Kenya Insights

Author: Guest Writer

  • The Listing That Doesn’t Lie: What the Market Isn’t Saying About Family Bank’s NSE Debut

    The Listing That Doesn’t Lie: What the Market Isn’t Saying About Family Bank’s NSE Debut

    Family Bank has arrived at the Nairobi Securities Exchange bearing gifts. A 55.4 percent jump in full-year 2025 profit after tax. A Q1 2026 net income of KSh 1.6 billion, up 52.6 percent year-on-year. Total assets ballooning past KSh 230 billion. A private placement that raised KSh 8 billion against a KSh 6.09 billion target.

    The numbers, on their face, are a celebration.

    The listing on June 23, 2026 at KSh 18 per share, valuing the mid-tier lender at roughly KSh 29.9 billion, is the culmination of a two-decade ambition by founder Titus Kiondo Muya, a man who once controlled the institution so comprehensively that eight of its top ten shareholders were members of his own family.

    Mainstream coverage has dutifully reproduced the headline metrics. Analysts at Standard Investment Bank, the lead transaction adviser, have written admiringly of the bank’s momentum.

    GCR Ratings recently assigned Family Bank a national-scale issuer rating of BBB+(KE), with a stable outlook. The Capital Markets Authority cleared the listing on June 11. The NSE is eager for new blood after years of listings drought.

    But something else is happening beneath the surface, away from the press releases and the choreographed optimism of roadshow season. Among independent market watchers, private equity professionals, and credit analysts who do not have a mandate to cheerlead this deal, a different conversation is taking place.

    It is not a conversation about catastrophe. Family Bank is not a broken institution. The hesitation, rather, concerns a cluster of structural issues that the listing event itself will not fix, and that a sudden injection of public market scrutiny could actually intensify.

    This is that conversation.

    1. THE PROFIT ENGINE RUNS ON GOVERNMENT PAPER, NOT LENDING MUSCLE

    Start with the most fundamental question any analyst asks about a bank: where is the money actually coming from? For Family Bank, the answer in recent quarters points uncomfortably toward Nairobi’s government securities market rather than the MSME lending engine the bank markets itself around.

    Kenya’s banking sector has been gripped for several years by a structural reluctance to lend to the private sector. With gross NPL ratios hitting a twenty-year high of 17.4 percent across the industry in Q1 2025 before moderating slightly to 16.9 percent by September 2025, and with private sector credit growth languishing in low single digits through much of 2024, banks have rotated heavily into Treasury bills and bonds, instruments that are risk-free by sovereign guarantee and have offered attractive yields. Family Bank, by its own financial architecture, has not been immune to this flight to safety. A significant portion of the net interest income surge that powered the bank’s headline profit numbers is attributable to income from government securities, not from the competitive grind of commercial and MSME lending.

    “A significant portion of the net interest income surge that powered Family Bank’s headline profit numbers is attributable to income from government securities, not from the competitive grind of commercial and MSME lending.”

    This matters enormously for investors taking a long view. If the bank’s profit growth is primarily a function of the macro interest rate environment, it is inherently fragile.

    The Central Bank of Kenya reduced its benchmark lending rate from 13.0 percent in early 2024 to 10.0 percent by end-2025 and has held it at 8.75 percent through mid-2026. Treasury bond coupon rates, while still attractive in historical terms, are compressing as the rate cycle turns.

    The same environment that supercharged government securities income is softening. And as private sector credit growth ticks up, rising to 9.3 percent in May 2026 from 7.1 percent in April, the pressure on banks to shift back toward lending will intensify, exposing whichever institutions have built their profit narratives most heavily on the sovereign tilt.

    Family Bank’s loan book grew 12.6 percent year-on-year to KSh 108.4 billion in Q1 2026, which is reasonable but hardly exceptional by the standards of a bank attempting to break into Kenya’s Tier 1 group.

    Meanwhile, the bank’s loan-to-deposit ratio remains constrained by a deposit base growing faster than its ability to deploy capital productively into credit. The SIB initiation report notes that the loan book grew 10.1 percent in Q1 2025, and describes this as “the fastest growth rate amongst Tier I and Tier II banks,” but in absolute terms Family Bank’s loan book at that point sat at KSh 96.2 billion, modest for an institution claiming to be on the cusp of Tier 1 status.

    The structural question that no press release will answer is whether Family Bank can sustain 50-plus percent profit growth once the government securities windfall compresses further and the bank must compete on actual credit quality, pricing discipline, and collection efficiency.

    2. THE ACHILLES HEEL IS NOT A METAPHOR: SME CREDIT IN A BROKEN ECONOMY

    Standard Investment Bank’s initiation coverage used the phrase “Achilles’ heel” deliberately. The SME and MSME segment that Family Bank has built its entire brand identity around, the “Preferred Bank for Biashara” positioning, is precisely the segment of the Kenyan economy that has sustained the most punishing damage from the past three years of macroeconomic turbulence.

    Government payment delays to contractors, suppliers and service providers have cascaded through the MSME economy. High interest rates through 2024 crushed debt serviceability. Consumers facing rising fuel costs, elevated food prices, and shrunken household incomes pulled back on discretionary spending, hitting the small traders, manufacturers, and service businesses that are Family Bank’s core clientele.

    The gross NPL ratio for the industry hit 17.4 percent in Q1 2025, described by CBK’s own data as the highest in over two decades. George Munga Amolo, Managing Partner at AMG Consulting Group, noted in January 2026 that NPLs in the sector rose because of government pending bills and decreased household incomes. He expected some recovery in 2026 and 2027, but recovery is not restoration.

    For Family Bank specifically, the gross NPL ratio hovered in the 14 to 16.6 percent range across 2025 periods. The SIB initiation report cited a figure of 14.2 percent in Q1 2025, below the industry average but still significantly elevated. Gross non-performing loans grew 7 percent year-on-year to KSh 14.9 billion in Q1 2025. Provisions spiked 59.6 percent to KSh 333.8 million in the same period, reflecting the bank’s cautious, if belated, acknowledgement that the MSME credit book carries real stress.

    The NPL coverage ratio stood at 58.6 percent on a reported basis, with adjusted coverage of around 80 percent in Q1 2025. An 80 percent coverage ratio is not poor, but it is not the 100-plus percent coverage that gives sophisticated credit analysts genuine comfort. For a bank with an NPL ratio north of 14 percent and a loan book concentrated in the most economically vulnerable segments of Kenyan business, the buffer is thinner than the profit headlines suggest.

    “The market that Family Bank has built its identity around is precisely the segment of the Kenyan economy that sustained the most punishing damage from the past three years.”

    There is also the SME loyalty paradox. Family Bank’s brand proposition is that it serves businesses others ignore: the market trader in Gikomba, the agribusiness operator in Kiambu, the small manufacturer in Thika. These customers are real, and the loyalty is genuine. But the lifecycle economics of SME banking create a structural problem. When a Family Bank MSME client succeeds, when they grow, formalise, access better financial products, and begin generating the kind of turnover that puts them in the commercial banking segment, they become a target for Equity Group, KCB, NCBA, and Co-operative Bank, institutions with stronger product ranges, wider agency networks, better digital platforms, and access to cheaper funding. The bank’s own SIB advisers acknowledged that customers migrating to larger banks as they scale “may prove to be the Achilles’ heel.”

    This customer churn problem is not unique to Family Bank. But it is particularly acute for a lender whose Tier 1 ambitions require demonstrating that it can retain and grow commercial relationships. There is an awkward tension between being the Preferred Bank for Biashara and being the bank that biashara graduates out of.

    3. THE KSH 18 LISTING PRICE: DISCOUNT OR DANGER SIGNAL?

    The listing price of KSh 18 per share was set at the conclusion of the 2025 private placement, when sophisticated institutional investors, fund managers, pension funds, insurance companies and high-net-worth individuals put KSh 8 billion into the bank at that price. The oversubscription, 131 percent of target, is frequently cited as a validation of the valuation.

    But Standard Investment Bank’s own research, published in August 2025, estimated fair value at KSh 16.54 per share, below the listing price. SIB’s methodology used a terminal price-to-book ratio of 1.26x based on precedent transaction averages, with a cost of equity of 21.9 percent and a weighted average cost of capital of 19.1 percent. The analysis reflects a bank that is correctly valued for what it is, not a discount story waiting to be arbitraged.

    The book value dimension adds another layer of complexity. As of Q1 2026, total shareholders’ funds stood at KSh 34.77 billion. With 1.66 billion shares, the book value per share was approximately KSh 20.91.

    This means that at the listing price of KSh 18, Family Bank is technically listing at a discount to its own book value, a price-to-book ratio of roughly 0.86x. On the surface, this appears to represent an opportunity. In reality, it raises a deeper question: why, if the bank is genuinely as well-positioned as its management claims, are sophisticated investors reluctant to price it above book?

    The answer lies partly in the sector context. Listed Kenyan banks traded at compressed valuations throughout the 2022-2024 period as NPLs rose and sentiment soured.

    Even the NSE’s banking index recovery in 2025, where KCB rose 32 percent, Equity 34 percent, and Co-operative Bank 25 percent, was concentrated in the large-cap Tier 1 names with stronger governance track records, diversified revenue streams, and East African subsidiaries providing growth optionality that Family Bank cannot yet offer. The market’s willingness to pay a premium is calibrated to scale, brand strength, and diversification, attributes that Family Bank is still building.

    For a new NSE entrant seeking institutional allocation, the comparison set matters. A portfolio manager who can buy Equity Group at a well-established price-to-earnings multiple with a 34 percent PAT trajectory and fifty-plus million customers across six East African markets is a demanding counterpart against which to pitch an SME-focused Kenyan-only bank at a debut price slightly above the estimates of its own transaction adviser.

    4. THE MTN BOMB TICKING BENEATH THE BALANCE SHEET

    One item in Family Bank’s financial calendar is not receiving the attention it deserves. On December 17, 2026, a KSh 4.0 billion medium-term note matures. The MTN, priced at a 13.0 percent annual coupon and issued in 2021 at 147.3 percent subscription of a KSh 3.0 billion target, falls due just six months after the NSE listing.

    This alone is not a crisis.

    Family Bank has previously redeemed a KSh 2.02 billion MTN in April 2021 without incident, and its current capital position, with a GCR Core Capital Ratio of 16.9 percent and total shareholders’ funds of KSh 34.77 billion, is superficially comfortable. But the timing is precisely the kind of detail that makes careful analysts nervous.

    A bank listing on a public exchange in June 2026 and then facing a KSh 4 billion capital refinancing event in December 2026 is operating with a compressed execution window.

    The listing by introduction raises no new equity. There is no fresh capital injection. The KSh 8 billion private placement of 2025, while buoyant, has already been deployed into the balance sheet.

    If secondary market trading post-listing is thin, or if the bank’s stock underperforms in its debut months because of the governance and NPL concerns discussed in this analysis, Family Bank’s ability to access public equity markets for refinancing before the December deadline becomes constrained.

    The bank says it does not need additional capital.

    Analysts at SIB have described the MTN maturity as simply framing “an opportune moment” for the listing. Both may be true. But the contingency risk, the scenario in which the December refinancing requires market access that a poorly-received listing would close off, is not zero.

    5. THE FAMILY PROBLEM THAT GOVERNANCE DOCUMENTS CANNOT FULLY RESOLVE

    Perhaps no aspect of Family Bank’s story is more thoroughly documented, or more persistently unresolved, than the question of the Muya family’s control.

    In December 2020, Titus Muya himself acknowledged that the family’s combined stake of approximately 60 percent would need to come down. “By ceding ownership as I am doing, the bank will be able to grow its loan book, attract investors and grow towards achieving its targets,” he said in an interview at the time. What followed was a decade-long sequence of dilution that moved at a pace calibrated more to the family’s comfort than to regulatory urgency.

    By the time of the 2025 private placement, the Muya family and associated entities held a combined stake of approximately 43.3 percent. Eight of the top ten shareholder positions were held by Muya-family interests. Titus Muya personally held 5.6 percent, above the Central Bank of Kenya’s five percent individual cap. The private placement, from which the Muya family largely sat out, diluted the combined family stake to an estimated 34 percent. Titus Muya’s direct holding fell to 4.4 percent, bringing him below the regulatory ceiling. But Daykio Plantations, his property company, holds 9.53 percent. The estate of the late Rachael Njeri Muya, also family-associated, holds 10.05 percent.

    “GCR Ratings explicitly flagged the founding family’s 31.9 percent shareholding as ‘viewed unfavourably,’ with the bank ‘actively working to further dilute’ it. That statement appeared in a credit rating report, not a shareholder letter.”

    GCR Ratings, whose BBB+(KE) rating has been widely cited as a positive ahead of the listing, explicitly flagged the founding family’s 31.9 percent shareholding as “viewed unfavourably,” with the bank “actively working to further dilute the founding family’s shareholding to comply with regulatory expectations.”

    That statement appeared in a credit rating report issued just before the listing, not a shareholder letter or investor presentation.

    The listing by introduction, it should be noted, provides a dilution pathway for shareholders who need to reduce their holdings to comply with CBK requirements.

    The Muya family, still collectively holding around 34 percent of a publicly listed institution after many years of promised dilution, now has a public exchange through which to offload shares. This is beneficial to the family’s regulatory compliance. Whether it is beneficial to the stability of a stock’s price is a different matter.

    Sustained family selling into thin secondary market liquidity is a suppressive force on any share price, and will hang over this counter in a way that Equity Group or KCB do not face.

    To be precise: this is not a corruption allegation or a governance failure in the egregious sense. Family Bank under Nancy Njau has made measurable progress. The board has professionalised. The DFI relationships, 50 million euros from the European Investment Bank development arm and 20 million dollars from British International Investment, reflect credibility with sophisticated institutional lenders who conduct their own due diligence.

    But for minority investors who are new to this stock, the governance optics of a publicly listed bank where 34 percent of shares are concentrated in a founding family is a real and legitimate concern that governance statements alone cannot dissolve.

    6. WHAT 2023 TAUGHT US: THE MARKET HAS A MEMORY

    The February 2024 rights issue collapse is the piece of Family Bank history that everyone in the market knows and few in the official listing narrative wish to dwell on. In December 2023, Family Bank launched a rights issue targeting KSh 9.3 billion, offering 643.5 million new shares to existing shareholders. The exercise closed on January 31, 2024. It raised KSh 252 million. That is 2.7 percent of the target.

    SIB’s own research acknowledged that the rights issue failure was “partly due to the pricing of the issuance and market conditions.” Both factors are relevant. The pricing was high relative to market sentiment, and 2023 was a brutal year for Kenyan equities and MSME confidence. But the rights issue failure also reflected something harder to quantify: an investor base that was not sufficiently convinced, at that price and in those conditions, to put additional money into this institution.

    The 2025 private placement success, which raised KSh 8 billion against a KSh 6.09 billion target from fund managers and pension funds, redeemed some of that reputation. But private placements are distributed to sophisticated, pre-selected investors in a controlled setting.

    A public secondary market with retail participation, price discovery, and open-book scrutiny is a different environment entirely.

    The NSE has suffered its own credibility wounds.

    The bourse lost significant equity value over 2022-2023 as large-cap stalwarts sold off. The All Share Index fell 8 percent in 2025 even as banking blue chips recovered. Post-listing trading liquidity for mid-tier bank counters on the NSE is notoriously thin. HF Group, Diamond Trust Bank, and other second-tier lenders trade with volumes that rarely move their prices meaningfully.

    Family Bank’s 6,345 existing shareholders are not a deep liquidity pool. Until institutional investors begin trading the counter in secondary markets, the price discovery function of the listing will be constrained, and the valuation signal will be noisy.

    7. THE TIER 1 ASPIRATION AS BOTH PROMISE AND PRESSURE

    Family Bank’s stated ambition is to transition from Tier 2 to Kenya’s elite Tier 1 group, a category currently occupied by Equity Group, KCB, Co-operative Bank, NCBA, and Absa. The strategic plan for 2025 to 2029 envisions a holding company structure, East and Central African expansion targeting Rwanda, Uganda, the DRC and Ethiopia, and KSh 1 billion in digital infrastructure investment.

    These are serious aspirations, and they are not without foundation.

    The bank’s asset base has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 31.4 percent from FY2020 to FY2024. Its digital credentials, the first bank in Kenya to offer paperless banking via smart card, the first in Africa to launch mVisa, are genuine. The 96-branch network spanning 32 counties is substantial for a Tier 2 institution.

    But Tier 1 ambition comes with public market accountability that OTC trading never imposed. Every quarterly result will now be compared against listed peers. The cost-to-income ratio, above 60 percent, is higher than the Tier 1 group average and will be watched by analysts who do not have the patience of a private shareholder.

    The regional expansion plan, capital-intensive and execution-dependent, will require follow-on capital raises that have historically not gone smoothly for this bank. And the consolidated capital requirements under the Business Laws (Amendment) Act, which mandates phased increases to KSh 10 billion minimum core capital by 2029, apply pressure across the entire sector. While Family Bank is comfortably above current thresholds, the escalating requirements mean that the growth capital requirement does not diminish: it compounds.

    The irony is that the listing, intended to signal readiness for Tier 1, also makes visible all the structural gaps that remain. Under OTC obscurity, the bank could manage its narrative. Under NSE scrutiny, the narrative is tested every trading day.

    THE VERDICT: A LEGITIMATE OPPORTUNITY WRAPPED IN LEGITIMATE RISK

    To be clear about what this analysis is not: it is not a verdict that Family Bank will fail, or that the listing is fraudulent, or that investors should avoid the counter entirely.

    The bank has genuine strengths.

    The management team under Nancy Njau has delivered two consecutive years of exceptional profit growth.

    The DFI funding relationships indicate credibility. The GCR rating, while it contains the uncomfortable family-shareholding caveat, is a stable BBB+(KE), not a speculative grade.

    The dividend commitment of at least 30 percent payout offers income investors something to hold onto in thin trading conditions.

    What experienced market analysts are genuinely hesitant about is the gap between the listing’s marketing and its mechanics.

    The gap between the profit growth and its sustainability once sovereign securities income normalises. The gap between the governance improvements and the 34 percent family concentration that remains.

    The gap between the Tier 1 aspiration and the execution capital required to achieve it. And the gap between the December 2026 MTN maturity and the liquidity that a debut-stage public market counter can reliably mobilise.

    Family Bank is not a distressed story dressed up as a success.

    It is something more nuanced and more instructive: a genuinely improving mid-tier institution being introduced to a public market at a moment when several of its most significant risks are simultaneously live.

    The listing provides a platform.

    The next twelve months, encompassing Q2 and Q3 2026 asset quality data, the December MTN refinancing, and the trajectory of family stake reduction, will reveal what Family Bank actually is beneath the record profits.

    In Kenya’s capital markets, the moment of the listing is rarely the moment of truth.

    The moment of truth comes six months later, when the fanfare is gone and the quarterly disclosures are open to the whole market. For Family Bank, that moment will be more revealing than anything that happens on June 23.

  • On Uthamaki’s Bogeyman Politics: Time to Call the Demonization of President Ruto What It Is

    On Uthamaki’s Bogeyman Politics: Time to Call the Demonization of President Ruto What It Is

    By David Ndii

    In the days leading to President William Ruto’s swearing-in, some supporters reportedly sent apologies to the President-elect explaining that they would not attend the Garden Party at State House. Instead, after leaving Kasarani, they would “turn right” to address what they described as a long-standing matter.

    That “long-standing matter” was historical land injustices in Kiambu. Their immediate target was said to be the vast Kenyatta family estates between Kasarani and Gatundu, though not exclusively those holdings.

    As I wrote in my earlier op-ed, Of Land and the Luo Bogeyman, during my childhood one could walk from Limuru to Gatundu without stepping on land owned by a peasant farmer.

    The Kikuyu class divide between Uthamaki and Mungiki remains arguably Kenya’s most potent political problem. As explained in the op-ed, it contributed to the fallout between Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Jomo Kenyatta and to Daniel arap Moi’s rise to the vice presidency in what I have previously described as the Kikuyu-Kalenjin “power-for-land” pact.

    Kikuyu class conflict has long been suppressed through the political tactic of manufacturing a siege mentality by inventing external enemies or political bogeymen. Jaramogi became the first victim of this politics. When it appeared that Jomo Kenyatta’s health was failing and Tom Mboya seemed poised to ascend to power, Mboya was assassinated and the bogeyman narrative expanded to target the entire Luo community through the 1969 oathing ceremonies.

    Jomo survived the 1969 heart attack, but by the mid-1970s the question was not whether succession would happen, but when.

    Those of us who, as we say in Gikuyu, have “eaten a bit more salt” can relate the demonization of William Ruto to the succession politics that unfolded during the Kenyatta era between the “Change the Constitution” campaign and the Njonjo inquiry. Those unfamiliar with that history can revisit it in Karimi and Ochieng’s book, The Kenyatta Succession.

    Moi began his presidency by attempting to appease Uthamaki. I recall him frequently speaking Kikuyu and, on one occasion, delivering an entire prayer in the language. “Fuata Nyayo” was intended as an olive branch. But Uthamaki would have none of it.

    The bogeyman campaign quickly began. How, people asked, could the country be led by a herdsman? Kikuyu masses were reassured that Moi was merely a passing cloud and that normal service would soon resume.

    The hostility peaked during the 1983 Rungiri church service where Kiambu tycoon Samuel Githegi, in the presence of Charles Njonjo, declared: iguthua ndongoria itikinyagira nyeki — a flock led by a lame sheep does not find pasture.

