The Kenya Revenue Authority is preparing to detonate a tax bomb on the millions of small traders who form the beating heart of Kenya’s informal economy, plotting the total elimination of the Sh5 million annual turnover threshold that has for nearly two decades shielded hustlers, kiosk operators and mama mbogas from mandatory Value Added Tax registration.
A KRA policy document, seen by this newspaper’s sister publication Business Daily, proposes to cut the VAT registration threshold to zero, meaning that every business in Kenya, regardless of how small, would be legally required to charge customers the full 16 percent VAT on all goods and services not specifically exempted under the VAT Act. The directive, if adopted in the Finance Bill due before Parliament this July, would repeal Section 34(1)(a) of the VAT Act, which since 2007 has protected small traders from the compliance burden carried by larger commercial enterprises.
The immediate casualty will be the consumer. A customer walking into a neighbourhood kiosk to buy a Sh50 bottle of water, a Sh200 gas refill or a bundle of data could soon find those prices ratcheted upward to recover VAT charges that were never factored into the business model of traders who collectively turn over less than Sh5 million annually and have never issued a tax invoice in their lives.
The KRA document names the specific products that will feel the heat: mobile phones, soft drinks, bottled water, cosmetics, snacks, cooking gas and petroleum products. Freelance consultants and service providers below the current threshold would equally be roped in, required to slap a 16 percent surcharge on every invoice. The goods exempted from VAT, a thin list, include staples like maize flour, unprocessed green tea, raw milk, bread and select medical products such as syringes — cold comfort for consumers who spend the bulk of their household budgets on items that are not exempt.
The driving arithmetic at Times Tower is stark. Kenya currently counts only 230,000 registered VAT taxpayers against a projected base of 800,000, leaving the taxman nursing a Sh378 billion VAT gap that KRA Commissioner General Humphrey Wattanga has publicly committed to closing. The authority believes that zeroing out the registration threshold, combined with a crackdown on exemptions, could drive VAT collections above Sh1 trillion, nearly double the Sh653 billion collected in the most recent financial year.
The KRA document is unsparing in its diagnosis of the problem. “Key challenges in closing Kenya’s Sh378 billion VAT gap include threshold exclusion which limits the tax base; high VAT leakage through exemptions; weak visibility of the informal economy and a narrow tax base with just 230,000 VAT taxpayers registered,” the document states, making no apology for the scale of disruption the proposed remedy would unleash.
The compliance obligations awaiting newly conscripted small traders would be crushing by any standard familiar to Kenya’s informal sector. Registered traders would be required to file and pay VAT to KRA by the 20th of every month without fail, maintain detailed sales records to support their returns, notify the authority of any change in business name, address or nature of trade, and — crucially — integrate with the Electronic Tax Invoice Management System (eTIMS), transmitting every sales invoice to KRA in real time.
The eTIMS requirement is particularly savage in its irony. It was only in December 2024 that the government specifically freed small traders with annual sales below Sh5 million from the obligation to issue electronic invoices, having watched large corporations ruthlessly drop compliant micro-suppliers unable to generate digital tax receipts. The new proposal would reverse that relief at a stroke, dragging traders back into the very compliance maze that nearly strangled their supply relationships less than two years ago.
The KRA itself acknowledges the uphill climb: barely 41 percent of the non-VAT registered taxpayers it has already targeted have successfully onboarded eTIMS, a damning indictment of the digital readiness of Kenya’s micro-trader ecosystem. Instructing the remainder to register, file, invoice and remit simultaneously is a gamble that tax consultants say could generate mass non-compliance rather than the revenue bonanza the authority is banking on.
The political backdrop is equally combustible. The Treasury has been explicitly cautious about new or higher taxes since the Gen Z protests of 2024 forced President William Ruto to abandon the Finance Bill that year in humiliating retreat. That reluctance to be seen raising rates has pushed the KRA toward base-broadening instead, a strategy that technically avoids new taxes while materially increasing the tax burden on Kenyans who were previously outside the net. Critics argue the distinction is cosmetic.
The KRA’s own medium-term ambitions underline the scale of its appetite for the informal sector. The authority has set a target to grow the number of active taxpayers from the current seven million to 11.5 million by June 2027, and to increase annual income tax collections from micro and small businesses from Sh17 billion to Sh500 billion, a near thirty-fold escalation. The February 2026 roundtable between KRA Commissioner George Obell and the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya confirmed that eliminating the Sh5 million VAT threshold was among the reforms formally on the table, with KRA integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and pursue businesses operating below the radar.
The VAT Special Table introduced in June 2025 provides a glimpse of the enforcement machinery awaiting small traders who fail to comply once registered. Traders placed on the table by KRA are blocked from filing VAT returns and have their input VAT claims suspended, effectively freezing their ability to trade compliantly until the authority is satisfied. The categories of non-compliance targeted include repeated failure to pay, suspected VAT fraud and failure to transition to eTIMS invoicing.
The Sh5 million threshold has its roots in 2007, when it was raised from the previous Sh3 million mark. Eighteen years later, the KRA has decided that inflation, digital systems and aggressive revenue targets have overtaken whatever economic wisdom underpinned the exemption. The Finance Bill for the year commencing July 2026, expected to land in Parliament by end of April, will reveal whether the Treasury is willing to hand the taxman the legislative ammunition to carry out the most sweeping expansion of Kenya’s VAT net in living memory.
For the mama mboga in Mathare, the mitumba trader in Gikomba and the kiosk owner in Kibera, the question is simple and brutal: does a business that survives on margins thinner than the paper a KRA return is printed on have any chance of absorbing 16 percent VAT, monthly filings and digital invoicing without shutting its doors? The answer, economists warn, may not be what the taxman is hoping for.
Kenya’s telecommunications industry has been handed a stunning legal setback after the High Court declared that mobile phone numbers constitute protected digital identities, delivering a potentially costly blow to the long-standing industry practice of automatically recycling and reassigning inactive SIM cards to new subscribers.
Justice Lawrence Mugambi, ruling last Thursday on Constitutional Petition No. E290 of 2024, declared that a registered mobile phone number is a digital identifier linking directly to an individual’s private affairs and is fully protected under Articles 31(c) and (d) of the Constitution of Kenya, which safeguard the right to privacy. The judgment, delivered virtually, marks the most far-reaching judicial intervention into the country’s telecommunications sector in a generation.
The petition was filed in June 2024 by Erastus Ngura Odhiambo, an inmate serving a 20-year prison sentence, and a co-petitioner. Odhiambo’s plight encapsulated the hazards that SIM recycling poses in an era when a phone number is no longer merely a communication tool but the skeleton key to an individual’s entire digital existence. During his incarceration, his dormant mobile line was recycled and reassigned by a service provider, cutting him off from family communications, mobile banking access and other critical personal affairs, all without his knowledge or consent.
Justice Mugambi found that the risks were not theoretical. When a recycled number falls into new hands, the incoming subscriber can receive M-Pesa transfers intended for the original owner, intercept one-time passwords for bank accounts, get added to family or work WhatsApp groups, and harvest verification messages for email accounts, government portals and social media platforms. The consequences, the court noted, range from financial loss to identity theft and the unauthorised disclosure of the most intimate personal data.
The ruling takes direct aim at Legal Notice 90 of 2025, which had permitted telcos to deactivate numbers after defined periods of non-use. The court declared the notice unreasonable and arbitrary for its failure to account for subscribers who are inactive through no fault of their own, citing prisoners, students in restricted environments and Kenyans living abroad in non-roaming zones as examples of those unlawfully disadvantaged by blanket inactivity thresholds.
Operators are now prohibited from reassigning deactivated numbers except under strict new conditions: they must obtain the previous subscriber’s informed and verifiable consent, or issue a public notice and wait a reasonable period after failing to locate the original owner, and must in all cases erect hard technical barriers preventing any new subscriber from accessing the previous owner’s linked personal data. Justice Mugambi issued a blunt warning: if the government fails to implement the required regulatory framework by midnight on September 19, 2026, all reassignment and recycling of deactivated numbers will automatically and unconditionally stop.
The Attorney General has been directed to work with the Communication Authority of Kenya, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, the Kenya Prisons Service and the relevant ministry to formulate the new regulatory scheme within six months. For prisoners specifically, the court ordered that registered mobile numbers be preserved throughout the period of incarceration, with the Prisons Service required to establish supervised access mechanisms allowing inmates to activate or update their numbers when necessary, in line with the Persons Deprived of Liberty Act.
COST SHOCK FOR OPERATORS
For the telecommunications industry, the judgment is a commercial earthquake. Telcos have historically relied on number recycling to manage the finite pool of mobile numbers allocated by the regulator, ensuring continuous availability for new subscribers. With Kenya hosting more than 76 million active SIM subscriptions as of the middle of last year, and Safaricom alone commanding a 65 per cent market share with nearly 50 million subscribers, the scale of the dormant line problem is immense. Inactive SIM cards continue to occupy routing databases, signalling systems and other network infrastructure, generating costs without generating a single shilling of revenue.
Neither Safaricom nor Airtel Kenya had responded to inquiries on the precise per-line cost of maintaining dormant numbers by the time of publication, a silence that underscores just how sensitive the financial implications are. Industry observers, however, have said that as Kenya’s subscriber base continues to grow and the ruling forces operators to retain millions of inactive lines for extended or indefinite periods, operational overheads will surge at the worst possible time. The telcos are already navigating pressure from falling voice revenues, mounting competition in data and digital financial services, and the rising infrastructure costs of 5G network rollouts.
The judgment will also force operators to invest heavily in consent management systems, public notification frameworks and the technical safeguards the court has ordered to prevent data leakage from recycled numbers. Each of these represents a fresh and unbudgeted expense. Legal and compliance teams will need to be strengthened, and new subscriber lifecycle management systems will need to be built, all while telcos scramble to meet the September deadline.
SAFARICOM’S DAIMA LIFELINE UNDER SCRUTINY
Safaricom had already anticipated part of the problem through its Daima Service, launched in 2022, which allows customers to pay to keep inactive lines alive without topping up. Under the scheme, subscribers pay Sh200 to retain a line for six months, Sh500 for a year and Sh1,000 for two years, effectively transferring part of the maintenance cost burden from operator to user. The service specifically targets customers who may be temporarily inactive, including those living abroad, in military or police training, managing multiple lines, or preserving numbers linked to vehicle tracking or financial accounts.
The court’s ruling now compels Safaricom and its rivals to extend comparable retention frameworks far more broadly, including to users who have not opted into any paid service but who retain constitutional rights over their registered numbers. That creates a structurally lopsided situation: the operator bears the ongoing cost of maintaining dormant lines while collecting no corresponding revenue from the inactive subscriber. Unless regulators introduce specific pricing allowances or the operators push new fee structures through the Communications Authority, the mismatch could prove a significant drag on margins.
NUMBERING PLAN AT RISK
Beyond the direct financial pressure, the ruling raises alarm over the long-term viability of Kenya’s numbering plan. Like most countries, Kenya operates a finite number pool, and it was precisely the exhaustion of traditional 07xx prefixes that forced the Communications Authority to issue new 01xx prefixes to Safaricom and Airtel starting in 2020. If operators are now barred from recycling dormant numbers back into circulation without the original subscriber’s consent, the pipeline of available numbers will narrow at precisely the moment demand from a still-growing subscriber base remains robust.
Industry experts warn that without either an expansion of number allocations by the regulator or the introduction of alternative identifier systems, the market could face a numbering shortage in the medium term. The Communications Authority will now be under pressure to accelerate planning on both fronts, even as it works to meet the court’s September deadline for a new consent and reassignment framework.
YOUR NUMBER IS YOUR LIFE
What has made the ruling so resonant with ordinary Kenyans is that it codifies in constitutional law something millions already experience as lived reality: that a phone number is no longer merely a way to make calls. It is the linchpin of the entire digital economy. A registered Safaricom or Airtel line is an individual’s gateway to M-Pesa, mobile banking, KRA tax filings, Huduma Centre services, government disbursements, school fee payments, healthcare platforms, NTSA transactions and social media identity verification. To lose that number, involuntarily and silently, is to lose access to all of those services simultaneously.
Kenyans on social media platforms erupted in support of the ruling, sharing stories of numbers sold by telcos after the death of a loved one, lines of two decades quietly reassigned while the original owner was abroad, and newly acquired numbers that arrived pre-loaded with the financial histories, loan obligations and message inboxes of strangers. One widely circulated account described a woman who tried to call her late mother’s number months after the burial, only to discover that a stranger had been assigned the line and, through it, had already accessed the deceased’s digital footprints.
The ruling intersects with a broader push to tighten the link between physical and digital identity in Kenya, following the recent nationwide SIM registration exercise that made the National Identity Card a mandatory anchor for all mobile line registrations. In that context, Justice Mugambi’s conclusion that a mobile number is by definition personal data under the Data Protection Act carries particular force: the state itself demanded that Kenyans tie their identities to their phone numbers, and the court has now ruled that the state and the private sector alike must protect that linkage.
The Communications Authority, whose Legal Notice 90 of 2025 has now been declared unreasonable, is expected to issue a formal response in the coming days. Safaricom and Airtel Kenya had not commented by the time of going to press.
EY Kenya | Debarment: 30 months from June 2024 | Offences: Fraudulent practices, corrupt practices, concealment of conflict of interest, irregular allowances paid to project officials | Project: Somalia SCORE and PFM II programmes | Internal fallout: Laban Gathungu, senior partner, terminated; High Court awards him Sh43.12m for unlawful removal but orders him to repay EY Sh148m in related costs
PwC Kenya, PwC Rwanda, PwC Associates (Mauritius) | Debarment: 21 months from 17 March 2026, running to 16 December 2027 | Offences: Collusive practices, fraudulent practices, misrepresentation of key experts, failure to disclose sub-consultants | Project: Eastern Electricity Highway Project, Ethiopia-Kenya, valued at Sh149.8 billion | Cross-debarment: AfDB, ADB, EBRD, IADB
For decades, the four giant accounting and advisory firms — Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and KPMG — have built their global empires on a singular, unassailable promise: that they are the guardians of financial probity in a world riddled with fraud. Corporates and governments have paid them hundreds of millions of dollars to audit their books, certify their accounts and keep the dishonest honest.
That promise lies in ruins in Kenya.
In a staggering sequence of admissions that has no parallel in the history of East African professional services, both Ernst & Young Kenya and PricewaterhouseCoopers Kenya have now confessed, under formal World Bank investigation, to the precise categories of misconduct their industry exists to combat. Bribery. Collusion. Fraudulent misrepresentation. The secret purchase of insider information from government officials. The Bank, which does not announce debarments lightly and investigates with the methodical thoroughness of a criminal court, has banned them both.
EY Kenya was the first to fall. On 26 June 2024, the World Bank Group announced a 30-month debarment against the Nairobi-based arm of the global firm, citing fraudulent and corrupt practices committed in the course of World Bank-funded programmes in Somalia. It was a sentence that would bar EY Kenya and any entity it controlled from all World Bank Group-financed operations for two and a half years, a punishment simultaneously extended to the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Inter-American Development Bank Group under a 2010 mutual enforcement agreement.
EY Kenya had not yet completed nine months of that sentence when PwC was next.
On 18 March 2026, the World Bank Group announced the 21-month debarment, with conditional release, of PricewaterhouseCoopers Associates Africa Ltd, based in Mauritius, alongside PricewaterhouseCoopers Limited Kenya and PricewaterhouseCoopers Rwanda Limited.
The sanction relates to the Eastern Electricity Highway Project, the flagship Sh149.8 billion infrastructure initiative designed to construct more than a thousand kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines connecting a power substation at Wolayta-Sodo in Ethiopia to the Kenyan grid at Suswa, allowing Addis Ababa to export electricity to Nairobi while cutting power costs for Kenyan consumers.
The project was everything development finance is supposed to look like: a $1.26 billion multilateral collaboration between the World Bank, the governments of Kenya and Ethiopia, and the African Development Bank, conceived to reduce energy poverty and bind regional economies through shared infrastructure.
It was precisely the kind of high-value, high-visibility contract that the Big Four have fed on for generations, and precisely the kind that the World Bank scrutinises most ferociously.
“It suggests that something is broken in the profession.”
Kwame Owino, Chief Executive, Institute of Economic Affairs
What PwC and its African affiliates are accused of is not complexity. It is straightforward corruption of the most degrading variety.
According to the World Bank’s findings, the three PwC entities obtained confidential procurement information from Ethiopian project officials in 2019 and used that information to gain an improper advantage in the competition to win a consultancy contract for implementing International Financial Reporting Standards at the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation.
Rival firms, including South Africa’s Aurecon, BDO Consulting, a joint venture between Argentina’s Levin and Estudios Energeticos, Grant Thornton Ethiopia and Australia’s RHAS, competed on the assumption that the process was clean. It was not.
The World Bank found that the PwC entities did not stop there. They sought further to steer the award of a second contract, for Fixed Asset Inventory and Revaluation for the Ethiopian Electric Utility, to PwC Associates.
During both the selection and execution phases of that contract, PwC Associates misrepresented the availability, qualifications and employment status of key experts it was putting forward for the work, and failed to disclose all sub-consultants it was deploying on the project.
The World Bank’s conclusion was unambiguous: this conduct constituted collusive and fraudulent practices under its Consultant Guidelines.
PwC has not issued a public statement on the ban. A firm that would, in ordinary circumstances, advise a corporate client to communicate early, clearly and with contrition in the face of reputational crisis, has chosen silence.
The EY Scandal: Bribery in the Horn of Africa
The EY Kenya case, adjudicated before PwC’s, is arguably the more lurid of the two. EY Kenya had been engaged as a consultant under the Somalia Core Economic Institutions and Opportunities Programme, known as SCORE, and under the Second Public Financial Management Capacity Strengthening Project, both World Bank programmes designed to rebuild Somalia’s public financial architecture after decades of conflict and state collapse. The programmes carried a weight of humanitarian purpose that made the betrayal all the more pronounced.
What the World Bank’s investigators found, after drilling through correspondence, financial records and the testimony of insiders, was a pattern of deliberate misconduct. EY Kenya failed to disclose a conflict of interest during the selection and implementation of four contracts under those programmes.
It involved an unauthorised agent in those contracts. And during the execution of at least one contract, EY Kenya made provision for allowances to be paid to project officials, a transaction the World Bank characterised, without equivocation, as bribery.
The man at the centre of it all was Laban Gathungu, a senior EY Kenya partner who led the firm’s operations in Somalia. Court papers filed in subsequent litigation in Nairobi reveal that Gathungu had secret and unethical communication with a Somali government official who provided him with confidential information about procurement discussions between the Intergovernmental Authority on Development and the African Development Bank, including intelligence on the proposed project price for the Drought Resilience and Sustainable Livelihoods programme.
That subcontractor, Horn Economic and Financial Institute, was later identified by forensic investigators as central to the alleged arrangement between Gathungu and the Somali official.
A whistleblower letter dated 10 March 2018 was sent to Gathungu while he was operating in Mogadishu. He did not escalate it. When the firm’s chief executive eventually confronted him in October 2018, Gathungu’s response was found unsatisfactory and his partnership was terminated immediately.
Gathungu then sued for wrongful removal, seeking Sh450 million in damages.
EY countersued. The High Court ruled that both sides had proven their respective claims, awarding Gathungu Sh43.12 million for procedurally unlawful removal while simultaneously allowing EY Kenya to recover Sh148 million from him, a sum comprising $1.053 million paid to EY India for a forensic review, ZAR850,000 paid to EY South Africa to investigate the fraud allegations, and Sh5.69 million in related costs.
The court’s refusal to award Gathungu the higher sum he sought, citing his own questionable behaviour, encapsulated the moral wreckage of the entire affair: a firm that polices the conduct of others, policed by the very courts to which it sells its governance expertise.
The Regulator’s Silence is Deafening
The Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya, which regulates all players in the Kenyan accountancy and audit industry and which wields the power to suspend or revoke practising certificates, has not publicly responded to either the EY Kenya or the PwC debarments.
It did not respond to queries from the press following the EY ban in 2024. It did not respond after the PwC announcement in March 2026. Its silence, in the face of the two most damaging regulatory events in the history of Kenyan professional services, has itself become a story.
Kwame Owino, chief executive of the Institute of Economic Affairs, says the debarments expose a structural failure that extends well beyond the firms themselves. He argues that after every World Bank ban, ICPAK should have taken visible, deterrent action to signal that the conduct was unacceptable under Kenyan professional standards, and that the absence of such action has contributed to a permissive environment in which firms calculated that the risk of exposure was manageable.
Owino is not entirely without sympathy for the commercial pressures these firms face in markets where corruption is deeply entrenched, where government officials with information of financial value sell it as a matter of routine, and where firms that decline to play the game may simply find that their competitors do not share their scruples. But his sympathy stops well short of absolution.
He notes that the World Bank is not an institution that is easily fooled, pointing out that the development lender typically deploys outside investigators to scrutinise its projects with exceptional rigour, and that anyone who decided to commit misconduct on a World Bank contract was not making a calculated bet so much as registering an eventual certainty of being caught.
That EY Kenya and PwC proceeded regardless, he says, is among the most disturbing aspects of the entire scandal.
A Global Giant Drowning in Scandal
The Kenya PwC debarment arrives at a moment of profound institutional crisis for the global firm. Mohamed Kande, who became PwC’s global chair in July 2024, the first Black professional to hold the role and the first from a consulting rather than audit background, inherited a firm already on fire across multiple continents.
In China, PwC’s auditing business was suspended for six months and fined $62 million by regulators who found that it had concealed or condoned fraud at the collapsed property developer Evergrande, which had accumulated more than $300 billion in debt before its spectacular implosion. Chinese state-owned enterprises departed the firm in a cascade.
In Australia, a senior tax partner was found to have passed confidential government information to colleagues to help them win business from multinational technology companies, triggering a political furore and forcing PwC to sell its government consulting division entirely.
In Saudi Arabia, the Public Investment Fund, the $925 billion sovereign wealth fund, severed its advisory relationship with the firm. By April 2025, PwC had shut down operations across more than a dozen African countries, including nine it exited simultaneously in a single announcement, as the firm scrambled to contain risk and distance itself from markets it could no longer guarantee it could police.
Kenya, conspicuously, was not on that list of exits. Within months of that African retreat, PwC Kenya’s Africa affiliates stood accused before the World Bank.
Kande has spoken publicly about rebuilding trust in the firm’s operations. The settlement that ended the World Bank’s Kenya investigation is, in one sense, a testament to his strategy: admit, cooperate, remediate, and accept a reduced sentence.
PwC Associates, PwC Kenya and PwC Rwanda pleaded guilty in exchange for 21 months rather than the longer sanction that would otherwise have applied. The ban took effect on 17 March 2026 and will run until 16 December 2027 unless the firms satisfy the World Bank’s conditions for early release.
