Kenya Insights

Author: Our Correspondent

  • How a Swedish Investor Lost Millions in a Sh3 Billion Fake Ambulance Tender Scam Orchestrated Inside the Office of the President

    How a Swedish Investor Lost Millions in a Sh3 Billion Fake Ambulance Tender Scam Orchestrated Inside the Office of the President

    It was the second visit that sealed the trap. On the morning of March 10, 2026, a Swedish timber and machinery exporter named Talar Yousef Zaitoun walked into Harambee House, the gazetted seat of the Kenyan presidency in the heart of Nairobi, for what he believed would be the final formality on a contract to supply 500 ambulances to the Government of Kenya.

    He had flown in from Stockholm with his brother Hatim.

    He had already wired nearly half a million dollars across multiple tranches from a sister company in China to an Ecobank Kenya account in Nairobi. He had received what appeared to be a legitimate pre-qualification certificate confirming his firm, Jokara AB, had won a tender worth over USD 36 million.

    And he had been received twice at Kenya’s most symbolically fortified address by men who presented themselves as senior government officials.

    What Zaitoun did not know was that the entire edifice had been constructed from fraudulent documents, impersonated officials, and a criminal syndicate operating with the brazen confidence that comes from using Kenya’s presidential address as scenery for a con.

    When detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations moved in on the 12th floor of Harambee House that morning, they arrested seven people mid-negotiation.

    The drama was extraordinary not merely because of its scale but because of its location.

    The suspects had been caught inside what the police would later describe in court documents as “a government premises that houses, among others, the office of the Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government, and the Office of the President, and which is gazetted as a protected government installation.”

    The seven arrested are Micheal Musyoki Ngumbi, Evans Simotwo, Geoffrey Were Odondi, Allan Mutahi Kariuki, Purity Njeri Njamiu, Jared Muniaro Masinde, and Kororia Simatwa.

    They were presented in a Nairobi court on a miscellaneous application and remanded for five days pending preparation of prosecution files, with a case mention set for March 17.

    Police had sought 14 days. A lawyer who is said to have received funds on behalf of the syndicate remains at large and is actively being sought.

    The Architecture of the Con

    The plot began on January 10, 2026, when Zaitoun, whose Stockholm-based Jokara AB exports timber and machinery to African markets, received a WhatsApp message from a person identifying himself as Stanley Ndawula using a Ugandan phone number requesting a product catalogue.

    The following day, a second contact reached him from a Kenyan number.

    This was Geoffrey Were, who introduced himself as a consultant at a firm called Interlog Corporate and presented himself as a facilitator of business between the Government of Kenya and private foreign companies. Were dangled a government tender to supply ambulances.

    On January 19, Were told Zaitoun that Kenya was seeking to procure ambulances. Zaitoun submitted a quotation on January 31, proposing Toyota Hiace High Roof ambulances at USD 65,500 per unit.

    He was invited to Nairobi. He arrived on January 26 aboard a Turkish Airlines flight at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, was received by Were and a driver named Nicho, and was accommodated at the Radisson Blu Hotel Arboretum until January 30.

    On January 27, Zaitoun was taken to Harambee House for a meeting with several individuals, including Michael and Geoffrey, who identified themselves as representatives of the National Treasury and the Ministry of Health.

    He was told the total contract value was USD 36,025,000 and that he was required to provide either a performance bond or insurance coverage before signing.

    He opted for a 3 percent insurance coverage fee, amounting to USD 1,080,750.

    He was also told there was a 2 percent ledger fee of USD 360,250 to be shared between him and the government, and he was presented with two pre-qualification options: USD 90,000 for a single government contract over five years, or USD 110,000 for multiple contracts within the same period. He chose the latter.

    The money began flowing on January 30, wired from Lianyungang Chanta International Wood Co. Ltd, a sister company in China, to an Ecobank Kenya account held in the name of the wanted lawyer.

    Zaitoun was issued invoices, a certificate of incorporation, company search records, and identification documents purportedly belonging to a law firm.

    He received a pre-qualification certificate.

    But even then, doubt crept in: the award date on the certificate showed October 22, 2025, months before the tender discussions had begun.

    The suspects explained, smoothly, that such certificates were routinely backdated.

    Even after Zaitoun returned to Sweden, the pressure continued. The syndicate insisted more insurance fees were outstanding, claiming the government had already paid its portion.

    On February 1, he transferred an additional USD 48,392, USD 51,607, and USD 80,000. On February 25, further transfers followed of USD 55,285.22, USD 55,438.30, and USD 69,275.95. By the time suspicion hardened into certainty, independent due diligence had confirmed the pre-qualification certificate was fraudulent.

    The total amount extracted from Zaitoun stands at USD 470,750, equivalent to approximately Sh60.8 million.

    He returned to Kenya on March 9 with his brother Hatim, was received again at the airport by Geoffrey and the same driver, taken to Radisson Blu Hotel, and escorted the following morning to Harambee House for what would become the arrest meeting.

    Police assert in their court affidavit that investigators are examining how meetings designed for criminal purposes were held inside a gazetted protected installation, and say senior government officials may have been involved, some of whom could be difficult to trace due to their busy schedules.

    Seven suspects, led by Michael Musyoki Ngumbi, appear at the Milimani Law Courts dock in Nairobi over a Sh60.8 million fake ambulance tender scam, following their arrest at Harambee House, which hosts President William Ruto’s office.
    Seven suspects, led by Michael Musyoki Ngumbi, appear at the Milimani Law Courts dock in Nairobi over a Sh60.8 million fake ambulance tender scam, following their arrest at Harambee House, which hosts President William Ruto’s office.

    A Pattern Written in CCTV Footage

    The ambulance tender scandal is not the first time criminal operators have used the physical prestige of Kenya’s presidential address to lend credibility to fraud.

    The most notorious precedent came in February 2020, when former Sports Cabinet Secretary Rashid Echesa, then recently fired by President Uhuru Kenyatta, walked two foreign arms dealers into Harambee House Annex, the building directly across Harambee Avenue that houses the Office of the Deputy President.

    The foreigners were Kozlowski Stanley Bruno, an American, and Mamdough Mostafa Amer, an Egyptian. They represented a firm called Eco Advanced Technologies and had been promised a Sh39 billion tender to supply the Kenya Defence Forces with military surveillance equipment.

    Echesa and his associates, including a man passing himself off as a military general identified as Daniel Otieno Omondi, had already extracted Sh11.5 million from the foreigners as consultancy fees before the deal unravelled. Detectives descended on Harambee House Annex to review CCTV footage, interview security personnel, and investigate how individuals with no official standing had been allowed access to the second-highest office in the republic.

    The then-Deputy President, William Ruto, acknowledged publicly that the 23-minute meeting had indeed taken place in his premises but denied any knowledge of it, calling the scandal a “choreographed smear campaign” by political competitors.

    That case carried a further, darker dimension.

    The sergeant who had been on duty at Harambee House Annex when Echesa brought in the foreigners, John Kipyegon Kenei, was found dead a week after the arrests. The then-DCI director linked Kenei’s death to the arms scandal, alleging he had been killed to suppress evidence.

    Echesa was eventually acquitted in December 2021 after a magistrate ruled that the CCTV footage presented in evidence did not show him committing an offence. No one was convicted.

    The arms scandal was itself not an isolated episode at the Annex. Earlier, in 2018 and again in 2020, a separate syndicate ran a fake laptop tender operation using the Harambee House Annex address.

    A woman known to victims as “Ms Muhoro,” whose real name was Joy Wangari Kamau, posed as a procurement officer or project manager at the DP’s office, bringing in businesspeople who believed they had won government contracts.

    One complainant, Charles Musinga, told a Milimani court that he and business partners had delivered 2,800 laptops worth approximately Sh180 million after signing what they believed was a legitimate contract at the Annex.

    A parallel victim, Charles Gathii, lost Sh116 million through a related operation. Kamau repeatedly evaded arrest, with courts issuing multiple warrants against her. At least eight individuals were ultimately charged across the various laptop tender prosecutions.

    Nor was the fraud confined to the Annex. In a separate case, a woman named Grace Mwarania Waigumu was arrested after police alleged she had been posing as an official at the Office of the President in Harambee House itself, defrauding victims through fake Jubilee party campaign materials tenders.

    One complainant, Abdiwahab Adan Ibrahim, lost Sh23.9 million. Others lost millions more. The Standard reported she promised victims their money would be returned with interest after the government paid out.

    The Procurement Impunity Complex

    What makes Harambee House a recurring venue for this genus of fraud is the intersection of access, prestige, and institutional weakness.

    The address carries an almost mystical authority in the minds of investors, particularly those from overseas unfamiliar with the granular mechanics of Kenyan public procurement law.

    The idea that a government representative would invite a foreign investor to the President’s own building for a tender meeting is not, on its face, implausible in a country where ministers routinely meet investors, and where the distinction between political favour and formal procurement process has historically been blurred.

    That blurring has deep institutional roots.

    The Anglo-Leasing scandal, which surfaced in 2002 and reverberated for nearly two decades, involved at least 13 phantom companies awarded security-related government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

    The contracts were signed through the Office of the President under then-President Mwai Kibaki’s administration.

    Anti-corruption czar John Githongo exposed the scheme in a dossier published in 2005 and later concluded that the conspiracy reached the very top of government.

    Only one person was ever convicted. The Pandora Papers subsequently revealed offshore trails involving suspects named in the Githongo report, with shell companies moving millions years after the initial exposé.

    The pattern of near-impunity is not merely historical.

    The Kenya Human Rights Commission noted in early 2024 that the current administration had presided over the dismissal of corruption cases involving senior figures, including Rigathi Gachagua, former Deputy President, facing money laundering allegations involving Sh7.2 billion.

    Henry Rotich, the former Treasury Cabinet Secretary whose charges related to the Sh63 billion Arror and Kimwarer dams fraud were dismissed under circumstances widely criticised as prosecution-abetted acquittal, was within 56 days of the acquittal appointed as a senior advisor in the Office of President Ruto. KHRC publicly called on Ruto to revoke the appointment.

    At the Office of the Deputy President, the OCCRP and Africa Uncensored have separately documented contracts awarded to companies with ties to serving politicians, including a USD 1.1 million contract to supply honorary medals awarded from the DP’s office in 2016 to Atticon Limited, a company linked to Mithika Linturi, then a senator. Linturi, who denied wrongdoing, was briefly detained after the story was published. Former employees alleged his companies had bid against each other to create the illusion of competition.

    The Charges and the Trail

    The charges against the seven arrested in the ambulance tender case span conspiracy to defraud under Section 317 of the Penal Code, obtaining by false pretences under Section 313, and multiple counts under the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act, including acquisition, use, and possession of proceeds of crime under Section 4 read with Section 16(1). Police described the offences as involving “forged documents, impersonation of government officials and fake legal entities” designed to convince the Swedish businessman that he had secured a legitimate government contract.

    The financial trail threads across continents.

    The money originated from a company registered in Lianyungang, China, was wired to an Ecobank Kenya account in Nairobi held by the wanted lawyer, and was dispersed across at least eight transactions between January 30 and February 25, 2026.

    Investigators are said to be following the money trail to determine how it was distributed and what role, if any, is played by individuals still inside government. The police affidavit is explicit that the probe has not concluded and that “several other persons, yet to be apprehended, whether government officials or otherwise, may have been involved.”

    The involvement of a lawyer as the recipient of the funds adds a significant dimension to the case.

    Under Kenya’s Anti-Money Laundering framework, legal practitioners handling client funds are subject to enhanced due diligence obligations.

    The use of an advocate’s account to receive proceeds of a fraud, if proven, would expose the legal professional to serious criminal liability under the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act, as well as potential disciplinary proceedings before the Law Society of Kenya.

    The fact that the lawyer remains at large and is being actively sought by investigators suggests the financial trail has not yet been fully mapped.

    Police are also investigating the security breach dimension of the case: how a criminal syndicate obtained repeated access to one of the most tightly secured government buildings in the country to conduct meetings with a foreign investor over a period of weeks.

    That question, investigators say, requires statements from senior government officials who may have been present or aware, and who may require special scheduling to interview.

    The Ambulance Sector: A History of Vulnerability

    The choice of ambulances as the tender vehicle is not incidental. Emergency medical procurement has been a recurring site of fraud in Kenya.

    The KEMSA scandal under the Kenyatta administration saw the state medical supplies agency lose close to Ksh8 billion in procurement irregularities during the COVID-19 pandemic, including for medical equipment.

    More recently, Kenya’s Social Health Authority has faced public accountability questions over procurement transparency as the government rolls out its flagship universal health coverage programme, the SHA.

    A tender for 500 ambulances priced at USD 65,500 per unit, totalling over USD 32.75 million, is not an absurd-sounding figure in a market where genuine government ambulance procurement programmes have historically involved hundreds of units at comparable price points.

    That surface plausibility is precisely what makes such fabrications work. The con only collapses when a victim with the means and the determination to conduct independent due diligence pushes hard enough. Zaitoun was such a victim: he returned to Kenya specifically to confront the discrepancies and was at the meeting table when police walked in.

    A Structural Problem Without a Structural Solution

    What the ambulance tender case, the arms deal, the laptop tenders, and the impersonator fraud share is not merely opportunism.

    They represent the exploitation of a structural ambiguity at the heart of Kenyan public procurement: the historic entanglement of political favour and formal process that has made it credible, to foreign investors in particular, that a government contract might be secured not through the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act portal but through a private meeting at a powerful address.

    President Kenyatta ordered in 2018 that all government tender notices and contract awards be published on the Public Procurement Information Portal operated by the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority.

    The directive has not ended the problem.

    Five years after that instruction, the OCCRP and Africa Uncensored were still documenting politically connected companies securing inflated contracts through loopholes in the IFMIS system that the Auditor General had publicly described as being “deliberately manipulated to hide information.”

    The U.S. Trade Representative’s 2024 report on Foreign Trade Barriers noted that American firms were losing Kenyan government contracts to foreign firms willing to pay bribes, with senior officials specifically demanding facilitation payments.

    The arrests at Harambee House on March 10, 2026, are dramatic. They are also, on the arc of Kenya’s institutional history with this class of fraud, unlikely to be the last. The seven suspects will appear before court on March 17.

    The lawyer remains at large.

    Investigators say more arrests are coming. Whether accountability follows or the pattern of acquittals and dropped cases reasserts itself, as it has so many times before, is the question that will define whether this case is a turning point or merely another chapter in a very long story.

  • Named: Havi Says Mutava Confessed He Was Collecting The Bribe For Lady Justice Josephine Mongare, So Why Is JSC Still Silence?

    Named: Havi Says Mutava Confessed He Was Collecting The Bribe For Lady Justice Josephine Mongare, So Why Is JSC Still Silence?

    The story of the Tuju property dispute has taken many dramatic turns over the decade it has consumed the Kenyan legal system. It has wound through courts in London and Nairobi.

    It has produced a UK judgment, a Kenyan enforcement order, Court of Appeal affirmations and a Supreme Court refusal to suspend execution. It has generated receivership proceedings, auctioneer deployments and police-escorted property visits.

    But nothing in the preceding ten years of litigation matches what Nelson Havi, Senior Counsel and former president of the Law Society of Kenya, placed on public record this week when he posted a single, detonating claim on his verified social media account.

    Havi stated, without qualification and without apparent concern for the personal jeopardy in which such a statement might place him, that former High Court judge Joseph Mutava had confessed to investigators that he was collecting the Sh10.4 million bribe on behalf of Lady Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mongare, the presiding judge of the very commercial dispute in which the money was allegedly being solicited.

    “Joseph Mutava (he used to be a Judge) confessed that he was collecting the bribe on behalf of Lady Justice Josephine Mongare,” Havi wrote. Then he turned to the institution built to police the bench: “Why has the JSC not taken action or issued a statement on the matter?”

    The question landed on a Commission that, as of the time of publication, had produced no response. Not a statement of receipt. Not a notice of investigation. Not even a procedural assurance that it was aware of the allegation.

    The Judicial Service Commission, the constitutionally mandated guardian of judicial integrity, has been publicly informed by a senior advocate of 30 years’ standing that a sitting High Court judge was the intended recipient of a bribe in an active commercial matter. Its response, so far, is silence.

    The Confession That Changes Everything

    To understand why Havi’s post is not merely incendiary commentary but a statement of profound legal consequence, it is necessary to recall the sequence of events on Monday, March 9, 2026. On that day, Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission detectives arrested Mutava, advocate Kimani Wachira and two other suspects at Tuju’s Karen property, where Tuju alleged they had arrived claiming to act on behalf of a judge and seeking money to influence the outcome of his case.

    The EACC confirmed the arrests, describing the alleged demand as USD 80,000, approximately Sh10.4 million, to influence a commercial dispute before the High Court.

    Also on that same day, Justice Josephine Mongare delivered her ruling in the matter of Dari Limited and Raphael Tuju versus the East African Development Bank and Garam Investment Auctioneers.

    She struck out the amended plaint filed by Tuju and Dari Limited, describing it as what she called a blatant abuse of court process meant to frustrate lawful recovery efforts after years of default and litigation. The way was cleared for auctioneers to proceed against Tuju’s Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary and properties linked to Dari Business Park.

    The ruling and the arrests occurred on the same calendar date.

    If Havi’s account of Mutava’s confession is accurate, and Havi has made this claim as a named Senior Counsel on a verified public platform, then the money was being solicited by a man now claiming to carry the instruction of the judge who, within hours, was disposing of the case.

    The logical consequences of that sequence, if the confession is corroborated, are of a gravity that the EACC, the JSC and the Director of Public Prosecutions will need to confront in the most direct terms.

    A Prior History the JSC Has Already Seen

    For those tracking Havi’s relationship with both Mongare and Justice Alfred Mabeya, the second half of his post carries equal weight.

    Having demanded accountability from the JSC over the Mutava confession, he added a statement that reads as a prosecutorial indictment of the commission itself: “The last time a complaint against her and Mr Justice Alfred Mabeya was made to the JSC, the two bribed their way out.”

    That is not a vague allegation. The JSC complaint against Lady Justice Mongare is a matter of documented public record. In July 2025, Havi filed a formal petition to the Judicial Service Commission, sworn on affidavit, seeking the removal of Justice Mongare from the bench over her conduct in case HCCCOMM/E610/2024, a dispute between Gikomba Business Centre Limited and Pumwani Riyadha Mosque Committee.

    Havi described her handling of the matter as gross misconduct, misbehaviour and incompetence, and declared that the injury to his clients could only be remedied by her removal. The JSC received the petition. Nothing of consequence followed.

    The complaint against Justice Mabeya runs deeper and further back. In December 2024, Havi publicly named two senior advocates who he alleged had never lost a case before Mabeya at the Milimani Commercial and Tax Division, suggesting an industry of judicial corruption linking the judge to specific practitioners.

    In January 2025, the JSC received a formal petition from Havi alleging gross misconduct and misbehaviour against Mabeya. That petition joined a separate complaint filed in December 2024 by Edwin Harold Dande raising similar concerns. In August 2025, the JSC dismissed Havi’s petition against Mabeya, ruling that the application amounted to an invitation to the commission to sit on appeal over a matter already determined, which fell outside its jurisdiction.

    What Havi is now alleging, in terms that his standing as a senior advocate makes impossible to simply dismiss, is that the dismissal of his petition against Mabeya was not a jurisdictional finding.

    It was the product of bribery. That the commission, which is constitutionally charged with safeguarding judicial integrity, was itself corrupted in the process of evaluating a complaint about a corrupt judge. And that the same fate now awaits any complaint about Mongare, unless the arrest of Mutava and his alleged confession have altered the calculus in ways that even the JSC cannot navigate around.

    Mongare’s Rulings: A Trail Through the Tuju Matter

    Lady Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mongare was appointed to the High Court in 2022, assigned to the Commercial and Tax Division at Milimani. She holds a Master of Laws degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Nairobi and a postgraduate diploma from the Kenya School of Law. Before the bench she had served as a senior partner and as a governance consultant for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Red Cross and UNICEF. The record of her appointment is one of considerable professional distinction.

    Her engagement with the Tuju property dispute has been the most consequential of her tenure.

    The dispute originates in a loan facility agreement signed in April 2015 between Dari Limited, Tuju’s company, and the East African Development Bank. After default, the High Court of Justice in England ordered repayment of over USD 15 million in June 2019. That judgment was recognised by Kenyan courts in 2020, upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2023, and left intact when the Supreme Court declined to suspend enforcement. The path to auction of Tuju’s Karen properties, the Dari Business Park on Ngong Road and the Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary, had been confirmed at every level of the judicial hierarchy before the matter returned to Mongare’s bench.

    In May 2025, Mongare had issued interim orders halting the auction.

    She extended protections and maintained the status quo, a posture that Tuju’s lawyers welcomed as evidence that their client’s applications were being taken seriously.

    But the orders proved fragile. Tuju’s court filings alleged that a transfer of title to one of the properties was processed in November 2024 and completed in February 2025 while her orders were still in force. He reported the violation to police. He wrote to the Chief Land Registrar.

    He alleged that a DCI officer accompanied buyers from Ultra Eureka Limited to the property in January 2025.

    None of these interventions produced relief before Justice Mongare.

    Her ruling of March 9, 2026 was categorical. She found that the issues raised by Tuju and Dari Limited had already been adjudicated and were res judicata. The amended plaint was struck out. The bank’s recovery process was cleared to proceed.

