NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 23 — Family members denied detectives investigating the disappearance of former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju access to his residence, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said Suunday night, as efforts to trace his whereabouts continue.
In a statement, the DCI said Tuju was reported missing by his family on Sunday at Karen Police Station after his vehicle was discovered abandoned in Nairobi’s Karen suburb.
Police said the car was found along Miotoni Lane with its hazard lights on after a security guard from a nearby institution alerted authorities.
Officers from Karen Police Station responded to the scene, and crime scene investigators later processed the area before towing the vehicle to the station for forensic examination.
However, the DCI said investigators attempting to access Tuju’s residence along Mwitu Drive were denied entry by family members.
“While progress is being made, the DCI notes that an attempt by investigators to access Mr Tuju’s residence along Mwitu Drive was denied by the family,” the agency said.
“We urge full cooperation from all parties, including unrestricted access to relevant locations and prompt provision of information, for a swift and thorough resolution.”
The DCI added that a specialised investigative team has been deployed and is working with other government agencies to trace Tuju.
Appeal for information
Authorities also appealed to members of the public with information about his whereabouts—or who may have witnessed suspicious activity in the Miotoni Lane area before, on or after March 21—to come forward.
Earlier Sunday, Siaya Governor James Orengo said Tuju had gone missing under unclear circumstances following the discovery of his abandoned vehicle in Karen.
Speaking during a church service in Narok, Orengo suggested the former minister may have been kidnapped and urged Kenyans to pray for him.
Lawyer and legislator Otiende Amollo said Tuju’s legal team was working to establish his whereabouts while pressing authorities for answers.
Tuju’s reported disappearance comes amid a prolonged legal dispute over the ownership and planned auction of Dari Business Park in Karen.
On March 18, the Commercial Court declined to grant temporary orders sought by Tuju to block the auction of the property and related assets.
Justice Moses Ado ruled that the application could not be granted without allowing the respondents to be heard and directed that the matter be heard on a priority basis.
The dispute involves lenders seeking to recover debts totaling more than $15 million linked to properties owned by Tuju’s company, Dari Limited.
Authorities have not commented on Tuju’s earlier claims that powerful government figures were pressuring him to vacate the Karen property after he declined an offer to sell it.
It began as another Nairobi road-rage clip. A dashcam video, thirty-three seconds long, filmed along a tree-lined Nairobi thoroughfare on Monday, March 17, and uploaded to X by motor assessor Wangai Mwaniki. The grey 2023 Range Rover Vogue in the clip, registration KDT 579P, cuts aggressively through gridlocked lanes, its dashboard blazing red and blue emergency lights, forcing matatus, sedans, trucks and boda-boda riders to scramble out of its path.
Overlaid text reads: “In Kenya when you have money traffic rules don’t exist.” Within hours, 290,000 views. By the time Nairobi woke up Tuesday morning, the clip had become something far more consequential than a viral rant.
The vehicle’s registered owner, confirmed through official National Transport and Safety Authority records circulated in the thread by a follow-up user, is Ahmed Hussein Ayoub Ali Dinar, the Sultan of the Fur tribe, Sudan’s largest ethnic community and the people over whom the Darfur conflict has been most catastrophically waged.
And in January 2024, that same Sultan sat across a table in a Nairobi hotel from Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known universally as Hemedti, the commander of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary militia that the United States government formally designated a perpetrator of genocide in January 2025.
The screenshot of that meeting, posted in the replies beneath the traffic video by user Shoba Gatimu with the caption “The plot thickens”, detonated a second wave of outrage. Nairobi was no longer discussing dangerous driving. It was discussing who, exactly, was behind the wheel and why he appeared to be moving through its streets entirely untouchable.
A NAME WEIGHTED WITH HISTORY
The name Ali Dinar is not merely a family surname in Sudan. It carries the freight of an entire civilisational epoch.
The original Sultan Ali Dinar ruled the independent Darfur Sultanate from 1898 until 1916, when British colonial forces killed him and annexed Darfur into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, ending more than two centuries of Keira dynasty sovereignty over a territory the size of France.
He is remembered across Darfur as a symbol of resistance, a man who proclaimed jihad against British occupation and whose capital, El Fasher, was a seat of Islamic scholarship, trade and culture connecting central Sudan to the whole of northern Africa.
It is precisely that symbolic weight that makes the modern Sultan’s political choices so contested. Ahmed Hussein Ayoub Ali Dinar was elected in June 2015 by the Fur tribe’s Shura and Notables’ councils as Sultan for the entire Fur people, renewing his family’s ceremonial claim to the seat his great-grandfather died defending.
He has presented himself publicly as a mediator, a voice for peace in Sudan’s devastating civil war, and a traditional leader committed to dialogue between all parties. Kenyan President William Ruto received him at State House, publicly engaging with him as the leader of the Fur in Darfur, alongside Sudan Liberation Movement figures.
Yet the RSF, the militia now fighting to dismember the Sudanese state and which the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission has documented committing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Darfur’s non-Arab communities, including the Fur, has invested heavily in the Sultan’s legitimacy. And by all available evidence, that investment appears mutual.
THE HEMEDTI MEETING IN NAIROBI
In January 2024, Hemedti arrived in Nairobi on what analysts described as a tour designed to legitimise the RSF as a governing force.
He met President Ruto at the Kenyan State House, receiving what multiple media accounts described as an elaborately warm reception, complete with traditional dancers and a full presidential pavilion welcome at JKIA that observers noted was notably more extravagant than that afforded to Sudanese Armed Forces Commander General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Khartoum recalled its ambassador in protest.
Hemedti also met Ahmed Ali Dinar in Nairobi. The RSF commander posted about the encounter on X, saying he appreciated what he described as the Sultan’s neutral stance in rejecting the war and devoting himself to supporting Darfurian communities.
Both men, according to the Sudan Times, pledged to coordinate efforts to alleviate suffering and achieve what they called sustainable peace and security.
To critics and to many Sudanese from Darfur, that characterisation of neutrality was grotesque. The RSF and its allied Arab militias were by that point already implicated in the massacre of up to 15,000 people in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, a slaughter the UN Panel of Experts documented in a January 2024 report.
The RSF’s predecessor formations, the Janjaweed, had been responsible for the ethnic killing, mass rape, and displacement of some 2.7 million people and the deaths of up to 300,000 in the original Darfur conflict beginning in 2003. A militia meeting with the paramount traditional leader of the Fur people and framing it as a peace gesture was, to Sudanese human rights organisations, a provocation dressed as diplomacy.
DARFUR’S WOUND THAT NEVER HEALED
To understand the stakes of any alignment between the modern Sultan and the RSF requires understanding Darfur’s history not as a series of events but as a continuous, unresolved trauma. When rebels from Darfur’s non-Arab communities launched an uprising against Khartoum in 2003, accusing the Arab-dominated government of systematic discrimination, then-President Omar al-Bashir responded by deploying the Arab tribal militias known as the Janjaweed.
The United States designated the resulting campaign as genocide in 2004. The UN Security Council referred the situation to the International Criminal Court in 2005, the first such referral in ICC history and the first involving allegations of the crime of genocide.
Al-Bashir formally reconstituted the Janjaweed into the RSF in 2013, giving the militia institutional form and placing it under Hemedti’s command.
Between 2013 and 2023, the RSF evolved from a counterinsurgency instrument into an autonomous economic and military power, controlling gold mines, border trade networks and a private army. When the RSF broke from the Sudanese Armed Forces in April 2023, the war that erupted was devastating in its speed and its savagery.
The RSF seized most of Khartoum and swept through Darfur. By late 2024 and into 2025, the RSF had laid siege to El Fasher, the last SAF stronghold in Darfur and the ancestral capital of the Darfur Sultanate that the historical Ali Dinar died defending, holding 1.5 million people under conditions the ICC’s deputy prosecutor described to the UN Security Council as a campaign of widespread mass criminality and collective torture.
The RSF, during this siege, also destroyed the Sultan Ali Dinar Palace in El Fasher in January 2025, a site African human rights organisations called a deliberate act of cultural erasure, an attempt to wipe out the symbols that give Darfur’s communities their collective identity. The same militia had been meeting with the historical sultan’s modern claimant in Nairobi hotel rooms.
In January 2025, the outgoing Biden administration formally declared that the RSF and allied militias had committed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, a determination that led to direct sanctions on Hemedti and several RSF-linked companies.
The European Union and United Kingdom followed with their own designations and sanctions on RSF commanders. The ICC’s deputy prosecutor signalled in early 2025 that arrest warrants for crimes committed since April 2023 in West Darfur were imminent.
KENYA AS RSF’S CONTINENTAL BASE
The Sultan’s comfortable presence in Nairobi, Range Rover and emergency lights included, does not exist in a vacuum. Kenya has become, whether by deliberate policy or geopolitical convenience, the RSF’s most important continental staging ground. President Ruto’s administration has extended to the RSF a degree of access and hospitality that has placed Kenya in direct diplomatic confrontation with Khartoum and drawn formal censure from rights organisations, civil society coalitions and, ultimately, the United States Senate.
In February 2025, RSF leadership and allied armed movements gathered at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi and signed a political charter creating what they called the Government of Peace and Unity, a parallel administration for RSF-controlled territories in Sudan.
The Kenyan government, through Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi, admitted providing the RSF with the platform and defended it as an exercise in Kenya’s long tradition of conflict mediation.
Sudan declared it an act of hostility, recalled its ambassador and imposed a ban on Kenyan imports. Human rights organisations, including the International Commission of Jurists Kenya chapter and the Kenya Human Rights Commission, issued a joint statement describing Kenya as complicit in mass atrocities.
They noted the RSF killed more than 433 civilians, including women and children, in an assault in Southern White Nile State during the very days its leadership was gathered in Nairobi.
The Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, in a November 2025 report, documented Kenyan-registered aircraft landing in RSF-controlled Nyala and offloading supplies, and separately transporting wounded RSF fighters.
Bellingcat published an investigation in June 2025 revealing Kenyan military ammunition crates in an RSF depot near Khartoum. The Kenyan government denied arms supply to the RSF. In August 2025, the United States Senate opened a review of Kenya’s major non-NATO ally status, conferred in 2024, in part over the Kenya-RSF question.
In late 2023, Ruto had flown to Juba on the presidential jet alongside RSF Deputy Commander Abdulrahim Dagalo, Hemedti’s brother, who carries US sanctions for allegedly fuelling Sudan’s civil war.
Analysts and critics noted that the RSF had essentially treated Nairobi as a de facto capital for its international diplomacy, its political charter-signing ceremonies and, apparently, the residential arrangements of at least one prominent ally.
ILLEGAL LIGHTS AND A LEGAL FRAMEWORK THAT APPLIES TO EVERYONE ELSE
Under Section 34 of Kenya’s Traffic Act Cap 403 and Rule 83 of the Traffic Rules, red and blue flashing emergency lights and sirens are restricted to police vehicles, fire engines and ambulances. The Order of Precedence Act of 2014 extends the privilege of sirens to the President, Deputy President, Speakers of Parliament and the Chief Justice.
The law is explicit that no private vehicle may be fitted with flashing lights, LED light bars or strobe systems of any kind without NTSA authorisation, which is not granted to private citizens or foreign nationals living in Nairobi.
The NTSA issued a circular to all Regional Police Commanders as recently as May 2024 directing law enforcement to take legal action against any unauthorised use of strobe lights, light bars, sirens or lead-and-chase vehicles, citing complaints about harassment on Nairobi roads and highways by unauthorized persons.
Section 58 of the Traffic Act makes the offence punishable by a fine of up to Sh400,000, imprisonment of up to two years, or both.
The Range Rover Vogue in the video, registered to the Sultan in April 2025 according to NTSA records circulating in the viral thread, appears fitted with exactly the kind of emergency lighting the law prohibits for private vehicles. The vehicle’s Kenyan registration raises its own questions. The Sultan is Sudanese.
He is resident in Nairobi. His vehicle carries a 2025 registration. Whether he travels on a diplomatic passport, holds a residency permit or relies on some other protected status that Kenya’s authorities have extended to him remains, as of publication, a question that neither the NTSA, the Kenya Police nor the relevant ministries have addressed.
As of Thursday morning, the NTSA had issued no public statement on the incident. The Sultan’s office had not responded to requests for comment.