PricewaterhouseCoopers Africa Limited, the continental coordination entity that sits above the national member firms and is responsible for compliance oversight across the network, was required to sign the settlement agreement as a non-sanctioned party. The World Bank’s insistence on that signature is itself a pointed commentary: the failure in Kenya was not an isolated deviation by a rogue unit but a failure of oversight at the continental level.
Half the Big Four, Half the Industry, All of the Shame
Kenya ranks second among African nations whose involvement in African Development Bank-financed projects has attracted multilateral sanctions, a grim statistic that speaks to the depth of the procurement corruption problem in the country’s public contracting ecosystem.
The Big Four, with their air of unimpeachable rectitude and their global brand equity, are supposed to be the corrective force in that ecosystem. Instead, the evidence now before the World Bank shows they were participants in it.
The commercial consequences are already visible. Both EY Kenya and the PwC affiliates face mandatory exits from the personnel involved in the misconduct, the forced termination of relationships with implicated sub-consultants and the obligation to construct from scratch integrity compliance programmes that satisfy the World Bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency.
They must submit to monitoring. They must train staff. They must demonstrate, to the satisfaction of an institution that was deceived by their own employees, that they have reformed.
The question that neither firm has answered publicly, and that ICPAK has declined even to acknowledge, is the one that now confronts the entire East African professional services industry: if the firms that are paid to certify integrity do not have any themselves, who is left to certify them?
On the evening of Friday March 20, 2026, a De Havilland Dash 8 carrying 34 passengers and five crew skidded off the runway at Wilson Airport after landing from Kisumu. It was, by the reckoning of those on board, a matter of seconds from becoming an inferno. It was also, by any fair reckoning of the record, anything but a surprise.
Vihiga Senator Godfrey Osotsi, who was among the 39 occupants of the aircraft operated by ALS Limited on behalf of Safarilink Aviation, later posted on Facebook shortly after 11pm to tell Kenya he was alive.
He praised the pilot for steering the Dash 8 off the sealed surface and forcing it to stall on the grass near the intersection of Runways 07 and 14, thereby preventing what he described as a catastrophic fire.
What he did not praise was anyone at Wilson Airport itself: no ambulance came. No emergency response team materialised. Kenya Airports Authority confirmed the aircraft remained on site while recovery efforts were ongoing, and said operations at the airport continued normally.
For Senator Osotsi, the ordeal did not come out of nowhere. Eight days earlier, on March 12, he had stood in the Senate chamber and listed five pointed questions about the state of Wilson Airport’s runway, drainage, rescue and firefighting facilities, air traffic systems and power backup. Nobody answered them before his plane nearly burned.
That gap between the warning and the disaster is the story of Safarilink and Wilson Airport in miniature: alarm bells that ring loudly, followed by institutional silence, followed by another incident.
Kenya Insights has reconstructed the airline’s safety record over more than a decade and found a pattern that Kenya’s civil aviation establishment has consistently failed to confront.
THE AIRLINE THEY TRUSTED TO FLY THEM TO PARADISE
Safarilink Aviation Limited, headquartered at Wilson Airport and carrying the IATA code F2, was founded in 2004 to do something deceptively simple: fly tourists to the Maasai Mara and back.
Over two decades it built a reputation as the premium domestic carrier for safari-bound travellers, with scheduled and charter routes connecting Nairobi to remote game reserve airstrips across the country.
Its current fleet includes several Cessna 208B Grand Caravans and De Havilland Canada Dash 8 variants, and the airline carries tens of thousands of passengers a year, many of them foreign visitors whose first and last impression of Kenya’s aviation infrastructure is formed aboard a Safarilink flight.
That image of reliability is not without foundation.
Safarilink has never lost a single paying passenger or crew member in a crash of its own aircraft. Against the backdrop of African aviation more broadly, that is a record worth noting.
The problem is the growing list of serious incidents that surrounds it, incidents that in other jurisdictions would have prompted regulatory intervention, public inquiries and fleet audits, but which in Kenya have been absorbed into the national conversation and then forgotten, one after another, until the next one arrives.
A CHRONOLOGY OF CLOSE CALLS
December 2007: The Apron Collision at Wilson
The airline’s first documented serious incident occurred even before it had firmly established its safari routes. On 12 December 2007, a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan registered 5Y-SLA sustained substantial damage at Wilson Airport in a ground collision on the apron involving a turning propeller from another aircraft.
No passengers were on board and no injuries resulted, but the episode exposed the congestion and ground handling risks that would shadow the airline for years to come.
August 2019: Wildebeest on the Runway at Kichwa Tembo
The most cinematically dramatic entry in Safarilink’s incident log came in August 2019. Its De Havilland Canada DHC-8-200, registration 5Y-SLM, was on a scheduled flight from Wilson to Kichwa Tembo Airstrip deep in the Maasai Mara.
As the aircraft touched down, several wildebeest dashed onto the strip.
The left main landing gear collapsed on impact and the number one propeller was damaged. The aircraft was written off as a total loss. Two wildebeest died. Every passenger and crew member walked away.
The incident was widely reported internationally, presented as a spectacular collision with the African landscape, but the underlying questions it raised about wildlife management at remote airstrips received little regulatory follow-through.
October 2019: Tyre Burst at Wilson
Just weeks after the Mara wildlife strike, a Safarilink Cessna Caravan, registration 5Y-SLJ, skidded off the runway at Wilson Airport after a tyre burst on landing from Lamu. Ten passengers and two crew members were on board. None were injured.
The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority closed the runway for 30 minutes while the aircraft was towed clear. The KCAA called the incident ‘regrettable.’
What it did not call it was part of a pattern, even though it followed a Silverstone Air wheel incident and preceded a second Safarilink tyre failure on a Dash 8 within days, prompting the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office to issue a travel advisory warning Britons to scrutinise the safety records of airlines operating from Wilson Airport.
March 5, 2024: Mid-Air Collision Over Nairobi National Park
This is the incident that should have changed everything and did not change enough. At 09:34 on the morning of March 5, 2024, Safarilink Flight 053, a Dash 8-315 registered 5Y-SLK, climbed out of Wilson Airport’s Runway 14 bound for Ukunda with 39 passengers and five crew.
Simultaneously, a Cessna 172M registered 5Y-NNJ, operated by the Ninety-Nines Flying School and based at Wilson, was conducting touch-and-go circuit training on Runway 07. Air traffic control had issued see-and-avoid instructions to both crews.
The aircraft collided. The Dash 8’s crew heard a loud bang, felt severe yaw and levelled off, eventually returning safely to Wilson with part of the right horizontal stabiliser’s de-icing boot torn away.
The Cessna spun out of control and fell into Nairobi National Park, 1.6 nautical miles from the airport perimeter.
The instructor pilot, 25 years old and holding a Commercial Pilot’s Licence, and the 20-year-old student pilot with 49 total hours in his logbook were both killed on impact. Their deaths remain the only passenger or crew fatalities ever linked to a Safarilink flight.
Kenya’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Department launched an investigation and issued a preliminary report. As of March 2026, a final report had not been publicly released.
The AAID noted that ATC had issued see-and-avoid instructions and that the Dash 8 crew reported what appeared to be clear traffic before impact.
The fundamental question of how Wilson Airport’s congested mixed-use airspace, shared daily by commercial turboprops, training aircraft and private planes operating under visual flight rules, can be made safe remains unanswered.
December 28, 2024: ALS Dash 8 Runway Mishap at Wilson
Less than a year before the March 2026 excursion, an ALS-operated Dash 8, registration 5Y-MRE, experienced a landing mishap at Wilson when its main tyres burst, temporarily closing the runway. No injuries were reported.
The significance of this incident lies partly in the aircraft: ALS, the same operator that would the following year handle Flight 090 on behalf of Safarilink, was already registering incidents at the very airport where another of its aircraft would come to grief.
THE NIGHT A SENATOR’S QUESTIONS CAME TRUE
The March 2026 runway excursion has a quality that separates it from those that came before: it was anticipated in formal legislative terms with extraordinary precision. On March 12, Senator Osotsi had asked the Standing Committee on Roads, Transportation and Housing for a statement covering the state of Wilson Airport’s runway, its drainage, its rescue and firefighting facilities, its air traffic control systems and its power backup installations.
He had asked for findings from investigations into recent accidents around Wilson. He had asked for timelines on the demolition of buildings rising above the prescribed height restrictions along the flight path.
His senatorial colleagues agreed with the thrust of his concerns.
Senate Majority Leader Aaron Cheruiyot, who represents Kericho, stated during the March 12 session that ‘any user of that airport must be concerned for their safety.’
He flagged the airport’s lax security arrangements and noted that runway repairs were progressing, in his phrase, ‘extremely slowly,’ such that planes on certain runways must overfly Lang’ata Road and the playing compound of Lang’ata Primary School during approach.
Marsabit Senator Mohamed Chute raised concerns about repairs to Runway 07 and called on airport management to appear before a Senate committee.
Mombasa Senator Faki Mwihaji cited encroachment by a developer who had constructed a playing field near the airport perimeter and blocked an emergency access road. Wajir Senator Mohamed Abass declared the airport ‘a disaster in waiting.’
Eight days later, Flight 090 arrived from Kisumu in rain and darkness. According to Senator Osotsi, writing from the scene that night, the runway was flooded and the lighting system was not functioning properly.
He noted that it is widely known that such conditions regularly force evening flights to divert to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and he demanded to know why this particular flight had not been redirected. Kenya Airports Authority said operations at Wilson remained normal.
WHAT THE RECORD REVEALS
Examined as a body of evidence rather than a series of isolated episodes, Safarilink’s incident history reveals several recurring failure modes. Runway excursions are the most frequent category: the 2007 apron collision, the 2019 tyre burst, the ALS Dash 8 tyre failure in December 2024 and the March 2026 skid-off share a common geography, Wilson Airport, and a common theme, an aircraft leaving its intended surface.
The 2019 Mara wildebeest strike represents the hazard of operating into unsecured bush strips where wildlife management is inconsistent. The 2024 mid-air collision stands alone as an airspace management failure of the gravest kind.
What is notably absent from this list is the category of failure that most frequently features in African aviation fatality statistics: catastrophic mechanical failure leading to controlled-flight-into-terrain, or crew incapacitation in cruise.
Safarilink’s aircraft have largely performed as designed; the incidents have occurred at the margins, during takeoff, landing, ground operations and low-level flight near an airport that senators now describe as structurally inadequate.
That distinction matters for how regulators should respond, because it points away from Safarilink’s maintenance culture and toward the operating environment.
Wilson Airport is 97 years old. It was established in 1929 in what was then open land outside Nairobi.
The city has since grown around and over it. Buildings encroach on its perimeter. Developers obstruct emergency access roads. Runway 07 is under repair at a pace senators describe as incompatible with safety. Drainage fails in heavy rain. Evening lighting malfunctions.
And Nairobi’s upper airspace continues to mix commercial turboprops with training aircraft under visual-separation rules that, as March 2024 demonstrated, can have fatal consequences.
THE WET LEASE QUESTION
One detail of the March 2026 incident deserves specific scrutiny that it has not yet received. The aircraft that skidded off Wilson’s runway on Flight 090 was not owned or crewed by Safarilink in the conventional sense.
It was a De Havilland DHC-8-100, registration 5Y-BXI, operated by ALS Limited under a wet lease arrangement, meaning ALS provided not just the aircraft but also the pilots and cabin crew.
KAA’s statement confirmed that 5Y-BXI is an aircraft normally deployed for humanitarian operations on behalf of the World Food Programme and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The wet lease is a legitimate and common commercial arrangement in African aviation. But it raises questions that regulators and the public should be pressing Safarilink to answer: what are the standards by which it selects wet lease partners?
What oversight does it exercise over their crew training, recency and qualifications? Does it conduct its own safety audits of operators flying its routes under its brand? And when an ALS aircraft on a Safarilink flight number runs off the runway at an airport where another ALS aircraft had already suffered a tyre failure fifteen months earlier, what does the contractual framework require the airline to do?
WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority has repeatedly described itself as committed to international safety standards.
The Kenya Airports Authority issues statements after incidents confirming everyone is safe. Investigations are launched and preliminary reports are filed. Final reports, with binding recommendations, are slower to materialise.
The AAID’s investigation into the March 2024 mid-air collision has not produced a final public report as of the date of this publication, more than two years after two pilots died above Nairobi National Park.
Senator Osotsi has called for Wilson Airport to be closed and comprehensively upgraded before it resumes full operations.
Senate Majority Leader Cheruiyot has said something must change. Marsabit’s Chute wants management summoned before a committee.
These are the right instincts, but Kenya has heard similar demands before. The KCAA convened a closed-door meeting with Wilson-based operators after the 2019 tyre burst incidents. The UK government issued a travel warning. Airlines issued statements. And then the moment passed, until the next one.
What Kenya’s aviation sector requires is not another round of statements and closed sessions but a published, time-bound action plan for Wilson Airport’s runway, drainage, lighting and emergency response infrastructure; a public final report on the March 2024 mid-air collision; an enforceable framework for wet lease safety oversight; and meaningful wildlife management standards at bush airstrips that receive commercial passenger traffic.
Safarilink, for its part, should publish the safety audit criteria it applies to wet lease operators and confirm what additional measures it has taken since March 2024.
Thirty-nine passengers survived March 20. Two pilots did not survive March 5, 2024. The arithmetic of Kenya’s aviation near-misses is still, for now, tolerable. The question is how much longer that tolerance can reasonably be extended before the luck runs out.
It was barely past two in the morning when the vehicles arrived. More than fifty officers, some in police uniform, others in balaclavas and arriving in unmarked vehicles, pushed through the gates of Dari Business Park on Ngong Road in Karen and sealed every entrance. Staff at the adjacent Tamarind Restaurant, who had done nothing wrong in their lives, were bundled out into the cold.
Raphael Tuju, roused from sleep at his nearby residence, walked out to find a small army in possession of everything he had spent three decades building.
They produced no court orders. They offered no explanation. They simply occupied. And behind that occupation, if you follow the trail of money and litigation far enough back, you find the East African Development Bank.
The scenes that played out in the early hours of Saturday, March 14, 2026, brought an otherwise dry banking dispute crashing into public consciousness.
Kenyans watched their television screens and social media feeds in astonishment as a former Cabinet Secretary, a former Jubilee Party Secretary-General, a man who had served his country in senior office across more than two decades, found himself locked out of his own business and speaking to a camera in the dark like a man who had lost everything.
In a sense, he had. And the institution at the centre of it all, the Kampala-headquartered EADB, retreated behind a terse press statement about the rule of law and the finality of court orders.
That statement, released on March 16, 2026, was clinical in its detachment. “The EADB distances itself from the ongoing public theatre of the borrower’s distortion of facts and disinformation,” it read. “There must be finality of court matters.”
In eleven years of dealing with Tuju and his company Dari Limited, those are among the most revealing words EADB has ever committed to public record.
They reveal an institution that is congenitally incapable of self-examination, that processes its borrowers through a machinery of foreign jurisdictions and immunity shields, and that walks away from the wreckage of ruined projects with the serene confidence of an entity that knows the courts will always give it the last word.
This is the story of how that machinery worked, why it was allowed to work, and what it has cost the borrowers who dared believe in the bank’s development mandate.
The Promise: A Two-Phase Deal, a Prestigious Karen Project
To understand why Tuju is standing outside his own gates, you must go back to April 10, 2015, when Dari Limited, his project vehicle, signed a facility agreement with EADB for USD 9,197,084.
The money was for a development that was, at first blush, exactly the sort of project a development bank should celebrate: the acquisition of a 20-acre prime parcel in Karen’s Tree Lane area, the rehabilitation of a 94-year-old Victorian bungalow originally built by Scottish missionary Dr. Albert Patterson into a high-end restaurant, the construction of luxury wellness villas under the Entim Sidai brand, and the creation of the Dari Business Park commercial complex off Ngong Road.
Tuju himself, his three children Mano, Alma and Yma, and a related company, S.A.M Company Limited, signed on as guarantors and co-directors.
The loan was structured in two tranches. Phase one, amounting to the bulk of the facility, was to finance the land acquisition, with EADB paying the vendor directly.
Phase two, valued at Sh294 million, was earmarked for construction of the residential units: thirty three-bedroom maisonettes on the Tree Lane property and a further eighty-five units on a nearby seven-acre plot along Mwitu Road.
The sale of these high-end units was the engine that was supposed to generate the revenue to service the debt. Without them, the project was a restaurant, and a restaurant alone, as Tuju and his lawyers have argued repeatedly, cannot service a loan of that magnitude.
The first tranche was drawn on July 29, 2015. The first interest instalment fell due in October 2015, and Dari paid it. It would be the only payment EADB ever received.
That single, faithful payment is a detail that tends to get buried in the avalanche of legal proceedings that followed, but it matters. It tells you that Tuju was not a man who borrowed money with no intention of repaying.
It tells you that the project was at a stage where service was possible. And it tells you that whatever broke between October 2015 and the second quarter of 2016, when the loan formally fell into default, something went catastrophically wrong with the project’s cash flow.
“I cannot explain why the second tranche was not disbursed since I was not in senior management. Conditions were to be met to release the money, but I did not know what happened.” – David Odongo, EADB’s own Kenya Country Manager, testifying in court, 2024
According to Tuju, what went wrong was that EADB refused to disburse phase two. The bank, he alleges, suddenly introduced new conditions for the release of the construction funds, including additional security over an Upper Hill property that was already charged to the Bank of Africa.
Without the construction money, the villas could not be built, the anticipated revenues never materialised, and the loan became unpayable. The bank counters that conditions for release were never met by Dari Limited and that it was never formally committed to the second disbursement.
The truth, in the form of sworn court testimony, arrived in July 2024 when David Odongo, EADB’s own former Kenya Country Manager, the very officer who had appraised and presented the project for board approval, appeared before High Court Judge Alfred Mabeya and recanted. He confirmed the loan was two-phased.
He confirmed the second tranche was for construction of the residential units. He confirmed that proceeds from food and beverage at the restaurant alone could not service the loan without the real estate component. And, most devastatingly, he said he could not explain why the second tranche was never disbursed. “I was not in senior management,” he told the court. In a related statement to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Odongo had confirmed that EADB’s board had approved both phases, including the additional Sh290 million for rehabilitation of structures and construction of demonstration villas.
He also told the court that the affidavit bearing his name that had been filed in the UK proceedings, the document that helped obtain the English judgment against Tuju, had not been sworn before a Commissioner for Oaths in the usual manner.
It was drafted by the bank’s lawyers, presented to him, and he signed it in good faith. Among the claims in that affidavit that he now said were not accurate: that Dari’s restaurant operations were generating revenues and profits sufficient to meet loan repayments without the construction component.
That is not a minor discrepancy. That goes to the heart of whether EADB obtained its landmark UK judgment on the basis of evidence that its own witness now admits was inaccurate. Tuju has since returned to London seeking a review of the 2019 ruling in light of this new testimony. But the Kenyan courts have already closed that door, citing res judicata and the principle that issues already determined cannot be relitigated. The bank’s argument, echoed by every court that has since ruled in its favour, is that this matter is settled. Finality of courts must be upheld.
The London Gambit: How EADB Armoured Itself Against Kenya’s Courts
There is a clause buried in virtually every facility agreement EADB signs with its Kenyan borrowers, and prospective clients should read it with the greatest care before putting pen to paper.
That clause specifies that disputes arising from the loan shall be resolved before the High Court of Justice in England, under English law, with the judgment to be registered and enforced in Kenya. For an institution whose mandate is to promote East African development, the choice of a London jurisdiction is remarkable.
It means that when things go wrong, the borrower, whether a small Ugandan transport company or a prominent Kenyan businessman, must fight their corner against a well-resourced multilateral bank in a foreign court whose daily operating costs in lawyers’ fees alone can dwarf the original loan.
EADB invoked that clause in December 2018 after years of correspondence with Dari Limited produced no payment. The case went before Judge Daniel Toledano of the High Court of Justice in London, who on June 19, 2019, granted summary judgment in EADB’s favour for USD 15,162,320.95, covering the outstanding principal, accrued interest, and penalties. Tuju’s appeal to the Court of Appeal in London, heard by Lord Justice Leggatt, was dismissed.
The UK judgment was then registered by Kenya’s High Court on February 13, 2020, and when Tuju challenged it all the way up through the Kenyan court system, the Court of Appeal in Nairobi reaffirmed it on April 20, 2023.
By that point, what had started as a USD 9.197 million loan had ballooned to the equivalent of Ksh1.9 billion, and depending on which party’s calculations you believe, the total exposure including continuing interest and legal costs may have reached Ksh4.5 billion by the time the auctioneers arrived.
A loan that began at roughly Ksh943 million had more than quadrupled through the mechanics of compound default interest, currency movements, London legal fees, and a decade of enforcement costs. No payment was ever made after that single October 2015 instalment.
The EADB Act that governs Kenya’s obligations to the bank was declared unconstitutional in March 2025 by a Machakos High Court judge, who found it allowed the Finance CS to channel public money out of the consolidated fund without parliamentary oversight or public participation.
The London jurisdiction clause is also where EADB’s status as an international organisation becomes most consequential for borrowers. Article 44 of the EADB Charter grants the bank immunity from legal process in its member states.
When Blueline Enterprises of Tanzania tried to execute an arbitration award against EADB’s bank accounts in the early 2000s, the Tanzanian Court of Appeal ultimately upheld the bank’s immunity, ruling that it enjoyed absolute immunity in the exercise of its lending powers, which is precisely the context in which a borrower would need to sue it.
A judge warned prospective counterparties in plain terms: secure an express written waiver of immunity before you engage. Most borrowers, dazzled by the prospect of development financing, do not.
Tuju has sought to test this immunity shield directly, filing a case at the East African Court of Justice challenging whether EADB’s blanket immunity is compatible with modern jurisprudence on the accountability of multilateral lenders.
That case would be the first time the regional court had been asked to examine EADB’s charter in this light, making it one of the most consequential institutional law proceedings in East Africa’s recent history.
The outcome remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is that immunity has functioned, in case after case, as a near-impenetrable shield for the bank and a near-insurmountable obstacle for anyone seeking redress against it.
The Auction: A Ksh4.5 Billion Debt Recovered at Ksh450 Million
On October 1, 2024, EADB auctioned the Ngong Road property that had been pledged by Dari Limited as loan security. Garam Investment Auctioneers, acting on behalf of the bank, conducted what it described as a competitive bidding process.
The winning bid was Ksh450 million, accepted from a company called Ultra Eureka Limited. Court papers filed subsequently reveal that Ultra Eureka paid the full purchase price and was issued with completion documents, including the transfer instrument.
