Kenya Insights

Category: Opinion

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

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

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

    The numbers, on their face, are a celebration.

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

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

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

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

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

    This is that conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    4. THE MTN BOMB TICKING BENEATH THE BALANCE SHEET

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

    This alone is not a crisis.

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

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

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

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

    The bank says it does not need additional capital.

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

    5. THE FAMILY PROBLEM THAT GOVERNANCE DOCUMENTS CANNOT FULLY RESOLVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The NSE has suffered its own credibility wounds.

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

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

    7. THE TIER 1 ASPIRATION AS BOTH PROMISE AND PRESSURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

    THE VERDICT: A LEGITIMATE OPPORTUNITY WRAPPED IN LEGITIMATE RISK

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

    The bank has genuine strengths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The listing provides a platform.

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

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

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

  • Itumbi Claims Kalonzo Has Settled on Sifuna as Running Mate

    Itumbi Claims Kalonzo Has Settled on Sifuna as Running Mate

    NAIROBI, June 10, 2026 — President William Ruto’s digital strategist Dennis Itumbi has sparked fresh political debate after claiming that Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka has settled on Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna as his preferred running mate for the 2027 General Election.

    In a lengthy open letter circulated on social media and addressed to a figure he referred to as “Jofri”, a name widely interpreted in political circles as a reference to former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, Itumbi laid out what he described as the opposition’s emerging political strategy ahead of the next election.

    According to Itumbi, Kalonzo and Sifuna are expected to lead a coalition under the banner of the Ukombozi Linda Mwananchi Alliance, bringing together Kalonzo’s Komboa Kenya campaign and Sifuna’s Linda Mwananchi movement.

    The strategist further alleged that the opposition has already identified key candidates for Nairobi’s top elective seats.

    He claimed Embakasi East MP Babu Owino has been earmarked for the Nairobi governor race, while former Public Service Cabinet Secretary Irungu Nyakera is being considered for the Senate seat.

    In a pointed attack on Gachagua, Itumbi claimed the opposition leadership had rejected advice allegedly advocating for a Kikuyu candidate in the Nairobi governor contest, suggesting growing tensions over the direction of opposition politics and the role of the Mount Kenya region within the coalition.

    The most serious allegations in Itumbi’s statement concerned the planned protests scheduled for June 24 and June 25, as well as the anticipated Saba Saba demonstrations.

    Without providing evidence, Itumbi accused Gachagua of being the architect of the planned protests and claimed the former deputy president follows a recurring pattern of distancing himself from events when demonstrations turn chaotic.

    The allegations are likely to intensify an already heated political environment as opposition leaders continue to mobilise supporters against the Kenya Kwanza administration.

    Neither Kalonzo, Sifuna nor Gachagua had publicly responded to Itumbi’s claims by Wednesday evening.

    The remarks come at a time of heightened political activity within opposition ranks. Kalonzo recently intensified his Komboa Kenya campaign, signalling his intention to mount another presidential bid, while Sifuna and allies associated with the Linda Mwananchi movement have been conducting political rallies across several regions.

    Political observers view Itumbi’s intervention as part of the increasingly aggressive battle for narrative control ahead of 2027.

    While some interpret the claims as an attempt to expose and potentially destabilise opposition plans, others argue the level of detail contained in the statement suggests deep knowledge of ongoing discussions within rival political camps.

    The claims also place fresh pressure on Gachagua, who has been seeking to consolidate support following his fallout with President Ruto and subsequent impeachment battles.

    Whether Itumbi’s assertions reflect genuine political realignments or form part of a broader contest for public opinion remains unclear. What is certain is that the statement has injected fresh intrigue into an opposition landscape that is still taking shape more than a year before the next General Election.

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

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

    By David Ndii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The first is money.

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

    The second is dynastic hubris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally published on X, May 27, 2026

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

    The Big Gaffe That Has Become Kenya’s Foreign Ministry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    THE PROTOCOL SCANDAL THAT REFUSES TO GO AWAY

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

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

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

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

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

    Mudavadi does not appear to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Presidential technology envoy Philip Thigo did the same.

