Category: Business

The judge did not mince words. Safaricom, Kenya’s most profitable company and the undisputed financial nerve of the East African economy, had taken Peter Nthei Muoki’s idea, deployed it at scale across millions of accounts, earned hundreds of millions of shillings from it, and never paid him a cent.

On May 8, 2026, the High Court corrected that injustice with a judgment that should alarm every boardroom that has ever looked at a lone innovator’s pitch deck and quietly decided it was cheaper to replicate than to license.

The damages stand at Sh1.4 billion.

But that figure, staggering as it is, understates the true scope of the financial exposure the ruling has created.

The court also directed Safaricom to pay Mr Muoki and his company, Beluga Ltd, an ongoing royalty equivalent to 0.5 percent of its gross M-Pesa revenue every financial year from March 31, 2025, for as long as the Manage Child Account, M-Pesa Go, or any substantially similar parent-child control functionality continues to operate on the platform.

That royalty, as things currently stand, is not a rounding error. It is a fixture on Safaricom’s income statement.

“Safaricom did not seek a license, they simply took it and the plaintiffs were deprived of a negotiating opportunity.” — High Court judgment, May 2026

WHAT 0.5 PERCENT OF M-PESA REVENUE ACTUALLY MEANS

To understand the gravity of the royalty order, one need only open Safaricom’s most recent annual results.

In its financial year ended March 31, 2025, M-Pesa revenue for Kenya alone stood at Sh161.1 billion, representing a 15.1 percent growth year-on-year and accounting for 41.1 percent of total service revenue.

At the mandated rate of 0.5 percent, Safaricom owed Mr Muoki and Beluga Ltd approximately Sh805 million in royalties for the financial year ending March 2025 alone, and this is before the compounding effect of M-Pesa’s projected continued growth.

In the financial year ending March 2026, the numbers are even larger.

Safaricom’s latest earnings release, published just two days before the judgment landed, revealed M-Pesa revenue had climbed a further 13.4 percent to Sh182.7 billion.

That means the royalty obligation for FY2026 will be approximately Sh913 million, assuming the court order survives the appeal Safaricom has signalled it will file.

At projected growth rates, the annual royalty payments to Mr Muoki will exceed one billion shillings within the next two financial years. Multiplied across a decade of operation, the total liability dwarfs the headline Sh1.4 billion damages figure by an extraordinary margin.

At M-Pesa’s current trajectory, Safaricom could be writing Peter Muoki a cheque of over Sh900 million every single year for the foreseeable future.

Safaricom secured a 30-day suspension of enforcement pending an appeal to the Court of Appeal.

That suspension does not extinguish the liability.

It merely delays it. Every day the appeal runs, the royalty meter runs too.

And Safaricom is appealing a judgment in which the court was explicit that its award was deliberately conservative, finding that one percent of a single year’s M-Pesa revenue was a commercially reasonable baseline, then ordering half that rate as the permanent forward-looking royalty.

THE COURT’S LOGIC AND WHAT SAFARICOM WILL STRUGGLE TO REBUT

The ruling rests on findings that are difficult to dislodge.

Mr Muoki’s M-Teen Account was a registered literary work under Kenyan copyright law, documented with the Kenya Copyright Board before he ever walked into a Safaricom office.

He approached the company in March 2021. He was told the concept was problematic because minors lacked national identity cards and CBK approval would be required.

Safaricom officials nonetheless indicated they were considering something similar. Months later, he discovered the company was beta-testing a product with functionality virtually identical to his own, deployed under the name Manage Child Account.

Safaricom’s defence collapsed on two fronts.

It argued that it had engaged Huawei to develop the parent-child functionality independently from September 2020, six months before Mr Muoki’s pitch.

But the court found this chronology unconvincing and, more damningly, dismissed Safaricom’s claim that the concept originated from a verbal instruction by the Central Bank of Kenya governor to address minors’ access to betting platforms.

The judge’s response was withering: it is not the CBK Governor’s duty to advise Safaricom on product features.

A company of Safaricom’s size, the judge noted, does not act on undocumented verbal instructions from a regulator. It acts on boardroom decisions, and those decisions happen to have closely followed a documented pitch from an outside innovator.

The court also declined to issue a permanent injunction shutting the product down, reasoning that millions of parents and minors now rely on the functionality and disruption would be disproportionate.

Safaricom may be tempted to read this as a partial victory. It is not. The court’s restraint on injunction relief was an act of public interest, not sympathy for the defendant. It preserves the product precisely so that the royalty payments can flow indefinitely.

A SERIAL PATTERN THE COMPANY CANNOT AFFORD TO IGNORE

The Muoki judgment does not exist in isolation. It arrives at a moment when Safaricom is simultaneously defending or managing a cascade of intellectual property and copyright claims, a pattern that collectively paints the portrait of a company with a cultural indifference to creative and innovative ownership.

Broadcaster and voice artist Peter Oyier is currently before the Commercial Division of the High Court seeking Sh69.3 million from Safaricom, alleging the company used his voice recordings in its Interactive Voice Response system for platinum clients for six years beyond the expiration of their licensing agreements.

The contracts, signed between 2018 and 2022 through MGM Studios, were each valid for two years. Oyier claims Safaricom simply kept using the recordings after they lapsed, ignoring his repeated requests for renegotiation, and that the extended association of his voice with the Safaricom brand has permanently damaged his ability to secure work with competing companies.

Safaricom’s response has been to claim there was no direct contractual relationship between itself and Oyier at all, relying on the privity argument that its agreement was with MGM Studios, not the artist.

That defence, if it fails, would suggest that Safaricom deliberately structured its creative licensing arrangements to insulate itself from direct accountability to the creators whose work powers its products.

Gospel musician Jemmimah Thiong’o has been locked in a nine-year copyright battle with Safaricom over 39 of her songs, which she claims the company distributed on its Skiza Tunes platform without paying her a single shilling in royalties since 2009.

The case, now set for substantive hearing in November, seeks Sh15 million and a full accounting of all revenue derived from her catalogue. Safaricom’s defence hinges on its agreements with music aggregators.

It is precisely the same structural argument it deployed in the Oyier case: we paid the middleman, therefore we owe the creator nothing.

Five music producers are simultaneously before the High Court over a separate Skiza Tunes dispute involving 400 songs. The court rejected Safaricom’s attempt to have that case struck out in early 2025, a further indication that the judiciary is losing patience with the aggregator-as-shield defence.

The pattern extends further back.

In Alternative Media Ltd versus Safaricom, a 2004 civil case, the company was found guilty of using copyrighted artwork without permission and was ordered to pay damages and withdraw the material from the market.

Rapper Simon Bamboo Kimani won Sh4.5 million against the company in a copyright case that became a reference point for subsequent proceedings. Musician Joseph Kimani later used that precedent in his own copyright litigation against the company.

An earlier dispute involving marketing agency Transcend Media Group alleged that Safaricom had awarded a campaign to a rival that had lifted intellectual property from Transcend’s bid, a claim that triggered protracted litigation in 2016.

What emerges from the record is not a series of isolated misunderstandings. It is a playbook: engage the innovator, decline to license, deploy the concept, then litigate if caught.

THE FINANCIAL DAMAGE IS ALREADY BAKED IN

Even assuming Safaricom wins its Court of Appeal challenge and the Sh1.4 billion damages award is set aside or reduced, the reputational damage is now systemic.

The judgment has created a public, judicially-confirmed narrative that Kenya’s dominant telecommunications company looked a small innovator in the eye, took his work, and fought him in court for years rather than negotiate a licence.

The court said so explicitly: Safaricom deprived Mr Muoki of a negotiating opportunity. That finding will outlast any appeal.