By February 18, 2025, a certificate of lease had been issued in the company’s name. By March 2026, Ultra Eureka had charged the property to KCB Bank Kenya, meaning the asset had been refinanced within months of its purchase.
Tuju was incandescent. He argued, publicly and in court, that the Ksh450 million sale price bore no relationship to the true value of the asset. He noted that EADB was simultaneously claiming a debt of Ksh1.9 billion to Ksh4.5 billion, and that even the lower figure was more than four times what the auctioned property fetched.
At what price, exactly, were Knight Frank Valuers Limited, who conducted the valuation, placing the remaining assets? Tuju contested the valuation fiercely, and it was on the basis of that challenge that a temporary court injunction stopped the auction of the remaining properties, Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary and Tamarind Karen, until March 9, 2026, when Justice Josephine Wayua Mong’are of the Milimani Commercial Court struck out the amended plaint as barred by res judicata and set aside all interim orders.
Six days later, on March 14, the masked operatives arrived at Dari Business Park. Ultra Eureka, which had hired Lavington Security Limited to guard the premises from March 10, moved to take physical possession.
The police, specifically officers from the Rapid Response Unit, provided the muscle. No court order was shown to Tuju, despite his repeated requests on camera.
He was allowed neither to collect his personal belongings nor to protect the interests of the tenants and employees whose livelihoods depended on the businesses operating within the park.
The Judiciary, evidently stung by the optics, issued a clarifying statement on March 18 emphasising that the March 9 ruling had been delivered lawfully on grounds of issue estoppel and that the plaintiffs had since filed an appeal before the Court of Appeal.
It urged all parties to exercise restraint.
That plea for restraint came after the cameras had captured everything, after a former Cabinet Secretary had spent a night in the cold, and after dozens of workers had been locked out of their source of income in the early hours of a Saturday morning.
The Allegations That Will Not Die: Bribery, the DCI, and a Petition to the Chief Justice
No account of this dispute is complete without confronting its most explosive dimensions. Tuju, in a press conference outside the Supreme Court buildings after delivering a petition to Chief Justice Martha Koome on March 13, 2026, levelled an allegation that should send shockwaves through Kenya’s legal establishment.
He claimed that agents of a commercial court judge had approached him for weeks demanding a bribe of Ksh10 million in exchange for a favourable ruling. He said he refused to pay.
He said he instead chose to work with the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. He did not name the judge publicly, but he was clear that the bribe demand preceded the adverse rulings he subsequently received.
These are unproven allegations. They are denied by the EADB. But Tuju made them in his own name, in public, outside the Supreme Court, with cameras rolling. He also recorded a formal statement at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
The DCI, it should be noted, has previously summoned Tuju, his children, David Odongo, and other EADB officials in connection with the same dispute, suggesting the criminal investigation dimension of this case is very much alive.
In the same press statement, Tuju applauded Justice Esther Maina of the Machakos High Court, who declined to dismiss a separate constitutional challenge to the EADB Act, allowing it to proceed to full trial.
That case had already yielded a devastating ruling in March 2025, when Justice Francis Rayola Olei declared Sections 2(1) and 2(2) of the EADB Act 2014 unconstitutional, finding that they allowed the Cabinet Secretary for Finance to channel money out of Kenya’s consolidated fund into EADB without parliamentary oversight and without the public participation required by Article 10 of the Constitution.
The judge ordered the Finance CS to produce records of all payments made to EADB since 2014, to be submitted to Parliament within sixty days. He also ordered the Auditor General to conduct a full audit.
Kenya’s Machakos High Court declared the EADB Act 2014 unconstitutional, finding it allowed the Finance CS to funnel public money out of the consolidated fund and into a multilateral bank without parliamentary oversight, accountability, or public participation.
Read that carefully.
Kenyan taxpayer money has been flowing into EADB since 2014 through a legal mechanism that a court has now found to be unconstitutional.
The bank whose charter grants it absolute immunity from judicial process in its own member states has been capitalised, in part, by public funds channelled in a manner that a Kenyan court has said violated the constitutional right to public participation.
The same bank then uses that capital to sue its Kenyan borrowers in London courts, obtain judgments that dwarf the original loans, and auction prime Kenyan assets to buyers whose acquisition prices bear little obvious relationship to market value.
At the East African Legislative Assembly in Arusha, a whistleblower petition filed by Peter Odhiambo of the Justice Alliance put additional allegations on the parliamentary record: board members clinging to seats for up to eighteen years, four times beyond what the EADB charter permits; allegations of insiders borrowing from the bank and sitting on the board that approves write-offs of the same loans; accusations that former Director General Vivienne Yeda leveraged her dual roles at EADB and as Kenya Power and Lighting Company chair to push dubious transactions.
Vivienne Yeda Apopo
Tanzanian EALA legislator Dr. Abdullahi Makawe told the assembly he had been served with an arrest warrant simply for speaking to the media after raising questions about the bank before the House. Whether those allegations are established or not, they describe an institution for which transparency has historically been an afterthought.
A Pattern Older Than Tuju: The Blueline Enterprises Precedent
Those inclined to view the Tuju affair as an aberration, a unique collision of political timing, personal financial misfortune, and legal bad luck, need only read the dossier on Blueline Enterprises Limited of Tanzania.
In March 1990, EADB advanced a loan of approximately USD 2.279 million in Special Drawing Rights to Blueline, a Tanzanian transport company, to finance the purchase of trucks, trailers, and haulage equipment for a petroleum logistics project serving Tanzania, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and neighbouring states.
The project was exactly the kind of real-sector development financing that development banks are established to support. Blueline defaulted. EADB exercised its right to appoint a receiver-manager under the floating debenture.
Blueline obtained an ex parte court order restraining the bank and the receiver from taking over its business. What followed was more than two decades of litigation across multiple courts and jurisdictions.
The arbitrator, Mr. A.T.H. Mwakyusa, eventually awarded Blueline damages of USD 61,386,853 against EADB for losses allegedly occasioned by the bank’s conduct in the receivership. When Blueline commenced execution proceedings in 2006, a Tanzanian High Court allowed a garnishee order to attach EADB’s accounts at Standard Chartered Bank in Dar es Salaam. EADB invoked its immunity shield under Article 44 of its charter and the East African Development Bank Act.
The High Court dismissed the immunity plea, finding that a liquid bank account was not the type of asset that enjoyed immunity.
On appeal, the Court of Appeal reversed that finding in a landmark 2011 judgment, holding that EADB enjoyed absolute immunity from all forms of legal process arising out of the exercise of its lending powers, and declared all proceedings against the bank a nullity.
Blueline was left holding a USD 61 million arbitration award it could not enforce against an institution whose charter placed its assets beyond the reach of any court.
The member states of EADB declined to step in with taxpayer funds to satisfy the award. EADB emerged intact. Blueline did not.
The structural parallel with Tuju’s situation is striking. In both cases, EADB advanced a loan for a project that was supposed to generate revenues enabling repayment. In both cases, the borrower alleges that the bank’s own conduct in the transaction contributed to the default.
In both cases, the bank pursued recovery through courts and enforcement mechanisms that placed it at an overwhelming procedural advantage, while the borrower’s avenues for counterclaims against the institution were constrained by the immunity shield. And in both cases, the bank won.
The Broader Portfolio: Write-Offs, Bad Loans, and the Quiet Reckoning
EADB has, to its credit, openly acknowledged the toll its lending portfolio has taken. Its audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2023, revealed that the bank wrote off loans amounting to USD 13.03 million during the year, a dramatic escalation from the USD 140,000 written off in 2022. Those written-off assets, secured by landed properties including apartment blocks and land in various locations across the region, were being offered for sale.
The bank noted that the sale process was expected to take approximately one year and that the estimated sale values had been discounted to present value, meaning the assets were being marketed at figures below what the bank itself estimated they would ultimately fetch.
That is the institutional version of the discount at which prime properties disappear from borrowers’ portfolios.
At the time of reporting, Tanzania held the largest share of EADB’s gross loan balances at USD 72.83 million, representing 63 percent of the total. Uganda accounted for 28 percent at USD 33.03 million, with Kenya at six percent and Rwanda at three percent. Uganda had a non-performing loan balance of USD 1.02 million as of that reporting period. Kenya had resumed repayment of its loans after defaulting on a USD 5.2 million repayment in 2022. These are not the figures of a bank with a pristine lending record operating in a straightforward development environment.
They are the figures of a multilateral institution managing a complex and contested loan book across four jurisdictions, with a history of defaults, receiverships, and contested recoveries.
In 2024, EADB announced a significant policy shift, moving from dollar-denominated lending to local currency financing through currency swap agreements worth USD 90 million signed with Rwanda and Tanzania. The stated purpose was to eliminate exchange rate risks for borrowers and reduce the cost of loans.
That is a welcome and long-overdue reform. It is also an implicit acknowledgment that lending in US dollars to borrowers earning in Kenyan shillings, Tanzanian shillings, or Ugandan shillings created a structural vulnerability in every loan it originated, a vulnerability that contributed to defaults across its portfolio when exchange rates moved adversely.
It is a vulnerability that, in Tuju’s case, meant that a loan originally equivalent to Ksh943 million had, through interest, penalties, and currency movements, become a debt of Ksh1.9 billion to Ksh4.5 billion, depending on the calculation date.
The Warning Every Borrower Must Heed
This story is not, at its core, about Raphael Tuju. Tuju is the most visible casualty of an institutional structure that has, over decades, created conditions systematically unfavourable to borrowers across East Africa.
The combination of factors that define EADB’s relationship with its clients is worth stating plainly, because every prospective borrower walking through its doors deserves to understand what they are signing.
First, the dispute resolution clause. When you borrow from EADB, you agree that any dispute will be resolved in England under English law. You are consenting, in advance, to fight any grievance you have against a Kampala-headquartered institution in a foreign court thousands of miles from your business, your assets, and your country’s legal system. The cost of that fight, in London lawyers’ fees alone, can render a legitimate defence economically impossible.
Second, the immunity shield. Article 44 of the EADB Charter, interpreted by courts from Tanzania to Kenya, grants the bank absolute immunity from legal process arising from its lending activities.
If the bank’s conduct in relation to your loan contributes to your default, whether by refusing a second tranche, by introducing new collateral conditions, or by any other means, your ability to sue it for those actions is severely curtailed.
You can lose. It cannot. That is not a metaphor. It is the legal architecture within which EADB operates.
Third, the dollar denomination risk. Until 2024, every loan EADB advanced to East African borrowers was denominated in US dollars. If the shilling fell against the dollar during the life of your loan, your debt grew in local currency terms without any new borrowing. Tuju’s original facility of approximately Ksh943 million became Ksh1.9 billion in part because of this mechanism, compounded by default interest rates that the facility agreement permitted the bank to apply.
Fourth, the affidavit problem.
Evidence from the Tuju case shows that EADB’s own Kenya Country Manager signed court affidavits prepared by the bank’s lawyers in proceedings before the English court, affidavits that he subsequently recanted under cross-examination before a Kenyan judge.
The same affidavits were used to obtain the UK summary judgment that forms the foundation of the entire enforcement action against Tuju and his family. That a Kenyan court has repeatedly declined to give effect to this recantation, citing issue estoppel and res judicata, does not make the underlying factual problem disappear. It simply means it cannot be relitigated domestically.
Fifth, the valuation and auction mechanics. When EADB auctions a property to recover a debt, the valuation is conducted by a firm it appoints. The bidding process is managed by an auctioneer it appoints.
The first Dari property, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park, was reportedly sold for Ksh450 million against a debt the bank simultaneously valued at Ksh1.9 billion.
Whatever remained of that gap, after the auction proceeds were applied to the outstanding balance, continued to accrue interest. The remaining properties, Entim Sidai and the others, were next in line. If those too are sold at prices significantly below the bank’s stated debt, Tuju could lose everything and still owe money.
When a development bank’s own official recants the evidence used to obtain a foreign judgment, but the courts say that judgment can no longer be questioned, something has gone wrong with the system. The question is who pays the price. In this case, it is the borrower.
What EADB Says, and What It Does Not Say
In fairness to EADB, its position is not without foundation. Contracts, once signed, must be enforced. A development bank that let every defaulting borrower walk away on the basis of hardship stories would cease to exist as a viable institution within a decade. The English court, the Kenyan High Court, and the Court of Appeal have all examined the facts and found for EADB. That is not nothing.
The bank also makes a point that deserves to be taken seriously: it says it received no credible or verifiable repayment proposal from Dari Limited throughout the seven years of this dispute.
Tuju’s counter-claim, that he made multiple settlement offers including an immediate Ksh1.29 billion payment and a KCB refinancing proposal that would have cleared the debt in cash, has not been established to the satisfaction of any court. The bank says those offers were not verifiable.
Tuju says the bank refused to engage or issue a redemption statement. A decade of litigation has not settled this factual dispute to the satisfaction of the public, even if the courts have moved on.
But here is what EADB does not say, and what no court has compelled it to explain. It does not explain why the second tranche of Ksh294 million, the construction money without which the project was designed to fail, was never disbursed.
It does not address the recantation by its own Kenya Country Manager. It does not explain why the facility was originally denominated in a currency that would automatically inflate the borrower’s obligations as the shilling weakened.
It does not explain what a property valued at Ksh4.5 billion in outstanding debt was doing selling at the auction for Ksh450 million.
And it does not explain why, when the moment of enforcement came, it deployed masked operatives in unmarked vehicles in the middle of the night rather than the unambiguous production of court orders that the rule of law it purports to represent would seem to require.
The Reckoning
Tuju has appealed to the Court of Appeal. He has petitioned the Chief Justice. He has recorded a statement at the DCI. He has filed at the East African Court of Justice. He has returned to London seeking a review of the foundational judgment.
Every door he knocks on has, so far, been closed by the same combination of res judicata, issue estoppel, and the formidable procedural architecture that EADB has built around itself over decades. Courts do not easily second-guess other courts, especially foreign ones whose judgments have been formally registered. That is the system working as designed.
But behind the legal formalism, a set of questions that go to the heart of what development finance is supposed to be for remain stubbornly unanswered. EADB was created in 1967 to promote sustainable socio-economic development in East Africa through long-term lending to viable projects.
It is owned by the governments of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda, capitalised partly by their taxpayers’ money, and endorsed by the African Development Bank, the Netherlands Development Finance Company FMO, and Germany’s DEG. It has won awards.
It has been rated. It has been celebrated. And yet the pattern that emerges from decade after decade of its lending record is of an institution that extends credit under contractual terms that systematically disadvantage its borrowers, pursues enforcement through foreign courts that most borrowers cannot afford to match, hides behind a charter immunity that places it above accountability, and auctions its way to recovery at values that bear no obvious relationship to the outstanding debt.
As for Tuju, he is outside his gates. His children, who signed as guarantors and whose properties are pledged as security, face the same enforcement machinery.
The Tamarind Restaurant that once served Karen’s moneyed classes has a new owner. The Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary is next. What was once a Ksh943 million loan, drawn in the full confidence that a development bank was a partner in a legitimate enterprise, has become the instrument of demolition of everything he built.
EADB calls it the rule of law. It calls it the finality of court orders. It calls it the inevitable consequence of a borrower who refused to pay.
Raphael Tuju, standing in the predawn dark outside the gates of his own business park, calls it something else entirely.
And the growing body of evidence from its loan book, its affidavits, its immunity battles, and its courtroom record across four countries and more than three decades suggests that this is not the last time East Africa will have this conversation about the bank that was built to develop the region and has become, for far too many of its clients, the institution that showed up in the night and took it all away.
A retired teacher in Nairobi is fighting to save her home after a Sh500,000 loan she took to fund her children’s travel abroad ballooned into a Sh1.5 million debt, triggering an eviction threat and exposing what she describes as a predatory lending trap.
Lydia Wangare Mwangi, 64, says she is now at risk of losing her Kahawa Wendani property valued at more than Sh10 million after defaulting on the loan from Bashy African Credit Limited.
The property includes her family home and ten rental units built over four decades from her teaching salary.
“I wanted my children to go abroad and come back with something,” Mwangi told the media at her compound near the SDA church. “Now I am the one being chased away. At my age, where do I begin?”
Her warning is stark.
“They will eat you alive.”
Mwangi’s ordeal began about three years ago when she sought financial help to send her two children to the Middle East for work opportunities. She was referred by a friend to an agent identified as Brenda Achieng Onyango, who operated from an office in Adams Arcade in Nairobi.
According to Mwangi, the agent declined a deferred payment arrangement and instead directed her to Bashy African Credit Limited for a secured loan.
The money was disbursed. The travel plans collapsed. The agent disappeared.
Mwangi says repeated attempts to trace the agent were unsuccessful after the office was shut down and the phone numbers went off.
What remained was the loan.
Last week, representatives of the lender reportedly issued a two-week ultimatum demanding settlement of an outstanding balance now said to exceed Sh1.5 million. Failure to pay could see the lender take possession of the property.
Mwangi had used her title deed as collateral.
“I built this place room by room from my salary,” she said. “How does a loan meant to help my children become something that destroys everything?”
She is now considering selling the entire property to clear the debt and relocate to a smaller home.
“If someone can buy and settle the loan, let them come. I just want peace,” she said.
Efforts to seek intervention have yielded little. Mwangi says she reached out to a local church leader for assistance but received no tangible support.
Bashy African Credit Limited, which operates in Nairobi and offers title deed-backed loans, advertises fast processing and competitive interest rates. However, borrower complaints and court records point to a pattern of aggressive recovery practices and disputed transactions.
In one High Court matter involving the company, a lower court found that a vehicle repossession and sale linked to a loan dispute were marred by fraud and misrepresentation, declaring the transaction null and void. In another case, the High Court criticised a ruling that released a disputed vehicle to the lender, warning it undermined ongoing criminal proceedings.
The lender had not responded to queries from The Star by the time of publication.
Mwangi’s case reflects a wider crisis in Kenya’s lending sector, where complaints against digital and microfinance lenders have surged.
Data from the Competition Authority of Kenya shows the financial sector accounts for a significant share of consumer complaints, with borrowers citing high interest rates, non-disclosure of terms, and harsh recovery tactics.
Regulators have acknowledged growing concerns, including hidden charges and unilateral changes to loan terms, and say investigations are ongoing.
Legal experts warn that many borrowers fall into trouble through loosely structured agreements involving title deeds.
Under Kenyan law, an “informal charge” must meet strict requirements, including a clear written agreement indicating intent to create a security interest. However, in practice, borrowers often sign documents without fully understanding the implications.
This creates a legal grey area that lenders can exploit when enforcing recovery.
Mwangi now finds herself trapped in that system, racing against time to avoid losing everything she owns.
Her children, whose planned migration triggered the loan, have been unable to reverse the situation.
As the deadline approaches, she says her story should serve as a warning.
“It is better to live in a small house that is yours,” she said. “Do not risk everything for a loan you do not fully understand.”
The agent at the centre of the transaction remains untraceable. The lender is yet to publicly respond. And Mwangi continues to wait, hoping to salvage what remains of a lifetime’s work.
The Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) has slapped Guaranty Trust Bank Kenya with a Sh33.18 million penalty after investigators established that the lender subjected ASL Limited, a long-standing corporate borrower, to false representations and unconscionable conduct during the troubled renewal of critical business facilities — conduct that ultimately forced the manufacturer to flee to a rival bank after clearing a staggering Sh417.85 million in overdraft balances under duress.
The ruling, dated January 29, 2026, and made public on February 24, is one of the most consequential consumer protection decisions in Kenya’s banking sector in recent memory.
CAK set the penalty at exactly two percent of GT Bank’s gross annual turnover for 2023 — a figure the regulator calculated at Sh33,180,000 — well below the ten percent statutory ceiling, a margin that signals the authority chose punishment over ruin, even as it described the bank’s behaviour in terms that left little room for charitable interpretation.
Beyond the headline fine, the regulator ordered GT Bank to refund ASL Sh13,211,285 within 30 days, a sum representing default interest and related charges the authority found were applied retroactively and without the notice the law demands.
GT Bank has since appealed the ruling to the Competition Tribunal, and the matter is now sub judice. The bank insists its conduct was fully consistent with its contractual obligations and applicable banking law, and has pledged to let the appellate process run its course before commenting further.
Two Decades of Loyalty, Then a Default Notice
ASL Limited is not a fly-by-night operation. The diversified manufacturer and distributor, which serves Kenya’s construction, electrical and industrial sectors, had banked with GT Bank since 2001 — a relationship stretching across more than two decades. In July 2021, the company secured a suite of credit facilities from the lender: overdrafts, letters of credit, asset financing, guarantees and working capital support.
These were backed by company assets and the personal guarantees of ASL’s directors, indicating the depth of commitment on both sides.
The facilities were due to expire in May 2022. ASL did the responsible thing: it applied for renewal as early as January 2022, well within the required timeline.
What followed, according to CAK’s findings, was not a straightforward renewal negotiation but a prolonged exercise in institutional ambiguity that left ASL in a state of suspended financial animation for the better part of eighteen months.
Despite months of back-and-forth engagement, GT Bank failed to communicate a clear position on the renewal. It was not until June 2023 — more than a year after the expiry date — that the bank offered a three-month extension. The offer came with strings: additional security requirements and reduced facility limits. ASL accepted.
“The bank leveraged its substantially higher negotiating power as a commercial lender to treat ASL unfairly by unilaterally recalling the facilities and backdating charges and fees.” — Competition Authority of Kenya
But the concessions did not end there. GT Bank subsequently issued a revised offer that cut the limits further still. That was the moment ASL began exploring a transfer of its facilities to I&M Bank. In the middle of those transition discussions — with the ink barely dry on preliminary arrangements — the company received a formal default notice on October 31, 2023, accompanied by a demand for Sh13.2 million in default interest that ASL said had been calculated back to August 2023, while the renewal process was still ostensibly ongoing.
To clear the path for the I&M Bank takeover and protect the continuity of its operations, ASL had little choice but to pay. It cleared outstanding overdrafts totalling Sh417,848,415 and a further USD 197,802.
GT Bank subsequently offered to refund Sh2.8 million as a goodwill gesture — a figure ASL rejected as wholly inadequate and lodged a formal complaint with CAK on October 5, 2024.
A Regulator Reads Between the Lines
The Competition Authority’s sixteen-month investigation parsed the facts with the rigour of a court of law.
Investigators found that GT Bank had violated Section 55(a)(ii) of the Competition Act on false or misleading representations and Section 57(1) on unconscionable conduct in business transactions — two distinct legal pillars that together frame a picture of a lender that knowingly exploited a client’s vulnerability.
On the question of misrepresentation, the authority found that the bank continued charging fees for facilities it had not formally approved, misled ASL on the status and availability of its banking services, and applied default interest retroactively without prior notice — thereby misrepresenting the state of ASL’s account to the company’s profound financial detriment.