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

    THE SING’OEI PROBLEM

    PS Sing’oei

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

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

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

    He is, by any measure, an intelligent man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Senators debated summoning the PS for contempt.

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

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

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

    THE STANDARD THAT WAS SET BEFORE THEM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    THE TANZANIA CATASTROPHE AND WHAT IT REVEALED

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

    Tanzanian authorities detained and deported several members of the group.

    Mwangi was not merely deported.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It makes five central claims in his defence.

    Each of them deserves a direct answer.

    REBUTTAL CLAIM 1: THE AMBASSADOR BASUNA INCIDENT WAS TABLOID EXAGGERATION

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

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

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

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

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

    The rebuttal has somehow interpreted professional discretion as an exoneration.

    It is neither.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    REBUTTAL CLAIM 3: THE DEEPFAKE APOLOGY SHOWED ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY

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

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

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

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

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

    This is not a serious argument.

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

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

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

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

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

    The rebuttal does not address what the sources actually alleged.

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

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

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

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

    By year four, the culture is yours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    One does not cancel the other.

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

    WHAT THE REBUTTAL ITSELF REVEALS

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

    It was circulated promptly and with clear organisation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    THE STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE OF KENYA’S DIPLOMATIC IDENTITY

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

    All three are in measurable deterioration under the current leadership.

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

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

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

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

    President Ruto addressed the assembled envoys on strategic communication.

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

    The conference appears to have changed nothing.

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

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

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

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

    A MINISTRY THAT DOES NOT KNOW WHAT IT DOES NOT KNOW

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

    Mudavadi is not Sing’oei.

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

    This gap in the defence is itself revealing.

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

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

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

    Kenya’s neighbours are watching.

    Its partners are watching.

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

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

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

    It has merely added a footnote to it.

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

    His ambassador does.

    His PS does.

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

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

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

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

    By Johaness Wamugo

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

    That moment has now arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    These are technical changes, but their implications are substantial.

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

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

    When systems are tightened, those affected are rarely neutral.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    By Wakili Makamu Mutua

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That is where the analysis properly begins.

  • Education Insurance Policies Are the Biggest Regulated Scam in Kenya

    Education Insurance Policies Are the Biggest Regulated Scam in Kenya

    A Nairobi woman recently posted a six-minute video to social media that deserves to be playing on loop in the boardrooms of every life insurer operating in this country.

    In it, she describes how she lost Sh540,000 paid into Britam Holdings’ Akiba Savings Plan after she lost her job and could no longer sustain monthly premiums of Sh90,000.

    When she escalated her case to Britam’s customer care desk, she was told her entire contribution had been forfeited. “Where did it go?” she asks, her voice breaking. “This was supposed to be an investment that makes profit.”

    Where it went is not a mystery. Her money went exactly where the product was designed to send it. Into commissions, administrative charges, mortality cost reserves, and ultimately into the insurer’s bottom line.

    Britam posted a pre-tax profit of Sh7.33 billion for the year ended December 2024, a 52 per cent jump from the Sh4.82 billion it recorded the previous year. The company holds 25 per cent of Kenya’s life insurance market for the eighteenth consecutive year. Business is spectacular. It always is when the product punishes the very income shock that most customers will inevitably face.

    But this story is not only about Britam. It is about an entire industry, a regulatory architecture, and a financial culture that has for decades sold endowment and education insurance policies to Kenyan parents under the most emotionally manipulative pretences imaginable, while carefully concealing the structural realities of what those parents were actually buying.

    “I personally lost 900k to the same Britam after contributing 30k a month for about 3 years. It is sold as an INVESTMENT, yet it is actually a policy — when you stop paying, you lose everything.” — Kenyan investor, social media

    THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE TRAP

    Let us strip sentiment from this and look at the structure of the product. An education endowment policy, offered under names such as Britam’s Boresha Elimu and Super Education Plus, Jubilee’s Career Life Plus, CIC’s Academia Policy, ICEA Lion’s Usomi Bora, Old Mutual’s Elimika, and Madison’s Bima ya Karo, is, at its core, a bundled financial product.