    Many Kenyans, particularly younger generations and those unfamiliar with history, believe the violence that accompanied the return of multiparty politics in 1992 was unprecedented. In reality, the violence mirrored the political turmoil that preceded the 1963 elections.

    Yet Moi, the supposed bogeyman, the “passing cloud,” and the “limping sheep,” retired on his own terms.

    Eventually, Uthamaki returned to power. Ironically, it was the political calculations of the so-called bogeyman alliance that made it possible: Moi’s Uhuru project and Raila Odinga’s “Kibaki Tosha” declaration. Moi appeared to believe that safeguarding his post-retirement interests required returning power to Uthamaki. Raila, meanwhile, realized that a divided opposition would ultimately hand victory to Uhuru Kenyatta.

    Almost overnight, Raila became a Kikuyu hero. But the alliance was short-lived.

    Mwai Kibaki was elected under a new political dispensation that promised to end tribalism and deliver a new constitution within 100 days. Uthamaki, however, had different ideas, which John Michuki famously rationalized through the metaphor of “handling liver” to describe the slippery nature of power.

    Kibaki’s capture by Uthamaki ideology cost him the disputed 2007 re-election and pushed the country to the brink of civil war. Had the NARC Memorandum of Understanding been honoured, Kibaki would likely have secured a second term with ease.

    Instead, Uthamaki embarked on what was described as gucokia rui mukaro — returning the river to its original course. Michuki began speaking Kikuyu in official meetings. Jomo Kenyatta’s portrait replaced Moi’s on the currency. The NARC dream collapsed, and the country has continued paying the price ever since.

    I briefly advised Uhuru Kenyatta when he was opposition leader. The stint was short-lived because I lacked the deferential temperament expected of palace courtiers. One piece of advice I gave him was to rise above ethnic political mobilization.

    Our last conversation was a brief phone call after I watched him on television being symbolically enthroned as muthamaki by Michuki and others. Had he resisted that path, he might have avoided ending up at the International Criminal Court. Then again, he might never have become president, considering that ICC sympathy significantly boosted his political fortunes.

    The Uhuru-Ruto alliance was born out of an existential threat. They understood that if they did not stand together, they would fall separately. But once the ICC threat subsided, Uthamaki reverted to its default settings. “Hustler” and “Tanga Tanga” politics followed.

    Uhuru’s legacy, in my view, will forever be tainted by the Building Bridges Initiative, the 2022 Bomas coup allegations, and continued attempts to undermine his successor. Why? Two reasons stand out.

    The first is money.

    Take the 11,000-acre Ruiru landholding. Northlands City alone occupies about 5,000 acres. At a conservative estimate of Sh50 million per acre, that translates to roughly Sh250 billion in land value, much of it surrounded by longstanding questions regarding acquisition records.

    The second is dynastic hubris.

    The 2010 Constitution outlawed individual portraits on Kenyan currency. When new currency designs were reportedly presented to Kibaki, with Uhuru serving as Finance Minister, Kibaki allegedly reacted angrily. A compromise was eventually reached, replacing the portrait with the Kenyatta International Convention Centre while still prominently featuring Jomo Kenyatta’s statue.

    I am also told he reacted similarly to the proposed Bomas of Kenya Convention Centre project during a meeting in Paris, allegedly because it would overshadow the KICC.

    To my friend Hassan Omar, you owe no apology for speaking your truth.

    To my Kalenjin brothers and sisters, remain calm. This too shall pass. Moi overcame it, and William Ruto will as well.

    To the opposition, Kikuyu voters have for many election cycles been mobilized to elect “one of our own” while simultaneously voting against Raila Odinga. There is little reason for them to wake up early and vote for you now. Uhuru Kenyatta and Rigathi Gachagua do not possess a unified Kikuyu vote to deliver. They are pursuing personal political interests.

    To Uhuru Kenyatta, Rigathi Gachagua, Uthamaki ideologues, and ethnic chauvinists more broadly, normal service is not resuming. The bogeyman politics has run its course.

    And to my fellow sons and daughters of Gikuyu and Mumbi, I leave you with three questions: What has Uthamaki done for us? How exactly has President Ruto wronged us? Kihooto kiha?

    Writer is the chairperson of the Presidential Council of Economic Advisers.

    Originally published on X, May 27, 2026

  • Bia Tosha’s Claim For Injunction Is Designed To Sabotage The Sh300bn Sale of EABL Shares

    Bia Tosha’s Claim For Injunction Is Designed To Sabotage The Sh300bn Sale of EABL Shares

    The corridors of the High Court witnessed a high-stakes legal showdown on Friday as East African Breweries PLC (EABL) and Kenya Breweries Limited (KBL) fiercely pushed back against an attempt to freeze a landmark Sh300 billion ($2.3 billion) corporate share transaction.

    For the respondents, the proceedings were less about a genuine legal grievance and more about fending off what their legal representatives described as “blatant commercial sabotage” by a local distributor, Bia Tosha (BT).

    The distributor has sought an injunction to halt the multi-billion-shilling transfer of EABL shares, anchoring their application on a decade-old dispute over beer distribution routes and an alleged Sh38 million in goodwill. It is a move that has left the respondents both deeply frustrated and deeply concerned about the broader implications for the country’s investment climate.

    Addressing the court, the respondents’ legal team did not mince words, characterizing the application as a severe abuse of the judicial process. They pointed out the sheer absurdity of using an unadmitted, localized distribution dispute to hold an international transaction of immense national economic importance hostage.

    “There is absolutely zero legal or factual nexus between local beer delivery routes in Nairobi and the international transfer of EABL shares,” the respondents’ legal counsel argued before the judge. “What we are witnessing is an attempt to use the courts for extortionate leverage, risking massive Foreign Direct Investment that would immensely benefit the national exchequer.”

    The respondents expressed a profound sense of exasperation over the petitioner’s legal maneuvers. Having already had a similar application dismissed by Justice Momuye on April 9 for lacking merit, the distributor moved to the Court of Appeal, only to rush back to the High Court 26 days later seeking the exact same interim orders. The respondents termed this “a classic case of forum shopping.”

    Speaking to the broader impact of the protracted litigation, representatives for EABL and KBL shared their concerns over the chilling message this sends to the global market.

    “It is deeply concerning that a transaction of this magnitude can be repeatedly threatened without the petitioner even offering an undertaking as to damages,” a representative noted, highlighting the immense value destruction that could befall thousands of institutional and retail shareholders—including employee provident funds—if the deal were to collapse. “We are well-capitalized, blue-chip entities. Should the petitioner ever succeed in their underlying Sh38 million claim, we are more than capable of settling it. But blowing up a Sh300 billion transaction to secure it is wildly disproportionate and unjust.”

    Despite the delays, there was a palpable sense of resolve from the respondents’ side as the session concluded. They remain steadfast in their commitment to protecting shareholder value and ensuring that corporate transactions are not derailed by frivolous litigation.

    The presiding judge has reserved the highly anticipated ruling for May 28, a date that the respondents, the Nairobi Securities Exchange, and international investors will be watching with bated breath.

  • The Big Gaffe That Has Become Kenya’s Foreign Ministry

    The Big Gaffe That Has Become Kenya’s Foreign Ministry

    There is a scene that plays out repeatedly at Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs. A presidential visit is announced. The Cabinet Secretary issues a communique calling it a state visit. The host country’s foreign ministry then issues its own communique, quietly but unmistakably, describing a different and lesser category of engagement altogether.

    Kenya’s ambassador to that country, who lives in the country and has read the official protocol, confirms the host’s version.

    Kenya’s own Principal Secretary confirms the host’s version. And then Musalia Mudavadi, the man constitutionally responsible for all of this, repeats his original error.

    This is not a story about a misplaced adjective in a press release.

    This is a story about what happens when a ministry of state is run without institutional discipline, without intellectual rigour, and without the most basic respect for the professional vocabulary of the trade.

    Under the stewardship of Prime Cabinet Secretary Mudavadi and Principal Secretary Abraham Korir Sing’oei, Kenya’s Foreign Ministry has become, in the blunt assessment of multiple serving ambassadors who spoke to Kenya Insights on condition of anonymity, an embarrassment to the country it claims to represent.

    A foreign affairs minister who cannot distinguish visit types is the diplomatic equivalent of a finance minister who cannot read a balance sheet.

    THE PROTOCOL SCANDAL THAT REFUSES TO GO AWAY

    The distinction between a state visit and an official visit is not a technicality for pedants.

    It is the fundamental vocabulary of international relations, codified in diplomatic protocol dating back to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, what former Indonesian Ambassador to Kenya Hery Saripudin has described as the bible of diplomacy.

    A state visit is extended by a head of state, carries full ceremonial honours including a 21-gun salute and a state banquet, and signals the highest elevation of bilateral ties.

    An official visit is meaningful but categorically subordinate: fewer ceremonies, more working meetings, and explicitly less symbolic weight.

    Every foreign minister on earth is expected to know this without being told.

    Mudavadi does not appear to.

    When President William Ruto travelled to Italy on April 20, Rome had designated the engagement an official visit, the first of its kind between the two countries.

    Kenya’s own ambassador to Italy, Fredrick Matwang’a, confirmed this explicitly and on the record.

    PS Sing’oei, in a social media post the day before Mudavadi held a briefing on the subject, also described it correctly as an official visit.

    And yet Mudavadi, on April 13, on April 19, and again upon Ruto’s arrival in Rome on April 20, called it a state visit, three times, without correction, without shame.

    This was not the first time. In March 2024, Mudavadi’s office billed Ruto’s visit to Japan as a state visit.

    Tokyo had classified it as an official visit. State House briefly echoed the mislabel before the Japanese foreign ministry’s quiet correction circulated through diplomatic channels.

    Earlier this year, when Mozambican President Daniel Chapo arrived in Nairobi, Mudavadi downgraded what the foreign ministry had designated a state visit, calling it a working visit upon Chapo’s arrival.

    The ministry then revised its own language again the following day.

    Three different officials, three different designations, across two days of a single visit.

    The Mudavadi protocol failure has also spread laterally through the government like a contagion. Finance PS Dr. Chris Kiptoo publicly described the Italy engagement as a state visit in his own social media post.

    Presidential technology envoy Philip Thigo did the same.

    The minister’s inflated language has become the official language of an entire layer of senior officials who either do not know better or are afraid to contradict the man at the top.

    THE SING’OEI PROBLEM

    PS Sing’oei

    To understand the full extent of Kenya’s diplomatic malfunction, one must look past Mudavadi to the man who runs the machinery on a daily basis.

    Korir Sing’oei has served as Principal Secretary at the Foreign Affairs ministry since 2022, appointed directly from his role as Senior Legal Adviser to the Executive Office of the Deputy President.

    He arrived with credentials: an advocate of the High Court, a Fulbright scholar, a graduate of the University of Minnesota and the University of Pretoria, a published academic on minority rights and African property law.

    He is, by any measure, an intelligent man.

    He is also, by the record of the past three years, a catastrophically undisciplined one.

    In February 2025, Sing’oei posted a doctored video to his official X account depicting CNN’s Fareed Zakaria praising Kenya’s role in the Sudan peace process.

    The video was a deepfake, an AI-generated fabrication that had no connection to CNN, to Zakaria, or to reality.

    After a public backlash that drew international attention, Sing’oei was forced into a public apology, promising to enrol in the School of AI Diplomacy at the Foreign Services Academy.

    That a Principal Secretary of foreign affairs required remedial education in media verification was, to put it diplomatically, a significant headline.

    Months later, the Iran episode arrived. On April 1, 2026, Sing’oei disclosed a phone call with a senior UAE official describing the repercussions of IRGC attacks on Gulf infrastructure, language that placed Kenya’s voice explicitly on one side of a live geopolitical conflict.

    The Iranian Embassy in Nairobi issued a pointed rebuttal within days, accusing Kenya of mischaracterising international law and ignoring the wider context of the conflict.

    Kenya, which has historically maintained a non-aligned posture honed across decades of regional turbulence, suddenly found itself being publicly lectured on the UN Charter by a foreign embassy in its own capital.

    Before that, Sing’oei had publicly clashed with Senate Speaker Amason Kingi over Kenya’s Somaliland policy, using social media to lecture the Speaker of a constitutionally co-equal arm of government about the limits of his mandate.

    Senators debated summoning the PS for contempt.

    Sing’oei’s office also oversaw a leaking, fractious relationship with heads of mission across multiple embassies, with The Standard reporting sustained clashes in Nairobi’s most consequential postings including Paris, Tokyo, London, Berlin, and Pretoria.

    Sources within the ministry described an institutional culture in which the headquarters felt less like a strategic nerve centre and more like an obstacle.

    Kenya’s once-formidable diplomatic brand has been replaced with something closer to performative noise: high on ambition, empty on execution.

    THE STANDARD THAT WAS SET BEFORE THEM

    It is worth remembering what Kenya’s foreign policy leadership used to look like, because the contrast with the current dispensation is not subtle.

    Monica Juma, who served as Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary under President Uhuru Kenyatta from 2017 to 2018, brought to the role a career diplomat’s rigour and a scholar’s analytical depth.

    She had served as Kenya’s concurrent Ambassador to Ethiopia, Djibouti, the African Union, IGAD and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, all simultaneously, from a base in Addis Ababa.

    She knew the protocol frameworks from lived operational experience. She did not confuse visit categories. She did not post deepfakes.

    Amina Mohammed, who held the portfolio from 2013 to 2016 before her elevation to the United Nations, built Kenya’s reputation as a serious continental power through a combination of diplomatic discretion, multilateral engagement, and meticulous attention to Kenya’s non-aligned positioning.

    Her tenure produced substantive architecture in AU diplomacy, East African security cooperation, and Somalia’s political transition that Kenya facilitated from behind.

    She did not need to be corrected by the host country’s foreign ministry about the nature of a presidential visit.

    Alfred Mutua, Mudavadi’s immediate predecessor, completed a functional diplomatic handover that included operational achievements in the visa-free initiative, the hosting of the Africa Climate Summit, and the activation of several bilateral instruments.

    Whatever Mutua’s political limitations, he was replaced partly because President Ruto wanted a heavier political figure in the role.

    What Ruto got instead was a heavier political figure with a lighter grasp of the role’s professional requirements.

    THE TANZANIA CATASTROPHE AND WHAT IT REVEALED

    The single most damaging episode of Mudavadi’s tenure was the Tanzania crisis of May 2025. In that month, Kenyan human rights activist Boniface Mwangi, along with former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, former Justice Minister Martha Karua, Law Society of Kenya Council member Gloria Kimani and others, travelled to Tanzania to observe the treason trial of opposition leader Tundu Lissu, a constitutionally protected activity under the EAC Common Market Protocol.

    Tanzanian authorities detained and deported several members of the group.

    Mwangi was not merely deported.

    He was held incommunicado, subjected to what he and Amnesty International described as beatings and torture including sexual assault, and abandoned at a border post in Ukunda, Kwale County.

    Mudavadi, appearing on Citizen TV on the day of Mwangi’s deportation, offered not outrage but a lecture.

    He told the nation that Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu had a point about Kenyan activists. He said he could not fault Suluhu. He said there was some truth in her remarks.

    A man had been tortured and abandoned at a border crossing. Kenya’s Foreign Minister responded by endorsing the philosophical basis of the conduct that led to his torture.

    For critics and former diplomats who spoke to this publication, this was an official declaration that Kenya had abandoned the protection of its citizens abroad as an active foreign policy commitment.

    THE REBUTTAL: WHAT SING’OEI’S ALLIES ARE SAYING

    Following publication of this story, a formal rebuttal was circulated online by parties whose language, framing and knowledge of internal ministry detail suggest alignment with Sing’oei himself or his immediate circle.

    The document describes this publication’s original story as a sensationalist smear relying almost entirely on unnamed sources and argues that Sing’oei is Kenya’s most dynamic and effective Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary.

    It makes five central claims in his defence.

    Each of them deserves a direct answer.

    REBUTTAL CLAIM 1: THE AMBASSADOR BASUNA INCIDENT WAS TABLOID EXAGGERATION

    The very same article quotes Ambassador Basuna herself on record: ‘He is too busy, his portfolio is large and complex… it was not mine to judge really… I did not take offence.’ She explicitly declined to validate the anonymous drama. There were no tears and no humiliation. This was not disrespect but accountability.

    This argument is a textbook case of using a single on-the-record denial to erase a much larger pattern of off-the-record testimony.

    The Standard’s David Odongo reported that multiple sources present at the 19th Ambassadors Conference described the exchange between Sing’oei and Ambassador Basuna as humiliating and disproportionate.

    Basuna’s own guarded public statement, that she did not take offence and that it was not hers to judge, is not exculpatory.

    It is the language of a serving diplomat who understands that attacking her Principal Secretary on the record would be career suicide.

    The rebuttal has somehow interpreted professional discretion as an exoneration.

    It is neither.

    Ambassadors do not speak freely when their PS has access to their posting, their performance review, and their next assignment.

    The fact that multiple sources, in a closed conference environment, described the same scene to a reporter independently is more evidentially significant than one ambassador’s careful public statement.

    The rebuttal’s characterisation of performance accountability as responsible leadership would be more convincing if the accountability were applied consistently and without what those present described as public humiliation.

    Demanding results and publicly demeaning a veteran diplomat before her peers are not the same act.

    REBUTTAL CLAIM 2: SING’OEI’S IRAN COMMENTS WERE CORRECT STATECRAFT, NOT A GAFFE

    Kenya had already expressed solidarity with the UAE and Gulf states multiple times under President Ruto. Non-alignment never meant silence when allies are attacked or global energy supplies are threatened. Dr Sing’Oei was simply communicating official government policy clearly and proactively.

    This argument would be compelling if the Iranian Embassy had not formally rebutted it. In diplomatic reality, a statement is not merely what it intends to say. It is what it causes other governments to say in response.

    When a country’s Principal Secretary of Foreign Affairs makes a public statement that causes the accredited ambassador of a sovereign state to issue a formal written rebuttal accusing Kenya of mischaracterising international law, the statement has produced a diplomatic consequence.

    That consequence is not cancelled by explaining what the statement was meant to mean.

    Kenya’s own subsequent clarification from Sing’oei’s office, insisting the country remained non-aligned, implicitly acknowledged that the original communication had created a misimpression serious enough to require correction.

    A communication that requires immediate clarification to undo its own damage is, by any professional definition, a failed communication.

    The rebuttal’s claim that this represents agile, interest-driven Twiga diplomacy mistakes noise for strategy.

    REBUTTAL CLAIM 3: THE DEEPFAKE APOLOGY SHOWED ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY

    He immediately apologised publicly, acknowledged the error, thanked those who flagged it, and committed the ministry to exploring AI watermarking and training. This was not an embarrassing cover-up but transparency and forward-thinking leadership in the digital age.

    The argument that a Principal Secretary of Foreign Affairs should receive credit for apologising after sharing a fabricated CNN video from his official government account requires a very low threshold for what constitutes forward-thinking leadership.

    The standard being invoked here, he apologised, is the minimum available response to a documented falsehood, not evidence of competence.

    The relevant question is not whether Sing’oei apologised but why a senior official responsible for managing Kenya’s international image did not verify content before amplifying it to his official government following.

    The rebuttal’s framing transforms a basic failure of professional judgment into a demonstration of digital savviness.

    This is not a serious argument.

    It is the rhetorical equivalent of praising a surgeon for apologising after operating on the wrong patient.

    REBUTTAL CLAIM 4: ANONYMOUS SOURCES ARE INHERENTLY UNRELIABLE AND THE CRITICISM IS BUREAUCRATIC RESISTANCE

    These are classic bureaucratic pushback against a high-performing outsider demanding results. Dr Sing’Oei is not a career diplomat. He brings fresh expertise, not decades inside the same echo chamber. Blaming him is scapegoating.

    The argument that critical anonymous sources are, by definition, resistant to change and therefore discountable is one of the oldest deflection techniques available to a public official under scrutiny.

    It allows any institution to dismiss any internal criticism as the product of vested interests, without engaging with the substance of what is being said.

    The rebuttal does not address what the sources actually alleged.

    It does not explain the mission clashes in Paris, Tokyo, London, Berlin and Pretoria.

    It does not explain the weeks of unanswered calls to the headquarters. It does not address the pattern of redeployments following ambassador-deputy conflicts.

    It simply asserts that those who complain are people resistant to performance standards, a claim that is inherently unfalsifiable and therefore analytically worthless.

    Furthermore, the claim that Sing’oei is an outsider bringing fresh expertise to a stale bureaucracy becomes harder to sustain when that outsider has been in post for nearly four years and the institutional problems have not resolved but compounded. Outsider energy is an asset in year one.

    By year four, the culture is yours.

    REBUTTAL CLAIM 5: SING’OEI HAS AN IMPRESSIVE RECORD THAT THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE IGNORES

    As Principal Secretary since October 2022, he has driven performance contracting and innovation across missions, championed economic diplomacy, diaspora engagement, and youth involvement in foreign policy, and advanced Kenya’s role in regional peace processes including Sudan, Somalia AUSSOM, the DRC Nairobi Process, and South Sudan.

    This publication does not dispute that Abraham Korir Sing’oei is a person of considerable intellectual capability or that Kenya has participated in regional peace processes during his tenure.

    These things are true and were not challenged in the original article.

    The original article challenged something different: the conduct, the communications culture, the treatment of mission staff, the erosion of institutional protocol, and the public record of documented errors that have cost Kenya diplomatic credibility with bilateral partners.