Crucially, CAK also found that GT Bank dressed up materially altered facility offers as renewals, a characterisation that obscured from ASL the true nature and continuity of what was being offered.
The bank also made a partial refund without proper admission or transparency, a move the regulator said could confuse or mislead customers about the accuracy of service charges.
The unconscionable conduct finding cuts deeper still. CAK was unsparing in its assessment of the power dynamics at play.
As a commercial lender with substantial financial resources, GT Bank held vastly superior bargaining power relative to ASL.
The regulator found the bank exploited that asymmetry in three ways: it unilaterally reduced facility limits while demanding additional security; it recalled facilities during active negotiations rather than after a breakdown; and it backdated charges at a moment calculated to maximise pressure on the borrower.
GT Bank’s defence — that ASL’s failure to execute a July 2023 offer triggered legitimate contractual default provisions and that the interest was not backdated — was rejected.
A Pan-African Bank Under Scrutiny
The ruling falls on a lender that is both a regional heavyweight and a relative niche player within Kenya’s competitive banking landscape.
GT Bank Kenya is a subsidiary of Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO), the Lagos-headquartered financial conglomerate that owns one of Nigeria’s most valuable banking franchises, listed on both the Nigerian Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange. GTCO entered Kenya in 2013 through a US$100 million acquisition of the Fina Bank Group, rebranding the network the following year.
As of December 2022, GT Bank Kenya held total assets of Sh54.23 billion and reported a profit of Sh753.29 million — solid numbers that make the Sh33 million penalty sting in symbolic rather than financial terms.
The bank is led in East Africa by Managing Director Jubril Adeniji, a veteran Nigerian banker who previously established GT Bank’s Tanzania franchise before being posted to Nairobi in July 2022.
The institution markets itself on eight core principles branded as the Orange Rules, promising excellence, integrity and a culture in which the customer is king. That brand promise now sits in uncomfortable tension with a regulatory finding that the bank’s most senior conduct toward one customer was neither fair nor transparent.
Why This Ruling Matters
For Kenya’s banking sector, the CAK decision carries implications that extend well beyond ASL Limited and Guaranty Trust Bank.
The ruling arrives at a moment when regulators across East Africa are sharpening their scrutiny of how financial institutions behave during credit renewal negotiations — a phase in the lending cycle where the power imbalance between bank and borrower is at its most acute.
Borrowers whose facilities are under review often cannot simply walk away; their operations, payroll and supplier relationships depend on the continuation of credit lines. It is precisely this vulnerability that CAK found GT Bank exploited.
The authority was deliberate in its choice of language. It defined unconscionable conduct expansively to include situations where a business coerces a consumer into contracts they do not fully understand, withholds material information, or uses ambiguous wording to influence decisions — conduct it said applies as much in corporate lending as in consumer retail banking.
That framing matters because it signals that CAK is prepared to apply consumer protection principles to the boardroom, not only the counter.
The penalty computation is equally instructive. By pegging the fine to two percent of gross annual turnover rather than a fixed sum, CAK has established a precedent for scaling punishment to the size of the offender — a methodology familiar from competition law enforcement in Europe and which concentrates the minds of larger institutions more effectively than flat fines.
Whether the Competition Tribunal will uphold the ruling remains to be seen. GT Bank has signalled it will mount a full defence, arguing the authority’s findings do not reflect the evidence.
The matter is now sub judice and the refund order is, for the moment, in abeyance. But whatever outcome emerges from the appellate process, the CAK’s initial findings have already drawn a line in the sand: in Kenya, a bank that holds all the cards is not free to play them any way it pleases.
On a night that Rwandan banking officials are still reluctant to discuss openly, unknown operatives gained access to the digital nerve centre of Equity Bank Rwanda and began moving money. Not in trickles, but in avalanches. SIM cards with no prior transaction history were suddenly purchasing mobile money float worth Rwf100 million apiece.
At the daily transfer cap of Rwf2 million, moving Rwf4.7 billion through legitimate channels would have required more than 2,000 individual transactions over multiple days.
Instead, it vanished in what investigators now believe was a single coordinated offensive through bulk float purchases, a channel that sits outside the strict withdrawal limits governing conventional banking and that, until now, nobody had thought to weaponise at this scale.
Equity Bank Rwanda confirmed on March 15, 2026 that it had detected and contained irregular transactions within its systems, triggering internal security and incident response procedures and reversing the majority of the transactions within 24 hours.
The bank was careful with its language. It did not name a figure. It did not say it had been hacked. It said its monitoring systems had worked. “Our internal monitoring systems detected the irregular transaction activity and immediately triggered the security and incident response protocols in line with operational and risk management procedures,” the Kigali-based lender said in its public announcement.
What the statement did not say was that the fraud operation had apparently already succeeded in moving close to Rwf4.7 billion, equivalent to roughly USD3 million to USD4 million, before those protocols closed the door.
A bank official who spoke to Taarifa Rwanda, the Kigali-based outlet that first broke the story, confirmed the figure and the partial recovery. Investigators have so far retrieved approximately Rwf1.2 billion.
That leaves Rwf3.5 billion still unaccounted for, scattered across mobile wallets, agent accounts and the accounts of dozens of individuals who may or may not have known what they were receiving.
Attempts by this publication to obtain comment from the National Bank of Rwanda were unsuccessful. Rwanda Investigation Bureau spokesperson Dr Thierry Murangira said he had no information on the case. The office of the Finance Minister did not respond.
THE VENDOR AT THE CENTRE
The suspected entry point into Equity Bank Rwanda’s systems was not through the bank itself but through a third-party platform.
Investigators have zeroed in on ESICIA Ltd, a Kigali-based technology company that has provided internet banking solutions to financial institutions in Rwanda since 2005. ESICIA, which markets itself as ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certified and holds contracts across the banking, government and telecoms sectors in the region, supplies Equity Bank Rwanda with a vendor-managed internet banking platform that the bank operates under licence.
Investigators are now examining whether the ESICIA platform was exploited to gain unauthorised access to the bank’s infrastructure or to manipulate transactions.
The Rwanda Investigation Bureau has moved to obtain system access logs that would show who entered the platform, at what time and what actions were performed.
Digital forensic specialists are simultaneously reviewing server records and user activity trails. ESICIA Chief Executive Officer Innocent Kaneza declined to comment when contacted by Taarifa. He did not respond to this publication’s enquiries either.
The implications of a vendor-side breach, if confirmed, would be severe. It would mean that the security of a Tier-1 bank’s digital operations had been compromised not from within its own walls but through a contractor’s system, one that sits between the bank and its customers.
It would also raise uncomfortable questions about how Rwanda’s central bank supervises the third-party technology arrangements of supervised institutions, and whether ESICIA’s ISO certifications accurately reflected the real-world security of its systems.
THE MOBILE MONEY TRAP
To understand how Rwf4.7 billion could move so quickly without triggering alarms, investigators have had to examine a gap buried inside Rwanda’s digital payments architecture.
The mechanism is called float. In Rwanda’s mobile money ecosystem, registered agents who facilitate transactions for customers obtain their operating balances by depositing equivalent cash into trust accounts held at banks.
The telecom operator, in this case MoMo Rwanda, then credits the agent’s mobile wallet with digital value that mirrors the deposit. That float is the working capital of Rwanda’s mobile economy. Without it, agents cannot transact.
The fraud appears to have weaponised this mechanism. Rather than moving funds through the bank’s normal transfer channels, where daily limits would have made bulk movement impossible, the perpetrators are believed to have used the internet banking platform to generate float purchases of extraordinary size.
SIM cards that had never previously received even Rwf1,000 were suddenly credited with Rwf100 million apiece in float.
Some of those SIM cards were registered outside Rwanda and were not recognised agents within the mobile money ecosystem. Nobody has yet explained how they were allowed to make such purchases. “That is where the biggest question arises,” a source familiar with the investigation said. “Who issued those SIM cards, who owns them and how were they allowed to purchase such large amounts of float?”
A senior official at MoMo Rwanda told Taarifa that he had learned of the matter from press reports and declined to provide details.
Neither MoMo Rwanda nor the National Bank of Rwanda has issued any public statement on the fraud. The silence from key institutions has drawn sharp comment from financial sector observers, who say it reflects a troubling pattern of opacity around major incidents in Rwanda’s financial system.
THIRTY-FIVE IN CUSTODY, SIX IN UGANDA
As of March 15, 35 people were in custody in Rwanda. The Rwanda Investigation Bureau is leading the probe, conducting forensic analysis of digital systems, financial records and electronic devices seized from suspects.
Most of those detained are believed to be individuals whose bank or mobile money accounts received suspicious transfers linked to the fraudulent transactions.
Investigators are working to determine whether the recipients knowingly participated or whether their accounts were used without their full understanding by whoever orchestrated the scheme.
“You cannot receive Rwf100 million in your account and claim you don’t know where it came from,” an official said. “Investigators want to know who sent the money and why it landed there.”
The human mule architecture of the fraud, in which stolen funds are dispersed rapidly across hundreds of accounts, is consistent with sophisticated cybercrime operations seen in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa over the past decade.
Once money is fragmented across multiple wallets, recovering it requires either the willing cooperation of every account holder or a court process to freeze and claw back each deposit separately.
Among those detained are two Equity Bank Rwanda employees from the IT department, both connected to data centre operations. Their detention does not necessarily establish guilt, bank officials have been careful to note. Investigators are examining whether perpetrators may have gained physical or technical access to the bank’s systems from inside.
“The suspicion was that there must have been physical access to the data centre,” a source said. “But even that I cannot confirm. RIB needs to complete the forensic investigation.” Simultaneously, six suspects were arrested in Uganda.
Police forensic teams are extracting and analysing digital images from devices seized in the Ugandan arrests to determine whether those individuals were directly involved or were themselves used by a wider network.
THE MWANGI CRACKDOWN THAT WASN’T ENOUGH
The timing of the Rwanda breach is as damaging as its scale. It lands less than a year after Equity Group CEO Dr James Mwangi launched the most aggressive anti-fraud purge in East African banking history, one in which more than 1,500 Equity employees across the group’s operations were dismissed in successive waves between May and July 2025 after internal audits uncovered a culture of staff collusion, unauthorised transaction facilitation and conflicts of interest.
The trigger was a Sh1.5 billion payroll fraud in Kenya, in which the IT system credentials of a Group Processing Centre manager were used to process over 40 transactions totalling nearly Sh1.5 billion before the money was transferred to rival banks.
Mwangi, who told Business Daily in May 2025 that he would be “consistently ruthless” in the purge, extended the clean-up to Uganda in June 2025 and pledged to sweep through all seven of the group’s operating markets. Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo were explicitly named as jurisdictions where similar integrity audits would follow.
Eight months after that pledge, fraudsters have apparently struck the Rwanda subsidiary in what investigators believe was an externally orchestrated attack rather than the insider collusion that drove the Kenyan losses.
But the distinction offers limited comfort to a bank that had staked its regional reputation on having cleaned house.
The Rwanda fraud raises the harder question: whether a determined, technically capable external adversary could still defeat a bank’s defences even after its internal vulnerabilities had been addressed, and whether the audit of human integrity had distracted attention from the robustness of the digital infrastructure and the third-party systems that run it.
A PATTERN ACROSS KIGALI
The Equity incident is not an isolated event. Banking sector sources have told this publication and sister outlets in Kigali that at least three other Rwandan financial institutions have been targeted in comparable attacks in recent months.
BPR Bank Rwanda, the KCB Group subsidiary that is the country’s largest commercial bank by branch network with over 154 outlets, was reportedly struck by a similar fraud scheme involving approximately Rwf1.2 billion.
NCBA Bank Rwanda faced a related incident involving around Rwf400 million, although the bank reportedly managed to recover about Rwf250 million.
Bank of Kigali, the country’s dominant lender controlling more than 30 per cent of all banking assets, has also been affected by a comparable incident in recent months, though the precise amount has not been independently confirmed.
Most striking of all, sources within the banking sector have told Taarifa that even the National Bank of Rwanda itself has recently experienced attempted cyber intrusions.
In the most brazen reported case, the suspected perpetrators allegedly operated from a hotel located less than 50 metres from the central bank’s premises, attempting to penetrate the BNR’s network from a position virtually within its shadow.
The frequency and ambition of the attacks suggest a level of organised criminal capability that has not previously been publicly acknowledged in Rwanda, a country that has invested heavily in positioning Kigali as a digital finance hub and that is currently implementing a Financial Sector Development Strategy 2025-2030 explicitly aimed at accelerating the growth of digital banking and fintech.
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME
Equity Bank Rwanda has been targeted before. In November 2019, Rwandan authorities arrested 12 people, including eight Kenyans, three Rwandans and a Ugandan, in an attempted cyber-fraud operation targeting the bank. They were convicted and sentenced to eight-year jail terms in 2021.
The 2026 attack appears far more sophisticated in its exploitation of the mobile money float mechanism, its cross-border architecture and its apparent use of a vendor’s system as the entry point rather than a direct assault on the bank’s own network. It is a reminder that the criminal ecosystem learns, adapts and probes for new gaps even as institutions patch the ones already known.
Equity Bank Rwanda, in a statement released alongside its confirmation of the fraud, said it maintains a zero-tolerance approach to financial crime and is continuing to strengthen its cybersecurity infrastructure, transaction monitoring systems and internal controls.
The bank insisted that no customer funds had been lost and that any unrecovered amounts would be absorbed by the institution.
The assurance, standard in such circumstances, means that Equity Group’s balance sheet will ultimately bear the exposure even as RIB works to recover the Rwf3.5 billion still outstanding.
For now, Rwanda’s financial sector regulator has said nothing. MoMo Rwanda has said nothing. The bank itself has said as little as it legally must.
The silence, investigators and observers agree, is itself an answer of sorts, one that says the full dimensions of what happened that night are still being mapped, and that the institutions responsible for oversight are not yet ready to explain how the maps came to have such large blank spaces in them.
When James Mworia took the wheel at Centum Investment Company in 2010, inheriting an institution whose roots stretch back to Kenya’s post-independence ambitions in 1967, he arrived as the steward of one of East Africa’s most formidable investment portfolios.
He had blue-chip stakes in the country’s most dependable income-generating businesses: beverages, insurance, financial services, a fast-growing micro-lender and a publisher that had served generations of Kenyan schoolchildren. The company was a machine that made money for its more than 36,000 shareholders. Sixteen years later, the machine is producing losses.
The announcement on Friday that Centum had completed the sale of its entire residual stake in Sidian Bank, exiting a 25-year investment at what the company itself described only as a “modest financial gain” relative to book value, has crystallised what many analysts and shareholders have long feared: that Mworia has methodically sold every business that was generating returns and left investors stranded with the ones haemorrhaging cash.
The reaction in market forums was immediate, visceral and almost unanimous in its condemnation. It is not difficult to understand why.
Centum always sells the profitable businesses and ends up holding the loss-making ones. Mworia killed ICDC long time ago.
THE EXIT LEDGER: NINE PROFITABLE DEPARTURES, ONE DAMNING PATTERN
The numbers are now on the record and they tell a story that no public relations exercise can soften. According to data compiled by financial research platform PesaWall, Centum has made at least nine major exits over the course of Mworia’s tenure.
Without exception, every single one of those businesses generated a positive gross internal rate of return. Not one was a distressed sale. Not one was a company that needed to be exited. They were, by the company’s own published performance metrics, exactly what a holding company is supposed to accumulate and retain.
The exits begin with Carbacid Investments in 2011. Centum had acquired a 22.8 percent stake at a cost of Sh400 million.
It was sold after just 23 months, generating Sh1.2 billion in exit proceeds for a gross IRR of 66.9 percent. On the face of it, a spectacular return. But Carbacid, a carbon dioxide manufacturer serving both industrial and medical clients, was a low-risk, annuity-style business with inelastic demand.
At a 23-month holding period, Centum surrendered decades of compounding income for a single-event gain.
The Minet exit, selling a 21.5 percent stake in the insurance brokerage formerly known as AON after a 85-month holding period, returned Sh1 billion on a Sh200 million investment for a gross IRR of 52.4 percent.
UAP Insurance, now subsumed into Old Mutual, was sold in 2015 at a gross IRR of 39.9 percent: Sh5.5 billion in exit proceeds on a Sh900 million cost over 69 months. Insurance is one of the most durable recurring-income businesses on any continent. Once a customer is on a policy, the renewal rates are extraordinary. Centum sold it.
Platinum Credit, the micro-lender operating as Platcorp Holdings across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, was exited in 2018 after a 63-month holding period.
Exit proceeds of Sh2.7 billion on a Sh800 million investment produced a gross IRR of 38.9 percent. Consumer lending to underbanked populations in East Africa was, and remains, a growth business with structural tailwinds.
The company went to other owners who continued to harvest it. Nairobi Bottlers generated Sh8.6 billion in exit proceeds on a Sh700 million cost over a 126-month holding period for a gross IRR of 34.3 percent.
Almasi Beverages delivered Sh10.9 billion in proceeds on Sh1.8 billion over the identical 126-month period for a gross IRR of 25.9 percent. These were Coca-Cola franchise bottlers with the most recognised consumer brand on the planet behind them.
GenAfrica Asset Managers, Kenya’s second-largest pension fund manager at the time of exit, was sold to New York-based Kuramo Capital in 2018. Centum realised Sh2.4 billion on a Sh1.1 billion investment over 53 months for a gross IRR of 24.4 percent.
Asset management is a recurring-fee business with negligible capital requirements and extraordinary margins at scale. Centum gave it up.
Kenya Wine Agencies Limited, the KWAL spirits and wines distributor sold to South Africa’s Distell in 2017, generated Sh1.1 billion on a Sh300 million entry cost over 96 months for a gross IRR of 20.8 percent. Even Rift Valley Railways, a quick-turnaround trade that returned only 4.4 percent gross IRR in 14 months, was at least a profitable exit.
Now comes Sidian Bank. Centum first invested in the lender in 2001 when it operated as K-Rep Bank, lifted its stake to 67.54 percent with a Sh4.3 billion acquisition in November 2014, began disposing in 2023 and has now exited entirely via the sale of its remaining 50 percent stake in Bakki Holdco Limited, the vehicle that held a 27.2 percent direct stake in the bank.
The carrying value of the investment was Sh1.1 billion. The gain, by Centum’s own description, was “modest.” At the moment of final sale, Sidian’s assets had grown to Sh94.8 billion from Sh44.79 billion in December 2023 and deposits had more than doubled to Sh78.11 billion in September 2025 from Sh27.6 billion two years prior. The bank had been promoted to mid-tier status in September last year. They sold it on the way up.
CENTUM’S NOTABLE EXITS: THE COMPLETE SCORECARD
Source: PesaWall Research / Centum Investment Company annual disclosures. Gross IRR is before costs and fees and excludes dividends received during holding period.
Company Exited
Stake
Cost
Holding Period
Exit Proceeds
Gross IRR
Carbacid Investments
22.8%
Sh 0.4bn
23 months
Sh 1.2bn
66.90%
Minet (formerly AON)
21.5%
Sh 0.2bn
85 months
Sh 1.0bn
52.40%
UAP Insurance (Old Mutual)
24.2%
Sh 0.9bn
69 months
Sh 5.5bn
39.90%
Platinum Credit
36.0%
Sh 0.8bn
63 months
Sh 2.7bn
38.90%
Nairobi Bottlers Ltd
27.6%
Sh 0.7bn
126 months
Sh 8.6bn
34.29%
Almasi Beverages Limited
53.9%
Sh 1.8bn
126 months
Sh 10.9bn
25.90%
GenAfrica Asset Managers
73.4%
Sh 1.1bn
53 months
Sh 2.4bn
24.40%
Kenya Wine Agencies (KWAL)
26.4%
Sh 0.3bn
96 months
Sh 1.1bn
20.76%
Rift Valley Railways
10.0%
Sh 0.06bn
14 months
Sh 0.08bn
4.40%
Sidian Bank (via Bakki Holdco — final exit March 2026)
Carrying value Sh 1.1bn — “Modest gain” (undisclosed proceeds)
Note: The table does not include dividends received from investments, which formed part of the IRR calculation in each case.
Selling a profitable bank to put money in failed real estate is crazy. I hope they return this cash to shareholders as a special dividend.
WHAT WAS KEPT: A PORTFOLIO OF COMPOUNDING DESTRUCTION
The combined exit proceeds from the nine major divestments enumerated above run into the tens of billions of shillings.
The question that 36,000 shareholders deserve answered is: where did the money go? The answer is on Centum’s balance sheet, buried under impairment lines, finance cost disclosures and subsidiary loss statements. It went into Two Rivers Development.
It went into the Akiira Geothermal project. It went into the Lamu coal-fired power plant. It went into Longhorn Publishers. These are not speculative conclusions. They are the publicly stated capital deployment decisions of the company’s own management.
Two Rivers Mall and its associated development vehicle, Two Rivers Development Limited, is the single largest destroyer of value in Centum’s history.
The mixed-use development along the Northern Bypass, financed with an Sh8 billion facility from Co-operative Bank that was later refinanced through Standard Bank and subsequently through multiple restructuring rounds, was presented to shareholders as a transformative urban project at a total investment cost of Sh25 billion. What it has delivered instead is a cascade of financial catastrophe.
In the financial year ended March 2021, Two Rivers’ finance costs drove Centum to a loss before tax of Sh2.33 billion. Without the Two Rivers drag, the loss would have been a comparatively manageable Sh473 million.
This was Centum’s first net loss in 42 years of operating history. The following year the group loss continued. In the year ended March 2023, the consolidated net loss after tax exploded to Sh7.31 billion, driven by a Sh3.87 billion impairment provision on TRDL’s undeveloped land and sustained high finance costs. The subsidiary in which Centum holds a 58 percent stake booked a standalone loss of Sh7.09 billion in that year alone.
The Two Rivers SEZ, branded as TRIFIC, was supposed to be the redemptive chapter in this saga.
It has not been. In the six months to September 2025, the TRIFIC SEZ lost Sh584.5 million, more than doubling the Sh288 million loss in the same period the prior year.
The core Two Rivers Development subsidiary added a further Sh90.68 million in losses over the same half-year, widening from Sh67.7 million.
In total, four of Centum’s six reporting business units were posting losses in the latest available half-year results. Pre-tax losses more than tripled compared to the prior period.
The headline net loss of Sh326 million in the six months to September 2025 was only partially disguised by a Sh296.71 million tax credit that flatters the reported figure.
The Akiira Geothermal project occupies its own chapter in this ledger of misjudgement. Centum invested Sh1.97 billion in Akiira Power in 2016 for a 37.5 percent stake in a proposed 140-megawatt plant in the Greater Olkaria area. Shareholders were also told that Centum had invested Sh2 billion in Amu Power, the consortium behind the now-dead 1,050-megawatt Lamu coal power plant.
By 2022, the Lamu investment had been written to zero. The Sh2 billion was gone.