    It combines a long-term savings commitment with a life insurance wrapper. Policy terms run from five to as long as twenty years. Minimum monthly premiums at most providers start from Sh3,000 and scale upward depending on the sum assured. At the upper end of the market, clients are committing Sh30,000, Sh50,000, even Sh90,000 per month for a decade or more.

    Here is the critical detail that almost no agent explains at the point of sale: in most of these products, a policyholder who defaults before a specified threshold — typically the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth policy month — receives nothing. Zero. Not a partial refund, not a surrender value, not an acknowledgement of the premiums paid.

    The entire amount is absorbed. It is described in product documents, when they are disclosed at all, as an absorption into administrative charges, agent commissions, and mortality cost reserves.

    In practice, this means a parent who commits Sh30,000 per month and loses their job after eighteen months has lost Sh540,000 with no legal recourse and no regulatory backstop.

    A parent paying Sh50,000 per month who is retrenched after two years has lost Sh1.2 million.

    These are not edge cases. They are predictable outcomes in an economy where formal employment accounts for only fifteen per cent of the total workforce of 20.8 million people, where real private sector wages declined in inflation-adjusted terms for the fifth consecutive year in 2024, and where sudden income disruption is not the exception but the condition of Kenyan economic life.

    WHAT THE FIRST MONTHS OF PREMIUMS ACTUALLY BUY

    The industry’s own internal logic reveals the deception. In the early months of any endowment policy, the client’s premiums are not primarily accumulating savings.

    They are servicing the distribution infrastructure that sold them the policy. Agent commissions on life endowment products in Kenya are paid heavily in the first year, front-loaded to incentivise new business.

    Administrative fees are deducted. Mortality charges for the attached life cover are levied. Only the residual portion begins to compound toward the eventual maturity benefit.

    This means that a policyholder in their first two years is, in financial terms, primarily funding the system. Their money is paying the agent who signed them up, the overhead of the insurer, and a thin slice of actual savings.

    The notion that they are accumulating an investment from day one is a fiction that is rarely corrected by the agent, who is compensated on new business written and not on policy persistency.

    Industry insiders have confirmed for years what policy data would show if insurers were required to disclose it: lapse rates in the first two years of education endowment policies are substantial.

    Agents are incentivised to sell without adequately stress-testing whether a prospective client can sustain premiums for five, ten, or fifteen years.

    The IRA has issued fines to insurers for failure to honour claims, but has published no specific directive requiring insurers to illustrate at point of sale what a client would recover if they lapsed in the first twenty-four months. That gap in regulation is not an oversight. It is a structural benefit to the industry.

    “I once tried to enlighten some policyholders that buying term life insurance plus a money market fund is a lot better than an education policy. I was told: ‘Please do not educate our stupid policy holders.’” — Industry practitioner

    THE NUMBERS THE SALESPEOPLE WILL NEVER SHOW YOU

    Let us conduct the comparison that every Kenyan parent considering an education policy deserves to see before they sign anything.

    Assume a parent commits Sh10,000 per month for fifteen years. The insurer’s marketing material will show them a guaranteed lump sum at maturity, with loyalty bonuses and life cover built in.

    What the marketing material will not show them is the opportunity cost of locking that money into a product whose real internal rate of return, after fees and charges, typically runs between five and seven per cent per annum.

    The same Sh10,000 per month invested in a money market fund generating returns at the current average effective annual rate of around nine to eleven per cent, with complete liquidity and the ability to exit at any time without penalty, would over fifteen years substantially outperform the endowment product.

    At peak Treasury bill yields in mid-2024, those instruments were returning as high as sixteen per cent.

    Even accounting for the CBK rate cuts that have brought yields down in 2025, Kenya’s government securities market has consistently offered returns that dwarf the embedded return inside an education endowment policy, with zero lock-in, zero lapse risk, and no agent commission being deducted from the first shilling.