For institutional investors, the judgment raises a compliance question that goes beyond any single case. Safaricom’s market capitalisation on the Nairobi Securities Exchange sits at well over Sh350 billion.

Its dividend obligation is roughly Sh48 billion per annum.

An indefinite annual royalty that could exceed Sh900 million is not a material threat to solvency, but it is a recurring drag on free cash flow that now has to be disclosed, provisioned for, and explained to shareholders every reporting cycle.

Every time M-Pesa grows, the royalty obligation to Mr Muoki grows with it. Safaricom’s own growth strategy has become, in part, the instrument of its liability.

There is also the speculative risk the judgment creates for Safaricom’s entire product development pipeline. M-Pesa is no longer merely a payments platform.

It is a financial services ecosystem encompassing credit, savings, insurance, merchant payments, and cross-border transfers, with ambitions to replicate across Ethiopia and beyond.

Every one of those product verticals was, at some point, an idea that existed outside Safaricom’s own walls before the company built it.

The question that innovators, lawyers, and investors will now ask is how many of those verticals came with a licensing agreement, and how many came with the same informal encounter Mr Muoki experienced in March 2021.

THE PRECEDENT THAT WILL SURVIVE THE APPEAL

Regardless of what the Court of Appeal does with the damages quantum, it cannot undo the trial court’s findings of fact. Safaricom infringed Mr Muoki’s copyright. The product is a copy. The company benefited commercially from it. Those findings are conclusions of fact, and appellate courts are traditionally reluctant to overturn factual findings made after a full hearing where witnesses were examined.

What the appeal may contest is the methodology used to calculate damages, the appropriateness of the revenue royalty as a remedy, or the rate applied. Even a successful appeal on quantum, however, leaves intact the core finding of liability.

It leaves intact the judge’s observation that innovation does not only emerge from corporate boardrooms, and that David can prevail against Goliath when evidence is properly marshalled.

It leaves intact the precedent that an innovator who registers their concept, documents their pitch, and pursues litigation with discipline can extract not just historical damages but a permanent seat at the table of a company that stole from them.

That precedent will be cited in every subsequent intellectual property claim filed against Safaricom. Peter Oyier’s lawyers are already watching. Jemmimah Thiong’o’s lawyers are already watching.

The five producers in the Skiza dispute are watching.

And somewhere in Nairobi, there are other individuals who pitched ideas to Safaricom’s product teams in recent years, noticed familiar features appear in subsequent releases, and have until now lacked the proof, the resources, or the courage that Peter Nthei Muoki assembled over four years of litigation.

They are watching too.

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.

Nairobi, May 1, 2026 — After a period of silence in the scheduled passenger market, Fly 748 has resumed domestic flights, marking a calculated comeback into Kenya’s increasingly competitive aviation sector.

The airline’s maiden return flights departed from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to Mombasa and Ukunda, signaling the start of what executives describe as a phased re-entry anchored on reliability, pricing, and operational discipline.

Fly 748’s leadership is framing the relaunch as more than a restart. According to the airline’s head, George Oduor, the carrier is leveraging its background in humanitarian and last-mile aviation to build a more predictable scheduled service model.

That experience, typically associated with high-risk and infrastructure-poor environments, is now being repurposed into commercial operations. Oduor insists this translates into tighter scheduling, faster aircraft turnaround, and stronger oversight, areas that have historically defined success or failure for smaller domestic airlines in Kenya.

The relaunch comes at a time when domestic air travel demand is quietly rebounding. Increased county-level economic activity, government travel, and a packed calendar of conferences and cultural events are driving passenger numbers, particularly along the Nairobi–Coast corridor.

Chairman Ahmed Jibril positions the airline as a bridge between business efficiency and leisure travel, targeting a wide customer base that ranges from corporate travelers needing same-day returns to holidaymakers heading to the الساحلي strip. He argues that accessibility to the Coast remains a key economic lever, particularly for tourism recovery.

At the operational level, Managing Director Moses Mwangi says the airline is deliberately starting small. The initial Nairobi–Mombasa–Ukunda routes are intended to function as a controlled test environment before frequencies are increased and larger aircraft deployed.

There is also a longer game. Beyond domestic routes, Fly 748 is signaling ambitions for regional expansion, leveraging its existing footprint in humanitarian and cargo operations across Africa. That dual identity, commercial passenger service alongside humanitarian logistics, remains central to its strategy.

The airline is re-entering a market where pricing, consistency, and trust have become decisive factors for travelers. Recent shifts show more Kenyans opting for air travel over road, particularly for time-sensitive trips tied to business or official functions. Industry observers note that reliability gaps have historically created openings for smaller carriers willing to compete aggressively on efficiency.

Fly 748 says it is betting on that gap. Its revamped service includes a loyalty programme aimed at frequent flyers, alongside promises of streamlined booking and improved customer experience.

Whether that promise holds under sustained demand will determine if this relaunch becomes a foothold or just another short-lived return in Kenya’s volatile aviation space.

NAIROBI, 29 April 2026 – The High Court has intervened to streamline proceedings and set the record straight in the decade-old legal dispute between Bia Tosha Distributors Limited and East African Breweries PLC (EABL).

During a morning court session dedicated to managing the complex litigation, the presiding Judge directed that before any further substantive hearings take place, the court must first determine exactly which version of the petition is officially on record.

Over the years, the case has accumulated numerous filings, including pending applications and a Further Amended Petition filed in January 2026 by Bia Tosha – which is designed to stop the Diageo-Asahi sale by way of injunction and to introduce a colossal money claim of KES 45Bn.

These new additions have been opposed by EABL and Diageo as the matter is filed before a constitutional and human rights court, and yet the remedies sought are ordinarily to be found only in commercial cases.

It is unclear what evidential process Bia Tosha expects the court to follow in awarding it billions of shillings in a constitutional and human rights court which is only used to declaration of laws and human rights issues.

To ensure judicial time is used optimally and to avoid procedural confusion, the Judge ruled that clarifying the exact pleadings before the court is paramount.

The court has directed all parties to highlight their submissions specifically regarding the status and admissibility of the Further Amended Petition.

Once the court issues a ruling to set the record straight on this foundational issue, it will then provide clear directions on the sequencing of the hearing—including whether the main petition and the various pending applications will be heard sequentially or determined together in a single judgment.

The parties have agreed to return to court on 28 May 2026, to highlight their submissions on this procedural matter.

This latest directive is viewed as a necessary administrative step to bring order to one of the oldest pending petitions in the Constitutional Division, ensuring that when the case proceeds to a full hearing, all parties are arguing from a clearly defined and judicially confirmed set of pleadings.

On the morning of April 4, 2026, travel vlogger Grace Yuge pulled into a TotalEnergies service station on the shores of Lake Naivasha, dispensed 56 litres of petrol worth roughly KSh 9,000 into her vehicle, and drove off toward Nakuru.

Her car stalled before she completed the journey.

A mechanic she flagged down on the roadside told her the fuel was mixed with water. The bill to drain the tank, flush the system, and restore the vehicle to working order came to KSh 45,000. Three days later, she drove back to the station, camera rolling.

The footage she posted on TikTok did not go quietly into the algorithm. Within days the clips, which showed receipts, drained fuel in jerricans, and confrontations with station staff, had accumulated over 2.5 million views.

Yuge, who also goes by Grace Ondieki, warned her followers to avoid the outlet and called on TotalEnergies management to hold its staff accountable. The company’s response was not a phone call, a refund, or a visit from a quality assurance officer. It was a demand letter from lawyers.

Through CK Nyoro and Co. Advocates, TotalEnergies Kenya has issued Yuge with a seven-day ultimatum demanding she remove all videos, publish a public apology with equivalent visibility, provide a written undertaking never to repeat the claims, and pay the company KSh 10 million in compensation for what it describes as significant reputational damage and financial loss.

