Author: Our Correspondent

When Raphael Tuju walked into Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary on the afternoon of March 9, 2026, the property had already been stripped from him by a High Court ruling delivered hours earlier.

What happened inside that serene Karen retreat would not stay serene for long.

Anti-corruption detectives were watching from a distance, Tuju was wired with audio-visual recording devices, and in his bag was one million shillings belonging to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, treated and ready to be traced. Within the hour, four men had been arrested, the cash had been recovered, and a bribery scandal of extraordinary proportions had burst into the open.

That afternoon did not happen in isolation. It was the final act of a scheme that the EACC says was negotiated across months, involved multiple middlemen, escalated from polite suggestions to demands denominated in American dollars, and at its core, according to investigators and a confession relayed by Senior Counsel Nelson Havi, was orchestrated with the knowledge of the very judge presiding over Tuju’s most consequential case.

Lady Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mongare of the High Court’s Commercial and Tax Division has denied any wrongdoing.

But the names of those arrested, the phone records extracted from seized devices, a speakerphone call in which Tuju says he heard a judge’s voice discussing his own case, and the staggering coincidence that the arrest and the adverse ruling landed on the same day, have produced a scandal Kenya’s judiciary has not seen in a generation.

THE ORIGINS OF A DEBT

To understand what is alleged to have happened inside Entim Sidai on March 9, it is necessary to travel back to 2015, when Tuju, then a businessman and former Cabinet minister, approached the East African Development Bank for financing.

Through his company Dari Limited, he secured a loan of approximately 9.3 million US dollars, later valued at about Sh1.2 billion, to develop a luxury hospitality complex in Karen anchored around Dari Restaurant and the Entim Sidai wellness sanctuary.

The properties pledged as collateral were his most prized assets. The loan was disbursed in July 2015. By the second quarter of 2016, it had defaulted. Tuju’s account attributes the collapse partly to disbursement shortfalls by the bank, arguing that EADB paid Sh932.7 million for the first tranche against an agreed figure of Sh943.9 million and later declined to release a further Sh294 million earmarked for the construction of luxury villas whose proceeds were intended to service the debt. EADB’s account is blunter: the money was borrowed, it was not repaid, and not a single cent has been returned since August 2016, when a payment of $10,000 was the last the bank ever received.

What followed was a decade-long legal war prosecuted across two continents. EADB filed proceedings in London, where the High Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that Dari Limited and Tuju owed $15,162,320. That judgment was domesticated in Kenya in 2020 by the Nairobi High Court and has since been affirmed at every appellate level, including the Supreme Court, which declined to suspend its execution.

The debt, accumulating interest and penalties, has since ballooned to an estimated Sh4.5 billion. Three prime Karen properties, Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary, Tamarind Karen, and Dari Business Park, stand as the collateral. One of them, Dari Coffee and Garden Restaurant, was auctioned in October 2024 for Sh450 million to a company linked to businessman Jackson Kiplimo Chebett, a figure whose name would surface again in other controversies.

Tuju contested the valuation fiercely, arguing properties worth Sh3 billion to Sh4 billion were being stripped for a fraction of their worth.

On the same day EACC detectives arrested four men at Tuju’s Karen property, Justice Mongare delivered her ruling striking out Tuju’s case as a ‘blatant abuse of court process.’ The coincidence, if it is one, has not been explained.

THE APPROACH

According to the EACC affidavit sworn by investigator Emmanuel Kubasu and now before the court, Tuju filed his first complaint with the commission in February 2026, alleging that individuals had begun approaching him with an unmistakable proposition: pay money, and the judge handling your case would be persuaded.

The approach, as investigators describe it, did not begin with a blunt demand. It began with assurances. Men who described themselves as connected to the highest levels of the judiciary told Tuju they could secure a favourable outcome in the pending matter before the Commercial and Tax Division. They named figures. They suggested sums. And then they escalated.

By early March 2026, the demands had crystallised into explicit financial terms. Tuju was asked to part with $80,000, equivalent to approximately Sh10.3 million.

A separate demand of Sh5 million was issued in connection with related proceedings. In an earlier episode that the EACC affidavit describes in forensic detail, one of the intermediaries told Tuju the judge was travelling and needed money urgently.