    A list of initiatives in which Kenya has participated is not an answer to evidence of institutional dysfunction. A foreign ministry can simultaneously be involved in the DRC Nairobi Process and be incapable of correctly classifying the nature of its president’s visits.

    One does not cancel the other.

    The rebuttal conflates activity with effectiveness and participation with leadership. These are not the same things.

    WHAT THE REBUTTAL ITSELF REVEALS

    The most instructive aspect of the Sing’oei rebuttal is not its arguments but its architecture. It was written with evident knowledge of internal ministry dynamics, including specific awareness of what was said at the Ambassadors Conference and the communications around the Basuna exchange.

    It was circulated promptly and with clear organisation.

    It deploys the language of accountability reform to defend against accountability scrutiny. It invokes the PS’s academic credentials and landmark legal victories as character evidence rather than engaging with the operational failures documented in the original reporting.

    This is the strategy of an official who is well-advised but poorly served by the record.

    A rebuttal that spends several hundred words praising the PS’s Endorois litigation victory from a decade ago in response to evidence of current institutional disorder is not a defence. It is a distraction.

    The Endorois case, which Sing’oei won before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2010, was a genuine milestone in African human rights jurisprudence.

    It has nothing to do with whether the ministry correctly classified Ruto’s visit to Japan in 2024.

    Bringing it up suggests the defence team understands they cannot defend the actual record and has opted instead to litigate the PS’s biography.

    The rebuttal also makes a revealing error in its own framing. It describes the criticism of Sing’oei as a hit piece against Kenya’s most dynamic and effective Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary.

    The word dynamic appears frequently in government circles in Nairobi as a synonym for visible and assertive.

    But dynamism is not a foreign policy outcome. It is a personality characteristic. The measure of a Principal Secretary is not whether he posts frequently, attends conferences, or generates social media traffic.

    It is whether the ministry he runs produces coherent communications, protects Kenyan citizens abroad, maintains non-partisan positioning on volatile geopolitical questions, and commands the institutional respect of the mission network it supervises.

    On each of these measures, the documented record is poor.

    THE STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE OF KENYA’S DIPLOMATIC IDENTITY

    Kenya’s diplomatic brand rested for decades on three pillars: non-alignment, citizen protection, and multilateral credibility.

    All three are in measurable deterioration under the current leadership.

    Non-alignment has been replaced with a pattern of reactive alignment that shifts depending on which foreign ministry official calls Sing’oei on a given day.

    Citizen protection has been replaced with strategic silence punctuated by occasional statements about bilateral trade volumes.

    Multilateral credibility, which Kenya spent forty years building through careful positioning at the UN, the AU, and IGAD, is now routinely undercut by communications gaffes that require foreign governments to correct the public record.

    The 19th Ambassadors Conference, held in Nairobi in late March 2026, was meant to address exactly this kind of institutional dysfunction.

    President Ruto addressed the assembled envoys on strategic communication.

    A dedicated session on coherent communications was led by Gina Din Kariuki. Mudavadi and senior ministry officials were present. Within three weeks, Mudavadi had called the Italy visit a state visit three separate times.

    The conference appears to have changed nothing.

    The consequences are quiet but cumulative. Ambassadors posted to Nairobi notice when Kenya’s official statements do not match what their own foreign ministries are saying.

    Partner governments begin applying what one veteran regional diplomat described to this publication as the verification discount: they receive Kenya’s official communications and independently verify before acting on them.

    When a country’s diplomatic word requires independent verification before it can be trusted, it has lost something that cannot be recovered by issuing a corrected tweet.

    The Sing’oei rebuttal, energetically denying a record that is publicly documented, applies precisely the same verification discount to itself.

    A MINISTRY THAT DOES NOT KNOW WHAT IT DOES NOT KNOW

    The most charitable interpretation of the Mudavadi protocol errors is ignorance: that the Cabinet Secretary and his communications team genuinely do not know the difference between visit categories. The Sing’oei rebuttal does not address this at all, because it cannot.

    Mudavadi is not Sing’oei.

    The rebuttal defends the PS with considerable energy but has nothing to say about the minister who has called three separate presidential visits by the wrong name in front of the host governments concerned.

    This gap in the defence is itself revealing.

    If the ministry were the coherent, high-performing institution the rebuttal describes, the minister and the PS would be operating from a shared institutional framework.

    The fact that Mudavadi repeatedly contradicts his own PS’s correct characterisation of visit categories, and that nobody in the ministry corrects this before it goes public, is the clearest possible evidence that no such framework exists.

    The rebuttal has defended one official against a record that implicates the whole house.

    Kenya’s neighbours are watching.

    Its partners are watching.

    The ambassadors posted to Nairobi, who speak among themselves in ways that never appear in official readouts, are watching.

    And what they are watching is the slow, public, entirely unnecessary self-destruction of a diplomatic reputation that generations of Kenyan civil servants spent decades building.

    A rebuttal published by anonymous allies praising the PS’s human rights litigation record from 2010 has not changed that picture.

    It has merely added a footnote to it.

    Mudavadi should know what kind of visit his president is making.

    His ambassador does.

    His PS does.

    The host country does. Apparently, the people drafting the PS’s rebuttals do.

    At some point, the outlier in that list becomes the story. In Kenya’s case, the outlier has been telling that story, repeatedly and without correction, for over two years. The rebuttal has confirmed it.

  • Why Dr. Korir Sing’oei’s Reform Agenda at Foreign Affairs Matters for Kenya

    Why Dr. Korir Sing’oei’s Reform Agenda at Foreign Affairs Matters for Kenya

    By Johaness Wamugo

    Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is undergoing a transition that was long overdue. For years, concerns around inefficiency, rising operational costs, and uneven accountability across missions abroad have been acknowledged quietly but rarely confronted directly.

    That moment has now arrived.

    At the centre of this shift is PS Dr. Korir Sing’oei, whose approach has introduced a level of scrutiny and structural adjustment that is beginning to redefine how Kenya conducts diplomacy.

    The response has been predictably mixed. Reform, particularly when it targets systems that have operated with limited oversight, rarely proceeds without resistance.

    The most immediate impact has been financial discipline. Mission rental expenditure, which had escalated to about KSh 3 billion annually, is being reassessed and reduced. This is not a cosmetic adjustment.

    It is a direct intervention into one of the largest cost centres within Kenya’s foreign operations. It signals a shift from passive expenditure to deliberate resource management.

    Equally significant is the restructuring of insurance frameworks across regions. For the first time, there is a coherent attempt to leverage scale and consistency.

    The Americas operate under a unified policy, Europe under a structured model, and Africa under a tailored plan that reflects its specific risk profile.

    These are technical changes, but their implications are substantial.

    They reduce fragmentation, improve bargaining power, and align benefits more closely with both personnel and state interests.

    Such measures inevitably disrupt established arrangements. Where inefficiencies exist, they are often accompanied by interests that benefit from their continuation. It is therefore not surprising that the reform process has coincided with increased criticism directed at Korir Sing’oei. The pattern is familiar.

    When systems are tightened, those affected are rarely neutral.

    What is less frequently acknowledged is that a significant portion of Kenya’s professional diplomatic corps supports these changes. Career officials understand that without reform, the country risks falling behind in a global environment where diplomacy is increasingly tied to measurable outcomes, strategic clarity, and efficient use of resources.

    Beyond internal restructuring, there is a broader strategic shift underway. Kenya’s foreign policy is becoming more deliberate in asserting national interest.

    The Kenya first approach is not rhetorical. It is visible in how the country positions itself in global partnerships, maintaining its standing even as other states in the region face more restrictive conditions in key jurisdictions.

    The decision to host the upcoming African French summit outside francophone regions, and in an anglophone country for the first time, is not incidental.

    It reflects growing diplomatic capital and an ability to convene across traditional divides. These are the markers of a country actively shaping its external environment rather than reacting to it.
    Diplomacy today is conducted in a fluid and highly scrutinised space.

    Communication is faster, expectations are higher, and the margin for ambiguity is narrower. In such a setting, adjustments in tone, speed, and clarity are inevitable.

    They are part of adaptation, not deviation.
    It is within this context that the current moment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should be understood. What is being witnessed is not disorder, but transition. Not decline, but recalibration.

    Reforms that touch on cost, structure, and accountability will always generate pressure. They will attract scrutiny, and at times, organised opposition.

    That does not invalidate their necessity.
    From where I stand, the direction is clear.

    Korir Sing’oei has set in motion changes that seek to align Kenya’s diplomacy with its economic and strategic ambitions.

    The resistance is real, but so is the rationale behind the reforms. Go forward PS!

  • How Safaricom Could Sell You Out To KRA

    How Safaricom Could Sell You Out To KRA

    Every morning, thirty-six million Kenyans wake up and reach for their Safaricom lines. They send money to a relative in Kisumu, call a business associate in Mombasa, browse the internet on a boda boda, top up airtime at a kiosk.

    In doing so, they hand Safaricom a continuous, real-time dossier of their lives.

    Their movements. Their associations.

    Their spending habits. Their approximate whereabouts at any given hour of the day. Most of them have no idea what Safaricom is legally permitted to do with that dossier. A careful reading of Safaricom’s own Data Privacy Statement makes the answer chilling.

    The document, accessible on Safaricom’s website and last formally dated October 2019 though still in active force, is written in the language of corporate compliance. It is polite, hedged, and apparently unremarkable.

    But buried inside its disclosures is a legal framework that grants Safaricom expansive latitude to share intimate personal data with a parade of third parties, including the Kenya Revenue Authority, law enforcement agencies, auctioneers, and debt collectors, without any obligation to notify the subscriber it has done so.

    The consent requirement that Section 4.5 appears to offer turns out, on close reading, to apply exclusively to direct marketing. For everything else, the telco decides.

    Safaricom knows where you sleep. It knows who you called at 2 a.m. It knows how much you sent through M-Pesa last Tuesday. The question is who else it is allowed to tell.

    THE PRIVACY POLICY NOBODY READS

    Section 3.2 of the Data Privacy Statement inventories what Safaricom collects, and the scope of it is staggering.

    The company retains your national identity document number, date of birth, photograph, email address, and biometric data including voice fingerprints gathered through its interactive voice response systems. It logs every phone number you call or receive a call from, every text message header, and every data session on its network.

    It records your M-Pesa transaction history in full. It uses CCTV in its physical premises to record visitors.

    It maps your device against mobile network masts to determine your approximate geographic location. And per Section 3.2.5, it collects income bracket and education level data through surveys conducted by its agents.

    The statement further acknowledges in Section 3.2.8 that while Safaricom does not record the content of calls and messages, it keeps the metadata: who you called, when, for how long, and roughly from where.

    To anyone familiar with how governments use telecommunications intelligence, the content of a call is often less valuable than the pattern of calls.

    Knowing that a journalist called a whistleblower three times in one week, or that a protest organizer spoke to nineteen different contacts in forty-eight hours before a demonstration, is intelligence. Safaricom collects all of it, all the time.

    SECTION 4.2: THE DISCLOSURE MENU

    The real danger in Safaricom’s privacy statement sits in Section 4.2, which lists the parties to whom the company may disclose customer information

    The list is extensive and its implications are barely discussed in public discourse.

    Law enforcement agencies, regulatory authorities, courts, and statutory bodies can receive your data in response to a demand carrying the appropriate lawful mandate.

    That phrasing does not require a court order. The word used is mandate, a category broad enough to encompass administrative demands from agencies that have no judicial sanction backing them.

    More alarming is Section 4.2(e), which lists debt-collection agencies and other debt-recovery organisations as legitimate recipients of customer data.

    Read alongside Section 3.2.3, which confirms that Safaricom retains your full M-Pesa transaction history, the question of exactly what data flows to a debt collector becomes acute.

    A subscriber who defaults on a mobile loan does not merely risk being reported to a credit reference bureau.

    They potentially expose their entire transaction footprint to an auctioneer or debt recovery firm with no particular obligation to data security or minimization.

    Section 4.2(c) names fraud prevention and anti-money laundering agencies, which again sounds uncontroversial until one considers that the definition of money laundering under Kenyan law is elastic enough to be applied to informal business activity, political fundraising, and ordinary cash transactions that do not match the tax profile the KRA has on file for you.

    Section 4.2(d) authorizes disclosure to government databases for identity verification purposes, a pathway that connects Safaricom’s data to the entire apparatus of state information infrastructure with no per-disclosure notification to the subscriber.

    Section 4.5 says Safaricom will seek your consent before sharing data with third parties for direct marketing. For law enforcement, auctioneers, KRA, and government databases, there is no such courtesy.

    THE CONSENT CLAUSE THAT MEANS NOTHING WHERE IT MATTERS

    Section 4.5 is the clause that sounds reassuring and is, in practice, irrelevant to the most sensitive disclosures.

    It reads: Safaricom will get your express consent before sharing your personal data with any third party for direct marketing purposes.

    This is the only section of the entire disclosure framework that requires subscriber consent before data is shared.

    It applies exclusively to marketing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the disclosures in Section 4.2, which govern law enforcement, regulatory agencies, auctioneers, debt collectors, and government databases.

    Those disclosures require no consent. They require no notification.

    They require nothing from you at all.

    This architecture creates a deeply asymmetric privacy regime. Safaricom will ask your permission before an insurance company sends you a promotional SMS.

    It will not ask your permission before handing your call records to a detective, your mobile money history to the KRA, or your account information to a firm pursuing a debt you may not even know you owe.

    The subscriber is protected from inconvenient advertising while being exposed, without notice, to the coercive machinery of the state and of private debt enforcement.

    KRA IS ALREADY AT THE DOOR

    The theoretical threat posed by Safaricom’s disclosure framework is not theoretical at all.

    The Kenyan government has been systematically building the legal and operational infrastructure to access telecommunications data for tax enforcement, and the integration is further advanced than public statements have acknowledged.

    A government brief to the International Monetary Fund, reported by The Standard, confirmed that at least one leading Kenyan telecommunications company had already begun sharing real-time mobile money transaction data with the Kenya Revenue Authority to enhance tax compliance.

    The brief stated that integration with telecommunications companies had commenced and was expected to be completed by June 2025.

    The government explicitly told the IMF that it intended to use telecommunications data to identify discrepancies between reported income and actual spending patterns, effectively turning M-Pesa transaction history into a tax intelligence instrument deployed against subscribers.

    Safaricom’s own Chief Finance Services Officer Esther Waititu publicly denied any integration between M-Pesa and KRA as recently as January 2024, telling journalists that sharing of data between separate business entities was not permissible under the Data Protection Act.

    The government’s simultaneous submission to the IMF confirming active integration creates a contradiction that has never been resolved in public. Either Safaricom’s most senior financial officer did not know an integration had commenced, or the company’s public denials were prepared with creative ambiguity about what constitutes sharing.

    The government told the IMF that telco integration for tax compliance ‘has commenced.’ Safaricom told Kenyans there was no integration. Both statements cannot be true.

    THE FINANCE BILL: A BRAZEN POWER GRAB, TWICE

    The government’s appetite for telecommunications data is not limited to quiet administrative arrangements.

    In May 2024, the Finance Bill proposed an explicit amendment to the Data Protection Act that would have exempted the Kenya Revenue Authority from compliance with data protection principles entirely, whenever it determined that data access was necessary for tax assessment, enforcement, or collection.

    The proposal, contained in Clause 63, would have removed KRA’s obligation to justify data collection, to limit it to what was strictly necessary, to inform subscribers that their data was being accessed, or to apply any of the other safeguards the Data Protection Act exists to provide.

    Civil society organisations responded with alarm. Amnesty International Kenya and ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa jointly condemned the amendment as unconstitutional, arguing that it would deny taxpayers their rights as data subjects to know who was accessing their data and for what purpose.

    The Law Society of Kenya called it unconstitutional. The CIPIT legal research centre at Strathmore University concluded that the proposal violated Article 31 of the Constitution of Kenya, which guarantees the right to privacy.

    The Finance Bill was eventually withdrawn entirely following the Gen Z protests of June 2024, during which parliament itself was stormed.

    The Treasury did not abandon the project.

    The Finance Bill 2025 revived the same ambition through a different mechanism, proposing to delete Section 59A(1B) of the Tax Procedures Act, a provision introduced in December 2024 that explicitly bars the KRA Commissioner from compelling businesses to share personal data or trade secrets collected from customers.

    Removing that clause would grant the KRA the power to compel telecoms, banks, and other data processors to integrate their systems and surrender customer information on demand. The Law Society of Kenya, KPMG East Africa, and Ernst and Young all raised objections.

    The proposal is still alive.

    NEURAL TECHNOLOGIES AND THE SURVEILLANCE MACHINE

    The question of what Safaricom’s data is capable of enabling, in the wrong hands, was answered with uncomfortable specificity by a Daily Nation investigation published in October 2024.

    The report, based on months of research and access to insider accounts, alleged that a British software company called Neural Technologies had embedded within Safaricom’s internal systems a data management architecture that allowed Kenya’s security services to access call data records in something approaching real time, with capabilities extending to predictive movement profiling.

    The investigation described a prototype tool called Find My Friends, developed by Neural Technologies for Kenyan law enforcement, which allowed officers to trace a target’s movements by triangulating mobile mast connections as the individual moved across the country.

    Former Neural Technologies director Adrian Harris was quoted describing the tool’s function in terms that made its purpose explicit, noting that while it was framed as counter-terrorism capability, the underlying mechanism treated all users as potential subjects.

    The investigation quoted Adrian Harris as characterising the tool as one designed to flag specific individuals for further investigation based on patterns of movement and association.

    Safaricom denied that the Neural Technologies system provided real-time access to subscriber location or movement data, insisting that call data records were generated only after calls ended and were used strictly for billing purposes.

    The company said its systems were not designed to track any subscriber’s live location. Neural Technologies did not respond to queries from the Daily Nation.

    The gap between Safaricom’s formal assurances and the specific technical capabilities described by a former director of the company it partnered with has never been closed.

    Amnesty International’s November 2025 report on tech-facilitated violence against Kenyan activists went further, documenting testimony from human rights defenders who believed that state surveillance supported by Safaricom had enabled clandestine police units to track protest organizers during the 2024 Finance Bill demonstrations.

    The report linked this surveillance to subsequent enforced disappearances and killings. Amnesty estimated that across protests between June 2024 and July 2025, excessive use of force by security agencies resulted in at least 128 deaths, more than 3,000 arrests, and over 83 enforced disappearances.

    Amnesty International documented 128 deaths, 3,000 arrests and 83 enforced disappearances across protests that its own investigators believe were enabled, in part, by telecommunications surveillance.

    IMEI NUMBERS AND THE TAXMAN’S NEW EYE

    The KRA’s ambitions extend beyond M-Pesa. In late 2024, new guidelines issued by the Communications Authority of Kenya required phone manufacturers, importers, retailers, and mobile network operators to upload the IMEI numbers of all locally assembled or imported devices into a KRA portal for tax compliance monitoring.

    The International Mobile Equipment Identity number is a 15-digit code unique to each handset, used by network operators to identify devices on their infrastructure. Its use outside of security contexts, specifically for device-level tax surveillance, raises privacy questions that courts have already considered.

    In 2017, a Kenyan court ruled against the Communications Authority’s earlier Device Management System, calling it a threat to subscriber privacy and directing the regulator to use less intrusive measures.

    That ruling wound its way to the Supreme Court and was eventually reversed in 2023, permitting the DMS to proceed.

    The new KRA IMEI portal framework may represent the next iteration of the same surveillance infrastructure, this time with a tax compliance rationale rather than a security one. Cybersecurity analyst Kamau, speaking to Citizen Digital, put the question plainly: IMEI numbers should only be shared with network service providers. Does this mean KRA will now be a network service provider?

    THE ARCHITECTURE OF SILENCE

    What makes Safaricom’s privacy framework most significant is not any single disclosure provision but the structural absence of subscriber notification rights across the most consequential categories of data sharing.

    The company’s statement acknowledges in Section 10 that subscribers have a right to be informed that personal data is being collected. It does not create any right to notification when that data is subsequently shared with law enforcement, government agencies, or debt recovery firms.

    A Safaricom subscriber whose call records are handed to a detective investigating a protest, whose M-Pesa history is cross-referenced by the KRA against their tax filing, or whose mobile account information is passed to an auctioneer pursuing a debt will not receive a text message, an email, or any other notice that this has happened.

    They may never know.

    The Data Protection Act’s general requirements that data be processed with transparency and for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes create obligations on paper that are difficult to enforce in practice when the subject of the data sharing does not know it has occurred.

    Section 4.4 of the privacy statement contains one guard clause: Safaricom shall not release any information to any individual or entity that is acting beyond its legal mandate.

    The company is therefore the judge of whether a requesting entity is acting within its mandate.

    There is no independent verification requirement, no subscriber right of challenge, and no mechanism by which a person targeted for data disclosure can intervene before it happens. The protection offered by 4.4 is entirely dependent on Safaricom’s own institutional willingness to exercise it.

    WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

    If you are a Safaricom subscriber, the practical implications of the company’s data privacy architecture are these.

    The KRA may have access to your M-Pesa transaction history, either through existing integration with at least one major telco, or through legal mechanisms that compel disclosure without your consent.

    Law enforcement agencies can receive your call data records on the basis of a mandate that does not require a court order as a prerequisite. An auctioneer or debt recovery firm pursuing a claim against you can receive your account information without you being notified.

