue that with professors and senior lecturers staying longer in their positions, opportunities for fresh graduates and young researchers may become more limited.
A university student in Nairobi said the policy could worsen unemployment among highly educated youth seeking academic careers.
“Many young people are finishing masters and PhDs but cannot get positions in universities,” the student said. “If senior lecturers stay longer in office, it will take more time before new opportunities open up for younger academics.”
Education analysts say the policy reflects a balance between retaining experienced scholars and creating opportunities for emerging researchers.
While senior academics bring institutional memory, mentorship and research leadership, stakeholders note that universities may also need to expand teaching and research positions to accommodate the growing number of qualified graduates entering the field.
The political empire Raila Odinga spent four decades assembling is now fracturing along family lines, with his daughter Winnie said to have personally issued instructions locking the Orange Democratic Movement’s interim party leader, Dr Oburu Oginga, out of the iconic Capitol Hill offices in Nairobi that served for a generation as the nerve centre of the country’s most consequential opposition movement.
At the same time, long-serving aides broke down in tears on Wednesday as a sweeping purge of Raila’s personal secretariat unfolded behind closed doors at the very compound they can no longer freely enter, five months after the former premier drew his last breath in Kerala, India.
The lockout of the party from its historic home is rooted in a property claim that redraws the battle lines within ODM entirely. Party insiders and sources familiar with the matter say Raila Odinga personally purchased the entire building housing the Capitol Hill office during his lifetime, vesting full ownership in the Odinga family rather than the party.
With the building now a family asset, the ODM leadership under Oburu has no legal claim to the premises, and Winnie, Raila’s daughter, has moved to enforce that reality.
The compound where generations of Kenyan politicians sought the former prime minister’s counsel, where alliances were sealed and presidential campaigns were plotted, is now sealed off from the party he founded.
The family’s grip extends further than Capitol Hill. Oburu has also been barred from using the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Foundation, known as JOOF, for any party-related activities.
The foundation’s gardens, which were recently renovated to accommodate gatherings of up to a hundred people and which hosted ODM events regularly under Raila’s tenure, are now off limits.
In a development that deepens the proprietary dispute, sources allege that Raila also finalised the purchase of the JOOF land outright before his death, converting what had long been a Kenya Railways leasehold of over four decades into full Odinga family ownership.
Both the party’s spiritual home and its most prestigious event venue have, in effect, passed to a private estate.
Stripped of both addresses, Oburu has relocated ODM’s operational base to a residence on Riverside Drive, a secluded property in one of Nairobi’s most exclusive corridors near Strathmore University.
The Riverside facility, insiders say, was acquired by a UK-based engineer who has been a long-standing financier of ODM, injecting a layer of external financial dependency into the party’s leadership transition at precisely the moment it can least afford questions about independence and direction.
Oburu has fitted the new address with a security detail that includes a chase car and a helicopter reportedly kept on standby, a projection of stature that signals his determination to be seen as wielding genuine executive authority over the party machinery.
It was against this backdrop of contested territory and competing claims that the Wednesday staff meeting at Capitol Hill turned into something close to a wake. The meeting, called through a memo dated March 5 by Raila’s chief of staff Andrew Mondoh, a retired Permanent Secretary who had served in the Grand Coalition Government of 2008 to 2013 overseeing the resettlement of internally displaced persons, was presented as a routine briefing.
What unfolded was a painful reckoning. Staff who had served through successive election cycles, political crises and the defining upheavals of Kenya’s post-2007 era were informed their services were no longer required.
Among those shown the door was Philip Juma, Raila’s longtime driver and a retired Kenya Prisons officer who had steered the former premier’s motorcades through the country’s most volatile political seasons for nearly two decades.
In a twist that stunned the room, Mondoh himself was caught in the same purge whose notice he had signed. He told The Star only that he had been unwell.
ODM Party Executive Director Oduor Ong’wen sought to contain the fallout.
He insisted the number of genuinely affected staff was small, putting it at seven individuals who had operated in an informal arrangement with no contractual basis after Raila’s death, running from Mondoh as chief of staff down to office cleaners.
He said those seconded from the public service remained government employees awaiting redeployment, and those on the formal ODM payroll continued to receive their salaries. “People have not been sacked,” he told reporters.
The party, he added, had grown concerned that continuing to fund the informal seven without a paper trail would invite audit queries, and had offered them a transitional payment alongside an explanation that the new party leader’s office might absorb or redeploy some.
But the picture that emerged from sources inside the Capitol Hill compound was considerably darker than Ong’wen’s account suggested.
Raila’s personal funding of staff ran well beyond any formal party or government arrangement, sustaining a third tier of aides who managed his philanthropic gestures across villages, settled medical bills for elderly supporters and childhood associates, and maintained the grassroots personal network that was as much a part of his political identity as any manifesto.
ODM politician Ben Ombima said friends of the late premier from Vihiga County whose hospital bills he quietly covered were now suffering in silence. “Raila touched many families in ways people may never fully know,” Ombima said. With that system now dismantled, the human cost of the transition is spreading across the country in ways that will not easily be measured.
At the Riverside office, Oburu’s own transition has been troubled from the outset.
His appointment of political activist Mike Agwanda as chief of staff has been received with barely concealed hostility by party veterans. Agwanda, who previously stood as an independent candidate and was a vocal critic of ODM in parts of Nyanza, is regarded by insiders as an outsider parachuted into the innermost ring of the party’s machinery.
