Category: Development

Rows of gleaming Porsches and Japanese sedans sit under guard in a warehouse at Lamu Port, their intended home — the glittering port of Jebel Ali in Dubai — now under the shadow of Iranian missile strikes and an effective naval blockade that has convulsed global shipping to its foundations.

The cars, more than 4,200 of them landed in two voyages within a week, are among the most vivid symbols of the extraordinary commercial earthquake rippling out of the US-Israel war on Iran and washing up, improbably, on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast.

Since February 28, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury — killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering a furious Iranian counter-offensive — the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply and enormous volumes of global cargo normally flow, has been effectively shut.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait closed, began attacking vessels attempting to transit, and sent insurance rates for the corridor soaring by up to four times in days. By mid-March, just two cargo vessels and a single tanker had openly transited the choke point eastbound. Before the war began, approximately 138 ships passed through every single day.

The consequences have been seismic. Jebel Ali, Dubai’s giant container port and the ninth busiest in the world, was struck by Iranian missiles on March 1, temporarily suspending operations. Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd, the four titans of global container shipping, all suspended passages through the strait. Shipping charter rates quadrupled. War-risk insurance premiums on Middle East-bound cargo surged. And hundreds of vessels, caught in a deadly no-man’s sea, anchored off the Gulf of Oman and waited. Some, with nowhere better to go, turned south.

They turned towards Kenya.

Lamu’s Moment of War

The MV Grande Auckland, a 9,000-capacity pure car carrier operated by Italy’s Grimaldi Lines, made its maiden call at Lamu Port on the first Tuesday of this month. It had left Europe with a full load of high-end European vehicles bound for Jebel Ali. Instead, it discharged 469 of those cars at Lamu’s Kililana terminal and continued to Mumbai with the rest. What followed was even more dramatic.

Last Wednesday, March 18, the MV Grande Florida Palermo, also operated by Grimaldi Lines, arrived from Yokohama, Japan, carrying 3,800 vehicles and assorted spare parts — all originally destined for Dubai. It made its maiden Lamu call and handed over the entire consignment to port warehouses. Another vessel is expected next week, this one carrying 5,000 motor vehicle units.

Munir Minas Hussein, Chartering and Business Development Manager for Africa at Nisomar Group, which serves as the official agent for Grimaldi Shipping Line in East Africa, told reporters that convincing vehicle owners to divert to Lamu made clear commercial sense.

The port’s proximity to the Middle East gives it a decisive advantage over rival East African alternatives. According to maritime data, Lamu sits approximately 3,300 to 3,600 kilometres from Dubai and about 3,400 kilometres from Jebel Ali, making it closer to the embattled Gulf than either Mombasa or Dar es Salaam, while also benefiting from direct Indian Ocean access that shortens sailing time and cuts fuel costs.

“As an agency, we managed to convince the vehicle owners to divert and bring the vessel to Lamu Port, which has substantial economic advantages compared to other countries and ports within the Indian Ocean,” Minas told journalists gathered for the MV Grande Florida Palermo’s reception.

Kenya Ports Authority Managing Director Captain William Ruto said Lamu’s deep-water stature was the technical factor clinching the decision for major shipping lines. The port boasts a depth of 17.5 metres and 400-metre quay lengths, capable of accommodating vessels of up to 12,000 twenty-foot equivalent units. Mombasa Port’s berths, by contrast, are 15 metres deep and 300 metres long, limiting it to smaller vessels. High-quality mobile harbour cranes, rubber-tyred gantry cranes, and modern terminal trailers add to the facility’s appeal for roll-on/roll-off operations — the specialised vessel type designed to carry wheeled cargo like vehicles and trucks.

The cars will remain at Lamu until shipping agents are satisfied the security situation in the Persian Gulf permits their safe onward movement.

Mombasa Strains as the World Reroutes

While Lamu basks in an unlikely windfall, its older sibling is feeling the strain. Mombasa Port, the economic engine of the Kenyan coast and the principal maritime gateway for East and Central Africa, is grappling with a surge in vessel traffic as global shipping lines scramble to reroute around the twin blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

Vessels that would ordinarily call at Jebel Ali or transit through the Suez Canal are now being redirected around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 10 to 14 days to transit times and over one million US dollars in additional costs per journey.