The letter accuses her of defamation, malice, and bypassing official complaint channels. It also alleges that she threatened to publish the videos unless compensated with KSh 200,000, an allegation she has publicly and flatly denied.

The company’s response was not a phone call, a refund, or a visit from a quality assurance officer. It was a demand letter from lawyers.

Yuge has since posted the demand letter itself on TikTok, highlighting what she describes as inconsistencies in the document. She maintains that she lodged a complaint with the station before going public and received no response.

TotalEnergies, for its part, insists that independent laboratory tests on fuel samples drawn from both the station and her vehicle returned no evidence of contamination.

The standoff is now precisely the kind of high-visibility consumer dispute that public relations consultants warn their clients to avoid at all costs, and TotalEnergies has walked straight into it.

Not an Isolated Voice

What TotalEnergies Kenya cannot so easily dismiss is that Yuge’s complaint is not a solitary data point. In recent weeks, the same platform that amplified her video has carried a series of similar grievances against TotalEnergies outlets across the country. One motorist claimed his vehicle’s fuel injectors were destroyed by water-contaminated petrol purchased at the company’s Uthiru station, putting his repair bill above KSh 90,000 and prompting a public appeal to the public to avoid the brand. Posts from motorists in Juja have described recurring water-in-fuel episodes even in dry weather, when condensation in storage tanks cannot be blamed. None of these individual claims has been independently verified, but their accumulation over a short period on the same platform carries a weight that a single demand letter cannot suppress.

TotalEnergies Marketing Kenya operates approximately 220 service stations across the country, making it the largest petroleum retailer in the East African region by network size. The company is listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange and markets itself as a premium, quality-assured brand whose products clean and protect engines. The gap between that brand promise and the experiences being documented on TikTok is precisely the kind of narrative that corporate legal departments are poorly equipped to manage, because a lawsuit against a consumer generates more views than the original complaint ever did.

Suing the Consumer: A Strategy From Another Era

Kenya’s Consumer Protection Act, 2012, enacted under the Bill of Rights in the 2010 Constitution, gives consumers the explicit right to goods and services of reasonable quality, the right to information, and the right to compensation for loss or injury arising from defects in those goods and services. Article 46 of the Constitution enshrines these rights as fundamental. A motorist who alleges that purchased fuel damaged her vehicle is, at the most basic level, asserting a constitutional right. The decision to respond to that assertion with a KSh 10 million defamation suit is a legal option, but it is also a message, and the message it sends is one that consumer protection advocates, legal experts, and social media users have already begun to read aloud.

Legal analysts who have examined the body of Kenyan defamation jurisprudence note that a corporate plaintiff suing a consumer over a complaint about a product faces a high evidential bar. The defendant’s primary line of defence is justification, meaning that if Yuge can demonstrate that her vehicle was genuinely damaged by fuel purchased at the station, the truth of the claim defeats the defamation action entirely. The independent laboratory tests cited by TotalEnergies are their evidence, but the company has not made those results public. In the court of public opinion, an assertion that lab results exist is considerably less persuasive than publishing them.

Consumer rights lawyers contacted by Kenya Insights point to the structural risk in this approach. When a large corporation deploys its legal department against an individual consumer who suffered a tangible financial loss and simply told other people about it, it inverts the power dynamic that consumer protection law was designed to correct. The Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act does provide for cyber harassment as a criminal offence, and there is a legal argument that online posts intended to cause commercial harm may cross a threshold. But the threshold is high, and the optics of a French multinational seeking KSh 10 million from a travel blogger who lost her vehicle for three days and spent KSh 45,000 in repairs are difficult to frame favourably.

The threshold is high, and the optics of a French multinational seeking Sh10 million from a travel blogger who lost her vehicle for three days are difficult to frame favourably.

The Backdrop: Kenya’s Fuel Sector in Freefall

The Grace Yuge dispute is not unfolding in a vacuum. It is playing out against the most serious petroleum quality and governance scandal Kenya has seen in years, one that has consumed three senior government officials, triggered arrests, prompted parliamentary hearings, and pushed petrol prices in Nairobi to KSh 206.97 per litre as of April 15, 2026, a KSh 28.69 increase in a single pricing cycle.

At the centre of the scandal is a 60,200-tonne consignment of super petrol that arrived at the Port of Mombasa on March 27, 2026, aboard the vessel MT Paloma, imported by One Petroleum Limited, a company owned by Mombasa businessman Mohamed Jaffer. The consignment was procured outside Kenya’s Government-to-Government fuel importation framework, the arrangement established in 2023 with Saudi Arabia and the UAE to guarantee supply and price stability. Independent analysis found the fuel to contain sulphur, manganese, and benzene levels that exceeded Kenya Bureau of Standards specifications. The consignment was priced at KSh 198,000 per tonne against the G-to-G contracted rate of KSh 140,000, a premium that would have added KSh 14 per litre at the pump.

On April 2, 2026, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations moved. Petroleum Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban, Kenya Pipeline Company Managing Director Joe Sang, and EPRA Director-General Daniel Kiptoo were arrested and subsequently resigned, accused of colluding to falsify domestic fuel stock data to manufacture an artificial shortage and then exploit that shortage to justify the irregular procurement. Two KPC employees, Joseph Wafula and Joel Mburu, were taken into custody and released on KSh 100,000 cash bail each. Internal government documents seen by the Business Daily show that Kenya had in fact sought to borrow petrol from Uganda’s transit reserves to stave off the projected April 4 stockout. Uganda declined, citing its own supply concerns amid the Iran conflict that has disrupted Strait of Hormuz shipping since late February.

Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi, who has faced calls to resign from opposition figures, civil society movements including Mtetezi, and opposition MPs, appeared before the National Assembly Energy Committee on April 13 and insisted the irregular import was a contained breach rather than a systemic failure. He acknowledged that a separate consignment aboard MT Elka Apollon was also allowed into the country despite quality concerns, after a waiver was sought from the Kenya Bureau of Standards and granted by the Ministry of Trade on March 28. He denied altering test results and attributed the procurement decisions to the PS level, below his direct authority. The committee has called the former EPRA chairman, the acting KPC managing director, One Petroleum’s executive director, and Oryx Limited’s managing director to appear before it.

Senator Cleophas Malala and other legislators have separately demanded that Wandayi and Trade CS Lee Kinyanjui, who signed the standards waiver, face consequences if implicated. The activist group Mtetezi has filed a petition in court under case number HCCHRPET/E230/2026 seeking ministerial accountability and alleging a KSh 3.2 billion loss linked to a cancelled fuel import arrangement. President William Ruto, speaking in Kisii on April 15, defended the G-to-G framework as a model for regional petroleum supply management, insisting it had shielded Kenya from worse price shocks.

A Regulator’s Admission and Its Limits

Against this backdrop, EPRA’s own public record on fuel quality compliance becomes relevant context for the TotalEnergies dispute. In a notice dated March 31, 2026, covering the period January to March, the regulator disclosed that it had conducted 2,713 fuel quality tests across 758 petroleum sites nationwide. Of these, 753 sites, representing 99.34 percent, were found compliant. Five sites, 0.66 percent of those tested, were found non-compliant, with violations including petrol and diesel adulterated with kerosene, high-sulphur products, and fuel designated for export being sold domestically. The named non-compliant stations include Asis Energy Filling Station, Green Wells Energies Kisumu CBD Service Station, and Plateau Filling Station in Murungaru, Nyandarua County, among others. None is a TotalEnergies outlet.