    Edwin Dande of Cytonn Investments has made the point publicly and precisely: instead of an education insurance policy, buy Government of Kenya treasury bonds with ten, fifteen, or twenty-year maturity dates timed to when your child will enter secondary school or university. You receive biannual coupon payments as income throughout the holding period. Your capital is returned at maturity. Infrastructure bonds carry tax-exempt interest. There is no surrender clause, no lapse provision, no agent collecting a commission from your first twelve months of savings, and no call centre telling you your money has been forfeited.

    The insurers know this comparison exists.

    Their marketing, relentlessly emotional and emphatically vague on fee structures, exists precisely to prevent parents from making it.

    THE PRODUCTS BY NAME

    Britam’s Boresha Elimu Plan is marketed as a comprehensive, flexible education insurance solution aligned with Kenya’s new 2-6-3-3-3 curriculum. It offers three guaranteed lump sum payouts in the last three years of the policy term, which can run from six to eighteen years.

    Premium waiver in the event of the policyholder’s death or disability is included. What the marketing does not foreground is that a client who stops paying before the twenty-fifth month has no cash value to recover, and that the premium waiver applies only in specified circumstances that explicitly exclude unemployment.

    Jubilee’s Career Life Plus is positioned for parents targeting secondary and university education.

    It carries an investment-linked component and offers loyalty bonuses for consistent contributors of over ten years.

    It is an instructive product to examine precisely because it is marketed as investment-linked, a framing that implies equity participation and growth.

    The reality is that an investment-linked endowment is still an endowment: the client bears the fee drag, the early-year commission deductions, and the surrender risk. The investment link does not convert the product from insurance into a transparent, liquid financial instrument.

    CIC’s Academia Policy, Old Mutual’s Elimika, ICEA Lion’s Usomi Bora, and Madison’s Bima ya Karo follow substantially the same structural logic across different premium floors and term ranges. All combine savings with life cover.

    All carry early-lapse provisions that can result in total forfeiture of premiums paid.

    All are sold through agent networks that are compensated on new business and not on the long-term solvency of the client’s relationship with the product.

    In each case, the accompanying money market fund product offered by the same institution would have delivered superior, accessible, and penalty-free returns for a client whose income ever came under pressure.

    THE REGULATORY FAILURE

    The Insurance Regulatory Authority operates under the Insurance Act Cap 487, with a statutory consumer disputes mechanism under Section 204A of the Act. Aggrieved policyholders can file written complaints with the Commissioner of Insurance, whose determinations are subject to appeal to the Insurance Tribunal within thirty days.

    The IRA has fined insurers for failure to honour claims. It has not published any directive requiring insurers to provide prospective policyholders with a written illustration of what they would recover if they lapsed before the twenty-fifth month.

    That omission is the central regulatory scandal in this story. The IRA mandates disclosure of the maturity benefit. It does not mandate disclosure of the lapse scenario, which is statistically far more likely for a significant proportion of the policyholders being sold these products.

    Kenya’s financial consumer protection architecture makes it compulsory to tell a buyer what they will receive if everything goes right. It does not compel the seller to explain what happens when something goes wrong, which in an economy with this level of income volatility, is the scenario that matters most.

    Industry voices have for years argued that the IRA should require life insurers to separate the insurance and investment components of endowment products in their disclosures, and that the Capital Markets Authority should assert regulatory jurisdiction over any product sold as an investment.

    The proposal has not advanced. The status quo, in which an insurer can market a product as investment-grade to buyers who do not understand that it is an insurance policy governed by insurance law, with insurance surrender terms, and insurance commission structures, continues undisturbed.

    “IRA should insist that insurance sells only protection and CMA should insist that any insurance company selling investments brings it under the CMA umbrella. Insurance companies should disclose how much income is coming from forfeited premiums.”

    WHAT SMART PARENTS SHOULD DO INSTEAD

    The case for education insurance is not wholly without merit in a narrow sense. The death benefit and premium waiver provision is a genuine protection.

    If a policyholder dies and the insurer waives remaining premiums while paying out the maturity benefit, a child’s education is secured regardless of the parent’s absence.

    Term life insurance provides this protection at a fraction of the cost, without locking the savings component into an illiquid, penalty-laden vehicle.