On the geothermal side, two exploratory wells sunk at a cost of approximately Sh1.2 billion failed to meet production capacity. By September 2022, the carrying value of the Akiira investment had fallen to Sh1.07 billion from the original Sh1.97 billion entry cost.
In FY2023, a further Sh900 million impairment was recognised. The total destruction of value across just the two energy projects runs to approximately Sh5 billion.
Undeterred by this record, Centum in May 2024 acquired a further 37.5 percent stake in Akiira from a UK fund, using more shareholder capital to double down on a project that had by then absorbed billions without producing a single kilowatt of electricity.
The book value of the expanded position at March 2024 stood at approximately Sh1 billion. There is no publicly disclosed timeline for the 140-megawatt plant to be commissioned.
Longhorn Publishers rounds out the gallery.
The NSE-listed educational publisher in which Centum holds a significant stake posted a net loss of Sh571.33 million in the financial year ended June 2023, the worst since its listing in 2012, on revenues that fell 27.3 percent to Sh1.07 billion.
In the year to June 2025, revenue fell a further 56 percent to Sh672 million while losses came in at Sh261.44 million. The company’s equity turned negative in the first half of the year to December 2024, with accumulated losses exceeding total equity.
Centum’s thesis that the Competency Based Curriculum transition would create a supercycle for educational publishers has instead produced the opposite: a company so damaged by procurement delays and curriculum uncertainty that it is now technically insolvent on a standalone equity basis.
THE LOSSES IN NUMBERS: WHAT SHAREHOLDERS ARE HOLDING
Two Rivers Development (TRDL) group loss FY2023: Sh7.09 billion | TRDL impairment provision FY2023: Sh3.87 billion | Centum consolidated net loss FY2023: Sh7.31 billion | Two Rivers SEZ (TRIFIC) loss — 6 months to Sept 2025: Sh584.5 million | Core TRDL loss — 6 months to Sept 2025: Sh90.68 million | Akiira Geothermal: Sh1.97bn invested (2016) + additional stake (2024) against zero electricity produced | Lamu coal project write-off: Sh2 billion | Two Akiira exploratory wells: Sh1.2 billion, failed to meet production capacity | Longhorn Publishers FY2025 loss: Sh261.44 million | Longhorn FY2025 revenue decline: 56%
THE SHARE PRICE: THE UNIMPEACHABLE VERDICT
Capital markets are the most honest long-run appraisers of management performance. Centum’s share price has delivered a judgment that no annual report narrative can overturn. The stock reached its all-time high of Sh31.50 on December 9, 2019, almost precisely at the moment the Almasi and Nairobi Bottlers divestment to Coca-Cola completed. The market was registering its last cheer before realising what had been sold and, more critically, what had been retained.
From that peak, the stock entered one of the most prolonged declines in the history of large-cap investment companies on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
By May 22, 2023, it had hit an all-time low of Sh7.60, a collapse of 75.9 percent from the 2019 high in less than four years. Shareholders who bought at the peak have lost more than three-quarters of their investment.
The stock currently trades at approximately Sh15, meaning it remains more than 52 percent below its all-time high. The market is not predicting a recovery. It is pricing in the portfolio that Mworia built.
The dividend trajectory confirms the same story. In 2019, Centum paid Sh1.20 per share to shareholders. By 2021, the dividend had fallen to Sh0.33 per share.
In 2024, in a year the company reported returning to profit partly because of Two Rivers SEZ property revaluations, the dividend was Sh0.32 per share, a 73 percent collapse from 2019 levels.
Net asset value per share fell from Sh62.10 to Sh54.00 in the single financial year ended March 2023. That is not a macroeconomic accident. It is the direct consequence of capital allocation decisions made at the top.
They have destroyed shareholder value since Chris Kirubi left. Nothing tangible is left.
THE BUYBACK: A COSMETIC SUBSTITUTE FOR RETURNS
In February 2023, Centum shareholders approved a Sh600.8 million share buyback programme, authorising the company to repurchase up to 66.5 million shares over 18 months.
By August 2024, the company had bought back 9.76 million shares. The buyback is dressed as a reward to shareholders, but the market has not been fooled. A buyback at distressed prices, funded by proceeds that should have been distributed as dividends, is not a reward.
It is a mechanism to support a share price that has collapsed because the underlying portfolio is producing losses. Shareholders who needed liquidity could not benefit from a buyback; they needed cash in their hands.
The conventional corporate response when a major asset divestment closes is a special dividend. Investors expect it. The market prices it in.
When the Sidian sale was confirmed on Friday, there was no share price rally. There was fury. Because shareholders have absorbed years of write-downs and annual losses, and the carrying value at which the Sidian stake sat in Centum’s books, Sh1.1 billion, was already considered by the market to be at or above the likely disposal price. The “modest gain” Centum described leaves almost no residual capital to distribute. The market already knew.
The broader question shareholders are now demanding be answered is whether the Sidian proceeds, whatever their quantum, will be returned via a special dividend or recycled into the same loss-making portfolio.
Mworia’s track record on this front is not reassuring. Proceeds from the beverage sales in 2019 went toward debt repayment and project funding. Proceeds from GenAfrica and Platinum Credit were reinvested.
There has been no special dividend in the modern era of Centum. Each exit has been followed by a fresh commitment of capital to long-dated development projects that have consistently underdelivered.
THE KIRUBI QUESTION: AN INHERITANCE MISMANAGED
Chris Kirubi.
The late Chris Kirubi, who died in June 2021 and whose estate remains the beneficial controlling shareholder at approximately 30.94 percent, was the architect of Centum’s diversified portfolio model. Kirubi understood that a holding company’s legitimacy rests on the quality and durability of its underlying businesses.
He assembled a portfolio spanning beverages, insurance, financial services and publishing that threw off consistent cash flows across economic cycles. He understood the difference between a business worth holding and a project worth speculating on.
Under Mworia, that philosophy has been inverted. The businesses that generated the cash flows have been sold. The projects that absorb the cash flows have been built.
A Sh25 billion real estate complex that required an Sh8 billion development loan and has since spawned billions in impairments and annual operating losses. A geothermal project that has consumed nearly Sh4 billion in committed capital and produced no electricity. A coal power plant written to zero. A publisher so damaged it has technically negative equity. An SEZ burning through more than Sh1 billion annually in losses.
Mworia’s stated defence of this strategy is that Centum is not a passive holding company but an active value creator that enters businesses, creates value and exits at a premium. This is a coherent argument for a private equity fund with a 10-year fund life and institutional limited partners who understand the model.
It is a catastrophic model for a listed investment company whose shareholders include retail investors who bought shares expecting dividend income and price appreciation, and who have received neither for six years. The 36,000 shareholders of Centum are not limited partners in a closed-end fund. They cannot redeem their capital except by selling on the secondary market at prices that reflect the wreckage beneath.
There is also a less visible dimension to this story. Multiple market observers who have tracked Centum’s evolution note an exodus of senior investment professionals from the company since Kirubi’s influence waned.
The institutional knowledge that identified Carbacid at Sh400 million and sold it for Sh1.2 billion, that bought into UAP when it was a regional insurer and exited with Sh5.5 billion, has largely departed. What remains is a management culture oriented toward project development and real estate, domains where capital is patient and illiquid, rather than the disciplined exit-focused private equity model that built Centum’s original reputation.
WHAT SHAREHOLDERS ARE OWED
The Sidian Bank exit proceeds, undisclosed in quantum at the time of going to press, are now sitting at the company level.
The market consensus, expressed with unusual force by analysts and shareholders across every platform monitoring CTUM, is unambiguous: those proceeds must be distributed as a special dividend. Not reinvested in Longhorn Publishers, which has negative equity on a standalone basis.
Not added to Akiira Geothermal, a project that has now absorbed billions over nearly a decade without producing electricity. Not channelled into the Two Rivers SEZ, which lost Sh584.5 million in six months. Distributed. Returned. To the 36,000 shareholders who have watched their investment halve over six years while being told that transformation is underway.
The Centum board faces the most serious credibility test in its 59-year history.
The Centum 5.0 strategy, built around value optimisation and sustained portfolio performance, has delivered three consecutive years of consolidated group losses at the last full-year audit.
Net asset value per share has declined. The share price is at less than half its peak. The businesses sold were all profitable. The businesses retained are all loss-making. The dividend has been cut by 73 percent. The buyback programme has done nothing to arrest the share price decline.
From a pure investment standpoint, the current Centum portfolio is structurally challenged in ways that a single asset sale cannot remedy. Real estate in Kenya is illiquid and oversupplied in the commercial segment.
Akiira is a long-dated greenfield energy project with no commissioned output and a track record of failed wells. Longhorn is a distressed publisher in a government-dictated curriculum environment. The TRIFIC SEZ is an unproven concept in a market where industrial zones have historically struggled to attract anchor tenants at the pace required to service the development debt.
The one genuine bright spot is Nabo Capital’s management of Centum’s marketable securities portfolio, which returned 13 percent in FY2024 and outperformed major regional indices. But a well-run liquid securities book cannot indefinitely subsidise billions in real estate impairments and geothermal write-downs.
The Sidian proceeds represent the last meaningful pool of clean liquidity Centum will generate before the company is entirely dependent on long-dated development assets to monetise its portfolio.
That liquidity belongs to the shareholders who have waited, and suffered, through six years of this strategy. The market has rendered its verdict on the NSE’s secondary screen.
The question now is whether James Mworia and the Centum board are listening, or whether the proceeds from Sidian Bank will quietly disappear into the next development project on the pipeline.
Parliament has cleared the way for the government to sell its 15 percent stake in Safaricom PLC to South Africa’s Vodacom Group, but not before issuing a damning catalogue of omissions, contractual ambiguities and structural weaknesses in a deal that lawmakers themselves admit may shortchange the Kenyan public by an amount that, depending on whose arithmetic one uses, runs well into the hundreds of billions of shillings.
The approval, recommended by the joint committees on Finance and National Planning and Public Debt and Privatisation in a report tabled on March 10, 2026, amounts to a conditional endorsement laced with enough qualifications to fill a legal brief and haunted by a central question that no government official has yet answered with any precision: at Sh34 per share, is Kenya selling its crown jewel at a bargain counter price?
The transaction, first announced by Finance Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi on December 4, 2025, involves the disposal of 6,009,814,200 Safaricom shares, representing 15 percent of the company, to Vodacom at Sh34 per share, generating gross proceeds of Sh204.3 billion.
An additional upfront payment of Sh40.2 billion, structured as an advance on future dividends from the government’s residual 20 percent stake, brings total projected inflows to Sh244.5 billion.
The money, the government insists, will seed the newly established National Infrastructure Fund rather than be absorbed into the recurrent budget.
Once the transaction closes, Vodacom’s effective holding in Safaricom will surge to 55 percent, making the South African operator, itself a subsidiary of British telecom giant Vodafone Group, the outright majority owner of East Africa’s most powerful private enterprise.
“The deal was undervalued. Kenyans have been given a raw deal. The joint committee is incompetent.” — Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro, National Assembly, March 10, 2026
THE DIVIDEND GAP THAT PARLIAMENT HAD TO CHASE DOWN
The most revealing detail in the joint committee’s report is not what it approved, but what it found missing from the deal as originally structured. Lawmakers discovered that the transaction’s foundational document, Sessional Paper No. 3 of 2025, is silent on whether the Treasury will receive dividends from the 15 percent stake for the financial year ending March 2026, should the deal close before that date.
The omission is not trivial. Safaricom declared an interim dividend of Sh0.85 per share in February 2026, a payout on which the Treasury will collect Sh11.92 billion based on its current 35 percent holding.
The full-year dividend for the year to March 2024 was Sh1.20 per share, generating Sh16.83 billion for the government.
At a company recording 52.1 percent net profit growth to Sh42.7 billion in the first half of its current financial year, the final dividend for FY2026 is expected to be considerably higher.
The committee noted in its report that the deal fails to specify whether it is structured on an ex-dividend or cum-dividend basis, meaning Parliament was asked to approve a Sh244.5 billion transaction without knowing who pockets potentially Sh17 billion or more in annual dividends depending on the closing date.
The committees have recommended that the effective date of the transaction be set at April 1, 2026, or later, to ensure the government collects what is rightfully its share of the 2025 financial year’s earnings.
They have also invoked Section 142 of the Companies Act, which stipulates that dividends are payable to shareholders registered at the time of declaration, and directed the Treasury to renegotiate with Vodacom to formalise this entitlement.
The absence of this basic commercial clarity from a deal of this magnitude speaks less to oversight and more to a negotiation conducted with suspicious haste.
The committees’ language is careful but pointed. They describe the absence of explicit dividend clarification as creating uncertainty that could trigger unintended revenue loss or post-completion disputes.
In the understated dialect of parliamentary committee reports, that is about as close to an accusation of reckless deal-making as procedural propriety allows.
THE PRICE KENYA ACCEPTED — AND THE PRICE KENYA COULD HAVE HAD
The arithmetic of the undervaluation argument is not partisan noise. It is a calculation that has been advanced by the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya (ICPAK), the Technology Service Providers Association, Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro, economics professor Fredrick Onyango Ogola, and, implicitly, by the Kenya Bankers Association’s own proposal to open a portion of the shares to the retail market.
At Sh34 per share, the government is pricing the entire Safaricom business at roughly Sh1.36 trillion.
In 2021, before Safaricom committed billions to its Ethiopian expansion, the shares traded at Sh45, implying a valuation of Sh1.8 trillion. With Ethiopia now approaching operational break-even, with half-year net profits up more than 50 percent, with M-Pesa processing over 100 million daily transactions and commanding a 91 percent mobile money market share, the argument that Safaricom is worth less today than it was four years ago does not survive even casual scrutiny.
Nyoro told Parliament’s joint committee in January that limiting the sale to a single strategic partner denied the state the price discovery that competitive bidding would have produced, and that an open international tender might have generated an additional Sh150 billion for the national treasury.
ICPAK chairperson Prof Elizabeth Kalunda told the same committees that the Sh34 per share price had not been accompanied by a clear explanation of the valuation methodology, and that independent benchmarking or third-party validation was minimal
The government has never publicly named the transaction adviser who recommended the price. CS Mbadi told a television interviewer on China’s CGTN in January that no transaction adviser was appointed at the proposal stage.
“Either the people at the National Treasury are putting their interests first, are just incompetent, or both.” — Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro
That admission, buried in a cable television appearance, is perhaps the single most consequential sentence uttered by any government official in this entire affair. A Sh204.3 billion equity disposal, the largest privatisation transaction Kenya has undertaken since independence, was apparently structured without the benefit of a financial adviser.
The government’s defence is that Vodacom’s premium of 23.6 percent above the six-month volume-weighted average price represents fair value for a block trade.
The committees accepted this framing, noting that the negotiated price aligns with market movements and that dealing exclusively with Vodacom minimises execution risk.
That reasoning, however, takes the market price as the appropriate baseline, which is precisely what critics challenge.
A block sale premium over a suppressed market price is not the same thing as a fair valuation of an asset with Sh48 billion in annual dividends.
THE ALLEGATION THAT HAS NOT GONE AWAY: WAS THE PRICE ENGINEERED?
The most explosive allegation in this affair, one that has received considerably less media coverage than it deserves, is Nyoro’s claim before Parliament’s joint committee that 16 billion Safaricom shares were immobilised by the buyer in June 2025, months before the deal was announced, in a move he alleges was designed to signal oversupply to the market and suppress the share price ahead of the transaction.
If accurate, the implication is that Vodacom, as an insider buyer with material non-public knowledge of a potential acquisition, engineered the very market conditions used to justify the price it subsequently agreed to pay.
The Capital Markets Authority, the Communications Authority, and the Competition Authority have each told Parliament they are satisfied with the transaction and consider the Sh34 price competitive for a block sale. None of them, in their public submissions, addressed the immobilisation allegation directly.
The CMA’s chief executive Wycliffe Shamiah told the committee that Safaricom had already sought regulatory approval for the shareholding change.
The regulatory enthusiasm for the deal stands in some contrast to the reluctance of the High Court, which has twice declined to issue interim conservatory orders but has also not dismissed three separate constitutional petitions challenging the transaction.
Journalist and activist Tony Gachoka and Professor Ogola have petitioned the Constitutional Division of the Milimani High Court, arguing violations of Articles 1, 10 and 227 of the Constitution. Vodacom Group, strikingly, has sought to be struck out as a respondent in that case, arguing it is not party to a shareholding decision made by the sovereign government.
That legal manoeuvre may be procedurally sound; it is also the move of a company that prefers to buy an asset than defend its purchase.
WHAT PARLIAMENT DEMANDED — AND WHAT THE CONTRACT STILL DOES NOT SAY
The joint committee’s report, co-chaired by Molo MP Kimani Kuria and Mbalambala MP Omar Shurie, appended a list of conditions to its recommendation that reads like a retroactive negotiation.
Lawmakers extended the job protection period for Safaricom’s 6,777 employees from three years to the duration of the transaction, and specified that no acquisition-related redundancies should occur within five years of closing.
The dealer, agent and business partner protections embedded in what the Safaricom Dealer Association calls the shared-prosperity model were extended from three years in the original term sheet to ten years in the committee’s recommendation.
These are not minor administrative adjustments; they are fundamental changes to the structure of a transaction that was already partially executed.
The committees also directed that Vodacom’s commitment to retain Kenyan leadership and governance structures be formally incorporated into the share purchase agreement, after observing that the existing commitment appears only in the Sessional Paper and not in the legally binding commercial contract.
In other words, Parliament approved a deal in which the most politically sensitive protections, those covering jobs, local suppliers, Kenyan board composition and the Safaricom Foundation, exist as policy aspirations in a government document rather than as enforceable obligations in law.
The Majority Leader, Kimani Ichung’wah, told the House the deal was sound. Several opposition members, including Suba South’s Caroli Omondi and Kitui Central’s Makali Mulu, were unpersuaded, with Omondi declaring flatly that Nyoro was correct and accusing the government of misleading Kenyans.
THE DIVIDEND MACHINE VODACOM IS BUYING — AND WHAT KENYA IS SURRENDERING
To understand the full financial weight of what is being transferred, it is necessary to look at Safaricom’s dividend history with the dispassion of a finance ministry that apparently did not apply its own numbers to the question before signing the term sheet.
Between 2014 and 2024, Safaricom paid Sh564.1 billion in dividends to all shareholders, of which the government received Sh197.4 billion.
In FY2020 alone, when global businesses were contracting, Safaricom paid Sh56.09 billion in dividends. In FY2019, it paid two rounds, a final of Sh50.08 billion and a special of Sh24.84 billion. The company has maintained an 80 percent dividend payout ratio as formal policy and reaffirmed it will not change that policy despite increased borrowings for the Ethiopian expansion.
What this means in practice is that the government, having received Sh40.2 billion as an advance on its future dividends, will not collect a single shilling of dividends from its remaining 20 percent stake for somewhere between two and three years while that advance amortises.
Vodacom’s own financial controller, Shaun Biljon, said in December 2025 that the company expects to recoup the advance in just over two years, based on an internal rate of return of 16.5 percent, capped at 18 percent.
Translated from corporate finance into plain language: Vodacom is lending Kenya its own money, at a mid-teens discount rate, secured against Kenya’s future dividend entitlements.
The government framed this facility as low-cost financing.
An independent financial analysis by Mwango Capital concluded the framing was misleading, noting that the correct structure indicates the state is monetising near-term Safaricom dividends at a mid-teens discount rate, not borrowing below sovereign yields.
Vodacom is, in effect, lending Kenya its own future dividend income, charging 16.5 percent interest on money that would have flowed to the Consolidated Fund regardless.
THE NATIONAL SECURITY DIMENSION NOBODY IN GOVERNMENT HAS ADEQUATELY ADDRESSED
Safaricom is not, in any meaningful analytical sense, a telecommunications company. It is a financial infrastructure provider that happens to operate a mobile network.
M-Pesa alone accounts for nearly half of Kenya’s GDP in transaction value flowing through its rails on any given day.
The platform serves 38 million Kenyan customers, facilitates government services including eCitizen and Huduma Namba, supports the National Hospital Insurance Fund’s digital payments architecture, and is embedded in the operational fabric of the Kenya Revenue Authority’s tax collection systems.
The united opposition in Parliament argued, with some force, that an entity of this description is not a portfolio asset available for routine privatisation but a national security infrastructure that the state has an obligation to govern.
The government’s response, that it will retain two board seats, require a Kenyan CEO and chair, and that Vodacom must consult the government before Safaricom expands outside Kenya, is constitutionally weightless in the absence of statutory underpinning.
Two board seats in a 55-percent-controlled company do not amount to veto power over strategic decisions that affect 38 million mobile money users. The Safaricom Dealer Association has warned that Vodacom’s more centralised model in other African markets risks dismantling the shared-prosperity dealer network.
The Technology Service Providers Association has called for golden share provisions and foreign ownership limits. Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka has questioned the transparency of the process.
The Kenya Bankers Association proposed offering at least 300 million shares to ordinary Kenyan citizens rather than transferring the entirety of the 15 percent to Vodacom. None of these proposals were incorporated in the final committee recommendation.
WHAT PARLIAMENT APPROVED IS NOT NECESSARILY WHAT WILL HAPPEN
The committee’s report has been tabled and debated. The full National Assembly must still vote to adopt it. At least three constitutional petitions continue before the High Court. COMESA has granted approval, but approvals from the Capital Markets Authority, the Communications Authority, the Central Bank of Kenya and the East African Community Competition Authority remain pending in various stages.
The parliamentary clock that ticked from the December 2025 announcement expires on or around March 26, 2026, after which the sessional paper takes effect automatically if no parliamentary action has been taken.
The committees, by tabling their report, have reset that dynamic, but the final vote on the House floor will be a reckoning for government loyalists who must explain to their constituents why Kenya’s most profitable listed company was handed to a foreign majority owner at a price that the country’s own accountancy body, its bankers’ association, and a former chair of the Budget and Appropriations Committee all described as inadequate.
The government’s fiscal predicament is real. With Sh12 trillion in public debt, interest payments consuming Sh1.097 trillion of a Sh3.321 trillion revenue projection, and only Sh29.8 billion available for development expenditure in the current fiscal year, the Ruto administration is not wrong to pursue asset monetisation.
The question is not whether to sell, but at what price, to whom, through what process, and with what binding protections. On each of those four questions, the parliamentary record suggests the government either did not ask, did not disclose, or did not negotiate hard enough.
The joint committee’s demands for renegotiation, its extension of worker protections, its insistence on formalising safeguards in the contract rather than the sessional paper, and its directive to clarify the dividend entitlement before closing are not routine legislative adjustments.
They are a parliamentary acknowledgment that the deal, as signed, was incomplete, opaque in key financial particulars, and structured more in the buyer’s interest than in the seller’s.