    And the pattern of calls you make, the times you make them, the towers your phone connects to as you move through the city, can be used to map your movements and associations in ways that go far beyond what the company’s official positions acknowledge.

    Safaricom holds the government’s 35 percent stake alongside Vodafone Group’s approximately 40 percent shareholding.

    It is simultaneously a private commercial entity with ISO 27701 privacy certification and a company in which the Kenyan state is the single largest identifiable shareholder.

    That structural reality creates inherent tensions between the company’s obligations to subscribers and its relationship with the agencies of state that its own disclosure framework empowers to demand subscriber data.

    When the CEO says no data has been shared with government agencies and the government simultaneously tells the IMF that integration with telecommunications companies has commenced, the subscriber is left to decide who to believe, with no independent means of verification.

    Safaricom is simultaneously a private company with a privacy certification and a firm in which the Kenyan state is the largest shareholder. Both identities cannot be served equally.

    WHAT SHOULD CHANGE

    At minimum, Safaricom subscribers deserve a notification right that mirrors what the company already offers for direct marketing.

    If a law enforcement agency demands your call records, you should receive a message informing you of that demand, subject to exceptions for active terrorism investigations where notification would genuinely compromise safety.

    That exception should be narrow, defined in law, and subject to judicial oversight, not left to the discretion of the requesting agency.

    The legal mandate threshold in Section 4.2(a) requires tightening.

    Any disclosure of call data records or M-Pesa transaction history to law enforcement should require a court order, not merely an administrative demand issued with what the company characterises as the appropriate lawful mandate.

    The courts exist precisely to test whether a demand is lawful. Bypassing them removes the only independent check on the coercive use of telecommunications data against political opponents, journalists, activists, or ordinary citizens caught in the ambiguous reach of tax enforcement.

    The Finance Bill 2025 proposal to delete Section 59A(1B) of the Tax Procedures Act should be rejected, as its predecessor was. The KRA already has the power to access financial data with a court warrant under Section 60 of the Tax Procedures Act.

    The effort to remove the additional safeguard introduced in December 2024 is not about enabling tax collection.

    It is about removing a constraint on how the KRA collects data from private entities, and it has no place in a state that claims constitutional protection for privacy as a fundamental right.

    Safaricom should publish a transparency report. Every six months, it should disclose the number of data requests it received from law enforcement agencies, the number it fulfilled, the number it refused, and on what grounds.

    Absent that disclosure, the company’s repeated insistence that it complies with data protection law cannot be evaluated by the thirty-six million people whose data it holds.

  • Bia Tosha vs EABL: Why the Dispute Isn’t What You Might Have Been Told

    Bia Tosha vs EABL: Why the Dispute Isn’t What You Might Have Been Told

    By Wakili Makamu Mutua

    Today, the High Court dismissed Bia Tosha’s application to halt the proposed Diageo–Asahi transaction. While the court stated that its full ruling will be posted on Monday—leaving observers waiting with bated breath to review the exact legal reasoning—this latest development brings the foundation of the underlying dispute back into sharp focus.

    The dispute between Bia Tosha Distributors Limited and East African Breweries Limited has attracted sustained public attention. Much of the commentary has adopted a familiar framing, presenting the matter as a contest between a local distributor and a large corporate entity. That framing is understandable, but it risks obscuring the legal character of the issues now before the court.

    From a legal standpoint, the first and most important question is one of classification. What, in law, is this dispute really about? Is it a claim grounded in the alleged violation of constitutional rights, or does it arise from a commercial relationship governed by contract?

    This is not a technical side issue. It determines the court that should properly handle the dispute, the principles that apply, the remedies that can be granted, and ultimately the outcome.

    A useful way to think about it is this: if two parties have a written business arrangement, the court normally starts with the documents. It asks what was agreed, what rights were granted, what limits were accepted, and what happens when the relationship ends or changes. It does not usually begin by treating the dispute as if it were a constitutional struggle over property or liberty.

    A review of the material placed before the court suggests that the relationship between the parties was neither incidental nor informal. It was structured, long term, and embedded within a defined distribution system. The record indicates that the principal behind Bia Tosha, Mr Peter Burugu, had extensive prior involvement within the same distribution ecosystem, including senior roles that provided insight into how that system operated.
    In legal analysis, such facts are not peripheral. They matter because they speak to the commercial sophistication of the parties. They go to whether the agreements entered into were informed and deliberate business choices, rather than arrangements stumbled into by an unsophisticated party unaware of their consequences.

    The distribution framework itself is also relevant. According to the court record, the distribution of products is carried out through a structured national system involving a broad network of appointed distributors. That point is important for non-lawyers: a manufacturer’s route-to-market is not ordinarily run by constitutional pronouncement. It is run by agreements, commercial terms, logistics, performance standards and operating documents. If a company distributes through many different appointed distributors, its distribution map cannot realistically be fixed forever by a single court order divorced from the underlying contracts.

    That helps explain why this litigation has become so difficult to administer. Once a commercial distribution issue is moved into the language of constitutional rights, the court is asked to do something very hard: to supervise a living business system as if it were a static constitutional entitlement. A distribution network changes with customers, routes, product mix, geography, market demand and commercial reality. Contracts can account for those things. A constitutional status quo order tied to a historical date often cannot.

    This is why the legal character of the case matters so much. If the dispute is contractual, then the answers are likely to be found in agreements, letters, invoices, maps, and the conduct of the parties over time. If it is constitutional, the court is invited to do something much larger: to convert a commercial relationship into a question of protected rights and public-law remedies. That is a far more dramatic move.

    The distribution system described in the record was governed by formal agreements and preceded by defined processes, including selection, assessment and ongoing performance arrangements. Rights and obligations were not floating or informal. They were set out in writing, negotiated in a commercial context, and subject to defined terms.
    That matters because courts are generally slow to depart from the terms of a bargain freely entered into, unless there is evidence of fraud, coercion, illegality, or some other recognised legal basis for doing so. The exercise is not one of sympathy or public mood. It is one of interpretation: what did the parties agree, and what did they not agree?

    It is against that framework that the present dispute must be examined.

    The petition invokes a range of constitutional provisions. That is a significant step, and one that carries implications beyond the immediate parties. But even then, the court must still decide whether the underlying dispute remains, in substance, a commercial disagreement arising from contract.

    That inquiry is not merely abstract. It goes to the proper line between private law and constitutional adjudication. Put simply: not every hard commercial dispute becomes a constitutional case just because the pleadings say so. Sometimes a contract dispute remains a contract dispute, even when it is wrapped in the language of rights.

    For those following the matter outside the courtroom, one point is worth bearing in mind. Courts do not decide cases on narrative momentum. They decide them on evidence and legal principle.

    In this case, that evidence consists of agreements, correspondence, invoices, internal commercial conduct, and the behaviour of the parties over time. It is those materials, not the loudest public storyline, that will determine how the court understands the relationship and the rights arising from it.

    At this stage, no final determination has been made. It would therefore be premature to claim certainty. What can be said, however, is that the public characterisation of the dispute does not appear to fully reflect the legal structure within which the parties operated.
    A careful reading of the record suggests a more complicated picture. It is one that turns less on broad assertions of dispossession and more on the exact terms of commercial engagement, the architecture of a national distribution system, and the difficulty of using constitutional process to manage what may ultimately be a private-law disagreement.

    That is where the analysis properly begins.

  • Misusing Courts? How A Chinese Firm’s Antics Risk Costing Kenya The Sh30 Billion Railway City Project

    Misusing Courts? How A Chinese Firm’s Antics Risk Costing Kenya The Sh30 Billion Railway City Project

    There is a scene playing out in Kenya’s courts right now that ought to chill every taxpayer, every infrastructure planner, and every diplomat in Nairobi who has laboured over the vision of a modern Railway City rising from the 13 acres of Kenya Railways land in the central business district.

    A Chinese state-owned firm, China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, known universally as by, has dragged the Kenyan government before two separate High Courts simultaneously, one in Nairobi and one in Kisumu, over a single procurement dispute.

    The stated cause is righteous indignation at having its engineers deported.

    The unstated consequence, whether intended or not, is that a transformative Sh30 billion project is now frozen in a web of litigation so dense that no contractor can be engaged, no ground can be broken, and no timetable can be assured.

    Kenya’s courts, it must be said without equivocation, are not CCECC’s procurement appeals department. They never were.

    The Railway City project is not a ministerial pet scheme. It is a centrepiece of Nairobi’s urban regeneration, a scheme designed to decongest the gridlocked city centre by creating a mixed-use hub of office blocks, retail malls, a light industrial zone, new railway lines, and connections to the planned Bus Rapid Transit network.

    The UK government has pledged Sh11.9 billion towards it, representing 39 per cent of the total project cost. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is separately procuring a technical assistance contract worth nine million pounds to run from mid-2026 to at least 2028.

    The project has already been modelled as a Kenyan answer to the regeneration of London’s King’s Cross station. It is not hyperbole to say that the Railway City is perhaps the single most consequential urban infrastructure investment in Nairobi’s recent history. The fact that it is being held hostage by the internal commercial rivalry of two Chinese state enterprises is a scandal that demands a reckoning.

    To understand what is actually happening here, it is necessary to understand who CCECC is, what it has done elsewhere, and what the pattern of its behaviour reveals about the firm that now asks Kenyan courts to protect it.

    A Firm With A Problem Wherever It Goes

    CCECC was incorporated in 1979 by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, growing out of the foreign aid department of the Ministry of Railways.

    Its foundational project was the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, the TAZARA line, a 1,860-kilometre Cold War-era infrastructure gift from Beijing to southern Africa. On the strength of that legacy, CCECC has expanded into over 50 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, positioning itself as one of the world’s top 100 international contractors as ranked by the Engineering News Record.

    What the glossy corporate profile does not mention is that CCECC’s global footprint is shadowed by a trail of procurement irregularities, regulatory sanctions, and outright misconduct findings that span at least three continents.

    In August 2019, the World Bank debarred CCECC and five of its affiliated entities in Nigeria from eligibility for any World Bank-financed contract. The listed companies included CCECC Nigeria Railway Company Limited, CCECC Nigeria Lekki (FTA) Company Limited, and CCECC Nigeria Company Limited.

    They were found to have violated the bank’s fraud and corruption policy, specifically provisions bordering on fraudulent practice, defined as any act or omission that knowingly or recklessly misleads a party to obtain a financial benefit or avoid an obligation in the procurement process.

    The debarment was a direct consequence of cross-sanctioning triggered by the World Bank’s sanctions against CCECC’s parent, China Railway Construction Corporation Limited, and its affiliates worldwide. When confronted, CCECC Nigeria Limited initially denied it was among the blacklisted entities and issued a public statement claiming mistaken identity.

    The World Bank confirmed to reporters that the sanction extended to all affiliates and subsidiaries under CRCC’s direct and indirect control, and that it would not speak further on the matter. CCECC’s denial, investigators noted, was false.

    That same year, it emerged that CCECC had in 2018 allowed Nigerian government ministers and senior officials to hijack a scholarship programme the firm had offered for young Nigerians to study railway engineering abroad.

    Rather than open the 40 slots to qualified applicants, the opportunities were distributed among the children and cronies of officials in the Federal Ministry of Transportation. No minister was punished.

    The European Investment Bank went further.

    In August 2023, the EIB and CCECC entered into a formal settlement agreement addressing what the bank described as past misconduct by CCECC as a tenderer in procurement procedures for EIB-financed projects.

    The misconduct was not confined to one country or one incident. The EIB explicitly identified the affected projects as spanning Ecuador, Egypt, Malawi, Montenegro, Serbia, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Zambia, a sweep of eight countries across four continents. As part of the settlement, CCECC was required to enforce compliance standards, report on its material developments to the EIB for twelve months, and cooperate with ongoing EIB investigations into prohibited conduct, including misconduct committed by third parties.

    In Malawi, procurement observers have documented an even more brazen pattern. Civil society auditors found that CCECC was awarded contracts to both relocate water pipelines and upgrade the same Kenyatta Road project in Lilongwe, effectively being paid twice for overlapping work.

    The firm was the fourth-lowest bidder on the pipeline relocation component, yet it received the award. Governance and transparency experts publicly questioned the arrangement.

    Roads Authority officials were accused by civil society organisations of being so captured by political interests that professional evaluation of Chinese firms’ technical qualifications was effectively suspended.

    The Kenyatta Road project, launched with presidential fanfare in August 2021 and supposed to be complete in 18 months, had shown no progress by 2022.

    This is the firm that now asks Kenyan courts to shield it from the consequences of what Kenyan immigration authorities say are legitimate administrative actions.

    The Procurement Battle And Its Convenient Victims

    The Kenya Railways Corporation launched the Railway City tender in late 2025. Three bidders emerged: CCECC at Sh22.9 billion, China Road and Bridge Corporation at Sh29.9 billion, and a consortium of China Overseas Engineering Group and China Railway Group at Sh32.5 billion.

    Kenya Railways’ evaluation committee gave CRBC the highest technical score and, on that basis, declared it the best bidder despite it being the middle bidder on price.

    CCECC and the China Overseas-China Railway consortium challenged the decision before the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board.

    Their argument was specific and procedural: CRBC had submitted its technical and financial proposals on two separate flash disks placed inside the same envelope, a clear breach of procurement rules set by Kenya Railways itself.

    The PPARB agreed.

    On January 26, 2026, the board nullified the award to CRBC and directed Kenya Railways to re-evaluate the remaining compliant bids. The board’s language was categorical, finding that CRBC’s bid should not have progressed to financial evaluation and that the scoring of its financial proposals had been erroneous and misguided.

    Any reasonable reading of that ruling would suggest that CCECC, as the lowest bidder among compliant submissions, stood to benefit substantially from the re-evaluation. But Kenya Railways, in a move that defies both logic and its own procurement history, again declared CRBC the best bidder on February 16, terming the flash disk confusion a minor error.

    CCECC and the consortium promptly filed a second appeal. CRBC responded by running to the High Court in Nairobi to argue that the second PPARB appeal was an abuse of process and to challenge the board’s jurisdiction to hear it.

    On March 11, the Nairobi High Court granted CRBC an interim order suspending the PPARB proceedings.

    Two days later, on March 13, Kenyan security agencies moved with extraordinary speed and precision.

    A project manager, Li Fangyi, was picked up from CCECC’s camp along the Kisian-Usenge road in Kisumu at 2pm by men who identified themselves as police officers.

    They drove him to Nairobi. That same evening, a separate team stormed CCECC’s Riverside Drive compound in Lavington without identifying themselves and arrested Zhang Hongze, a CCECC engineer.

    Both men were reunited at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and bundled onto Kenya Airways flight KQ886 to Guangzhou, which departed at ten minutes past midnight. A third CCECC official, Director Li Wei, narrowly escaped the dragnet but had his passport seized.

    The timing, two days after the court order silencing the PPARB, is not lost on anyone with a functioning memory. CCECC’s petition to the Kisumu High Court says so without equivocation, arguing that the arrests and deportations were orchestrated to intimidate the firm into abandoning its procurement challenge and clearing the way for CRBC to collect the Sh7 billion premium that separates the two bids.

    The Sh7 Billion Question Kenya Must Answer

    The arithmetic here is stark and should offend every Kenyan. CCECC bid Sh22.9 billion. CRBC bid Sh29.9 billion. If CRBC is awarded this contract, Kenya will pay Sh7 billion more for what the PPARB has already found should not have been awarded to CRBC in the first place.

    The Railway City project is partly funded by UK taxpayers through FCDO. A Sh7 billion overcharge on a UK-backed, publicly scrutinised project is not a rounding error. It is a policy catastrophe.

    There are questions that the courts, the public, and policymakers must now force into the open. Why did Kenya Railways, after being ordered by the PPARB to re-evaluate, simply re-run the same outcome? Was there political direction behind that decision? Who benefits from a Sh29.9 billion contract being awarded when a Sh22.9 billion compliant bid sat on the table? Why did Kenya’s security apparatus respond with the speed of a counter-terrorism operation to deport the employees of a company that had done nothing more than exercise its legal right to challenge a procurement decision before the appropriate administrative body? And why, of all the crowded procurement disputes in Kenya, did this one trigger a midnight deportation flight?

    None of these questions are answered by CCECC’s litigation.

    The Other Side Of The Coin: CCECC Is No Innocent

    It would be a grave error, however, to conclude from the above that CCECC is simply an aggrieved bidder whose rights have been trampled. The firm’s conduct in this dispute also demands scrutiny, and the pattern it is establishing in Kenya is troubling.

    CCECC has now triggered multiple parallel legal proceedings across two courts in two cities over a single procurement dispute. At the PPARB, it filed two appeals.

    At the Nairobi High Court, proceedings initiated by CRBC have already blocked the PPARB. At the Kisumu High Court, CCECC has filed a constitutional petition seeking to restrain Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, Immigration Director-General Evelyn Cheluget, Inspector-General Douglas Kanja, and Attorney-General Dorcas Oduor from taking any action against its employees.

    This proliferation of simultaneous proceedings across multiple jurisdictions is precisely the kind of behaviour that legitimate procurement review systems are designed to prevent.

    It is not impossible that the Kisumu petition is tactically timed, filed in a court far from Nairobi’s familiar procurement bar, to secure broader injunctive relief than CCECC could obtain in Nairobi.

    The effect, whatever the intention, is jurisdictional confusion and institutional paralysis.

    Courts in two cities are now issuing orders that touch on the same underlying dispute, and no one can be entirely certain which orders prevail.

    There is also a deeper irony that should not escape the notice of any reader who has followed CCECC’s record. Here is a firm that the European Investment Bank has formally found engaged in procurement misconduct in eight countries, a firm whose Nigerian affiliates were debarred by the World Bank for fraud, a firm caught in Malawi receiving payments for overlapping contracts, now appearing before Kenyan courts wrapped in the constitutional language of due process, fair hearings, and freedom from arbitrary detention. The principle is sound. The messenger is compromised.

    This does not mean its engineers deserved to be deported in the middle of the night.

    If Kenyan authorities used immigration law as a weapon of commercial intimidation, that is a serious constitutional violation that must be remedied.

    The Kisumu court was right to issue interim orders protecting CCECC’s employees from further harassment pending full hearing. Due process does not belong only to firms with clean hands.

    But courts must also be alert to the risk of becoming instruments in a corporate war between two Chinese state enterprises that have both demonstrated, in different ways, a willingness to bend the rules in pursuit of African infrastructure contracts.

    The question before the Kenyan judiciary is not simply whether CCECC’s employees were wrongly deported. It is also whether the entire architecture of litigation being constructed around this procurement dispute serves the public interest or subverts it.

    What Policymakers Must Do

    The Kenyan government has created this crisis for itself. Kenya Railways was told by the PPARB to re-evaluate the bids after CRBC’s procedural breach. Instead of doing so transparently, it arrived at the same conclusion a second time, triggering a second round of challenges that the state then attempted to short-circuit through midnight deportations.

    This sequence, regulatory order, defiance, intimidation, litigation, is not the sequence of a government that respects its own procurement laws.

    Parliament should demand an urgent statement from the Transport Cabinet Secretary on why Kenya Railways disregarded the PPARB’s first ruling.

    The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority should conduct an independent review of the entire Railway City tender process.

    The FCDO, as a major funder, has both the standing and the responsibility to make clear that UK taxpayer funds will not be committed to a project whose procurement integrity is under active judicial challenge in two courts simultaneously.

    Above all, Kenya must recover control of this process from the courts and return it to where it belongs: a transparent re-evaluation of compliant bids, conducted in full public view, with documented justification for every scoring decision.

    The Sh7 billion difference between the two leading bids is not a technicality.

    It is a number large enough to build several secondary schools, equip several district hospitals, or resurface hundreds of kilometres of rural roads.

    The Railway City is supposed to be Kenya’s King’s Cross. It would be a profound national embarrassment if the project that was to redefine Nairobi’s skyline were to become instead a monument to procurement capture and judicial abuse.

    The courts can protect individual rights without allowing themselves to become battlegrounds for Chinese state-enterprise commercial rivalry. They must try to do both.

    The author writes on governance and infrastructure policy. Views are the author’s own.

  • Centum Special Report: Is Mworia Overseeing Shareholder Value Destruction?

    Centum Special Report: Is Mworia Overseeing Shareholder Value Destruction?

    When James Mworia took the wheel at Centum Investment Company in 2010, inheriting an institution whose roots stretch back to Kenya’s post-independence ambitions in 1967, he arrived as the steward of one of East Africa’s most formidable investment portfolios.

    He had blue-chip stakes in the country’s most dependable income-generating businesses: beverages, insurance, financial services, a fast-growing micro-lender and a publisher that had served generations of Kenyan schoolchildren. The company was a machine that made money for its more than 36,000 shareholders. Sixteen years later, the machine is producing losses.

    The announcement on Friday that Centum had completed the sale of its entire residual stake in Sidian Bank, exiting a 25-year investment at what the company itself described only as a “modest financial gain” relative to book value, has crystallised what many analysts and shareholders have long feared: that Mworia has methodically sold every business that was generating returns and left investors stranded with the ones haemorrhaging cash.

    The reaction in market forums was immediate, visceral and almost unanimous in its condemnation. It is not difficult to understand why.

    Centum always sells the profitable businesses and ends up holding the loss-making ones. Mworia killed ICDC long time ago.

    THE EXIT LEDGER: NINE PROFITABLE DEPARTURES, ONE DAMNING PATTERN

    The numbers are now on the record and they tell a story that no public relations exercise can soften. According to data compiled by financial research platform PesaWall, Centum has made at least nine major exits over the course of Mworia’s tenure.