    That ruling arrived on the day detectives were arresting men who, if Havi’s account of the confession is accurate, had been dispatched to collect money on her behalf.

    Tuju at the Gate

    Raphael Tuju.

    Raphael Tuju’s response to the unfolding situation has been the response of a man who believes the courts have become the machinery of his destruction. Standing at the disputed Dari Business Park this week, he told journalists that individuals identifying themselves as Mr Chebet, Mr Kiprono and Mr Kiprop had arrived claiming to have purchased the property. He accused them of intimidation. He said the ownership dispute remained live in court. And then he delivered the statement that has circulated across Kenya’s legal and political classes with the velocity of something that cannot be unsaid.

    “They will have to kill me first and organise a big burial for me in Rarieda before they take this property,” Tuju said. It is the declaration of a man for whom the language of law has been exhausted and replaced by the language of physical survival.

    That a former Cabinet secretary, a former member of Parliament, a man who has contested his dispossession through every tier of the Kenyan and international judicial system, has arrived at this formulation, is a statement about the state of the courts that no bar association communique or JSC press release can adequately absorb.

    Tuju’s identification of the arrested suspects as individuals claiming to act on behalf of a judge was the thread that the EACC pulled.

    The arrests that followed gave investigators Mutava, Wachira and two others. Mutava was released on Sh200,000 police cash bail alongside his co-suspects.

    The EACC confirmed it would forward the completed investigation to the Director of Public Prosecutions for review and potential charging. The DPP has not yet indicated whether the confession reported by Havi forms part of the material before it.

    The Anatomy of a Captured Commission

    Havi’s second accusation, that the JSC allowed both Mongare and Mabeya to bribe their way out of previous complaints, is the more structurally devastating of his two claims.

    The EACC arrest of Mutava is a criminal matter. It will produce a prosecution or it will not. But the allegation that the institution responsible for judicial discipline is itself corruptible, that complaints about judges are resolved not through due process but through the financial persuasion of commission members, is an allegation about the entire architecture of judicial accountability in Kenya.

    The Mabeya record gives the allegation specific texture.

    A 2015 JSC complaint against Mabeya was withdrawn by the complainant after the judge’s accusers were unable to produce evidence. Mabeya denied all wrongdoing.

    In 2020, a second petition seeking Mabeya’s removal was filed and subsequently withdrawn, with reporting at the time suggesting the petitioner had been financially induced to abandon the complaint. In December 2024, Havi named specific advocates alleged to have an unbroken winning record before Mabeya, raising structural questions about the relationship between the judge and those practitioners. In January 2025, the JSC received Havi’s formal petition. In August 2025, the commission dismissed it, citing jurisdictional grounds.

    Havi’s characterisation of that sequence as bribery, and his linking of the Mongare complaint to the same pattern, means that he is not merely alleging that individual judges are corrupt.

    He is alleging that the mechanism for holding corrupt judges accountable is under the control of those same judges. That the JSC is not a check on judicial corruption but a clearing house for it.

    This is an allegation of constitutional dimension. It is also an allegation that, if true, explains everything about the Tuju case that has so far defied explanation: why protections granted were not enforced, why property transfers proceeded through ostensibly subsisting orders, why no action was taken against those who allegedly violated court directions, and why a man who has litigated his case at every available level still finds himself facing auctioneers at his gate.

    The Question That Demands an Answer

    At the time of publication, the Judicial Service Commission has not issued any statement about Nelson Havi’s public allegation that Joseph Mutava confessed to collecting a bribe on behalf of Lady Justice Josephine Mongare.

    Justice Mongare has not commented. The JSC Chairperson has not commented. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has not indicated whether the confession is part of its review file. The Chief Justice, whose office carries constitutional responsibility for the supervision of the judiciary, has been silent.

    Lady Justice Josephine Mongare is a sitting judicial officer. She has not been charged with any offence. She has not been suspended.

    She has not been called before any tribunal. She is, as far as the formal record shows, an active member of the Commercial and Tax Division bench at Milimani, available to preside over commercial disputes involving Kenyan citizens and foreign institutions alike.

    What the formal record also shows is this: a disgraced former judge has been arrested and is alleged by Kenya’s most prominent accountability lawyer to have confessed that the money he was collecting was for her.

    A JSC complaint about her conduct was filed months ago and produced no outcome.

    A parallel complaint about her alleged colleague in corruption was dismissed in circumstances that Havi describes as the product of bribery.

    And the ruling that cleared the way for a former Cabinet secretary to be evicted from his property was delivered on the same day as the arrests, by the same judge whose name now sits at the centre of Kenya’s most explosive judicial scandal in a generation.

    Nelson Havi has asked why the JSC has taken no action. It is the right question, and it deserves an answer in public, under oath, and without further delay.

    UPDATE:

    Tuju has been allowed to appeal a High Court ruling that cleared the way for the auction of his Karen properties over a Sh1.9 billion debt dispute.

    Justice Josephine Mongare certified his application as urgent and granted him and his company Dari Limited leave to appeal the March 9 ruling.

    However, the court declined to stop the execution of the decision, meaning the properties could still be auctioned as the case proceeds.

    The matter will be mentioned again on March 17 for further directions.

  • SPY IN THE HOUSE: Kirinyaga MP Njeri Maina Accuses Malala of Running Secret Ruto Operation Inside DCP

    SPY IN THE HOUSE: Kirinyaga MP Njeri Maina Accuses Malala of Running Secret Ruto Operation Inside DCP

    Kirinyaga County Women Representative Jane Njeri Maina has lit a political firestorm inside the Democracy for the Citizens Party (DCP), publicly accusing the party’s own Deputy Leader, former Kakamega Senator Cleophas Malala, of operating as a covert agent for President William Ruto’s government while posing as a committed opposition figure.

    The accusations, delivered in an incendiary post on her X account on Wednesday, have rocked a party already battered by defections and whispers of infiltration, and have thrust into the open what many DCP insiders had long suspected in private.

    Maina, a close Gachagua loyalist who has stood with the former Deputy President since his turbulent impeachment in October 2024, alleged that Malala convened a secret night gathering of Kirinyaga Members of County Assembly allied to Governor Anne Waiguru, doing so between 8 pm and 10 pm on Tuesday evening at the Golden Palm hotel in Kenol, Murang’a County.

    The meeting’s stated purpose, she claimed, was to recruit and organise a rival internal bloc designed to undercut Gachagua’s grassroots foot soldiers in Kirinyaga ahead of the 2027 general elections.

    Most damaging was her claim about the money.

    Maina alleged that Malala disbursed Ksh 20,000 to each MCA who attended, funds she said were furnished by forces intent on fracturing DCP from within.

    She accused those financiers of seeking to derail what she called the “united alternative government,” a reference to the opposition coalition that Gachagua has been painstakingly constructing with Kalonzo Musyoka’s Wiper party since his removal from office.

    Addressing Malala directly in language that was withering in its contempt, Maina wrote: “I do not know who you work for, nor do I want to speculate.” She reminded him of what she described as a pattern of soliciting funds from multiple political actors in exchange for favours, a practice she said he had developed while serving as UDA’s Secretary General.

    “Unfortunately, it seems that you have not changed one bit,” she wrote, before issuing what amounted to a declaration of open war. “So bring it on, you shall face off with me where the rubber meets the road. In case you forgot, where I come from, we milk lions while seated on porcupines.”

    The charges, even by the scorched-earth standards of Kenyan intraparty politics, carry particular weight because of the broader context in which they land. For months, Gachagua himself had been warning that Ruto’s camp had planted moles inside DCP, publicly vowing in January to eject them one by one.

    “Within my team, we knew who the Ruto spies were. DCP is intact, no one is leaving,” Gachagua said at the time. He stopped short of naming Malala. On Wednesday, Maina appeared to remove any remaining ambiguity.

    Malala’s trajectory inside DCP has been shadowed by suspicion almost from the start. He joined the party as Interim Deputy Leader when Gachagua unveiled DCP in Lavington in May 2025, brought in as a bridge figure whose Western Kenya profile and national name recognition could help the party escape the charge that it was purely a Mount Kenya tribal vehicle.

    The two men had been bonded by a shared experience of political ejection: Malala had been ousted from UDA’s Secretary General position after he opposed Gachagua’s impeachment, and the former DP welcomed him into DCP with considerable fanfare.

    But the questions began piling up. Malala missed the party’s three-day strategy retreat in Mombasa in January, his absence drawing sharp comment from delegates who found an empty chair where he should have been sitting.

    He had also been conspicuously absent from a string of DCP public rallies over the preceding weeks. When political analysts began speculating openly about a possible defection back to UDA, Gachagua gave him cover, citing illness sustained after the annual Malala Super Cup football tournament in Kakamega.

    “He was in Kakamega for the Super Cup, after which he fell seriously ill and asked me for permission to rest,” Gachagua told a radio interviewer in January, insisting the party was intact.

    Maina’s allegations on Wednesday suggest the explanation has worn thin. Her post also hinted at prior private confrontations between herself and Malala, describing his alleged nocturnal meeting in Kenol as the moment he had “crossed the Rubicon.” The phrase signals a break that, in her view, can no longer be managed behind closed doors.

    The Waiguru dimension of the affair adds a charged subplot.

    The Kirinyaga Governor, who has publicly and repeatedly rejected overtures to join DCP, declared in December 2025 that, as she put it, “kwa Wamunyoro siendi,” signalling she would not align with Gachagua’s camp.

    She has maintained her positioning within Ruto’s orbit, and the former DP has in turn accused most of Kirinyaga’s MCAs of having been “pocketed” by the county government, predicting they would be voted out for betraying the community.

    Governor for Kirinyaga County Anne Waiguru

    Waiguru dismissed those accusations as misleading, and had not responded to Maina’s latest allegations by the time of publication.

    Malala had not issued any public denial on his social media platforms as of Wednesday evening, though associates quoted by political commentators suggested he had privately warned Maina to prepare for a bruising nominations battle in 2027, an implicit threat that their disagreement would follow them all the way to the ballot.

    Malala’s history in Kirinyaga is not without its own ironies. It was he who chaired the Senate committee that in 2020 cleared Waiguru of an impeachment motion brought against her by the county assembly, a piece of political history that his critics within DCP now invoke to argue that his loyalties were never truly with Gachagua’s camp.

    For DCP, which will spend most of 2026 attempting to expand beyond its Central Kenya stronghold and prove it can deliver results in the 2027 cycle, the timing of this eruption could not be worse.

    The party already absorbed the blow of Juja MP George Koimburi’s defection in late 2025. Nyeri Governor Mutahi Kahiga has signalled a drift back toward the Ruto administration. Nakuru grassroots officials threatened to bolt in January.

    Against that backdrop, a public allegation by one of the party’s most visible elected legislators that its own second-in-command is a State House plant threatens to inflict damage that no amount of denial can easily repair.

    Gachagua’s office had not released any comment by the time this story went to press. Whether he will move against Malala, shield him once more, or simply allow the accusation to smoulder in the public domain may be the defining political test of his leadership as the opposition road to 2027 grows steeper and more treacherous with every passing week.

  • Parliament Faults Vodacom’s Safaricom Share Sale As Kenya Stands To Lose, Makes New Orders

    Parliament Faults Vodacom’s Safaricom Share Sale As Kenya Stands To Lose, Makes New Orders

    Parliament has cleared the way for the government to sell its 15 percent stake in Safaricom PLC to South Africa’s Vodacom Group, but not before issuing a damning catalogue of omissions, contractual ambiguities and structural weaknesses in a deal that lawmakers themselves admit may shortchange the Kenyan public by an amount that, depending on whose arithmetic one uses, runs well into the hundreds of billions of shillings.

    The approval, recommended by the joint committees on Finance and National Planning and Public Debt and Privatisation in a report tabled on March 10, 2026, amounts to a conditional endorsement laced with enough qualifications to fill a legal brief and haunted by a central question that no government official has yet answered with any precision: at Sh34 per share, is Kenya selling its crown jewel at a bargain counter price?

    The transaction, first announced by Finance Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi on December 4, 2025, involves the disposal of 6,009,814,200 Safaricom shares, representing 15 percent of the company, to Vodacom at Sh34 per share, generating gross proceeds of Sh204.3 billion.

    An additional upfront payment of Sh40.2 billion, structured as an advance on future dividends from the government’s residual 20 percent stake, brings total projected inflows to Sh244.5 billion.

    The money, the government insists, will seed the newly established National Infrastructure Fund rather than be absorbed into the recurrent budget.

    Once the transaction closes, Vodacom’s effective holding in Safaricom will surge to 55 percent, making the South African operator, itself a subsidiary of British telecom giant Vodafone Group, the outright majority owner of East Africa’s most powerful private enterprise.

    “The deal was undervalued. Kenyans have been given a raw deal. The joint committee is incompetent.” — Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro, National Assembly, March 10, 2026

    THE DIVIDEND GAP THAT PARLIAMENT HAD TO CHASE DOWN

    The most revealing detail in the joint committee’s report is not what it approved, but what it found missing from the deal as originally structured. Lawmakers discovered that the transaction’s foundational document, Sessional Paper No. 3 of 2025, is silent on whether the Treasury will receive dividends from the 15 percent stake for the financial year ending March 2026, should the deal close before that date.

    The omission is not trivial. Safaricom declared an interim dividend of Sh0.85 per share in February 2026, a payout on which the Treasury will collect Sh11.92 billion based on its current 35 percent holding.

    The full-year dividend for the year to March 2024 was Sh1.20 per share, generating Sh16.83 billion for the government.

    At a company recording 52.1 percent net profit growth to Sh42.7 billion in the first half of its current financial year, the final dividend for FY2026 is expected to be considerably higher.

    The committee noted in its report that the deal fails to specify whether it is structured on an ex-dividend or cum-dividend basis, meaning Parliament was asked to approve a Sh244.5 billion transaction without knowing who pockets potentially Sh17 billion or more in annual dividends depending on the closing date.

    The committees have recommended that the effective date of the transaction be set at April 1, 2026, or later, to ensure the government collects what is rightfully its share of the 2025 financial year’s earnings.

    They have also invoked Section 142 of the Companies Act, which stipulates that dividends are payable to shareholders registered at the time of declaration, and directed the Treasury to renegotiate with Vodacom to formalise this entitlement.

    The absence of this basic commercial clarity from a deal of this magnitude speaks less to oversight and more to a negotiation conducted with suspicious haste.

    The committees’ language is careful but pointed. They describe the absence of explicit dividend clarification as creating uncertainty that could trigger unintended revenue loss or post-completion disputes.

    In the understated dialect of parliamentary committee reports, that is about as close to an accusation of reckless deal-making as procedural propriety allows.

    THE PRICE KENYA ACCEPTED — AND THE PRICE KENYA COULD HAVE HAD

    The arithmetic of the undervaluation argument is not partisan noise. It is a calculation that has been advanced by the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya (ICPAK), the Technology Service Providers Association, Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro, economics professor Fredrick Onyango Ogola, and, implicitly, by the Kenya Bankers Association’s own proposal to open a portion of the shares to the retail market.

    At Sh34 per share, the government is pricing the entire Safaricom business at roughly Sh1.36 trillion.

    In 2021, before Safaricom committed billions to its Ethiopian expansion, the shares traded at Sh45, implying a valuation of Sh1.8 trillion. With Ethiopia now approaching operational break-even, with half-year net profits up more than 50 percent, with M-Pesa processing over 100 million daily transactions and commanding a 91 percent mobile money market share, the argument that Safaricom is worth less today than it was four years ago does not survive even casual scrutiny.

    Nyoro told Parliament’s joint committee in January that limiting the sale to a single strategic partner denied the state the price discovery that competitive bidding would have produced, and that an open international tender might have generated an additional Sh150 billion for the national treasury.

    ICPAK chairperson Prof Elizabeth Kalunda told the same committees that the Sh34 per share price had not been accompanied by a clear explanation of the valuation methodology, and that independent benchmarking or third-party validation was minimal

    The government has never publicly named the transaction adviser who recommended the price. CS Mbadi told a television interviewer on China’s CGTN in January that no transaction adviser was appointed at the proposal stage.

    “Either the people at the National Treasury are putting their interests first, are just incompetent, or both.” — Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro

    That admission, buried in a cable television appearance, is perhaps the single most consequential sentence uttered by any government official in this entire affair. A Sh204.3 billion equity disposal, the largest privatisation transaction Kenya has undertaken since independence, was apparently structured without the benefit of a financial adviser.

    The government’s defence is that Vodacom’s premium of 23.6 percent above the six-month volume-weighted average price represents fair value for a block trade.

    The committees accepted this framing, noting that the negotiated price aligns with market movements and that dealing exclusively with Vodacom minimises execution risk.

    That reasoning, however, takes the market price as the appropriate baseline, which is precisely what critics challenge.

    A block sale premium over a suppressed market price is not the same thing as a fair valuation of an asset with Sh48 billion in annual dividends.

    THE ALLEGATION THAT HAS NOT GONE AWAY: WAS THE PRICE ENGINEERED?

    The most explosive allegation in this affair, one that has received considerably less media coverage than it deserves, is Nyoro’s claim before Parliament’s joint committee that 16 billion Safaricom shares were immobilised by the buyer in June 2025, months before the deal was announced, in a move he alleges was designed to signal oversupply to the market and suppress the share price ahead of the transaction.

    If accurate, the implication is that Vodacom, as an insider buyer with material non-public knowledge of a potential acquisition, engineered the very market conditions used to justify the price it subsequently agreed to pay.

    The Capital Markets Authority, the Communications Authority, and the Competition Authority have each told Parliament they are satisfied with the transaction and consider the Sh34 price competitive for a block sale. None of them, in their public submissions, addressed the immobilisation allegation directly.

    The CMA’s chief executive Wycliffe Shamiah told the committee that Safaricom had already sought regulatory approval for the shareholding change.

    The regulatory enthusiasm for the deal stands in some contrast to the reluctance of the High Court, which has twice declined to issue interim conservatory orders but has also not dismissed three separate constitutional petitions challenging the transaction.

    Journalist and activist Tony Gachoka and Professor Ogola have petitioned the Constitutional Division of the Milimani High Court, arguing violations of Articles 1, 10 and 227 of the Constitution. Vodacom Group, strikingly, has sought to be struck out as a respondent in that case, arguing it is not party to a shareholding decision made by the sovereign government.

    That legal manoeuvre may be procedurally sound; it is also the move of a company that prefers to buy an asset than defend its purchase.

    WHAT PARLIAMENT DEMANDED — AND WHAT THE CONTRACT STILL DOES NOT SAY

    The joint committee’s report, co-chaired by Molo MP Kimani Kuria and Mbalambala MP Omar Shurie, appended a list of conditions to its recommendation that reads like a retroactive negotiation.

    Lawmakers extended the job protection period for Safaricom’s 6,777 employees from three years to the duration of the transaction, and specified that no acquisition-related redundancies should occur within five years of closing.

    The dealer, agent and business partner protections embedded in what the Safaricom Dealer Association calls the shared-prosperity model were extended from three years in the original term sheet to ten years in the committee’s recommendation.

    These are not minor administrative adjustments; they are fundamental changes to the structure of a transaction that was already partially executed.

    The committees also directed that Vodacom’s commitment to retain Kenyan leadership and governance structures be formally incorporated into the share purchase agreement, after observing that the existing commitment appears only in the Sessional Paper and not in the legally binding commercial contract.

    In other words, Parliament approved a deal in which the most politically sensitive protections, those covering jobs, local suppliers, Kenyan board composition and the Safaricom Foundation, exist as policy aspirations in a government document rather than as enforceable obligations in law.

    The Majority Leader, Kimani Ichung’wah, told the House the deal was sound. Several opposition members, including Suba South’s Caroli Omondi and Kitui Central’s Makali Mulu, were unpersuaded, with Omondi declaring flatly that Nyoro was correct and accusing the government of misleading Kenyans.

    THE DIVIDEND MACHINE VODACOM IS BUYING — AND WHAT KENYA IS SURRENDERING

    To understand the full financial weight of what is being transferred, it is necessary to look at Safaricom’s dividend history with the dispassion of a finance ministry that apparently did not apply its own numbers to the question before signing the term sheet.

    Between 2014 and 2024, Safaricom paid Sh564.1 billion in dividends to all shareholders, of which the government received Sh197.4 billion.

    In FY2020 alone, when global businesses were contracting, Safaricom paid Sh56.09 billion in dividends. In FY2019, it paid two rounds, a final of Sh50.08 billion and a special of Sh24.84 billion. The company has maintained an 80 percent dividend payout ratio as formal policy and reaffirmed it will not change that policy despite increased borrowings for the Ethiopian expansion.

    What this means in practice is that the government, having received Sh40.2 billion as an advance on its future dividends, will not collect a single shilling of dividends from its remaining 20 percent stake for somewhere between two and three years while that advance amortises.

    Vodacom’s own financial controller, Shaun Biljon, said in December 2025 that the company expects to recoup the advance in just over two years, based on an internal rate of return of 16.5 percent, capped at 18 percent.

    Translated from corporate finance into plain language: Vodacom is lending Kenya its own money, at a mid-teens discount rate, secured against Kenya’s future dividend entitlements.

    The government framed this facility as low-cost financing.

    An independent financial analysis by Mwango Capital concluded the framing was misleading, noting that the correct structure indicates the state is monetising near-term Safaricom dividends at a mid-teens discount rate, not borrowing below sovereign yields.