EPRA’s biannual statistics report for the period July to December 2025 recorded a broader non-compliance finding: 23 stations out of 2,305 tested, representing approximately one percent, were found selling adulterated fuel across 10,598 sample tests. Violations that period included diesel adulterated with domestic kerosene in Nakuru and Kakamega counties, export-bound diesel sold at retail in Makueni County, and high-sulphur diesel stored at illegal sites in Marsabit. The regulator’s enforcement response has ranged from fines of KSh 100,000 to KSh 435,000 and temporary station closures pending product upgrades.

These numbers tell a story of persistent if minority non-compliance in a sector that is simultaneously under pressure from global supply disruptions, domestic hoarding by oil marketing companies, and the fallout from the MT Paloma scandal. What they do not tell, and what EPRA’s testing methodology cannot fully capture, is whether water contamination at individual pump nozzles, a separate category of adulteration from the kerosene-mixing and export-diversion offences the regulator targets, is being adequately detected. Industry insiders note that water contamination in fuel storage tanks is a known hazard during the long rains season and can occur even at otherwise compliant, well-managed stations, particularly if above-ground tanks are improperly sealed. The Lake Naivasha region is currently in the middle of the long rains.

TotalEnergies: A Company Under Scrutiny Region-Wide

TotalEnergies Kenya’s current reputational difficulties are not confined to its domestic retail operations. Just days before this investigation went to press, a separate controversy emerged from Kampala. A government investigation in Uganda found that TotalEnergies Uganda had redirected fuel allocated to the Ugandan domestic market into Kenya, contributing to fuel shortages at several of the company’s own stations in Kampala and surrounding districts. Discrepancies were detected through a tracking system operated by NEC DW FinSprint, a joint venture involving the National Enterprise Corporation, the commercial arm of the Uganda People’s Defence Force. Government sources told Ugandan media the company expressed regret when confronted and was issued a formal warning.

The timing is particularly awkward given that some TotalEnergies Uganda stations temporarily shut down due to supply delays during the same period, while the company was simultaneously accused of diverting product to Kenya for profit. Officials in Kampala pointed to the price differential between the two markets as the driver of the alleged diversion, noting that higher pump prices in Kenya during the shortage period made it more profitable to sell Ugandan-allocated product across the border. The French oil giant has not publicly responded to the Ugandan allegations.

At the global level, TotalEnergies is a company that in October 2025 was found guilty by a Paris court of deliberately misleading consumers with claims that it was a major player in the energy transition and on course for carbon neutrality by 2050. The court found that these public-facing statements conflicted materially with the company’s actual investment trajectory in new oil and gas fields, and ordered the misleading content removed from the company’s website under pain of a 10,000-euro per day penalty. The ruling was the first time a major oil company had been penalised by a court for greenwashing. In Kenya, where the Competition Act prohibits misleading claims by advertisers, legal researchers have noted the ruling as a potential precedent for African consumer protection litigation against fossil fuel majors.

At the global level, TotalEnergies is a company found guilty by a Paris court of deliberately misleading consumers. In Kenya, it is now threatening to sue one of those consumers for Sh10 million.

What a Better Response Would Have Looked Like

Consumer relations professionals who have reviewed the TotalEnergies Kenya situation, speaking to Kenya Insights on condition of anonymity, are unanimous that the demand letter was the worst available response. The sequence that Yuge describes, logging a complaint, receiving no response, returning to the station, filming the confrontation, and posting the footage, is a textbook consumer escalation pattern that any company operating in 2026 should have protocols to interrupt at the first stage.

A company with 220 service stations and a listed entity on the NSE should have a consumer complaints resolution mechanism capable of dispatching a quality assurance officer to Naivasha within 24 to 48 hours, drawing its own fuel sample from the suspect tank, commissioning an independent laboratory test, and sharing the results directly with the complainant. If those results vindicated the company, the conversation would likely have ended before any TikTok video was made. If the results found contamination, the company would have had an opportunity to acknowledge the problem, remediate the station, and compensate the customer, turning a potential public relations disaster into a demonstration of corporate responsibility.

Instead, TotalEnergies Kenya waited until the video had 2.5 million views, then sent lawyers. The KSh 10 million figure in the demand letter is ten times what Yuge spent on repairs and 223 times what she originally allegedly sought in compensation. The proportionality of that response is itself a story, and it is the story that the 2.5 million people who watched her original video are now following with considerably more interest than they had in the original contamination complaint.

The Bigger Question

Kenya’s fuel sector is in a moment of acute crisis. Three officials have resigned and been arrested. Prices have hit levels not seen in years. A substandard consignment arrived at Mombasa and portions of it may have entered the general supply before the government moved to halt distribution. EPRA, the regulator whose director-general departed under criminal investigation, has been documenting persistent adulteration at retail stations for years without the enforcement capacity to guarantee quality at the individual nozzle level. Petrol in Nairobi now costs KSh 206.97 per litre, and the government is burning KSh 6.2 billion from the Petroleum Development Levy fund to prevent prices from going higher.

Into this environment, a travel vlogger in Lake Naivasha says her car stalled on water-contaminated fuel. Whether or not the specific fuel at that specific station on that specific date was genuinely contaminated, the claim is not implausible in the context of the crisis that surrounds it. TotalEnergies Kenya’s laboratory tests may well be accurate. But in a country where senior petroleum officials have just been arrested for falsifying stock data to manipulate a procurement process, where EPRA has documented contaminated fuel across the country in every quarterly inspection period, and where the same regulator who was running enforcement operations resigned under criminal investigation, the assertion that a lab test proves nothing happened requires more than a lawyer’s letter to be believed.

Grace Yuge has seven days to comply with a demand that would require her to retract what she says is her lived experience, apologise publicly for sharing it, and pay KSh 10 million to a company with an annual revenue that runs into the billions. She has indicated she will not comply. The next move is TotalEnergies Kenya’s.

On Tuesday, April 15, 2026, Kenyans woke up to the most painful fuel prices in years. Super petrol in Nairobi hit Sh206.97 per litre — a Sh28.69 jump in a single month. Diesel surged to Sh206.84, up Sh40.30 — the biggest single-cycle diesel increase in living memory, closing to within thirteen cents of petrol parity. Kerosene, used by the poorest Kenyan households for cooking and lighting, was left unchanged at Sh152.78.

The government announced it had cut VAT from 16 percent to 13 percent. It confirmed it was deploying Sh6.2 billion from the Petroleum Development Levy Fund to cushion consumers. President Ruto’s office called the crisis a result of an emergency procurement ‘in blatant breach of the G2G framework.’ Four civil servants were in police custody, charged with economic crimes.

And Gulf Energy — the company whose failure to deliver a contracted 85,000 metric ton petrol cargo triggered the entire cascade — remained a nominated importer for the next cycle, untouched by law enforcement, unpenalised by the ministry, and standing to pocket billions from every litre now flowing through Kenya’s compromised supply chain.

This is the story of how Kenya’s most politically-connected fuel company built a monopoly using public money, failed its sovereign obligations at the worst possible moment, allowed rival firms to be scapegoated, and walked away from the wreckage with its contracts intact while Kenyans foot the bill.

THE PRICE THAT REVEALS EVERYTHING

Begin with a number that Energy CS Opiyo Wandayi has not been asked to explain clearly enough in public. According to an official ministry statement published during the scandal, fuel supplied by One Petroleum aboard MV Paloma landed in Mombasa at Sh198,855 per metric ton. Fuel supplied under the G2G arrangement by Gulf Energy via MT FOS Mercury cost Sh140,111 per metric ton. The difference is Sh58,744 per metric ton — equivalent to approximately Sh43.4 per litre. The cheaper fuel was One Petroleum’s. The more expensive fuel was Gulf Energy’s.