Vodacom, for its part, is acquiring majority control of a business that generated Sh42.7 billion in net profit in a single half-year, that commands 91 percent of the mobile money market in one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital economies, and that is positioned at the intersection of telecommunications, financial services and national data infrastructure, all at a price that its own funding structure suggests it will recover in full within two years from dividends alone.
Whether Parliament’s conditions survive the negotiating table, and whether the High Court will allow the transaction to close without first hearing the constitutional questions it raises, are questions that will define not just Safaricom’s ownership structure but the precedent Kenya sets for how a sovereign state ought to sell its most consequential assets.
The answer, at this stage of an unfinished process, is that the price of getting it wrong will compound, year after year, in the dividends that flow south.
Let’s get straight to the point: what’s happening with the JILK vs. KBL dispute isn’t a quest for justice. It’s a masterclass in how to hold a multi-billion-dollar transaction hostage.
In a functioning democracy, disputes are settled in courtrooms with evidence, cross-examinations, and legal arguments.
But when a litigant realizes their evidence isn’t holding up, what do they do? They weaponize social media, write angry letters to the Chief Justice, threaten private prosecutions, and unleash bloggers to muddy the waters.
Take the Jilk sexual harassment claims. The public narrative by Jilk is that KBL covered it up. The actual documentary evidence shows KBL immediately asked Jilk for information, evidence, or witnesses of the alleged sexual harassment to aid in carrying out investigations as requested by JILK.
JILK never responded. Even more revealing, in documents recently filed before the Chief Magistrate, the alleged victim confirms that it was actually JILK’s CEO, Pastor Engineer Sammy Maina Kamau, who prevailed on her not to pursue the matter.
Given that explanation, how is KBL to blame for the failure to follow up? KBL also clarified to Jilk that the accused was an employee of a third-party company, not KBL. But facts don’t trend as well as outrage.
Then there’s the whistleblower who filed a report with KBL. A detailed report of bribery and collusion between Pastor Sammy Kamau (Jilk) and Mutinda Mutuku QS (the Arbitrator and owner of Buildnett Limited) was lodged through a secure, auditable platform.
It wasn’t idle gossip; it was a serious allegation of a hijacked legal process. Instead of addressing the core issue—whether the arbitration was corrupted—the tactic has been to attack the whistleblower and pressure the judges handling the case – and so far two judges have walked!
When a magistrate simply asked for standard procedures to be followed, JILK’s lawyers bypassed the appeals process and wrote directly to the Chief Justice, accusing the magistrate of “gross incompetence.” This isn’t lawyering; it’s intimidation. It’s a deliberate strategy to scare judicial officers into compliance.
This isn’t just about one brewery in Kisumu. Diageo is currently navigating a $2.3bn transaction with Asahi. By creating a loud, chaotic public siege alongside their lawsuits, the goal is clear: create enough noise and reputational risk to force a payout.
If we allow litigants to bypass the courts and use Twitter mobs and intimidation tactics to extort settlements, we don’t just lose this case—we lose the rule of law.
Kenya’s commercial risk shouldn’t be defined by who can shout the loudest online. Justice must remain in the courtroom, not in the comments section.
The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development issued a statement from Geneva on Tuesday that was polite, dignified and retrospective.
It spoke of six decades of editorial independence, of a free press built from a Kiswahili-language weekly purchased in 1959, of 30 brands and 62 million digital users and a legacy of democratic contribution. What the statement did not adequately reckon with was the character of the man now inheriting all of that.
Rostam Abdulrasul Aziz, Tanzania’s first dollar billionaire, former CCM parliamentarian, and the man Tanzanian parliamentary investigators linked to the Richmond Development Company corruption scandal that toppled a prime minister, has acquired the 54.08 per cent controlling stake in Nation Media Group PLC that the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) held through NPRT Holdings Africa Limited.
The deal, announced simultaneously in Geneva and confirmed by Nairobi market filings, transfers 92,618,177 ordinary shares to Aziz’s vehicle Taarifa Ltd. The transaction price has not been disclosed.
The combined platform that Aziz now effectively controls includes the Daily Nation, Business Daily, NTV Kenya, Nation FM, The EastAfrican, the Daily Monitor in Uganda, The Citizen and Mwananchi in Tanzania, and a regional digital audience that the group itself values at over 62 million users. In any country, that would be a significant accumulation of editorial power for a single private owner with active business interests across the region.
In Kenya in 2026, a country hurtling toward a general election while its press freedom ranking dropped from 102nd to 117th out of 180 countries in a single year according to Reporters Without Borders, it is something else entirely.
THE MAN WHO JUST BECAME KENYA’S MOST POWERFUL PUBLISHER
Aziz was born in August 1960 in the Igunga District of Tabora Region, the son of one of the wealthiest trading families in East Africa. He was educated at the University of Exeter before returning to Tanzania to multiply a fortune that eventually earned him a Forbes billionaire designation in 2013. He was, at the time, the only dollar billionaire in East Africa according to the Henley and Partners Africa Wealth Report, a distinction he held as recently as 2022.
His business empire has ranged across telecommunications, mining, agriculture, real estate, and energy. He was the man who facilitated Vodacom South Africa’s entry into Tanzania, eventually accumulating a 35 per cent stake in Vodacom Tanzania before exiting in two tranches in 2014 and 2019, earning a combined $460 million from those transactions alone.
He controls Caspian Limited, which operates as Tanzania’s largest contract mining company, servicing DeBeers and Barrick Gold. He controls MIC Tanzania, giving him ownership of Tigo Tanzania and Zanzibar Telecom, together reaching over 13 million mobile customers.
He owns Taifa Gas Group, a company whose journey into Kenya is central to understanding how Aziz came to acquire NMG.
He has also always been in media. In 1999, Aziz co-founded Mwananchi Communications Limited in Tanzania in partnership with Ambassador Ferdinand Ruhinda. The company later launched The Citizen, an English-language daily.
Critically, he brought in Nation Media Group itself as a partner in that venture. NMG purchased the controlling shares of Mwananchi Communications in December 2002.
The commercial relationship that began more than two decades ago has now been inverted. The junior partner has purchased the parent.
Through his vehicle New Habari (2006) Limited, Aziz also maintains ownership of several influential Swahili newspapers in Tanzania including Mtanzania, The African, Bingwa, Dimba and Rai, though critics have long noted that his control there is exercised through proxies.
The acquisition of NMG adds a regional media dimension that dwarfs anything he has previously owned, placing him in command of editorial operations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda simultaneously.
The man who once forced Nation Media Group to pull down stories about him now owns Nation Media Group.
THE RUTO CONNECTION AND THE GAS EMPIRE THAT OPENED EVERY DOOR
To understand what the NMG acquisition means for press freedom in Kenya specifically, one must understand what happened in Mombasa in February 2023.
Taifa Gas Investments SEZ Ltd, Aziz’s energy company, had for years been attempting to build a $130 million cooking gas terminal at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Likoni, Mombasa.
The project, intended to house a 30,000-tonne liquefied petroleum gas terminus, had been blocked by regulatory opposition in Kenya during the Uhuru Kenyatta era. Then came September 2022, and the election of William Samoei Ruto as Kenya’s fifth president.
On February 24, 2023, five months into his presidency, Ruto personally presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for Aziz’s Mombasa gas plant.
President William Ruto (left) and Taifa Gas Group Chairman Rostam Aziz during the ground-breaking ceremony of the 30,000-tonne plant at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Likoni, Mombasa on February 24, 2023.
At that ceremony, Ruto said of Aziz: ‘I know the struggles he has been through to get to this point. The investment should have been done five years ago, but it was delayed due to government shenanigans here in Kenya. I have put that to an end.’ The project was then described by Tanzanian and Kenyan media as the largest single private foreign direct investment in Kenya since the collapse of the East African Community in 1977.
The Ruto administration’s clearing of the path for Aziz’s gas investment was not incidental.
Analysts and business press had been explicit for years that the Aziz camp was closely allied with Ruto while Uhuru Kenyatta was in power.
Business insiders pointed to rivalries with coast-based businessman Muhammed Jaffer of Africa Gas and Oil, who was seen as aligned with the late Raila Odinga camp that Kenyatta had backed before the 2022 election. When Ruto won, the Aziz gas investment, which had been stalled for years, suddenly had a presidential champion.
That Ruto and Aziz share a bond warm enough for a sitting head of state to publicly launch a private business investment and describe its regulatory delays as ‘government shenanigans’ that he personally corrected is not a matter of speculation. It is on camera. It is on record. And it is now the backdrop against which journalists employed by Aziz’s newly acquired media house must decide how to cover William Ruto’s government in the run-up to the 2027 general election.
THE RICHMOND SHADOW: A CORRUPTION SCANDAL THAT NEVER FULLY WENT AWAY
Aziz’s path to extraordinary wealth has not been without shadow. The most significant of those shadows is the Richmond scandal, which shook Tanzania in 2007 and 2008 and ultimately forced the resignation of Prime Minister Edward Lowassa along with two cabinet ministers.
In 2006, Tanzania faced a crippling electricity shortage caused by drought. The government, bypassing standard procurement procedures, awarded an emergency contract to Richmond Development Company, a US-registered entity, to supply 100 megawatts of diesel generators to the state utility TANESCO.
The contract, valued at approximately TSh 172 billion, included a provision guaranteeing payment of $137,000 daily regardless of actual output. The generators arrived late, underperformed, and the deal was ultimately passed to another entity, Dowans Holdings. Tanzania lost over $120 million on the arrangement.
A parliamentary select committee chaired by Dr Harrison Mwakyembe investigated and tabled its findings in February 2008. The committee found that Richmond was a briefcase company with no relevant experience, financial capacity, or clear US registration.
The report found that Aziz had been granted power of attorney by Richmond by late 2005, making him the legal representative of the company at the critical time it won the tender in 2006.
The report further stated that the real proprietors of Richmond were Prime Minister Lowassa and, in the committee’s words, ‘his close friend, Igunga MP Rostam Aziz.’ Lowassa resigned. Two ministers resigned. The entire cabinet was dissolved.
Aziz denied the allegations then, as he has consistently since. He called for a panel of judges to review the committee’s findings, insisting the report was wrong about his role. No criminal prosecution followed. But the scandal’s association with his name never disappeared.
In July 2011, when the ruling CCM party called on leaders tainted by corruption accusations to resign, Aziz became the first Tanzanian MP in history to voluntarily vacate his parliamentary seat, citing what he called ‘dirty politics’ within the party. He has remained outside active politics since, though his business influence and his relationships with sitting governments have never diminished.
WHEN NMG WAS HIS ADVERSARY
There is a particular irony sharpening Tuesday’s transaction.
During the Taifa Gas regulatory battles in Kenya, Aziz’s lobbying machinery was pointed, among other targets, directly at Nation Media Group. Business news monitoring services reported that the group was forced to pull down critical stories about the Taifa Gas investment and apologise to Aziz. The details of those interactions have not been independently verified in full, but the broad pattern is on record.
The man who once used political leverage to neutralise NMG coverage of his own business interests now sits at the top of NMG’s ownership chain.
Journalists at the Daily Nation, Business Daily, NTV, and The EastAfrican are now ultimately employed by a proprietor whose business empire has active interests in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
Their reporting on the Ruto administration, on energy policy, on telecommunications regulation and on regional business affairs will all occur within an ownership structure in which the proprietor has documented commercial relationships with the very governments and industries being reported on.
Press freedom organisations have been watching NMG with concern for reasons entirely separate from the ownership change.
Reporters Without Borders documented in December 2024 that Safaricom threatened the group with SLAPP suits, suspended advertising contracts, and demanded internal hearings following NMG’s investigation into surveillance practices.
Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria threatened to withdraw all government advertising from NMG in 2023 after the group published an investigation into a cooking oil import scheme allegedly involving government officials.
The Kenyan government was estimated to owe NMG alone approximately Ksh 800 million in unpaid advertising debts as of 2024, a structural leverage point that no commercial media organisation can afford to ignore.
Kenya’s press freedom ranking fell from 102nd to 117th place in a single year. Now its biggest media house has a new owner with active business deals involving the sitting government.
A FINANCIALLY WOUNDED INSTITUTION
NMG arrived at this ownership transition in a condition of significant financial distress. From a profit peak of over Ksh 2.5 billion in 2013, the group recorded its first back-to-back annual losses in more than a decade in 2023 and 2024. The net loss for 2024 was Ksh 254.4 million, following a Ksh 205.7 million loss the year before. Group turnover fell 12.5 per cent to Ksh 6.23 billion in 2024. The board suspended dividend payments to shareholders.
The group has closed regional newsrooms in Mombasa, Meru, Kakamega and Kisii, in addition to implementing multiple rounds of staff reductions since 2016.
These financial pressures are not unique to NMG. The global collapse of print advertising revenue, the rise of social media platforms that have captured advertising spend from legacy media, and the specific challenge of building viable digital subscription businesses in relatively low-income markets have combined to squeeze media economics across East Africa.
NMG has been investing in its digital transformation, reaching 83 per cent digital content delivery by end of 2024 and targeting $55 million in digital revenue by 2027.
But a financially distressed media institution is also a more vulnerable one. Advertisers, regulators, and now a new proprietor with active business interests across the region all have structural leverage over a newsroom that needs revenue to survive.
Aziz and Taarifa Ltd have committed publicly to investing in NMG’s digital transformation, and Sultan Allana of AKFED has expressed confidence that editorial independence will be maintained. Those are the correct things to say at the moment of announcement.
The harder test comes when a Taarifa-linked story needs investigating or when the Ruto government applies pressure to a newsroom whose majority owner has a Ksh 16 billion gas plant to protect in Mombasa.
WHAT FOLLOWS IN THE REGION
The implications extend beyond Kenya’s borders. NMG’s Daily Monitor in Uganda is one of that country’s most credible independent news organisations in a media environment that has become increasingly hostile under the Museveni government.
The Citizen and Mwananchi in Tanzania, two publications that Aziz himself helped found before selling his stake, now return under his indirect control in a country where the ruling CCM, the party he served for nearly two decades, remains in government under President Samia Suluhu Hassan. Rwanda, a market where press freedom rankings are among the continent’s most restrictive, rounds out the group’s regional footprint.
Aziz told the media at announcement: ‘NMG is an institution of profound importance to East Africa, and we will uphold its editorial independence while investing in its continued success as the region’s leading independent media organisation.’ The commitment is noted.
But Aziz also has a documented history as both a political actor and a commercial operator whose interests regularly intersect with the state. The confidence of AKFED’s Sultan Allana that ‘NMG will continue to uphold the values of independent journalism’ is understandable from a departing shareholder who built those values over 66 years. It does not bind the incoming majority owner in any legally enforceable way.
There is a school of thought that argues private billionaire ownership is neutral or even beneficial for media, that financial stability provided by a deep-pocketed proprietor is preferable to the slow death of a loss-making independent institution.
That argument has merit in the abstract.
It loses considerable force when the billionaire proprietor has publicly documented commercial ties to the sitting head of government in the group’s most important market, when that proprietor has a history of using business relationships to manage media coverage of himself, and when the country involved is approaching an election in an environment of documented government pressure on the press.
The Daily Nation was founded on the conviction, articulated by its founder the late Aga Khan IV, that a free press is indispensable to democratic society.
For 66 years, that conviction had the backing of an owner with no commercial interests in Kenya beyond the media house itself, and whose development mission was structurally incompatible with editorial capture.
What backs that conviction now is the word of a Tanzanian billionaire with a gas terminal in Mombasa, a telecommunications empire in Dar es Salaam, and a warm relationship with the man in State House.
Whether those assurances prove sufficient will not be determined in Geneva announcement rooms. It will be determined the next time a Daily Nation editor receives a call she would rather not have received, and decides whether the story runs.
MAR 10 – Oil prices fell on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump warned Iran to not block a shipping route crucial to global energy supplies.
“If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far,” he said on Social media.
In late morning trade in Asia, Brent crude was 6% lower at $93.05 (£69.33) and Nymex Light Sweet was down 6.1% at $88.96.
Oil had reached almost $120 a barrel on Monday over fears that the US-Israeli war with Iran would cause lengthy disruption to supplies from the Middle East, but fell back after Trump suggested that the war could end soon.
“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. Then, I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion,” Trump said during a news conference in Florida.
The fall in oil prices on Tuesday has given traders a moment to “exhale”, but energy markets remain in a state of “total tug-of-war”, said Alberto Bellorin from oil and gas investment firm InterCapital Energy.
Oil trading will “remain incredibly twitchy” and prices are likely to spike if the conflict escalates and fall if it seems to be easing, he said.
Share prices in Asia made gains as concerns about the economic impact of he conflict eased.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 was 3.3% higher, while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong was up by 1.7% and South Korea’s Kospi gained 6.2%.
Stock markets in the region were hit hard the previous day on investor concerns that disruptions in the Gulf could mean higher inflation and rising interest rates.
The Strait of Hormuz is crucial to the global energy market as around a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the narrow waterway.
While the price of oil has fallen from Monday’s peak it is still around 20% higher than where they were before the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran just over a week ago, said Park Kee Hyun from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Prices will remain “volatile” as the firms will charge a premium for shipments to account for any risk of the situation worsening, Park said.
Trump’s comments may suggest the war may end soon, but the bigger question is whether those remarks are followed by concrete changes in the conflict zone, he added.
G7 nations on Monday said it is ready to take “necessary measures” to address the global supply of energy in the light of surging oil prices.
A meeting between G7 leaders and the International Energy Agency (IEA) ended without a final decision on whether the nations would release oil from stockpiles, though the matter was discussed.
UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves said on Monday the UK used the meeting to urge for “immediate de-escalation” in the Middle East and guaranteed security for vessels in the region.
She said: “I stand ready to support a co-ordinated release of collective IEA oil reserves.”
Faida Investment Bank success fee: Sh1.06bn | Fixed advisory fee: Sh98.6mn | Placement fees (22 brokers, capped at 1.5%): Up to Sh1.59bn shared | Total government advisory spend (excl. success fee): ~Sh3bn | KPC listing date: March 9, 2026 | IPO subscription rate: 105.7% | Retail take-up: 19% of allocation | Foreign take-up: 0.15% of allocation | Oil marketers take-up: 0.14% of allocation
The cheque that Faida Investment Bank is set to collect from the Kenya Pipeline Company IPO dwarfs anything the firm has earned in its 31-year history. A success fee of Sh1.06 billion, a fixed advisory retainer of Sh98.6 million, and a share of the placement fees shared among 22 brokers — the cumulative payout to the bank linked to former Dagoretti South MP Dennis Waweru could surpass Sh1.16 billion.
To put that figure in context: in the year ended December 2024, Faida’s total net profit was a meagre Sh216,107. The KPC fee is not just a windfall. It is a structural transformation of the bank’s balance sheet.
The success fee is legally triggered and commercially clean. The information memorandum for the Sh106.3 billion IPO set the payment at one percent of gross proceeds plus 16 percent VAT upon oversubscription of the offer.
The IPO closed at a 105.7 percent subscription rate, raising Sh112 billion, and under the terms of the mandate, Faida earned every shilling of the bonus. Nobody is disputing the contractual arithmetic. The question is whether the market outcome that triggered the payout reflects genuine investor confidence — or something more complicated.
“The IPO received a 105.7 percent subscription rate. But retail Kenyans bought just 19 percent of their allocation. Foreign investors bought less than 0.2 percent of theirs.”
The anatomy of the IPO is unsparing. Local retail investors, whom President William Ruto publicly urged to buy shares for as little as Sh200, purchased stock worth Sh4.1 billion against their allocation of Sh21.2 billion — a take-up rate of roughly 19 percent.
Foreign investors, allocated an identical pool of Sh21.2 billion, spent a negligible Sh32.7 million, acquiring a rounding-error stake of 0.02 percent of the company. Oil marketing companies — the most natural strategic buyers in the entire transaction, the firms that feed fuel through KPC’s pipeline daily — took up shares worth Sh22.9 million against a Sh15.9 billion allocation, a participation rate of 0.14 percent. Major players including Vivo Energy, Rubis, and TotalEnergies abstained altogether.
Even KPC’s own employees, given a 5 percent reserved pool worth Sh5.3 billion, bought shares worth Sh99.1 million — an average of approximately Sh148,000 per person among the 670 staff reportedly participating.
Workers with the most intimate knowledge of a company’s operational realities — a 42 percent underspend on capital budget last year, an ongoing Sh3 billion environmental lawsuit over pipeline leaks — chose caution above enthusiasm.
The IPO was rescued in its final stretch by a concentration of buyers whose participation raises questions that regulators and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee cannot afford to ignore.
Local institutional investors — led by the National Social Security Fund and the Public Service Superannuation Fund — absorbed Sh67 billion in shares, oversubscribing their segment by 216 percent while every other investor category fell dramatically short.
Reporting circulated that the government leaned on both funds to ensure the offer crossed its minimum threshold of Sh53.1 billion. Both institutions deny this characterisation. What is not in dispute is the pattern: the entities closest to the state stepped in when the market would not.
“Uganda secured veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy, share dilution, and the appointment of the CEO — structural control over a company handling 80 percent of Kenya’s petroleum supply.”
The transaction’s single decisive actor, however, was Uganda’s state-owned Uganda National Oil Company, which acquired shares worth Sh34.7 billion — far exceeding its East African Community allocation of Sh21.2 billion — and secured a 20.15 percent stake in KPC. As part of a legally binding side letter negotiated ahead of the IPO, Uganda obtained veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy changes, material amendments to the business plan, share dilution, governance restructuring, and the appointment of the company’s chief executive officer. Uganda also gained the right to appoint two directors to the nine-member KPC board.
Kenya financed this outcome by surrendering strategic governance rights over an asset that handles more than 80 percent of the country’s petroleum supply.
Whether this amounts to sound infrastructure policy or geopolitical improvisation by a government desperate to close a struggling deal remains a question Nairobi has not answered publicly.
THE WAWERU CONNECTION
Dennis Gichahi Waweru is not a household name to most Kenyans who do not follow the capital markets. To those who do, he is a fixture of Kenya’s investment banking establishment. A Partner and Director at Faida Investment Bank, he served as the Member of Parliament for Dagoretti South from 2013 to 2017 before losing the seat to John Kiarie.
He holds an MBA in Strategic Management from Moi University and lists over 22 years of experience as an investment banker. He also serves as Chairman of the Kenya Investment Authority — the government investment promotion body operating under the Ministry of Investments, Trade and Industry — a position he has held across successive administrations.
That last detail deserves pause. Waweru chairs a state institution under the current Ruto government. His bank simultaneously won the mandate to lead the most significant capital markets transaction of the Kenya Kwanza administration — a transaction the President personally championed, repeatedly described as a transparency benchmark, and staked political capital on.