An initial demand of Sh1 million was negotiated down to Sh500,000.

Tuju paid Sh250,000 via mobile phone to the intermediary’s number. He later produced the remaining Sh250,000 in cash. The digital forensic examination report attached to the EACC filings confirms the mobile money transfer and corroborates the timeline through call logs and WhatsApp communications extracted from Tuju’s phone.

Most damning of all the elements described in the affidavit is the speakerphone incident.

According to EACC investigator Kubasu, one of the intermediaries, described as a debt restructuring and recovery consultant, sought to convince Tuju he had direct access to the judge.

To demonstrate this, the consultant placed a call in Tuju’s presence and put the judge on speakerphone. The affidavit states that during that conversation, details of Tuju’s pending case were openly discussed, and that Tuju was left convinced the person on the other end of the line was the petitioner, Justice Mongare.

The specificity of the case details discussed in the call, details only someone with intimate knowledge of the proceedings would hold, formed the basis of Tuju’s certainty.

THE MEN IN THE ROOM

On March 9, the EACC handed Tuju one million shillings in treated currency, fitted him with recording equipment, and sent him to a meeting already arranged at Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary, his own Karen property.

What the detectives monitoring from a distance would witness, and what the audio-visual recordings now preserved in the EACC files would capture, was the meeting of four individuals whose collective presence in one room constitutes an extraordinary indictment of the networks that allegedly operate within and around Kenya’s commercial court.

The first man arrested was Justice Joseph Mutava. Mutava is not merely a former judge. He is a former judge who was removed from the bench in disgrace. A tribunal convened in 2016 found him guilty of gross misconduct and recommended his removal.

He challenged the finding all the way to the Supreme Court, which dismissed his application in 2019 and upheld the tribunal’s determination that he be removed from office.

That Mutava was subsequently re-admitted to practice as a private advocate raises questions the Law Society of Kenya has not publicly answered. That he was at a meeting in which, according to investigators, Sh1 million was handed over in circumstances described as the culmination of a multi-million-shilling bribery scheme raises questions of a different and graver order.

Nelson Havi, the Senior Counsel who has waged a sustained public campaign on this matter, states publicly that Mutava, upon arrest, confessed that he was collecting money on behalf of Justice Mongare. That assertion has not been confirmed in court filings available on the public record, but Havi, a named Senior Counsel posting under a verified identity, has not retracted it.

The second man arrested was advocate Kimani Wachira.

Wachira was introduced to the circle through a businessman named Tom Awili, who claimed Tuju had asked him to identify competent legal representation following a series of adverse rulings. Wachira’s own legal team has mounted an aggressive counter-narrative, describing the arrests as unlawful, procedurally unfair and an abuse of process. They argue their client was present simply as a lawyer reviewing a brief, that he solicited nothing, and that the money was produced by Tuju unsolicited before the meeting had even properly begun.

A statutory declaration by Awili supports this account. Awili himself, however, is the third man arrested, the very person who arranged the meeting, and his credibility as an exonerating witness is undermined by the fact that he too sat in the same room when the EACC descended.

The High Court declined to grant Wachira conservatory orders blocking investigations, finding the application failed to meet the urgency threshold.

The fourth man is the figure whose identity detonates the entire architecture of coincidence that Justice Mongare and the Judicial Service Commission would prefer the public to dismiss as unrelated.

Kennedy Mulwa, described in court documents and investigative reports as an auctioneer, is, according to Nelson Havi and multiple reporting outlets, the spouse of Lady Justice Josephine Mongare.

Havi has stated publicly that Mulwa and the judge were in telephone communication in the minutes before the arrests took place.

That communication, he says, has been reviewed by the EACC. If that spousal relationship is established and the phone communication record is what investigators say it is, then the judge’s husband was among the four men arrested in a sting operation targeting a bribery scheme allegedly aimed at influencing her court.

The Garam Investment Auctioneers firm, in which Mulwa has been associated, features as a named party in aspects of the very Dari Limited property litigation over which Justice Mongare was presiding.

Kennedy Mulwa, described as an auctioneer, is according to Senior Counsel Nelson Havi the husband of Justice Josephine Mongare. He was in phone contact with the judge minutes before EACC detectives moved in. His auctioneering firm is a named party in the same case Mongare was presiding over.