    The rational financial structure for a Kenyan parent planning for a child’s education is to separate the functions.

    Buy term life insurance, which is cheap, offers high cover, and can be cancelled without penalty. Then invest the remainder in instruments that are liquid, transparent, and governed by the Capital Markets Authority.

    Money market funds averaging nine to eleven per cent in effective annual returns are accessible from as little as Sh1,000 via platforms including Britam’s own asset management division, Sanlam, ICEA Lion, CIC, and the Co-operative Bank unit trust platform.

    Government treasury bonds, particularly infrastructure bonds with tax-exempt coupons, provide long-term, inflation-beating returns with capital guaranteed by the state and no surrender clause in existence anywhere in the term.

    The insurer does not want you to know this.

    The agent does not want you to know this. The product literature is written so that you do not compare. Every page of the Boresha Elimu or Career Life Plus marketing is designed to make you feel that refusing the product is a failure of parental responsibility, rather than the financially literate decision it actually is.

    THE BOTTOM LINE

    Education insurance policies are not illegal. They are, in the strict technical sense, authorised, supervised, and compliant financial instruments. That is precisely the problem.

    The regulatory framework has been designed to make them legal, not to make them fair. It mandates disclosure of what the product delivers when held to maturity. It does not mandate disclosure of what the product costs when life intervenes, as life, in Kenya, has an unfortunate habit of doing.

    The woman in the viral video lost Sh540,000. The investor who spent three years paying Sh30,000 a month to Britam lost Sh900,000.

    Across the nation, thousands of policyholders who trusted an agent, believed the brochure, and signed a commitment they could not ultimately sustain have lost money that, deployed differently, would have grown, remained accessible, and survived the income shocks that education endowment policies are specifically designed not to cover.

    Their losses are not bad luck. They are the intended operating mechanism of the product.

    Until the IRA requires that every education endowment policy be sold alongside a written, quantified illustration of the lapse scenario; until the CMA asserts jurisdiction over any product sold as an investment regardless of the insurer’s regulatory domicile; and until insurers are required to publish the annual income they derive from forfeited premiums, this industry will continue to do exactly what it is currently doing: extracting wealth from Kenyan families in the name of their children’s futures, with the full blessing of the law.

    ___

    Complaints against insurance companies can be directed to the Insurance Regulatory Authority consumer disputes desk. The IRA toll-free complaints line is 0800 723 225.

    For policyholders who have already passed the twenty-fifth month threshold, a surrender value is available from the insurer, though it will be substantially below total premiums paid. Those who believe they were not adequately informed of lapse terms at point of sale may file a formal written complaint with Britam’s customer service and, if unsatisfied, escalate to the IRA.

  • Fixer’s Deal for Nation Media Raises Fears for Press Independence and Ruto’s 2027 Bid

    Fixer’s Deal for Nation Media Raises Fears for Press Independence and Ruto’s 2027 Bid

    The Economist has raised the alarm. Kenya Insights goes further. The sale of the Nation Media Group to Tanzanian billionaire Rostam Azizi is not merely a commercial transaction with uncertain editorial consequences.

    It is, on the available evidence, the most structurally dangerous transfer of media power in East African history — timed, whether by design or fortune, to deliver maximum political utility to a Kenyan president fighting for his political survival in 2027.

    On March 10, 2026, in the gilded surroundings of the Serena Hotel in Nairobi, two men signed a document that ended 66 years of one of Africa’s most durable institutional arrangements. Sultan Ali Allana, representing the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, handed the keys of Nation Media Group to Rostam Abdulrasul Azizi, Tanzania’s first and most controversial dollar billionaire.

    The pen strokes took seconds. Their consequences will unfold across a decade.

    NMG is not a media company in the ordinary sense. It is a constitutional fixture. Its Daily Nation, Business Daily, NTV Kenya, The EastAfrican, Uganda’s Daily Monitor, Tanzania’s Mwananchi and The Citizen, and Rwanda Today collectively form the most credible independent information infrastructure in East and Central Africa, reaching over 62 million digital users monthly and thousands more through print and broadcast.