‘NTSA HAIWEZI GUZA YEYE’
Mwaniki’s original post tagged the NTSA with a knowing laugh: “@ntsa_kenya huyu arudi driving school pia?” Should this one go back to driving school too? The replies swelled with a mixture of outrage, dark humour and the particular resigned fatalism of Nairobi motorists who have watched high-powered vehicles move through the city as though the law existed for everyone else. “NTSA haiwezi guza yeye,” wrote one commenter. NTSA cannot touch him. “He is not even Kenyan!” wrote another. “Unless that fool is a police officer responding to an emergency, he has no right of way!!” a third commenter added.
What distinguishes this episode from the regular catalogue of Nairobi road impunity complaints is not merely the identity of the registered owner. It is what that identity represents in the context of Kenya’s increasingly fraught entanglement with Sudan’s civil war.
A man publicly photographed alongside the commander of a militia designated a perpetrator of genocide, whose formal traditional role as Sultan of the Fur people makes his RSF alignment all the more symbolically charged, appears to be moving through Nairobi roads with what the video depicts as the confidence of someone who knows no traffic officer will flag him down.
Kenya’s roads are among the most dangerous in Africa. The NTSA records thousands of road fatalities annually, with reckless driving, impunity and corruption at traffic enforcement level repeatedly identified as systemic causes. Each incident like this one feeds a public narrative that Kenyan road law is, in practice, a tiered system: merciless toward matatu drivers and boda-boda operators, invisible when the vehicle is expensive enough, the plates are the right kind, or the owner is connected to the people who make the rules.
QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED
Several questions arising from this incident demand formal answers, and Kenya Insights has submitted enquiries to the NTSA, the Directorate of Immigration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Under what immigration and residency status does Sultan Ahmed Ali Dinar reside in Kenya? Has he or any entity on his behalf applied for and received any form of diplomatic status in Kenya? Who authorised, if anyone, the installation of emergency-grade flashing lights on the vehicle registered to him? Has Kenya’s government, in extending hospitality to RSF-linked figures including the Sultan, conducted any due diligence on the implications given the US genocide designation against the RSF?
The broader question, which the Sudanese diaspora community in Nairobi and human rights organisations have been raising with increasing urgency since the February 2025 RSF parallel government ceremony at KICC, is whether Kenya’s political relationship with Hemedti and his allied civilian and traditional leaders has extended into a permissive environment in which those figures operate in Nairobi with privileges that Kenyan law does not formally recognise and that Kenyan institutions appear unwilling to examine.
The irony that the RSF, which in January 2025 dynamited the palace of the Sultan Ali Dinar in El Fasher, the very monument to the Fur people’s sovereignty and cultural identity that the historical sultan built and died defending, should simultaneously be cultivating his modern successor in Nairobi hotel rooms and Nairobi streets will not be lost on those Sudanese who have lived through the war.
The RSF erased the old sultan from the landscape of Darfur. In Nairobi, his descendant drives with emergency lights, and no one seems willing to ask who gave him permission.
Seven suspects linked to an alleged multi-million dollar fraud scheme involving a fake government contract have been arraigned before a Nairobi court and charged with multiple offences.
The 7 accused include Michafi Musyoki Ngumbi, Evans Simotwo, Geofrey Were Odondi, Allan Mutahi Kariuki, Purity Nieri Niamu, Muniaro Jared Masinde and Kororia Simatwa —appeared before Milimani Chief Magistrate Teresa Nyangena, where they denied all the charges.
However, their co-accused, Rose Mbuthia, failed to appear in court, prompting the magistrate to issue summons requiring her to appear before the court.
According to court documents, the eight are accused of conspiring to defraud a foreign national, Talal Yousef Yousef Zaitoun, of USD 470,750 (approximately KSh 60 million).
The prosecution alleges that between January 10 and February 25, 2026, the group falsely claimed they were in a position to secure a Kenyan government tender for the supply and delivery of 500 high-roof diesel Toyota Hiace ambulances.
The court heard that the suspects allegedly misrepresented themselves as capable of facilitating the contract purportedly from the Ministry of Interior and National Administration — claims investigators say were false.
In a separate charge co-accused Geofrey Were Odondi faces charges of obtaining money by false pretences, with prosecutors stating that he received the funds through Lianyungang Chanta International Wood Company Limited under the guise of facilitating the non-existent deal.
Odondi is also charged with acquisition of proceeds of crime after allegedly receiving USD 450,750 through an Equity Bank account registered under Damira Multiactivities, knowing or having reason to believe the funds were proceeds of crime.
Additionally, Michafi Musyoki Ngumbi faces two counts of forgery. He is accused of forging a contract agreement purportedly between the Ministry of Interior and a foreign firm, Jokara AB, for the ambulance supply, as well as a letter of notification of award to make the deal appear legitimate.
All the accused present in court denied the charges.
Magistrate Nyangena released each of the seven accused persons on a cash bail of Sh300,000 and directed that Rose Mbuthia appear before court as summoned. The case will be mentioned on a later date.
NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 16 – Kenyan companies have recently attracted growing interest from Tanzanian billionaires, with several high-profile acquisitions raising questions about why investors from the neighbouring country are increasingly targeting local firms.
In 2024, Tanzanian businessman Edha Nahdi, the Managing Director of Amsons Group, acquired Bamburi Cement in a deal that strengthened the group’s presence in Kenya’s construction sector.
Following the takeover, Bamburi reported a double-digit increase in EBITDA, supported by group-level efficiencies. Through Bamburi, Amsons has also begun construction of a 5,000 tonnes-per-day clinker facility—equivalent to about 1.6 million tonnes annually—in Kwale County. The project is expected to create more than 1,000 direct jobs.
Nahdi has also expanded his presence in the Kenyan cement industry through Kalahari Cement Ltd, which last year acquired an additional 27 percent stake in East African Portland Cement Company from the National Social Security Fund. The transaction increased his stake in the company to 69 percent.
In another major development last week, Tanzanian billionaire Rostam Azizi acquired control of Nation Media Group from the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development.
Under the deal, AKFED sold its entire shareholding in NPRT Holdings Africa Limited—the entity that holds a 54.08 percent controlling stake in Nation Media Group—to Taarifa Ltd.
The transaction gave Azizi majority ownership of Nation Media Group through the acquisition of 92,618,177 ordinary shares. However, the company’s shares will continue trading on the Nairobi Securities Exchange and other cross-listed platforms.
Brookhurst International Schools delivered an outstanding performance at the World Scholars Cup Nairobi Light Round held on February 22, securing its fifth championship title and further cementing its reputation as a leading academic institution in global competitions.
The school emerged as one of the top performers in the prestigious competition, which brings together students from different countries to compete in debate, collaborative writing, and quiz-based challenges focused on global issues. Brookhurst scholars collectively won 33 trophies along with numerous gold and silver medals across the junior and senior divisions.
From the Kiserian campus, Brookhurst secured second place in the junior division and first place in the senior division. The Lavington campus also delivered impressive results, emerging first in the Senior Scholar’s Bowl, fourth overall in the senior division, and placing among the top ten in the junior division.
The victory marks a remarkable milestone for the school, which has maintained the top position in the senior division for five consecutive years since 2021. The scholars excelled across all competition categories including debate, collaborative writing, the Scholar’s Challenge, and the Scholar’s Bowl.
Among the standout performers were Darvin Nato, a Year 7 student, and Denzyl Siele, a Year 10 student from the Kiserian campus, who were ranked among the top scholars in their respective divisions. Their efforts played a key role in helping their teams secure second place in the junior division and first place in the senior division.
Denzyl described the experience as unforgettable.
“Representing Brookhurst was an amazing experience. I have participated in World Scholars before, but nothing quite compared to seeing my name ranked among the top scholars and realizing that our team, Team 630, had won the Nairobi Round 2026. Preparing for the competition wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. I’m grateful for the support from my parents and teachers and look forward to the Global Round in Malaysia and later the Tournament of Champions at Yale,” he said.
Darvin, who was among the top performers in the junior division, highlighted the importance of teamwork and determination.
“At Brookhurst International Schools we are always encouraged to aim high. This experience showed me that teamwork, confidence and hard work can take you far. Next time we’re aiming even higher as we prepare for the next round in Malaysia,” he said.
Teachers at the school also expressed pride in the scholars’ achievements.
Mildred Wambui, a teacher from the Lavington campus, said the victory was a moment of great pride after months of preparation.
“Hearing our school announced among the top winners after months of training and sacrifice was truly unforgettable. The extra training sessions, debate practice and writing challenges really paid off. Our slogan was teamwork, and that spirit clearly reflected in our results,” she said.
She added that the school is already preparing for the Global Round with even greater focus and determination.
Sandra Soti, a Year 10 student from the Lavington campus, also celebrated her team’s performance after finishing among the top ten overall.
“This was my second time participating in World Scholars. Last year I learned the game, and this year I was ready to play it. I’m excited to see what we can achieve next at the global stage in Malaysia,” she said.
The teams from Brookhurst have now qualified for the World Scholars Cup Global Round to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in June. Successful participants will then advance to the prestigious Tournament of Champions at Yale University in the United States later in the year.
Brookhurst International Schools have consistently performed strongly in global competitions. In 2025, one of its scholars, Hope Wanjiku, advanced to the Tournament of Champions at Yale University where she competed with top students from around the world and ranked among the top thirty gold medalists globally.
Haju Yun, a Year 9 student from the Lavington campus, encouraged more students to participate in future competitions.
“World Scholars Cup is a great opportunity to meet new people, learn new ideas and build confidence. It opens doors to global experiences,” she said.
Dennis Nyaoro, a teacher at the Kiserian campus, emphasized that the competition provides students with opportunities beyond the traditional curriculum.
“World Scholars Cup allows learners to explore global issues through debate, writing and teamwork. It helps students develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills while interacting with peers from around the world,” he said.
With another impressive performance at the Nairobi Round, Brookhurst International Schools continue to strengthen their reputation as a centre of academic excellence and global competitiveness.
According to the Daily Nation, two politicians were overheard at a restaurant in Nairobi’s upscale Kilimani district discussing in hushed tones their desperate hope that properties they own in Dubai would escape the barrage of rockets and drones now pounding the Gulf region .
The panic follows escalating Middle East tensions after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Tehran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of Revolutionary Guard commanders . Iran retaliated fiercely, launching ballistic missiles across the region, including into the UAE, where drone debris triggered a massive fire at the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone.
Saboti MP Caleb Amisi has thrown gasoline on the fire, publicly alleging that President William Ruto’s swift condemnation of Iran wasn’t motivated by diplomatic principle:: but by personal financial exposure.
Amisi claimed that Kenyan leaders have “channeled billions of shillings into real estate” in Dubai, the UAE, Cyprus, and South Africa using “stolen public funds” . In a blistering attack on X, the MP suggested Ruto’s panic was driven by fear that his own Dubai assets could go up in smoke.
“This is why they panic,” Amisi wrote, accusing the political class of caring more about their foreign luxury portfolios than the Kenyan voters they plundered.
Dubai has long been a favorite offshore haven for Kenya’s wealthy elite, offering stability, anonymity, and glittering returns on real estate investment . But the recent Iranian strikes have shattered that illusion of safety.
Housing TV Africa reports that the attacks have sent jitters through foreign investors with Gulf assets, as airports, oil facilities, and critical infrastructure now find themselves in the crosshairs of a widening regional war .
While UAE authorities insist operations have largely resumed and air defenses intercepted most threats, the psychological damage is done: Kenyan politicians who once toasted their ill-gotten gains in Dubai’s champagne bars are now watching the news with white knuckles.
The Daily Nation also reports that one unnamed presidential hopeful has quietly relocated his family abroad even as he campaigns to lead Kenya: triggering murmurs among allies who now label him a “perpetual frequent flier” with “one foot firmly planted at home and the other already outside the country” .
Supporters fear they’re backing a “flight risk” who would abandon them at the first sign of trouble .
As Iranian missiles light up Middle East skies, they’ve also illuminated a uncomfortable truth about Kenya’s political class: while preaching service at home, many have stashed fortunes in the very war zones now under fire. And as their Dubai dream burns, Kenyans are left asking one question: whose money built those mansions in the first place?
A Nairobi woman has lost Sh540,000 she paid into Britam Holdings’ Akiba Savings Plan after her policy lapsed when a sudden job loss left her unable to keep up with monthly premiums of Sh90,000, according to a video she posted on social media.
In the six-minute clip, the woman says a friend who had invested in the same product convinced her it was a safe, long-term savings vehicle for her children’s future, with life cover attached.
When she lost her job and could no longer make payments, her agent told her she would have to clear the arrears in full before the policy could be reinstated.
When she escalated the matter to Britam’s customer care desk, she was told her entire Sh540,000 had been forfeited. “Where did it go? This was supposed to be an investment that makes profit,” she says in the recording.