THE JUDGE FIGHTS BACK

Justice Mongare’s response to the EACC’s attempt to summon her was swift, constitutionally framed, and institutionally consequential. When the commission addressed a letter dated March 17, 2026, to the office of the Deputy Registrar of the High Court, directing that she present herself at the Integrity Centre on March 19 for questioning, she did not comply.

Instead, she moved to the High Court herself and filed a petition.

On March 19, 2026, Justice Bahati Mwamuye granted conservatory orders halting any arrest, detention, investigation, summoning or adverse action against Mongare pending the determination of her petition. The orders extended to the seizure of her property, devices and records. The case has since been closed to public access.

Mongare’s constitutional argument is not without legal texture. She contends that Article 160 of the Constitution, which guarantees judicial independence, is the appropriate framework within which complaints against sitting judges must be processed, and that the Judicial Service Commission, not the EACC, is the proper forum for such allegations.

She further argues that the summons was issued in a procedurally improper manner, directed at a subordinate officer rather than to her directly, and that singling her out among the eight judges of the Commercial and Tax Division constitutes harassment and selective targeting.

The EACC disagrees, emphatically. Its replying affidavit argues that while judicial independence protects the act of judicial decision-making, it does not confer immunity from criminal investigation. The commission cites a letter from the Chief Justice encouraging investigative agencies to pursue corruption within the judiciary as institutional support for its mandate.

It argues that routing all such investigations through the JSC, a body whose own integrity has been publicly questioned in this very matter by Senior Counsel Havi, would effectively insulate judges from accountability. The EACC says its constitutional mandate to investigate bribery and corruption extends without exception to the offices that hold power over those very proceedings.

The JSC, for its part, chose a response that speaks volumes without saying anything. It transferred Justice Mongare to the Machakos High Court. Machakos lawyers were unimpressed.

At an annual general meeting on April 10, 2026, advocates of the Machakos region unanimously resolved to boycott all proceedings before Mongare, effective immediately, until the corruption allegations are conclusively and transparently addressed.

The bar’s chairperson, Priscilla Kioko, said in a formal statement that while the advocates recognised the presumption of innocence, the standard applicable to judicial officers demands impeachable integrity.

The JSC’s decision to transfer rather than investigate has drawn sustained condemnation. Critics, Havi loudest among them, have accused the commission of shielding the judge from accountability and of having a track record of resolving complaints against judges not through due process but through financial persuasion, a charge the JSC has not publicly answered.

THE RULINGS THAT SHAPED EVERYTHING

On the morning of March 9, 2026, before any arrests had been made and before Tuju had walked into Entim Sidai with treated money and a recording device strapped to his body, Justice 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. Her language was categorical and unsparing. She found that the plaintiffs were seeking to re-hear an injunction already denied, reopen a debt already adjudicated internationally and recognised domestically, and re-litigate the enforceability of securities over properties already subject to multiple court orders.

She called it a blatant abuse of court process designed to frustrate the bank’s lawful recovery efforts after years of default and litigation. There was no way, she ruled, that the amended plaint could survive. It was struck out. Auctioneers were cleared to move.

That ruling and the arrests of the four men at Entim Sidai are not merely events that occurred on the same date. They are, if the EACC’s case holds, two sides of a single transaction. Senior Counsel Havi’s reading of that coincidence, made on a named and verified platform, is that the men arrested at Entim Sidai had been dispatched to collect money on behalf of the judge who, within hours of the collection, was disposing of the case. Whether the money was to secure relief Tuju never received, or whether the ruling regardless of its legal merit was tainted by the parallel negotiation happening in the background, are questions the Director of Public Prosecutions and eventually a trial court will have to answer.

Since that ruling, Tuju has continued to fight on every available front. Justice Moses Ado, before whom the matter now sits, issued interim orders barring further transfer of the disputed property while a stay application is considered.

A ruling on that application was scheduled for May 7, 2026, the day after the Mongare petition is set for mention.

The property dispute, the bribery investigation, the judicial petition and the JSC silence are all reaching a simultaneous inflection point in the week the nation watches.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE RACKET

What the EACC affidavit describes, in aggregate, is not an impulsive act of individual greed but a structured intermediary network. There was a consultant who served as the primary contact and who allegedly received at least Sh500,000.