Now read that against what Wandayi told Parliament on April 13. The CS told the National Assembly’s Energy Committee that if the One Petroleum consignment had been factored into the April price computation, consumers would have faced a Sh14 per litre increase. The ministry’s decision to exclude that cargo from the pricing calculation was presented as a government act of consumer protection. But here is the contradiction that has not received adequate attention: the government simultaneously accepted Gulf Energy’s more expensive G2G cargo into the computation. The result is not protection — it is substitution. Kenya rejected the Sh198,855 per ton cargo and accepted the Sh140,111 cargo, but the prices still rose by Sh28.69 for petrol and Sh40.30 for diesel. The government then deployed Sh6.2 billion in levy funds and reduced VAT to soften a price surge that was structurally driven, in part, by the very G2G cargo it is defending.

Wandayi told Parliament that excluding the One Petroleum fuel saved Kenyans a Sh14 increase. He did not explain why the fuel that replaced it cost Kenyans Sh28 to Sh40 more per litre anyway — and why public money is now being used to hide that bill.

The mathematics are straightforward and damning. Kenya’s monthly petrol consumption stands at approximately 450 million litres. The pricing differential between what One Petroleum or an equivalent market entrant would have charged under open procurement versus what Gulf Energy’s G2G rate implies, given the extraordinary spike in the landed cost of super petrol from US$582.11 to US$823.87 per cubic metre — a 41.53 percent single-month surge — represents a transfer from Kenyan consumers and the public levy fund to the G2G framework beneficiaries of between Sh6 billion and Sh12 billion per month at peak crisis pricing. That money is not going to global oil markets. A significant portion of it is staying within the Gulf Energy supply chain — a supply chain whose majority beneficial ownership sits, deliberately, in Mauritius.

EPRA APRIL 15 REVIEW: THE NUMBERS GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ TOGETHER

THE GACHAGUA-NYORO ACCUSATION AND WHAT IT MEANS

In the immediate aftermath of the April 2 arrests, the political opposition moved quickly to frame the scandal not as a story of rogue civil servants but as a turf war within the petroleum cartel.

Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, speaking at a thanksgiving ceremony in Murang’a on April 4, offered the most explicit version of this narrative: ‘The only crime they have committed is to deny William Ruto more profit for the benefit of the people of Kenya.’

He accused the President of masterminding the arrests to protect interests in the oil sector. ‘The DCI has now become rogue,’ Gachagua said, demanding the DCI director’s contract not be renewed.

Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro was equally direct in parliamentary forums and public statements. He described the G2G arrangement as having been captured by a single oil company that had monopolised the sector, adding the explosive detail that this same company ‘that deals with G2G and had those 75 percent of the volumes is the same company that is dealing with exploiting our Turkana oil resources.

The reference to Turkana is not cryptic. In September 2025, Gulf Energy’s affiliate Auron Energy E&P Limited completed the acquisition of Tullow Oil’s entire Kenyan working interests — the Lokichar oil fields — for a minimum of US$120 million. From downstream fuel distributor to upstream oil explorer, Gulf Energy now spans Kenya’s entire petroleum value chain.

The UDA’s response was to label both men reckless, superficial, and acting ‘at the behest of their Mombasa-based benefactor’ — a phrase that, while not naming any individual, gestured unmistakably at the Mombasa political and business network that intersects with Gulf Energy’s founding shareholder structure.

UDA Secretary General Hassan Omar Hassan dismissed the characterisations as politically motivated and warned that Gachagua’s apparent familiarity with the alleged scheme warranted investigative scrutiny.

ODM, meanwhile, walked a more cautious line. Oburu Odinga issued a statement expressing outrage at the scandal while cautioning against the ‘public lynching’ of CS Wandayi and Trade CS Lee Kinyanjui, arguing that the two are not accounting officers. ‘Should professional investigations place responsibility on their actions, then there must be no sacred cows,’ the statement read — carefully leaving the door open while defending Wandayi from immediate political pressure.

The ODM-UDA 10-point anti-corruption agenda was cited. The irony of a coalition government citing its own anti-corruption compact to manage the fallout from a scandal implicating the coalition’s own Energy ministry was not lost on the Kenyan public.

Ndindi Nyoro said it directly: the company with 75 percent of G2G petrol volumes is the same company that has acquired Turkana oil blocks. One company. Both ends of Kenya’s petroleum chain. Mauritius-registered beneficial ownership. Zero arrests.

WANDAYI’S CONTRADICTION AND THE ANATOMY OF A COVER STORY

CS Wandayi’s appearance before the National Assembly’s Energy Committee on Monday April 13 was, as the Daily Nation observed, less an accountability session and more a distancing act. The minister’s central claim was that the procurement of the One Petroleum consignment was conducted without his knowledge, approved at PS level by Mohamed Liban, and that he only learnt of the importation after the fact.

‘This deviation would have required higher approval. The approval was not sought, and if it had been sought, I would have acted on it and escalated the matter to the President,’ he told the committee. He denied knowing why the three officials resigned, and denied any evidence of coercion.

What Wandayi did not explain — and was not pressed adequately to explain — is the quality exemption. The ministry’s own letter dated March 25, 2026 confirmed that the Gulf Energy cargo being offered as a replacement contained RON 91 petrol instead of Kenya’s mandatory RON 93, carried elevated sulphur content, and included manganese — a metallic additive explicitly banned under Kenyan petroleum regulations.

The exemption was granted ‘in the interest of security of supply.’ The CS has not publicly acknowledged his ministry’s role in granting that waiver. He has not been asked why a ministry whose mandate is to ensure quality was approving below-specification fuel from the company it was supposed to hold accountable for triggering the crisis.

Wandayi told the committee that the ministry had ‘stopped the delivery of a second cargo under similar circumstances, thus protecting and securing public interest.’ He framed this as evidence of decisive action. But the second cargo had already been excluded from the price computation — a concession the government made only after the first cargo triggered arrests, a presidential statement, and a DCI investigation.

The question is not whether the second cargo was stopped. The question is whether both cargoes should ever have existed as emergency procurement options while Gulf Energy’s contractual failure remained uninvestigated and unpunished.

EPRA acting director Joseph Oketch told the same parliamentary committee that 12 oil marketers had been issued show-cause letters for allegedly creating artificial shortages through restricted sales to independent dealers.

This is a significant expansion of the accountability net — but it still conspicuously stops short of Gulf Energy, whose contracted failure is the predicate for everything that followed.

THE SH6.2 BILLION SUBSIDY: PUBLIC MONEY TO MASK A PRIVATE FAILURE

The deployment of Sh6.2 billion from the Petroleum Development Levy Fund to cushion the April-May price cycle requires the most careful public scrutiny. The PDL is not a crisis windfall or emergency war chest.

It is money collected systematically from every Kenyan who buys fuel — a levy built up over years specifically to stabilise prices during supply disruptions. Its deployment is supposed to be a last resort, a buffer against genuinely unforeseeable external shocks.

What the April 2026 deployment actually represents is different in character. The crisis that necessitates the subsidy was created, at its origin point, by Gulf Energy’s contractual failure to deliver 85,000 metric tons of petrol under cargo code KG05/2026 — a failure admitted by the company itself at a crisis meeting on March 18.

The emergency procurement at inflated prices, which drove up the landed cost computation underlying the new pump prices, followed directly from that failure.

The VAT reduction from 16 to 13 percent, signed by Treasury CS John Mbadi via Legal Notice No. 69 on April 14, followed from the same arithmetic. The net result is that Kenyan consumers and the PDL Fund — not Gulf Energy, not One Petroleum, not the ministry — are absorbing the cost of a supply chain failure that originated with a politically protected company.