    For six decades, that infrastructure was owned by a philanthropic institution — the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development — insulated by both governance design and institutional culture from the transactional pressures of African politics. That insulation is now gone.

    In its place stands a man who built his fortune through intimate proximity to power, who resigned from Tanzania’s parliament under the shadow of a corruption scandal that brought down a prime minister, who personally counts among his close associates every sitting head of state in the four countries where NMG operates, and who has a Sh16.8 billion gas plant on the Kenyan coast that depends on continued goodwill from the very government his new newsrooms are supposed to hold to account.

    The Economist, in a careful piece published on March 19, noted the conflict of interest with characteristic restraint and asked whether Azizi could deliver on his pledges of editorial independence.

    This website — which has reported on Kenya’s political economy, its courts, its regulatory agencies and its media for years — believes the question deserves a blunter answer: the structural conditions for editorial interference are already fully assembled.

    Whether Azizi uses them will depend on his character.

    But character, history shows, is the least reliable protection any free press has ever had.

    THE PRESIDENT AT THE GROUNDBREAKING

    Begin with the most conspicuous fact. On February 24, 2023 — five months into William Ruto’s presidency — the head of state personally presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for Azizi’s Taifa Gas liquefied petroleum gas plant at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Mombasa.

    Standing beside the Tanzanian tycoon in the coastal heat, Ruto told the assembled crowd: “I know the struggles he has been through to get to this point. The investment should have been done five years ago, but it was delayed due to government shenanigans here in Kenya. I have put that to an end.”

    President William Ruto (left) and Taifa Gas Group Chairman Rostam Aziz during the ground-breaking ceremony of the 30,000-tonne plant at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Likoni, Mombasa on February 24, 2023.

    The plant — a 30,000-metric-tonne LPG terminal described as the largest private foreign direct investment in Kenya since 1977 — was valued at $130 million.

    The Ruto administration had cleared years of regulatory obstruction to make it happen. Azizi’s Taifa Gas was positioned as the vehicle to break the monopoly of Kenya’s domestic gas oligarchy and lower cooking fuel prices, giving the project a powerful populist veneer.

    What it also created was a specific, quantifiable financial dependency: Azizi now holds a flagship infrastructure asset on Kenyan soil whose profitability depends on regulatory licensing, port access, energy policy and the goodwill of the executive branch.

    Three years later, Azizi owns the newsrooms that cover that same government. The conflict of interest is not theoretical. It is structural, financial and explicit.

    Azizi, at a press conference on March 11, attempted to diffuse these concerns by insisting the Taifa Gas permits were obtained under former President Uhuru Kenyatta, not Ruto, and that he maintains relationships with leaders across the political spectrum.

    He also invoked his closeness to the late Raila Odinga, who attended his daughter’s wedding in Dar es Salaam.

    The deflection, while technically defensible in its narrow framing, misses the material point entirely. The question is not under whose government the permits were issued.

    The question is: under whose government the $130 million plant must operate, expand, be relicensed and be protected from competition.

    That government is Ruto’s.

    That government runs until at least 2027 — and, if its incumbent gets his way, well beyond.

    A TELLING COINCIDENCE OF TIMING

    Separately — and the word separately is doing significant work here — the Kenyan government moved with unusual urgency in the same week that Azizi’s acquisition was announced to prioritise settlement of a massive Sh410.6 million debt owed specifically to Nation Media Group.

    The arrears, accumulated through unpaid MyGov government advertising, had sat unresolved across years of the Ruto administration’s chronic delays in paying media houses.

    Budget requests obtained by Kenyan media reveal that settlement of NMG’s debt was elevated to priority status in the same fortnight as the Serena Hotel signing ceremony.

    Government sources have offered no formal explanation for the timing. Analysts and NMG insiders who spoke to this newspaper on condition of anonymity described it as, at minimum, a pointed signal.

    Whether it constitutes an inducement, a quid pro quo or a fortunate coincidence is, at this stage, a matter for the reader to judge.

    What is not in dispute is that a government which The Economist reports makes daily requests to State House to have critical NMG coverage removed suddenly found the money to pay almost half a billion shillings to the group at the precise moment its new owner was taking his seat.