There was a former judge whose presence at a meeting served to lend the scheme institutional credibility, to suggest, as investigators put it, that the network reached into the courts.

There was a lawyer introduced as competent counsel but whose presence in the same room as a disgraced former judge, at a meeting with no prior written correspondence or formal fee arrangement, strains the innocent explanation his legal team has offered.

There was an auctioneer who, if the spousal link alleged by Havi is accurate, was the closest human connection between the network and the judge herself. And there was a judge, still sitting, who obtained conservatory orders preventing investigators from even asking her questions.

The forensic picture assembled by investigators adds to this account in ways that are not easy to dismiss. Phone records extracted from seized devices document repeated contact between Tuju and suspects across the period during which the scheme was allegedly being negotiated.

WhatsApp chats, SMS messages and call logs form a digital timeline that the EACC affidavit says corroborates every material element of Tuju’s account.

The mobile money transfer of Sh250,000 is confirmed in the forensic report.

The speakerphone call is described in detail sufficient to anchor it to a specific time and location. The treated Sh1 million, recovered at the scene on March 9, is in the hands of investigators. This is not a case built on rumour.

That does not mean it is a case without complication. Wachira’s lawyers have raised serious procedural challenges.

Tom Awili’s statutory declaration offers an account of the March 9 meeting that, if believed, dismantles the bribery narrative and recasts it as a facilitation fee.

Awili further alleges that after his arrest he was pressured by investigators to change his statement to implicate the lawyers, a claim the EACC has not formally addressed.

Justice Mongare’s legal arguments about the separation of investigative powers are not frivolous.

And Tuju himself, it should be recalled, is a man who defaulted on a nine-million-dollar loan, has fought every attempt to enforce a decade of court orders against him, and has powerful political motivation to cast the entire recovery process as corrupt.

But the question is not whether Tuju is a sympathetic complainant.

The question is whether the evidence assembled by the EACC, the recordings, the digital forensics, the treated currency, the phone logs, the alleged confession relayed by a Senior Counsel, the spousal connection between an arrested auctioneer and the presiding judge, is sufficient to sustain a prosecution. That is a question for the Director of Public Prosecutions, who has received the investigation file and has not yet communicated a charging decision.

A disgraced former judge removed from the bench for gross misconduct. A city advocate who walked into the same room. An auctioneer married to the presiding judge. A consultant who allegedly relayed Sh500,000 to the bench. The EACC has the recordings. The DPP has the file. Kenya is waiting.

THE LARGER RECKONING

This case has already forced a reckoning that extends far beyond the fate of three Karen properties or the guilt or innocence of the individuals arrested on March 9. It has forced the question of whether judicial independence, invoked with constitutional precision by Justice Mongare to block her own investigation, is a shield against accountability or a guarantee of impartiality. The two are not the same thing. A judge may issue rulings that are legally correct and independently arrived at, and those rulings deserve constitutional protection from political interference. That protection does not, and cannot, extend to shielding a judge from investigation into whether she or he has taken money in exchange for those rulings.

The JSC’s handling of this matter will define its institutional credibility for a generation.

Its silence in response to Havi’s public naming of Mutava as a man who confessed to collecting money on the judge’s behalf is a silence that speaks. Its decision to transfer Mongare to Machakos, a move the Machakos bar responded to with a boycott, suggests an institution more concerned with managing optics than confronting corruption.

If the JSC’s position is that the EACC has no jurisdiction to investigate a sitting judge, it has not explained what it intends to do with the material in the EACC’s file. If its position is that it will conduct its own investigation, it has not commenced one.

If its position is that Mongare is innocent and the allegations are without foundation, it has not said so.

It has simply moved her, a bureaucratic sleight of hand that may satisfy neither the Machakos bar nor the Kenyan public.

The case is set for mention on May 6, 2026. A ruling on the Tuju property stay application was expected from Justice Ado on May 7. The DPP has the investigation file.

The conservatory orders protecting Mongare from EACC investigation remain in force.

The recordings exist. The digital trail has been forensically extracted. The treated money was recovered.

And somewhere in the records of an EACC interview room, if Senior Counsel Havi’s account is accurate, a disgraced former judge told investigators whose instructions he was operating under when he sat down at a table inside a Karen wellness sanctuary and watched a former Cabinet Secretary reach into a bag.