That longer routing is delivering more ships to East African shores than normal schedules would ever produce.

Shippers Council of Eastern Africa Chief Executive Agayo Ogambi confirmed the pressure bearing down on Mombasa. One shipping line alone increased its vessel calls to the port from eight to twenty following disruptions in other ports that produced congestion and longer waiting times. “This put pressure on Mombasa,” Ogambi said.

Kenya Ship Agents Association Chief Executive Elijah Mbaru was blunter about the fallout. He told journalists that the conflict had inflated charter fees from $100,000 to $400,000 per vessel, making exports prohibitively expensive and forcing cargo onto costly detours.

Emergency war-risk surcharges are being piled onto shipping costs and are expected to find their way to Kenyan consumers as higher prices on imported goods.

Cargo volumes handled through Mombasa reached a record 45.45 million metric tonnes in 2025, a near 11 percent jump on the prior year. The port’s infrastructure is now being tested to absorb a sudden and unplanned spike on top of that record base.

A War That Rewired the World’s Oceans

The magnitude of the disruption unleashed by the US-Israel strikes on Iran is difficult to overstate. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow corridor just 39 kilometres wide at its tightest point, carries approximately 20 million barrels of oil every day — about 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption. It is the only maritime exit from the Persian Gulf. When it closes, cargo does not simply slow down. It stops.

Iran’s IRGC has made good on its threats. By mid-March, Iranian forces had conducted at least 21 confirmed attacks on merchant ships in and around the strait. A large wave of coordinated strikes on March 11 damaged or sank multiple vessels. The Thai-flagged bulk carrier Mayuree Naree caught fire and 20 crew members were rescued by the Royal Navy of Oman. Oil tankers were struck by Iranian drone boats off the Port of Basra in Iraq. US military intelligence confirmed that Iran had begun planting naval mines in the strait’s navigation lanes, prompting the US military to destroy 16 Iranian minelayers in a single operation.

The Houthis in Yemen, seizing their moment, simultaneously reversed a ceasefire of several months and resumed attacks on Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Tehran, closing off the Suez Canal route at the same time the Persian Gulf route went dark.

For the first time in modern history, both of the two great maritime shortcuts connecting Asia to Europe and the Middle East were simultaneously blocked.

Cargo that once took 25 days from Asia to Europe now faces a 49-day journey around the Cape of Good Hope. The global container market absorbed an immediate shock: freight rates from Shanghai to Jebel Ali more than doubled within days. CMA CGM slapped a $3,000 emergency surcharge per container on Gulf-bound cargo.

Oil prices broke through $100 per barrel within days of the strikes, after opening the prior week below $72. The International Energy Agency launched what it described as the largest emergency reserve release in its history. At its peak, tanker traffic through the strait had fallen by 90 percent compared to pre-war volumes.

Kenya’s Bittersweet Bonanza

Lamu Port General Manager Abdulaziz Mzee gave voice to the moral complexity hanging over Kenya’s commercial windfall. “There are still ships with cargo that are destined for the Gulf, but since the situation there has deteriorated, those ships are more or less just wandering or drifting at sea,” he said. “It is not something to celebrate, because people there are suffering and facing difficulties, but at the same time it is a commercial blessing.”

The Kenya Ports Authority posted that Lamu was “geared up for a spike in vessel calls in the coming days.” The port recorded 74 vessels between January and March this year alone, roughly a third of the total ships it serviced in the entire period since it first opened in 2021. Last year, cargo throughput at Lamu exploded to 799,161 metric tonnes, up from just 74,380 metric tonnes in 2024, a performance already driven by the previous disruption of the Dar es Salaam port during post-election instability in Tanzania. The Iran war is adding a fresh and potentially far more powerful engine to that growth.

Shipping lines that have made maiden calls at Lamu have already signalled interest in returning on a long-term basis. The port is offering incentives for sustained commercial commitments. Captain William Ruto confirmed that KPA revenues from the current surge already run into “hundreds of millions of shillings.”