Britam Holdings Plc, listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, is Kenya’s largest life insurer by market share, holding a 25 per cent share of the life insurance market for the eighteenth consecutive year as at December 2024.
The group posted a pre-tax profit of Sh7.33 billion in the year ended December 31 2024, a 52 per cent increase from Sh4.82 billion the year before, on total assets of Sh208.5 billion.
The Akiba plan is an endowment product that combines a savings element with life cover. Britam markets it as a “risk-free” instrument that pays a guaranteed lump sum at maturity, with policy terms of between five and twelve years and a minimum monthly premium of Sh5,000.
According to the product’s terms, a surrender benefit is available only from the end of the twenty-fifth policy month. A policy that lapses before that point carries no cash surrender value, meaning premiums already paid are absorbed into the insurer’s reserves to cover administrative charges, agent commissions and mortality costs.
The distinction matters because endowment products are routinely sold by agents to customers who may not fully understand that the product is a long-term contractual commitment, not a liquid savings account.
Industry practitioners say the consequences of a lapse before the two-year threshold are rarely explained in plain language at the point of sale.
A STRUCTURAL MISMATCH
The viral case sits against a difficult economic backdrop. Formal employment accounts for only 15 per cent of Kenya’s total workforce of 20.8 million, with the informal sector employing an estimated 17.4 million people, according to KNBS data from the 2025 Economic Survey.
Real wages in the private sector declined in inflation-adjusted terms for the fifth consecutive year in 2024, with real average annual earnings falling to Sh689,300 against Sh694,000 the year before.
For workers in the formal sector, income shocks such as sudden retrenchment are not covered by endowment policies, which protect only against death during the policy term.
Premium waiver on disability is a separate optional rider, and unemployment is not covered under standard terms.
Consumer advocacy groups have for years argued that endowment products sold to lower-to-middle income earners carry a structural mismatch: the payment discipline they demand is inconsistent with the income volatility that characterises much of Kenya’s workforce.
Comments under the viral video reflect similar experiences. Several users said they had also been unable to access any refund after defaulting on Britam Akiba policies, with one noting that even an attempt to surrender the policy mid-term would result in the loss of most premiums paid to date.
Another said Britam’s statements showed unexplained deductions that had not been adequately explained by the insurer.
WHAT THE POLICY ACTUALLY PROVIDES
The Akiba plan’s maturity benefit is the sum assured, paid as a lump sum at the end of the term. In the event of the policyholder’s death before maturity, a waiver of premium provision keeps the policy in force and guarantees payment of the maturity benefit. An optional lump sum death rider can be added, up to a maximum equal to the sum assured on the main benefit. Policy loans are available from the twenty-fifth month. Tax relief on premiums of up to Sh60,000 annually is available under the Income Tax Act.
The plan does not cover retrenchment, salary cuts, or any other income disruption short of death or disability.
The product literature does not include an illustration of what a policyholder would recover if they were forced to exit before completing twenty-five months of payments, a scenario that for many savers on volatile incomes is a realistic risk.
The Insurance Regulatory Authority, which supervises all licensed underwriters under the Insurance Act Cap 487, has a statutory consumer disputes mechanism under Section 204A of the Act. Aggrieved policyholders can lodge a written complaint with the Commissioner of Insurance, whose determination is subject to appeal to the Insurance Tribunal within thirty days. In recent years the IRA has issued fines to several insurers for failure to honour claims, but has not published any specific directive on endowment lapse disclosure standards.
BRITAM DECLINES TO COMMENT
Kenya Insights sent written queries to Britam’s head of communications and to the group’s corporate affairs department seeking comment on the specific complaint, the company’s reinstatement policy for lapsed Akiba policies, and whether the group was reviewing how lapse consequences are disclosed at point of sale. No response was received before publication time.
The IRA was similarly contacted for comment on whether existing regulations require insurers to provide a surrender value projection at point of sale for endowment products. No response was received.
Financial sector practitioners say the complaint is unlikely to be isolated. Because Britam has more than 2,500 financial advisors selling products across the country, the Akiba plan has penetrated deep into the middle-income and lower-middle-income segments where income volatility is highest.
Industry insiders say agents are incentivised on new business written, with limited accountability for policy persistency, creating a structural incentive to sell without adequately stress-testing a prospective client’s ability to sustain premiums over a five-to-twelve year horizon.
OPTIONS AVAILABLE TO AFFECTED POLICYHOLDERS
Policyholders who have passed the twenty-fifth month threshold can surrender their policies for a cash value, though the amount recovered will be substantially less than total premiums paid, particularly in the early years of the contract. Those who believe they were not adequately informed of lapse terms at point of sale can file a written complaint with Britam’s customer service department, and if unsatisfied, escalate to the IRA’s dispute resolution desk. The IRA’s complaints line is 0800 723 225.
Alternative savings products in the Kenyan market that carry daily liquidity and no minimum commitment period include money market funds. Britam itself operates a money market fund under its asset management division. Other providers include Sanlam, ICEA Lion, CIC, and the Co-operative Bank unit trust platform, among others.
The first sign that something was wrong came just after midnight. Vehicles without registration plates began assembling on the access roads near Karen’s Ngong Road junction.
By 2am, a force of more than 50 armed men, some in police uniform and others in balaclavas, had pushed through the gates of Dari Business Park and locked every employee of Tamarind Restaurant outside the premises.
Former Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju, roused from sleep at his adjacent home, walked out to find a small army in possession of his property. The army refused to say who had sent them.
It was a spectacular, and violent, ending to a legal saga that has consumed the former Jubilee Party secretary-general for the better part of a decade.
Tuju filmed himself from outside his own gate at 3:30am, speaking directly to the camera in a video that spread across social media before most of Nairobi had woken up.
“I have been kicked out by armed police officers who came in six unidentified vehicles. This is pure impunity because they have no court orders to conduct such a raid.”
Tuju said the officers communicated with each other in their mother tongue, shielded their faces each time he raised his phone, and told him only that they were following orders from above. When he demanded to see court documents authorising the eviction, he was told there were none. “This is not law,” he said. “If it is law, it is the law of the jungle.”
To understand what happened in the darkness of Karen on Saturday morning one must go back to 2014, when Raphael Tuju, then a media millionaire with ambitions that matched the size of his real estate dreams, fixed his eye on a 22-acre forested estate along Tree Lane in Karen.
At the heart of the property stood a Victorian-era bungalow built by Scottish missionary Dr Albert Patterson more than a century earlier.
The building had been preserved with almost religious care, its 60-year-old refrigerator still running, a gramophone in the parlour, Dr Patterson’s original furniture in place and the forest canopy unbroken overhead. Rooms were let at Sh43,000 a night for honeymooners.
Tuju’s plan was to transform the estate into the kind of establishment that would rival Windsor Golf Hotel or Hemingways on Mbagathi Ridge: boutique accommodation, a high-end restaurant named Tamarind Karen, a wellness sanctuary called Entim Sidai, and a ring of luxury residential villas at Sh100 million each.
The vehicle was his company Dari Limited, and the financier was the East African Development Bank.
On April 10, 2015, EADB disbursed Sh943.9 million, the equivalent of 9.3 million US dollars, to Dari Limited under a facility agreement that named Tuju, his three children Mano, Alma and Yma, and a related company, S.A.M Company Limited, as guarantors.
The properties along Tree Lane, Ngong Road and Mwitu Road in Karen were charged as security. The first interest payment fell due in October 2015. Dari paid it. It would be the only payment EADB ever received.
What followed, in Tuju’s telling, was a cascade of broken promises. EADB had committed to a second tranche of Sh294 million for the construction of the residential units but declined to release those funds, Tuju has alleged, because the bank wanted additional security over an Upper Hill property already pledged to the Bank of Africa.
Without the second disbursement, he argued, the project unravelled and with it his ability to service the debt. EADB disputes the account and courts in London agreed with the bank, ruling that the second facility was discussed but never formally agreed and therefore never owed.
In December 2018 EADB invoked the dispute resolution clause in the original facility agreement and sued Dari Limited and its guarantors before the High Court of Justice in London. Judge Daniel Toledano ruled against Tuju in July 2019, ordering repayment of more than 15.1 million US dollars, equivalent at the time to well over Sh1.5 billion.
Tuju’s appeal before Lord Justice Leggatt was dismissed. By the time the Kenyan courts adopted the UK judgment in February 2020, the debt had grown further through accumulated interest and currency movements.
Tuju responded by opening every legal front available to him. He challenged the adoption of the UK judgment in the Kenyan High Court and lost. He fought at the Court of Appeal and lost again. He petitioned the Supreme Court, sought to have Supreme Court judges removed before the Judicial Service Commission, was barred from the apex court on procedural grounds, and eventually filed a case at the East African Court of Justice in Arusha.
In Nairobi he accused senior advocates of fabricating affidavits and colluding with the bank’s former Kenya country manager to deceive multiple courts. He filed criminal complaints with the DCI and the ODPP. He told courts that a Dubai investor identified as ZLivia had been willing to inject fresh equity into the project but that EADB had blocked the deal, and that KCB Group had been ready to take over the loan but was similarly obstructed.
Through every round of litigation, temporary court orders and injunctions kept auctioneers at bay. EADB fought back, seeking to have Tuju and his three children jailed or fined for contempt of court, and filing bankruptcy proceedings against them individually.
PricewaterhouseCoopers partners Muniu Thoithi and George Weru were appointed receiver managers over Dari Limited in December 2019, though that appointment was successfully contested for a period. The debt, which started at 9.3 million dollars, had by 2026 grown to the equivalent of Sh4.5 billion according to EADB.
Tuju disputes the figure and argues the bank’s running total is inflated by punitive default interest applied in bad faith.
The final chapter opened on Monday, March 9. Justice Josephine Wayua Mong’are of the Milimani Commercial Court struck out Dari Limited’s amended plaint, ruling that the issues raised had already been determined across multiple forums and were substantially res judicata.
The court vacated the injunctions that had since October 2024 barred Garam Investment Auctioneers and Knight Frank Kenya from advertising, attaching or selling the Karen properties. The road to auction was open.
On Wednesday night, March 11, more than 100 men arrived at Dari Business Park on motorbikes. Tuju, who had received no notice, walked out to find strangers claiming the property had a new owner and demanding he vacate immediately.
He stood his ground, filmed the confrontation and called Karen Police Station. Officers arrived and restored order. He filed a report, returned inside and believed the matter would be addressed in court. Then came Saturday.
The force that arrived in the early hours of March 14 was a different kind of operation altogether. Tuju has suggested, based on the equipment carried and the coordination on display, that the unit included elements of the Rapid Response Unit, the elite GSU formation based at Ruiru that handles the most sensitive internal security operations in the country.
The Kenya Police Service had not confirmed which unit carried out the operation by the time of publication, and no statement had emerged from the Inspector General’s office.
According to Tuju’s account, corroborated by videos he recorded at the scene, the officers arrived in at least seven vehicles, several without registration plates. Some wore full police uniform.
Others had covered their faces with balaclavas. When Tuju approached, officers turned away from his camera. When he asked for court orders, he was told there were none. When he asked who had given the orders, he was told only that the orders came from above.
Restaurant staff and security guards employed at Tamarind Karen were pushed outside the gates. The officers locked themselves inside the compound. Tuju stood at his own perimeter wall in the dark as more vehicles arrived and dawn was still hours away.
“They will have to kill me and bury me in Rarieda. Entim Sidai, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park will only change hands over my dead body.”
In the video Tuju addressed his children Mano, Alma and Yma by name, telling them he was protecting the family business and would not give way to what he described as state-backed criminality. “First of all, I would like to encourage my children, who I know will be watching this video, that I am only protecting my family business which belongs to my family,” he said.
The Karen raid did not occur in isolation. Earlier on Wednesday evening, Fairways Hotel in Kisumu, owned by former Principal Secretary Irungu Nyakera, was attacked by a group of men who caused damage worth millions of shillings and assaulted security staff. Nyakera attributed the attack to political opponents and fired warning shots into the air to disperse the intruders.
DCI Director Amin Mohammed, speaking at the Police Leadership Academy in Nairobi on Thursday during a national security commanders meeting, confirmed that several suspects from both incidents had been arrested. “Goons are criminals, and we have no place for criminals,” Amin said, adding that those already identified had been arraigned in court while efforts to identify others were continuing.
Internal Security Principal Secretary Raymond Omollo echoed the position, saying the government would not tolerate violence or hooliganism and promising legal accountability for perpetrators. Neither official addressed the Saturday operation at Dari Business Park, which by all accounts involved uniformed officers rather than private goons.