    A BILLIONAIRE WHOSE HISTORY SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

    Rostam Azizi’s biography is, in the African business tradition, inseparable from politics.

    Born in the Tabora region of Tanzania, he was elected to parliament for the Igunga constituency in 1994 as a member of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party.

    He served three terms, rising to become CCM National Treasurer and a member of its Central Committee. He served as campaign manager for Jakaya Kikwete’s successful 2005 presidential run — a role in which, revealingly, he took such personal exception to Nation Media Group’s coverage of the candidate that he subsequently sold his stake in the Mwananchi Communications consortium he had co-founded with the Aga Khan’s group, and went out and bought competing media assets instead.

    That episode alone — of a media co-owner who exited a shared media venture over unfavourable political coverage of his preferred presidential candidate — should give every NMG journalist and editor serious pause.

    It is not a historical abstraction. It is a revealed preference.

    When editorial coverage conflicted with his political loyalties in 2005, Azizi voted with his feet. He now controls the newsrooms outright.

    Then there is the Richmond scandal.

    In 2006, the Tanzanian government awarded an emergency power generation contract to the US-registered Richmond Development Company — bypassing competitive procurement — for the provision of 100 megawatts of diesel generators to the state utility TANESCO.

    The contract, valued at approximately TSh172 billion, included a provision guaranteeing payment of $137,000 daily regardless of actual output.

    The generators underperformed, arrived late, and Tanzania lost over $120 million on the arrangement.

    A parliamentary select committee subsequently found that Richmond’s real proprietors included Prime Minister Edward Lowassa and, in the committee’s own words, “his close friend, Igunga MP Rostam Aziz.” Lowassa resigned. Two ministers resigned. The entire cabinet was dissolved.

    Azizi has consistently and strenuously denied wrongdoing. No criminal prosecution followed.

    He won a defamation case in 2009 against a Tanzanian newspaper that published the allegations verbatim. But in July 2011, when CCM demanded that leaders tainted by corruption allegations step down, Azizi became the first Tanzanian MP in history to voluntarily vacate his parliamentary seat — citing, with audible bitterness, what he called “gutter politics” within the party.

    That exit, widely read as recognition that the reputational damage was terminal, marked his formal pivot from politics to business expansion. The network of presidential relationships, however, never dimmed.

    A PATTERN ACROSS FOUR COUNTRIES

    What makes Azizi’s acquisition categorically more dangerous than a typical conflict-of-interest scenario is the geographic alignment of his political relationships with the precise governments that NMG newsrooms must hold to account. Consider the map.

    In Kenya, where the Daily Nation and Business Daily operate, Azizi has a $130 million energy asset and a documented personal relationship with President Ruto.

    In Tanzania, where Mwananchi and The Citizen publish, Azizi is intimately connected to President Samia Suluhu Hassan and to former President Kikwete — figures from his own party, CCM, a party he served for nearly two decades at the highest levels.

    In Uganda, where the Daily Monitor is one of the few remaining credible independent voices in an increasingly hostile media environment, Azizi has declared himself close to the leadership.

    In Rwanda, where the press freedom environment is among the most restrictive on the continent, NMG publishes Rwanda Today.

    This is not a portfolio of coincidental relationships. It is a complete political coverage of every jurisdiction in which NMG operates.

    A media owner who needs to maintain functional working relations with Ruto in Nairobi, Samia in Dar es Salaam, Museveni in Kampala and Kagame in Kigali — simultaneously — faces structural pressure to ensure that his newsrooms do not produce the kind of sustained, evidence-based investigative journalism that has historically been NMG’s distinguishing contribution to democratic life in the region.

    The Uganda evidence is already instructive. Long before Azizi’s acquisition was announced, Nation Media Group’s Ugandan publications — NTV Uganda and the Daily Monitor — were banned from covering President Yoweri Museveni’s events and barred from parliamentary grounds during his re-election campaign last year.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists documented the ban in detail, noting that security personnel cited unspecified “instructions” in refusing NMG journalists entry.