The strategic promise of the LAPSSET corridor, the $23 billion regional infrastructure plan linking Lamu to South Sudan and Ethiopia through ports, highways and pipelines, has for years outrun the commercial reality of a port struggling to attract business from major international lines.

Before the Iran war, Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, mainly routed its trade through Djibouti, and international shippers overwhelmingly preferred Mombasa for its road and rail connections to the Ugandan market. In a matter of days, a war thousands of kilometres away has delivered what years of government promotion could not.

But the ceiling of Lamu’s ambition remains constrained by unfinished infrastructure. Highways linking the port to South Sudan and Ethiopia remain incomplete, limiting how much cargo can be moved inland and dampening the port’s ability to serve as a full regional transit hub. Minas himself acknowledged the gap directly: “Once the hinterland infrastructure of East Africa is well built and lit, we will be able to discharge more vehicle cargo and other goods destined for Kenya and neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and South Sudan.”

The War That Has No End in Sight

US President Donald Trump has called for an international naval coalition to force the Strait of Hormuz open, naming China, France, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom as countries he hoped would dispatch warships.

The response has been tepid. Security analysts noted that most US allies opposed the war to begin with and have little appetite for a naval escort mission that would put their ships in the path of Iranian mines, drones and missiles. An Iranian commander declared on March 15 that Iran would continue to use the strait as a pressure point for as long as the war continued.

Iran has selectively permitted vessels from neutral countries to pass. Two Indian-flagged LPG tankers crossed safely on March 15 after negotiation with Tehran. A Pakistan-flagged tanker became the first confirmed non-Iranian cargo vessel to openly transit while broadcasting its location. China-linked vessels have largely been spared targeting, reflecting Beijing’s critical dependence on Gulf oil and its ongoing diplomatic leverage with Tehran.

For Kenya’s ports, that geopolitical arithmetic is straightforward. The longer the strait remains effectively closed, the longer ships will need somewhere to go. And for the foreseeable future, at least some of them will keep turning south.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NAIROBI, MARCH 2, 2026

In a development that cuts to the heart of Kenya’s troubled relationship with powerful foreign institutions, the National Assembly last week unanimously voted to strip the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) of the sweeping diplomatic immunities it had enjoyed for less than five months.

The decision, passed on February 24, 2026, came largely unannounced amid routine parliamentary business but carries consequences that reverberate far beyond the walls of the August House.

At its centre is a story of institutional capture, alleged donor fraud, and a foreign climate organisation that, facing ruin in Europe, found a powerful patron in Nairobi.

The GCA, a Netherlands-founded international non-governmental organisation established in 2018 and known for its iconic floating headquarters on Rotterdam’s Rijnhaven, bills itself as the world’s premier broker of climate adaptation solutions.

Its Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program, co-designed with the African Development Bank and endorsed by the African Union, claims to have channelled over $18 billion into climate resilience projects across 40 African countries, benefiting close to 60 million people. The organisation’s ambition has always been operatic in scale. So, it turns out, has been the controversy surrounding its methods.

A Scandal Born in Rotterdam

Before Kenya’s parliament voted to extend its arm of welcome, the GCA’s reputation was already in tatters in the country that created it.

In October 2025, Dutch public broadcaster NOS published a devastating investigation, the product of six months of work, more than 70 interviews, and hundreds of documents.

The conclusions were damning: the GCA had systematically exaggerated its contributions to major international projects, falsely claimed involvement in World Bank initiatives it had no part in, and pressured staff to inflate results in order to secure donor funding.

The GCA had told donors it created 900,000 jobs, mobilised €25 billion in investments, and improved the lives of 82.5 million Africans, all while operating on an annual budget of approximately €23 million.

Pieter Pauw, a climate finance expert at TU Eindhoven, described the figures as grotesquely inflated and without precedent in the sector. Among the most egregious findings was the GCA’s claim to have participated in a $100 million World Bank soil erosion project in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

World Bank officials, confronted by NOS investigators on two separate occasions, stated categorically that the GCA had played no role in that project. More than 20 former employees corroborated the picture of an organisation where, under the direct pressure of CEO Patrick Verkooijen, staff were regularly encouraged to embellish outputs to attract funding.