Meanwhile, Raila’s son Raila Junior is reported to have attempted to install a new secretary and accountant at the Capitol Hill office, only for the existing accountant, a civil servant seconded by government, to refuse to hand over pending formal redeployment orders. Junior also did not respond to queries.
The property battle and the staff purge have erupted at the worst possible moment for a party already consumed by an ideological civil war.
The rival Linda Ground and Linda Mwananchi factions have hardened into what party insiders describe as the most serious internal split in ODM’s twenty-year history.
The Linda Mwananchi camp led by Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna and Embakasi East MP Babu Owino presented a ten-point scorecard of the ODM-UDA power-sharing deal with President William Ruto, which they titled “The Ten-Point Lies” and rated one out of ten on delivery, dismissing a counter-report from the Oburu-aligned side as superficial and misleading.
Oburu’s own performance in formal settings has done little to project the commanding authority the moment demands.
At a joint UDA-ODM Parliamentary Group meeting attended by President Ruto this week, he set aside a prepared speech outlining the party’s ten-point agenda and spoke without notes, leaving legislators uncertain what official messaging to carry back to their constituencies. “I said I’m not very good at reading speeches,” Oburu told the gathering.
The remark drew laughter but also unease among those expecting sharp political direction from a party already approaching a National Delegates Convention on March 27, at which fundamental questions about ODM’s leadership and its relationship with the Ruto administration are expected to come to a head.
Of those who formed the protective innermost ring around Raila, only Maurice Ogeta, the head of his security detail who was at his side in Kerala when he died on October 15, has so far landed safely.
Mombasa Governor Abdulswamad Nassir appointed Ogeta in January as the county’s Adviser on Security Affairs, citing his years of dedicated service to the party’s founding leader.
For the rest, the dismantling continues. As some staff quietly packed their private belongings and walked out of Capitol Hill on Wednesday, many understood that what was ending was not merely a job. It was an era, and it was being brought to a close not gently but with the cold finality of a padlock on a door.
A Nairobi court has blocked an attempt by prosecutors to withdraw criminal charges against a director of Heritage Flowers Ltd accused of threatening to shoot and kill a business rival, ruling that the reasons presented did not meet the constitutional threshold required to halt the case.
Milimani Principal Magistrate Caroline Mugo declined an application by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions led by RensonIngonga, saying the court could not endorse what she described as an unexplained reversal by the prosecution.
The ruling means that Shaileshi Kumari Rai, a director at Heritage Flowers Ltd, will proceed to trial over allegations that he threatened to kill businessman Punjani Riyaz Mahammadali during a confrontation in Nairobi.
Magistrate Mugo ruled that the prosecution had failed to demonstrate why it now considered the evidence insufficient despite previously approving charges and setting the case down for hearing.
“Justice is served when prosecutorial power is exercised with transparency, consistency and fidelity to the Constitution,” the magistrate said while rejecting the request to withdraw the case under Section 87(a) of the Criminal Procedure Code.
She warned that courts cannot allow the criminal justice system to become “a revolving door where decisions shift without explanation.”
According to the court, prosecutors had earlier reviewed the investigation file, approved the charges and arraigned the accused after concluding that the available evidence met the legal threshold for prosecution. However, in seeking to terminate the case, the prosecution merely cited “insufficiency of evidence” without explaining what had changed.
“There is no evidence demonstrating the emergence of new material, recantation of key witnesses, loss of exhibits or any supervening circumstance that would justify the abrupt shift in position,” the magistrate said.
The court further found that prosecutors had breached provisions of the Victim Protection Act (Kenya) by failing to inform the complainant of their intention to withdraw the charges.
Magistrate Mugo noted that the complainant had been actively involved in the proceedings and had even secured legal representation. Under Kenya’s constitutional framework, victims are entitled to participate in criminal proceedings and must be informed of key prosecutorial decisions.
“It is unfathomable for the prosecution to waive the complainant’s right to be informed and involved in the decision to withdraw the charges,” she ruled, adding that victims are no longer passive spectators in criminal trials.
The magistrate cited jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Kenya, which recognizes victims as active participants in the justice process within constitutionally defined limits.
Court documents indicate that Rai is accused of threatening Mahammadali on May 27, 2022, in Parklands, within Westlands Sub-County in Nairobi.
The charge sheet stated that without lawful excuse, he uttered unprintable words with Hindu language meaning “****” I will come and shoot you in the *** right now” words which directly caused Punjani to receive threats.
Prosecutors allege that during the confrontation he uttered threatening words in Hindi indicating that he would immediately shoot the complainant, causing him to fear for his life.
Although the defence has suggested the dispute is linked to a business rivalry and possible civil disagreements, the magistrate said the existence of a commercial dispute does not automatically negate criminal liability.
“While the court appreciates that criminal proceedings should not be weaponized to settle civil disputes, where a criminal element is disclosed the charges may still be sustained,” she said.
Mugo emphasized that while the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has constitutional authority to review or discontinue prosecutions, such decisions must comply with Article 157(11) of the Constitution, which requires prosecutors to consider public interest, the administration of justice and the need to prevent abuse of legal process.
Allowing the withdrawal without explanation, the magistrate warned, would reduce the court’s oversight role to a ceremonial endorsement of prosecutorial decisions.
“The court must ensure that prosecutorial discretion is exercised lawfully, in good faith and not in abuse of the process,” she ruled.
Rai remains out on cash bail as the case proceeds to hearing at the Milimani Law Courts.