    Without exception, every single one of those businesses generated a positive gross internal rate of return. Not one was a distressed sale. Not one was a company that needed to be exited. They were, by the company’s own published performance metrics, exactly what a holding company is supposed to accumulate and retain.

    The exits begin with Carbacid Investments in 2011. Centum had acquired a 22.8 percent stake at a cost of Sh400 million.

    It was sold after just 23 months, generating Sh1.2 billion in exit proceeds for a gross IRR of 66.9 percent. On the face of it, a spectacular return. But Carbacid, a carbon dioxide manufacturer serving both industrial and medical clients, was a low-risk, annuity-style business with inelastic demand.

    At a 23-month holding period, Centum surrendered decades of compounding income for a single-event gain.

    The Minet exit, selling a 21.5 percent stake in the insurance brokerage formerly known as AON after a 85-month holding period, returned Sh1 billion on a Sh200 million investment for a gross IRR of 52.4 percent.

    UAP Insurance, now subsumed into Old Mutual, was sold in 2015 at a gross IRR of 39.9 percent: Sh5.5 billion in exit proceeds on a Sh900 million cost over 69 months. Insurance is one of the most durable recurring-income businesses on any continent. Once a customer is on a policy, the renewal rates are extraordinary. Centum sold it.

    Platinum Credit, the micro-lender operating as Platcorp Holdings across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, was exited in 2018 after a 63-month holding period.

    Exit proceeds of Sh2.7 billion on a Sh800 million investment produced a gross IRR of 38.9 percent. Consumer lending to underbanked populations in East Africa was, and remains, a growth business with structural tailwinds.

    The company went to other owners who continued to harvest it. Nairobi Bottlers generated Sh8.6 billion in exit proceeds on a Sh700 million cost over a 126-month holding period for a gross IRR of 34.3 percent.

    Almasi Beverages delivered Sh10.9 billion in proceeds on Sh1.8 billion over the identical 126-month period for a gross IRR of 25.9 percent. These were Coca-Cola franchise bottlers with the most recognised consumer brand on the planet behind them.

    GenAfrica Asset Managers, Kenya’s second-largest pension fund manager at the time of exit, was sold to New York-based Kuramo Capital in 2018. Centum realised Sh2.4 billion on a Sh1.1 billion investment over 53 months for a gross IRR of 24.4 percent.

    Asset management is a recurring-fee business with negligible capital requirements and extraordinary margins at scale. Centum gave it up.

    Kenya Wine Agencies Limited, the KWAL spirits and wines distributor sold to South Africa’s Distell in 2017, generated Sh1.1 billion on a Sh300 million entry cost over 96 months for a gross IRR of 20.8 percent. Even Rift Valley Railways, a quick-turnaround trade that returned only 4.4 percent gross IRR in 14 months, was at least a profitable exit.

    Now comes Sidian Bank. Centum first invested in the lender in 2001 when it operated as K-Rep Bank, lifted its stake to 67.54 percent with a Sh4.3 billion acquisition in November 2014, began disposing in 2023 and has now exited entirely via the sale of its remaining 50 percent stake in Bakki Holdco Limited, the vehicle that held a 27.2 percent direct stake in the bank.

    The carrying value of the investment was Sh1.1 billion. The gain, by Centum’s own description, was “modest.” At the moment of final sale, Sidian’s assets had grown to Sh94.8 billion from Sh44.79 billion in December 2023 and deposits had more than doubled to Sh78.11 billion in September 2025 from Sh27.6 billion two years prior. The bank had been promoted to mid-tier status in September last year. They sold it on the way up.

    CENTUM’S NOTABLE EXITS: THE COMPLETE SCORECARD

    Source: PesaWall Research / Centum Investment Company annual disclosures. Gross IRR is before costs and fees and excludes dividends received during holding period.

    Company Exited

    Stake

    Cost

    Holding Period

    Exit Proceeds

    Gross IRR

    Carbacid Investments

    22.8%

    Sh 0.4bn

    23 months

    Sh 1.2bn

    66.90%

    Minet (formerly AON)

    21.5%

    Sh 0.2bn

    85 months

    Sh 1.0bn

    52.40%

    UAP Insurance (Old Mutual)

    24.2%

    Sh 0.9bn

    69 months

    Sh 5.5bn

    39.90%

    Platinum Credit

    36.0%

    Sh 0.8bn

    63 months

    Sh 2.7bn

    38.90%

    Nairobi Bottlers Ltd

    27.6%

    Sh 0.7bn

    126 months

    Sh 8.6bn

    34.29%

    Almasi Beverages Limited

    53.9%

    Sh 1.8bn

    126 months

    Sh 10.9bn

    25.90%

    GenAfrica Asset Managers

    73.4%

    Sh 1.1bn

    53 months

    Sh 2.4bn

    24.40%

    Kenya Wine Agencies (KWAL)

    26.4%

    Sh 0.3bn

    96 months

    Sh 1.1bn

    20.76%

    Rift Valley Railways

    10.0%

    Sh 0.06bn

    14 months

    Sh 0.08bn

    4.40%

    Sidian Bank (via Bakki Holdco — final exit March 2026)

    Carrying value Sh 1.1bn — “Modest gain” (undisclosed proceeds)

    Note: The table does not include dividends received from investments, which formed part of the IRR calculation in each case.

    Selling a profitable bank to put money in failed real estate is crazy. I hope they return this cash to shareholders as a special dividend.

    WHAT WAS KEPT: A PORTFOLIO OF COMPOUNDING DESTRUCTION

    The combined exit proceeds from the nine major divestments enumerated above run into the tens of billions of shillings.

    The question that 36,000 shareholders deserve answered is: where did the money go? The answer is on Centum’s balance sheet, buried under impairment lines, finance cost disclosures and subsidiary loss statements. It went into Two Rivers Development.

    It went into the Akiira Geothermal project. It went into the Lamu coal-fired power plant. It went into Longhorn Publishers. These are not speculative conclusions. They are the publicly stated capital deployment decisions of the company’s own management.

    Two Rivers Mall and its associated development vehicle, Two Rivers Development Limited, is the single largest destroyer of value in Centum’s history.

    The mixed-use development along the Northern Bypass, financed with an Sh8 billion facility from Co-operative Bank that was later refinanced through Standard Bank and subsequently through multiple restructuring rounds, was presented to shareholders as a transformative urban project at a total investment cost of Sh25 billion. What it has delivered instead is a cascade of financial catastrophe.

    In the financial year ended March 2021, Two Rivers’ finance costs drove Centum to a loss before tax of Sh2.33 billion. Without the Two Rivers drag, the loss would have been a comparatively manageable Sh473 million.

    This was Centum’s first net loss in 42 years of operating history. The following year the group loss continued. In the year ended March 2023, the consolidated net loss after tax exploded to Sh7.31 billion, driven by a Sh3.87 billion impairment provision on TRDL’s undeveloped land and sustained high finance costs. The subsidiary in which Centum holds a 58 percent stake booked a standalone loss of Sh7.09 billion in that year alone.

    The Two Rivers SEZ, branded as TRIFIC, was supposed to be the redemptive chapter in this saga.

    It has not been. In the six months to September 2025, the TRIFIC SEZ lost Sh584.5 million, more than doubling the Sh288 million loss in the same period the prior year.

    The core Two Rivers Development subsidiary added a further Sh90.68 million in losses over the same half-year, widening from Sh67.7 million.

    In total, four of Centum’s six reporting business units were posting losses in the latest available half-year results. Pre-tax losses more than tripled compared to the prior period.

    The headline net loss of Sh326 million in the six months to September 2025 was only partially disguised by a Sh296.71 million tax credit that flatters the reported figure.

    The Akiira Geothermal project occupies its own chapter in this ledger of misjudgement. Centum invested Sh1.97 billion in Akiira Power in 2016 for a 37.5 percent stake in a proposed 140-megawatt plant in the Greater Olkaria area. Shareholders were also told that Centum had invested Sh2 billion in Amu Power, the consortium behind the now-dead 1,050-megawatt Lamu coal power plant.

    By 2022, the Lamu investment had been written to zero. The Sh2 billion was gone.

    On the geothermal side, two exploratory wells sunk at a cost of approximately Sh1.2 billion failed to meet production capacity. By September 2022, the carrying value of the Akiira investment had fallen to Sh1.07 billion from the original Sh1.97 billion entry cost.

    In FY2023, a further Sh900 million impairment was recognised. The total destruction of value across just the two energy projects runs to approximately Sh5 billion.

    Undeterred by this record, Centum in May 2024 acquired a further 37.5 percent stake in Akiira from a UK fund, using more shareholder capital to double down on a project that had by then absorbed billions without producing a single kilowatt of electricity.

    The book value of the expanded position at March 2024 stood at approximately Sh1 billion. There is no publicly disclosed timeline for the 140-megawatt plant to be commissioned.

    Longhorn Publishers rounds out the gallery.

    The NSE-listed educational publisher in which Centum holds a significant stake posted a net loss of Sh571.33 million in the financial year ended June 2023, the worst since its listing in 2012, on revenues that fell 27.3 percent to Sh1.07 billion.

    In the year to June 2025, revenue fell a further 56 percent to Sh672 million while losses came in at Sh261.44 million. The company’s equity turned negative in the first half of the year to December 2024, with accumulated losses exceeding total equity.

    Centum’s thesis that the Competency Based Curriculum transition would create a supercycle for educational publishers has instead produced the opposite: a company so damaged by procurement delays and curriculum uncertainty that it is now technically insolvent on a standalone equity basis.

    THE LOSSES IN NUMBERS: WHAT SHAREHOLDERS ARE HOLDING

    Two Rivers Development (TRDL) group loss FY2023: Sh7.09 billion | TRDL impairment provision FY2023: Sh3.87 billion | Centum consolidated net loss FY2023: Sh7.31 billion | Two Rivers SEZ (TRIFIC) loss — 6 months to Sept 2025: Sh584.5 million | Core TRDL loss — 6 months to Sept 2025: Sh90.68 million | Akiira Geothermal: Sh1.97bn invested (2016) + additional stake (2024) against zero electricity produced | Lamu coal project write-off: Sh2 billion | Two Akiira exploratory wells: Sh1.2 billion, failed to meet production capacity | Longhorn Publishers FY2025 loss: Sh261.44 million | Longhorn FY2025 revenue decline: 56%

    THE SHARE PRICE: THE UNIMPEACHABLE VERDICT

    Capital markets are the most honest long-run appraisers of management performance. Centum’s share price has delivered a judgment that no annual report narrative can overturn. The stock reached its all-time high of Sh31.50 on December 9, 2019, almost precisely at the moment the Almasi and Nairobi Bottlers divestment to Coca-Cola completed. The market was registering its last cheer before realising what had been sold and, more critically, what had been retained.

    From that peak, the stock entered one of the most prolonged declines in the history of large-cap investment companies on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

    By May 22, 2023, it had hit an all-time low of Sh7.60, a collapse of 75.9 percent from the 2019 high in less than four years. Shareholders who bought at the peak have lost more than three-quarters of their investment.

    The stock currently trades at approximately Sh15, meaning it remains more than 52 percent below its all-time high. The market is not predicting a recovery. It is pricing in the portfolio that Mworia built.

    The dividend trajectory confirms the same story. In 2019, Centum paid Sh1.20 per share to shareholders. By 2021, the dividend had fallen to Sh0.33 per share.

    In 2024, in a year the company reported returning to profit partly because of Two Rivers SEZ property revaluations, the dividend was Sh0.32 per share, a 73 percent collapse from 2019 levels.

    Net asset value per share fell from Sh62.10 to Sh54.00 in the single financial year ended March 2023. That is not a macroeconomic accident. It is the direct consequence of capital allocation decisions made at the top.

    They have destroyed shareholder value since Chris Kirubi left. Nothing tangible is left.

    THE BUYBACK: A COSMETIC SUBSTITUTE FOR RETURNS

    In February 2023, Centum shareholders approved a Sh600.8 million share buyback programme, authorising the company to repurchase up to 66.5 million shares over 18 months.

    By August 2024, the company had bought back 9.76 million shares. The buyback is dressed as a reward to shareholders, but the market has not been fooled. A buyback at distressed prices, funded by proceeds that should have been distributed as dividends, is not a reward.

    It is a mechanism to support a share price that has collapsed because the underlying portfolio is producing losses. Shareholders who needed liquidity could not benefit from a buyback; they needed cash in their hands.

    The conventional corporate response when a major asset divestment closes is a special dividend. Investors expect it. The market prices it in.

    When the Sidian sale was confirmed on Friday, there was no share price rally. There was fury. Because shareholders have absorbed years of write-downs and annual losses, and the carrying value at which the Sidian stake sat in Centum’s books, Sh1.1 billion, was already considered by the market to be at or above the likely disposal price. The “modest gain” Centum described leaves almost no residual capital to distribute. The market already knew.

    The broader question shareholders are now demanding be answered is whether the Sidian proceeds, whatever their quantum, will be returned via a special dividend or recycled into the same loss-making portfolio.

    Mworia’s track record on this front is not reassuring. Proceeds from the beverage sales in 2019 went toward debt repayment and project funding. Proceeds from GenAfrica and Platinum Credit were reinvested.

    There has been no special dividend in the modern era of Centum. Each exit has been followed by a fresh commitment of capital to long-dated development projects that have consistently underdelivered.

    THE KIRUBI QUESTION: AN INHERITANCE MISMANAGED

    Chris Kirubi
    Chris Kirubi.

    The late Chris Kirubi, who died in June 2021 and whose estate remains the beneficial controlling shareholder at approximately 30.94 percent, was the architect of Centum’s diversified portfolio model. Kirubi understood that a holding company’s legitimacy rests on the quality and durability of its underlying businesses.

    He assembled a portfolio spanning beverages, insurance, financial services and publishing that threw off consistent cash flows across economic cycles. He understood the difference between a business worth holding and a project worth speculating on.

    Under Mworia, that philosophy has been inverted. The businesses that generated the cash flows have been sold. The projects that absorb the cash flows have been built.

    A Sh25 billion real estate complex that required an Sh8 billion development loan and has since spawned billions in impairments and annual operating losses. A geothermal project that has consumed nearly Sh4 billion in committed capital and produced no electricity. A coal power plant written to zero. A publisher so damaged it has technically negative equity. An SEZ burning through more than Sh1 billion annually in losses.

    Mworia’s stated defence of this strategy is that Centum is not a passive holding company but an active value creator that enters businesses, creates value and exits at a premium. This is a coherent argument for a private equity fund with a 10-year fund life and institutional limited partners who understand the model.

    It is a catastrophic model for a listed investment company whose shareholders include retail investors who bought shares expecting dividend income and price appreciation, and who have received neither for six years. The 36,000 shareholders of Centum are not limited partners in a closed-end fund. They cannot redeem their capital except by selling on the secondary market at prices that reflect the wreckage beneath.

    There is also a less visible dimension to this story. Multiple market observers who have tracked Centum’s evolution note an exodus of senior investment professionals from the company since Kirubi’s influence waned.

    The institutional knowledge that identified Carbacid at Sh400 million and sold it for Sh1.2 billion, that bought into UAP when it was a regional insurer and exited with Sh5.5 billion, has largely departed. What remains is a management culture oriented toward project development and real estate, domains where capital is patient and illiquid, rather than the disciplined exit-focused private equity model that built Centum’s original reputation.

    WHAT SHAREHOLDERS ARE OWED

    The Sidian Bank exit proceeds, undisclosed in quantum at the time of going to press, are now sitting at the company level.

    The market consensus, expressed with unusual force by analysts and shareholders across every platform monitoring CTUM, is unambiguous: those proceeds must be distributed as a special dividend. Not reinvested in Longhorn Publishers, which has negative equity on a standalone basis.

    Not added to Akiira Geothermal, a project that has now absorbed billions over nearly a decade without producing electricity. Not channelled into the Two Rivers SEZ, which lost Sh584.5 million in six months. Distributed. Returned. To the 36,000 shareholders who have watched their investment halve over six years while being told that transformation is underway.

    The Centum board faces the most serious credibility test in its 59-year history.

    The Centum 5.0 strategy, built around value optimisation and sustained portfolio performance, has delivered three consecutive years of consolidated group losses at the last full-year audit.

    Net asset value per share has declined. The share price is at less than half its peak. The businesses sold were all profitable. The businesses retained are all loss-making. The dividend has been cut by 73 percent. The buyback programme has done nothing to arrest the share price decline.

    From a pure investment standpoint, the current Centum portfolio is structurally challenged in ways that a single asset sale cannot remedy. Real estate in Kenya is illiquid and oversupplied in the commercial segment.

    Akiira is a long-dated greenfield energy project with no commissioned output and a track record of failed wells. Longhorn is a distressed publisher in a government-dictated curriculum environment. The TRIFIC SEZ is an unproven concept in a market where industrial zones have historically struggled to attract anchor tenants at the pace required to service the development debt.

    The one genuine bright spot is Nabo Capital’s management of Centum’s marketable securities portfolio, which returned 13 percent in FY2024 and outperformed major regional indices. But a well-run liquid securities book cannot indefinitely subsidise billions in real estate impairments and geothermal write-downs.

    The Sidian proceeds represent the last meaningful pool of clean liquidity Centum will generate before the company is entirely dependent on long-dated development assets to monetise its portfolio.

    That liquidity belongs to the shareholders who have waited, and suffered, through six years of this strategy. The market has rendered its verdict on the NSE’s secondary screen.

    The question now is whether James Mworia and the Centum board are listening, or whether the proceeds from Sidian Bank will quietly disappear into the next development project on the pipeline.

  • Top 7 Reasons People Choose to Remove Their Tattoos

    Top 7 Reasons People Choose to Remove Their Tattoos

    Getting a tattoo often feels like a permanent commitment to a meaningful symbol, memory, or design. However, life circumstances change, and what once seemed like a perfect idea may no longer fit who you are today. If you’re considering tattoo removal, you’re not alone. Millions of people decide to remove or fade their tattoos each year for various reasons. Understanding why others make this choice can help you feel more confident about your own decision.

    Career Advancement and Professional Image

    One of the most common reasons people seek tattoo removal is to improve their professional opportunities. While workplace attitudes toward body art have become more relaxed in recent years, certain industries still maintain conservative dress codes and appearance standards. Visible tattoos can sometimes create barriers in fields like law, finance, healthcare, and corporate management.

    Many professionals find that removing tattoos from highly visible areas like hands, neck, or face opens doors to promotions and new job opportunities. Even in creative industries, some people prefer to present a blank canvas that allows their work to speak for itself rather than their body art. The decision to remove a tattoo for career reasons doesn’t diminish the original meaning it held, but rather reflects personal growth and evolving priorities.

    Relationships and Life Changes

    Tattoos commemorating former romantic relationships are among the most frequently removed designs. Whether it’s a partner’s name, matching symbols, or dates that no longer hold positive meaning, these permanent reminders can feel uncomfortable in new relationships. Moving forward emotionally often means wanting to move forward physically as well.

    Beyond romantic relationships, some people remove tattoos that represented friendships or group affiliations that have since ended. Life transitions like divorce, changing social circles, or distancing from certain communities can make previously meaningful tattoos feel out of place. Columbus tattoo removalspecialists frequently work with clients who want to close chapters of their lives and start fresh.

    Regret Over Design Quality or Style

    Not all tattoos are created equal, and quality varies significantly between artists. Some people seek removal because their tattoo was poorly executed, with blurred lines, incorrect spelling, uneven shading, or colors that didn’t heal as expected. Amateur tattoos or those done in unprofessional settings often fall into this category.

    Additionally, tattoo trends change over time. Designs that were popular years ago may now feel dated or no longer reflect your personal aesthetic. Tribal bands, certain fonts, or specific imagery that seemed perfect at eighteen might not align with your taste at thirty-five. Removing or fading these tattoos allows for either a clean slate or preparation for a cover-up with better artwork.

    Personal Identity and Self-Expression

    As we grow and evolve, our sense of identity naturally shifts. A tattoo that represented who you were at one point in life might not reflect who you’ve become. Some people remove tattoos associated with beliefs they no longer hold, phases they’ve outgrown, or interests that have changed.

    This reason is particularly common among people who got tattoos during their youth or during significant life transitions. What felt rebellious, meaningful, or important at the time may now feel disconnected from your current values and self-image. Removing these tattoos isn’t about erasing the past but rather making space for who you are now.

    Medical or Skin Health Concerns

    Though less common, some people pursue tattoo removal for medical reasons. Certain tattoos can cause allergic reactions, particularly those with red or yellow ink. Persistent itching, raised skin, or ongoing irritation can make removal the healthiest option.

    Additionally, some medical procedures like MRI scans can be complicated by certain tattoo inks. People with chronic skin conditions may also find that tattooed areas become problematic. In these cases, removal becomes a health priority rather than simply an aesthetic choice.

    Social Stigma and Family Considerations

    Despite increasing acceptance of tattoos, some people still face judgment or discomfort from family members or their communities. This is especially true for tattoos with religious, cultural, or controversial imagery that may offend others or create unwanted attention.

    Parents sometimes choose removal to set different examples for their children or to avoid difficult conversations. Others remove tattoos before major life events like weddings, where they want the focus on the celebration rather than explaining their body art to extended family.