Kenya has seen judicial corruption scandals before. It has not often seen one assembled with this degree of documentary precision, this density of named individuals, this many converging lines of evidence pointing toward a sitting member of the bench.

The institutional response so far has been conservatory orders, a transfer, and silence.

What comes next will determine whether accountability in this country means something, or whether it means something only for those who cannot afford to file a petition.

For six decades, Kenyatta National Hospital has borne the weight of a nation’s health. East and Central Africa’s largest referral hospital, a 2,000-bed institution straddling Nairobi’s Upper Hill, has cut open hearts, transplanted kidneys and held the hands of the dying poor who had nowhere else to go.

Today, it is dying itself.

A fresh audit report by Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu for the financial year ending June 30, 2025, documents the formal descent into what she terms ‘technical insolvency’ — the fourth consecutive year in which the hospital has spent more than it earned.

But the auditor’s language, clinical and measured as it must be, barely captures the full horror of what has been happening inside KNH’s walls and procurement corridors.

What the audit cannot say in polite accounting prose, Kenya Insights says plainly: KNH has been systematically looted, its revenues leaked, its infrastructure projects corrupted, and its patients — among them the most vulnerable Kenyans alive — abandoned to a collapsing institution that a succession of managers, contractors and Ministry of Health officials have treated as a personal revenue stream. Four consecutive years of deficit spending are not a fiscal accident. They are the arithmetic of theft.

KNH has been systematically looted. Its procurement corridors became personal revenue streams. Four years of consecutive deficits are not a fiscal accident — they are the arithmetic of theft.

The numbers alone are staggering.

In 2024/25, the hospital’s deficit reached Sh2.6 billion — a figure Sh2.3 billion worse than the Sh299 million shortfall recorded the previous financial year.

Its total expenditure budget stood at Sh22.5 billion yet only Sh17.5 billion in funding was received, a 22 percent underfunding that translated directly into a 19 percent under-absorption of its spending budget. The auditor notes this gap ‘may have affected the hospital’s mandate.’ It has. Patients know it. Doctors know it. The morgue knows it. The only people who appeared not to know it — or more precisely, not to care — are the network of executives, contractors and officials who have spent years feeding off an institution that is supposed to feed the sick.

THE CEO, THE OXYGEN SCANDAL, AND THE SECRET ACCOUNTS

No single episode captures the moral catastrophe at KNH more completely than the oxygen plant scandal that has consumed the institution since 2022. In that year, the Ministry of Health awarded a Sh443.6 million tender to Biomax Africa Ltd for the supply, installation and commissioning of a medical oxygen-generating plant — a plant that would produce 8,000 litres of oxygen per minute and free the hospital from its expensive dependence on commercial oxygen suppliers.

The contractor was given six months to deliver.

Three years later, the plant still does not work.

The facts that have emerged from Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission investigations are damning. Biomax Africa, working with French manufacturer Novair Group, submitted bid documents that were forged.

The Kenya Bureau of Standards quality approval marks were fake.

The performance bonds from CIC Insurance and Intra Africa Assurance were fabricated.

The work history citing a similar project in Machakos County was invented. Former Health Principal Secretary Susan Mochache and other Ministry officials who sat on the tender evaluation committee are accused by the EACC of failing to conduct the most basic due diligence — a failure that handed a Sh443 million public contract to a company armed with fraudulent papers.

The EACC forwarded its investigation report to Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga in June 2025 recommending that Mochache, Biomax Director Leonard Muriuki Njeru and ten other suspects be prosecuted. The DPP was still reviewing the file as of publication.

While the plant collected dust, KNH was haemorrhaging cash buying oxygen from private vendors.

Between July 2023 and February 2024 alone, the hospital spent more than Sh168 million on liquid oxygen.

Since 2022, when the contract was signed, the institution has spent more than Sh565 million purchasing oxygen externally — money that would have been unnecessary had the plant been delivered.

At one point, the oxygen purity coming out of the plant was as low as 60 percent — far below the 95 percent required for medical use — meaning that even when the plant briefly operated, it was pumping substandard air into the lungs of critically ill patients.

This detail alone should have triggered criminal proceedings.