On Friday, March 13, the day before the raid, Tuju walked to the Supreme Court building and delivered a letter personally addressed to Chief Justice Martha Koome.
Speaking to journalists outside, he said he had chosen institutions over retaliation. “I have come to the judiciary today only with a letter and not with goons,” he said. “If you allow our country to go the goons way then we will be heading to anarchy, chaos, in other words, a failed state.”
The letter, copies of which were submitted simultaneously to the DCI, the EACC and the ODPP, alleged that a sitting judge in the Commercial Division of the High Court had been approached by a broker, a former judge and a lawyer who sought Sh10 million in exchange for influencing the outcome of his pending appeal.
Tuju said the three individuals were arrested after they visited his Karen home and made the bribery pitch. He named them in separate communications to investigative agencies.
On March 12, Justice Mong’are, leaving the division on transfer, declined to grant interim conservatory orders that would have halted the auction pending the appeal but certified the matter as urgent and granted leave to appeal.
The next hearing before the presiding judge of the division was scheduled for March 17. With his property already occupied by officers who arrived in the night and declined to leave, it is not immediately clear what relief that hearing can provide.
Tuju’s legal resistance has been nothing short of exhausting to document. He has fought in courts in London, Nairobi and Arusha. He has used every procedural mechanism available: injunctions, stays, contempt applications, constitutional petitions, criminal complaints and judicial integrity petitions.
He has accused lawyers of fabricating affidavits, accused judges of soliciting bribes, accused the bank of predatory lending and accused auctioneers of operating without proper authority. He has prevailed in isolated procedural battles while losing the broader war of attrition. What he had never done, until Saturday morning, was physically lost possession of the property.
The question being asked across Kenya’s legal and political establishment on Saturday is whether the operation was a lawful enforcement of a judgment obtained across multiple courts over eleven years, or whether the deployment of what appeared to be state security forces to execute a commercial debt recovery in the dead of night, without presenting court orders to the registered owner, amounts to an extrajudicial action that should alarm every property holder in the country. Tuju himself has framed the issue as nothing less than a constitutional test. “This is not law,” he said, standing alone outside his locked gate in the dark. “If it is law, it is the law of the jungle.”
A Nairobi court has issued warrant of arrest against two businessmen for failing to appear in court to plead to fraud charges.
Milimani Principal Magistrate Teressia Nyangena issued arrest warrant against Mohamed Annour Sadate and Gilbert Omollo Orwe alias David Gweth after they failed to appear in court to answer to charges related to gold fraud.
Magistrate Nyangena rejected an application by a lawyer representing one of the suspects, who claimed that they were ambushed with the case and that his client was unwell.
Sadate and Orwe are accused of committing the offence on diverse dates between 6 April and 30 June 2022 in Nairobi City County.
It is further alleged that they committed the fraud jointly with others not before court, with intent to defraud and allegedly obtained USD 101,400 from Sardar Mohamad Tabraiz by falsely pretending that they were in a position to sell to him 2,000kgs of gold.
The charge sheet registered in court stated that they allegedly forged a rejection letter for export purporting it to be a valid and genuine document issued by Kenya Revenue Authority.
It is alleged that they forged the document on or before 7 day of march 2022 at an unknown place and time within the country, Orwe jointly in the country.
Orwe is also accused of making a certificate of origin No. 8796, purporting it to be a valid and genuine document issued by East African Community Customs COMESA, without lawful authority.
The document, passed as genuine, was meant to defraud Tabraiz.
NAIROBI, Kenya Mar 13 – More than 5,500 Kenyans have signed up to join the Linda Mwananchi movement shortly after Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna launched its official website on Friday.
The Nairobi Senator unveiled the online platform on March 13, urging supporters to register and connect with the movement through its website and social media platforms.
According to information shared by the organisers, thousands of supporters had already followed the movement across Facebook, X, TikTok and Instagram within hours of the launch.
Last month,Sifuna insisted on a Linda Mwananchi census in the quest to send President William Ruto home saying it will only succeed if it is backed by clear numbers, proper planning and a strong grassroots structure.
Sifuna said members of the Linda Mwananchi movement have consistently told supporters, including at rallies in Kakamega, that they can remove President Ruto from office. However, he stressed that certain steps must come first which include knowing the actual figures or building the systems needed to organise them.
Those seeking to join the initiative are required to complete a brief registration process on the website, which includes confirming their voter registration status. Registrants are also asked to pay a Ksh10 fee, a step the organisers say is intended to filter out automated or fake accounts.
During the sign-up process, a message explains that the small fee is meant to help the movement verify genuine supporters and determine its actual membership numbers.
Once the payment is completed, new members receive a confirmation message welcoming them to the movement.
The website also outlines several ways supporters can participate, including volunteering their time or making donations starting from as little as Ksh10 to support the initiative’s activities.
Organisers say the funds will help sustain the campaign as it mobilises supporters across the country.
In addition, the platform features an events calendar where members can track upcoming meetings and rallies organised by the movement.
The next gathering is scheduled to take place in Mombasa County on March 22.
The group has also announced plans to convene a delegates’ convention later in the month dubbed “The People’s NDC,” which is expected to outline the movement’s next political steps.
Last week,the Linda Mwananchi faction of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party rejected a plan to register the caucus’ movement name as a political party.
The Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna-led faction says it has not approved any plan or authorised any person to register the Linda Mwananchi party following an application to the Office of Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP).
Already, the faction has written to the ORPP seeking to block the attempt by an individual identified as Charles Wanyonyi, citing the likelihood of infringement of images and symbols associated with the caucus.
The group says it has not approved the use of the slogan “Linda Mwananchi,” arguing that if registered, it will provide an avenue for the public to be conned.
“The political party is likely to use our clients’ names, images, and goodwill to fraudulently get financing either from members of the public or other entities,” the faction stated through lawyer Duncan Anzala of Henia Anzala & Associates.
The faction informed the ORPP that they were apprehensive over the plan to register the party after reading about the move in one of the dailies.
“In view of the foregoing, our clients urge your office to shun upon and thwart the attempt to defraud Kenyans through political conmanship by declining the application to register “Linda Mwananchi” as a political party,” the letter received at the ORPP on March 4, 2026 states.
There is a moment that will outlive every gazette notice, every ceremonial swearing-in, and every press release that the new National Land Commission will ever issue.
It happened in a committee room in Parliament on the morning of Monday, March 9, 2026, when Dr Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy — President William Ruto’s personal choice to chair the commission that oversees Kenya’s 70-million-acre public land estate — looked at a panel of MPs and said: ‘I am a bit shaky.’
It was not a throwaway admission. It was a diagnosis.
The MPs had stripped away Alawy’s crib sheets. Committee chairman Joash Nyamoko, the North Mugirango MP who chaired the Departmental Committee on Lands, had already ordered the nominee to set aside the notes he was reading from after suspecting that questions had been leaked to him in advance.
Without his prepared script, Alawy could not field basic interrogation about the commission he had been nominated to lead. He sought permission to answer questions one by one because, in his own words, he found it difficult to recall them.
The committee refused. Kaloleni MP Paul Katana asked the question that hung over the entire session: ‘NLC is a huge responsibility. Will he manage the storm?’ Nobody has yet answered it.
The committee gave him a five-minute breather after Bahati MP Irene Njoki proposed it. When he returned, Alawy thanked the committee for its patience and confessed: ‘This is a new environment for me. I am already feeling the weight of NLC on my back. Usually, I am a very composed and listening person.’ It was the most revealing sentence of the entire vetting exercise.
The weight of the NLC — an institution charged with managing public land on behalf of 55 million Kenyans, investigating historical land injustices stretching back to colonial dispossession, and recommending national land policy — was apparently something Alawy encountered for the first time in that committee room. Despite all of this, the committee still recommended his approval. Parliament voted him through. President Ruto gazetted him within 24 hours.
“Are we serious as a country? Are we perpetuating land malpractices in the land sector? What kind of disservice are we doing to this country? It is a sad day.” — Dr Wilberforce Oundo, Funyula MP
TWICE REJECTED, THRICE LUCKY
This is not Alawy’s first parliamentary ordeal. In February 2014, former President Uhuru Kenyatta nominated him for appointment as a member of the National Gender and Equality Commission — a different constitutional body, but the same pattern.
The Labour and Social Welfare Committee, chaired by then Matungu MP David Were, vetted him and concluded bluntly that he was ‘out of touch with gender and equality challenges in Kenya to an extent that he could not identify even one minority group in Kenya.’
The committee found him unsuitable and rejected his nomination outright.
There was a further, more fundamental problem in 2014. The committee found that Alawy had lost his Kenyan citizenship in 2005 when he acquired American citizenship under the old constitution, which did not permit dual nationality.
He was asked to prove that he had lawfully resumed Kenyan citizenship.
The documents he presented — a declaration made the day after his vetting — were ruled ‘irrelevant to his case’ by the committee. He was unable to demonstrate, to the committee’s satisfaction, that due diligence was followed in regaining the citizenship that Article 14(5) of the 2010 Constitution entitles him to reclaim.
The full House overturned the committee’s rejection and Alawy served a six-year term on the gender commission.
His citizenship questions have not disappeared: during his NLC vetting this month, the issue resurfaced, with Alawy confirming he had at some point held American citizenship and had since renounced it.
What the record therefore shows is a man who carries a 12-year paper trail of parliamentary unease about his suitability for constitutional office.
That trail includes a formal rejection by a House committee, a disputed citizenship file, and a vetting performance so poor that even the committee that recommended him recorded in its official report that he was ‘shaky in responding.’ In any functioning meritocracy, this dossier would disqualify a candidate from the chairmanship of a ward development committee, let alone a constitutional commission. In Kenya in March 2026, it was apparently sufficient.
THE CONFLICT THAT PARLIAMENT NOTED AND THEN IGNORED
Perhaps the most explosive dimension of the Alawy nomination is not his academic credentials or his shakiness before MPs. It is what his family has been doing to the people of Wasini Island in Kwale County for the past four decades — and what it means for any community that finds itself in a land dispute with the Saggaf Alawy family while Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy chairs the institution that has jurisdiction over exactly such disputes.
The backstory is long and bitter. Wasini is a five-square-kilometre coral island off Kenya’s southern coast, home to some 1,700 residents who depend on fishing and tourism.
In 1979, the patriarch of the Saggaf Alawy family — Abdulrahman Saggaf Alawy, a former school teacher on the island — began a legal campaign to reclaim communal farmland known as the Puma, which he asserted the family owned by virtue of a 1908 land title ordinance issued during the era of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
What followed was nearly five decades of litigation, government commissions, surveys, injunctions, eviction threats, and community protests that have left the island in a state of perpetual anxiety.
In September 2025 — just five months before Ruto nominated Abdillahi Saggaf Alawy to chair the NLC — the government issued the Saggaf Alawy family a freehold title deed for 610 acres of Wasini Island, representing nearly half the island.
The National Land Commission, the very institution Alawy now chairs, had previously recognised the family as victims of historical injustice. Within weeks of receiving that title, the family issued formal eviction notices to hotel and cottage owners on the island.
Local leaders and residents, many of whom have lived on the land for generations, insist the land is ancestral and communal. MPs from the Coast had previously passed resolutions questioning the survey process and ordering residents to stay put. None of that stopped the eviction machinery.
During his NLC vetting, MPs pressed Alawy on whether he would recuse himself should Wasini Island matters come before the commission. He said he would. But the institutional problem runs deeper than one vote or one recusal.
The Saggaf family’s claim to nearly half of Wasini Island was processed through the NLC. The NLC issued gazette notices affirming their ownership. The NLC’s own historical injustice committee was the vehicle through which the family secured its legal victories.
A man whose family has already benefited from NLC decisions to the tune of Sh3.9 billion in prime coastal land — and who has himself declared a net worth of Sh62 million — is now the chairman of the body that will adjudicate the next generation of such disputes.
The Institute of Surveyors of Kenya and Kituo Cha Sheria both raised this concern in formal memoranda to the vetting committee. The committee noted their concerns in its report. Parliament then voted Alawy through.
“His family is involved in a land dispute in Wasini Island against the locals. Will you be fair to the residents if you are appointed?” — MP Paul Katana
THE CHAIR’S RECORD AT ADC: A DRESS REHEARSAL FOR FAILURE
Alawy’s defenders will point to his academic credentials — a PhD in Agricultural Education from Ohio State University, a background in monitoring and evaluation, decades of work in international development spanning 43 countries.