Monthly consumption (est.): 450 million litres

Sh17.49 penalty per litre (emergency fuel surcharge, pre-April cycle): Sh7.87 billion total

PDL fund deployed: Sh6.2 billion

VAT reduction value passed to consumers: ~Sh3 per litre

Gulf Energy penalty: Zero

Gulf Energy suspension: None

Gulf Energy next cycle status: Nominated importer

THE FOUNDER’S NETWORK: SHAHBAL, NJOGU, LIMOH AND THE OFFSHORE ARCHITECTURE

To understand why Gulf Energy operates as though it is above accountability, one must trace the web of relationships between its founding shareholders, their current institutional positions, and the Mauritius-registered structures that sit above the company’s operating entity.

Suleiman Said Shahbal banked Sh2.4 billion from the Rubis Energy buyout of Gulf Energy in 2019 — proceeds from his 25 percent stake held through Monte Carlo Investments Limited. He is now a Member of Parliament at the East African Legislative Assembly, where he chairs the Communication, Trade and Investment Committee.

He is the founder of Gulf African Bank, the country’s first Islamic bank, and the chairman of GulfCap Group, which is currently co-developing a Sh120 billion real estate project in Kisumu in partnership with a prominent political family.

His Gulf Power Limited — majority-owned through another Mauritius entity, Gallant Power Limited — supplies electricity to Kenya Power at rates senators have questioned as nearly four times the national average.

When senators pressed the Gulf Power managing director in 2023 to identify the beneficial owners of Gallant Power, he declined to produce the list.

Francis Koome Njogu, who banked Sh1.9 billion from the Rubis deal and who remains CEO of Gulf Energy alongside Paul Kiprotich Limoh, was appointed by President Ruto to the National Investment Council in 2022 — the advisory body that shapes the government’s position on high-value strategic investments.

He co-owns Noora Power Limited with Shahbal.

He owns 50 percent of Gulf Power through the same Noora Power structure. His presence on the National Investment Council — advising a government whose single largest G2G petroleum contract flows to a company in which he holds executive leadership — is a conflict of interest that has never been publicly addressed.

Paul Kiprotich Limoh, who also cleared approximately Sh1.2 billion from the Rubis buyout as a co-shareholder, is now the company’s CEO and principal public spokesperson. It was Limoh who appeared before Senate committees in 2023 to confirm Gulf Energy had paid US$686 million in G2G remittances.

It was to Limoh that Petroleum PS Mohamed Liban addressed the March 17 warning letter about the missing petrol cargo. And it is Limoh who, despite all that has followed, is planning Gulf Energy’s next import cycle.

The Mauritius layer is the final and most important piece of this architecture. The Competition Authority of Kenya approved the acquisition of 80 percent of Gulf Energy Limited by Auron Energy Limited — registered in Mauritius.

The beneficial ownership of this Auron entity has never been disclosed in Kenya’s public corporate registries.

Social media and industry sources have consistently pointed to a ‘top Kenyan politician’ as the beneficial owner, a claim that neither the company nor the government has addressed.

It is this opacity — deliberately designed, deliberately maintained, and never challenged by the regulatory authorities that are supposed to demand disclosure — that gives Gulf Energy its effective immunity from accountability.

Francis Koome Njogu sits on the National Investment Council advising a government that hands his company 80 percent of Kenya’s petrol imports. That is not a coincidence. That is a governance failure with a price tag: Sh6.2 billion and counting.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE CALLS GOING UNANSWERED

The National Integrity Alliance — comprising Transparency International Kenya, Inuka Kenya Ni Sisi!, the Kenya Human Rights Commission, and the Institute of Social Accountability — published a statement on April 10, 2026, describing the scandal as ‘Profiting from Poison.’ The coalition observed that actors in the energy sector had prioritised profit over public safety and constitutional obligations.

It called for the Cabinet Secretaries for Energy and Trade to step aside pending independent investigations, urged the Auditor General to conduct a full audit of the G2G framework, and recommended the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission formally assess corruption risks within the arrangement.

None of these demands have been acted upon. Wandayi remains in office.

The G2G framework remains intact and unaudited. Gulf Energy remains nominated.

The EACC has not publicly confirmed it is examining the framework’s structural corruption risks.

The Auditor General has not announced a G2G audit.

The DCI’s investigation, which investigators have said will follow bank accounts wherever they lead, has produced five arrests on the civil servant side and zero arrests on the private sector side — a disparity that the DCI’s own public statements about ‘a wider network beyond arrested officials’ have yet to resolve.

THE VERDICT KENYA MUST DEMAND

There is a legal standard and there is a political standard, and in this scandal they are running on entirely different tracks. The legal standard — bank account tracing, Mutual Legal Assistance with international partners, charges under the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act — is nominally proceeding.

The political standard, which is the one that determines whether the G2G framework’s structural corruption is addressed, is stalled behind a wall of coalition mathematics, Mauritius registration numbers, and cabinet ministers who do not know, did not approve, and were not there.

But the EPRA April 15 review makes one thing impossible to deny: Kenyans are paying. Super petrol at Sh206.97. Diesel at Sh206.84.

A government that had to cut VAT and raid its own levy fund to soften prices caused by a chain of events originating with a politically-connected company’s contract failure.

The public PDL Fund has been drawn down. Matatu fares will rise. Food prices will climb. Manufacturing costs will increase. Every Kenyan who buys fuel in the next thirty days is paying a premium that traces a direct line back to Gulf Energy’s failure to sail MT Elka Apollon from Jebel Ali in March.

Gulf Energy has not been penalised. Gulf Energy has not been suspended. Gulf Energy’s Mauritius-registered beneficial ownership has not been disclosed. Francis Koome Njogu’s role on the National Investment Council has not been reviewed. CS Wandayi has not resigned.

And at Sh140,111 per metric ton, with 450 million litres consumed monthly, Gulf Energy’s G2G arrangement will generate revenues of billions in the next cycle alone — revenues flowing through a corporate structure deliberately designed so that Kenyans cannot see who, ultimately, is being paid.

Ndindi Nyoro said it most plainly: the company with 75 percent of G2G petrol volumes is the same company now controlling Turkana oil. One company. Both ends of the petroleum chain. Beneficial ownership in Mauritius. Absolute immunity from sanction.

Someone is pocketing the difference. The EPRA review numbers prove it. The public subsidy funds prove it. The political deflection proves it. The only question left is whether Kenya’s investigators will prove it in court — or whether Gulf Energy’s political cover will, once again, hold.

In a shocking manoeuvre that has raised eyebrows across the political and business elite, the powerful Odinga dynasty has quietly shifted its substantial 35 percent stake in the lucrative fuel giant Be Energy to a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands, a notorious zero-tax haven known for its thick veil of secrecy .

The transfer, which took place against the backdrop of a raging national fuel scandal, was confirmed in regulatory filings seen by this publication. It sees the family’s investment vehicle, Pan African Petroleum Limited, completely exit the picture, replaced by a mysterious offshore entity named Africanable Corporation .

A Veil of Secrecy

The British Virgin Islands is not just any offshore centre. It is ranked by the Tax Justice Network as the most significant tax haven in the world, a jurisdiction where the true owners of corporations can hide behind a fortress of anonymity. The decision by the family of the late Prime Minister Raila Odinga to park their assets there has left industry watchers asking one pressing question: What are they hiding?

The Business Daily, which first broke the story, noted that it was “unable to determine whether the transfer of the shares involved an outright sale or asset reallocation.” In the world of high finance and higher politics, such opacity is often a precursor to a storm .

Boardroom Purge and Loyalists Take Over

As the ownership shifted to the shadows, the boardroom experienced a violent restructuring. Political heavyweights Siaya Senator Oburu Oginga and Raila Odinga Junior have been purged from the directorate.