    Vodacom is, in effect, lending Kenya its own future dividend income, charging 16.5 percent interest on money that would have flowed to the Consolidated Fund regardless.

    THE NATIONAL SECURITY DIMENSION NOBODY IN GOVERNMENT HAS ADEQUATELY ADDRESSED

    Safaricom is not, in any meaningful analytical sense, a telecommunications company. It is a financial infrastructure provider that happens to operate a mobile network.

    M-Pesa alone accounts for nearly half of Kenya’s GDP in transaction value flowing through its rails on any given day.

    The platform serves 38 million Kenyan customers, facilitates government services including eCitizen and Huduma Namba, supports the National Hospital Insurance Fund’s digital payments architecture, and is embedded in the operational fabric of the Kenya Revenue Authority’s tax collection systems.

    The united opposition in Parliament argued, with some force, that an entity of this description is not a portfolio asset available for routine privatisation but a national security infrastructure that the state has an obligation to govern.

    The government’s response, that it will retain two board seats, require a Kenyan CEO and chair, and that Vodacom must consult the government before Safaricom expands outside Kenya, is constitutionally weightless in the absence of statutory underpinning.

    Two board seats in a 55-percent-controlled company do not amount to veto power over strategic decisions that affect 38 million mobile money users. The Safaricom Dealer Association has warned that Vodacom’s more centralised model in other African markets risks dismantling the shared-prosperity dealer network.

    The Technology Service Providers Association has called for golden share provisions and foreign ownership limits. Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka has questioned the transparency of the process.

    The Kenya Bankers Association proposed offering at least 300 million shares to ordinary Kenyan citizens rather than transferring the entirety of the 15 percent to Vodacom. None of these proposals were incorporated in the final committee recommendation.

    WHAT PARLIAMENT APPROVED IS NOT NECESSARILY WHAT WILL HAPPEN

    The committee’s report has been tabled and debated. The full National Assembly must still vote to adopt it. At least three constitutional petitions continue before the High Court. COMESA has granted approval, but approvals from the Capital Markets Authority, the Communications Authority, the Central Bank of Kenya and the East African Community Competition Authority remain pending in various stages.

    The parliamentary clock that ticked from the December 2025 announcement expires on or around March 26, 2026, after which the sessional paper takes effect automatically if no parliamentary action has been taken.

    The committees, by tabling their report, have reset that dynamic, but the final vote on the House floor will be a reckoning for government loyalists who must explain to their constituents why Kenya’s most profitable listed company was handed to a foreign majority owner at a price that the country’s own accountancy body, its bankers’ association, and a former chair of the Budget and Appropriations Committee all described as inadequate.

    The government’s fiscal predicament is real. With Sh12 trillion in public debt, interest payments consuming Sh1.097 trillion of a Sh3.321 trillion revenue projection, and only Sh29.8 billion available for development expenditure in the current fiscal year, the Ruto administration is not wrong to pursue asset monetisation.

    The question is not whether to sell, but at what price, to whom, through what process, and with what binding protections. On each of those four questions, the parliamentary record suggests the government either did not ask, did not disclose, or did not negotiate hard enough.

    The joint committee’s demands for renegotiation, its extension of worker protections, its insistence on formalising safeguards in the contract rather than the sessional paper, and its directive to clarify the dividend entitlement before closing are not routine legislative adjustments.

    They are a parliamentary acknowledgment that the deal, as signed, was incomplete, opaque in key financial particulars, and structured more in the buyer’s interest than in the seller’s.

    Vodacom, for its part, is acquiring majority control of a business that generated Sh42.7 billion in net profit in a single half-year, that commands 91 percent of the mobile money market in one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital economies, and that is positioned at the intersection of telecommunications, financial services and national data infrastructure, all at a price that its own funding structure suggests it will recover in full within two years from dividends alone.

    Whether Parliament’s conditions survive the negotiating table, and whether the High Court will allow the transaction to close without first hearing the constitutional questions it raises, are questions that will define not just Safaricom’s ownership structure but the precedent Kenya sets for how a sovereign state ought to sell its most consequential assets.

    The answer, at this stage of an unfinished process, is that the price of getting it wrong will compound, year after year, in the dividends that flow south.

  • The Art of the Corporate Shakedown and Extortion tactics – Jilk Construction versus KBL

    The Art of the Corporate Shakedown and Extortion tactics – Jilk Construction versus KBL

    Let’s get straight to the point: what’s happening with the JILK vs. KBL dispute isn’t a quest for justice. It’s a masterclass in how to hold a multi-billion-dollar transaction hostage.

    In a functioning democracy, disputes are settled in courtrooms with evidence, cross-examinations, and legal arguments.

    But when a litigant realizes their evidence isn’t holding up, what do they do? They weaponize social media, write angry letters to the Chief Justice, threaten private prosecutions, and unleash bloggers to muddy the waters.

    Take the Jilk sexual harassment claims. The public narrative by Jilk is that KBL covered it up. The actual documentary evidence shows KBL immediately asked Jilk for information, evidence, or witnesses of the alleged sexual harassment to aid in carrying out investigations as requested by JILK.

    JILK never responded. Even more revealing, in documents recently filed before the Chief Magistrate, the alleged victim confirms that it was actually JILK’s CEO, Pastor Engineer Sammy Maina Kamau, who prevailed on her not to pursue the matter.

    Given that explanation, how is KBL to blame for the failure to follow up? KBL also clarified to Jilk that the accused was an employee of a third-party company, not KBL. But facts don’t trend as well as outrage.

    Then there’s the whistleblower who filed a report with KBL. A detailed report of bribery and collusion between Pastor Sammy Kamau (Jilk) and Mutinda Mutuku QS (the Arbitrator and owner of Buildnett Limited) was lodged through a secure, auditable platform.

    It wasn’t idle gossip; it was a serious allegation of a hijacked legal process. Instead of addressing the core issue—whether the arbitration was corrupted—the tactic has been to attack the whistleblower and pressure the judges handling the case – and so far two judges have walked!

    When a magistrate simply asked for standard procedures to be followed, JILK’s lawyers bypassed the appeals process and wrote directly to the Chief Justice, accusing the magistrate of “gross incompetence.” This isn’t lawyering; it’s intimidation. It’s a deliberate strategy to scare judicial officers into compliance.

    This isn’t just about one brewery in Kisumu. Diageo is currently navigating a $2.3bn transaction with Asahi. By creating a loud, chaotic public siege alongside their lawsuits, the goal is clear: create enough noise and reputational risk to force a payout.

    If we allow litigants to bypass the courts and use Twitter mobs and intimidation tactics to extort settlements, we don’t just lose this case—we lose the rule of law.

    Kenya’s commercial risk shouldn’t be defined by who can shout the loudest online. Justice must remain in the courtroom, not in the comments section.

  • Kindiki’s Wife Spent Sh45 Million In Six Months Without Parliament Approval

    Kindiki’s Wife Spent Sh45 Million In Six Months Without Parliament Approval

    Nairobi, Kenya — The Office of the Spouse of the Deputy President spent more than Sh44 million in six months despite having no budget approved by Parliament, a new audit report has revealed.

    The report by Controller of Budget Margaret Nyakang’o shows that the Office of the Spouse of the Deputy President used Sh44.52 million between July and December 2025 even though it had not been allocated any funds in the 2025/26 financial year.

    The office is headed by Dr Joyce Njagi Kithure, the spouse of Deputy President Kithure Kindiki.

    According to the budget implementation review submitted to the National Assembly of Kenya, the expenditure was incurred despite the office not having a formal budget allocation approved by lawmakers.

    Controller of Budget Nyakang’o noted in the report that the office operated without an approved vote in the national budget but still incurred millions in spending during the period under review.

    “The Office of the Spouse of the Deputy President had no budgetary allocation in the period under review but incurred expenditure of Sh44.52 million,” the report states.

    The audit indicates that the activities of the office may have been facilitated through the Office of the Deputy President, which has its own budget allocation.

    However, the Controller of Budget pointed out that facilitating the operations of the spouse of the deputy president is not one of the legally defined mandates of the deputy president’s office.

    The revelations have reignited debate over the legality and funding of offices held by spouses of senior government officials.

    In 2024, President William Ruto ordered the removal of budget allocations for the offices of the First Lady, the spouse of the Deputy President and the spouse of the Prime Cabinet Secretary as part of austerity measures aimed at reducing public expenditure.

    The directive came at a time when the government was under pressure to cut spending amid rising public debt and growing public anger over tax increases.

    Before the directive, the government had set aside about Sh1.3 billion to fund the three offices despite them not being established in law.

    Parliament is now expected to scrutinise the findings of the report as part of its oversight role on public spending, with questions emerging about how public funds were used without an approved budget allocation.

  • THE MAN WHO OWNS YOUR GOVERNMENT: How a Private Firm Seized Kenya’s Digital State and Refuses to Let Go

    THE MAN WHO OWNS YOUR GOVERNMENT: How a Private Firm Seized Kenya’s Digital State and Refuses to Let Go

    KEY FACTS: The eCitizen Money Trail

    Sh1.45 billion collected by Webmasters consortium in FY2024 alone. Sh700 million processed daily on eCitizen. Sh127.85 million transferred to private entities without documentation. Sh7.05 billion held in unsanctioned settlement accounts. Sh44.8 billion in total collections whose accuracy cannot be confirmed. Sh2.57 billion in receipts with no matching invoices. Sh195.7 million paid irregularly for gateway services. Zero Data Protection Impact Assessments conducted. Zero signed Service Level Agreements with payment providers.


    It takes a particular kind of audacity to look the President of the Republic in the eye at State House, agree to surrender control of the country’s most critical digital infrastructure, and then, three years later, still be running that same infrastructure while billing the government hundreds of millions of shillings every month.

    It takes an even rarer kind of impunity to respond to a major newspaper investigation exposing your firm’s collection of Sh1.45 billion in public fees by posting on Facebook that the figure is, in your own words, ‘very little money for what government is getting in return. We actually need more.’

    That is James Ayugi Panaito in a sentence.

    He is the founder and chief executive of Webmasters Kenya Limited, the private firm that built the eCitizen platform in 2014 and has, through a labyrinthine web of associated companies, managed to transform a World Bank-funded government project into what amounts to a private toll road through which every Kenyan must pass to access the most basic of state services.

    From applying for a passport to registering a business, from paying university fees to renewing a driving licence, the platform that sits between you and your government is controlled not by the state, but by James Ayugi.

    And he has made abundantly clear that he has no intention of giving it back.

    “We’ve run eCitizen for 10 years. We are still young and will continue serving Kenyans.” — James Ayugi, CEO Webmasters Kenya, LinkedIn, March 2026

    The Architecture of Capture

    The eCitizen story begins in the early years of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration, when the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation bankrolled an ambitious initiative to digitise Kenya’s government services.

    The contract for development and maintenance went to Webmasters Kenya Limited, a firm whose principal shareholder, director and chief executive was then better known publicly as James Panaito.

    The name change would come later, once his foothold in government was secure enough that obscuring his identity was no longer necessary.

    The platform launched in December 2014 with an initial roster of ten services.

    In its original design, according to court documents filed by Treasury auditor Willis Odhiambo Okwacho, eCitizen was intended to be free to citizens, funded instead through budgetary allocations.

    No documentation existed, Mr Okwacho told the court, to show that citizens would be charged any fee over and above the normal transaction costs. What followed was a departure from that founding principle that has cost Kenyan citizens billions of shillings.

    Webmasters introduced a Sh50 ‘convenience fee’ on every eCitizen transaction without approval from the National Treasury, without gazettal as appropriation-in-aid, and without any enabling provision in the Appropriation Act.

    It was, in the measured language of the audit, introduced outside the laid-down procedures. In less measured terms, it was a private tax levied on citizens accessing their own government, collected by a private firm into private accounts, for years before anyone in authority raised a formal objection.

    By the time Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu’s latest special audit landed before Parliament, the numbers had grown to staggering proportions.

    In the single financial year ending June 2024 alone, the Webmasters consortium collected Sh591.9 million in convenience fees and an additional Sh857.2 million in maintenance fees, a combined Sh1.45 billion extracted from public funds and citizen pockets.

    The platform, by that point, was processing upwards of Sh700 million daily. At current transaction volumes, Ayugi’s consortium bills the government between Sh100 million and Sh200 million every month.

    Three Companies, One Man

    What makes the eCitizen arrangement so extraordinary, and so difficult to challenge, is the deliberate fragmentation of the enterprise into multiple legal entities that confuse accountability while consolidating control under a single beneficial ownership structure.

    The platform is operated by a consortium formally constituted as Electronic Citizen Services, or ECS LLC, comprising three companies.

    Webmasters Kenya Limited, Ayugi’s original vehicle, provides customer care and technical coordination. Pesaflow Limited handles all payment processing across the platform. Olive Tree Media Limited manages bulk messaging, security notifications and revenue mobilisation.

    Together they touch every dimension of eCitizen’s operations. Together, they are all roads leading to James Ayugi.

    The story of Pesaflow is particularly instructive. Between 2014 and 2017, the payment function on eCitizen was handled by Goldrock Capital Limited, a firm that Webmasters Africa, Ayugi’s other vehicle, had subcontracted to manage fund flows from citizens to the government’s consolidated fund account at KCB.

    The National Treasury, when it eventually discovered the arrangement, declared it illegal on the grounds that it had never approved the subcontracting. Goldrock was ejected.

    The Directorate of Criminal Investigations launched an inquiry, writing to Webmasters Africa seeking information on suspected fraud and embezzlement of funds flowing through the eCitizen payment system. Government ministries and departments, the DCI letter noted, had lost funds paid through the platform.

    That investigation, remarkably, appears to have gone nowhere.

    Instead, in August 2017, at the precise moment Goldrock was locked in court battles with the government and Webmasters over the Sh127.8 million frozen in eCitizen wallets, a new company was quietly incorporated to take over the payment function. That company was Pesaflow Limited.

    At first glance, Pesaflow appeared to be an entirely new entity. Its largest shareholders were listed as Evid Araka Sibi and Frank Lawrence Ochieng Weya, with 3,000 shares each, and Charles Wambani Sewe and Larry Ochieng Agoro holding 2,000 shares apiece. Closer examination revealed that all four individuals had previously worked for Webmasters Africa.

    Evid Sibi, who became Pesaflow’s managing director, had in fact been a director at Webmasters Kenya before departing to co-found the payment firm.

    The individuals who had been operating an illegal payment arrangement had, through a new corporate vehicle, simply resumed the same function. The DCI probe that never materialised had cleared the path.

    Mr Ayugi, when pressed on his connections to Pesaflow by Business Daily Africa, declined to explain the links. He acknowledged being the principal shareholder, director and chief executive of both Webmasters Kenya and Webmasters Africa but insisted the companies were separate legal entities.

    The individuals who had been operating an illegal payment arrangement had, through a new corporate vehicle, simply resumed the same function. The DCI probe that never was had cleared the path.

    The Billion-Shilling Handover That Never Happened

    When President William Ruto swept to power in September 2022, there was, briefly, reason to believe the Webmasters arrangement might finally be unwound.

    His administration moved quickly. Within weeks of being sworn in, Ruto summoned Ayugi and the Webmasters team to State House and delivered a blunt message: hand over the platform and abandon all financial claims, because the firm had paid itself enough from convenience fees across nearly eight years of operations.

    A follow-up meeting was convened on November 30, 2022, at 7:15 in the morning in the National Treasury’s 14th-floor boardroom.

    Treasury Cabinet Secretary Njuguna Ndung’u and his ICT counterpart Eliud Owalo led the government’s delegation.

    The resolution was unambiguous. Webmasters was to transfer everything, including front-end and back-end rights, source code, system architecture, user manuals, and all associated materials, and then train government staff to take over. The deadline for full completion, including staff capacity building, was July 13, 2023.

    On January 13, 2023, the Ministry of ICT and Webmasters formalised a handover agreement. Goldrock and Webmasters dropped their outstanding financial claims and withdrew their court suits.

    The government sent sixty-two officials to an eight-day workshop at the PrideInn Paradise Beach Resort in Mombasa, at a cost of at least Sh11.9 million in accommodation alone, to be trained by Webmasters on platform onboarding.

    Jambopay and Safaricom staff participated as trainers. The government paid. The training happened. The deadline passed.

    Three years later, Webmasters and its consortium are still running eCitizen.

    More troubling than the failure to hand over is what the January 2023 agreement reveals when examined against the platform’s earlier history. In 2017, the World Bank’s IFC had handed over the eCitizen platform to the National Treasury in its entirety, transferring all source code, contracts and documentation with a formal handover letter dated August 7, 2017.

    In legal terms, the government had owned eCitizen since that date. By 2022, however, the government found itself negotiating with Webmasters as though the platform still belonged to the vendor.

    MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, reviewing the matter in 2025, put the question directly: it was not explained, they noted in their report, how ownership and control of eCitizen ended up back in the hands of the vendor after having already been handed over to the National Treasury by IFC in 2017.

    No answer has been provided. The mystery of the double transfer, in which a platform that legally belonged to the state somehow reverted to private hands without any documented legal or administrative justification, sits at the heart of the scandal.

    The Kill Switch

    If the story of the convenience fee represents an act of prolonged financial extraction, the contract signed on May 25, 2023, between the ICT Authority and the ECS consortium represents something potentially far graver: the formalisation of a private veto over the functioning of the Kenyan state.

    The agreement, reviewed by multiple media organisations, contains a clause whose implications should alarm any serious constitutionalist or national security analyst.

    In the event of termination, it states, ‘the suppliers shall be entitled to rescind, withdraw or otherwise uninstall all their proprietary infrastructure and resources, including all technical infrastructure whether software or otherwise, that may have been deployed in order to enable them to provide their services under this agreement.’

    Put plainly: if the government falls out with James Ayugi, Webmasters and its consortium have a contractual right to switch off eCitizen.

    In a country where over 22,000 government services, from passport applications and immigration control to university fee payments, business registrations, national identification, tax compliance and NHIF contributions, flow exclusively through this single platform, that is not a commercial contract clause. It is a weapon.

    MP Dido Raso, serving as vice-chair of the National Assembly Committee on Security and National Administration, questioned the legality of the contract’s execution, noting the conspicuous absence of a signature from the Principal Secretary for ICT.

    Rarieda MP Otiende Amollo described the situation as a monumental scandal.

    Mathioya’s Edwin Mugo warned that Kenya was staring at a monumental monster it would be unable to deal with in future. Turkana MP Joseph Namwar was more direct, calling the platform itself a scam.

    In July 2023, a distributed denial-of-service attack on eCitizen disrupted access to government services nationwide for several days. No government entity controlled the response.

    The Auditor-General has since formally warned that the absence of a state-controlled backup system means a sustained cyberattack could bring the economy to its knees. The Communications Authority and relevant security ministries have been tasked with oversight. They have yet to act.

    If the government falls out with James Ayugi, the consortium has a contractual right to switch off eCitizen. That is not a commercial clause. It is a weapon.

    The Missing Billions

    The financial irregularities documented in Gathungu’s audits read less like the failures of an imperfect system and more like the methodical exploitation of one deliberately kept opaque.

    The special audit for the financial year ending June 30, 2024, flagged over Sh9.6 billion in questionable transactions.

    At the centre of the figure is Sh7.05 billion sitting in eCitizen collection and settlement accounts as of that date, the product of an absence of any signed Service Level Agreements between the National Treasury and the platform’s financial service providers.

    Without SLAs, the Auditor-General warned, nothing prevents service providers from utilising that float for their own benefit.

    Four payments totalling Sh127.85 million were transferred from the official government M-Pesa Paybill 222222 directly to private entities on January 25, 2024, without a single document to justify or authorise the transfers.

    An undisclosed Equity Bank account named ‘Pesaflow,’ which had not been approved by the National Treasury, received Sh68.7 million and an additional Sh6.2 million. A separate ‘Pesaflow2’ account processed Sh68.7 million and USD 48.1 million through what the audit termed unapproved channels.

    Furthermore, Sh549.69 million was paid to a company called Electronic Citizens Solutions Limited, which was not party to the ICT Authority contract, meaning public money flowed to an entity with no legal standing in the arrangement.

    A further Sh195.7 million was paid for ‘payment gateway services,’ a charge the audit deemed irregular on the grounds that the government should not pay external parties to use its own platform.

    Discrepancies in revenue reporting mean the accuracy of Sh44.8 billion in total collections through eCitizen cannot be confirmed. The government’s own departments, including the State Law Office, were found unable to access financial reports on revenues generated from their own services on the platform.

    No Data Protection Impact Assessment has ever been conducted for a platform that holds the identity, payment and service records of virtually every adult Kenyan. Government agencies resolved technical problems by contacting the vendor via WhatsApp.

    The Impunity of the Indispensable

    What has shielded Webmasters from the consequences that would, in any functional accountability environment, have long since followed is the impunity of the indispensable.

    The firm and its associated entities have, over eleven years, made themselves so deeply embedded in the architecture of government that removing them now carries genuine risk of service disruption. That condition was not an accident.

    It was the product of a conscious strategy to expand eCitizen’s footprint, to onboard thousands of services beyond the original ten, and to resist every attempt to transfer technical knowledge to government officials.

    Ayugi has been remarkably candid about the logic.