Instead, KNH granted Biomax Africa at least three contract extensions.

Since 2022, KNH has spent over Sh565 million buying oxygen from private vendors — wasted because a Sh443 million plant, paid for by Kenyans, was delivered on forged documents and still does not work.

At the centre of the scandal is Dr Evanson Njoroge Kamuri, the dermatologist-turned-CEO who ran KNH from 2019 until his suspension in mid-2025.

In May 2024, the EACC obtained court orders freezing Sh28 million in Kamuri’s Housing Finance accounts.

A month later, the High Court expanded the freeze to Sh48.5 million held across eight accounts at HFC Bank, National Bank and Standard Chartered, while blocking him from transacting six parcels of land in Nairobi, Kirinyaga and Kajiado.

The EACC’s affidavit stated preliminary investigations found Kamuri had accumulated assets not commensurate with his known income ‘to a tune of Sh800 million’ on a gross monthly salary of Sh278,725.

By August 2025, having concluded its investigations, the EACC returned to court with findings that Kamuri had built assets worth Sh466.5 million between 2015 and 2024, of which Sh229.4 million remained unexplained.

Anti-Corruption Court judge Lucy Njuguna granted preservation orders on those assets pending forfeiture proceedings.

The EACC alleges Kamuri endorsed irregular payments totalling Sh290 million on the oxygen plant contract as well as on a second troubled tender for the hospital’s Enterprise Resource Planning system.

The ERP contract — also flagged in the probe — was meant to digitise KNH’s hospital management but became another procurement controversy that investigators say was used to channel funds to entities linked to the CEO.

Kamuri has denied wrongdoing, insisting the Ministry bore primary responsibility as the procuring entity.

Whether his repeated letters to then PS Harry Kimtai were sincere calls for help or calculated paper trails against a mounting legal threat is a question the DPP will eventually have to answer.

The scandal took a more lurid turn when the EACC and the Financial Reporting Centre discovered that Sh4 million linked to Kamuri had been deposited in May 2024 into the Standard Chartered account of Jacqueline Kavete Mbuli, who told the court she had no idea why the money appeared there and had tried to have the bank reverse it.

Justice Njuguna extended the preservation order on those funds in April 2025, ruling that the need to prevent dissipation of assets under investigation outweighed the CEO’s objections.

Whistleblowers within KNH, speaking to Kenya Insights on condition of anonymity, allege the pattern was broader — that Kamuri used associates to route cash, their loyalty and career advancement intertwined with financial complicity.

On December 29, 2024, Kamuri attended a Board of Management meeting and refused to sign a report that documented anomalies in the Biomax contract, arguing the board had no power to investigate procurement matters.

Seven months earlier, the EACC had already opened its file on exactly those matters. Within weeks, he was suspended.

SH6.7 BILLION IN ROTTING DEBTS AND SH188 MILLION THAT VANISHED

The audit’s financial findings go well beyond the oxygen scandal.

The auditor-general reveals that nearly Sh6.7 billion in patient debts have remained uncollected for more than three years.

Despite the hospital having a credit policy, its unpaid bills grew by over Sh1.6 billion in a single financial year — evidence of a debt recovery operation so dysfunctional it can barely be called one.

The crisis has a face: 17,906 patients who received treatment at KNH and walked out without paying, leaving behind Sh866.6 million in unpaid bills.

The hospital spent Sh74.5 million on outsourced security in 2024/25 yet those guards could not stop nearly 18,000 patients from absconding.

Two murders also took place on the hospital premises during the same period, raising questions about what the security contract was actually purchasing.

More alarming than the absconded patients is Sh188.8 million in revenue the audit found was never officially receipted.

The hospital reported earning over Sh9.5 billion from medical services in 2024/25, but audit teams discovered this substantial sum floating outside the official receipting system, making it impossible to verify whether the income declared was complete or accurate.

When revenue is collected but not receipted, the question is not complicated: where did it go? KNH has not answered that question publicly. The auditor has asked it in the gentlest possible official language. The money, for now, remains a ghost.

Sh188.8 million in revenue was collected but never officially receipted. When money is collected and not recorded, the question is not complicated: where did it go?

The audit further exposes a Sh110 million discrepancy in what KNH says it owes the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority and what KEMSA’s own records show. KNH accounts declare a debt of Sh6.7 million to the supply authority.