Waweru was initially associated with the Kenyatta political orbit, serving as BBI Co-chair and a visible Jubilee-aligned figure. His retention as KenInvest chairman under Ruto, and the award of the KPC mandate to Faida, indicates that his utility to the state has survived the change of administration.
Faida won the KPC mandate through a competitive tender process floated by the Privatisation Commission in October 2024, inviting bids for lead transaction advisory services. The firm was awarded the letter of appointment and named lead transaction adviser.
That the process was formally competitive is on record. That Faida’s principal shareholder simultaneously chairs a government investment promotion agency and that the mandate was for the most politically sensitive transaction of the year — these are facts that, in a stronger accountability environment, would trigger public disclosure and parliamentary scrutiny of conflict-of-interest frameworks.
“Faida reported a net profit of Sh216,107 in 2024. The KPC success fee alone is worth more than 4,800 times that annual profit figure.”
The firm itself is a legitimate market participant of standing. In 2025, Faida ranked third in value of equities trades handled at the NSE with Sh35.97 billion, commanding a 12.36 percent market share. In the bonds market, it held a 7.55 percent share with Sh409.34 billion in combined trades.
Its team lead for the KPC transaction, Dr Belgrad Kenne, chaired the allocation committee that determined share apportionment across investor categories. The firm held at least four roadshows with oil marketing companies to court their participation — meetings that ultimately yielded 0.14 percent uptake. Whether the failure of that effort reflects inadequate marketing, an unwinnable valuation argument, or simply a price that sophisticated commercial actors refused to accept at scale, is the central question about whether Faida earned its bonus in any meaningful market sense.
A PRICE THE MARKET REFUSED
Faida itself endorsed the Sh9 per share offer price as lead transaction adviser — the same Sh9 that Dyer and Blair, the lead sponsoring broker, also validated.
Against them stood a range of independent valuations that told a different story.
Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda priced KPC shares at Sh4.61, warning of an embedded premium that would force post-listing repricing. Sterling Capital placed intrinsic value at Sh3.70. Some independent online analysts went lower still. The government’s pricing implied a price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 22 times based on KPC’s earnings per share of Sh0.4122 for the year to June 2025.
Kenya Power, for context, trades at 1.2 times earnings. KenGen at 4 times. Safaricom — Kenya’s most profitable and liquid listed company — at 8 to 9 times.
The government priced a state monopoly carrying a corruption investigation, unresolved pipeline leaks, and a chronic capital budget underspend as though it were a high-growth technology firm. It then appointed a lead adviser financially incentivised by a one percent success fee to validate and defend that pricing.
The incentive structure is internally consistent: the higher the price at which the deal closes, the larger the fee. Whether it is compatible with independent adviser duty is a question the Capital Markets Authority has not yet addressed publicly.
Standard Investment Bank’s senior research associate Wesley Manambo issued a buy recommendation for the IPO but restricted it explicitly to investors with a long time horizon, warning of limited attraction for shorter-term participants.
With the KPC listing commencing today, March 9, and institutional holders expected to maintain positions indefinitely, secondary market liquidity is widely expected to be thin in the opening weeks. Investors who bought for income have accepted a dividend payout ratio cut from 94.5 percent to 50 percent to fund capital expenditure. Investors who bought for growth bought at a price independent analysts placed well above intrinsic value.
WHERE THE MONEY GOES
President William Ruto.
Of the Sh112 billion raised, none returns to KPC. All proceeds flow to the National Infrastructure Fund as seed capital for President Ruto’s infrastructure investment programme.
The Fund’s legal standing is currently before the High Court, which is examining whether its establishment bypassed constitutional safeguards. The National Infrastructure Fund Bill was still before the National Assembly this week.
Investors have purchased shares in a company whose proceeds flow into a fund whose constitutionality is under active judicial scrutiny — a structural risk that was not foregrounded in government communications ahead of the IPO.
Total government expenditure on the transaction, excluding Faida’s conditional success fee, reaches approximately Sh3 billion.
That figure covers legal advisers TripleOKLaw Advocates and G&A Advocates LLP at Sh31.9 million, reporting accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers at Sh13.45 million, public relations firm Apex Porter Novelli at Sh42.13 million, advertising agency Belva Digital at Sh12.26 million, Image Registrars for data processing and registrar services at Sh70.35 million, and the three receiving banks collectively at Sh16.35 million.
The CMA collected Sh30 million in approval fees and the NSE Sh1.5 million in listing fees. Against all of that combined spend, the single fee to Faida — Sh1.16 billion — exceeds the entire remainder of the advisory bill.
The 22 stockbrokers and investment banks enlisted to handle the sale will share a maximum of Sh1.59 billion in placement fees capped at 1.5 percent of the offer size. Faida will participate in that pool as well, collecting additional millions beyond its advisory retainer and success fee depending on the volume of shares it processed directly.
DID FAIDA EARN IT?
The contractual answer is yes. The fee was set in advance, the terms were disclosed in the information memorandum, the subscription threshold was met, and the oversubscription is real by the numbers. In that narrow commercial sense, Faida performed exactly what the mandate required. The more probing question is whether the mandate itself was designed for success — or for accountability.
A lead transaction adviser that endorses the government’s pricing, markets a product that retail, foreign, and strategic investors overwhelmingly reject, and then collects a nine-figure success fee because pension funds controlled by the same government stepped in to rescue the deal, has technically earned its fee while arguably demonstrating a market failure the fee structure was designed to obscure. The success fee mechanism rewards closure, not quality of demand. It rewards the headline subscription rate, not the distribution of ownership or the price integrity of the transaction.
The government raised its Sh106.3 billion. The numbers cleared the threshold. Faida triggered its bonus. But the retail Kenyan who was invited to buy shares for Sh200 owns 2.56 percent of the company.
A foreign sovereign with veto rights over its CEO appointment owns 20.15 percent. State-adjacent pension funds — whose fiduciary obligations to workers are now tied to post-listing price discovery against an entry point that independent analysts placed below fair value — own the largest single block.
The democratisation of national assets that the government promised produced a company that ordinary Kenyans fled, institutions were pressured to rescue, and a neighbour was rewarded with governance control for buying in. In that context, the Sh1.16 billion cheque heading to Waweru’s bank is technically deserved and analytically remarkable — a reward for presiding over a transaction that the free market declined to validate.
When Kenya Airways unveiled its new board on March 5, 2026, the announcement had the trappings of institutional renewal.
Four fresh faces, led by veteran businessman Kiprono Kittony as chairman, were presented as the architects of the airline’s long-awaited turnaround. The fanfare lasted about 48 hours.
By the weekend, Kenya’s financial and legal commentariat had torn into a detail the airline’s press release buried in its third paragraph: Kittony is also the sitting chairman of the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the very bourse on which KQ shares trade.
The question now circulating in boardrooms, on social media, and increasingly in the offices of regulators is blunt.
Can the man who chairs the exchange that lists and oversees Kenya Airways simultaneously chair Kenya Airways itself without compromising the structural independence that market integrity demands?
“One can’t sit in the board of NSE and be a board member of a listed company. There is complete conflict of interest. It is worse when the board member is a chairman in both places.” — Governance commentator Ike Ojuku
Corporate governance commentator Ike Ojuku was among the first to go on the record. Writing on X, Ojuku argued that the dual positions amounted to a complete conflict of interest and called on the Capital Markets Authority and the National Treasury to account for what he described as a failure of regulatory vigilance. “National Treasury and Capital Markets Authority are not doing their work,” Ojuku wrote in a post that was widely shared and cited in online governance discussions.
The concern is not theoretical. NSE, as a securities exchange, holds a quasi-regulatory function over its listed companies.
It enforces listing rules, monitors continuous disclosure obligations, reviews board composition changes, and can recommend or initiate enforcement action against listed companies in concert with the CMA.
Kittony, as NSE chairman, presides over that oversight function. As KQ chairman, he is now the primary custodian of one of the listed companies that the exchange regulates. The two roles, in their most literal sense, put him on both sides of the oversight relationship simultaneously.
The Standard reported that the KQ announcement did not address how Kittony intends to manage the two roles, an omission that governance observers found telling.
The Capital Markets (Public Offers, Listings and Disclosures) Regulations, 2023, which currently govern listed companies, require issuers to disclose conflicts of interest at the point of appointment.
KQ made the announcement pursuant to those very regulations but included no such disclosure.
Professor Winnie Nyamute, also newly appointed to the KQ board, simultaneously sits on the NSE board, compounding the structural overlap critics have identified.
The conflict has layers. Beyond Kittony, Standard Media reported that Professor Winnie Iminza Nyamute, one of the three other new independent non-executive directors appointed to the KQ board alongside him, also currently sits on the NSE board.
The two now share seats in both the exchange’s boardroom and Kenya Airways’. That dual boardroom overlap between the same pair of individuals at the regulator and a listed company would raise eyebrows in any jurisdiction with functioning governance enforcement.
Kenya’s legal architecture does not make the arrangement outright unlawful. The Companies Act, 2015 permits multiple directorships. Kenyan governance codes allow a person to chair up to two publicly listed companies provided conflicts are declared and managed.
The CMA’s Circular No.06/2024, issued to clarify the 2023 regulations, specifies that non-executive directors must not hold executive or employee positions in related entities, but does not prohibit non-executive board chairmanships across the exchange and a listed company.
Kittony’s defenders will note that the NSE chairmanship is itself a non-executive governance role, not an operational regulatory post, and that the NSE board’s day-to-day market oversight functions are executed by management, not the chairman.
But governance does not run on legal technicalities alone, particularly when a national carrier at the centre of a government privatisation drive is involved.
Kenya Airways has been navigating a bruising investor search after years of accumulated losses.
The government is actively scouting for a strategic investor to revive the airline, a process that involves valuations, disclosures, and market-sensitive negotiations, all of which flow through or past the NSE’s oversight apparatus.
The argument that Kittony’s NSE role creates at minimum an acute perception of conflict in that environment is one that even commentators sympathetic to his personal credentials have found difficult to dismiss.
Kittony’s credentials themselves are not in question.
He co-founded Betway Kenya and Radio Africa Group, chairs Mtech Limited and CreditInfo CRB Kenya, serves as vice chairman of the World Chambers Federation in Paris, and is widely credited with the rehabilitation of the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry during his tenure as its chairman.
He holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Nairobi and a Global Executive MBA from USIU and Columbia University. He was awarded the Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear in 2019 under former President Uhuru Kenyatta. The question his critics are raising is not about his competence. It is about institutional design.
The government is actively scouting for a strategic investor for KQ. That process involves valuations, disclosures, and market-sensitive negotiations. Kittony’s role atop the exchange that oversees that market creates structural questions no amount of personal credentials can paper over.
David Ndii’s appointment to the same board has attracted separate scrutiny of a political nature.
Ndii previously served as chairperson of President William Ruto’s Council of Economic Advisors, a role that was declared unconstitutional by the High Court in January 2026 after Justice Bahati Mwamuye found the Executive had bypassed the Public Service Commission and the Salaries and Remuneration Commission in creating and staffing the advisory positions.
The court barred the National Treasury from disbursing any further funds to the 21 former advisers. Ndii dismissed the ruling as a pyrrhic victory and indicated the advisory relationship with the presidency would continue informally.
His presence on the KQ board raises questions about the commercial and political independence of a board now navigating a sale process under the same government whose economic agenda Ndii has publicly championed.
Kenya Airways, through Company Secretary Habil Waswani, congratulated the new board members and expressed confidence in their ability to steer the company forward.
The airline did not respond to specific questions about how the structural conflicts identified by critics would be managed or whether CMA had been consulted prior to the announcement.
Neither the CMA nor the National Treasury had issued a public statement on the matter at the time of going to press. The silence is itself a form of answer.
In jurisdictions where governance enforcement is robust, an appointment of this nature would typically require pre-approval from the market regulator or, at minimum, a formal conflict declaration and recusal protocol lodged with the exchange before the announcement was made public.
That none of this appears to have happened is the detail that governance observers are finding most alarming.
For Kenya Airways, the governance controversy arrives at the worst possible moment. The airline’s recovery strategy depends on the credibility of its leadership to attract institutional investors willing to take a long-term stake in a loss-making carrier.
Institutional investors, particularly foreign ones, apply their own governance screens before committing capital.
A board chairman whose other hat belongs to the very institution regulating the company they are evaluating is exactly the kind of structural anomaly that triggers red flags in due diligence. Whatever Kittony’s personal standing, the arrangement hands prospective investors a ready-made excuse to negotiate harder or walk away entirely.
The CMA and National Treasury now face a choice. They can let the appointment stand and trust that Kittony will manage the inherent tensions through robust conflict declaration and recusal mechanisms, a workable outcome only if those mechanisms are visible, enforceable, and credible.
Or they can require KQ and Kittony to resolve the structural conflict by vacating one of the two roles, a course that would be disruptive but would restore the institutional clarity that market integrity requires.
The third option, continued silence, is the one neither the market nor investors can afford.
When the Communications Authority of Kenya quietly confirmed that it has opened a formal review of Airtel Kenya’s application to introduce Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellite service, the announcement arrived with the understated tone of routine regulatory administration. It was anything but.
Beneath the procedural language of frequency coordination and interference thresholds sits one of the most consequential contests in Kenya’s telecoms history: who controls the invisible architecture of digital connectivity, and on whose terms does the next generation of internet access get built.
The answers to those questions are being written right now, in meetings between regulator and operator, in the corridors of Parliament, and in the strategic rooms of a company that has spent decades turning market dominance into institutional permanence.
“The satellites act as cell towers in space. Any 4G smartphone can connect. No extra hardware. No fibre contract. No incumbent.” That is the proposition Safaricom spent 2024 trying to bury.
Airtel Africa announced in December 2025 that it had signed a partnership with SpaceX to roll out Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell technology across all 14 of its African markets beginning 2026.
The service works by equipping satellites in low Earth orbit with evolved Node B modems, the same radio equipment used in conventional 4G towers, enabling standard smartphones to connect directly to satellites when terrestrial coverage is unavailable. No satellite dish. No specialised device. Just a sky view and a compatible handset.
The initial rollout covers text messaging and basic data for select applications, with voice capability and broadband-grade speeds on a roadmap through 2028.
The CA confirmed to the media that it has received a formal application from Airtel Networks Kenya Limited and that discussions are ongoing.
The regulator says its primary technical concern is the potential for harmful interference: transmissions from higher-power low Earth orbit satellites can degrade noise levels in the licensed spectrum bands used by ground-based 3G, 4G and 5G networks. It is a legitimate engineering problem.
It is also the kind of argument that has, in the Kenyan market, a habit of being deployed as cover for competitive resistance.
THE LETTER THAT STARTED IT ALL
Rewind to July 2024. Safaricom’s director for broadband services, Tom Waithaka, put his name to a formal submission to the CA that, had it succeeded, would have fundamentally altered Starlink’s position in Kenya.
The letter, later leaked and reported by multiple outlets including this publication, argued that satellite coverage inherently extends across territorial borders and, in the absence of effective management, could provide services illegally and cause harmful interference to mobile networks. Safaricom’s prescription was precise: satellite internet providers should not be granted independent operating licences. They should instead be classified as infrastructure providers, permitted only to operate through partnerships with existing local licensees.
The argument was dressed in regulatory language, but its commercial logic was transparent. Starlink had entered the Kenyan market in July 2023 and had immediately disrupted the pricing structure that local operators, Safaricom chief among them, had spent years calibrating.
The entry price for a Starlink kit was initially steep at Sh89,000, but the American firm moved aggressively, slashing terminal costs to Sh45,500 and introducing monthly rental options at Sh1,950, making it genuinely accessible to a swelling middle class that had grown restless with the quality and cost of terrestrial broadband.
Monthly data packages entered the market as low as Sh1,300, a figure that put competitive pressure on the entire local ISP sector.
The CA, to its credit, held its ground. It told the court handling a parallel challenge brought by rights group Kituo Cha Sheria that it viewed Safaricom’s submission as the position of a market participant with a direct commercial interest, and that it was not bound to act on it.
The regulator noted that Safaricom was, in the court’s own language, directly prejudiced by its market dominance and likely apprehensive about the entry of new players.
That was then. In August 2024, Safaricom’s subscriber-growth machine was still running at pace. Its market share stood north of 65 percent. M-Pesa was the unrivalled architecture of Kenyan mobile money. The company could afford to fight.
THE EROSION BEGINS
Eighteen months later, the numbers tell a different story. Safaricom’s mobile subscriber market share has slid in consecutive quarters, falling from 65.7 percent in September 2024 to 64.4 percent by the end of 2024 and further to 63.3 percent in the first quarter of 2025.
In the same period, Airtel Kenya added nearly three million new subscribers, lifting its share to a record 32.2 percent.
Airtel Money, the company’s mobile wallet, punched through to double-digit market share for the first time, squeezing an M-Pesa platform that has now spent six consecutive quarters losing ground, even as it still commands around 90 percent of the mobile money market.
The competitive strain does not end at subscriber numbers. In March 2026, the CA implemented a further reduction in mobile termination rates, cutting the interconnection fee that operators charge each other for completing calls from Sh0.41 to Sh0.37 per minute.
The revision is the latest in a series of phased reductions that have compressed an income stream Safaricom has historically relied upon.
In the year ending March 2025, the company collected Sh4.7 billion in interconnection revenue, down from Sh5 billion the year before, itself a decline from the higher figures that prevailed before prior regulatory reviews.
Safaricom is the net beneficiary of termination fees precisely because it is the largest network: when the regulator trims the rate, the biggest network absorbs the largest absolute loss.
The company has been open about its anxiety. In its most recent regulatory filings, Safaricom listed market disruption and competition among its top ten strategic risks, a disclosure that would have been unthinkable five years ago for a company that then appeared structurally immune to challenge.
Its response to the competitive pressure has been partly technical, partly reactive. In September 2024, weeks after the Starlink-driven pricing panic, Safaricom quietly upgraded speeds on its home fibre packages to stem subscriber flight. It worked temporarily. But the structural arithmetic has not changed.
Mobile data revenue has now overtaken voice revenue for the first time in Safaricom’s history, reaching Sh44.4 billion in the half-year to September 2025, an 18 percent increase.
That figure looks impressive until one considers that data pricing is under perpetual downward pressure from Airtel, which charges less for comparable bundles, and from Starlink, which is redefining what affordable broadband looks like in areas beyond the fibre grid.
A Direct-to-Cell service that brings satellite broadband to any standard smartphone, without infrastructure investment by the subscriber, threatens the one revenue pool that Safaricom has successfully grown while voice and interconnection decline.
Data is now Safaricom’s beating heart. A space-based competitor that can reach every corner of Kenya without a single fibre cable is not a nuisance. It is an existential variable.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF CAPTURE
Safaricom’s July 2024 letter was not the company’s first attempt to shape the competitive environment through regulatory channels rather than product competition.
The company has a documented history of engaging regulators, courts and government when new entrants threaten its ecosystem. It opposed the attempted merger of Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya on grounds of spectrum rebalancing and debt obligations. When Starlink introduced rental options and slashed kit prices in mid-2024, Safaricom’s submission to the CA arrived within weeks.
What makes the Starlink episode distinctive is that it activated the entire weight of the regulatory apparatus simultaneously.
Starlink.
The CA turned to the International Telecommunication Union for a global framework rather than applying existing Kenyan rules, effectively delaying a definitive regulatory posture.
A court case brought by Kituo Cha Sheria to defend Starlink’s independent operation was met with the CA arguing that the NGO’s suit was a proxy for Starlink’s commercial interests. The government, meanwhile, was simultaneously pursuing a registration and identity verification drive targeting Starlink subscribers specifically.
That verification requirement, announced in February 2026 under the Kenya Information and Communications (Registration of Telecommunications Service Subscribers) Regulations 2025, mandates that all Starlink users complete in-person identity verification at an authorised retailer by April 30, 2026, or face service interruption.
Starlink is required to collect national identity cards, postal addresses and phone numbers of each subscriber and authenticate them against the National Integrated Population Registration System. The consequence of non-compliance is deactivation.
The CA frames the requirement as routine extension of Kenya’s Know Your Customer framework to satellite services. The language of security and fraud prevention runs through every official statement on the matter.
But the practical effect is to eliminate one of the structural advantages that had made Starlink attractive to a specific and significant segment of Kenyan subscribers: those who had, after the events of 2024, become acutely conscious of what their digital footprint meant.
THE SURVEILLANCE DIMENSION
The year 2024 was, for Kenya, a year of rupture. Gen Z-led protests against the Finance Bill brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets in June and July, producing one of the most consequential political upheavals of the Ruto administration.
The government’s response involved police live fire that killed dozens.
It also, according to investigations by the Daily Nation, Nairobi-based journalist Namir Shabibi and international outlet The Continent, involved the systematic use of subscriber data by security agencies.
The investigation, published in October 2024, alleged that Safaricom had allowed security agencies routine access to call data records and location data without court orders, assisting in the tracking and capture of individuals linked to the protest movement.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission and Muslims for Human Rights wrote a formal open letter to Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa detailing specific allegations: that the company had facilitated the handling of call data records by police attached to its own Law Enforcement Liaison Office, creating a conflict of interest in which the accused agency controlled access to evidence of its own conduct; that it had produced records bearing signs of manipulation before courts; that it had retained data it claimed had been deleted; and that it had, in partnership with Neural Technologies Limited, developed a software system granting security agencies what the rights groups described as virtually unfettered access to subscriber data.
The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented more than 80 cases of abductions and enforced disappearances following the protests.
Activists who had been targeted publicly said they had abandoned their Safaricom lines in an effort to evade tracking, encouraging others to do the same. US Ambassador Meg Whitman weighed in, describing the mobile phone surveillance by security agents as a breach of privacy.
Safaricom denied the allegations categorically.
CEO Ndegwa said during the company’s half-year results presentation that the reports were inaccurate and that sharing subscriber data without a court order would produce chaos in the business.
The company noted its ISO 27701 certification from the British Standards Institute for privacy information management. Its lawyers filed a complaint against Nation Media Group with the Media Council Complaints Commission, alleging that the publication had violated the journalism code of conduct.
Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa.
The Senate launched an ICT committee probe. Senators demanded to know whether Safaricom had a data-sharing agreement with the government and whether subscribers had been informed. The answers were never definitively provided.
What the episode established, beyond reasonable dispute, is that Kenyan security agencies regard telco subscriber data as an operational asset, that the legal framework governing access to that data is porous and contested, and that the established operators, whether by design or systemic pressure, have operated within a surveillance ecosystem that serves state objectives.
Against that backdrop, Starlink’s architecture represented something genuinely disruptive that had nothing to do with data speeds or pricing.
A satellite operator headquartered in the United States, routing traffic through a constellation in low Earth orbit, does not sit inside the reach of the Law Enforcement Liaison Office.