    Making the Right Choice for You

    Deciding to remove a tattoo is deeply personal and doesn’t require justification to anyone else. Whether your reason is professional, emotional, aesthetic, or practical, modern removal technology makes it possible to fade or eliminate unwanted ink safely and effectively. Take time to research qualified providers, understand the process, and feel confident that you’re making the right decision for your life today. Your body is your canvas, and you have every right to change the artwork as you see fit.

  • 8 Ways to Make the Most of Your Botswana Trip

    8 Ways to Make the Most of Your Botswana Trip

    Botswana stands as one of Africa’s most spectacular destinations, offering pristine wilderness, incredible wildlife encounters, and unforgettable safari experiences. Whether you’re planning your first visit or returning to explore more of this remarkable country, making the most of your journey requires thoughtful preparation and smart choices. From the waterways of the Okavango Delta to the vast salt pans of Makgadikgadi, Botswana promises adventures that will stay with you forever.

    Choose the Right Season for Your Visit

    Timing can make or break your Botswana adventure. The dry season from May to October offers excellent game viewing as animals congregate around permanent water sources, making wildlife spotting easier and more predictable. The vegetation is also less dense during these months, improving visibility across the landscape.

    However, the green season from November to April has its own unique appeal. This period brings dramatic thunderstorms, lush landscapes, and baby animals taking their first steps. Bird enthusiasts will find this time particularly rewarding, as migratory species arrive in spectacular numbers. Keep in mind that some remote camps close during the wettest months, so plan accordingly.

    Explore Multiple Ecosystems

    Botswana’s diverse landscapes each offer distinct experiences that showcase different aspects of African wilderness. The Okavango Delta transforms the Kalahari Desert into a watery paradise, where traditional mokoro canoe trips provide intimate encounters with nature. Meanwhile, Chobe National Park boasts one of Africa’s largest elephant populations, with river cruises offering front-row seats to their daily routines.

    Don’t overlook the Makgadikgadi Pans, where endless white salt flats create an otherworldly landscape unlike anything else on the continent. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve offers a more remote, rugged experience for those seeking solitude and authentic wilderness. Splitting your time between at least two or three different regions will give you a comprehensive understanding of Botswana’s natural wealth.

    Invest in Quality Accommodations

    Where you stay dramatically influences your overall experience in Botswana. The country specializes in low-impact, high-quality tourism, with many camps and lodges offering exceptional service and expert guides. These accommodations often include game drives, bush walks, and other activities in their rates, providing better value than budget options.

    Consider mixing luxury lodges with mobile camping experiences for variety and adventure. Many top-rated Botswana excursionsoperate from well-established camps that have spent years perfecting their operations and building relationships with local communities. The guides at these facilities possess invaluable knowledge about animal behavior, bird identification, and ecological systems.

    Embrace Walking Safaris

    While game drives offer comfort and extensive coverage, walking safaris provide an entirely different perspective on the African bush. Moving quietly on foot heightens your senses and creates a more intimate connection with the environment. You’ll notice smaller details like tracks, insects, and plants that you’d miss from a vehicle.

    Walking safaris also generate an exhilarating sense of vulnerability and awareness that makes every encounter more meaningful. Always choose experienced, licensed guides for these activities, as safety depends entirely on their expertise and judgment.

    Respect Local Culture and Communities

    Botswana’s people are as important to your journey as its wildlife. Take time to learn about local customs, support community-run enterprises, and engage respectfully with residents you encounter. Many areas offer cultural visits where you can learn traditional skills, hear ancient stories, and gain insight into life in rural Botswana.

    Purchasing crafts directly from artisans and choosing lodges that employ local staff and contribute to community development ensures your tourism dollars make a positive impact. This approach enriches your experience while supporting sustainable tourism practices.

    Pack Appropriately for Bush Life

    Successful safaris require practical packing choices. Neutral-colored clothing helps you blend into the environment, while layers accommodate temperature fluctuations between cool mornings and hot afternoons. Good binoculars, a quality camera with extra batteries, and a detailed field guide will enhance your wildlife observations significantly.

    Don’t forget sun protection, insect repellent, and any prescription medications, as remote areas have limited shopping options. Most camps provide laundry services, so you can pack lighter than you might think.

    Allow Flexibility in Your Schedule

    The bush operates on its own timeline, and rigid schedules can lead to disappointment. Build buffer days into your itinerary to account for weather delays, unexpected wildlife sightings, or simply the desire to spend an extra morning watching lions at a kill. The most memorable safari moments often happen when you’re not rushing to the next destination.

    Botswana rewards those who approach it with patience, respect, and curiosity. By following these strategies, you’ll create a journey filled with extraordinary moments and lasting memories that capture the true essence of this magnificent country.

  • How to Keep Track of Your Travel Rewards Easily

    How to Keep Track of Your Travel Rewards Easily

    Travel rewards programs can be incredibly valuable, but they’re only useful if you actually remember to use them. Between airline miles, hotel points, credit card rewards, and cashback programs, keeping track of everything can feel overwhelming. The good news is that with the right strategies and tools, managing your travel rewards doesn’t have to be complicated.

    Let’s explore practical ways to organize your rewards so you never miss out on free flights, hotel stays, or valuable perks again.

    Create a Centralized Tracking System

    The first step to managing your travel rewards effectively is getting everything in one place. You might have points scattered across multiple airlines, hotel chains, and credit card programs, making it nearly impossible to remember what you have and where.

    Start by making a simple spreadsheet that lists each rewards program, your account number, current point balance, and expiration dates. Update this document monthly or after significant purchases. This gives you a bird’s eye view of your entire rewards portfolio at a glance.

    Alternatively, consider using a dedicated rewards tracking app. Many free and paid options exist that automatically sync with your accounts and provide real-time balance updates. These apps often send notifications about expiring points, special promotions, or opportunities to earn bonus rewards.

    Set Up Account Alerts and Notifications

    Most rewards programs offer email or push notifications for important account activity. Take a few minutes to enable these alerts for each of your programs. You’ll want notifications for point expirations, special earning opportunities, and account statements.

    These automated reminders act as your personal assistant, ensuring you never lose points due to inactivity or miss limited-time bonus offers. Some programs also alert you when you’re close to reaching a redemption threshold, which can motivate you to earn just a few more points for that free flight or hotel night.

    Consolidate Your Rewards Programs

    While it’s tempting to join every rewards program you encounter, spreading yourself too thin can actually reduce the value you get. Instead, focus on a few programs that align with your travel patterns and spending habits.

    Choose one or two airline alliances and one or two hotel chains where you’ll concentrate your loyalty. This strategy helps you accumulate meaningful point balances faster rather than having small, unusable amounts across dozens of programs. When you signup for My10x, you can maximize your rewards by strategically funneling your everyday spending through cards that earn transferable points to your preferred travel partners.

    The same principle applies to credit cards. Having multiple cards can be beneficial, but make sure you understand the earning structure of each one and use them strategically for their bonus categories.

    Schedule Regular Rewards Reviews

    Set a recurring calendar reminder to review your rewards accounts quarterly. During these sessions, check for expiring points, evaluate whether your current strategy is working, and look for redemption opportunities.

    This is also the perfect time to assess whether you’re still using the right credit cards or if newer options might serve you better. The travel rewards landscape changes frequently, with new cards launching and existing programs adjusting their benefits.

    During your review, calculate the actual value you’re getting from your rewards. Are you earning points that you never use? Are you paying annual fees for cards that don’t deliver enough value? These quarterly check-ins help you course-correct before small inefficiencies become costly mistakes.

    Take Advantage of Account Activity Requirements

    Many rewards programs require some activity every 12 to 24 months to keep points from expiring. Don’t let inactivity cost you thousands of hard-earned points.

    For programs you don’t use frequently, set annual reminders to make a small purchase, transfer points, or complete whatever action counts as qualifying activity. Sometimes something as simple as dining at a partner restaurant or shopping through an online portal is enough to reset the expiration clock.

    Keep a list of easy, low-cost ways to maintain activity in each program. This might include subscribing to a magazine, making a small donation to charity through a rewards portal, or purchasing a small amount of points to trigger account activity.

    Conclusion

    Managing travel rewards doesn’t require hours of work each week. With a solid organizational system, strategic program selection, and regular maintenance, you can maximize the value of every point you earn. The key is creating sustainable habits that keep your rewards organized and accessible.

    Start by implementing just one or two of these strategies today. As they become routine, add more techniques to your rewards management toolkit. Before long, you’ll have a streamlined system that ensures you’re always ready to redeem those points for your next adventure.

  • The Oversubscribed Mirage: Why KPC’s IPO Success Masks a Deeper Market Rejection

    The Oversubscribed Mirage: Why KPC’s IPO Success Masks a Deeper Market Rejection

    March with a headline-grabbing 105.7 per cent subscription rate, raising Sh112.37 billion against a Sh106.3 billion target. Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi hailed the outcome as a triumph of transparency and investor confidence, pointing to the company’s regional monopoly in petroleum transport as a bulwark against economic volatility.

    The government was effusive. President William Ruto, in a statement from State House, described the result as reflecting “strong confidence by investors and the market.”

    Beneath this veneer of success lies a stark and inconvenient anatomy. The deal was propped up almost entirely by 465 local institutional investors led by the National Social Security Fund and the Public Service Superannuation Fund, alongside Uganda’s state-owned oil entity. Those with the most intimate knowledge of KPC, its own employees and the oil marketers who depend on its infrastructure daily, stayed conspicuously on the sidelines. When insiders and natural strategic buyers abandon an offering at scale, the question is not whether the numbers add up but whether the market is trying to communicate something the government refuses to hear.

    A Damning Anatomy of Demand

    The numbers are precise and they are damning. Oil marketers, allocated Sh15.9 billion in shares and positioned as natural strategic buyers given their reliance on KPC’s network, purchased a mere Sh23.1 million worth, equivalent to 0.14 per cent of their reservation. Only ten such firms participated against a sector that moves the overwhelming bulk of the country’s fuel.

    Major players including Vivo Energy, Rubis, and TotalEnergies abstained altogether. The final allocation tells the same story in stark arithmetic: oil marketing companies ended up with 0.014 per cent of total shares, and that figure, as disclosed by the Privatisation Authority, understates the rejection because it covers only those who did participate.

    KPC employees fared little better. Against a Sh5.3 billion reservation representing a dedicated 5 per cent pool, staff purchased Sh99.1 million worth of shares. All 670 employees reportedly took some allocation, yielding an average investment of approximately Sh148,000 per person.

    For workers with front-row seats to KPC’s operational realities including a 42 per cent underspend of the capital budget last year and an ongoing Sh3 billion environmental lawsuit over pipeline leaks, that is not a vote of confidence. It is a hedge dressed up as participation.

    Retail investors, the democratic heartbeat of any mass-market privatisation, numbered just 73,000 compared to the 800,000 who bought into the 2008 Safaricom IPO. They invested Sh4.1 billion against a Sh21.2 billion allocation, taking a final stake of 2.56 per cent. Foreign investors, for whom a quota of Sh21.2 billion was similarly set aside, spent a negligible Sh34.8 million, acquiring a rounding-error 0.02 per cent of the company. The IPO was extended by three days after early reports placed subscription at roughly 10 per cent, a figure that, if accurate, would have placed the entire transaction at risk of collapse.

    When the lead transaction adviser describes the oil marketers’ avoidance as a ‘cocktail of issues,’ the more parsimonious explanation is that sophisticated actors looked at the price and declined.

    The institution that ultimately saved the offering was Uganda’s state-owned Uganda National Oil Company. UNOC acquired shares worth Sh34.7 billion, far exceeding its East African Community allocation of Sh21.2 billion and securing a 20.15 per cent stake in KPC.

    As part of a legally binding side letter negotiated ahead of the IPO, Uganda secured veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy changes, material amendments to the business plan, share dilution, governance restructuring, and the appointment of the chief executive officer.

    Uganda also gained the right to appoint two directors to the nine-member KPC board. Kampala, which had for fifty years relied on KPC’s infrastructure to fuel its economy while having no formal say in tariff or strategic decisions, has now bought its way to the table. It is a rational act of statecraft. Whether it constitutes a rational investment at these prices is a separate question altogether.

    The Valuation Question the Government Cannot Escape

    Priced at Sh9 per share, the KPC offering implied a price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 22 times based on the company’s earnings per share of Sh0.4122 for the year to June 2025.

    The comparison with listed peers is instructive and brutal. Kenya Power trades at approximately 1.2 times earnings. KenGen trades at 4 times. NCBA, one of the country’s leading commercial banks, trades at 3.5 times.

    Even Safaricom, Kenya’s most profitable listed company and the uncontested jewel of the Nairobi Securities Exchange, trades at 8 to 9 times earnings. The government priced a state monopoly carrying a corruption investigation, pipeline leaks, and a capital budget chronically below target as though it were a high-growth technology company.

    Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda, in a detailed initiation note released in January, valued KPC shares at just Sh4.61, barely half the offer price, warning of limited upside due to what it characterised as an “embedded premium” in the current pricing.

    The firm forecast post-listing repricing as market liquidity forces genuine price discovery. The Ugandan analysts were not alone.

    Former Central Bank of Kenya chairman Mbui Wagacha publicly questioned the opacity of the process, warning that boardroom dealings “affect investor confidence.” Opposition senator Okiya Omtatah filed suit to stop the privatisation, citing constitutional violations and inadequate public participation, though the transaction ultimately proceeded.

    Faida Investment Bank, the lead transaction adviser, attributed oil marketers’ absence to fears over valuation, delayed board approvals, and a lack of consensus on whether to bid collectively or individually.

    That explanation is technically accurate and analytically insufficient. When sophisticated commercial actors whose primary business depends on the infrastructure being sold calculate that the entry price offers no reasonable return, the problem is not their decision-making process. The problem is the price.

    Pension Funds, Political Pressure, and the Rescuer Problem

    The rescue of this IPO by the NSSF and the PSSF raises questions that neither institution has adequately answered.

    A Nairobi lawyer publicly warned both funds against deploying pension savings into the offering, a warning that drew no public substantive rebuttal on the merits.

    The NSSF’s own Auditor-General report for the year ended June 2025 identified Sh199.4 million tied up in non-performing assets, Sh47 million lost in falling share investments, Sh163 million linked to ghost contributors, and five prime central business district properties worth Sh4.02 billion lying idle.

    The fund simultaneously committed to the Rironi-Nakuru-Mau Summit highway project and the KPC offering, all while its investment policy compliance remains under audit scrutiny.

    The Nation’s reporting noted that “talk” circulated of state pressure on the NSSF and PSSF to ensure the offering reached minimum thresholds. Both funds deny this characterisation.

    What is not in dispute is the arithmetic: local institutional investors purchased Sh67 billion in shares, oversubscribing their segment by 216 per cent, while every other category of investor fell dramatically short.

    The concentration of rescue capital in state-adjacent institutions is either a remarkable coincidence of investment conviction or something that warrants the scrutiny of the Capital Markets Authority and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.

    The government has sold a strategic national asset, diverted the proceeds to a fund whose constitutionality is before the High Court, and declared the transaction a benchmark for transparency. Each of those three claims merits separate examination.

    Sovereignty Sold, Sovereignty Bought

    Uganda’s acquisition deserves consideration on its own terms before it is celebrated as proof of regional integration. Kampala financed the Sh34.7 billion purchase in part through borrowing capacity, partly backed by a proposed facility linked to global oil trader Vitol.

    Uganda’s fuel supply relies on KPC for roughly 95 per cent of its imports. The investment gives UNOC formal veto rights over the pricing of a service on which its own economy depends. That is strategically rational for Uganda.

    It is less obviously rational for Kenya, which has diluted a majority of a monopoly infrastructure asset to a neighbour that now controls the appointment of the company’s chief executive and two of its nine board seats.

    East African Community investors collectively hold 21.22 per cent of the company, with Uganda accounting for the overwhelming majority. Rwanda’s pension funds participated with a smaller allocation.

    The Kenyan government retains 35 per cent. Local institutional investors hold 41 per cent. Retail Kenyans, despite President Ruto’s exhortation to buy shares for as little as Sh200, hold 2.56 per cent. The democratisation of public assets that the government promised has produced a company majority-owned by institutions and a foreign sovereign, with the Kenyan public as spectator shareholders.

    Where the Money Goes and What It Does Not Do

    Proceeds from the KPC IPO will be channelled into the National Infrastructure Fund, a vehicle CS Mbadi described as “the premier economic engine” of Kenya’s development strategy.

    The problem is that 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 before the National Assembly as of this week, with Mbadi insisting the legislative process was near conclusion. Investors who have purchased shares in a company whose proceeds flow into a fund of disputed constitutionality have accepted a structural risk that was not adequately foregrounded in the government’s public communications.

    None of the Sh112.37 billion raised returns to KPC. The company plans to reduce its dividend payout ratio from 94.5 per cent of profits to 50 per cent to fund capital expenditure requirements, including a new Mombasa-Nairobi pipeline.

    Investors who bought for income have accepted a dramatic reduction in near-term yield. Investors who bought for capital growth have accepted entry at a price that independent analysts place well above intrinsic value.

    Standard Investment Bank’s senior research associate Wesley Manambo issued a buy recommendation strictly for investors with a long time horizon, explicitly warning of limited attraction for shorter-term participants. With the listing date set for 9 March and institutional holders expected to hold positions indefinitely, secondary market liquidity on the Nairobi Securities Exchange may prove thin and disorderly in the opening weeks.

    What This Tells Capital Markets

    Kenya’s privatisation programme has been dormant since 2008, and the KPC listing carries the weight of representing an entire policy agenda. A clean, broadly subscribed deal would have signalled that the Nairobi Securities Exchange can serve as a credible venue for large public offerings, that retail investors trust government pricing, and that strategic buyers see long-term value in Kenyan infrastructure. The KPC transaction delivered none of those signals.

    What it delivered instead is a more sobering lesson. An oversubscription built on two pillars, a foreign sovereign with a structural dependency on the asset and a cluster of state-adjacent pension funds with murky investment mandates, is not market validation. It is managed demand.

    The government has raised its Sh106.3 billion. But it has done so at a cost that will become legible only after listing: reduced retail confidence in future privatisations, unresolved questions about NSSF’s fiduciary obligations, a secondary market almost certain to be illiquid, and a foreign shareholder now positioned with veto rights over the strategic direction of a company that handles over 80 per cent of Kenya’s petroleum supply.

    In a debt-laden economy where annual loan repayments devour roughly 40 per cent of government revenues, the urgency to execute this transaction was real.

    That urgency is precisely the condition under which pricing discipline collapses, scrutiny is dismissed as obstructionism, and institutions are leaned upon to perform the market’s function. The KPC IPO did not fail.

    But it also did not succeed in the way that matters for the long-term health of Kenya’s capital markets. Those are not the same thing, even when the headline subscription rate is 105.7 per cent.

  • Mukombero Doesn’t Boost Stamina and Energy, Medics Warn

    Mukombero Doesn’t Boost Stamina and Energy, Medics Warn

    NAIROBI, Kenya — Medical experts are urging Kenyans to stop treating mukombero as a natural booster for stamina, energy or sexual performance, warning there is no conclusive scientific evidence to support the widespread claims.

    The root, locally known as mukombero and scientifically identified as Mondia whitei, grows mainly in Kakamega Forest and other parts of Western Kenya. It is traditionally chewed raw, brewed into tea or soaked in beverages by men who believe it improves blood flow, relaxes muscles, raises energy levels and acts as a gentler alternative to drugs like Viagra.

    However, urologists say these beliefs are not backed by robust clinical research.

    “There is no conclusive scientific evidence proving that mukombero treats erectile dysfunction,” said urologist Dr Edward Mugalo.

    He explained that erectile dysfunction is usually caused by underlying medical or psychological issues — including diabetes, hypertension, low testosterone, stress, anxiety or depression — and requires proper diagnosis, not self-medication with unproven herbs.

    Silvas Lisamula, a Luhya elder and former director of culture in the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, defended the root’s traditional role. He said mukombero has long been used during social gatherings and long cultural events to keep people alert, energised and confident.

    “It was mainly used to keep people active and focused,” Lisamula told The Star at his home in Shinyalu, Kakamega County.

    Botanist Dennis Omayo acknowledged that the root contains useful micronutrients such as magnesium, calcium, zinc, Vitamin D and Vitamin K. He described its effects as gradual and gentler than Viagra, but still cautioned: “It can perform like Viagra, but from a distance.”

    Dr Mugalo stressed that while some men report feeling more energetic after using mukombero, this could be placebo effect or simply the result of the root’s mild stimulant properties — not proof it fixes sexual health problems.

    He warned especially against its use by people with hypertension or other chronic conditions, saying unregulated herbal remedies can sometimes worsen existing health issues.

    The experts are calling for better public education: men experiencing persistent fatigue, low energy or erection difficulties should visit a doctor for proper evaluation rather than depending on traditional roots alone.

    Proven medications for erectile dysfunction are available and work within minutes when prescribed correctly, they added.

    The caution comes as mukombero continues to gain popularity across the country, with some vendors even selling it in dried form or as packaged drinks.

    While cultural leaders want the tree protected as part of Kenya’s heritage, medical professionals insist that respect for tradition must not override evidence-based health advice.

    “If it gives you energy, then it gives you energy for everything,” one user said — but doctors say that feeling alone is not enough to recommend it as medicine.

    Men are therefore advised: consult a qualified health professional first.