But credentials on paper and performance in office are different things, and the parliamentary record of his stewardship of the Agricultural Development Corporation is instructive.
Alawy has served as chairman of the ADC board, a state agency that manages some of Kenya’s most strategically important agricultural land, including the 1.7-million-acre Galana Kulalu ranch in Kilifi and Tana River counties.
The Galana Kulalu project is arguably the most catastrophically mismanaged land asset in modern Kenyan history.
The project consumed more than Sh14 billion in public funds while putting fewer than 10,000 of its projected million acres under cultivation. Parliament described it as a ‘spectacular fiasco.’ Under Alawy’s tenure as ADC chairman, 52,000 acres of ADC land were allocated to a cement factory in Mombasa even as landless communities in Tana River continued to wait for resettlement that had been promised since the presidency of Mwai Kibaki. A parliamentary resolution specifically directed that 250,000 acres of ADC land be allocated to landless residents in Tana River. Alawy did not implement it.
MPs during his NLC vetting also raised the matter of a parliamentary fact-finding visit to ADC offices in Tana River County, during which Alawy was reportedly absent.
Legislators described having travelled at taxpayer expense to ADC facilities only to find the ADC chairman unavailable to meet them. This is the man now entrusted with the chairmanship of the constitutional body mandated to manage all public land in Kenya.
THE COMMISSION’S SIX: A GALLERY OF THE UNQUALIFIED
The problem with Kenya’s new NLC is not limited to its chairman.
It is structural. Section 8 of the NLC Act sets a clear threshold: commissioners must hold a degree and have at least 15 years of knowledge and experience in land management and administration, natural resource management, land adjudication, land law, land surveying, spatial planning, land economics, public administration, or related social sciences. The seven nominees Ruto sent to Parliament are, by the assessment of multiple professional bodies, substantially incapable of meeting that statutory bar.
Susan Khakasa Oyatsi, designated vice-chairperson, is an accountant who served for approximately six years in an acting capacity as finance director at the Judiciary.
She has no background in land law, land surveying, spatial planning, or any of the core technical disciplines listed in Section 8.
Even Funyula MP Wilberforce Oundo, the most outspoken critic of the nominees during the House debate, conceded he had no objection to Oyatsi — a diplomatic hedge that nonetheless signals she is the closest thing to a technically defensible appointment in the batch.
Daniel Murithi Muriungi, nominated from Meru County, is described as a property lawyer and aviation practitioner.
Property law has tangential relevance to land administration, but the NLC’s mandate extends to adjudication, historical injustice investigations, compulsory acquisition, national land policy, and the oversight of county land management boards. Aviation practice contributes nothing to that mandate.
Kigen Vincent Cheruiyot, from Kericho County, is a certified human resource professional and former chairman of the National Employment Authority. Human resources is a management discipline. It has no connection to land governance.
Cheruiyot’s appointment to a body whose core technical functions are inherently spatial and legal in character is, on its face, a Section 8 anomaly.
The ISK’s president Eric Nyadimo put it plainly: the NLC’s statutory work involves land survey, valuation, physical planning, environmental management, and land administration. ‘How will the team that has been proposed carry out these core functions when all these matters are alien to them?’ he asked. Nobody answered him.
Mohamed Abdi Haji Mohamed, former Banissa MP, brings a legislative background to the commission. His constituency lies in the pastoral northeast, a region with acute and historically under-served land tenure problems.
Haji’s political experience is not nothing — commissioners who understand community land tensions in arid and semi-arid regions serve a genuine function.
But his is not a technical appointment, and the NLC is, above all else, a technical institution.
Mary Yiane Seneta, former Kajiado County Women Representative, holds a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Nairobi. She was among nominees shortlisted for the Salaries and Remuneration Commission in 2025 and did not make the final cut.
She brings no evident land expertise to an institution that will resolve title disputes, compulsory acquisitions, and resource allocation decisions affecting millions of Kenyans.
Dr Julie Ouma Oseko, from Siaya County, is described as an advocate and senior legal consultant. Of all six commissioners, she comes closest to the legal competencies the NLC requires. Her confirmation of legal standing would depend on the nature of her practice, but at minimum she represents a partial exception to the broader pattern.
“We are populating the commission with Kenyans who have no qualifications at all, as clearly outlined in this Act.” — Dr Wilberforce Oundo, MP, on the floor of the National Assembly
THE PROFESSIONALS WHO WERE PASSED OVER
The Institution of Surveyors of Kenya, the Architectural Association of Kenya, and Kituo Cha Sheria all submitted formal memoranda opposing the nominations before vetting began. ISK president Nyadimo’s public statement raised a question that the selection panel has not answered: was there a scoring system? Qualified land surveyors, spatial planners, land economists, and land lawyers applied for positions on the NLC.
The selection panel, whose proceedings are not transparent to the public, passed them over in favour of a human resources professional, a finance officer, a former MP, and a woman with a degree in education.
Section 8 of the NLC Act was not drafted idly. It was designed by the architects of Kenya’s 2010 constitutional settlement to ensure that the body charged with addressing one of Africa’s most complex inherited land problems — colonial dispossession, adjudication irregularities, historical injustice, compulsory acquisition and compensation — would be staffed by people who understand what they are doing.
The current selection process has produced a commission where the dominant expertise appears to be loyalty.
PARLIAMENT: A SIDESHOW WITH OFFICIAL STATIONERY
The most dispiriting element of this episode is not what the President did. Presidents appoint allies. That is a political constant. The most dispiriting element is what Parliament did. The Departmental Committee on Lands heard the evidence.
MPs questioned Alawy’s citizenship history, his conflict of interest in Wasini Island, his failure at ADC, his inability to answer questions without a cheat sheet, and his visible breakdown under routine interrogation.
The committee chairperson told him on the record that his shakiness would be noted in the official report. It was noted. The committee then recommended his approval.
The full House adopted the report. Parliament discharged its constitutional function of vetting presidential nominees by noting every reason the nominees should be rejected, writing those reasons into its official record, and voting yes.
Oundo, who delivered the most searing indictment of the nominations on the floor of the House, captured the capitulation in a single sentence: ‘I would have easily stood here and said I oppose this motion, but the commission has to run.’ The commission has to run. It is the oldest and most reliable justification for institutional surrender in Kenyan public life. The commission has to run, therefore the unqualified must be confirmed.
The state house has spoken, therefore the oversight mechanism must perform its ritual and stand aside. Leader of Majority Kimani Ichung’wah even attempted to silence Oundo, demanding he substantiate his criticisms or withdraw and apologise. Oundo declined.
He told his colleagues they should have had the courage to return the nominations to the appointing authority. They did not.
The swearing-in of the new NLC commissioners was deferred on the day the gazette notice was published because Chief Justice Martha Koome and Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu were unavailable. It was, perhaps, an unintentional metaphor.
The republic’s most senior judicial officer was not present to witness the formal installation of the commission that will adjudicate land rights for the next six years.
WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN ANY OTHER BAD APPOINTMENT
Kenya is a country in which the word ‘land’ has triggered ethnic conflict, electoral violence, mass displacement, judicial corruption, and political assassination. The National Land Commission is not a decorative constitutional body. It manages public land on behalf of national and county governments. It investigates historical injustices.
It recommends compulsory acquisition of private land for public purpose. It advises on national land policy. It monitors land use planning. Its decisions determine whether communities are settled or evicted, whether infrastructure projects proceed or stall, whether colonial-era grievances are addressed or compounded.
A commission staffed by people who, in the words of the ISK, find the commission’s ‘core functions alien to them’ is not merely an ineffective commission. It is a dangerous one.
And at the head of that commission sits a man whose family has a Sh3.9 billion stake in a land dispute that passed through the very institution he now chairs, who struggled to answer questions without a script, who was rejected by a parliamentary committee twelve years ago, and who told the nation’s elected representatives that he was feeling the weight of the NLC on his back in the room where he was supposed to demonstrate he could carry it.
Ruto has had his skunk. Parliament has accepted delivery. Six years is a long time for an island community to wait.
Section 8 of the National Land Commission Act (Cap. 281) requires that all commissioners hold a degree and possess at least 15 years of knowledge and experience in: public administration, land management and administration, natural resource management, land adjudication and settlement, land law, land surveying, spatial planning, land economics, or social sciences — in addition to satisfying the Chapter Six integrity requirements of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.
Section 5 confers on the commission the mandate to manage public land, recommend national land policy, investigate historical injustices, and monitor land use planning across all 47 counties.
Iran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz on the condition that the cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, a senior Iranian official told CNN on Friday.
The official said the potential move is part of Tehran’s plan to manage the flow of oil tankers through the strategic waterway.
Global oil is predominantly traded in US dollars, except for sanctioned Russian oil, which is priced in rubles or the yuan, said CNN, adding that China has sought for years to expand the use of yuan in oil transactions, but the dollar remains the world’s primary reserve currency.
Concerns about disruptions in the strait, a critical route for the world’s energy supply, have pushed oil prices to their highest since July 2022, following the start of the Russian-Ukranian conflict that began earlier that year, it said.
The Strait of Hormuz carries about 20 million barrels of oil a day and roughly 20% of the global liquefied natural gas trade.
The UN warned on Friday that restrictions on shipping through the strait could have a “massive impact” on humanitarian operations in the region.
Tehran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz since March 1, following Israel and the US launching joint attacks against Iran on Feb. 28, which have so far killed around 1,300 people, including then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hostilities have since escalated.
Four US soldiers were killed in action after a US KC-135 refueling aircraft went down in western Iraq during a collision between it and a second aircraft during Operation Epic Fury, US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed on Friday night.
The circumstances of the incident are under investigation, and the identities of the soldiers have not been released yet.
CENTCOM assured that the incident occured in friendly airspace, and was not due to hostile or friendly fire.
The refueler went down near Turaibil, along the Iraqi-Jordanian border, CBS News reported, citing an Iraqi intelligence source.
A US official, speaking to Reuters on the condition of anonymity, said that the other aircraft involved in the crash was also a KC-135.
The official added that the refueler that had crashed had six service members on board. Their status is currently unknown.
Search and rescue efforts for the missing crew are currently underway, CENTCOM said in its statement, and that the public should be patient as it “gather[s] additional details and provide clarity for the families of service members.”
Flight tracking service FlightRadar24 showed that the second KC-135 had declared an emergency before landing safely in Israel earlier in the day.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed armed factions, claimed responsibility for downing the US military aircraft, Reuters reported.
The group said in a statement it had shot down the KC-135 aircraft “in defense of our country’s sovereignty and airspace.”
Kuwait accidentally downs three US fighter jets
This marks the fourth US aircraft to be lost as part of Operation Epic Fury.
Last week, Kuwait’s air defenses mistakenly shot down three US F-15 fighter jets during active combat, which CENTCOM at the time described as an apparent friendly‐fire incident.
All six crew members ejected from the aircraft safely and were recovered in stable condition.
The Public Service Commission has issued new retirement age guidelines for academic, research and non-teaching staff in public universities and research institutions, setting different limits based on rank, employment type and disability status.
Under the new framework, academic and research staff will retire between the ages of 60 and 75, depending on their position and whether they are registered as persons living with disability.
In a circular addressed to cabinet secretaries, principal secretaries, university councils, vice chancellors, state corporations, the registrar of the Judiciary and the Auditor General, PSC CEO Paul Famba said the changes are intended to streamline retirement policies.
“The Constitution places the mantle of human resource management in the Public Service on the Public Service Commission. This includes ensuring the public service is efficient and effective, reviewing and making recommendations to the national government on conditions of service and qualifications for public officers,” Famba said.
He said Section 70(1)(c) of the Public Service Commission Regulations, 2020 gives the commission the authority to determine the mandatory retirement age for lecturers and research scientists in public universities and research institutions in consultation with the institutions.
“The mandatory retirement age in the public service shall be determined by the commission for lecturers and research scientists serving in public universities, research institutions or equivalent institutions,” Famba said.
According to the new guidelines, professors and research professors employed on permanent and pensionable terms will retire at the age of 70, while those living with disability will retire at 75.
Associate professors, associate research professors, senior lecturers and senior research fellows will retire at 65 years or 70 years for those registered as persons with disability.
Lecturers, research fellows, assistant lecturers, tutorial fellows and junior research fellows—whether serving on permanent, pensionable or contractual terms will retire at 60 years. Those living with disabilities will retire at 65 years.
For research scientists working in research institutions, those holding PhDs will retire at 65 years, with an extension to 70 years for persons living with disability.
Scientists with master’s degrees and relevant publications will also retire at 65 years or 70 years if registered as persons with disability.