Accessing subscriber data from Starlink requires going through Starlink, which means navigating American corporate governance, US federal law and SpaceX’s own policy frameworks. For anyone who had spent 2024 watching their compatriots disappear after their calls were traced, that was not an abstract distinction.
Joseph Khago, a Nairobi-based IT specialist, framed the implications of the KYC mandate with characteristic directness when speaking to this publication.
Without the registration requirement, he noted, authorities seeking to identify a Starlink user from an IP address would have to go through the company itself. The new regulations give the government more control.
What he did not need to add is that they simultaneously diminish one of the most significant practical privacy advantages that satellite broadband had offered to ordinary Kenyan internet users.
Starlink’s architecture bypassed the surveillance architecture that terrestrial operators had spent a decade building with, and sometimes for, the Kenyan state. The KYC mandate closes that gap.
PEACE IN OUR TIME
Safaricom’s formal posture toward Starlink changed with conspicuous speed once the competitive arithmetic shifted. By late September 2024, CEO Ndegwa was telling interviewers that the company was open to discussions with satellite providers and viewed their technology as complementary.
In November 2025, Safaricom’s parent company Vodacom signed a continent-wide agreement with SpaceX authorising Vodacom and its subsidiaries, including Safaricom, to resell Starlink’s satellite internet equipment and services to enterprise and small business customers across Africa.
The deal was announced as a strategic evolution. In operational terms it is more accurately described as absorption: Safaricom gains a distribution relationship with the disruptor, integrating satellite backhaul into its network to reach remote areas without the capital cost of new towers, while Starlink gains a distribution partner with 50 million subscribers and a retail infrastructure that extends to the furthest reaches of the country.
Both sides benefit. But the dynamic is not symmetrical. Safaricom retains control of the customer relationship, the billing relationship and the data relationship. Starlink enters as a supplier.
The Airtel deal is structurally different, and that difference explains everything.
Where Safaricom’s Starlink integration uses satellites to relay data between remote towers and the core network, the Direct-to-Cell arrangement turns the satellite into the tower. The customer connects directly to the sky.
There is no Airtel-controlled data path in a dead zone; the connection is established between handset and satellite, with Airtel providing the licensed LTE spectrum that makes the integration legal.
This is the architecture that Safaricom’s 2024 letter was specifically designed to prevent. It is the model that was, in the language of that letter, too risky to license independently.
Airtel, of course, is not Starlink operating independently. It is a licensed Kenyan mobile operator using licensed Kenyan spectrum to partner with a satellite provider.
That is precisely the model Safaricom claimed to want: satellite as infrastructure, working through a local operator.
The irony is that the local operator enabling it is Safaricom’s most aggressive competitor. Airtel Kenya CEO Ashish Malhotra has not been coy about the strategic ambition.
The promise that every Airtel customer in every corner of Kenya will get coverage the day approval comes is not just a connectivity statement. It is a competitive declaration addressed to a market leader whose rural reach has been one of its most durable advantages.
THE REGULATOR’S TIGHTROPE
The CA’s position in this contest is genuinely difficult, and there is reason to believe that the current review reflects something more than procedural caution. The interference concern is real: the GSMA, the ITU and independent telecoms analysts have all noted that high-power LEO satellite transmissions in flexible-use spectrum bands can degrade noise floors in ground networks. The CA will need to model signal propagation, assess the satellite constellation’s orbital parameters and determine operational conditions that protect existing licensees. That work takes time and requires technical capacity.
What complicates the picture is that the CA’s track record on Starlink regulation has shown a consistent tendency to move slowly in ways that favour incumbents.
The ITU referral in 2024 was cited by some industry observers as a means of deferring a decision that would otherwise have required the regulator to either grant or deny Starlink’s operating model explicitly.
Safaricom is itself a partial government asset, with the Kenyan state holding a stake through the National Treasury alongside Vodacom and Vodafone. The institutional relationships that flow from that ownership structure do not require conspiracy to function as competitive cushioning.
Airtel Kenya has a record of filing competition complaints against Safaricom over regulatory processes.
In the LTE licensing process of the mid-2010s, Airtel and Telkom Kenya both raised objections about the manner in which the 4G licence was awarded to Safaricom. That grievance was never resolved in a manner satisfactory to the smaller operators. The frequency rebalancing dispute that Safaricom cited in opposing the Airtel-Telkom merger was, in the view of Airtel’s lawyers, precisely the kind of regulatory asymmetry that entrenches dominance under the cover of technical administration.
The CA has, under the current government, moved to address at least one dimension of competitive imbalance.
The reduction in mobile termination rates, opposed strenuously by Safaricom and implemented over its objections, is a structural intervention designed to reduce the automatic income advantage that accrues to the largest network.
The logic of the Airtel-Starlink review should, in principle, run along similar lines: a technology that demonstrably extends coverage into underserved areas, using a licensed operator and licensed spectrum, should face a clear regulatory path.
Whether it will is the question that the market, and Safaricom’s board, is watching with intense interest.
WHAT A DECISION WOULD MEAN
The CA’s approval of the Airtel-Starlink Direct-to-Cell service would reshape the competitive landscape in ways that cannot be contained by Safaricom’s current countermeasures.
The technology does not require terrestrial infrastructure in the areas it covers. It reduces the capital cost of extending coverage to rural and pastoral regions, which have been the most durable source of Safaricom’s network advantage.
An Airtel customer in a dead zone who can send a text, access emergency services or use a data application directly via satellite is no longer captive to whoever owns the nearest tower.
The data pricing implications are potentially more significant still. Direct-to-Cell is initially limited in bandwidth capacity per satellite, but the roadmap that Airtel and SpaceX have publicly committed to includes next-generation satellites with data speeds described as twenty times greater than the first generation.
If that roadmap executes on schedule, the service moves from a coverage solution for dead zones to a competitive broadband product for anyone with sky visibility.
In a country where Safaricom’s mobile data revenue has become the primary growth engine, a satellite-delivered alternative that bypasses the terrestrial network is not a fringe concern. It is a core revenue threat.
Starlink’s current position in Kenya’s fixed internet market, at 0.8 percent with roughly 19,470 subscribers, understates its competitive trajectory. The company grew at more than 2,500 percent between its entry and December 2024.
The KYC mandate, the CA’s regulatory pace and the absence of a Direct-to-Cell approval have collectively dampened that growth. Remove those constraints and the growth dynamics change. Add a distribution partner with Airtel’s subscriber base and agent network, and the dynamics change again, at Safaricom’s direct expense.
CONCLUSION: THE SATELLITE AND THE STATE
Kenya’s satellite internet story is not, at its core, a story about technology. It is a story about power: who holds it, who extends it, and who is threatened when the underlying architecture of connectivity shifts in ways that cannot be controlled from the top of the existing hierarchy.
Safaricom spent 2024 attempting to use the regulatory system to slow a competitor whose fundamental business model challenged the proposition that you need a tower, a cable and a licensed operator in your vicinity to get online.
It failed to stop Starlink’s entry, but it succeeded in framing the terms of Starlink’s integration into the Kenyan ecosystem in ways that preserve the data relationship between subscribers and a state that has demonstrated it regards that relationship as an operational resource.
The Airtel partnership now tests whether the CA is willing to approve a Direct-to-Cell model that, if it scales as its architects intend, materially changes the competitive landscape for the dominant operator and, as a consequence, changes the surveillance arithmetic for a state whose security agencies have shown a persistent appetite for subscriber data from within the country’s borders.
That is not a regulatory question with a clean technical answer. It is a political and commercial question dressed in the language of spectrum management.
The CA has said it is reviewing the application. The market is watching the clock.
March with a headline-grabbing 105.7 per cent subscription rate, raising Sh112.37 billion against a Sh106.3 billion target. Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi hailed the outcome as a triumph of transparency and investor confidence, pointing to the company’s regional monopoly in petroleum transport as a bulwark against economic volatility.
The government was effusive. President William Ruto, in a statement from State House, described the result as reflecting “strong confidence by investors and the market.”
Beneath this veneer of success lies a stark and inconvenient anatomy. The deal was propped up almost entirely by 465 local institutional investors led by the National Social Security Fund and the Public Service Superannuation Fund, alongside Uganda’s state-owned oil entity. Those with the most intimate knowledge of KPC, its own employees and the oil marketers who depend on its infrastructure daily, stayed conspicuously on the sidelines. When insiders and natural strategic buyers abandon an offering at scale, the question is not whether the numbers add up but whether the market is trying to communicate something the government refuses to hear.
A Damning Anatomy of Demand
The numbers are precise and they are damning. Oil marketers, allocated Sh15.9 billion in shares and positioned as natural strategic buyers given their reliance on KPC’s network, purchased a mere Sh23.1 million worth, equivalent to 0.14 per cent of their reservation. Only ten such firms participated against a sector that moves the overwhelming bulk of the country’s fuel.
Major players including Vivo Energy, Rubis, and TotalEnergies abstained altogether. The final allocation tells the same story in stark arithmetic: oil marketing companies ended up with 0.014 per cent of total shares, and that figure, as disclosed by the Privatisation Authority, understates the rejection because it covers only those who did participate.
KPC employees fared little better. Against a Sh5.3 billion reservation representing a dedicated 5 per cent pool, staff purchased Sh99.1 million worth of shares. All 670 employees reportedly took some allocation, yielding an average investment of approximately Sh148,000 per person.
For workers with front-row seats to KPC’s operational realities including a 42 per cent underspend of the capital budget last year and an ongoing Sh3 billion environmental lawsuit over pipeline leaks, that is not a vote of confidence. It is a hedge dressed up as participation.
Retail investors, the democratic heartbeat of any mass-market privatisation, numbered just 73,000 compared to the 800,000 who bought into the 2008 Safaricom IPO. They invested Sh4.1 billion against a Sh21.2 billion allocation, taking a final stake of 2.56 per cent. Foreign investors, for whom a quota of Sh21.2 billion was similarly set aside, spent a negligible Sh34.8 million, acquiring a rounding-error 0.02 per cent of the company. The IPO was extended by three days after early reports placed subscription at roughly 10 per cent, a figure that, if accurate, would have placed the entire transaction at risk of collapse.
When the lead transaction adviser describes the oil marketers’ avoidance as a ‘cocktail of issues,’ the more parsimonious explanation is that sophisticated actors looked at the price and declined.
The institution that ultimately saved the offering was Uganda’s state-owned Uganda National Oil Company. UNOC acquired shares worth Sh34.7 billion, far exceeding its East African Community allocation of Sh21.2 billion and securing a 20.15 per cent stake in KPC.
As part of a legally binding side letter negotiated ahead of the IPO, Uganda secured veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy changes, material amendments to the business plan, share dilution, governance restructuring, and the appointment of the chief executive officer.
Uganda also gained the right to appoint two directors to the nine-member KPC board. Kampala, which had for fifty years relied on KPC’s infrastructure to fuel its economy while having no formal say in tariff or strategic decisions, has now bought its way to the table. It is a rational act of statecraft. Whether it constitutes a rational investment at these prices is a separate question altogether.
The Valuation Question the Government Cannot Escape
Priced at Sh9 per share, the KPC offering implied a price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 22 times based on the company’s earnings per share of Sh0.4122 for the year to June 2025.
The comparison with listed peers is instructive and brutal. Kenya Power trades at approximately 1.2 times earnings. KenGen trades at 4 times. NCBA, one of the country’s leading commercial banks, trades at 3.5 times.
Even Safaricom, Kenya’s most profitable listed company and the uncontested jewel of the Nairobi Securities Exchange, trades at 8 to 9 times earnings. The government priced a state monopoly carrying a corruption investigation, pipeline leaks, and a capital budget chronically below target as though it were a high-growth technology company.
Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda, in a detailed initiation note released in January, valued KPC shares at just Sh4.61, barely half the offer price, warning of limited upside due to what it characterised as an “embedded premium” in the current pricing.
The firm forecast post-listing repricing as market liquidity forces genuine price discovery. The Ugandan analysts were not alone.
Former Central Bank of Kenya chairman Mbui Wagacha publicly questioned the opacity of the process, warning that boardroom dealings “affect investor confidence.” Opposition senator Okiya Omtatah filed suit to stop the privatisation, citing constitutional violations and inadequate public participation, though the transaction ultimately proceeded.
Faida Investment Bank, the lead transaction adviser, attributed oil marketers’ absence to fears over valuation, delayed board approvals, and a lack of consensus on whether to bid collectively or individually.
That explanation is technically accurate and analytically insufficient. When sophisticated commercial actors whose primary business depends on the infrastructure being sold calculate that the entry price offers no reasonable return, the problem is not their decision-making process. The problem is the price.
Pension Funds, Political Pressure, and the Rescuer Problem
The rescue of this IPO by the NSSF and the PSSF raises questions that neither institution has adequately answered.
A Nairobi lawyer publicly warned both funds against deploying pension savings into the offering, a warning that drew no public substantive rebuttal on the merits.
The NSSF’s own Auditor-General report for the year ended June 2025 identified Sh199.4 million tied up in non-performing assets, Sh47 million lost in falling share investments, Sh163 million linked to ghost contributors, and five prime central business district properties worth Sh4.02 billion lying idle.
The fund simultaneously committed to the Rironi-Nakuru-Mau Summit highway project and the KPC offering, all while its investment policy compliance remains under audit scrutiny.
The Nation’s reporting noted that “talk” circulated of state pressure on the NSSF and PSSF to ensure the offering reached minimum thresholds. Both funds deny this characterisation.
What is not in dispute is the arithmetic: local institutional investors purchased Sh67 billion in shares, oversubscribing their segment by 216 per cent, while every other category of investor fell dramatically short.
The concentration of rescue capital in state-adjacent institutions is either a remarkable coincidence of investment conviction or something that warrants the scrutiny of the Capital Markets Authority and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.
The government has sold a strategic national asset, diverted the proceeds to a fund whose constitutionality is before the High Court, and declared the transaction a benchmark for transparency. Each of those three claims merits separate examination.
Sovereignty Sold, Sovereignty Bought
Uganda’s acquisition deserves consideration on its own terms before it is celebrated as proof of regional integration. Kampala financed the Sh34.7 billion purchase in part through borrowing capacity, partly backed by a proposed facility linked to global oil trader Vitol.
Uganda’s fuel supply relies on KPC for roughly 95 per cent of its imports. The investment gives UNOC formal veto rights over the pricing of a service on which its own economy depends. That is strategically rational for Uganda.
It is less obviously rational for Kenya, which has diluted a majority of a monopoly infrastructure asset to a neighbour that now controls the appointment of the company’s chief executive and two of its nine board seats.
East African Community investors collectively hold 21.22 per cent of the company, with Uganda accounting for the overwhelming majority. Rwanda’s pension funds participated with a smaller allocation.
The Kenyan government retains 35 per cent. Local institutional investors hold 41 per cent. Retail Kenyans, despite President Ruto’s exhortation to buy shares for as little as Sh200, hold 2.56 per cent. The democratisation of public assets that the government promised has produced a company majority-owned by institutions and a foreign sovereign, with the Kenyan public as spectator shareholders.
Where the Money Goes and What It Does Not Do
Proceeds from the KPC IPO will be channelled into the National Infrastructure Fund, a vehicle CS Mbadi described as “the premier economic engine” of Kenya’s development strategy.
The problem is that the Fund’s legal standing is currently before the High Court, which is examining whether its establishment bypassed constitutional safeguards.
The National Infrastructure Fund Bill was before the National Assembly as of this week, with Mbadi insisting the legislative process was near conclusion. Investors who have purchased shares in a company whose proceeds flow into a fund of disputed constitutionality have accepted a structural risk that was not adequately foregrounded in the government’s public communications.
None of the Sh112.37 billion raised returns to KPC. The company plans to reduce its dividend payout ratio from 94.5 per cent of profits to 50 per cent to fund capital expenditure requirements, including a new Mombasa-Nairobi pipeline.
Investors who bought for income have accepted a dramatic reduction in near-term yield. Investors who bought for capital growth have accepted entry at a price that independent analysts place well above intrinsic value.
Standard Investment Bank’s senior research associate Wesley Manambo issued a buy recommendation strictly for investors with a long time horizon, explicitly warning of limited attraction for shorter-term participants. With the listing date set for 9 March and institutional holders expected to hold positions indefinitely, secondary market liquidity on the Nairobi Securities Exchange may prove thin and disorderly in the opening weeks.
What This Tells Capital Markets
Kenya’s privatisation programme has been dormant since 2008, and the KPC listing carries the weight of representing an entire policy agenda. A clean, broadly subscribed deal would have signalled that the Nairobi Securities Exchange can serve as a credible venue for large public offerings, that retail investors trust government pricing, and that strategic buyers see long-term value in Kenyan infrastructure. The KPC transaction delivered none of those signals.
What it delivered instead is a more sobering lesson. An oversubscription built on two pillars, a foreign sovereign with a structural dependency on the asset and a cluster of state-adjacent pension funds with murky investment mandates, is not market validation. It is managed demand.
The government has raised its Sh106.3 billion. But it has done so at a cost that will become legible only after listing: reduced retail confidence in future privatisations, unresolved questions about NSSF’s fiduciary obligations, a secondary market almost certain to be illiquid, and a foreign shareholder now positioned with veto rights over the strategic direction of a company that handles over 80 per cent of Kenya’s petroleum supply.
In a debt-laden economy where annual loan repayments devour roughly 40 per cent of government revenues, the urgency to execute this transaction was real.
That urgency is precisely the condition under which pricing discipline collapses, scrutiny is dismissed as obstructionism, and institutions are leaned upon to perform the market’s function. The KPC IPO did not fail.
But it also did not succeed in the way that matters for the long-term health of Kenya’s capital markets. Those are not the same thing, even when the headline subscription rate is 105.7 per cent.
Cytonn Investments CEO Edwin Dande has publicly warned Ohangla star Prince Indah to keep out of real estate, invoking the ruinous example of Bishop Mark Kariuki to make his point.
The warning, posted on X this week, has set off a fierce debate, not least because of Dande’s own contested record in the very sector he is cautioning others about.
“Prince Indah is now parlaying his top notch ohangla skills into selling plots? We have seen enough of this: just as Pastor Mark Kariuki should have avoided selling plots and stuck to the pulpit, the King of Ohangla should avoid plots like a plague. Real estate in Kenya is flammable stuff,” Dande wrote.
Prince Indah, born Kevin Otieno Onyango, recently promoted a venture called Prime Plots Property on social media, advertising plots with ready title deeds and cash discounts of up to five per cent.
The musician, widely hailed as the King of Ohangla for his blend of traditional Luo rhythms and modern performance energy, pitched the investment as offering buyers “a place to call home” and a secure future.
Dande’s reference to Kariuki cuts deep.
The Bishop, who serves as General Overseer of Deliverance Churches Kenya, stands at the centre of one of the country’s most damaging land scandals.
In 2014, Kariuki and fellow church leaders endorsed the Imani Estate project in Ruiru, Kiambu County, through the church’s commercial arm, Ukombozi Holdings.
Thousands of congregants paid between Sh2.5 million and Sh4.4 million per plot on a 500-acre site marketed as a divine opportunity for homeownership.
The land turned out to be part of the disputed estate of former intelligence chief James Kanyotu and was under High Court restraining orders due to an unresolved succession battle.
Investigations exposed forged documents and entities linked to Kamlesh Pattni, the architect of the 1990s Goldenberg scandal.
A High Court ruling dated July 10, 2025, declared all transactions null and void, triggering a government gazette notice ordering the cancellation of titles.
Victims, many of whom had sunk life savings and bank loans into the scheme, estimate losses at around Sh10 billion.
Kariuki has also previously faced accusations over a 2007 pyramid scheme called DECI, which reportedly cost investors millions, though he insisted he was himself a victim.
The irony of Dande’s warning has not been lost on Kenyans online.
As CEO of Cytonn Investments, Dande himself faces accusations of overseeing schemes that have trapped more than Sh15 billion in investor funds through delayed payouts and stalled projects.
His legal battles include allegations of armed confrontations over a Kilimani property and non-compliance with liquidation orders.
In January 2026, Alego Usonga MP Samuel Atandi petitioned parliament over Cytonn’s alleged fraud, and the matter is now before the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.
The exchange has reignited debate about Kenya’s property market, long plagued by forged title deeds, disputed land and high-profile collapses.
Real estate experts warn that celebrities who lend their names to plot sales face particular exposure, given that their fame draws investors who may not conduct due diligence.
In a move that has sent shockwaves through the digital entertainment landscape, the Showmax Board has officially announced the decision to discontinue the service in the near future.
The decision follows a “comprehensive review” by the board aimed at strengthening their overall digital offering and ensuring long-term sustainability in what they describe as an “increasingly competitive streaming environment.”
While the news marks the end of an era for the platform, you don’t need to put down the remote just yet. The company confirmed that there will be no immediate interruption to current services.
“Importantly, at the moment there will be no interruption to your current service. You can continue streaming as usual, and no action is required from you at this time,” Showmax said in a statement.
Subscribers can continue streaming their favorite shows as usual, and no action is required from them at this time.
Showmax emphasized that its users remain a top priority, and they are currently working on a transition plan to ensure clear communication and a smooth experience when the final day arrives.
The company has promised to share further details well in advance, including official timelines and any necessary future steps for account holders. Despite the impending exit of the Showmax brand, the parent company isn’t abandoning the digital space.
They reiterated that streaming remains central to their strategy, promising continued investment in premium content, technological innovation, and new partnerships to deliver the best possible entertainment experience to their customers.
“Streaming remains central to our strategy. We will continue to invest in premium content, technology innovation and partnerships to deliver the best possible entertainment experience to our customers. Thank you for your continued support,” Showmax said.
For now, Kenyan subscribers can keep their popcorn ready, but the clock is officially ticking on one of Africa’s most prominent streaming platforms.
NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 4 – Kenya Airways (KQ) will operate special repatriation flights between Nairobi and Dubai following disruptions caused by escalating tensions in the Middle East.
The airline said the first flight will depart from Nairobi to Dubai today, with the return flight from Dubai to Nairobi scheduled for tomorrow. The operations were approved after Dubai Airport authorities granted limited flight slots.
The move follows guidance from UAE authorities allowing the partial resumption of operations at Dubai International Airport (DXB) from March 2, 2026. Only a small number of flights are being permitted, strictly for repatriation purposes.
The crisis has left Kenyan and international travellers stranded after several countries closed their airspace due to ongoing hostilities involving Iran, Israel and the United States.
In a statement, KQ said it is working closely with relevant authorities to facilitate the safe return of passengers.
The airline has advised customers to check their flight status on its website and update their contact details through the “Manage Booking” option.
“We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused and appreciate your patience and understanding. The safety of our crew and customers remains our highest priority,” KQ said, adding that affected travellers will be contacted directly with further assistance.