  • Israel-Kenya: Africa’s Intelligence Front Line

    Israel-Kenya: Africa’s Intelligence Front Line

    By Jose Lev Alvarez

    Israel’s intelligence relationship with Kenya is not a feel-good partnership or a relic of counterterrorism folklore. It is a hard-nosed alliance forged by blood, memory, and shared threat perception. What binds Israel and Kenya is not sentiment or diplomacy, but securitization: the recognition that terrorism, radical networks, and hostile transnational actors are existential threats that must be confronted early, aggressively, and without illusion.

    Kenya learned this lesson long before al-Shabaab made headlines. In the 1970s, Palestinian terror organizations turned Africa into an operational rear base—hijacking Israeli aircraft, staging attacks from African soil, and exploiting weak states and permissive airspace.

    The 1976 hijacking at Entebbe, carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and its allies, was not just Israel’s trauma; it was Africa’s wake-up call. Kenya’s decision to quietly facilitate Israel’s rescue operation was not altruistic. It was self-interest. Nairobi understood that allowing Palestinian terrorism to metastasize on African territory would invite permanent instability, international retaliation, and the erosion of state sovereignty.

    That moment hardened Kenyan threat perception—and locked in an endless strategic alignment with Israel.

    For Jerusalem, East Africa has long been part of the outer security perimeter: a forward zone where intelligence cooperation, early warning, and partner capacity prevent threats from traveling north and west.

    For Nairobi, Israel brought something Western lectures never did—results. Training, intelligence sharing, aviation and maritime security, protective services, and the normalization of intelligence liaison as statecraft. When Israeli expertise—often associated with Mossad—meets Kenyan operational depth, the outcome is not domination, but resilience.

    Certainly, this relationship endures because securitization is cumulative. Once terrorism is framed as existential, institutions follow. Laws tighten. Budgets move. Doctrine hardens. Kenya’s security architecture reflects this shift, and Israel is embedded within it—not as a colonial patron, but as a trusted force multiplier. That trust explains why Kenya has remained, year after year, the most pro-Israel country in Africa even as others wobble under pressure from the Global South narrative machine.

    Certainly, the Palestinian issue exposes the core logic. Kenya’s alignment with Israel is not based on hostility to Palestinians as a people; it is based on lived experience with Palestinian terrorism. As aforementioned, Nairobi remembers when Palestinian groups hijacked planes, killed civilians, and treated Africa as expendable terrain in their war against Israel.

    From Kenya’s perspective, this was not “liberation.” It was foreign terrorism imported onto African soil. Israel’s fight was Kenya’s fight—against radicalization, against state erosion, and against being used as someone else’s battlefield.

    That logic still holds. Kenya judges Israel not by slogans, but by outcomes: intelligence that saves lives, technology that hardens targets, and doctrine that prioritizes prevention over performative outrage. This is securitization in its raw form—issues move out of moral abstraction and into security policy because the cost of failure is too high.

    For Israel, the stakes today are even higher. Africa is no longer neutral terrain. China builds infrastructure and buys silence. Russia sells muscle. Iran hunts influence. Jihadist networks exploit seams. Kenya is the anchor state—the intelligence hinge that secures Red Sea approaches, aviation routes, and regional counterterrorism cooperation. Through Kenya, Israel projects stability, breaks isolation efforts, and demonstrates that partnership beats pressure in international politics.

    Looking ahead, this alliance will deepen. Cyber threats, drone proliferation, maritime insecurity, and terror financing are converging into a single battlespace. Kenya needs partners who act, not moralize. Israel needs allies who vote, host, and cooperate without apology.

    Taken together, this is not a sentimental friendship. It is a strategic bargain rooted in survival. In Africa, where allegiances shift fast, Kenya remains aligned with Israel for one simple reason: it works. And in geopolitics, usefulness is the only loyalty that lasts.

    Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in Israeli security doctrine and international geostrategy.

  • The Crash of Koko Networks: A Detailed Look Into How and Why It Happened, And The Potential For A “Silver Lining” For Carbon Integrity

    The Crash of Koko Networks: A Detailed Look Into How and Why It Happened, And The Potential For A “Silver Lining” For Carbon Integrity

    By Tom Price

    As the news of Koko Networks’ bankruptcy sank in over the weekend, a false narrative was created that this was somehow the fault of Government of Kenya regulators, for failing to approve the sale of Koko’s carbon credits.

    While that may have been the trigger, if anything that decision is a silver lining in this tragedy, showing that the system for ensuring high quality carbon credits is starting to work as intended.

    Regulators aren’t rubber stamps – and in the case of Koko, the Government of Kenya did their job exactly right, enabling carbon credits to exist alongside Kenya’s other high quality exports like tea and coffee. And that’s because Koko’s carbon credits were largely hot air, and the failure of Koko to sell their offsets was entirely of their own making.

    Before explaining why, first a moment of compassion for the victims here: the customers, employees, investors, lenders, and other partners who thought they were supporting a clean cooking fuel company rather than a flawed carbon credit company, and were misled by Koko’s leadership team.

    To their credit, they built Koko into a world class operation, run by some of the smartest, most capable operators available in business today; other companies will be lucky to snap them up.

    Koko was incredibly impressive, a marvel of technology and branding meeting a market ripe for disruption.

    The stoves worked well, the fuel was clean and affordable, and the fuel ATMs were convenient and modern. And the need to replace dirty, unsustainable charcoal is as pressing as ever. The fatal flaw for Koko was the heart of their operation: how they counted carbon credits.

    A business model built on carbon

    That’s because making and selling carbon credits was the entire business. As they told the Harvard Business Review, Koko subsidized their fuel by 25-40% and their stoves by up to 85% – they lost money on every customer they signed up, and every liter of fuel they sold. And if their claims are to be believed, they were selling upwards of ~20 million liters every month at the end, losing money on every single one. So the only way to break-even – let alone profit – was carbon credits.

    The problem lay in how Koko exploited the now-closing gaps in how carbon credits are generated. Koko has to date been issued almost 15 million carbon credits by Gold Standard, at least 170,000 of which have been sold to companies like Bank of America and Bristol Meyers. But those were sold into the voluntary market, which generally commands lower prices. The real money was in the compliance market, like CORSIA which covers airlines.

    According to Gold Standard and Koko’s own documents, Koko expected to earn as much as 5+ carbon credits per customer per year for ten years – far, far more than other companies in the same market. These carbon credits, generating $100 in revenue per customer per year, would be used to repay the cost of the stove and the fuel subsidy and then generate operating profit for the company.

    This carbon finance would therefore be used to provide a clean transition from cooking with dirty fuels, return a profit to investors and provide the company with healthy margins to continue expansion.

    Why was this approach doomed to fail from the start? There are three fatal flaws in Koko’s approach, lessons that must be learned for the sector to build back better. 

    1 – Overcounting their sustainability. Koko used a wildly inaccurate fNRB (the fraction of non-renewable biomass, or the modeled rate at which trees won’t grow back after cutting them down to make charcoal). Koko claimed 93%, when in fact fNRB in Kenyan cities like Nairobi is 38%. The inaccuracy of Koko’s assumption has been widely known and discussed for some time. Koko, like most other project developers, opted against using scientific studies and instead chose a figure that would maximise the amount of savings they can claim.

    That metric alone would result in overcredited Koko by 2.4X.

    2 – Overcounting their impact, with a vastly distorted and inaccurate claim of baseline fuel usage. Koko claimed all of their urban customers in cities like Nairobi were previously using only charcoal (6.8 tons of firewood equivalent, or about 1 ton of charcoal per household per year), and none used any LPG, and that they all used their Koko stoves all the time instead.

    Any credible survey shows that is simply not true. “Fuel stacking” (cooking with multiple fuels alongside one another) is the default, not exception, and LPG use is widespread among households in urban Kenya.

    At the start of their staggering growth, 52% of households in urban Kenya were already using LPG (2019 census ref, table 2.18, page 330). In Nairobi, the urban area where Koko expanded the fastest, the number was at 67.2%. The logic that all of the customers onboarded were solely non LPG customers is simply not credible. Yet Koko claimed that all ~1.3 million customers were using *only* dirty charcoal before switching to ethanol.

    That would overcredit them significantly, compounding their fNRB overcrediting.

    From Koko’s Gold Standard documents, GS 11440. Citation: GS11440_ER Sheet_MP07_VPA2_V03_20.01.2025.xlsx. Dated March 2025. Full documents available here.

    From Koko’s Gold Standard documents, GS 11440. Citation: GS11440_ER Sheet_MP07_VPA2_V03_20.01.2025.xlsx. Dated March 2025. Full documents available here.


    3 – Overcounting how much clean fuel their customers were actually using.     This is perhaps the most egregious metric. Koko was a walled garden system – you could only fill their stoves with their tanks, which you could only top up in their fuel ATMs, and only after you punched in your personal customer ID.

    Customer ID

    They knew exactly, to the liter, how much each customer was buying every month, and there was every incentive to report that number … if it would be higher than the claimed average.

    But they didn’t.

    Instead, they used an average of 15+ liters for every customer, every month, “verified” most recently by surveying only 159 customers out of almost 900,000 households in March 2023.

    There’s a simple way to know what actually happened – they have the data, they just didn’t use it. And the most obvious reason why is also the most likely one.

    These three metrics alone account for substantial overcrediting, with some estimates suggesting as much as 10X (without actual fuel sales data, we may never know). 

    Academic experts weigh in

    The concern about what a company like Koko was doing was explicitly laid out in research by UC Berkeley in January, 2024, in ground breaking work which for the first time took a comprehensive look at the over/under crediting in the global cookstove market.

    The researchers examined every methodology and input metric in detail, including the methodology Koko chose and how Koko chose to interpret the rules. Literally every concern they raised about potential overcrediting was something Koko had chosen to do.

    The attention surrounding the research accelerated calls for reform, and pretty soon the clock for Koko was ticking. Tough new rules were coming into place, like those by Gold Standard and UNFCCC that would come into effect in January 2026 requiring the use of an accurate fNRB.

    So the race was on to get those credits sold, and that required Kenya to sign off on a Letter of Authorization.

    A changing market

    Some background may be in order. Not all carbon credits are the same. Early methodologies relied largely on insufficient sampling and estimates, which UC Berkeley pointed out was rife with overcrediting. To its credit, the cookstove sector has responded, and now projects that can prove their use and impact, such as through tracking fuel sold or stove use, are seen as more credible. The Gold Standard’s accurate new “Metered and Measured” methodology is widely seen as most reliable, and the new CLEAR methodology has helpfully incorporated approaches relying on continuously-tracked energy consumption (CTEC).

    But as the market continues to move towards quality and tougher standards, outdated methodologies are still used by legacy projects. Koko has chosen to continue using one of the worst rated methodologies (AMS-I.E), for perhaps the simple expedient that it was in their best interest.

    This is not to discount the challenges for developers as standards change, but it has now been almost three years since the pre-print of the UC Berkeley research became public, and concerns about overcrediting have been constant in the last years.

    This duality is what has created the market opportunity for the rise of ratings agencies like BeZero, which independently evaluate carbon projects on objective standards, and then rate them from AAA-D depending on quality.  

    Here’s how cookstove projects stacked up last year, by rating:

    When Koko was rated, they earned only a “B” overall grade, which means “the credit issued by the project has a low likelihood of achieving 1 tonne of CO2 removal.” And they got an even lower “D” on the sub-metric for carbon accounting.

    Since they chose not to use more credible metrics and earn a higher rating, their only hope was to find large buyers who either wouldn’t know enough, or wouldn’t ask before buying the offsets – or simply didn’t care about quality.

    For a while that market seemed like CORSIA, the program for airlines to offset their emissions. And while CORSIA had their own standards, they weren’t nearly tough enough – check out just how poorly rated all the CORSIA eligible projects are:

    Crash Out

    Which brings us back around to the Government of Kenya’s refusal to issue Koko a letter of authorization to sell into the CORSIA market. According to reporting by QCINTEL, Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) wanted Koko to amend their fNRB to be more accurate, and Koko refused. Kenya needed the carbon credits it approved to be valid, since it would impact their ability to meet their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris climate accords. Koko’s approach to over-crediting meant they requested an outsized number of authorizations from the country’s entire budget for all projects, industries and years.

    And reportedly attempts to work with Koko to use more credible approaches so that the Kenyan Government could safely authorize a smaller volume within their national budget were rebuffed by the company, unwilling to be reasonable.

    By refusing to use credible numbers, Koko chose their own fate. There can be no more damning indictment than of them being willing to let the company go out of business (and try to blame regulators in hopes of claiming an insurance settlement from MIGA) than to play by the rules and be accurate. They crashed out instead of coming clean.

    Plenty of blame to go around

    Koko is not alone in blame here. These fundamental flaws in the business model link back to larger flaws within the system.

    1. Standard bodies and verification bodies  

    Gold Standard, which issued almost 15M carbon credits to Koko, has some tough questions to answer about why they continued to let projects use significantly divergent fNRB rates at the same time in the same market, and why a company like Koko was allowed to choose an estimate of usage, even though Koko had all the data needed to prove it.

    Meanwhile, the independent verifier hired by Koko signed off on millions of credits based on ~150 surveys of customers picked by Koko out of their ~900,000 total customer population. Why was the company not challenged to provide actual fuel sales data?

    (On a more positive note, it is helpful to see Gold Standard’s recent methodological updates – including both overall as well as to its suite of cookstove methodologies – to align with the Paris Agreement, introduce greater scrutiny on data used and increase the hurdle rate on what qualifies as a GS VER.)

    1. Koko carbon and commercial leaders

    The leadership at Koko who set up, generated and sold carbon credits under false pretenses have to accept responsibility for the choices they made. All of this was being debated publicly and widely. None of these issues were a secret or a surprise. So it’s difficult to find another way to interpret the design of the carbon program they oversaw, and the data they chose to report, other than that at some point along the way they realized their mistakes and yet continued to knowingly mislead stakeholders about the veracity of their carbon claims, in hopes of a big payout. Estimates are Koko was on track to eventually issue almost $1B in carbon credits.

    1. The investor community

    Investors appear to have missed key items during their due diligence on this business. All their workings are readily accessible in the public domain. It only takes someone with a few hours on their hands to unpack what is being stated and walk outside and check those assumptions with reality. If they couldn’t check reality, they could have at least referenced the latest science, and compared it to Koko’s claims.

    For example, the MIGA due diligence report is publicly accessible. The publicly-available key documents and scope of review don’t appear to have reviewed the actual carbon programme they were insuring against.

    How the industry moves forward

    The tragedy of all of this is that while the business model of using carbon to enable broader clean cooking access is fundamentally sound, Koko’s overwhelming reliance on only that revenue while deeply subsidizing their fuel sales was fatally flawed from the start.

    In Kenya, unsubsidised ethanol cooking fuel is the most expensive method to cook any meal (link to CCT paper). The notion that a perpetual carbon subsidy should cover the negative operating margin was always going to meet reality at some point in time, no matter how much good PR they received.

    Koko was an incredibly well run operation, delivering real value and benefit to customers.  Perhaps they could have charged a higher price for the fuel, reducing risk exposure. Or maybe if they had aimed to earn fewer credits but gotten a higher price for them, they could have made it work. In recent months, there has been a very clear trend towards projects with higher ratings earning a multiple of the value of lower rated ones.

    That makes sense – to use an analogy, if carbon credit buyers are purchasing bottles of water, they don’t want the container, they want the content. A ton of emission reductions should be a provable ton of emission reductions. If you can prove it, you should be paid more. And if you can’t prove it, then you should sell at a discount, if at all. Koko tried to have it both ways – selling a water bottle labeled as “full” but with only a few drops at the bottom, trying to get premium pricing for a substandard product.

    The good news is that tools now exist for all cookstove projects to prove their impact, through logging fuel sales or incorporating stove use monitors.

    The urgency is greater than ever. Cooking with firewood and charcoal adds more CO2 emissions than the entire global aviation industry, while hundreds of millions of families suffer the health impacts of smoky kitchens.

    Ratings agencies will play a vital role in birthing this new market of integrity. There are now multiple “A” rated cookstove projects, delivering real provable impact, while lowering costs and improving health.

    Koko could have been one of those. Instead it will be remembered for two things: the company that tried to pull off another great carbon heist, and the bravery of the Government of Kenya regulators who stood up for the integrity of their market.

    Anything else is just hot air and victim blaming.

    The above images and data are all taken from publicly available information, mostly by Koko to Gold Standard; will happily update or amend if/when better information is available.

    The author has eight years’ experience in the clean cookstove sector, most recently with EcoSafi, with a focus on carbon credit integrity. The author is no longer affiliated with the company, and the views expressed are personal, offered in the public interest to support informed debate on carbon finance for cookstoves.

  • Your Excellency! How Ida’s New Job Title From Ruto’s Envoy Job Is Likely to Impact Luo Politics Post Raila

    Your Excellency! How Ida’s New Job Title From Ruto’s Envoy Job Is Likely to Impact Luo Politics Post Raila

    President William Ruto’s nomination of Mama Ida Odinga as Kenya’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations Environment Programme has injected a new dynamic into Luo Nyanza politics, three months after the death of opposition icon Raila Odinga.

    The appointment, announced on Friday, carries more weight than the diplomatic responsibilities it entails. Should Parliament approve her nomination, Ida Odinga will assume the formal title “Your Excellency,” a designation reserved for heads of state and ambassadors. This elevation transforms her from the revered widow of a political titan into a state official with formal authority to match her already considerable moral influence.

    In Luo Nyanza, where Ida Odinga is fondly known as Min Piny, meaning Mother of the Nation, the implications of this new status are profound. Even during Raila’s lifetime, political observers noted that a visit to the former Prime Minister was considered incomplete without paying homage to Ida. That cultural reverence now intersects with formal state authority, creating a unique position of power that could reshape political dynamics in the region.

    The timing of the appointment is particularly significant. It comes amid an intensifying power struggle within the Orange Democratic Movement, the political vehicle Raila built over decades. With the party’s founding father gone, fault lines have emerged within both ODM and the wider Odinga family, threatening the unity that Raila’s presence once guaranteed.

    Raila Odinga Jr’s social media post just hours after the announcement signals that the appointment may already be having its intended effect. In a rare public statement attempting to de-escalate family tensions, particularly involving his uncle Oburu Oginga, the younger Raila announced that a family meeting had been scheduled for February 1st.

    Winnie, Raila Odinga Junior during a recent rally in Kibera.
    Winnie, Raila Odinga Junior during a recent rally in Kibera.

    “I’m not a politician. I love everyone and respect everyone. My uncle has agreed to a family meeting on the 1st. I would like it sooner. I don’t know what is happening; don’t drag me into the politics,” he posted on X.

    The choreography of Ruto’s announcement was deliberate. The President could have bundled Ida’s nomination with other diplomatic postings announced earlier in the week. Instead, it stood alone, clean, prominent and unmistakable. In his statement, Ruto praised her as “a distinguished educationist, civic leader and an acclaimed advocate for social justice and gender equity.”

    Yet Ida Odinga’s public life cannot be understood through professional credentials alone. For decades, she stood beside Raila through detention, political exile, electoral heartbreaks and improbable resurgences. When the state took Raila away during the harshest chapters of his political life, it was Ida who held the family together, shielded their children and anchored a political machine many expected to collapse.

    National Assembly Minority Leader Junet Mohamed appeared to endorse the nomination, noting that environmental conservation was close to Raila’s heart. “She has what it takes to do that work. Immense experience and knowledge. Baba was also passionate about environmental issues and he put a lot of efforts in restoring the Mau until it almost cost him politically. She will continue from where baba stopped and fulfill his dreams of conservation of the environment,” Mohamed said.

    Only weeks ago, Mama Ida stepped into ODM’s turbulence herself, urging unity and restraint among party stalwarts. “My husband left you a thriving party. You must keep it vibrant and strong, if not for anything else, at least do so in honour of his memory,” she told party leaders at her Karen home during celebrations marking what would have been Raila’s 81st birthday.

    Political analysts suggest that by elevating Ida Odinga to a position of formal state authority, President Ruto may be attempting to stabilize Luo Nyanza politics while simultaneously weakening ODM’s opposition credentials. The move could be seen as a continuation of the political chess game that characterized relations between Ruto and Raila, particularly after their unexpected rapprochement following the 2022 elections.

    President William Ruto and Mama Ida Odinga during Raila Odinga's funeral service at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology grounds in Siaya County.
    President William Ruto and Mama Ida Odinga during Raila Odinga’s funeral service at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology grounds in Siaya County.

    For a woman who has long exercised influence without title or trumpet, the symbolism of the “Your Excellency” designation is profound. It transforms her moral authority into institutional power, potentially giving her a stronger hand in mediating the succession politics that have roiled ODM since Raila’s death.

    Whether Ida Odinga chooses to continue pulling strings from the quiet center she has mastered, or steps fully into the national arena using her new platform, one thing appears certain. In Luo Nyanza politics, the widow of Raila Odinga now carries not just the weight of history and culture, but the formal imprimatur of the Kenyan state.

    The UNEP posting, with its headquarters in Gigiri, Nairobi, is one of the most prestigious in Kenya’s Foreign Service. As host nation to the UN’s environmental authority, Kenya occupies a rare diplomatic space, and its permanent representative wields considerable influence in global climate politics.

    If confirmed by Parliament, where all indications suggest she will sail through without opposition, Ida Odinga will replace former Budalang’i MP Ababu Namwamba, who has been redeployed as Kenya’s High Commissioner to Uganda.