    In a February 2025 interview following the Business Daily investigation, he acknowledged that his group bills the government between Sh100 million and Sh200 million every month, and suggested those figures should be higher. When the government attempted the 2023 handover, he told another interviewer, no team in government possessed the capacity to handle the platform’s complexity. He used the word ‘primitive’ to describe the idea that the public sector, rather than his firm, should earn revenue from running public digital infrastructure.

    His vision extends well beyond Kenya.

    Having built what he describes as the world’s most advanced integrated government services platform, Ayugi has been explicit that eCitizen Kenya is merely a proof of concept for a global commercial enterprise.

    Webmasters has delivered related services to Rwanda, Somalia and Iraq.

    He has spoken publicly of making ‘real money’ when the model is exported internationally. The question Kenyans should be asking is whether their compulsory participation in his platform, their data, their transactions, their government services, is the capital investment funding his global expansion.

    Consumer advocate Stephen Mutoro has alleged that Ayugi’s grip on the platform is protected by a cartel with interests spanning the National Treasury, the Central Bank of Kenya and State House, with ethnic affiliations providing additional insulation for the beneficial owners who remain, in Mutoro’s characterisation, hidden from public view.

    A State That Cannot Govern Itself

    What the eCitizen scandal ultimately exposes is not simply the avarice of a single entrepreneur or the negligence of a few civil servants. It exposes a structural failure of the Kenyan state, a failure to develop and retain the technical capacity to run its own critical infrastructure, to enforce its own contracts and presidential directives, and to protect public funds and citizen data from private exploitation.

    The government has known about the Webmasters problem since at least 2017, when its own internal audit first raised the alarm. It has known about the illegal convenience fee, the unapproved payment arrangements, the absence of data protection assessments, and the concentration of operational control in private hands. It has received the same recommendations from the Auditor-General in successive annual reports.

    It has summoned principal secretaries, held parliamentary committee sessions, commissioned special audits and signed handover agreements. And every time, the platform has remained exactly where it was: in the hands of James Ayugi.

    President Ruto stood before cameras on June 30, 2023, to relaunch eCitizen with fanfare as a flagship achievement of his administration’s digital agenda. Behind the spectacle, the man whose firm retained the kill switch over the entire enterprise had attended the same event. A platform built with World Bank money, declared government property in 2017, remained, in every operational and practical sense, a private business.

    The May 2023 contract with the ECS consortium runs for three years. It expires in May 2026. As the deadline approaches, the question is whether this government will, at last, do what two administrations have failed to do, or whether James Ayugi will once again demonstrate that in the contest between a determined private operator and a diffident state, the one who actually controls the infrastructure wins every time.

    In the meantime, every Kenyan who logs onto eCitizen to apply for a document, pay a fee or register a service is, whether they know it or not, enriching a private consortium that has turned the machinery of democratic governance into a revenue stream. The state they are paying to access is not, in any meaningful sense, theirs.

    The state they are paying to access is not, in any meaningful sense, theirs.

  • High Court Blocks NTSA Instant Traffic Fines

    High Court Blocks NTSA Instant Traffic Fines

    NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 12 – The High Court of Kenya has temporarily stopped the enforcement of the recently launched instant traffic fines system introduced by the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA).

    Justice Bahati Mwamuye issued conservatory orders suspending the implementation of the system following a petition filed by lawyer Shadrack Wambui, who is challenging its legality.

    In the case, Wambui argues that the instant fines framework may violate due process and motorists’ constitutional rights by allowing penalties to be issued and enforced without adequate legal safeguards.

    The orders mean that NTSA and other enforcement agencies cannot implement or enforce the instant fines system until the court hears and determines the petition.

    The instant fines system had been introduced as part of efforts by NTSA to strengthen road safety enforcement and improve compliance with traffic regulations by allowing motorists who commit offences to pay fines immediately rather than undergoing lengthy court processes.

    However, critics have raised concerns over transparency, accountability and the potential for abuse if the system is implemented without clear legal frameworks and oversight.

    The High Court will now consider the arguments presented in the petition before determining whether the instant fines system can proceed or requires further legal and regulatory review.

  • Two MMUST Students Found Dead In Suspected Murder-Suicide

    Two MMUST Students Found Dead In Suspected Murder-Suicide

    Detectives in Kakamega are investigating a shocking suspected murder–suicide after two university students were found dead inside a house in Maraba, Kakamega Central.

    Police said the two victims were students at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology (MMUST). Their bodies were discovered in the same house, sending shockwaves through the local community.

    Preliminary investigations indicate that one of the victims may have fatally stabbed the other before taking their own life. However, police say the motive behind the incident remains unclear.

    Relatives of one of the deceased, a 21-year-old third-year student identified as Dariel Jedidah Luvunga, said they last spoke to him on the evening of March 8, 2026.

    Their concern grew after repeated attempts to reach him the following day failed. On March 10, family members visited the house where he lived, only to find the door locked from the inside.

    According to police, the relatives peeped through a small opening and spotted someone lying motionless on the floor, prompting them to alert authorities.

    Officers arrived at the scene and forced their way into the house, where they discovered two bodies. One man was lying on the floor with multiple stab wounds to the head and stomach, while the other was found hanging in the bathroom.

    Police confirmed that the body found hanging was that of Dariel. A blood-stained kitchen knife believed to have been used in the attack was recovered at the scene. Investigators also said no suicide note was found.

    The bodies were moved to the Kakamega General Hospital mortuary for postmortem examination as investigations continue.

    The incident drew a large crowd of residents who gathered at the scene as police removed the bodies.

    Authorities have urged residents to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activities as detectives work to establish the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.

    In a separate incident in Vihiga County, police are searching for a 43-year-old woman accused of fatally stabbing her 79-year-old father in Chamasilihi village in Mbale Sub-location.

    Police said the victim, identified as Mundanya Hezron Madaga, died after being stabbed in the neck during the attack. The suspect reportedly fled the scene immediately after the incident.

    The body was taken to Vihiga Teaching and Referral Hospital mortuary as police launched a manhunt for the suspect.

    According to police statistics, murder cases have been rising in the country, with authorities reporting up to eight incidents daily, many of which remain under investigation.

  • How Little-Known Pesa Print, Linked to State House Tycoons, Won NTSA Tender Worth Sh42 Billion in Traffic Fines

    How Little-Known Pesa Print, Linked to State House Tycoons, Won NTSA Tender Worth Sh42 Billion in Traffic Fines

    On the morning of March 9, 2026, NTSA Director General Nashon Kondiwa stepped before cameras at the Sarova Stanley in Nairobi and announced that Kenya had entered a new era of automated traffic enforcement.

    More than a thousand cameras were live, fines would arrive by SMS, and motorists had seven days to pay or face lockout from every NTSA service.

    The country, he declared, would no longer tolerate the culture of bribery that had made Kenyan roads among the deadliest on the continent.

    What Kondiwa did not dwell on at that morning briefing was the commercial architecture beneath the road safety rhetoric.

    The cameras, the digital licences, the automated fines system, the entire Sh42 billion machine now grinding into gear, exist principally to generate revenues for a private consortium over the next 21 years.

    At the core of that consortium sits Pesa Print Limited, a firm that only months earlier had drawn the attention of investigators for the identity of its newest shareholders.

    Two men, Faryd Abdulrazak Sheikh and Jabir Abdul Nassir Abdalla Al-Kindy, had quietly acquired a combined 41.17 percent stake in Pesa Print through companies incorporated in August and October 2023, respectively.

    The timing was not coincidental. The National Treasury had approved the smart driving licence project’s feasibility study in July 2023. By the time the ink had dried on those government approvals, Simbabanc Investments and Cropharmony Africa, the vehicles through which Faryd and Jabir made their entry, were already registered.

    “If these guys are as powerful as you say, why are we being given more steps to follow?” — David Njane, Pesa Print founder

    The men are not, by conventional measure, strangers to power. Faryd is the co-owner of the Dolphin Resort in Shanzu, Mombasa, a Sh600 million beachfront property that then Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i listed in Parliament in 2021 among assets linked to the then-Deputy President William Ruto and afforded round-the-clock police protection at taxpayer expense.

    President Ruto did not dispute the inclusion of the Dolphin Resort in Matiang’i’s list, even as he rejected other allegations.

    That defence of public funds for a private commercial interest was itself a scandal. That the same co-owner now holds a 41 percent stake in the company positioned to earn billions from Kenyan motorists is the more consequential one.

    Jabir’s links to presidential property are, if anything, more direct. Company registry searches establish him as a shareholder of North Mogor Holdings, the entity through which President Ruto is reported to have acquired the Murumbi Farm, a roughly 1,000-acre tract in Kilgoris, Narok County. The property was among those Matiang’i identified as belonging to Ruto and guarded by the State.

    When the former Interior CS made his parliamentary disclosure, North Mogor Holdings was a company whose ownership records had, curiously, vanished from the government’s online portal. They have since resurfaced.

    Jabir is listed alongside Abdul Karim Abdulrak, who himself serves as a director of Kazi ni Kazi Ventures, a company whose sole shareholder is the United Democratic Alliance, President Ruto’s own political party. The web does not so much connect these men as wrap itself around them.

    The depth of the presidential relationship extends into social ceremony. In May 2023, President Ruto attended the wedding of Faryd’s son Idris to Salma Konse. Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale, who accompanied the President, marked the occasion on social media.

    Screenshot

    The attendance of a sitting head of state at the nuptials of a man who would subsequently acquire a controlling stake in a company seeking a 21-year, Sh42 billion state contract is the kind of detail that, in a functioning transparency architecture, would have been disclosed and scrutinised. It was not.

    A PROJECT BORN IN DELAY, SHAPED BY CRISIS

    The smart driving licence project is not new. Its origins trace to March 2017, when NTSA signed a Sh2.03 billion contract with a consortium led by the National Bank of Kenya and Pesa Print for the supply, installation, and maintenance of five million second-generation chip-embedded licences.

    The contract was budgeted from public coffers and was meant to run three years.

    It ran into the ground instead.

    By the time the Kenya Kwanza administration came to power in 2022, the Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu had recorded the project as four years behind schedule. NTSA had managed to produce fewer than two million licences against a target of five million.

    Meanwhile the government had accumulated close to Sh2 billion in pending bills owed to Pesa Print. The state, in short, had failed as a client. It turned to the private sector to fix what public procurement had broken.

    The restructuring into a PPP was, on its face, defensible. Kenya’s roads kill more than 5,100 people annually. The economic cost of road accidents has been pegged at Sh450 billion per year, equivalent to approximately five percent of GDP.

    The case for digital enforcement, biometric licences, and a merit-and-demerit points framework is a real one. The problem is not the policy logic. The problem is the procurement.

    The government opted for direct procurement under the PPP Act rather than competitive bidding. NTSA has offered the explanation that Pesa Print is the only company with the relevant technology and that the project’s history makes competitive tendering impractical.

    David Njane, Pesa Print’s founder, who holds 58.83 percent of the company through Kenya Twelve Ventures and his own personal shares, echoed the same justification. ‘We designed the licences from scratch, using Kenyan artists,’ he has said. The PPP Directorate confirmed that contract negotiations are underway.

    What neither NTSA nor Pesa Print has adequately addressed is how the PPP Act’s direct procurement provision, designed for rare circumstances of unique capability, came to be applied to a project where the primary beneficiary has, at precisely the moment of government approval, welcomed shareholders with documented proximity to the presidency.

    The question is not whether Pesa Print has a legitimate historical claim to the project. It is whether the entry of Faryd and Jabir into the company’s ownership structure, timed as it was to the approval of the feasibility study, represents the kind of political capture of public procurement that Kenya’s laws are supposed to prevent.

    Sources familiar with the deal estimate a gross return of at least 120 percent on the initial Sh42 billion investment over 21 years.

    THE ECONOMICS: WHO EARNS, AND HOW MUCH

    The financial architecture of this project is extraordinary by any measure. The KCB-Pesa Print consortium is committing an estimated Sh42 billion in capital over the first two to three years, entirely through private debt and equity.

    Not a single shilling of public money is meant to fund the implementation phase. In exchange, the consortium will operate and maintain the infrastructure for 21 years and recoup its investment through user charges.

    Sources familiar with the deal indicate a projected return of at least 120 percent over the concession period, suggesting gross earnings in the region of Sh50 billion on the initial investment.

    The revenue streams are layered. Motorists will pay Sh3,000 for the issuance, renewal or replacement of each smart driving licence.

    With a target of five million licences every three years, that licensing fee alone is projected to yield around Sh15 billion to the consortium and NTSA combined. Then come the fines.

    Treasury data shows Kenya collected an average of Sh1.7 billion annually in traffic fines over the five years to June 2024.

    The new system is designed to multiply that figure dramatically. Over 1,000 cameras, 700 fixed and 300 mobile, deployed across the major highways and high-risk corridors of the country will detect violations in real time, transmit offence data to a central command system, and generate fines payable electronically within seven days.

    The scale of potential fine revenue, across an enforcement system that detects at least 37 categories of offence ranging from Sh500 for a missing seatbelt to Sh10,000 for driving without a valid inspection certificate, is not projected in any public document. What is clear is that the private investors have modelled returns on a very different order of magnitude than anything the current system generates.

    KCB’s role in the project came about through the acquisition of National Bank of Kenya by Nigeria’s Access Bank, completed on May 30, 2025. The Central Bank of Kenya approved the transfer and issued Gazette Notice No. 4666 in April 2025 clearing KCB to assume all functions NBK had held under the original 2017 contract.

    The bank will now handle enrolment, distribution and licence issuance, while Pesa Print manages card design and production.

    NTSA retains oversight of enforcement and data governance. At the end of the 21-year concession, core infrastructure including cameras, enrolment systems and the command centre will revert to NTSA. The private partners will retain non-core assets.

    THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST PARADOX

    There is a bitter irony embedded in the timing of all this. Shortly before the NTSA announced the rollout of its instant fines system, President Ruto signed the Conflict of Interest Act into law.

    The legislation, demanded by the International Monetary Fund as part of Kenya’s fiscal adjustment programme, was intended to bring greater transparency to public appointments and government contracts. In practice, lawmakers diluted the bill’s most critical provisions before passing it, rendering the final version significantly weaker than the original draft.

    The Conflict of Interest Act, in its enfeebled form, did not reach backward to examine contracts already in the pipeline. It did not trigger a review of the ownership structures of companies positioned to receive state revenues through PPP arrangements.

    It did not ask why two men with documented personal relationships with the President had, within weeks of a Treasury feasibility approval, incorporated new companies and immediately acquired a combined 41 percent stake in the project vehicle.

    The man who directly connects these threads is Charles Tela Alusala, Faryd’s business partner in the Dolphin Resort. Alusala co-owns Easton Industrial Park alongside President Ruto’s daughter June Ruto.

    He is a shareholder in Jipe Fisheries with First Lady Rachel Ruto.

    At Amaco Insurance, where Alusala holds 100,000 shares amounting to a 10.83 percent stake, the Ruto family’s investment vehicle Yegen Farms, owned by the First Lady and her daughter Charlene, holds 190,000 shares.

    Alusala is listed as the contact person at Koilel Farm, where the First Lady and her son Nick are co-owners, and at Urban Groove Apartments, where Rachel Ruto and Charlene hold equity. The business constellation between Faryd’s circle and the first family of Kenya is dense, documented, and commercially active.

    In that context, Pesa Print’s Njane insists the political affiliations of his co-shareholders are irrelevant to the company’s operations and its legitimate historical claim to the project. His frustration at persistent scrutiny is understandable.

    He built the company, won the 2015 competitive tender under the previous administration, and has waited through years of state failure to be paid and to have the project advanced.

    Yet the question of whether Faryd and Jabir’s entry was motivated by technical value or political access is not answered by the sincerity of Njane’s belief. It is answered by the evidence of timing, ownership structure, and the network of relationships that surrounds the deal.

    LEGAL BATTLES ALREADY QUEUING

    This is not the first time NTSA has attempted instant fines and been slapped down by the courts. In 2016 and again in 2020, the High Court invalidated similar frameworks, with Justice Roselyne Aburili ruling that any instant fines regime that does not give a motorist the option to either pay or contest the matter in court violates the constitutional right to a fair trial.

    The current system has already attracted a constitutional petition from Nairobi motorist Kennedy Maingi Mutwiri, filed on March 10, 2026, one day after the system went live. Mutwiri argues that the automated framework, fully operational without human intervention and requiring payment within seven days on pain of interest accrual and service lockout, presumes guilt, bypasses judicial oversight, violates the separation of powers, and constitutes an unconstitutional exercise of quasi-judicial authority by an executive agency.

    The High Court declined an urgent injunction but scheduled the matter for mention on April 9.

    The Motorists Association of Kenya has written to the NTSA Director General raising procedural concerns about due process and accountability in the revenue management framework.

    Transport operators, while broadly supportive of the road safety rationale, have called for clarity on how liability is allocated between vehicle owners, drivers, and SACCO management when cameras detect violations in PSVs.

    The Federation of Public Transport Sector, in a statement welcoming the system’s anti-corruption potential, simultaneously flagged the absence of a clear and publicised offence register and warned of compliance failures if motorists remain uninformed.

    The legal and operational challenges facing the system are not, in themselves, fatal to the project. The government has cleared multiple procedural milestones: the PPP Committee conditionally approved the project in June 2024, the Attorney General signed off in January 2025, and Cabinet gave final approval in December 2025.

    The project is, by every administrative measure, properly authorised. The constitutional objections to the instant fines mechanism, however, represent a genuine vulnerability.

    If the courts rule, as they twice have before, that the administrative fine regime violates the right to a fair trial, the revenue projections undergirding the entire 21-year investment case collapse.

    The courts have twice ruled instant fines unconstitutional. A third challenge is already in court.

    The NTSA smart driving licence project is not an isolated procurement anomaly. It is the latest and perhaps most financially significant chapter in a pattern of politically connected investors securing stakes in infrastructure concessions structured as PPPs under the Kenya Kwanza administration.

    The Rironi-Mau Summit superhighway land valuations, the SGR Phase 2B contractor selection, the Affordable Housing Programme procurement controversies, each story traces the same anatomy: private investors with verifiable personal ties to the political establishment acquiring positions in high-value public projects at the precise moment those projects gain government momentum.

    The PPP model, conceived as a mechanism for attracting competent private capital to compensate for a constrained public purse, has in practice become the preferred instrument through which political access is converted into generational commercial advantage. The 21-year concession period is not incidental. It means the men who entered Pesa Print in 2023, weeks after a Treasury approval, will be drawing revenues from Kenyan motorists’ fines and licence fees until 2047, irrespective of who governs after Ruto.

    Faryd Abdulrazak Sheikh’s business biography has been described by those who have studied it as a masterclass in strategic proximity to power. He has built and dissolved companies, entered and exited sectors, and emerged consistently from each transition closer to the next contract. He is the kind of businessman who surfaces in the margins of every major procurement story of this administration, photographed at presidential weddings, registered in company records just ahead of approvals, invisible during the hard work of implementation and entirely present when revenues begin to flow.

    Kenya’s legal and constitutional architecture theoretically prohibits this dynamic. The Conflict of Interest Act, however weakened in its parliamentary passage, establishes at minimum that public officials must not advance private interests that intersect with their public duties. The PPP Act requires that direct procurement be justified by genuine uniqueness of the private partner’s capability. The Constitution mandates transparency and accountability in the use of public resources. Against that framework, the story of how Faryd and Jabir entered Pesa Print and positioned themselves to earn a share of Sh42 billion from Kenya’s roads demands more than the silence currently emanating from State House and the relevant ministries.

    Njane, the man who built Pesa Print and endured years of non-payment and administrative obstruction to reach this moment, says his company represents a Kenyan solution to a Kenyan problem. He is probably right. The solution, however, now carries passengers whose journey into this deal was not earned through technical innovation or competitive risk-taking. It was purchased through proximity to power at exactly the moment that power had money to distribute.

  • Nyakera Accuses Interior PS Omollo of Orchestrating Predawn Raid on His Kisumu Hotel in Bid to Seize Sh235m Property

    Nyakera Accuses Interior PS Omollo of Orchestrating Predawn Raid on His Kisumu Hotel in Bid to Seize Sh235m Property

    A PREDAWN raid on a lakeside hotel in Kisumu has ignited a high-voltage political and business dispute, with former Principal Secretary and Democracy for Citizens Party (DCP) patron Irungu Nyakera squarely accusing Interior PS Dr Raymond Omollo of masterminding what he calls a hostile takeover of his Sh235 million investment.

    Nyakera, who built a reputation as a no-nonsense technocrat before aligning himself with former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua and the opposition, says that at around 5am on Tuesday, more than 100 men stormed his hotel, damaging property and assaulting members of staff, including tying up a female security guard who was on duty at the time.

    Nyakera says he rushed to the scene and fired two warning shots into the air before the attackers fled.

    “I called the OCS and asked for backup, but an hour later, when no backup was forthcoming, I sent him a message that I intend to shoot anyone stepping into my property,” Nyakera said in a statement published on his social media accounts, adding that he hoped the OCS had shared the warning through the relevant security communication channels.

    Nyakera Irungu.
    Nyakera Irungu.

    The incident is not the first of its kind. Nyakera says that three weeks prior, goons working alongside the Lake Basin Development Authority (LBDA) arrived at the premises, carted away merchandise belonging to his business and locked him out. He says he subsequently reported the matter to Kisumu security agencies, where officials told him something that now forms the centrepiece of his allegations against the Interior PS.