An internal advisory note from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of GCA’s largest private donors, obtained by NOS, described the organisation as difficult to work with and prone to claiming credit for projects it had not initiated or materially supported.

The Gates Foundation is understood to be reconsidering its position. Norway temporarily froze its contributions to demand greater transparency. Denmark wrote that it found it difficult to estimate what could be attributed to the GCA’s work. The United Kingdom withdrew its support entirely, and the Dutch government, which had funded the centre since its inception, announced it would pull the plug on financing after 2025, citing a combination of budget constraints and governance concerns.

Faced with the evaporation of nearly half its funding, Verkooijen publicly announced the GCA would abandon its Rotterdam base and relocate to Nairobi if Dutch support ceased. The announcement turned out to be less a threat than a blueprint already in execution.

Nairobi Opens Its Arms

The GCA’s pivot to Kenya did not happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of a relationship between Verkooijen and President William Ruto that critics have described, with mounting alarm, as one of the most troubling entanglements between a foreign NGO and a sitting African head of state in recent memory.

The sequence of events is worth setting out in full, because taken individually each step carries its own explanation; taken together they form a pattern that Kenya’s parliamentarians ultimately found impossible to ignore.

In December 2023, the GCA awarded a research contract worth €1.2 million to the University of Nairobi for climate adaptation projects.

In January 2024, weeks after that funding was formalised, President Ruto personally appointed Verkooijen as Chancellor of the University of Nairobi, making the Dutch executive the first foreign national to hold the chancellorship of a major Kenyan public university. Verkooijen assumed the role in February 2024.

The circularity was immediately apparent: the head of an organisation that had just paid Kenya’s foremost public university was now simultaneously the head of that same university. No independent audit of the contract’s deliverables has been made public.

In July 2025, President Ruto presided over the groundbreaking of a Sh1.7 billion GCA headquarters at the Kenya School of Government in Kabete, Nairobi, a facility that was to serve as the organisation’s African anchor and, in a detail that would later fuel parliamentary concern, would also house Mazingira House, the headquarters of Kenya’s Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry.

Critics noted the arresting logic of the arrangement: the government ministry mandated to oversee environmental policy and partnerships with organisations like the GCA would now operate from within the GCA’s own premises. The ministry cannot investigate, audit, or sue a landlord that enjoys diplomatic immunity.

On April 20, 2025, the Prime Cabinet Secretary signed Legal Notice No. 82, granting the GCA and its internationally recruited staff a comprehensive suite of privileges under Kenya’s Privileges and Immunities Act (Cap 179).

These included full immunity from lawsuits and legal process, inviolability of the organisation’s offices and archives, exemption from income tax on staff salaries, freedom from immigration restrictions for officers and their families, and exemption from customs duties on goods imported for official use.

On September 30, 2025, Parliament ratified the agreement, following stakeholder hearings and public participation conducted, critics noted, in a process that gave interested parties little more than two weeks to respond, and a committee report that offered scant analysis of the potential risks to Kenyan citizens.

The Parliamentary Revolt

The ratification was not the end of the story. Over the months that followed, public fury intensified, driven by investigative journalism, civil society activism, and the emerging contours of the European scandal.

The question that rang loudest across Kenyan social media and in the opinion pages was deceptively simple: why does an organisation dealing with our land and resources need protection from Kenyan laws? The activist Lynn Ngugi, whose posts on the subject attracted thousands of engagements, put it with characteristic directness, asking how a regulator could be a tenant of the entity it was supposed to oversee.

Comparisons to an earlier controversy proved irresistible. In 2024, the Kenyan government had extended similar diplomatic-style immunities to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, only to suspend the arrangement after a public and legal backlash.

The GCA case seemed to many observers like a repetition of the same dynamic: a foreign organisation with powerful connections to the executive securing protections that ordinary Kenyans and Kenyan organisations could never enjoy.

Parliamentary critics were particularly exercised by a report from the Departmental Committee on Environment, Forestry, and Mining, which had flagged the GCA’s pronounced proximity to the executive branch.