KEMSA’s records put the figure at over Sh117 million. The gap of more than Sh110 million is unexplained.

This is not a rounding error.

This is a hospital that either does not know what it owes its medical supplier, or does not want it known.

The finding raises fundamental questions about how KNH manages its procurement liabilities and whether suppliers are being paid double, not at all, or through channels that bypass official accounting entirely.

In the background of all this sits the government’s own failure to honour its obligations.

The audit reveals Sh268 million in grant money owed by the government to KNH for more than three years, with no payment plan and no timeline.

The auditor raised serious doubts about whether this money will ever be recovered.

Combined with the 22 percent underfunding of KNH’s budget, the picture that emerges is of a government that demands accountability from its hospital while exempting itself from the basic obligation of paying what it owes.

A SH10.2 BILLION PENSION HOLE AND THOUSANDS OF RETIREES AT RISK

Hidden beneath the procurement scandals and revenue leakages is a slow-motion human catastrophe that will outlast any individual corruption case.

KNH’s staff pension scheme is sitting on a Sh10.2 billion deficit.

The scheme requires Sh14.6 billion in assets to cover its obligations to current and future retirees. It holds Sh4.3 billion.

That means for every ten shillings it needs, it has less than three.

Thousands of KNH employees — nurses, doctors, radiographers, lab technicians — who have spent their working lives in public service are staring at a retirement system that cannot pay them.

KNH has repeatedly sought government intervention to bridge this gap. The audit found no evidence that any funding has been received and no alternative plan exists to manage the growing liability.

Without a bailout, the hospital faces the prospect of legal action from retirees and the complete collapse of its pension obligations.

A hospital already in technical insolvency, carrying a Sh10.2 billion pension hole it cannot fill, is a hospital that could stop being able to pay its retired staff at any moment.

It is also a hospital struggling to retain its current workforce, who are watching this unfold in real time and calculating their exit.

SHA BILLIONS WITHHELD AS THE HOSPITAL BLEEDS

KNH’s financial collapse has been deepened by the chaotic rollout of the Social Health Authority, the government’s flagship replacement for the National Hospital Insurance Fund.

SHA was launched in October 2024 with promises of faster, more transparent reimbursements.

The reality has been a disaster for facilities across Kenya, and KNH has been no exception. Despite collecting between Sh40 million and Sh60 million daily from patients, KNH was being starved of operational funds by a National Treasury directive, creating critical shortages of blood test reagents, essential drugs and nutritional supplies for inpatients.

The hospital was simultaneously owed approximately Sh1.58 billion by SHA in pending claims.

Nationally, the SHA scandal has taken on dimensions that dwarf individual hospital mismanagement.

A Ministry of Health audit revealed in January 2026 that the authority lost Sh11 billion to fraud between October 2024 and April 2025, with the bulk of false claims submitted by ghost hospitals that existed only on paper.

SHA had paid out Sh50 billion of the Sh93 billion in claims submitted since its inception — a reimbursement rate that hospital associations say proves the scheme cannot cover what it has promised. Parliament’s Health Committee was told SHA owed providers Sh30 billion in pending bills, some inherited from NHIF.

The scheme sold to Kenyans as universal healthcare has become another mechanism for looting, and KNH, already technically insolvent, is caught in the crossfire.

SHA lost Sh11 billion to fraud in its first seven months. KNH is owed Sh1.58 billion in pending claims. The scheme sold as universal healthcare has become another vehicle for looting while patients go without drugs, oxygen and food.

STALLED INFRASTRUCTURE, BROKEN EQUIPMENT AND DEAD PATIENTS

The oxygen plant is not the only stalled project at KNH.

The audit documents a pattern of infrastructure failure that has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions without producing functioning services.

The Sh500 million allocation for a linear accelerator for cancer treatment went unspent because the actual funds were never released.

Existing cancer treatment equipment continues to fail, with patients facing prolonged interruptions to radiotherapy.

Meanwhile, the hospital continues to source oxygen at costs exceeding Sh596 million for the year, keeping 700 patients reliant on external supply for a gas that was supposed to be produced on-site three years ago.

The human consequences of these failures are not abstract.