    At Raila Odinga’s burial at Nyayo Stadium, President Ruto spoke words that now read as more than condolence. “Kenya stands with you in this moment of sorrow. We share in your inexpressible grief, but we also share in your pride for your husband, your father, your brother, and your kin who belonged not only to you, but also to all of us. Thank you for sharing him so generously with us, our families and the nation,” he said.

    Those words, political observers now note, may have been foreshadowing this moment when the widow of his most formidable political rival would be transformed into “Your Excellency” by presidential decree.

  • The Easy Way to MSport Ghana: From Login to Your First Bet

    The Easy Way to MSport Ghana: From Login to Your First Bet

    MSport has firmly established itself as one of the most convenient and reliable betting platforms in Ghana, attracting players with its easy login, high security, and extensive betting options. Thanks to its intuitive interface and sophisticated account security, users can quickly register, log in to their account, and take advantage of all available features. In this review, we’ll take a detailed look at completing the MSport login process, security measures, key benefits of the platform, and what makes it such a popular choice among Ghanaian players.

    Registering on the MSport platform

    Registering on MSport is necessary to access the platform’s numerous betting options, promotions, and other features. The registration process is designed to be simple and accessible to users across Ghana.

    1. Open your preferred browser and search for MSport Ghana.
    2. Find the “Register” button in the upper right corner of the website’s home page.
    3. Enter your active Ghanaian mobile phone number in the appropriate field. Ensure the number is entered correctly, as it will be used to verify your account.
    4. Choose a strong password consisting of letters, numbers, and special characters. This will enhance the security of your account.
    5. Carefully read the MSport terms and conditions, then tick the box to agree.
    6. Click the “Register” button to complete the process. Follow the instructions to verify your account.

    Security Measures to Protect Your Account

    The security of your MSport account is a top priority when logging into the platform. MSport offers several account security options, but users should also take preventative measures to enhance security.

    • Create a strong password: Always choose a password that includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Avoid using easily guessed information, such as your name or date of birth.
    • Enable two-factor authentication (2FA): MSport offers this feature; activate it to add an extra layer of security. This includes receiving a verification code via SMS every time you log in.
    • Avoid Sharing Login Details: Never share your password or login details with anyone. MSport representatives will never request this information.
    • Monitor Account Activity: Regularly check your account activity for unusual or unauthorized transactions. Immediately report any suspicious activity to MSport support.
    • Log out of your account when not in use: Always log out of your account after use, especially when logging into MSport from a shared or public device.

    How to Login to the MSport Platform

    After registering with MSport, logging into the platform is a simple process designed for quick access to your account. Follow these simple steps to log in and start betting:

    1. Use your web browser to visit the official MSport Ghana website.
    2. Find the “Login” option on the homepage, in the upper right corner.
    3. Enter the phone number you used when registering and the password you set.
    4. Click “Login” to access your account. If two-factor authentication (2FA) is enabled, enter the verification code sent to your phone.
    5. If you have forgotten your password, use the “Forgot Password” option on the login page. Follow the instructions to securely reset your password.

    Benefits of Logging into the MSport Platform in Ghana

    MSport has quickly gained recognition as one of the leading betting and casino platforms in Ghana. Renowned for its innovation and user-focused approach, the platform offers users a convenient, secure, and enjoyable gaming experience. Below, we’ll explore the key features that make MSport an excellent choice for betting and online casino enthusiasts.

    Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface

    Navigating MSport is very easy thanks to a well-designed user interface. The platform is designed with simplicity and accessibility in mind, allowing both new and experienced users to navigate the site with ease. The “Register” button is prominently located in the upper right corner of the homepage, making the registration process quick and simple. Similarly, the “Sports Betting” and “Online Casino” categories are strategically placed on the main navigation bar, providing users with instant access to the desired sections.

    Comprehensive Technical Support

    MSport prides itself on offering reliable 24/7 technical support to promptly resolve user issues. The support team can be reached via multiple channels, including live chat, email, and phone, ensuring a convenient way for every user to communicate. Whether users are experiencing account registration issues, withdrawal delays, or understanding the platform’s general features, a dedicated customer support team is ready to provide the necessary assistance. This high level of reliability instills confidence and allows users to fully focus on their gaming experience.

    Licensed and Secure

    One of MSport’s distinguishing features is its commitment to reliability and security. The platform operates under a Curacao license, confirming its compliance with international standards and reliability. MSport also employs advanced encryption methods to protect user data, ensuring the safety of personal and financial information. Regular audits and system checks further confirm the platform’s commitment to providing a secure and transparent environment for its users.

    Convenient Mobile App

    For users who prefer to play on the go, MSport offers a dedicated mobile app that enhances convenience and functionality. The app takes up only 25 MB, ensuring minimal storage space consumption and an exceptional gaming experience. Users can access all site features, including sports betting and casino games, directly from their mobile devices. Importantly, the app can only be downloaded from the official MSport website, ensuring secure installation without third-party interference.

    Attractive bonuses for all users

    MSport stands out for its generous bonuses, designed specifically for new and existing users. New users can take advantage of a 100% welcome bonus of up to GHS 1,000, making it a great incentive to register. Existing users aren’t left out: the platform regularly announces attractive promotions and loyalty programs to retain players. These bonuses not only add value but also increase the chances of winning, making MSport an attractive choice for gambling enthusiasts.

    Fast and Secure Transactions

    MSport guarantees users fast and secure transactions. The platform supports a variety of payment methods, including mobile payments such as MTN and Vodafone, as well as major bank cards. Transactions are protected by advanced encryption, ensuring the privacy of user data. Furthermore, the minimum deposit is very affordable, starting from GHS 20, making the platform accessible to players of all budgets.

    Casino Games on MSport

    Online casinos have become a growing trend in Ghana, offering players the opportunity to combine entertainment with potential winnings. Logging into the MSport platform offers a rich gaming experience, offering a variety of game options tailored to the preferences of a wide range of players. With a user-friendly interface and highly secure transactions, MSport allows players to easily immerse themselves in the virtual casino environment. Players can enjoy a variety of classic and innovative casino games.

    Slots

    Slots are one of the most popular entertainment options on the MSport platform, attracting both new and experienced players. These games offer a visually captivating experience with engaging themes and colorful graphics. A distinctive feature of MSport slots is the wide range of user settings available. Players can adjust the number of paylines, coin denominations to suit their bankroll, and even take advantage of unique bonus features. This flexibility allows players to tailor the gameplay to their preferences and maximize their enjoyment. Whether it’s themed slots inspired by myths or modern adventures, there’s always something new for slot lovers.

    Roulette

    Roulette is another important game at MSport, giving Ghanaian players the thrill of spinning the wheel. This classic casino game allows players to bet on where they think the ball will land after the wheel spins. There are a variety of betting options, from picking individual numbers to betting on larger groups of numbers, such as odd or even numbers, colors, or specific ranges. With a wide variety of betting options, roulette appeals to both strategic players and those looking for a quick and exciting thrill.

    Blackjack

    Blackjack is a favorite among players who enjoy games that combine strategy and luck. At MSport, blackjack offers fast-paced gameplay where the goal is to get a hand as close to 21 as possible without going over it. Players can bet on individual hands or choose betting options that cover multiple rounds or outcomes, depending on their preferences. The simplicity of this game and the skill it unlocks make it an excellent choice for players seeking more than just luck.

    Poker

    For those who value strategic depth and a competitive spirit, poker is a great option. MSport offers accessible poker tables where players can compete against others, striving to build the strongest hand or bluff their way to victory. Poker variations, including Texas Hold’em and Omaha, allow for a variety of playstyles. Poker betting involves strategic decisions such as folding, raising, or calling, creating a smart and engaging experience for enthusiasts exploring the platform.

    Sports Betting on MSport in Ghana

    Once you log in to the MSport Ghana platform, you’ll have the opportunity to bet on a variety of popular sporting events. Whether you’re a fan of football, basketball, tennis, boxing, or cricket, MSport offers a wide selection of markets and tournaments for betting. The variety of available options makes the process as simple and engaging as possible for both beginners and experienced bettors.

    Football

    Football is a favorite sport in Ghana, and the MSport platform reflects this interest by offering a variety of betting opportunities on local and international matches. Bettors can explore well-known leagues like the English Premier League, UEFA Champions League, La Liga, and Serie A, as well as follow exciting competitions like the Africa Cup of Nations. Domestically, the Ghana Premier League is a particular favorite, featuring matches with local talent. MSport allows users to bet on a variety of markets, including regulation time, total goals, first goalscorer, and total corners, providing a variety of ways to enjoy the game.

    Basketball

    Basketball fans in Ghana can follow a variety of leagues and tournaments through the MSport platform. The NBA, with its exciting events and world-famous players, is a key focus, along with other sports such as European basketball leagues and international competitions like the FIBA ​​World Cup. Bettors can predict the winners of individual games or entire series, as well as bet on point spreads, point totals, and individual player stats such as rebounds or assists. This wide range of options ensures that every fan will find a way to immerse themselves in the basketball atmosphere.

    Tennis

    For those who appreciate action-packed tennis, MSport offers betting on major tournaments such as Wimbledon, the US Open, the Australian Open, and Roland Garros. Furthermore, ATP and WTA tournament matches are held year-round, keeping tennis exciting. Users can bet on match winners, set scores, total games played, and even place live bets that change as the match progresses. A focus on both global stars and up-and-coming tennis players adds even more interest to MSport for tennis fans.

  • 1Win Games 2025: Ultimate Overview of Popular Casino, Sports & Live Games

    1Win Games 2025: Ultimate Overview of Popular Casino, Sports & Live Games

    Fast-Paced Future of Slots, Crash, Dice & Live Wins on 1Win Tanzania

    In the ever-evolving world of online entertainment, few platforms have surged in popularity as rapidly — or as decisively — as 1Win. Since its launch in 2017, this multi-platform operator has transformed from a niche betting site into a global powerhouse, offering over 10,000 games, 50+ sports markets, and real-time live dealer experiences to millions of players across Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

    By 2025, 1Win Tanzania isn’t just another gambling site — it’s a full-spectrum digital playground where slot enthusiasts, live casino addicts, sports bettors, and crypto gamers all converge. With its lightning-fast mobile app, generous bonuses, and a game library that rivals even the most established names in the industry, 1Win has mastered the art of keeping players engaged.

    But with so many options available, where should you start?

    Whether you’re a newcomer looking for your first win or a seasoned player seeking the hottest trends of 2025, this comprehensive guide breaks down every major category of games on 1Win, highlights the most popular titles, explains what makes them stand out, and gives you actionable tips to play smarter, safer, and more profitably.

    Why Play on 1Win in 2025?

    Before exploring the games, it’s crucial to understand why 1Win has become a top choice for millions.

    First, licensing and trust. 1Win Tanzania operates under a Curaçao Gaming Authority license (No. 8048/JAZ2020-021), ensuring compliance with international standards for fair play and secure transactions. While not licensed in regulated markets like the UK or Malta, its global reach and transparency have earned it a strong reputation in emerging markets.

    Second, user experience. The platform 1Win com is designed for speed and simplicity. Whether you’re on desktop, iOS, or Android, the interface is intuitive, multilingual (supporting Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, and more), and loads in under 2 seconds — even on low-bandwidth connections.

    Third, bonuses, and promotions. 1Win’s welcome package is among the most generous in the industry:

    • Up to 500% bonus on your first deposit
    • 250 Free Spins on Book of Dead or Sweet Bonanza
      Weekly cashback up to 20%
      Loyalty program with 7 VIP tiers
      Daily “Spin & Win” and “Bet & Get” challenges

    Fourth, payment flexibility. 1Win supports over 200 deposit and withdrawal methods — including Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, Litecoin, and popular e-wallets like Skrill, Neteller, and ecoPayz. Localized options like UPI (India), Pix (Brazil), and Paytm make deposits instant and fee-free.

    Finally, mobile dominance. The 1Win app (available on iOS and Android) boasts a 4.8/5 rating on both stores. It’s lightweight, supports offline notifications for live odds, and lets you switch between casino, sports, and live games without logging out.

    In short: 1Win doesn’t just offer games — it offers an experience.

    Top 5 Popular Casino Games on 1Win

     

    The casino section is where 1Win online platform truly shines — with thousands of slots, table games, and jackpots powered by over 100 providers, including Pragmatic Play, Play’n GO, NetEnt, Microgaming, and Evolution.

    Here are the five most-played and highest-performing casino games on 1Win in 2025:

    Book of Dead (Play’n GO)

    This Egyptian-themed slot remains a fan favorite for good reason. With its 96.2% RTP and high volatility, Book of Dead delivers big wins — especially during its iconic Free Spins round, where one symbol expands to fill the entire reel. In 2025, 1Win has integrated “Book of Dead Spin & Win” daily tournaments, where players compete for extra free spins and cash prizes. It’s the go-to game for thrill-seekers who don’t mind waiting for big hits.

    Sweet Bonanza (Pragmatic Play)

    Sweet Bonanza is the poster child of modern slot design. With its candy-colored visuals, tumbling reels, and multipliers that can reach 100x, it’s no surprise this game dominates 1Win’s “Top 10” leaderboard. The Ante Bet feature (increasing win potential by 25%) and the Buy Bonus option (pay 100x your bet to trigger free spins instantly) make it perfect for both casual and high-stakes players. In 2025, 1Win added a “Sweet Spins Weekend” promotion — deposit 20,000 TZS, get 50 free spins on Sweet Bonanza + 10% cashback.

    Starburst (NetEnt)

    A true classic that refuses to age. Starburst’s simple yet effective mechanics — win both ways, expanding wilds, and a 96.1% RTP — make it ideal for players who prefer frequent, smaller wins over high-risk jackpots. Its clean design and nostalgic feel have kept it relevant for nearly a decade. On 1Win, Starburst is often featured in “Low Volatility” filters and is the most-played slot among users aged 35+.

    Mega Moolah (Microgaming)

    For players dreaming of life-changing wins, Mega Moolah is still the gold standard. This progressive jackpot slot has paid out over $200 million since its launch. In 2024, a single player won $21.7 million on 1Win — the largest single payout on the platform to date. The jackpot has four tiers (Mini, Minor, Major, Mega), and the Mega jackpot resets at $2 million, making it a magnet for high-rollers. Pro tip: Bet the max (25,000 TZS) to qualify for the full jackpot.

    Live Blackjack & Live Roulette (Evolution Gaming & Ezugi)

    While slots dominate volume, live casino games drive revenue and retention. 1Win partners with top studios like Evolution Gaming to offer HD streams with real dealers in real time.

    • Live Blackjack: Choose from Classic, Speed, Infinite, or VIP tables. Infinite Blackjack allows unlimited players at one table — perfect for social play.
    • Live Roulette: European, French, Auto-Roulette, and the wildly popular Lightning Roulette, where random numbers are hit with 50x–500x multipliers.

    These games are not just about spinning wheels or hitting 21 — they’re about immersion. The live chat, dealer banter, and real-time stats (e.g., “Reds in last 10 spins”) create a casino-floor atmosphere from your sofa.

    Live Casino: The Heart of 1Win’s 2025 Experience

    If you thought live casino was just about blackjack and roulette, think again. In 2025, game shows have taken over the live section — and 1 Win official website leads the charge.

    Top Live game shows on 1Win:

    • Dream Catcher – A giant wheel with multipliers up to 500x. Simple, addictive, and perfect for beginners.
    • Monopoly Live – A hybrid of board game and live dealer. Roll dice, land on properties, and trigger bonus rounds with real money prizes.
    • Crazy Time – The undisputed king of 2025. Features four mini-games: Cash Hunt, Pachinko, Coin Flip, and the Crazy Time wheel — with potential multipliers up to 20,000x.
    • Deal or No Deal Live – Based on the TV show. Pick briefcases, negotiate with the banker, and win up to $1 million.

    These games aren’t just entertaining — they’re engineered for virality. Players stream their wins on TikTok and YouTube, driving even more traffic to 1Win. Many users now spend more time in the game show section than in traditional slots.

    Pro tip: Use the “Filter by Provider” tool to find your favorite studio. Evolution Gaming games tend to have the best graphics and most interactive features.

    Also, don’t overlook Baccarat. With its low house edge (1.06% on Banker bets), it’s the smart player’s choice. 1Win offers “Squeeze Baccarat” and “Dragon Tiger” variants — both with real-time statistics and auto-bet options.

    Crash & Innovation Games: The New Fan Favorites

     

    If you’re looking for fast, adrenaline-pumping action, look no further than Crash, Dice, Plinko, Keno, and Bingo. These games are the future of online entertainment — and 1Win has perfected them.

    Crash (Spribe)

    The game that broke the internet. Players place a bet, watch a multiplier climb from 1x upward, and cash out before the “crash” point. If you cash out at 3.5x, you win 3.5x your bet. If you wait too long? You lose everything.

    Why it’s addictive:

    • Rounds last 5–15 seconds.
    • Auto-cashout feature lets you set your exit point.
    • “Crash History” shows past multipliers to spot patterns (though results are RNG-based).
    • 1Win runs daily “Crash Marathon” tournaments — top 100 players split a 500,000 TZS prize pool.

    Dice

    Bet whether the next roll will be over or under 50 (or any range you choose). With a 97%+ RTP, it’s one of the fairest games on the platform. Use the “Auto Bet” function to automate 10–100 rolls with your preferred strategy.

    Plinko

    Inspired by The Price Is Right, drop a chip from the top and watch it bounce down through pegs. Choose your risk level (low, medium, high) — low risk = small wins, high risk = 1000x+ payouts.

    Keno & Bingo

    Perfect for casual players. Keno draws 20 numbers from 80 — pick 1–10, win if they match. Bingo games run every 5 minutes with chat rooms and community jackpots.

    These games thrive in 2025 because they’re mobile-native, instant, and social. Players share their wins on social media, creating organic growth. Many 1Win users now start their session with a quick Crash round — then move to slots or sports.

    Sports Betting: 1Win’s Dominance in Tanzania

    While casino games attract the masses, sports betting is where 1Win truly competes with other bookies. In 2025, 1Win bet offers over 50 sports, 1,000+ daily events, and 100+ markets per match — far more than most competitors.

    Most Popular Sports on 1Win:

    • Football (Soccer): From major tournaments like the Premier League, La Liga, and Champions League to lesser-known leagues such as the Thai League or Caribbean Club Championship, 1Win provides extensive coverage. Bet on everything from match winners and goal totals to player-specific markets like goals scored or assists.
    • Tennis: Covering ATP, WTA, Grand Slams, and Challenger events, tennis fans can enjoy live streaming paired with in-play stats for better decision-making. Bet on match winners, sets, aces, and even specific games within matches.
    • Basketball: From NBA and EuroLeague to leagues like the CBA and NBL, basketball enthusiasts can explore options like point spreads, over/unders, player props, and quarter-specific results.
    • Esports: With nonstop action, 1Win dives deep into esports, offering betting markets on CS2, Dota 2, Valorant, and League of Legends. With live odds for 24/7 tournaments across the globe, esports fans can bet on match winners, team performances, and even specific player stats.
    • Cricket: Whether it’s international tournaments like the ICC World Cup, IPL, or smaller domestic leagues, cricket fans can bet on every aspect of the game, from match outcomes and player performances to over/under predictions on runs scored.
    • American Football: With comprehensive coverage of the NFL, NCAA, and CFL, American football fans can choose from an array of betting options, including point spreads, player-specific stats, and team props.
    • Horse Racing: From iconic races like the Kentucky Derby to international events in the UK and Australia, 1Win offers odds on race winners, trifectas, and more, giving horse racing enthusiasts a wide range of choices.
    • Combat Sports: Boxing and MMA fans can bet on major events like UFC pay-per-views and championship boxing bouts, with markets for fight winners, method of victory, and round outcomes.
    • Golf: Covering PGA, LPGA, and European Tour events, golf betting includes markets for outright winners, top-5/10 finishes, head-to-head matchups, and round-specific performances.
  • Sonko Unveils New Party, Hints At Return To Politics

    Sonko Unveils New Party, Hints At Return To Politics

    NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 10 – Former Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko has officially received the registration certificate for his new political outfit, the National Economic Development Party (NEDP), marking what he describes as the beginning of a major political resurgence.

    Sonko, who has been inching back into the political arena after years of legal and eligibility battles, said the newly registered party will serve as the “foundation of his political comeback” as he repositions himself ahead of the 2027 General Election.

    “This is the party to watch. We are building a movement that will help form the next government. Our foundation is economic transformation, development, and upgrading the livelihoods of Kenyans,” Sonko confirmed.

    The NEDP leader issued an open invitation, positioning the party as a broad coalition for national renewal.

    Speaking after being handed the certificate, Sonko said NEDP will champion economic empowerment, job creation, inclusive development and a people-first governance model.

    NEDP Party Leader Mike Sonko, alongside Party Chairman Dr. John Nyamu Muchai after receiving the party’s full registration certificate on December 9, 2025.
    NEDP Party Leader Mike Sonko, alongside Party Chairman Dr. John Nyamu Muchai after receiving the party’s full registration certificate on December 9, 2025.

    He described the party as a home for Kenyans feeling politically sidelined, promising a movement that focuses on “real issues affecting ordinary citizens.”

    “We welcome everyone from Gen Z to elders, from all political backgrounds, anyone who believes in changing our country. Let us join hands and work together,” Sonko noted.

    Sonko has intensified his public engagements, charity activities, grassroots mobilisation, and political commentary in recent months—moves widely seen as precursors to a full-throttle return.

    The NEDP registration now gives him a formal political vehicle, ending speculation over which party he would use for his comeback bid.