The appointment of Verkooijen as university chancellor, the financial relationship with the University of Nairobi, the co-location of the Ministry of Environment within GCA’s new premises: each was cited as evidence of blurred institutional boundaries and potential conflicts of interest that the immunity arrangement would place permanently beyond legal remedy. The National Assembly’s unanimous vote on February 24 to annul Legal Notice No. 82 was, by any measure, a remarkable rebuke of both the executive and the foreign organisation it had championed.

Sall at State House

The timing of the parliamentary vote lent the episode an almost theatrical quality. On the same day the National Assembly stripped the GCA of its privileges, former Senegalese President Macky Sall, who chairs the GCA’s Supervisory Board, was received at State House Nairobi for discussions with President Ruto on Kenya’s climate agenda, including resilient agriculture, clean energy infrastructure, and the next phase of the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program.

Sall posted on social media afterwards, welcoming what he described as the extraordinary leadership of President Ruto on adaptation for Africa. Whether Sall was informed of the vote taking place in parliament while he sat with the president is not known. Neither the presidency nor the GCA responded to requests for comment.

Sall is himself a figure of some complexity in this story.

A former two-term president of Senegal who stepped down in 2024 amid domestic controversy, he chairs a supervisory board whose membership reads like a roll call of global influence: the president of Kenya, the prime minister of Barbados, the president of Tanzania, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the chair of the African Union Commission, and a representative of the Gates Foundation, among others. Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon serves as honorary chair. The organisation that Kenya’s parliament has now stripped of immunity is, by any measure, deeply embedded in the architecture of global power.

The Government Defends Itself

Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Dr Korir Sing’oei has consistently defended the process that led to the GCA’s host country status.

In statements issued in October 2025 following the initial public backlash, Sing’oei emphasised that the privileges granted to the GCA were not extraordinary, that more than 170 non-state entities, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and the World Wide Fund for Nature, had received comparable status in Kenya since 1984. He rejected allegations that the arrangement was driven by external political pressure or personal relationships, insisting that the Host Country Agreement followed all legal requirements under the Privileges and Immunities Act and served Kenya’s strategic interest in positioning Nairobi as a continental hub for international institutions.

The GCA, for its part, has strongly denied the findings of the NOS investigation. In a statement, the organisation said the suggestion that it exaggerates results or misleads donors was false and unfounded, noting that its methodology was independently evaluated, including by the Boston Consulting Group. Verkooijen himself dismissed the NOS figures as utter nonsense.

The GCA also warned, in an earlier communication to journalists in Kenya covering the story, that it would pursue legal action against reports it considered defamatory.

What Comes Next

The annulment of Legal Notice No. 82 does not, in itself, shut the GCA’s Nairobi operation. The organisation’s multi-billion-shilling headquarters continues under construction at the Kenya School of Government, and its Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program, for all the governance questions swirling around it, retains the backing of the African Development Bank and has attracted fresh commitments from donors including France as recently as February 2026. The GCA’s AAAP 2.0 phase, which is intended to run from 2026 to 2030, is already in preparation.

But the loss of diplomatic immunity is more than symbolic. It means the GCA’s Nairobi office is now subject to the same legal framework as any other organisation operating in Kenya. Its premises can be entered, its archives can be subpoenaed, its staff can be sued, and its financial arrangements with Kenyan public institutions, including the University of Nairobi, can be subjected to the scrutiny that immunity had, until last week, placed beyond reach.

For Kenya, the episode raises questions that will outlast any single parliamentary vote. The country has built its international identity, in no small part under President Ruto, around its role as a climate leader and a welcoming hub for the global institutions that shape the agenda on adaptation and resilience. That identity carries real value. It has brought investment, international attention, and a seat at tables where decisions affecting Africa’s future are made. The question that Kenya’s parliament has now forced into the open is whether that identity can be sustained without clearer rules about which organisations qualify for which privileges, and what accountability looks like when things go wrong.

Kenya’s lawmakers have, for once, provided an answer. Whether the executive branch takes heed of it is another matter entirely.