    “Upon reporting the matter to the security agencies in Kisumu, I was informed that PS Raymond Omollo had directed that I cannot continue being a tenant in a government building because I am in DCP,” Nyakera said.

    He went further, claiming that the Nyanza Region DCI boss told him that PS Omollo has personal interests in the property, a claim that Nyakera said made perfect sense given that Omollo is a former Chief Executive of LBDA, the state agency that owns the premises, and that Omollo’s cousin currently serves as LBDA’s chief executive.

    Screenshot

    LBDA is a regional development authority established by Parliament in 1979 under Cap 442 to coordinate and implement development programmes across 18 counties in the Lake Victoria basin region, with its headquarters in Kisumu.

    Dr Omollo served as its Managing Director from 2019 before being appointed Principal Secretary for Internal Security and National Administration in December 2022 by President William Ruto, making him one of the most powerful civil servants in the country and the youngest person ever to hold that office.

    A Nation investigation published in February 2023 had earlier linked Omollo, while at LBDA, to an alleged scheme in which retrenched employees were denied benefits worth at least Sh100 million through fictitious court processes involving a string of lawyers. Omollo denied any knowledge of or involvement in the alleged fraudulent arrangement at the time.

    Nyakera, who has invested in the LBDA-owned premises since 2019, says he holds a 50-year lease on the property and that court records confirm he has sunk more than Sh235 million into developing what was a shell when he took it over. He was blunt in his message to the PS.

    “If he indeed wants to take over the property, let him come and we do a valuation and I sell it to him. Sending goons here, chanting ‘hatutaki Mkikuyu,’ will not drive me away. I am an investor, but I am not stupid,” Nyakera said, using language that raises the spectre of ethnic targeting in what he frames as a politically motivated campaign of intimidation.

    The ethnic dimension of the alleged chants adds a volatile layer to an already combustible standoff. Nyakera, who hails from Murang’a in Central Kenya, is a prominent critic of the Ruto administration and a key organiser for Gachagua’s DCP in Nairobi, where he is the party’s patron and an aspirant for the Nairobi governorship in the 2027 elections. He had previously served on state boards, including as chairman of KEMSA and KICC, before President Ruto revoked both appointments, moves Nyakera has attributed to his refusal to dissolve his political affiliations.

    Kenya Insights sought a response from Dr Omollo’s office and the Interior Ministry regarding the allegations but had not received a statement by the time of going to press.

    The LBDA communications office also did not respond to queries on whether it had authorised any action against Nyakera’s tenancy or whether any formal eviction proceedings had been initiated.

    If Nyakera’s account is accurate, it raises serious governance questions.

    The Interior PS not only oversees national security and law enforcement coordination across Kenya, but also sits on the board of the Communications Authority of Kenya.

    An allegation that a serving PS is directing a parastatal over which he previously held executive authority to act against a political opponent, and that security agencies are declining to respond to distress calls from that opponent, strikes at the heart of Kenya’s constitutional guarantees of equality before the law and protection of property rights.

    Political observers will note that the timing is not incidental. Nyakera has become one of the more vocal and visible faces of the DCP opposition project, lending financial credibility and policy weight to Gachagua’s platform. His public profile has grown sharply since his sacking from the KICC board in April 2025, which he described at the time as a badge of honour. That trajectory, from government insider to opposition irritant, appears to have attracted consequences that now extend beyond the political arena and into his business affairs.

    For now, Nyakera says he is not going anywhere. His message to those behind the raids was unambiguous: come with a valuation, not with goons.

    In a second statement published hours after the attack, Nyakera appeared to validate a recent Standard Media Group investigation into the security situation in Kisumu under PS Omollo’s watch, and issued a stark warning to the investor community.

    “Standard Media was right. PS Raymond Omollo has turned Kisumu into goons territory. The chants of ‘Hatutaki wakikuyu’ cut deep for me after all the investments I have made. Anyone from outside Nyanza planning to invest in Kisumu, hold off till the security situation here improves. It’s 2007 all over again.”

    The 2007 reference will send a chill through anyone who lived through Kenya’s post-election violence, which claimed over 1,300 lives and displaced more than 600,000 people, with Kisumu and the Lake Region among the worst-affected areas.

    Nyakera is not alleging that organised political violence of that scale is imminent, but his invocation of that period as a frame for the current security climate in Kisumu is a measure of how seriously he regards the threat he says he and his staff now face.

    His investor warning carries its own economic weight. Kisumu is the third-largest city in Kenya and has in recent years positioned itself as a regional hub for trade with Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo through the Northern Corridor and the LAPSSET development framework.

    An allegation by a prominent businessman that the county has become unsafe for non-Nyanza investors, made in the context of ethnically charged attacks and alleged state complicity, will not be ignored by the business community or by development finance institutions with exposure in the region.

    PS Omollo’s office, the Interior Ministry, LBDA and the Kisumu County Commissioner had not responded to media requests for comment by the time of publication.

  • THE DIRT: Dissecting Five Firms Requesting Mining Licenses in Kenya

    THE DIRT: Dissecting Five Firms Requesting Mining Licenses in Kenya

    The Ministry of Mining and Blue Economy recently published notice that Halal Mining Company Limited, Shanta Gold Kenya Limited, Royal DFC Limited, Rotor Systems Limited and Altona Mining Ltd have submitted formal applications for mining licenses. Cabinet Secretary Hassan Joho has granted the public 42 days to file objections.

    Kenya Insights’s investigations desk spent time dissecting each applicant. What we found should give the Cabinet Secretary serious pause.

    Kenya’s mining sector has historically been a stage for spectacular wealth extraction and equally spectacular betrayals of communities and the public purse.

    From the Goldenberg scandal of the 1990s, which bled the state of the equivalent of ten percent of GDP through fictitious gold exports, to the phantom Mrima Hill licensing scandal of 2013, which was so riddled with irregularities that the incoming Kenyatta administration cancelled every license issued in the transition period, this country has been here before.

    The five firms now standing at the gate are not all equal in their problems.

    But none of them arrives without questions that demand answers before a single license is signed.

    “Kenya has been here before. The five firms now standing at the gate are not all equal in their problems. But none arrives without questions that demand answers.”

    I. SHANTA GOLD KENYA LIMITED — BLOOD ON THE GROUND IN KAKAMEGA

    Of the five applicants, Shanta Gold Kenya Limited carries the most immediate and viscerally documented record.

    The British-owned firm, incorporated locally as Shanta Gold Kenya Limited in 2010 and listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market as the parent Shanta Gold, has become the most politically explosive name in Kenya’s extractive sector. Its application concerns gold mining rights in Kakamega County, a county the company has already turned into a war zone.

    The facts are on the record.

    On December 4, 2025, a National Environment Management Authority public participation forum in Ikolomani’s Emusali Primary School disintegrated into deadly violence.

    At least four people were killed when police opened fire on artisanal miners and residents opposing the company’s bid to acquire 337 acres of ancestral land to establish what it describes as an underground mining operation at the Isulu-Bushiangala site. Six others were hospitalised, including two police officers. Scores were arrested. Journalists covering the forum were assaulted and had their equipment seized.

    Two days after the December 4 killings, a mine shaft in the same district collapsed at Wangoto village, killing three more artisanal miners who had been scrambling for survival since Shanta’s arrival began displacing their livelihoods. These deaths did not occur in a vacuum.

    The artisanal mining community of Kakamega has consistently levelled a damning accusation against Shanta Gold: that the company has been conducting mining operations in Ikolomani under the legal pretence of conducting mere exploration. Artisanal miners who have worked the Isulu and Bushiangala sites for generations accused the firm of exploiting local resources for years while its exploration license technically barred it from commercial extraction. The accusation is not new. Similar allegations preceded Shanta’s operations in Siaya County, where the government issued a mining license in late 2025 over the objections of residents in seven villages. No member of affected communities attended the stakeholders’ workshop in Kisumu at which the government proclaimed the project would benefit locals.

    Shanta Gold’s own Environmental Impact Assessment, submitted to NEMA and prepared in partnership with South Africa’s Digby Wells Environmental, confirmed 1.27 million ounces of gold at the Isulu-Bushiangala site, placing its total value at an estimated Ksh 683 billion. The arithmetic of extraction that follows from these figures has detonated public fury. The national government stands to collect between Ksh 555 million and Ksh 607 million in annual royalties, plus Ksh 193.8 million through the Mineral Development Levy. Kakamega County would receive approximately Ksh 111 million from its 20 percent share. The 800 households being displaced from their ancestral land would collectively receive a community share of approximately Ksh 55 million per year, which breaks down to less than Ksh 7,000 per household annually from a Ksh 683 billion operation built on their land.

    Trans-Nzoia Governor George Natembeya and Kakamega Senator Dr. Boni Khalwale, speaking on behalf of leaders from five Western counties, were categorical: the proposed Ksh 3 billion compensation package for relocation is a grotesque insult when the gold beneath these villages is worth more than Ksh 680 billion. They accused the national government of enabling a foreign-driven land grab disguised as development. Their demands included the immediate suspension of Shanta’s operations and full accountability for the deaths on December 4.

    The Kenya Human Rights Commission added its institutional voice to the chorus of condemnation. In a formal press release on December 8, 2025, KHRC registered outrage at the killings, arbitrary arrests and procedural chaos at the December 4 forum, noting that what should have been a lawful civic process had degenerated into intimidation and impunity. The Commission found that artisanal miners had been systematically excluded from the consultations required by law under the Mining Act 2016, that no transition or inclusion plan had been presented to thousands of families whose sole livelihood depended on small-scale mining, and that the approval process itself was riddled with what it called flawed NEMA approvals and violations of the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent.

    Environmental research compounds the human rights indictment. Soil, sediment and water analysis from 19 artisanal and small-scale gold mining villages in Kakamega and Vihiga counties found arsenic concentrations at mining and ore processing sites reaching up to 7,937 times the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s safety standards for residential soils. Chromium, mercury and nickel concentrations in a majority of samples exceeded applicable safety thresholds. These are the villages into which Shanta Gold proposes to sink its billion-shilling operation.

    The governance pattern visible in Shanta’s Kenyan trajectory raises a legal question that the Mineral Rights Board must answer before any further license is granted: can a company whose exploration activities in Siaya have been formally challenged by community groups for procedural flaws, and whose December 2025 public participation forum in Kakamega produced four civilian deaths, lawfully be granted an additional mining license in the same political and social environment before those deaths have been accounted for?

    “800 households face displacement from Ksh 683 billion of gold. Their annual community share works out to less than Ksh 7,000 per family.”

    II. HALAL MINING COMPANY LIMITED — A NAME THAT DEMANDS SCRUTINY

    Halal Mining Company Limited presents a different category of concern. The company is seeking a mining license in Kilifi County to extract lead, zinc and barytes. On its surface, it is an application for a relatively conventional industrial mining operation. But the name itself, in the context of Kenya’s extractive history and the documented trajectory of similarly-named entities in the Horn of Africa, demands a level of due diligence that goes beyond routine bureaucratic processing.

    Nairobi Law Monthly’s research found no publicly available records establishing the ownership structure, directorship or corporate history of Halal Mining Company Limited in Kenya’s official registries or in the mining ministry’s publicly accessible license database. This opacity is in itself a compliance issue. The Mining Act 2016 requires prospective license holders to demonstrate technical and financial capacity, and the ministry’s due diligence framework is premised on the assumption that it knows who it is dealing with.

    The naming concern is not merely semantic. In March 2024, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on a network of entities across the Horn of Africa that raised and laundered funds for al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated terror organisation responsible for some of the worst attacks in East African history. Among the sanctioned Kenya-based entities was Haleel Commodities Limited, a business identified as a key node in al-Shabaab’s financial facilitation network. Though Haleel and Halal are distinct names and distinct entities, the pattern of naming in the region’s informal financial networks frequently involves deliberate proximity to established, credible-sounding names. The ministry owes the public a transparent disclosure of the full ownership and directorship of Halal Mining Company Limited, its source of capital and its previous commercial activities.

    Beyond the naming question, the mineral combination that Halal Mining proposes to extract in Kilifi requires careful environmental scrutiny. Lead and zinc mining carries significant contamination risks to groundwater and coastal ecosystems, particularly in Kilifi’s topography where rivers flow toward the Indian Ocean and where communities depend heavily on subsistence agriculture and fishing. Barytes extraction, while commercially low-risk from a toxicity standpoint, is frequently used in the oil and gas drilling sector as a weighting agent, raising the question of who the end buyer for Kilifi barytes would be and whether Kenya’s royalty calculations reflect the market value of what is being exported.

    The Kilifi region has already experienced the political fallout of mining ambitions that went badly for local communities. Marula Mining’s acquisition of the Kilifi manganese processing plant through its subsidiary Muchai Mining Kenya has proceeded under conditions of limited public transparency, while community expectations around employment and environmental management have frequently outpaced the delivery. Halal Mining Company Limited must demonstrate, before any license is granted, that its Kilifi application is not another instance of extractive opportunism cloaked in a thin corporate structure.

    III. ALTONA MINING LTD — A DELISTED SHELL CHASING COASTAL SAND

    Of all five applicants, Altona Mining Ltd presents perhaps the most structurally ambiguous profile. The company has submitted two applications seeking rights to mine heavy mineral sands in Kwale County. Kwale is a county whose extractive history is deeply instructive, and the timing of Altona’s applications, coming as the county’s residents continue to await royalty payments owed to them from a decade of titanium extraction under Base Titanium, makes it among the most sensitive license decisions the ministry will face.

    The Altona Mining referenced in Australian Securities Exchange records was an ASX-listed copper company, ticker code AOH, which focused its operations on a copper-gold project in Queensland, Australia. That company was acquired by Canadian copper producer Copper Mountain Mining Corporation in 2018, through a scheme of arrangement approved by courts on both the ASX and Toronto Stock Exchange. Following the acquisition, the Altona Mining entity on the ASX was delisted. The company that acquired Altona’s Cloncurry Project was subsequently itself absorbed, creating a chain of corporate succession that makes the lineage of any entity currently trading under the Altona Mining name in Kenya deserving of the most rigorous verification.

    Nairobi Law Monthly’s research could not confirm that the Altona Mining Ltd applying for Kwale heavy mineral sand mining licenses has any verified structural or operational connection to the Australian entity that was previously publicly traded. The ministry must establish and publicly disclose whether the Altona Mining Ltd appearing in the Gazette notice is a genuine mining enterprise with documented technical capacity and capital resources sufficient for heavy mineral extraction, or a shell incorporation.

    The Kwale heavy mineral context raises the stakes considerably. Base Titanium, which operated the Kwale Mineral Sands Project as Kenya’s largest mining project from 2013 until depletion of its ore reserve in December 2024, was absorbed by Arizona-based Energy Fuels Inc in October 2024. In 2023, its final substantial year of production, Base Titanium paid Ksh 2.9 billion in royalties, of which Kwale County was entitled to Ksh 1.2 billion under the 20 percent county allocation stipulated in the Mining Act. As of early 2026, Kwale County Governor Fatuma Achani has publicly stated that not a single shilling of those royalties has reached the county. The community’s 10 percent share, mandated by law, has similarly vanished into the national government’s account without disbursement.

    Governor Achani’s response to new mining applications in Kwale has been unambiguous. Speaking in the context of prospecting interest in Mrima Hill, she stated that she would not allow any new mining until the government could demonstrate that Kwale residents would actually benefit, referencing the billions in unpaid royalties as proof that formal legal frameworks are routinely ignored when it comes to revenue sharing. Altona Mining Ltd’s two applications land directly in this political environment. For the Ministry of Mining to grant Kwale heavy mineral sand licenses to an entity of uncertain provenance while the county waits for Ksh 1.2 billion in lawfully owed royalties from the previous operation would be an act of institutional contempt toward both the county government and the communities it serves.

    The Kwale coastal ecosystem adds a further dimension. Heavy mineral sand extraction involves hydraulic mining and wet concentrator processing that historically creates significant pressure on water sources, coastal vegetation and marine environments. Kwale’s communities have already lost agricultural land, fishing resources and cultural assets in the course of Base Titanium’s operations. Any entity proposing to commence a new extraction cycle in this environment must face the highest level of technical, financial and corporate scrutiny the ministry can apply.

    “Kwale County is still waiting for Ksh 1.2 billion in royalties from the last mining operator. Granting Altona a license before that debt is settled would be institutional contempt.”

    IV. ROTOR SYSTEMS LIMITED — GOLD IN SAMBURU, QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS

    Rotor Systems Limited is seeking gold mining rights in Samburu County. Of the five applicants, it is perhaps the most opaque. Nairobi Law Monthly’s exhaustive search of public records, corporate registries, mining databases and media archives produced no substantive information about the company’s ownership, directors, financial standing, technical capacity or previous mining or commercial activities. It does not appear in any publicly accessible list of licensed mining operations in Kenya. It does not appear in media coverage of Kenya’s extractive sector. It is, for practical purposes, invisible.

    This invisibility is itself a serious red flag. Any company seeking a gold mining license in Kenya is expected to demonstrate, under the Mining Act 2016, that it possesses the technical expertise, financial resources and institutional capacity to conduct mining operations responsibly, manage environmental impact and fulfil its royalty and reporting obligations. A company with no verifiable public footprint cannot satisfy that standard on the available evidence.

    The Samburu context sharpens the concern. Samburu County is home to one of Kenya’s most historically marginalised pastoralist communities, the Samburu people, who have experienced repeated cycles of state-facilitated displacement from their ancestral grazing lands. The Samburu have been subjected to what Cultural Survival and other international human rights organisations have documented as systematic land dispossession, often justified through development framings. The history of Laikipia, which borders Samburu and hosts overlapping Samburu pastoralist land claims, is a chronicle of eviction, violence and legal subordination of indigenous land rights to commercial and political interests.

    Kenya’s record on mineral rights in pastoralist and indigenous counties is troubling. Gold deposits have been identified in Samburu’s Nachola area. Copper, chromite and other minerals are documented across northern Kenya’s geological belt. The Ministry of Mining’s own critical minerals catalogue acknowledges that most of these areas remain at reconnaissance or early exploration stages, with limited systematic evaluation of economic viability. The rush to license before adequate assessment exposes communities to speculative operations that will extract and depart without adequate accountability.

    Rotor Systems Limited must, before any license decision is made, publicly disclose its directors, shareholders, source of capital, technical team, previous corporate activities in Kenya and elsewhere, and evidence of its capacity to meet the financial assurance requirements for environmental rehabilitation mandated by the Mining Act 2016. In the absence of that disclosure, the Ministry should decline the application on grounds of insufficient documentation.

    V. ROYAL DFC LIMITED — KITUI’S RARE METALS AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

    Royal DFC Limited is seeking a mining license in Kitui County to extract minerals classified under Group E: Base and Rare Metals. This is a broad and commercially significant category that includes niobium, tantalum, cobalt, lithium, manganese and related strategic minerals that have become the focus of intense global competition as demand for battery technology and defence manufacturing accelerates. Kitui County is known to host deposits of iron ore, coal, copper, amethyst and sapphire, and its geological profile makes it a legitimate target for base and rare metal exploration.

    Like Rotor Systems Limited, Royal DFC Limited has left no visible trace in the public record. Nairobi Law Monthly found no company by that name in publicly accessible Kenyan corporate or mining license databases, no media coverage, no industry association membership and no prior licensing history. Its application for what is potentially a strategically important category of minerals in a politically sensitive county arrives without a public identity.

    The rare metals dimension places Royal DFC’s application in a geopolitical context the Ministry of Mining cannot afford to treat lightly. Kenya’s Critical Minerals Catalogue, released in August 2024, explicitly identifies Kitui as among the counties with the highest mineral wealth prospects. The global scramble for rare earth elements and critical minerals has seen Kenya targeted by interests from the United States, China, Europe and the Gulf states, all seeking to secure supply chains for the energy transition and advanced manufacturing. In this environment, opaque license applications for rare metal extraction in high-value counties represent a potential national security concern, not merely a regulatory compliance issue.

    The Ministry of Mining must conduct a full beneficial ownership disclosure process for Royal DFC Limited before this application is processed. The source of the company’s capital, the nationality of its ultimate beneficial owners and the identity of any foreign partners or investors must be placed on the public record. Kenya has no sovereign wealth fund stake, no mandatory state equity participation requirement and no publicly disclosed critical minerals strategy that would ensure the national interest is protected in any licensing arrangement. Until those gaps are addressed, granting a rare metals license to an entity with no public profile is a gamble with Kenya’s long-term strategic mineral wealth.

    VI. THE SYSTEMIC ROT: WHAT THESE FIVE APPLICATIONS REVEAL

    Taken individually, each of these five applications presents specific concerns that the Ministry of Mining and the 42-day public objection window should be used to address. Taken together, they reveal something more troubling: a licensing system that consistently serves the interests of capital over community, obscures corporate identity behind bureaucratic form-filling and deploys the language of development to justify extraction that leaves counties poorer and communities displaced.

    The figures are stark. Kenya’s total mineral production value stood at Ksh 25.5 billion in the most recent official reporting period. Gold accounted for Ksh 3 billion. Base minerals added Ksh 801 million. Against the Ksh 683 billion sitting beneath Ikolomani’s fields alone, the scale of what Kenya is giving away is extraordinary. The Goldenberg scandal of the 1990s, which cost the state between Ksh 158 billion and the equivalent of Ksh 3.4 trillion in today’s money depending on the estimate used, was a lesson about what happens when licensing is captured by political and commercial interests that have no accountability to the communities above whose land extraction occurs.