KNH treated nearly 500,000 Kenyans in the year to June 2025 — 390,000 outpatients and 65,000 inpatients. It performed 37,318 specialised surgeries, 1,045 heart surgeries and 22 kidney implants.

These are people whose lives depended on the hospital functioning.

Two of them were murdered in the wards. Kennedy Kalombotole, arrested in July 2025 for killing Edward Maingi Ndegwa in Ward 7B, was also a suspect in the February 2025 killing of Gilbert Kinyua. Court documents revealed the suspect had first been admitted to KNH’s Intensive Care Unit in November 2022 and migrated through the wards for years without being discharged or expelled.

Security costing Sh74.5 million annually could not detect this. It also could not stop 17,906 patients walking out with nearly Sh867 million in unpaid bills.

The forensic audit KNH itself commissioned in 2023 — to investigate payment irregularities where payee details were manipulated to divert funds to unintended recipients, including fictitious, inflated and unapproved payments — represents yet another thread in the same unravelling cloth. Whether those investigations produced prosecutions has not been confirmed on public record.

The hospital has not updated the public.

Parliament has not pressed for answers. The pattern continues.

THE SYSTEM THAT MADE THIS POSSIBLE

The collapse of KNH is not the story of one bad CEO or one fraudulent contractor.

It is the story of a system that created the conditions for all of it: procurement structures that allow the Ministry of Health to award tenders worth hundreds of millions to entities with forged documents; oversight frameworks so porous that a contractor can deliver oxygen at 60 percent purity and receive extensions rather than termination; and a government that chronically underfunds its flagship hospital while demanding it maintain world-class healthcare standards.

Whistleblowers who spoke to Kenya Insights described KNH under recent leadership as a personal fiefdom where loyalty was rewarded, resistance punished, and the hospital’s considerable financial flows treated as accessible to those with the right connections.

The EACC’s own documents allege that PS Harry Kimtai was approached to assist the CEO amid the oxygen scandal probe, with a whistleblower dossier claiming Sh20 million was delivered to the PS and Sh80 million routed through legislators on the parliamentary health committee.

These are allegations that Kimtai and the named legislators have denied. But the EACC found the dossier sufficiently credible to incorporate into its investigative trail — a detail that should alarm every Kenyan who pays taxes and, one day, may need care from a hospital that has become a crime scene.

KNH Acting CEO Dr Richard Lesiyampe told Kenya Insights that matters raised in the audit are before the Public Investments Committee of Parliament and that the hospital ‘remains committed to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.’

It is the kind of statement institutions issue when they have no better answer. Parliament’s oversight is real and welcome. But Kenya’s history of parliamentary health committee hearings producing accountability rather than additional negotiating leverage for the accused is not encouraging.

THE VERDICT

Kenyatta National Hospital is not facing imminent collapse because it is poorly managed.

It is facing imminent collapse because it has been deliberately milked.

A Sh443 million oxygen plant that does not work. Sh188.8 million in unreceipted revenue.

A Sh10.2 billion pension hole the government refuses to fill. Nearly Sh6.7 billion in uncollected debts.

A former CEO whose assets have been frozen three times over by the same commission that has now recommended his prosecution.

An SHA scheme haemorrhaging billions to ghost facilities while the real hospital that needs the money descends into technical insolvency. A security contract worth Sh74.5 million that could not stop 18,000 patients walking out on their bills or a murder suspect living in the wards for years.

Every shilling stolen from KNH is a shilling that cannot buy a reagent, cannot stock a ward with drugs, cannot pay a retiring nurse her pension, cannot repair a linear accelerator so that a cancer patient does not die waiting for a machine that costs less than what was paid for an oxygen plant that pumps air at half the required purity.

The institution that millions of Kenyans depend on as their last resort is being destroyed from within. That destruction has names, court files, frozen bank accounts and forged tender documents attached to it.

Kenya Insights calls on the DPP to move without further delay on the EACC’s June 2025 recommendations.

We call on the National Treasury to immediately fund the pension deficit and the SHA reimbursement backlog owed to KNH.

We call on Parliament to stop accepting money from people it is supposed to be investigating.

And we call on every Kenyan who has ever taken a sick child or ageing parent to Kenyatta National Hospital to understand that what is being destroyed is theirs — and to demand that it stop.