However, do not be fooled into thinking the family has lost control. The vacant seats have been filled by a cadre of loyal lieutenants, ensuring the family’s iron grip on the fuel trade remains unbroken.

Notably, Jackson Awele, the former Prime Minister’s personal lawyer who stood with him during the fierce legal battles against President William Ruto, has been installed on the board. Alongside him is William Ojonyo, a cousin to the Odingas who recently made headlines for publicly castigating Raila’s children .

This is not a retreat. It is a strategic repositioning of assets and loyalists behind a wall of corporate secrecy.

The Crony Capitalism Pipeline

The timing of this offshore transfer is nothing short of explosive. It comes just as Be Energy finds itself at the centre of a firestorm over the controversial Government to Government fuel deal with Gulf giants Saudi Aramco and ENOC .

Critics argue that Be Energy only secured a slice of this lucrative, 180 day credit import pie following a “surprise handshake” between President Ruto and the late Raila Odinga in 2024. This political truce, formalized in March 2025, has since been condemned by economic watchdogs as the epitome of crony capitalism, where business success relies entirely on a close relationship between entrepreneurs and government officials .

As Kenya reels from a separate scandal involving substandard fuel imports that led to the dramatic resignation of top energy officials, the Odinga family’s decision to move their wealth offshore reeks of preparation for a rainy day .

The Succession Time Bomb

While the family scrambles to shield its petroleum billions from prying eyes, internal cracks are beginning to show. The death of Raila Odinga on October 15 last year has opened a Pandora’s box regarding the inheritance of the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga’s vast empire .

Oburu Oginga himself has admitted to fears that the younger generation of Odingas “might not necessarily enjoy the same cohesion” as their elders. “If anything happens to you or me… these young people—I don’t see them gelling,” Oburu confessed in a past interview regarding the future of the family’s East African Spectre gas business .

With billions of shillings in play and the patriarch gone, the transfer of Be Energy to a tax haven looks less like a business decision and more like a lifeboat being lowered from a sinking ship—or a fortress being fortified against the coming war.

For now, the Odinga name remains tethered to Be Energy through a web of proxies, lawyers, and cousins. But the money? The money has vanished into the Caribbean mist.

CONFIRMED: KPC Acting MD Pius Mwendwa told the Senate Energy Committee on April 14, 2026, that the consignment — which tested at 43ppm sulphur against the legal maximum of 10ppm — was blended with existing stocks and released to oil marketing companies following a written waiver from Trade CS Lee Kinyanjui.

The government’s week-long assurance that Kenya’s motorists were safe — that the 60,000 tonnes of substandard super petrol aboard MT Paloma had been intercepted and would never reach a forecourt — collapsed in a Senate committee room on Tuesday, April 14, 2026. Kenya Pipeline Company Acting Managing Director Pius Mwendwa, appearing before the Senate Energy Committee, did what the Ministry of Energy, Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi, and One Petroleum Limited had all carefully avoided doing: he told the truth. The substandard fuel is in the market. It was always going to be in the market. And anyone in Kenya who purchased petrol after March 27, 2026, may have pumped it into their vehicle.

The revelation is not merely a political embarrassment. It is a public safety crisis with direct, measurable consequences for millions of Kenyans who depend on private vehicles, public transport, motorcycles, generators, and water pumps. Senators on the committee raised immediate alarm about reports of vehicles burning on Kenyan roads, a symptom consistent with the kind of engine damage that high-sulphur, high-manganese, benzene-contaminated fuel can cause in modern engine management systems. The government, which had characterised the controversy as a procurement irregularity, must now answer for a different category of harm entirely.

THE NUMBER THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING: 43PPM AGAINST A LIMIT OF 10PPM

The technical dimensions of this scandal demand precise understanding. Kenya’s petroleum specifications, governed by the Kenya Bureau of Standards, set a maximum sulphur content of 10 parts per million (ppm) for super petrol. This threshold exists for well-established reasons: excess sulphur damages catalytic converters, fouls oxygen sensors, accelerates corrosion in fuel injection systems, and degrades the lubricating properties of fuel in engine components. In modern vehicles with electronic engine management systems, high-sulphur fuel can trigger diagnostic failures, reduce fuel efficiency, and in sustained use, cause irreversible damage to emission control hardware.

The consignment discharged from MT Paloma on March 27 tested at 43ppm. That is not a marginal exceedance. It is more than four times the legal limit permitted for fuel sold in the Kenyan market. The Kenya Bureau of Standards, the same institution whose waiver enabled the fuel’s entry, had determined through its own specifications that petrol with sulphur above 10ppm should never reach a Kenyan motorist’s tank. For KPC to have admitted this cargo into its system — and then to have blended and distributed it — on the authority of a letter from Trade CS Lee Kinyanjui is a governance failure of extraordinary proportions.

“We received the consignment on 27th March 2026 but after measuring it we realised there were high levels of sulphur. It had a sulphur content of 43ppm against the requirement of 10ppm.” — KPC Acting MD Pius Mwendwa, Senate Energy Committee, April 14, 2026

THE KINYANJUI LETTER: BLEND IT AND HOPE

At the centre of what is now a confirmed public contamination event is a letter dated March 28, 2026, from Trade and Investment Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui to Energy CS Opiyo Wandayi. Documents tabled before the Senate committee show that the letter directed that the 60,000 tonnes of substandard petrol aboard MT Paloma be comingled with existing stocks to mitigate excess manganese. The letter further instructed KPC and EPRA to control distribution of the blended fuel while awaiting the arrival of the next consignment, expected in early April. That consignment — a 96,000 metric tonne shipment by Oryx Energies Kenya — was subsequently cancelled when the government revoked the tender, leaving the dilution plan without its intended second phase.

Kinyanjui, when pressed in earlier media appearances, characterised his letter as simply giving conditions that were to be met and insisted he was doing what the law requires. The Senate testimony obliterates that framing. His letter did not merely set conditions. It affirmatively instructed KPC to blend illegal fuel with compliant stock and release the mixture to oil marketing companies. In law, that instruction — documented, tabled before Parliament, and confirmed by KPC’s own acting MD — is a directive to distribute adulterated fuel to consumers. That is not an administrative condition. It is a health and safety order whose consequences are now being borne by the motoring public.

The timing compounds the procedural irregularity to a degree that Narok Senator Ledama Ole Kina described in plain language before the committee. PS Liban requested a waiver on March 26. KPC admitted the consignment into its system on March 27. Kinyanjui’s formal approval letter authorising the waiver was only written on March 28. The cargo entered the system before the authority to admit it was formally issued. KPC, in the words of Senator Ole Kina, was trying to regularise an irregularity. Retroactive authorisation of a fait accompli is not a waiver process. It is a cover-up with letterheads.

“Does this not raise your eyebrows that KPC was trying to regularise an irregularity?” — Narok Senator Ledama Ole Kina, Senate Energy Committee, April 14, 2026

WANDAYI’S APRIL 7 STATEMENT: A FICTION IN REAL TIME

The full moral and political weight of Tuesday’s Senate testimony falls most heavily on CS Wandayi, whose April 7 press statement has now been exposed as either a deliberate untruth or a statement made in profound ignorance of what his own pipeline company was doing. On April 7, Wandayi directed One Petroleum to exit its product out of Kenya as soon as possible. He barred oil marketing companies from uplifting product from the consignment. He told the nation that the consignment had been imported in contravention of the G-to-G framework and posed a risk to pricing stability. What he did not tell the nation was that by April 7 — eleven days after MT Paloma docked — the fuel had already been blended and distributed. The withdrawal order was issued after the product had left the system. The horses had long since bolted. Wandayi was locking an empty stable.