    The pattern has not broken. Kwale County is still owed Ksh 1.2 billion in royalties from an operation that closed more than a year ago. Affected residents of Tiomin’s original titanium operations in Kwale were displaced from their land in 2007 and have spent seventeen years seeking adequate compensation. The Ramula and Mwibona communities in Siaya, where Shanta Gold has already been granted a license, conducted a community survey showing that most households had not reviewed the Environmental Impact Assessment document they were supposedly consulted on. The EIA for Kakamega was prepared in Kiswahili, which a significant proportion of the affected Luhya-speaking community could not read.

    Mining Cabinet Secretary Hassan Joho is not without options. The 42-day objection window is not a formality designed to absorb public comment before a predetermined outcome. It is, in law and in constitutional principle, a genuine accountability mechanism. The Kenya Human Rights Commission has already placed its formal objection to Shanta Gold’s Kakamega application on the public record. Civil society organisations, county governments, artisanal mining associations and individual residents in all five affected counties have both the right and the legal standing to submit objections that the ministry is constitutionally obligated to consider.

    What is required, before any of these five licenses is granted, is a transparent public hearing process that discloses the full beneficial ownership of every applicant, publishes their financial and technical capacity documentation, mandates community impact assessments in accessible languages, establishes binding royalty disbursement mechanisms with independent oversight, and holds any company with a documented record of community harm to the highest possible standard of justification.

    “The 42-day objection window is not a formality. It is a constitutional accountability mechanism. Communities, counties and civil society have every right to use it.”

    Five firms. Five counties. Five applications that between them could reshape Kenya’s mineral landscape for decades. The question is not whether mining should happen. The question is whether it can happen in a Kenya where the law means what it says, where communities own what the Constitution says they own, and where no company gets to build its profits on the graves of the Kenyans who had the misfortune to live above what their country calls wealth.

    NOTE

    This investigation relied on government gazette notices, court records, parliamentary transcripts, environmental impact assessments, official corporate registries, US Treasury OFAC records, documented media reporting from accredited outlets, and statements by county governments, civil society organisations and human rights bodies. All claims attributed to named parties are drawn from publicly available documents and verified statements. Readers, affected communities, county governments and members of civil society are encouraged to utilise the 42-day objection mechanism by submitting formal objections to: The Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Mining, Blue Economy and Maritime Affairs, Works Building, Ngong Road, P.O. Box 30009-00100 Nairobi, or by email to [email protected]. You can also write a confidential report to us.

  • Sh50 Billion Vanished: Audit Exposes Massive Looting Inside Kenya’s SHA

    Sh50 Billion Vanished: Audit Exposes Massive Looting Inside Kenya’s SHA

    THE ANATOMY OF A HEIST

    In the year ending June 2025, a single patient underwent open heart surgery four times in one day. All four claims were paid. In the same period, at least one woman gave birth ten times within a single calendar year. Kenya’s public health insurer paid for every delivery. These are not isolated clerical errors. They are the fingerprints of an organised plunder conducted at scale inside the Social Health Insurance Fund, the flagship health financing vehicle of President William Ruto’s Universal Health Coverage programme.

    The Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu, whose office has a constitutional mandate to scrutinise the use of public funds, has now produced what amounts to the most damning forensic catalogue of the Social Health Authority’s financial conduct since its inception.

    The report, covering the financial year 2024/25, flags a total of Sh49.29 billion in irregular, unsupported, or fraudulent transactions, a figure that obliterates earlier official estimates and reframes the SHA scandal as one of the most audacious raids on public resources in Kenya’s post-independence history.

    The fund only raised Sh57.7 billion in total contributions during the entire year. The queried amount is more than 85 percent of everything SHIF collected. It is a figure that should shock even the most jaded observer of Kenyan public finance.

    Sh26.8 billion paid without a single supporting document. That is 29.3 per cent of all SHIF payments in one year.

    THE NUMBERS THAT CONVICT

    The Auditor-General’s report itemises the irregularities with forensic precision. At the top of the register, dwarfing every other line item, sits Sh26.84 billion described simply as unsupported claims: payments made by SHIF to health facilities without any records to confirm that the services claimed were ever rendered to any patient. This single category represents 29.3 percent of every shilling SHIF disbursed during the year.

    Beyond the unsupported payments, a further Sh7.32 billion was paid to 1,091 health facilities for services not authorised under the SHIF benefit framework.

    Facilities that had not even been contracted by SHA at all received Sh1.57 billion. Another Sh4.78 billion was disbursed using service codes that have not been gazetted, a breach that strips any payment of its legal basis and opens the fund to virtually unlimited manipulation.

    Some 50,045 claims had multiple service codes consolidated into single entries, generating Sh1.45 billion in overpayments.

    Then there are the transfers that have simply disappeared. SHIF reported sending Sh7.3 billion to SHA, but SHA says it received only Sh3.9 billion.

    The difference of Sh3.37 billion is untraced. More alarming still, Sh1.34 billion was transferred from SHIF into the bank account of the defunct National Hospital Insurance Fund between January and June 2025.

    NHIF ceased to exist in law on the day SHA was established. There is no explanation on record for what the money was for or where it went.

    BILLIONS QUERIED BY THE AUDITOR-GENERAL IN SHIF OPERATIONS (FY 2024/25)

    CATEGORY OF FRAUD/IRREGULARITY

    AMOUNT (KSH)

    Unsupported Claims

    Sh26.84 billion

    Claims for Unauthorised Medical Services

    Sh7.32 billion

    Untraced SHIF-to-SHA Transfer

    Sh3.37 billion

    Claims Using Unapproved Service Codes

    Sh4.78 billion

    Claims by Non-Contracted Facilities

    Sh1.57 billion

    Unsupported Payables

    Sh1.67 billion

    Overpayments via Consolidated Codes

    Sh1.45 billion

    Irregular SHIF-to-NHIF Transfer

    Sh1.34 billion

    Unapproved/Repeat Surgical Cases

    Sh445 million

    Multiple Child Delivery Claims

    Sh148 million

    Manual Claims

    Sh366 million

    Cash Paid in Excess of Amount Claimed

    Sh2.4 million

    TOTAL QUERIED

    Sh49.29 billion

    Source: Auditor-General’s Report, Financial Year Ending June 2025

    THE SURGICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES

    The report’s most viscerally scandalous findings concern the surgical claims. Open heart surgery is, under SHIF’s own operational rules, limited to one procedure per patient per year.

    The clinical basis for this is self-evident: the procedure involves stopping the heart, placing the patient on a bypass machine, and exposing the chest cavity under general anaesthesia. Recovery spans months. The idea that any patient could undergo the procedure four times in a single day is not merely implausible. It is physiologically impossible.

    Yet that is what the claims records show. In total, there were 3,235 instances of unapproved or repeat surgical cases during the year, at a total approved payment of Sh445.4 million. The total amount originally claimed for these phantom repeat procedures was Sh463.8 million. The claims were processed and paid. Nobody stopped them.

    The repeat birth claims tell a similar story of systematic abuse. SHIF’s auditors identified 6,392 instances where the same patient record showed multiple deliveries within a single year. One patient’s record showed ten deliveries.

    The total claimed amount for these medically impossible repeat interventions was Sh161.3 million, of which Sh148.5 million was approved and paid. Gathungu’s report observes that the pattern exposes fraud at SHIF, possible data integrity issues or system abuse, all of which result in financial loss and undermine the credibility of the claims approval process.

    THE SYSTEM BUILT TO FAIL

    How did any of this pass through a digital claims system backed by a Sh104.8 billion technology contract? That question goes to the heart of the second scandal nested inside the first. The benefits payment system at SHIF is operated by a private consortium that includes Safaricom PLC as lead bidder, alongside Apeiro Limited and Konvergenz Network Solutions Limited.

    The contract was awarded without competitive bidding, with no defined scope of work, and critically, ownership of the system was left with the contractor consortium rather than SHA. The government does not own the platform through which its citizens’ health insurance premiums are being processed.

    The Auditor-General is scathing on this point. Her report states that the system was deployed before any comprehensive user requirement testing was conducted, meaning it was rolled out without SHA ever fully verifying that it met the fund’s operational needs.

    She further flags the absence of IT governance structures, standard operating procedures, service level agreements with the operating consortium, and IT compliance protocols. In plain terms: a Sh104.8 billion system was handed to a private consortium, deployed without testing, and operated without any enforceable accountability framework.

    COTU Secretary-General Francis Atwoli, who sits on the SHA board, made a revelation that has largely been absorbed without adequate outrage: the SHA does not control the IT systems used to verify claims.

    The authority that is responsible for disbursing billions of shillings in public funds cannot independently audit, interrogate, or override the technology infrastructure through which those payments flow.

    The government does not own the platform through which citizens’ health insurance premiums are processed.

    THE REGULATORY INSIDE JOB

    The Auditor-General’s findings on the fraud’s systemic architecture are now being corroborated by criminal prosecutions.

    In late February 2026, Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga approved charges against eight hospital owners and one regulatory official following investigations by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations covering the period between January 28 and February 24, 2026.

    The official is Harun Liluma, a senior employee of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council, the state body responsible for licensing health facilities.

    Liluma faces over 40 counts spanning conspiracy to defraud, unauthorised access to KMPDC’s computer systems, abuse of office, and computer fraud under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act.

    He is accused of using his access to KMPDC’s registration systems to fraudulently facilitate the licensing of eight medical facilities, none of which met statutory requirements, so that they could receive payments from SHA.

    The eight facilities named in the charges include Danaba Care Hospital, Kamishawa Medical Centre, Kaafi Nursing Home, Mama Nerbeel Nursing Home, Alati Nursing Home, Julun Nursing Home, Adfaal Kids Care Medical Centre, and Dimtu Nursing Home Limited.

    In one documented case, a facility was approved by the Ministry of Health before it was even incorporated as a legal entity. It was registered with KMPDC before it existed on paper, began receiving SHIF payments, and only later appeared in the company registry.

    Critics, including the Rural and Urban Private Hospitals Association of Kenya, have posed the structural question that the prosecution of eight individuals does not answer: how did unlicensed facilities access the SHA payment system if the same facilities must be accredited by KMPDC before being empanelled by SHA? Whether the KMPDC registry communicates with the SHA registry at all remains, publicly, unanswered.

    A SYSTEM BLEEDING DRY

    The audit’s findings on SHIF’s financial sustainability are as alarming as the fraud disclosures. The fund collected Sh57.7 billion in contributions during the year but spent Sh96.1 billion on claims and operations, leaving it operating in a Sh38.3 billion deficit.

    The SHA management’s own figures show that benefits paid out amounted to 158 percent of contributions collected. The fund is paying out one and a half times what it is taking in.

    The structural problem is compounded by the contribution base. Formal sector workers raised Sh51.99 billion, representing 90 percent of everything SHIF collected, from an informal sector that comprises the overwhelming majority of the population.

    Of 27 million registered SHA members, 20.7 million in the informal sector contributed nothing at all during the year. The fund that was sold to Kenyans as Universal Health Coverage is in practice a levy on the employed few, with those contributions now being systematically looted before reaching the patients who need them.

    St Mary’s Hospital in Mumias is on the edge of closure because SHA has not paid its admitted debt of Sh180 million. Paid-up contributors across the country have had legitimate claims rejected.

    Meanwhile, a hospital that does not legally exist can be registered, empanelled, and paid Sh12.2 million in a single month. The contrast is not incidental. It is the operational logic of the fraud.

    ACCOUNTABILITY DEFERRED

    Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale and SHA Chief Executive Officer Dr Mercy Mwangangi did not respond to the Nation’s inquiries on the day the Auditor-General’s findings were published. For months, neither official has disclosed the full quantum of losses, despite having forwarded thousands of files to the DCI for review.

    Duale had previously stated that SHA lost approximately Sh11 billion to fraud, but subsequently walked back that figure, characterising it as claims rejected before payment was made rather than money actually lost.

    Mwangangi confirmed that the rejected claims represented 12.1 percent of total claims processed, and that the irregularities were escalated to investigative agencies.

    Both positions are now rendered untenable by the Auditor-General’s report. The Sh26.8 billion in unsupported payments alone exceeds the Sh11 billion figure by a factor of two and a half. The question is no longer whether fraud occurred. The question is why the official narrative has been so systematically narrow.

    Former Chief Justice David Maraga captured the public mood in August 2025 when he accused state officials of presiding over systemic failures that allowed billions of taxpayer funds to be siphoned to ghost hospitals while ordinary Kenyans continued to suffer.

    He called for an independent forensic audit of all SHA funds, a demand that has gained new urgency with the publication of Gathungu’s findings. His demands remain unmet.

    At the KAMMP Iftar dinner in Nairobi on March 8, 2026, CS Duale confirmed that multiple facilities had been shut down and cases forwarded to the ODPP for prosecution.

    He welcomed a statement by the Kenya Association of Muslim Medical Professionals condemning fraud as haram and as a crime under law. He said the Ministry was committed to safeguarding SHA’s integrity. He did not address the Sh49.29 billion.

    The charges approved by the DPP in February 2026 are a beginning, not a reckoning. Fewer than 40 prosecution recommendations have emerged from the 1,188 investigation files that DCI received from SHA in September 2025.

    The facilities now in the dock received a combined total of roughly Sh22 million in irregular payments. Against the backdrop of Sh49.29 billion in queried transactions, the legal process has so far addressed less than 0.05 percent of the financial exposure.

    What the DPP’s action has confirmed, however, is the structure of the conspiracy.

    It runs from hospital ownership through facility registration at KMPDC, through the SHA empanelment process, through a payment system that the government does not own, and out through transfers that disappear into accounts of institutions that no longer legally exist. Every layer of institutional oversight failed, and in at least one case, a regulator is accused of actively facilitating the fraud.

    The Social Health Insurance Act, 2023, was passed as the legal architecture for a new era of public health financing in Kenya. Section 2(1) and Section 6 of its First Schedule are now cited in the Auditor-General’s report as provisions violated by the transfer of Sh1.34 billion to the defunct NHIF.

    The law was written. The regulations were gazetted. The technology was procured. The fund was capitalised. And then, while the architecture was being admired, Sh50 billion went missing.

    The case against Harun Liluma and the eight facility owners is set for mention on March 12, 2026 at Milimani Law Courts.

  • CS Kabogo Pushes for Stronger TikTok Regulation Ahead of Next Elections

    CS Kabogo Pushes for Stronger TikTok Regulation Ahead of Next Elections

    NAIROBI, Kenya Mar 9 – The Country is pushing for stronger regulation and oversight of TikTok as the government moves to safeguard the digital space ahead of the next electoral cycle, Information, Communications and the Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo has said.

    Kabogo said the government is engaging the global social media platform to strengthen content moderation, improve age-verification mechanisms and enhance tools to detect misinformation that could undermine election integrity.

    The Cabinet Secretary spoke after holding talks with TikTok executives ahead of the TikTok Safer Internet Summit 2026 scheduled to take place in Nairobi.

    During the meeting, Kabogo emphasised that while Kenya welcomes innovation and the growth of digital platforms, technology companies must take greater responsibility for the safety of their users.

    “With over 17M users in Kenya, TikTok is a key pillar of our Creative Economy. I emphasized that while we welcome innovation, digital safety is a shared responsibility. We are strengthening content moderation and age-verification to protect our children and vulnerable groups,”he said.

    However, the CS warned that the rapid growth of social media also presents risks, particularly during politically sensitive periods such as elections.

    Kabogo said the government had sought assurances from TikTok on the effectiveness of its systems to detect and curb coordinated disinformation campaigns, warning that unchecked misinformation could threaten democratic processes.

    “I sought clear assurances on TikTok’s tools to detect misinformation and prevent coordinated disinformation campaigns. It is vital that global platforms align with Kenya’s Data Protection Act and our evolving regulatory frameworks,”CS Kabogo noted.

    He stressed that global platforms operating in Kenya must comply with the country’s legal and regulatory framework, including the Data Protection Act, as authorities continue to refine digital governance policies.

    The government is also pushing the company to expand its operational footprint in the country to better support its activities across Africa.

    Kabogo challenged the platform to invest more resources in moderating content in local languages, noting that many harmful or misleading posts often evade detection because automated systems are primarily designed for major international languages.

    The CS said deeper collaboration between the government and technology companies will be key to building a digital ecosystem that balances innovation, economic opportunity and public safety.

    The ICT Cabinet Secretary emphasized that the country is positioning itself as a regional leader in digital transformation and is keen to ensure that the growth of its online platforms is anchored in trust, accountability and responsible use of technology.

    “ I’ve challenged TikTok to establish a stronger operational presence in Kenya to support African operations and invest in moderation for local languages. Together, we are building a digital future anchored in innovation, trust, and safety,”CS Kabogo expressed.

  • ‪TikToker ‘Billionaire Son’ Arrested After Filming Himself Tearing Sh100 Bank Notes

    ‪TikToker ‘Billionaire Son’ Arrested After Filming Himself Tearing Sh100 Bank Notes

    Nairobi, March 10, 2026 — Kenyan authorities have arrested TikTok creator Maximilian Motara, popularly known as “Billionaire Son,” after he filmed himself tearing Sh100 banknotes and posted the video online.

    The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) confirmed that Motara is in custody and awaiting arraignment on charges related to the defacement of Kenyan currency.

    The arrest follows a video circulated on TikTok showing Motara seated in a white sleeveless shirt as he tears several pink Sh100 notes while looking directly at the camera. In the clip, he rips the banknotes into pieces and discards them.

    According to the DCI’s Banking Fraud Investigations Unit, Motara was wanted for allegedly mutilating Kenyan currency notes and flaunting the act on TikTok.

    Kenyan law prohibits the deliberate destruction or defacement of currency. Section 367A of the Penal Code states that any person who wilfully and without lawful authority defaces, tears, cuts or otherwise mutilates a currency note commits an offence punishable by imprisonment for up to three months, a fine of up to Sh2,000, or both.

    The video triggered debate online, with some Kenyans condemning the act as irresponsible, while others questioned why authorities were pursuing what they described as a minor offence.

    Authorities have not yet disclosed when Motara will appear in court.

  • Waweru’s Bank Pockets Sh1.16 Billion from KPC IPO While Ordinary Kenyans Fled the Sale

    Waweru’s Bank Pockets Sh1.16 Billion from KPC IPO While Ordinary Kenyans Fled the Sale

    KPC IPO: The Fee Breakdown

    Faida Investment Bank success fee: Sh1.06bn | Fixed advisory fee: Sh98.6mn | Placement fees (22 brokers, capped at 1.5%): Up to Sh1.59bn shared | Total government advisory spend (excl. success fee): ~Sh3bn | KPC listing date: March 9, 2026 | IPO subscription rate: 105.7% | Retail take-up: 19% of allocation | Foreign take-up: 0.15% of allocation | Oil marketers take-up: 0.14% of allocation


    The cheque that Faida Investment Bank is set to collect from the Kenya Pipeline Company IPO dwarfs anything the firm has earned in its 31-year history. A success fee of Sh1.06 billion, a fixed advisory retainer of Sh98.6 million, and a share of the placement fees shared among 22 brokers — the cumulative payout to the bank linked to former Dagoretti South MP Dennis Waweru could surpass Sh1.16 billion.

    To put that figure in context: in the year ended December 2024, Faida’s total net profit was a meagre Sh216,107. The KPC fee is not just a windfall. It is a structural transformation of the bank’s balance sheet.

    The success fee is legally triggered and commercially clean. The information memorandum for the Sh106.3 billion IPO set the payment at one percent of gross proceeds plus 16 percent VAT upon oversubscription of the offer.

    The IPO closed at a 105.7 percent subscription rate, raising Sh112 billion, and under the terms of the mandate, Faida earned every shilling of the bonus. Nobody is disputing the contractual arithmetic. The question is whether the market outcome that triggered the payout reflects genuine investor confidence — or something more complicated.

    “The IPO received a 105.7 percent subscription rate. But retail Kenyans bought just 19 percent of their allocation. Foreign investors bought less than 0.2 percent of theirs.”

    The anatomy of the IPO is unsparing. Local retail investors, whom President William Ruto publicly urged to buy shares for as little as Sh200, purchased stock worth Sh4.1 billion against their allocation of Sh21.2 billion — a take-up rate of roughly 19 percent.

    Foreign investors, allocated an identical pool of Sh21.2 billion, spent a negligible Sh32.7 million, acquiring a rounding-error stake of 0.02 percent of the company. Oil marketing companies — the most natural strategic buyers in the entire transaction, the firms that feed fuel through KPC’s pipeline daily — took up shares worth Sh22.9 million against a Sh15.9 billion allocation, a participation rate of 0.14 percent. Major players including Vivo Energy, Rubis, and TotalEnergies abstained altogether.

    Even KPC’s own employees, given a 5 percent reserved pool worth Sh5.3 billion, bought shares worth Sh99.1 million — an average of approximately Sh148,000 per person among the 670 staff reportedly participating.

    Workers with the most intimate knowledge of a company’s operational realities — a 42 percent underspend on capital budget last year, an ongoing Sh3 billion environmental lawsuit over pipeline leaks — chose caution above enthusiasm.

    The IPO was rescued in its final stretch by a concentration of buyers whose participation raises questions that regulators and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee cannot afford to ignore.