Non-teaching staff in universities and research institutions will continue to retire at 60 years, while those living with disability will retire at 65 years in line with Regulation 70(1)(b) of the PSC Regulations.
The commission said the circular takes effect immediately and replaces earlier guidelines issued under circular Ref OPCAB 2/7A dated March 20, 2009, along with any other policies that previously governed retirement in public institutions.
Famba directed all public institutions to comply fully with the revised retirement framework.
However, the move has sparked debate among university students and education stakeholders who fear that extending the retirement age for senior academics could slow the entry of young professionals into the academic workforce.
Some students argue that with professors and senior lecturers staying longer in their positions, opportunities for fresh graduates and young researchers may become more limited.
A university student in Nairobi said the policy could worsen unemployment among highly educated youth seeking academic careers.
“Many young people are finishing masters and PhDs but cannot get positions in universities,” the student said. “If senior lecturers stay longer in office, it will take more time before new opportunities open up for younger academics.”
Education analysts say the policy reflects a balance between retaining experienced scholars and creating opportunities for emerging researchers.
While senior academics bring institutional memory, mentorship and research leadership, stakeholders note that universities may also need to expand teaching and research positions to accommodate the growing number of qualified graduates entering the field.
A Nairobi court has blocked an attempt by prosecutors to withdraw criminal charges against a director of Heritage Flowers Ltd accused of threatening to shoot and kill a business rival, ruling that the reasons presented did not meet the constitutional threshold required to halt the case.
Milimani Principal Magistrate Caroline Mugo declined an application by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions led by RensonIngonga, saying the court could not endorse what she described as an unexplained reversal by the prosecution.
The ruling means that Shaileshi Kumari Rai, a director at Heritage Flowers Ltd, will proceed to trial over allegations that he threatened to kill businessman Punjani Riyaz Mahammadali during a confrontation in Nairobi.
Magistrate Mugo ruled that the prosecution had failed to demonstrate why it now considered the evidence insufficient despite previously approving charges and setting the case down for hearing.
“Justice is served when prosecutorial power is exercised with transparency, consistency and fidelity to the Constitution,” the magistrate said while rejecting the request to withdraw the case under Section 87(a) of the Criminal Procedure Code.
She warned that courts cannot allow the criminal justice system to become “a revolving door where decisions shift without explanation.”
According to the court, prosecutors had earlier reviewed the investigation file, approved the charges and arraigned the accused after concluding that the available evidence met the legal threshold for prosecution. However, in seeking to terminate the case, the prosecution merely cited “insufficiency of evidence” without explaining what had changed.
“There is no evidence demonstrating the emergence of new material, recantation of key witnesses, loss of exhibits or any supervening circumstance that would justify the abrupt shift in position,” the magistrate said.
The court further found that prosecutors had breached provisions of the Victim Protection Act (Kenya) by failing to inform the complainant of their intention to withdraw the charges.
Magistrate Mugo noted that the complainant had been actively involved in the proceedings and had even secured legal representation. Under Kenya’s constitutional framework, victims are entitled to participate in criminal proceedings and must be informed of key prosecutorial decisions.
“It is unfathomable for the prosecution to waive the complainant’s right to be informed and involved in the decision to withdraw the charges,” she ruled, adding that victims are no longer passive spectators in criminal trials.
The magistrate cited jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Kenya, which recognizes victims as active participants in the justice process within constitutionally defined limits.
Court documents indicate that Rai is accused of threatening Mahammadali on May 27, 2022, in Parklands, within Westlands Sub-County in Nairobi.
The charge sheet stated that without lawful excuse, he uttered unprintable words with Hindu language meaning “****” I will come and shoot you in the *** right now” words which directly caused Punjani to receive threats.
Prosecutors allege that during the confrontation he uttered threatening words in Hindi indicating that he would immediately shoot the complainant, causing him to fear for his life.
Although the defence has suggested the dispute is linked to a business rivalry and possible civil disagreements, the magistrate said the existence of a commercial dispute does not automatically negate criminal liability.
“While the court appreciates that criminal proceedings should not be weaponized to settle civil disputes, where a criminal element is disclosed the charges may still be sustained,” she said.
Mugo emphasized that while the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has constitutional authority to review or discontinue prosecutions, such decisions must comply with Article 157(11) of the Constitution, which requires prosecutors to consider public interest, the administration of justice and the need to prevent abuse of legal process.
Allowing the withdrawal without explanation, the magistrate warned, would reduce the court’s oversight role to a ceremonial endorsement of prosecutorial decisions.
“The court must ensure that prosecutorial discretion is exercised lawfully, in good faith and not in abuse of the process,” she ruled.
Rai remains out on cash bail as the case proceeds to hearing at the Milimani Law Courts.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Thursday that the ongoing US-Israeli campaign against Iran was “crushing” Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, urging Iranians to rise up and overthrow the Islamic Republic.
Speaking shortly after Iran’s new ruler, Mojtaba Khamenei, vowed to avenge Iranians killed in the conflict, Netanyahu outlined a third objective for Israel’s campaign: creating conditions for the Iranian people to remove the clerical leadership in Tehran.
“We are crushing Iran and Hezbollah,” he said during a televised briefing, adding that the original goals of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons and dismantling its ballistic missile capabilities remain.
Netanyahu also warned the Lebanese government to rein in Hezbollah, which has been conducting missile strikes on Israel in coordination with Iran.
(FILES) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press at the US Capitol following his closed-door meeting with US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Republican from Louisiana, in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2025. Turkey announced on November 7, 2025, that it had issued arrest warrants for genocide against Israeli Prime Minister and senior officials within his government. (Photo by oliver contreras / AFP)
“You are playing with fire if you continue allowing Hezbollah to operate, in violation of your commitment to disarm it,” he said.
“The time has come for you to do so. Now, if you do not, it is clear that we will do so.”
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for several attacks on Israeli targets on Thursday, including a strike on an air defence system near Caesarea, where Netanyahu’s private residence is located.
Israel has threatened to target Lebanese government infrastructure if the attacks continue.
Netanyahu also addressed Iran’s new leadership directly: “We eliminated the old tyrant, and the new tyrant, the puppet of the Revolutionary Guards, can’t show his face in public,” referring to Khamenei.
It was the second visit that sealed the trap. On the morning of March 10, 2026, a Swedish timber and machinery exporter named Talar Yousef Zaitoun walked into Harambee House, the gazetted seat of the Kenyan presidency in the heart of Nairobi, for what he believed would be the final formality on a contract to supply 500 ambulances to the Government of Kenya.
He had flown in from Stockholm with his brother Hatim.
He had already wired nearly half a million dollars across multiple tranches from a sister company in China to an Ecobank Kenya account in Nairobi. He had received what appeared to be a legitimate pre-qualification certificate confirming his firm, Jokara AB, had won a tender worth over USD 36 million.
And he had been received twice at Kenya’s most symbolically fortified address by men who presented themselves as senior government officials.
What Zaitoun did not know was that the entire edifice had been constructed from fraudulent documents, impersonated officials, and a criminal syndicate operating with the brazen confidence that comes from using Kenya’s presidential address as scenery for a con.
When detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations moved in on the 12th floor of Harambee House that morning, they arrested seven people mid-negotiation.
The drama was extraordinary not merely because of its scale but because of its location.
The suspects had been caught inside what the police would later describe in court documents as “a government premises that houses, among others, the office of the Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government, and the Office of the President, and which is gazetted as a protected government installation.”
The seven arrested are Micheal Musyoki Ngumbi, Evans Simotwo, Geoffrey Were Odondi, Allan Mutahi Kariuki, Purity Njeri Njamiu, Jared Muniaro Masinde, and Kororia Simatwa.
They were presented in a Nairobi court on a miscellaneous application and remanded for five days pending preparation of prosecution files, with a case mention set for March 17.
Police had sought 14 days. A lawyer who is said to have received funds on behalf of the syndicate remains at large and is actively being sought.
The Architecture of the Con
The plot began on January 10, 2026, when Zaitoun, whose Stockholm-based Jokara AB exports timber and machinery to African markets, received a WhatsApp message from a person identifying himself as Stanley Ndawula using a Ugandan phone number requesting a product catalogue.
The following day, a second contact reached him from a Kenyan number.
This was Geoffrey Were, who introduced himself as a consultant at a firm called Interlog Corporate and presented himself as a facilitator of business between the Government of Kenya and private foreign companies. Were dangled a government tender to supply ambulances.
On January 19, Were told Zaitoun that Kenya was seeking to procure ambulances. Zaitoun submitted a quotation on January 31, proposing Toyota Hiace High Roof ambulances at USD 65,500 per unit.
He was invited to Nairobi. He arrived on January 26 aboard a Turkish Airlines flight at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, was received by Were and a driver named Nicho, and was accommodated at the Radisson Blu Hotel Arboretum until January 30.
On January 27, Zaitoun was taken to Harambee House for a meeting with several individuals, including Michael and Geoffrey, who identified themselves as representatives of the National Treasury and the Ministry of Health.
He was told the total contract value was USD 36,025,000 and that he was required to provide either a performance bond or insurance coverage before signing.
He opted for a 3 percent insurance coverage fee, amounting to USD 1,080,750.
He was also told there was a 2 percent ledger fee of USD 360,250 to be shared between him and the government, and he was presented with two pre-qualification options: USD 90,000 for a single government contract over five years, or USD 110,000 for multiple contracts within the same period. He chose the latter.
The money began flowing on January 30, wired from Lianyungang Chanta International Wood Co. Ltd, a sister company in China, to an Ecobank Kenya account held in the name of the wanted lawyer.
Zaitoun was issued invoices, a certificate of incorporation, company search records, and identification documents purportedly belonging to a law firm.
He received a pre-qualification certificate.
But even then, doubt crept in: the award date on the certificate showed October 22, 2025, months before the tender discussions had begun.
The suspects explained, smoothly, that such certificates were routinely backdated.
Even after Zaitoun returned to Sweden, the pressure continued. The syndicate insisted more insurance fees were outstanding, claiming the government had already paid its portion.
On February 1, he transferred an additional USD 48,392, USD 51,607, and USD 80,000. On February 25, further transfers followed of USD 55,285.22, USD 55,438.30, and USD 69,275.95. By the time suspicion hardened into certainty, independent due diligence had confirmed the pre-qualification certificate was fraudulent.
The total amount extracted from Zaitoun stands at USD 470,750, equivalent to approximately Sh60.8 million.
He returned to Kenya on March 9 with his brother Hatim, was received again at the airport by Geoffrey and the same driver, taken to Radisson Blu Hotel, and escorted the following morning to Harambee House for what would become the arrest meeting.
Police assert in their court affidavit that investigators are examining how meetings designed for criminal purposes were held inside a gazetted protected installation, and say senior government officials may have been involved, some of whom could be difficult to trace due to their busy schedules.
Seven suspects, led by Michael Musyoki Ngumbi, appear at the Milimani Law Courts dock in Nairobi over a Sh60.8 million fake ambulance tender scam, following their arrest at Harambee House, which hosts President William Ruto’s office.
A Pattern Written in CCTV Footage
The ambulance tender scandal is not the first time criminal operators have used the physical prestige of Kenya’s presidential address to lend credibility to fraud.
The most notorious precedent came in February 2020, when former Sports Cabinet Secretary Rashid Echesa, then recently fired by President Uhuru Kenyatta, walked two foreign arms dealers into Harambee House Annex, the building directly across Harambee Avenue that houses the Office of the Deputy President.
The foreigners were Kozlowski Stanley Bruno, an American, and Mamdough Mostafa Amer, an Egyptian. They represented a firm called Eco Advanced Technologies and had been promised a Sh39 billion tender to supply the Kenya Defence Forces with military surveillance equipment.
Echesa and his associates, including a man passing himself off as a military general identified as Daniel Otieno Omondi, had already extracted Sh11.5 million from the foreigners as consultancy fees before the deal unravelled. Detectives descended on Harambee House Annex to review CCTV footage, interview security personnel, and investigate how individuals with no official standing had been allowed access to the second-highest office in the republic.
The then-Deputy President, William Ruto, acknowledged publicly that the 23-minute meeting had indeed taken place in his premises but denied any knowledge of it, calling the scandal a “choreographed smear campaign” by political competitors.
That case carried a further, darker dimension.
The sergeant who had been on duty at Harambee House Annex when Echesa brought in the foreigners, John Kipyegon Kenei, was found dead a week after the arrests. The then-DCI director linked Kenei’s death to the arms scandal, alleging he had been killed to suppress evidence.