One Petroleum’s own statement, issued in the days following Wandayi’s directive, declared that the company was taking steps to ensure that the cargo brought in on March 27 via MT Paloma does not enter the Kenyan market. Senate testimony confirms this was false at the time it was issued. The company has since declined to appear before the Senate committee, instead questioning the mandate of the Senate to investigate the matter — a position that, in the context of confirmed fuel contamination affecting millions of citizens, borders on contempt.

VEHICLES BURNING ON ROADS: THE HUMAN COST TAKES SHAPE

Senator Ledama Ole Kina’s warning during Tuesday’s hearing was not rhetorical. We are already seeing instances of vehicles burning on our roads, he told the committee. While the specific incidents he referenced have not been independently verified by Kenya Insights at time of publication, the causal chain between high-sulphur, high-manganese petrol and vehicle damage is well established in automotive engineering literature and has been documented in multiple countries where substandard fuel has inadvertently or deliberately entered fuel supply chains.

High manganese content, which the Kinyanjui waiver letter also acknowledged was present in the MT Paloma cargo, is particularly destructive. Manganese-based fuel additives, while used as octane boosters in some markets, deposit manganese oxides in combustion chambers, on spark plugs, and on catalytic converter surfaces. The deposits reduce combustion efficiency, foul ignition systems, and in sustained use can cause partial or total catalytic converter failure. In a vehicle where catalytic failure creates a blockage in the exhaust pathway, the consequences range from dramatic loss of power to fire risk.

The benzene content flagged in the Kinyanjui letter introduces an additional public health dimension that extends well beyond individual vehicle damage. Benzene is a Group 1 carcinogen under the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Its combustion in vehicle engines releases benzene derivatives into urban air, with the highest exposures experienced by vehicle operators, fuel station attendants, and pedestrians in high-traffic urban corridors. Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, and Eldoret — all served by KPC depots — have now been exposed to a month of elevated benzene emissions from a consignment that should never have been distributed.

THE FUEL IMPORT SURGE: NUMBERS THAT TELL A STORY

Documents tabled before the Senate committee also revealed a data anomaly that investigators are likely to examine closely. According to KPC figures, Kenya received 403,343 metric tonnes of fuel in March 2026, dramatically higher than the 277,920 metric tonnes received in February. The 45 percent month-on-month surge in imports occurred precisely during the period when senior officials are alleged to have manipulated stock data to engineer a false impression of supply scarcity. The question investigators must now answer is whether the import surge itself was a consequence of genuine supply anxiety, or whether it represents the fingerprint of a procurement operation that used manufactured panic to justify extraordinary volumes at inflated prices.

The same documents revealed a separate and alarming supply discrepancy: KPC currently holds only 16,995 metric tonnes of diesel in stock for the month of April. For context, Kenya’s monthly diesel consumption runs to hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes. That stock level, tabled before senators in the same session where the substandard petrol contamination was confirmed, suggests that the supply disruption caused by the scandal — through the cancellation of the Oryx Energies consignment and the ongoing uncertainty around the fuel distribution system — has created real scarcity even as the government insists supply is stable.

THE REGULARISATION SCANDAL WITHIN THE SCANDAL

The sequence of events documented before the Senate committee reveals a pattern that investigators describe as retroactive regularisation: the practice of first taking an irregular action and then manufacturing paper trails designed to give it retrospective legitimacy. KPC admitted the MT Paloma cargo on March 27. The waiver authorising that admission was formally issued on March 28. This is not a technicality. Under Kenya’s procurement and regulatory law, the authority to act must precede the act. KPC’s admission of 43ppm sulphur fuel into the national pipeline system without valid authorisation was, in the absence of a pre-existing waiver, an unauthorised release of adulterated fuel into Kenya’s distribution network.

The paper trail constructed after the fact — Liban’s March 26 request, Kinyanjui’s March 28 approval — reads, in Senator Ole Kina’s framing, as an attempt to legitimise a decision that had already been taken at a level and on a timeline that the formal correspondence cannot fully explain. Who instructed KPC to admit the cargo before the waiver letter arrived? That question remains unanswered. The five officials arrested by the DCI — Liban, Sang, Kiptoo, Wafula, and Mburu — were released on Sh100,000 police cash bail each. No charges have been filed. The ODPP has been conspicuously silent. And the fuel is already in the market.

PARLIAMENT HAS NEVER SEEN THE G-TO-G DOCUMENTS

The Senate and National Assembly hearings have exposed a governance failure that predates the MT Paloma scandal by years. National Assembly Energy Committee member Awendo MP Walter Owino told the committee that Parliament has repeatedly requested the documents governing Kenya’s government-to-government fuel import framework but has never been provided with them. Committee chairman David Gikaria confirmed that legislators want to review the G-to-G regulations to identify whether loopholes in the arrangement enabled the landing of the illegal consignment at Mombasa.

The implications of this revelation are profound. Kenya’s entire fuel import architecture since 2023 has been governed by a framework that Parliament, the constitutionally mandated oversight institution, has never been permitted to examine. The G-to-G arrangement, which channels hundreds of billions of shillings in annual petroleum procurement through a narrow set of Gulf suppliers and their nominated Kenyan partners, has operated without the legislative scrutiny that public procurement of this magnitude demands. The fuel scandal is, in part, the consequence of a system designed to function beyond parliamentary sight.

THE KPC IPO AND THE QUESTION OF DISCLOSURE

The confirmed contamination also re-opens the question of disclosure obligations that arose with the March 2026 KPC initial public offering. The IPO was 105 percent oversubscribed, raising Sh106 billion at Sh9 per share, with 70,000 ordinary Kenyan investors participating. What those investors were not told — because neither KPC’s management nor the government disclosed it — was that the pipeline company’s acting leadership would, within weeks of the IPO closing, admit before a Senate committee that KPC had introduced a four-times-over-limit sulphur petrol into the national distribution system on the authority of a ministerial letter whose authorisation arrived the day after the cargo was admitted. If KPC’s board and management were aware of the MT Paloma quality failure at the time of the IPO roadshow, and if that information was material to the company’s regulatory standing, the non-disclosure may carry legal consequences for the issuer and its advisers.

WHAT MOTORISTS ARE OWED

Kenya Insights has been consistent in its position since this investigation began: the question at the heart of this scandal is not whether One Petroleum complied with a post-hoc withdrawal order. It is whether Kenyans who purchased petrol after March 27, 2026, were sold a product that met the standards their regulatory system promised them. Tuesday’s Senate testimony answers that question definitively. They were not.

What motorists are now owed is a public accounting that goes beyond parliamentary hearings and bail bonds. They are owed a formal public health disclosure that identifies, to the extent possible, the geographic distribution of the blended fuel through KPC’s depot network and the downstream retail stations that purchased it. They are owed independent laboratory testing of fuel samples drawn from the market between March 27 and the date the blended stock was exhausted. They are owed a liability framework that addresses engine damage claims from vehicle owners who can demonstrate causation. And they are owed a criminal process — not a bail and silence arrangement — that holds accountable those who signed the letters, admitted the cargo, issued the false assurances, and then declined to appear before Parliament.

The senators who pressed Mwendwa on Tuesday, April 14, achieved what a week of ministerial press statements had deliberately obscured. Kenya now knows, on the record, in a parliamentary committee, confirmed by the acting head of its own pipeline company, that substandard fuel with more than four times the legal sulphur limit was blended into the national supply and released to the market. Whether the institutions of accountability — the DCI, the ODPP, the courts, the Energy and Finance ministries, and ultimately the Presidency — rise to meet that confirmation is the only question that remains.

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.