    Local institutional investors — led by the National Social Security Fund and the Public Service Superannuation Fund — absorbed Sh67 billion in shares, oversubscribing their segment by 216 percent while every other investor category fell dramatically short.

    Reporting circulated that the government leaned on both funds to ensure the offer crossed its minimum threshold of Sh53.1 billion. Both institutions deny this characterisation. What is not in dispute is the pattern: the entities closest to the state stepped in when the market would not.

    “Uganda secured veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy, share dilution, and the appointment of the CEO — structural control over a company handling 80 percent of Kenya’s petroleum supply.”

    The transaction’s single decisive actor, however, was Uganda’s state-owned Uganda National Oil Company, which acquired shares worth Sh34.7 billion — far exceeding its East African Community allocation of Sh21.2 billion — and secured a 20.15 percent stake in KPC. As part of a legally binding side letter negotiated ahead of the IPO, Uganda obtained veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy changes, material amendments to the business plan, share dilution, governance restructuring, and the appointment of the company’s chief executive officer. Uganda also gained the right to appoint two directors to the nine-member KPC board.

    Kenya financed this outcome by surrendering strategic governance rights over an asset that handles more than 80 percent of the country’s petroleum supply.

    Whether this amounts to sound infrastructure policy or geopolitical improvisation by a government desperate to close a struggling deal remains a question Nairobi has not answered publicly.

    THE WAWERU CONNECTION

    Dennis Gichahi Waweru is not a household name to most Kenyans who do not follow the capital markets. To those who do, he is a fixture of Kenya’s investment banking establishment. A Partner and Director at Faida Investment Bank, he served as the Member of Parliament for Dagoretti South from 2013 to 2017 before losing the seat to John Kiarie.

    He holds an MBA in Strategic Management from Moi University and lists over 22 years of experience as an investment banker. He also serves as Chairman of the Kenya Investment Authority — the government investment promotion body operating under the Ministry of Investments, Trade and Industry — a position he has held across successive administrations.

    That last detail deserves pause. Waweru chairs a state institution under the current Ruto government. His bank simultaneously won the mandate to lead the most significant capital markets transaction of the Kenya Kwanza administration — a transaction the President personally championed, repeatedly described as a transparency benchmark, and staked political capital on.

    Waweru was initially associated with the Kenyatta political orbit, serving as BBI Co-chair and a visible Jubilee-aligned figure. His retention as KenInvest chairman under Ruto, and the award of the KPC mandate to Faida, indicates that his utility to the state has survived the change of administration.

    Faida won the KPC mandate through a competitive tender process floated by the Privatisation Commission in October 2024, inviting bids for lead transaction advisory services. The firm was awarded the letter of appointment and named lead transaction adviser.

    That the process was formally competitive is on record. That Faida’s principal shareholder simultaneously chairs a government investment promotion agency and that the mandate was for the most politically sensitive transaction of the year — these are facts that, in a stronger accountability environment, would trigger public disclosure and parliamentary scrutiny of conflict-of-interest frameworks.

    “Faida reported a net profit of Sh216,107 in 2024. The KPC success fee alone is worth more than 4,800 times that annual profit figure.”

    The firm itself is a legitimate market participant of standing. In 2025, Faida ranked third in value of equities trades handled at the NSE with Sh35.97 billion, commanding a 12.36 percent market share. In the bonds market, it held a 7.55 percent share with Sh409.34 billion in combined trades.

    Its team lead for the KPC transaction, Dr Belgrad Kenne, chaired the allocation committee that determined share apportionment across investor categories. The firm held at least four roadshows with oil marketing companies to court their participation — meetings that ultimately yielded 0.14 percent uptake. Whether the failure of that effort reflects inadequate marketing, an unwinnable valuation argument, or simply a price that sophisticated commercial actors refused to accept at scale, is the central question about whether Faida earned its bonus in any meaningful market sense.

    A PRICE THE MARKET REFUSED

    Faida itself endorsed the Sh9 per share offer price as lead transaction adviser — the same Sh9 that Dyer and Blair, the lead sponsoring broker, also validated.

    Against them stood a range of independent valuations that told a different story.

    Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda priced KPC shares at Sh4.61, warning of an embedded premium that would force post-listing repricing. Sterling Capital placed intrinsic value at Sh3.70. Some independent online analysts went lower still. The government’s pricing implied a price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 22 times based on KPC’s earnings per share of Sh0.4122 for the year to June 2025.

    Kenya Power, for context, trades at 1.2 times earnings. KenGen at 4 times. Safaricom — Kenya’s most profitable and liquid listed company — at 8 to 9 times.

    The government priced a state monopoly carrying a corruption investigation, unresolved pipeline leaks, and a chronic capital budget underspend as though it were a high-growth technology firm. It then appointed a lead adviser financially incentivised by a one percent success fee to validate and defend that pricing.

    The incentive structure is internally consistent: the higher the price at which the deal closes, the larger the fee. Whether it is compatible with independent adviser duty is a question the Capital Markets Authority has not yet addressed publicly.

    Standard Investment Bank’s senior research associate Wesley Manambo issued a buy recommendation for the IPO but restricted it explicitly to investors with a long time horizon, warning of limited attraction for shorter-term participants.

    With the KPC listing commencing today, March 9, and institutional holders expected to maintain positions indefinitely, secondary market liquidity is widely expected to be thin in the opening weeks. Investors who bought for income have accepted a dividend payout ratio cut from 94.5 percent to 50 percent to fund capital expenditure. Investors who bought for growth bought at a price independent analysts placed well above intrinsic value.

    WHERE THE MONEY GOES

    President William Ruto.
    President William Ruto.

    Of the Sh112 billion raised, none returns to KPC. All proceeds flow to the National Infrastructure Fund as seed capital for President Ruto’s infrastructure investment programme.

    The Fund’s legal standing is currently before the High Court, which is examining whether its establishment bypassed constitutional safeguards. The National Infrastructure Fund Bill was still before the National Assembly this week.

    Investors have purchased shares in a company whose proceeds flow into a fund whose constitutionality is under active judicial scrutiny — a structural risk that was not foregrounded in government communications ahead of the IPO.

    Total government expenditure on the transaction, excluding Faida’s conditional success fee, reaches approximately Sh3 billion.

    That figure covers legal advisers TripleOKLaw Advocates and G&A Advocates LLP at Sh31.9 million, reporting accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers at Sh13.45 million, public relations firm Apex Porter Novelli at Sh42.13 million, advertising agency Belva Digital at Sh12.26 million, Image Registrars for data processing and registrar services at Sh70.35 million, and the three receiving banks collectively at Sh16.35 million.

    The CMA collected Sh30 million in approval fees and the NSE Sh1.5 million in listing fees. Against all of that combined spend, the single fee to Faida — Sh1.16 billion — exceeds the entire remainder of the advisory bill.

    The 22 stockbrokers and investment banks enlisted to handle the sale will share a maximum of Sh1.59 billion in placement fees capped at 1.5 percent of the offer size. Faida will participate in that pool as well, collecting additional millions beyond its advisory retainer and success fee depending on the volume of shares it processed directly.

    DID FAIDA EARN IT?

    The contractual answer is yes. The fee was set in advance, the terms were disclosed in the information memorandum, the subscription threshold was met, and the oversubscription is real by the numbers. In that narrow commercial sense, Faida performed exactly what the mandate required. The more probing question is whether the mandate itself was designed for success — or for accountability.

    A lead transaction adviser that endorses the government’s pricing, markets a product that retail, foreign, and strategic investors overwhelmingly reject, and then collects a nine-figure success fee because pension funds controlled by the same government stepped in to rescue the deal, has technically earned its fee while arguably demonstrating a market failure the fee structure was designed to obscure. The success fee mechanism rewards closure, not quality of demand. It rewards the headline subscription rate, not the distribution of ownership or the price integrity of the transaction.

    The government raised its Sh106.3 billion. The numbers cleared the threshold. Faida triggered its bonus. But the retail Kenyan who was invited to buy shares for Sh200 owns 2.56 percent of the company.

    A foreign sovereign with veto rights over its CEO appointment owns 20.15 percent. State-adjacent pension funds — whose fiduciary obligations to workers are now tied to post-listing price discovery against an entry point that independent analysts placed below fair value — own the largest single block.

    The democratisation of national assets that the government promised produced a company that ordinary Kenyans fled, institutions were pressured to rescue, and a neighbour was rewarded with governance control for buying in. In that context, the Sh1.16 billion cheque heading to Waweru’s bank is technically deserved and analytically remarkable — a reward for presiding over a transaction that the free market declined to validate.

  • The Man With The Golden Pen: How NLC’s Joel Ombati Is Accused Of Masterminding Kenya’s Biggest Infrastructure Land Heist

    The Man With The Golden Pen: How NLC’s Joel Ombati Is Accused Of Masterminding Kenya’s Biggest Infrastructure Land Heist

    Joel Ombati Nyamweya is not a man who appears often in newspaper columns. He prefers the quiet corridors of Ardhi House, the hushed back rooms of county land offices, and the comfortable distance between his official title and the billions his directorate controls.

    But sources inside the National Land Commission are talking, and what they describe is a pattern of conduct that has turned one of Kenya’s most powerful bureaucratic posts into what they call a ‘goldmine wrapped in a government gazette.’

    Ombati is the Director of Valuation and Taxation at the NLC, the man who holds the pen over the single most consequential number in every compulsory land acquisition exercise in Kenya: the price.

    It is a position that, in the hands of a venal operator, is worth more than any piece of land in the country. And sources within the commission, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the personal risks involved, say Ombati arrived in that seat not through merit but through a transaction.

    ‘He paid for that job,’ said one official who has worked at NLC for more than a decade. ‘Everyone at the commission knows it. He came in and the people he bribed were powerful enough that nothing was going to stop him getting the directorship.’

    Kenya Insights could not independently verify the exact nature or amount of any alleged payment, and Ombati did not respond to detailed questions put to him before publication.

    ‘He paid for that job. Everyone at the commission knows it. He came in and the people he bribed were powerful enough that nothing was going to stop him getting the directorship.’

    What is not in dispute is the timing of his arrival. Ombati assumed his position last year in circumstances that raised eyebrows among career valuers and administrators who had expected the role to go to officers with more seniority and institutional experience.

    His appointment coincided precisely with the moment that Kenya’s two most expensive infrastructure projects in decades were entering the most financially sensitive phase of implementation: the compulsory land acquisition stage.

    TWO PROJECTS. ONE MAN. BILLIONS ON THE TABLE.

    The Rironi-Mau Summit highway, a 175-kilometre dualling of the A8 corridor connecting Nairobi to Nakuru and beyond, is estimated to cost between Sh170 billion and Sh200 billion under a public-private partnership with Chinese conglomerate China Road and Bridge Corporation and the National Social Security Fund.

    President Ruto personally launched the project at Kamandura, Kiambu County, on November 28, 2025, calling it ‘a gateway to prosperity, unity and transformation.’ Government insiders say the President wants it done by June 2027, an immovable political deadline.

    Running parallel is the even more ambitious SGR Phase 2B extension from Naivasha to Kisumu: 264 kilometres of rail traversing Narok, Bomet, Kericho, Nyamira and Kisumu counties, featuring 79 bridges, eight tunnels, 376 culverts and 26 stations.

    The groundbreaking, to be led by President Ruto, is set for March 20, 2026. The combined Naivasha-Kisumu-Malaba corridor is estimated at five billion US dollars. The government has committed Sh47.55 billion from the national treasury for land acquisition alone.

    Both mega-projects require NLC to compulsorily acquire land on behalf of the acquiring bodies: the Kenya National Highways Authority for the road, and Kenya Railways Corporation for the SGR.

    The commission is in the process of acquiring more than 5,000 acres across five counties for the railway corridor alone. Every single one of those acres must be valued. Every single valuation passes through Ombati’s directorate.

    According to multiple sources, those valuations are not being driven by prevailing market rates. They are being driven by a cartel.

    THE ARCHITECTURE OF A HEIST

    The operation, as described by insiders, is elegant in its simplicity.

    A network of land surveyors, law firms and brokers with advance knowledge of the SGR and highway corridor routes identifies target parcels and positions proxies and associates to file inflated claims.

    The valuers under Ombati, sources say, are largely sidelined from the process.

    In a marked departure from standard NLC practice, junior officers with established institutional knowledge have been systematically excluded from the valuation work for both the Rironi-Mau Summit highway and the SGR acquisition exercises.

    ‘He does not work with us,’ said one career valuer at the commission who asked not to be named. ‘He brings in outsiders. We are told to stay away from the corridor files. When you ask questions, you are frozen out. The deals are being done somewhere we cannot see.’

    The financial logic of what the insiders describe is stark. On the SGR’s Phase 2A Nairobi-Naivasha line, auditors already found that the government had paid more than Sh20 billion in land compensation, with the total bill on the Mombasa-Nairobi line alone exceeding Sh33 billion under the watch of a previous NLC leadership.

    Independent investigators found properties inflated by as much as 310 per cent above market value.

    A semi-permanent three-bedroomed house in rural Makueni was compensated at Sh9.2 million, a figure the auditors noted was comparable to Nairobi prices. A tin-sheet church was valued at Sh10.58 million.

    On the current SGR Phase 2B acquisition, where the government is moving to compensate landowners across five counties with the groundbreaking less than two weeks away, sources say the same template is being applied at a scale that dwarfs anything seen before.

    With 5,000 acres to be priced across diverse land markets from the Mau escarpment to the shores of Lake Victoria, the room for manipulation is, as one official put it, ‘essentially unlimited.’

    With 5,000 acres to be priced across five counties, sources say the same template of overvaluation is being applied at a scale that dwarfs anything seen before.

    THE DIGITAL PLATFORM OBSTRUCTION

    Perhaps the most telling indicator of the cartel’s operation is its sustained resistance to transparency. The NLC, working with Kenya Railways, had identified digitisation as the single most effective tool to de-risk the acquisition exercise.

    The plan was to deploy a digital platform to demarcate parcels, collect ownership data and verify claims in real time, specifically to prevent the kind of false insertions, name substitutions and phantom beneficiaries that hollowed out the Phase 1 compensation fund.

    The targeted timeline was ambitious: full digital demarcation and data collection completed within eight months to ensure construction proceeds without delay.

    Sources familiar with the project say the push for digital processing has been effectively sabotaged.

    ‘The digital system would make it impossible to do what they want to do,’ said one official with direct knowledge of the process. ‘It creates a paper trail. It closes the gaps where the money disappears. That is exactly why they do not want it.’

    The opposition to digitisation is not administrative inertia.

    It is, according to the officials who describe it, a deliberate and coordinated pushback from within the directorate that handles valuations.

    The NLC had flagged digital data collection as its stated approach, with Ombati himself publicly assuring communities at forums in Kisumu and elsewhere that the process would be transparent. Behind the scenes, sources say, the digital architecture has been systematically stalled.

    THE CORRIDOR INSIDER: A SCANDAL WITHIN A SCANDAL

    The most explosive allegation circulating within NLC corridors concerns a claim that cannot yet be independently confirmed, and Kenya Insights presents it as an allegation that warrants immediate investigation by the EACC and DCI.

    Sources say that Ombati, using proxies, acquired parcels of land along the planned SGR extension corridor in advance of the public gazette notices, and that his wife is among those positioned to benefit from compensation payouts.

    If proven, this would constitute a criminal conflict of interest of the highest order under the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act.

    NLC officials are not permitted to have any personal interest, direct or indirect, in any land compulsorily acquired by the commission.

    The directorate that Ombati runs is the very organ that determines how much such land is worth. The allegation, if substantiated, would mean that the man setting the price had already bought the goods.

    Separate from the corridor land allegation, sources describe Ombati as a man whose lifestyle and asset base are conspicuously inconsistent with his declared public servant’s salary.

    Without producing specific details that could identify informants, insiders describe what they characterise as significant investments and account balances that go beyond what his government remuneration would ordinarily support. Ombati did not respond to questions about his assets and financial interests.

    A HISTORY WRITTEN IN BLOOD MONEY: THE NLC VALUATION SCANDAL TIMELINE

    What makes the current allegations so alarming is that they are not happening in a vacuum.

    They are happening at an institution with one of the most comprehensively documented corruption legacies of any government commission in Kenya’s history, and crucially, the corruption has been concentrated in the very directorate that Ombati now commands.

    In 2018, NLC chairman Muhammad Swazuri was charged alongside Kenya Railways managing director Atanas Maina with conspiracy to commit fraud involving a loss of Sh221 million in SGR land compensation.

    The charges centred on the payment of Sh221 million for five railway reserve parcels that had been illegally subdivided and whose titles had been revoked by the commission’s own Review of Grants and Dispositions Committee.

    The 2019 arrests, conducted by EACC detectives who swept into the homes of top NLC officials at dawn, were more comprehensive. Among those arrested was Salome Munubi, the then Director of Valuation and Taxation at NLC: Ombati’s predecessor in the same office he now occupies. Munubi was accused of facilitating overvalued compensation on the Mombasa Southern Bypass acquisition, where a parcel initially valued at Sh34.5 million was revalued under Swazuri’s personal order to Sh109.7 million, a 218 per cent inflation in two years.

    The Sh75 million difference was distributed in kickbacks through a law firm to NLC officials, with then-acting Finance Director Bernard Cherutich and then-Deputy Director of Valuation Joash Oindo each allegedly pocketing Sh7 million. The EACC recovered Sh18 million from a raid, Sh16 million of it in foreign currency.

    Auditors had by then separately documented the wider devastation.

    A Standard Media investigation revealed that taxpayers had lost more than Sh4 billion in fraudulent SGR land compensation deals involving fake claims, double payments, overvaluations, and compensation for land outside the corridor.

    At one farcical extreme, Kenya Railways Corporation paid compensation for land it already owned: a Sh636 million claim on its own marshalling yard, illegally subdivided into nine parcels.

    At another, people illegally squatting on railway land received payouts. In Voi, landowners with dramatically different property sizes were uniformly paid Sh1.29 million each. In the most brazen inflation found, a single piece of land had been bumped from Sh9 million to Sh30 million, a 310 per cent markup.

    A crucial piece of evidence: a computer hard drive containing compensation data from the Directorate of Valuation and Taxation was stolen from the second floor of the heavily guarded Ardhi House on December 17, 2019, the day before a tranche of Sh7.2 billion in payments was due. The hard drive was never recovered. The thieves were never identified. The directorate carried on.

    The 2021 parliamentary inquiry was equally damning. Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee, NLC acting CEO Kabale Tache was forced to admit that valuation reports used to authorise a Sh12.1 billion SGR land payout had vanished without trace.

    Committee members, accustomed to bureaucratic evasion, were visibly shocked.

    The Auditor-General’s special report covering NLC’s accounts for the 2014/15 and 2016/17 financial years flagged the irregular acquisitions and named Swazuri specifically.

    That is the institution. Those are the precedents. And now, with the single largest land acquisition exercise in the commission’s history underway, a man who sources say bought his directorship is running the valuation desk.

    RUTO’S LEGACY IN THE CROSSHAIRS

    William Ruto, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, dons the KDF jungle uniform as he presides over KDF Day at Moi Barracks, Eldoret.
    William Ruto, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, dons the KDF jungle uniform as he presides over KDF Day at Moi Barracks, Eldoret.

    President William Ruto has staked enormous political capital on the twin infrastructure projects.

    The Rironi-Mau Summit highway is the most visible artery through the country’s commercial heartland, carrying nearly 40 per cent of Kenya’s trade traffic by some estimates.

    The Naivasha-Kisumu SGR extension is the fulfilment of a promise stretching back to the original Vision 2030 blueprint: a railway that reaches Lake Victoria, transforming Kisumu into what Governor Anyang’ Nyong’o has called ‘a multimodal logistics hub’ for trade with Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan and beyond.

    Ruto’s re-election prospects in 2027 are, at least in part, tied to the delivery of both projects before the electorate passes its verdict.

    The groundbreaking for the SGR extension on March 20 is a set-piece presidential event. The Rironi highway was launched with a personal appearance and a personal promise. These are not technocratic exercises. They are political commitments delivered with fanfare.

    Into this charged moment, the land compensation cartel has inserted itself with surgical precision.

    Every billion shillings siphoned through inflated valuations is a billion less for genuine compensation, a potential court case from an underpaid landowner, a potential injunction that stops construction, a project delay that bleeds into the 2027 calendar.

    And every credible allegation of corruption at the land commission is ammunition for those who want to frame the President’s flagship legacy projects as enrichment vehicles for his allies.

    Gen Z Kenya, which erupted into the streets in 2024 with unprecedented force, making clear that public accountability for government spending is no longer optional, is watching every shilling.

    The pressure has not dissipated. It has mutated into permanent scrutiny. Any scandal touching Ruto’s showcase projects in the months before the 2027 election will not be a news cycle. It will be a campaign issue.

    Every billion shillings siphoned through inflated valuations is a billion less for genuine compensation, a potential injunction that stops construction, and ammunition for those who want to frame the President’s legacy projects as personal enrichment vehicles.

    CS WAHOME AND THE QUESTION OF OVERSIGHT

    Lands Cabinet Secretary Alice Wahome, who was re-appointed in August 2024 after her initial dismissal, appeared before the National Assembly Appointments Committee and promised to crush land cartels.