Echesa was eventually acquitted in December 2021 after a magistrate ruled that the CCTV footage presented in evidence did not show him committing an offence. No one was convicted.
The arms scandal was itself not an isolated episode at the Annex. Earlier, in 2018 and again in 2020, a separate syndicate ran a fake laptop tender operation using the Harambee House Annex address.
A woman known to victims as “Ms Muhoro,” whose real name was Joy Wangari Kamau, posed as a procurement officer or project manager at the DP’s office, bringing in businesspeople who believed they had won government contracts.
One complainant, Charles Musinga, told a Milimani court that he and business partners had delivered 2,800 laptops worth approximately Sh180 million after signing what they believed was a legitimate contract at the Annex.
A parallel victim, Charles Gathii, lost Sh116 million through a related operation. Kamau repeatedly evaded arrest, with courts issuing multiple warrants against her. At least eight individuals were ultimately charged across the various laptop tender prosecutions.
Nor was the fraud confined to the Annex. In a separate case, a woman named Grace Mwarania Waigumu was arrested after police alleged she had been posing as an official at the Office of the President in Harambee House itself, defrauding victims through fake Jubilee party campaign materials tenders.
One complainant, Abdiwahab Adan Ibrahim, lost Sh23.9 million. Others lost millions more. The Standard reported she promised victims their money would be returned with interest after the government paid out.
The Procurement Impunity Complex
What makes Harambee House a recurring venue for this genus of fraud is the intersection of access, prestige, and institutional weakness.
The address carries an almost mystical authority in the minds of investors, particularly those from overseas unfamiliar with the granular mechanics of Kenyan public procurement law.
The idea that a government representative would invite a foreign investor to the President’s own building for a tender meeting is not, on its face, implausible in a country where ministers routinely meet investors, and where the distinction between political favour and formal procurement process has historically been blurred.
That blurring has deep institutional roots.
The Anglo-Leasing scandal, which surfaced in 2002 and reverberated for nearly two decades, involved at least 13 phantom companies awarded security-related government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The contracts were signed through the Office of the President under then-President Mwai Kibaki’s administration.
Anti-corruption czar John Githongo exposed the scheme in a dossier published in 2005 and later concluded that the conspiracy reached the very top of government.
Only one person was ever convicted. The Pandora Papers subsequently revealed offshore trails involving suspects named in the Githongo report, with shell companies moving millions years after the initial exposé.
The pattern of near-impunity is not merely historical.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission noted in early 2024 that the current administration had presided over the dismissal of corruption cases involving senior figures, including Rigathi Gachagua, former Deputy President, facing money laundering allegations involving Sh7.2 billion.
Henry Rotich, the former Treasury Cabinet Secretary whose charges related to the Sh63 billion Arror and Kimwarer dams fraud were dismissed under circumstances widely criticised as prosecution-abetted acquittal, was within 56 days of the acquittal appointed as a senior advisor in the Office of President Ruto. KHRC publicly called on Ruto to revoke the appointment.
At the Office of the Deputy President, the OCCRP and Africa Uncensored have separately documented contracts awarded to companies with ties to serving politicians, including a USD 1.1 million contract to supply honorary medals awarded from the DP’s office in 2016 to Atticon Limited, a company linked to Mithika Linturi, then a senator. Linturi, who denied wrongdoing, was briefly detained after the story was published. Former employees alleged his companies had bid against each other to create the illusion of competition.
The Charges and the Trail
The charges against the seven arrested in the ambulance tender case span conspiracy to defraud under Section 317 of the Penal Code, obtaining by false pretences under Section 313, and multiple counts under the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act, including acquisition, use, and possession of proceeds of crime under Section 4 read with Section 16(1). Police described the offences as involving “forged documents, impersonation of government officials and fake legal entities” designed to convince the Swedish businessman that he had secured a legitimate government contract.
The financial trail threads across continents.
The money originated from a company registered in Lianyungang, China, was wired to an Ecobank Kenya account in Nairobi held by the wanted lawyer, and was dispersed across at least eight transactions between January 30 and February 25, 2026.
Investigators are said to be following the money trail to determine how it was distributed and what role, if any, is played by individuals still inside government. The police affidavit is explicit that the probe has not concluded and that “several other persons, yet to be apprehended, whether government officials or otherwise, may have been involved.”
The involvement of a lawyer as the recipient of the funds adds a significant dimension to the case.
Under Kenya’s Anti-Money Laundering framework, legal practitioners handling client funds are subject to enhanced due diligence obligations.
The use of an advocate’s account to receive proceeds of a fraud, if proven, would expose the legal professional to serious criminal liability under the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act, as well as potential disciplinary proceedings before the Law Society of Kenya.
The fact that the lawyer remains at large and is being actively sought by investigators suggests the financial trail has not yet been fully mapped.
Police are also investigating the security breach dimension of the case: how a criminal syndicate obtained repeated access to one of the most tightly secured government buildings in the country to conduct meetings with a foreign investor over a period of weeks.
That question, investigators say, requires statements from senior government officials who may have been present or aware, and who may require special scheduling to interview.
The Ambulance Sector: A History of Vulnerability
The choice of ambulances as the tender vehicle is not incidental. Emergency medical procurement has been a recurring site of fraud in Kenya.
The KEMSA scandal under the Kenyatta administration saw the state medical supplies agency lose close to Ksh8 billion in procurement irregularities during the COVID-19 pandemic, including for medical equipment.
More recently, Kenya’s Social Health Authority has faced public accountability questions over procurement transparency as the government rolls out its flagship universal health coverage programme, the SHA.
A tender for 500 ambulances priced at USD 65,500 per unit, totalling over USD 32.75 million, is not an absurd-sounding figure in a market where genuine government ambulance procurement programmes have historically involved hundreds of units at comparable price points.
That surface plausibility is precisely what makes such fabrications work. The con only collapses when a victim with the means and the determination to conduct independent due diligence pushes hard enough. Zaitoun was such a victim: he returned to Kenya specifically to confront the discrepancies and was at the meeting table when police walked in.
A Structural Problem Without a Structural Solution
What the ambulance tender case, the arms deal, the laptop tenders, and the impersonator fraud share is not merely opportunism.
They represent the exploitation of a structural ambiguity at the heart of Kenyan public procurement: the historic entanglement of political favour and formal process that has made it credible, to foreign investors in particular, that a government contract might be secured not through the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act portal but through a private meeting at a powerful address.
President Kenyatta ordered in 2018 that all government tender notices and contract awards be published on the Public Procurement Information Portal operated by the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority.
The directive has not ended the problem.
Five years after that instruction, the OCCRP and Africa Uncensored were still documenting politically connected companies securing inflated contracts through loopholes in the IFMIS system that the Auditor General had publicly described as being “deliberately manipulated to hide information.”
The U.S. Trade Representative’s 2024 report on Foreign Trade Barriers noted that American firms were losing Kenyan government contracts to foreign firms willing to pay bribes, with senior officials specifically demanding facilitation payments.
The arrests at Harambee House on March 10, 2026, are dramatic. They are also, on the arc of Kenya’s institutional history with this class of fraud, unlikely to be the last. The seven suspects will appear before court on March 17.
The lawyer remains at large.
Investigators say more arrests are coming. Whether accountability follows or the pattern of acquittals and dropped cases reasserts itself, as it has so many times before, is the question that will define whether this case is a turning point or merely another chapter in a very long story.
– Crisis could create a ‘domino effect’ that could last ‘for an extended period of time’ and drive higher food prices worldwide, say experts
The escalating US-Israel war with Iran could ripple through global food markets, analysts warn, threatening fertilizer supplies, agricultural production and food prices.
The closure of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz – a route that carries about a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas and vast volumes of oil – has already sent oil prices soaring to alarming highs.
But experts say fertilizer exports from the Gulf, food imports into the region and global agricultural supply chains could also face pressure if the crisis drags on, potentially driving higher food prices worldwide.
The Gulf is a major center for fertilizer production and exports, with Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain all depending on the Strait of Hormuz for their shipments.
Together, these five accounted for 23% of global ammonia trade and 34% of global urea trade in 2024, according to the International Fertilizer Association.
The wider Middle East region made up nearly 30% of global export supply for major fertilizers, including nitrogen, phosphate and potash, while almost half of all global urea trade also originated there in 2024.
A 2025 analysis by analytics firm Kpler estimated that a closure of the Strait of Hormuz could tighten fertilizer supply chains by 33%, with sulfur supplies falling by 44% and urea by 30%.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, pointed out that the Gulf’s importance goes beyond fertilizer exports, as it is also a major source of LNG, a key feedstock in fertilizer production.
The major fertilizer products “are going to come under pressure by the fact that there’s just less natural gas available,” Glauber told Anadolu.
He warned that prolonged restrictions on nitrogen-based fertilizer shipments could have a major effect, with major importers such as Brazil, the US, Thailand and India especially exposed to disruption.
Staple crops such as corn, wheat and rice also depend heavily on fertilizers, making food production vulnerable if supplies tighten.
“Without a steady supply of high-grade commercial fertilizer, yields really suffer, and that’s going to have direct implications for international agricultural trade and food prices around the world,” said Richard Volpe, an agricultural economics expert at California Polytechnic State University.
He said weak harvests could also affect future seasons, creating a “domino effect” that could last “for an extended period of time.”
– Imports and inflation
The conflict could also hit food supply chains through shipping delays and congestion at ports.
Volpe said the first effects would likely be seen in longer waiting times and disrupted trade routes: “That’s absolutely likely to affect food availability around the world.”
He said fertilizer shortages may not hit the current crop cycle immediately because many farmers have already bought supplies for this season, but the problem could become more serious for the next planting season.
Glauber, meanwhile, said farmers may end up reducing fertilizer use or switching to crops that need fewer inputs if the conflict drags on.
Analysts say the strongest link between the conflict and food prices may ultimately be energy.
Volpe called higher energy costs the most pressing concern for the global food supply chain, citing their “multiplier effect.”
“As we go down the food supply chain, go downstream towards consumers, those higher energy costs are going to be compounded,” he said.
Even if the conflict ended quickly, higher energy costs could still push food prices up within one or two months, he added.
Glauber agreed that energy markets are likely to have a bigger effect on retail food prices than fertilizer shortages alone.
– Can markets adapt?
Experts say the length of the conflict will determine how deeply it affects global food systems.
“The longer this conflict persists, the longer will be the ramifications for global food prices and food availability,” Volpe said.
He warned that some short-term effects are already unavoidable.
“I think we’re already past the point of no return for seeing some short-term impacts,” he added.
Kenneth Medlock, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said agricultural markets would need to find alternative supplies, “which are not typically readily available.”
He emphasized that the system’s full flexibility depends on other facilities’ capacity to increase output in the short run.
Volpe said the crisis shows why countries need more flexible trade routes and supply chains.
“This conflict is just another sort of reminder that it makes sense to keep as many trade pathways open and flexible at any point in time,” he said.
Glauber said markets would eventually adapt, but at a price.
“I’m confident that the market will work in that regard, but at a higher cost. That’s, I think, the real concern,” he added.
Medlock also believes the global agricultural system has some capacity to adjust.
“It is important to note that none of the Persian Gulf countries rank in the top 20 countries for global agricultural commodity exports, so the global system has the capacity to manage what is going on, albeit at higher prices,” Medlock said.
The story of the Tuju property dispute has taken many dramatic turns over the decade it has consumed the Kenyan legal system. It has wound through courts in London and Nairobi.
It has produced a UK judgment, a Kenyan enforcement order, Court of Appeal affirmations and a Supreme Court refusal to suspend execution. It has generated receivership proceedings, auctioneer deployments and police-escorted property visits.
But nothing in the preceding ten years of litigation matches what Nelson Havi, Senior Counsel and former president of the Law Society of Kenya, placed on public record this week when he posted a single, detonating claim on his verified social media account.
Havi stated, without qualification and without apparent concern for the personal jeopardy in which such a statement might place him, that former High Court judge Joseph Mutava had confessed to investigators that he was collecting the Sh10.4 million bribe on behalf of Lady Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mongare, the presiding judge of the very commercial dispute in which the money was allegedly being solicited.
“Joseph Mutava (he used to be a Judge) confessed that he was collecting the bribe on behalf of Lady Justice Josephine Mongare,” Havi wrote. Then he turned to the institution built to police the bench: “Why has the JSC not taken action or issued a statement on the matter?”
The question landed on a Commission that, as of the time of publication, had produced no response. Not a statement of receipt. Not a notice of investigation. Not even a procedural assurance that it was aware of the allegation.