    She disclosed a net worth of Sh327 million, up from Sh218 million when she first assumed the docket in 2022, a 50 per cent appreciation she attributed to rising property values and a lump-sum rent payment from a defaulting tenant.

    At her vetting, Wahome was pressed on her relationship with the NLC, with MPs noting she had rarely convened formal meetings with commissioners.

    She denied any friction, but acknowledged that the commission faced challenges.

    The Lands Amendment Bill 2023, which sought to strip NLC of its compulsory acquisition powers and vest them in the Ministry of Lands, was withdrawn after public outcry, but it signalled the ministry’s ambition to control the very process that sources say Ombati’s cartel is currently exploiting.

    The ministry of Lands and NLC were contacted for responses. NLC did not reply. Ombati did not respond to questions submitted to him regarding the allegations in this report. No response was received from CS Wahome’s office before publication.

    WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

    The allegations against Ombati and the cartel operating within his directorate are serious enough to demand immediate independent investigation.

    The EACC, whose own detectives previously conducted pre-dawn raids on Ardhi House and removed electronics from the Directorate of Valuation and Taxation, should not need a prompt from a newspaper to investigate credible reports of the same directorate operating on the same model.

    Kenya Railways and KeNHA, as the acquiring bodies that will ultimately pay out the compensation, have both an institutional and a legal obligation to scrutinise every valuation report they receive from NLC.

    The Senate Transport Committee, which previously threatened to stop SGR construction over compensation failures, should summon Ombati to answer specific questions about the exclusion of junior officers from corridor valuations, the stalling of digital data collection systems, and his personal financial interests.

    The Treasury, which has committed Sh47.55 billion for SGR land acquisition, should not release a single shilling in compensation without an independent third-party audit of every valuation report produced under Ombati’s directorate.

    And above all, President Ruto, whose political legacy and national transformation agenda depend on the clean, timely execution of these projects, should know that the men he has trusted with the most sensitive transactional work of his administration are, if these sources are to be believed, already carving up the compensation fund.

    The pen that values Kenya’s land is worth more than all the land it values. And the man holding that pen is not, sources say, valuing for Kenya.

  • Drama As Govt Officials Skip Opening Of County Commissioner’s Office Presided By Ndindi Nyoro

    Drama As Govt Officials Skip Opening Of County Commissioner’s Office Presided By Ndindi Nyoro

    NAIROBI, Kenya Mar 9 – Residents of Kahuro in Kiharu Constituency witnessed an unusual standoff on Monday after government administrators failed to attend the official opening of a newly built Assistant County Commissioner’s office presided over by area MP Ndindi Nyoro.

    The new Kahuro Assistant County Commissioner (ACC) offices were launched in a ceremony attended by local residents, but the absence of the administrators expected to work from the facility cast a shadow over the event.

    Sources indicated that the officials who had initially been scheduled to attend the launch reportedly stayed away after receiving instructions from senior authorities not to participate in the ceremony.

    According to the sources, the administrators cited receiving “orders from above” directing them not to attend the event or formally take up the office.

    Despite the absence of the officials, Nyoro went ahead with the opening ceremony, saying the facility was ready to serve residents of the area.

    The event briefly turned dramatic when police officers arrived at the venue and attempted to stop the proceedings, prompting protests from residents who had gathered for the launch.

    Nyoro criticised what he described as attempts to frustrate development efforts in the constituency.

    “This office is ready to serve the residents. There were issues here and there. I want to tell those people, they are seeing us quiet but they should not forget who we are. Those who had sent the officers, next time don’t send them  come face me one on one,” he said.

    Residents confronted the officers, forcing them to withdraw from the venue before the ceremony continued.

    The boycott by administrators mirrors a similar incident last year in Murang’a County, when several chiefs and police officers failed to attend another handover ceremony organised by Nyoro in the Mjini area of Kiharu.

    That project involved the opening of another administration block funded through the National Government Constituencies Development Fund.

    Following the latest incident, Nyoro dismissed the absence of the officials as an attempt to undermine his work, insisting he would continue pursuing development initiatives for his constituents.

    In recent months, the Kiharu legislator has appeared to distance himself from the agenda of the ruling Kenya Kwanza Alliance, instead highlighting programmes aimed at improving education and social support in the constituency.

    Among the initiatives he has announced is a plan to provide free primary education for learners in Kiharu. Secondary school students are also required to pay only Sh500 in school fees, while all learners benefit from a free lunch programme supported by the constituency leadership.

  • How NTSA Will Detect Traffic Offenders and the Instant Fines Motorists Will Pay

    How NTSA Will Detect Traffic Offenders and the Instant Fines Motorists Will Pay

    The National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) is preparing to fundamentally change how traffic laws are enforced in Kenya, rolling out an automated system designed to detect violations, instantly notify offenders, and impose fines without the need for roadside cash transactions.

    The new regime introduces instant penalties ranging from KSh500 to KSh10,000, targeting dozens of common offences committed by motorists, motorcycle riders, PSV operators and even pedestrians.

    At the centre of the new enforcement system is a nationwide network of surveillance technology. Authorities plan to deploy 700 fixed traffic cameras and 300 mobile camera units along highways, urban roads and accident-prone corridors.  

    These devices will automatically detect violations such as speeding, driving on pedestrian paths, or ignoring traffic signs. Once a violation is captured, the footage will be transmitted to a National Command and Control Centre, where it will be processed in real time.

    The system will then generate a digital offence record linked to the driver’s second-generation Smart Driving Licence (e-DL). From there, the registered vehicle owner or driver will receive a notification of the violation and the fine due.  

    Motorists will be able to pay the penalties electronically through mobile money platforms, banking channels, USSD codes, or a digital driving licence wallet. The move is meant to eliminate roadside cash payments and reduce bribery, which anti-corruption investigators have long identified as a major problem in traffic enforcement.  

    Kenya’s road safety record has deteriorated sharply in recent years, with fatalities rising from 3,875 deaths in 2019 to more than 5,100 by 2024, according to road safety data. Authorities say weak enforcement, corruption and limited surveillance tools have allowed dangerous driving habits to flourish.  

    The automated system is part of a long-term project expected to run for 21 years under a public-private partnership valued at roughly KSh42 billion, aimed at restoring discipline on Kenyan roads.  

    Highest Instant Fines — Up to KSh10,000

    The most serious traffic offences attract the highest penalties.

    Drivers will face KSh10,000 fines for offences including:

    Driving without identification number plates.

    Operating a vehicle without a valid inspection certificate.

    Exceeding speed limits by 16–20 km/h or more.

    Causing obstruction by leaving a vehicle blocking traffic.

    PSV operators employing unlicensed drivers or conductors.

    Common Traffic Offences and Penalties

    The NTSA schedule lists 37 minor traffic offences and their corresponding fines.

    Some of the most common include:

    Speeding

    Exceeding limit by 1–5 km/h: Warning.

    6–10 km/h: KSh500.

    11–15 km/h: KSh3,000.

    16–20 km/h or more: KSh10,000.  

    Driving and Road Conduct

    Driving on a pedestrian walkway: KSh5,000.

    Failure to obey traffic signs: KSh3,000.

    Failure to obey police directions: KSh3,000.

    Failure to stop when ordered by police: KSh5,000.

    Using a mobile phone while driving: KSh2,000.

    Vehicle Compliance

    Failure to carry a driving licence: KSh1,000.

    Failure to renew a driving licence: KSh1,000.

    Failure to wear a seat belt: KSh500.

    Failure to install seat belts in a vehicle: KSh1,000 per seat.

    Failure to carry reflective warning triangles: KSh2,000.

    PSV and Matatu-Specific Offences

    Public Service Vehicle operators face additional penalties aimed at tightening discipline in the sector.

    Some of the key offences include:

    Driving a PSV while unqualified: KSh5,000.

    Employing an unlicensed driver or conductor: KSh10,000.

    Driver or conductor failing to wear badge or uniform: KSh2,000.

    Operating a PSV with tinted windows: KSh3,000.

    Failure to install a speed governor: KSh10,000.

    Picking or dropping passengers at unauthorized locations: KSh3,000.

    Motorcycle riders will also face penalties, including KSh1,000 fines for riding without protective gear or carrying more than one passenger.  

    Pedestrians Not Spared

    Even pedestrians fall under the new enforcement regime. Anyone found wilfully obstructing vehicles on the road can be fined KSh500, while passengers boarding or alighting vehicles at unauthorized points may face KSh1,000 penalties.  

    Officials say the automated system is intended to remove discretion from roadside enforcement and replace it with data-driven policing.

    By linking violations directly to digital driver records and automated fines, authorities hope to close loopholes that have long enabled bribery, ignored offences and inconsistent enforcement.

    For motorists across Kenya, the message is clear: once the cameras go live, every lane change, speed surge or illegal stop could be recorded — and the fine may arrive before the driver even reaches home.

     

  • SOLD TO THE BULLET: How the Bodyguard Handed MP Ong’ondo Were to His Killers

    SOLD TO THE BULLET: How the Bodyguard Handed MP Ong’ondo Were to His Killers

    He sensed it. For weeks before the night they finally caught up with him, Kasipul Member of Parliament Charles Ong’ondo Were had been telling anyone who would listen that his life was in danger. He had gone to the police. He had told his colleagues. He had said it to the media. Yet when darkness fell over Nairobi on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, and his white Toyota Crown turned off Parliament Road into the evening traffic, the danger was not approaching from outside — it was already seated inside the car with him.

    Now, months after the fatal shots rang out near the City Mortuary roundabout along Valley Road, a devastating new exposé by KTN News has given Kenya its most detailed and harrowing account yet of how the plot unfolded. The broadcaster obtained exclusive CCTV footage spanning multiple cameras across Nairobi’s inner city — footage that, frame by chilling frame, shows the MP’s bodyguard not as his last line of defence, but as the door through which his killers walked.

    “The bodyguard allegedly abused his position of trust to deliver the MP into the hands of his executioners.”

    Senior Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Gikui Gichuhi did not mince words when she opened the State’s case before High Court Judge Lady Justice Diana Kavedza at Kibera High Court in February 2026. The killing of Ong’ondo Were, she told the court, was the result of a carefully orchestrated conspiracy. One suspect was the overall mastermind who ordered and financed the operation. Another supplied the murder weapon. A hired gunman pulled the trigger. And the bodyguard, Allan Omondi Ogola, delivered the MP to all of them.

    A DAY THAT BEGAN AS ANY OTHER

    The CCTV record of April 30, 2025 begins innocuously enough. At 8:37am, Were’s white Toyota Crown, registration KDM 783A, was captured entering Bunge Towers — Parliament’s administrative complex. The MP had a full legislative day ahead. Kenya’s Finance Bill 2025 was on the table, and the National Assembly was humming with political tension. A continent away from that tension, in a restaurant along Kimathi Street, two men were eating lunch and watching the parliamentary proceedings on a screen. They were not watching for the Finance Bill. They were watching for the moment the Speaker would rise to close the day’s business and send Charles Ong’ondo Were into the street.

    At 3:14pm, as the afternoon began its slow slide toward evening, a vehicle bearing registration number KAZ 645Z entered the cameras’ field of view near the Parliament roundabout, approaching from Harambee Avenue. It was accompanied by a motorcycle. The two moved together with a practiced coordination that had nothing to do with ordinary Nairobi traffic — making deliberate loops around Parliament Lane, doubling back along Harambee Avenue, the motorcycle maintaining close proximity to the car at all times.

    At 3:18pm, a man identified in court as the co-driver of KAZ stepped out near Equity Bank. He wore a checked long-sleeved shirt, blue trousers and brownish shoes. He carried a sling bag. He paused, entered the Equity Bank parking area, spoke briefly with the motorcycle rider, and returned to the car. Eleven minutes later, at 3:29pm, the same exchange was captured inside Equity Bank parking. The two men were coordinating. County Hall cameras then caught the sling-bag suspect pacing near Parliament’s entrance, crossing the road, making phone calls, watching.

    KDM 783A, meanwhile, sat parked near Family Bank along Parliament Road. Were was still inside Bunge Towers. It would be another four hours before he emerged. Four hours in which the killing machine around him tightened its formation.

    THE BODYGUARD BOARDS LAST

    At 4:09pm, KAZ 645Z found parking. The sling-bag suspect stepped out again, walked toward Family Bank, lingered for several minutes, and returned. The waiting was meticulous, professional, unhurried. These were men who had done this before — or men who had been told exactly what they were doing and by whom.

    Then came the moment that would stand as the most damning single image in this entire investigation. At 7:15pm, with the evening already darkening over Nairobi, CCTV cameras captured a man in a suit running after KDM 783A in Ukulima House parking. That man was Allan Omondi Ogola — the MP’s own bodyguard, one of the accused persons now facing a murder charge at Kibera High Court. He caught the car. He climbed in.

    Moments later, KDM exited through the DCI gate and drove to Parliament to collect Were at approximately 7:20pm. Almost simultaneously, KAZ 645Z left Equity Bank parking, while the sling-bag suspect positioned himself outside Parliament’s entrance, his face pointed at the door, waiting for the legislator to emerge.

    “He fired four shots at close range. These shattered the window and went into Were’s hand and chest.”

    At 7:24pm, Were’s vehicle left Parliament. It headed toward Holy Family Basilica roundabout. At the same instant, the sling-bag suspect mounted the waiting motorcycle, which immediately swung into pursuit along Parliament Road. KAZ 645Z, having already looped past the Senate gate, executed a U-turn at the Basilica roundabout at 7:26pm, now heading in the same direction as the MP’s vehicle — all three moving together through the Nairobi night like a dark and practiced tide.

    THE M-PESA STOP THAT SEALED HIS FATE

    On Wabera Street, footage from cameras mounted at the Standard Building recorded KDM pulling over near an M-Pesa shop at 7:35pm. A man in a suit — the bodyguard, investigators confirm — stepped out of the back seat and walked into the shop. He deposited Sh20,000 into Were’s phone. The M-Pesa attendant, who would later record a statement with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and furnish detectives with the shop’s own CCTV footage, watched the transaction without knowing she was a witness to the preamble of a murder.

    Outside, on the street, the sling-bag suspect had dismounted from the motorcycle and walked toward the parked MP’s vehicle, donning a maroon beanie. He made phone calls. Then he walked away. The motorcycle idled. When KDM eventually pulled back into traffic and proceeded toward Kenyatta Avenue, the motorcycle resumed its pursuit. By 7:39pm, both vehicles were on Valley Road, heading toward Hurlingham roundabout. Were was sitting, in stark contradiction of all security protocols for VIPs, in the front passenger seat. His bodyguard sat behind him.

    The assassins had long established this arrangement. They had been watching. They knew exactly which window to aim for.

    SEVEN SECONDS ON VALLEY ROAD

    Traffic backed up at the Nairobi Funeral Home roundabout — the chokehold the killers had been steering their target toward since 3:14pm that afternoon. At 7:40pm, KDM 783A was stationary. The motorcycle stopped alongside it. One man dismounted. He walked quickly to the front passenger door. He was wearing a balaclava now. He raised the weapon and fired four shots at point-blank range, shattering the window, the bullets entering Were’s hand and chest.

    Hitman caught on CCTV in Nairobi streets as he trailed the MP

    No sooner had the gunman turned back to the motorcycle than the rider gunned the engine, speeding back toward the city centre. The bodyguard, who was sitting directly behind the man he was supposed to protect, later told investigators that the shooting caught him completely unawares and that he had taken cover before giving chase — a statement the prosecution has treated with open scepticism given the mountain of CCTV evidence now placed before the court.

    Were’s driver rushed him to Nairobi Hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival.

    THE WEAPON, THE VEHICLE AND THE DIRTY MONEY

    Ballistic investigators recovered a Sarsilmaz handgun and a Retay Falcon pistol linked to the murder, as well as to three prior armed robberies in Kiambu and Nairobi counties, the last occurring just days before Were’s death. The guns were not improvised street weapons. They were professional tools, part of an armoury that pointed to an organised criminal network with access to significant financial resources.

    The vehicle KAZ 645Z, which had spent the entire afternoon of April 30 circling Parliament in pursuit of Were, was subsequently identified as a car that had previously belonged to an assistant police commissioner. It had changed hands for the suspiciously low price of Ksh 300,000 — a fraction of its market value.

    That transaction left a digital trail so clean and so obvious that it has prompted serious questions among investigators and analysts alike: was the trail genuine, or was it deliberately lit, a controlled explosion designed to burn a specific figure within the security apparatus?

    A search of suspect Edwin Oduor Odhiambo’s Nairobi residence produced two pistols with ammunition, five SIM cards, and multiple mobile phones now under forensic examination. At the home of William Imoli Shighali, another suspect, detectives found police uniforms, more than USD 4,800 in cash, and further mobile devices. In the home of suspect Juma Ali Hikal — an active Administration Police officer at the time of his arrest — investigators found ammunition and teargas canisters.

    Preliminary police investigations established that meetings to plan the killing took place both in Nairobi and in Homa Bay County.

    A deposit of Ksh 850,000 was paid to secure the hit squad’s services. Bodyguard Allan Ogola allegedly received Ksh 80,000 described as transport money, while both he and driver Walter Owino Awino were in constant communication with the planners before and after the murder.

    Mobile phone triangulation placed all five original suspects in proximity to the crime corridor throughout the day.

    THE STATE’S LONG SHADOW

    The five charged before Kibera High Court are William Imoli alias Imo, Edwin Odour Odhiambo alias Machuani, Ebel Ochieng alias Dave Calo — a neighbour of Were’s in Kasipul, Homa Bay County, and a board member of the Lake Basin Development Authority — Isaac Kuria, and Allan Omondi Ogola, the bodyguard. All five have denied the charges. Two of them, Kuria and Ogola, were ordered to undergo mental assessments at Kamiti Prison before their trial could proceed.

    Three suspects were denied bail after Ochieng allegedly threatened to kill the prosecutor handling the case — a development that sent a visible chill through the court.

    The suspects in court.

    But it is a name that does not appear on the charge sheet that has sent the loudest tremor through Kenya’s political class.

    Embakasi East MP Babu Owino, went on KTN Prime and named Were’s main personal assistant, identified only as Calvince, as someone arrested in connection with planning the murder.

    What made this allegation explosive was Babu Owino’s further claim: that Calvince had previously been employed at the Lake Basin Development Authority when it was headed by Raymond Omollo, who now serves as the Interior Principal Secretary.

    “These things are being organised by the State. Are you aware that he was the one who was planning and executing the assassination of Ong’ondo Were?”

    Omollo has not been charged. His office did not respond to inquiries by the time of publication. But the implication, made on national television by a sitting Member of Parliament, is one that has proved impossible to ignore — that the killing of Charles Ong’ondo Were was not merely a criminal conspiracy between a bodyguard, a hired gun and a few desperate men. It was, in the telling of those closest to it, a state-facilitated execution.

    CCTVS ARE NOT ORNAMENTS

    The Ong’ondo Were case has become, among other things, a landmark demonstration of what surveillance infrastructure — long dismissed in Kenya as decorative — can do when investigators choose to use it. Thousands of minutes of CCTV footage were reviewed. Cameras at Parliament, at Equity Bank parking, at the Standard Building on Wabera Street, at Valley Road businesses, at the Rubis petrol station in Hurlingham where the KAZ driver was captured pacing and making prolonged calls after the shooting — all of it assembled into a prosecution narrative that has left very little room for the accused to manoeuvre.

    The chief inspector in charge of forensic imaging and acoustics testified at Kibera High Court that there was consistent interaction between the motorcycle rider, the driver and co-driver of KAZ across multiple locations, visible use of mobile phones, and synchronised stopovers at M-Pesa outlets and petrol stations along the MP’s route. The conclusion was direct: from 3:14pm to 7:40pm, the kill team moved with Were through the city as surely as his own shadow.

    What the cameras could not capture — what no camera has ever captured — is the moment a man accepts money to betray the person whose life he is paid to guard. That moment happened somewhere in a hotel room, or across a table in Homa Bay, or in a quiet phone call on a night before the cameras switched on. The prosecution will attempt to reconstruct it through call data records, witness testimony and forensic analysis. Whether those threads lead all the way to the corridors of Interior Ministry headquarters remains the question that Kenya is now asking aloud.

    A NATION WATCHES AND WAITS

    Ong’ondo Were had publicly complained of threats to his life in February 2025. He had gone to the police. He had told Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga, who subsequently confirmed his concerns. He had been a marked man for months, and the machine that was marking him had been patient. When it finally moved, it moved in daylight, through the city, in a vehicle that had once belonged to a senior officer of the state, with a bodyguard holding the door open.

    The trial continues before Justice Kavedza. The prosecution has promised further witnesses and further evidence.

    Lead investigator Inspector Oliver Nabonwe has indicated that the probe extends to multiple counties and multiple scenes of crime not yet fully documented for court. Somewhere in those scenes, investigators believe, lie the fingerprints of whoever gave the final authorisation for what happened on Valley Road on the evening of April 30, 2025.

    There is a Swahili proverb that Kenyans have been repeating since this story broke: Kikulacho ki nguoni mwako. The thing that devours you is within your own clothes. For Charles Ong’ondo Were, the man sitting behind him was not just within his clothes. He was holding the map to the ambush.

    The cameras were watching. Every frame of what they saw is now in evidence. Whether justice will follow those frames to their logical conclusion — to whoever sits at the top of the chain that ordered, financed and directed this assassination — is the question that will define whether this nation’s institutions mean what they claim.