The Judicial Service Commission, the constitutionally mandated guardian of judicial integrity, has been publicly informed by a senior advocate of 30 years’ standing that a sitting High Court judge was the intended recipient of a bribe in an active commercial matter. Its response, so far, is silence.
The Confession That Changes Everything
To understand why Havi’s post is not merely incendiary commentary but a statement of profound legal consequence, it is necessary to recall the sequence of events on Monday, March 9, 2026. On that day, Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission detectives arrested Mutava, advocate Kimani Wachira and two other suspects at Tuju’s Karen property, where Tuju alleged they had arrived claiming to act on behalf of a judge and seeking money to influence the outcome of his case.
The EACC confirmed the arrests, describing the alleged demand as USD 80,000, approximately Sh10.4 million, to influence a commercial dispute before the High Court.
Also on that same day, Justice Josephine Mongare delivered her ruling in the matter of Dari Limited and Raphael Tuju versus the East African Development Bank and Garam Investment Auctioneers.
She struck out the amended plaint filed by Tuju and Dari Limited, describing it as what she called a blatant abuse of court process meant to frustrate lawful recovery efforts after years of default and litigation. The way was cleared for auctioneers to proceed against Tuju’s Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary and properties linked to Dari Business Park.
The ruling and the arrests occurred on the same calendar date.
If Havi’s account of Mutava’s confession is accurate, and Havi has made this claim as a named Senior Counsel on a verified public platform, then the money was being solicited by a man now claiming to carry the instruction of the judge who, within hours, was disposing of the case.
The logical consequences of that sequence, if the confession is corroborated, are of a gravity that the EACC, the JSC and the Director of Public Prosecutions will need to confront in the most direct terms.
A Prior History the JSC Has Already Seen
For those tracking Havi’s relationship with both Mongare and Justice Alfred Mabeya, the second half of his post carries equal weight.
Having demanded accountability from the JSC over the Mutava confession, he added a statement that reads as a prosecutorial indictment of the commission itself: “The last time a complaint against her and Mr Justice Alfred Mabeya was made to the JSC, the two bribed their way out.”
That is not a vague allegation. The JSC complaint against Lady Justice Mongare is a matter of documented public record. In July 2025, Havi filed a formal petition to the Judicial Service Commission, sworn on affidavit, seeking the removal of Justice Mongare from the bench over her conduct in case HCCCOMM/E610/2024, a dispute between Gikomba Business Centre Limited and Pumwani Riyadha Mosque Committee.
Havi described her handling of the matter as gross misconduct, misbehaviour and incompetence, and declared that the injury to his clients could only be remedied by her removal. The JSC received the petition. Nothing of consequence followed.
The complaint against Justice Mabeya runs deeper and further back. In December 2024, Havi publicly named two senior advocates who he alleged had never lost a case before Mabeya at the Milimani Commercial and Tax Division, suggesting an industry of judicial corruption linking the judge to specific practitioners.
In January 2025, the JSC received a formal petition from Havi alleging gross misconduct and misbehaviour against Mabeya. That petition joined a separate complaint filed in December 2024 by Edwin Harold Dande raising similar concerns. In August 2025, the JSC dismissed Havi’s petition against Mabeya, ruling that the application amounted to an invitation to the commission to sit on appeal over a matter already determined, which fell outside its jurisdiction.
What Havi is now alleging, in terms that his standing as a senior advocate makes impossible to simply dismiss, is that the dismissal of his petition against Mabeya was not a jurisdictional finding.
It was the product of bribery. That the commission, which is constitutionally charged with safeguarding judicial integrity, was itself corrupted in the process of evaluating a complaint about a corrupt judge. And that the same fate now awaits any complaint about Mongare, unless the arrest of Mutava and his alleged confession have altered the calculus in ways that even the JSC cannot navigate around.
Mongare’s Rulings: A Trail Through the Tuju Matter
Lady Justice Josephine Wayua Wambua Mongare was appointed to the High Court in 2022, assigned to the Commercial and Tax Division at Milimani. She holds a Master of Laws degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Nairobi and a postgraduate diploma from the Kenya School of Law. Before the bench she had served as a senior partner and as a governance consultant for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Red Cross and UNICEF. The record of her appointment is one of considerable professional distinction.
Her engagement with the Tuju property dispute has been the most consequential of her tenure.
The dispute originates in a loan facility agreement signed in April 2015 between Dari Limited, Tuju’s company, and the East African Development Bank. After default, the High Court of Justice in England ordered repayment of over USD 15 million in June 2019. That judgment was recognised by Kenyan courts in 2020, upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2023, and left intact when the Supreme Court declined to suspend enforcement. The path to auction of Tuju’s Karen properties, the Dari Business Park on Ngong Road and the Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary, had been confirmed at every level of the judicial hierarchy before the matter returned to Mongare’s bench.
In May 2025, Mongare had issued interim orders halting the auction.
She extended protections and maintained the status quo, a posture that Tuju’s lawyers welcomed as evidence that their client’s applications were being taken seriously.
But the orders proved fragile. Tuju’s court filings alleged that a transfer of title to one of the properties was processed in November 2024 and completed in February 2025 while her orders were still in force. He reported the violation to police. He wrote to the Chief Land Registrar.
He alleged that a DCI officer accompanied buyers from Ultra Eureka Limited to the property in January 2025.
None of these interventions produced relief before Justice Mongare.
Her ruling of March 9, 2026 was categorical. She found that the issues raised by Tuju and Dari Limited had already been adjudicated and were res judicata. The amended plaint was struck out. The bank’s recovery process was cleared to proceed.
That ruling arrived on the day detectives were arresting men who, if Havi’s account of the confession is accurate, had been dispatched to collect money on her behalf.
Tuju at the Gate
Raphael Tuju.
Raphael Tuju’s response to the unfolding situation has been the response of a man who believes the courts have become the machinery of his destruction. Standing at the disputed Dari Business Park this week, he told journalists that individuals identifying themselves as Mr Chebet, Mr Kiprono and Mr Kiprop had arrived claiming to have purchased the property. He accused them of intimidation. He said the ownership dispute remained live in court. And then he delivered the statement that has circulated across Kenya’s legal and political classes with the velocity of something that cannot be unsaid.
“They will have to kill me first and organise a big burial for me in Rarieda before they take this property,” Tuju said. It is the declaration of a man for whom the language of law has been exhausted and replaced by the language of physical survival.
That a former Cabinet secretary, a former member of Parliament, a man who has contested his dispossession through every tier of the Kenyan and international judicial system, has arrived at this formulation, is a statement about the state of the courts that no bar association communique or JSC press release can adequately absorb.
Tuju’s identification of the arrested suspects as individuals claiming to act on behalf of a judge was the thread that the EACC pulled.
The arrests that followed gave investigators Mutava, Wachira and two others. Mutava was released on Sh200,000 police cash bail alongside his co-suspects.
The EACC confirmed it would forward the completed investigation to the Director of Public Prosecutions for review and potential charging. The DPP has not yet indicated whether the confession reported by Havi forms part of the material before it.
The Anatomy of a Captured Commission
Havi’s second accusation, that the JSC allowed both Mongare and Mabeya to bribe their way out of previous complaints, is the more structurally devastating of his two claims.
The EACC arrest of Mutava is a criminal matter. It will produce a prosecution or it will not. But the allegation that the institution responsible for judicial discipline is itself corruptible, that complaints about judges are resolved not through due process but through the financial persuasion of commission members, is an allegation about the entire architecture of judicial accountability in Kenya.
The Mabeya record gives the allegation specific texture.
A 2015 JSC complaint against Mabeya was withdrawn by the complainant after the judge’s accusers were unable to produce evidence. Mabeya denied all wrongdoing.
In 2020, a second petition seeking Mabeya’s removal was filed and subsequently withdrawn, with reporting at the time suggesting the petitioner had been financially induced to abandon the complaint. In December 2024, Havi named specific advocates alleged to have an unbroken winning record before Mabeya, raising structural questions about the relationship between the judge and those practitioners. In January 2025, the JSC received Havi’s formal petition. In August 2025, the commission dismissed it, citing jurisdictional grounds.
Havi’s characterisation of that sequence as bribery, and his linking of the Mongare complaint to the same pattern, means that he is not merely alleging that individual judges are corrupt.
He is alleging that the mechanism for holding corrupt judges accountable is under the control of those same judges. That the JSC is not a check on judicial corruption but a clearing house for it.
This is an allegation of constitutional dimension. It is also an allegation that, if true, explains everything about the Tuju case that has so far defied explanation: why protections granted were not enforced, why property transfers proceeded through ostensibly subsisting orders, why no action was taken against those who allegedly violated court directions, and why a man who has litigated his case at every available level still finds himself facing auctioneers at his gate.
The Question That Demands an Answer
At the time of publication, the Judicial Service Commission has not issued any statement about Nelson Havi’s public allegation that Joseph Mutava confessed to collecting a bribe on behalf of Lady Justice Josephine Mongare.
Justice Mongare has not commented. The JSC Chairperson has not commented. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has not indicated whether the confession is part of its review file. The Chief Justice, whose office carries constitutional responsibility for the supervision of the judiciary, has been silent.
Lady Justice Josephine Mongare is a sitting judicial officer. She has not been charged with any offence. She has not been suspended.
She has not been called before any tribunal. She is, as far as the formal record shows, an active member of the Commercial and Tax Division bench at Milimani, available to preside over commercial disputes involving Kenyan citizens and foreign institutions alike.
What the formal record also shows is this: a disgraced former judge has been arrested and is alleged by Kenya’s most prominent accountability lawyer to have confessed that the money he was collecting was for her.
A JSC complaint about her conduct was filed months ago and produced no outcome.
A parallel complaint about her alleged colleague in corruption was dismissed in circumstances that Havi describes as the product of bribery.
And the ruling that cleared the way for a former Cabinet secretary to be evicted from his property was delivered on the same day as the arrests, by the same judge whose name now sits at the centre of Kenya’s most explosive judicial scandal in a generation.
Nelson Havi has asked why the JSC has taken no action. It is the right question, and it deserves an answer in public, under oath, and without further delay.
UPDATE:
Tuju has been allowed to appeal a High Court ruling that cleared the way for the auction of his Karen properties over a Sh1.9 billion debt dispute.
Justice Josephine Mongare certified his application as urgent and granted him and his company Dari Limited leave to appeal the March 9 ruling.
However, the court declined to stop the execution of the decision, meaning the properties could still be auctioned as the case proceeds.
The matter will be mentioned again on March 17 for further directions.
A Chinese national has been arrested in Kenya’s main airport accused of attempting to smuggle more than 2,000 queen garden ants out of the country.
Zhang Kequn was intercepted during a security check at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in the capital Nairobi after authorities discovered a large consignment of live ants in his luggage bound for China.
He has yet to respond to the accusation but investigators said in court that he was linked to an ant-trafficking network that was broken up in Kenya last year.
The ants are protected by international bio-diversity treaties and their trade is highly regulated.
Last year, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) warned of a growing demand for garden ants – scientifically known as Messor cephalotes – in Europe and Asia, where collectors keep them as pets.
A state prosecutor told the court on Wednesday that Zhang had packed some ants in test tubes, while others were concealed in tissue paper rolls hidden in his luggage.
“Within his personal luggage there was found 1,948 garden ants packed in specialised test tubes,” prosecutor Allen Mulama told the court.
“A further 300 live ants were recovered concealed in three rolls of tissue paper within the luggage,” he added.
The prosecutor asked the court to allow the suspect’s electronic devices – phone and laptop – to be forensically examined.
Duncan Juma, a senior KWS official, told the BBC that more arrests were expected as investigators widen their probe into other Kenyan towns where ant harvesting was suspected to be ongoing.
The four suspects – two Belgians, a Vietnamese and a Kenyan – had pleaded guilty to the charges after their arrest in what the KWS described as “a co-ordinated, intelligence-led operation”.
The Belgians told the court that they were collecting the highly sought-after ants as a hobby and didn’t think it was illegal.
Investigators now say Zhang was the mastermind behind this trafficking ring but apparently escaped Kenya last year using a different passport.
On Wednesday, the court allowed prosecutors to detain him for five days to enable detectives to conduct further investigations.
The KWS, which is more used to protecting larger creatures, such as lions and elephants, described last year’s ruling as a “landmark case”.
The ants seized last year were giant African harvester ants, which KWS said were ecologically important, noting that their removal from the ecosystem could disrupt soil health and biodiversity.
It is believed that the intended destinations were the exotic pet markets in Europe and Asia.