    Museveni’s deputy presidential press secretary confirmed on social media that the president had personally ordered the exclusion over what he termed “persistent instances of misreporting.” Museveni had previously threatened to force the Daily Monitor into bankruptcy and called journalists “parasites.”

    This is the media environment Azizi now inherits as majority owner in Uganda — a country where he has simultaneously declared himself close to the leadership.

    The tension between those two positions is irreconcilable in any democracy. It is the defining test he faces, in four countries at once, on day one.

    THE RSF RECORD AND THE RUTO PATTERN

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has been explicit about what Ruto’s presidency has meant for Kenyan media.

    Its country assessment states that Ruto’s election in August 2022 marked the start of a difficult period, with heads of major press groups including Nation Media Group and leading outlets such as the Daily Nation being removed from their positions as a direct result of political pressure.

    RSF notes that authorities can influence the appointment of media managers and editors through the regulator — described as nominally independent but practically government-aligned — and that this governmental presence generates systematic self-censorship.

    The Economist, drawing on a senior NMG company insider, reports that State House has made daily requests to have critical coverage removed from NMG platforms since Ruto took office in 2022. During the 2024 Gen Z protests — when Kenyan youth briefly came close to storming parliament — major advertisers including Safaricom withdrew revenue from NMG following its investigations into state surveillance of protesters.

    The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s 2025 Kenya report confirmed that mainstream media houses faced mounting pressure to align their coverage with the government’s narrative following those protests, with the result that audiences migrated in significant numbers toward YouTube, TikTok and independent digital platforms regarded as less susceptible to capture.

    Against this backdrop, the timing of the Azizi acquisition — with Kenya’s 2027 general election eighteen months away and Ruto campaigning for a second term amid significant public discontent — is not an inconvenient coincidence to be dismissed. It is a structural fact to be confronted.

    The president who wants Kenya’s most influential newspaper on his side for 2027 now has a media owner in place who has a quantifiable financial interest in keeping that president happy.

    WHAT AZIZI SAYS — AND WHAT HISTORY SAYS BACK

    Azizi, to his credit, has not hidden from the scrutiny. At the March 11 press conference and in a subsequent television interview on NTV Kenya, he offered detailed rebuttals: the gas permits predated Ruto; his relationships span the political spectrum; he has 26 years of media experience; he is a “great believer in print media”; and a newspaper that loses credibility loses its commercial value — therefore editorial independence is in his financial interest too. These are not unreasonable arguments. They deserve engagement rather than dismissal.

    The argument about commercial logic is the strongest, and in normal circumstances it would carry significant weight.

    The problem is that East African media economics do not operate in normal circumstances. Government advertising revenue is a structural lifeline for every major media house in the region. The threat to withhold it — or the promise to pay Sh410 million in arrears — is not a market signal but a political one. A media owner who holds a Ksh16.8 billion gas plant, who depends on regulatory goodwill for its continued operation, and who needs government advertising revenue to keep a loss-making media group solvent, faces a fundamentally different cost-benefit calculation than a purely commercial media investor insulated from state power.

    Tito Magoti, a Tanzanian human rights lawyer, put it bluntly in comments to Semafor: people of Azizi’s stature, he said, would never advocate for press freedom because it is against their business interest.

    Former NMG editor-in-chief Mutuma Mathiu, writing publicly after the deal was announced, asked two questions that have not been adequately answered: whether Azizi is a front for background investors whose identities have not been disclosed, and what the Aga Khan’s departure signals for the region’s democratic infrastructure.

    Churchill Otieno, president of the Africa Editors Forum, wrote on LinkedIn that NMG has for decades functioned as part of East Africa’s democratic infrastructure, and that when ownership shifts, the critical issue is not merely who buys, but what vision of the public sphere accompanies that purchase.

    THE MECHANISM OF INTERFERENCE

    Editorial interference in media institutions of NMG’s scale and institutional culture rarely arrives through the front door.

    It does not manifest as a proprietor calling a newsroom and ordering the removal of a story — at least not initially, and not in the early months when reputations are still being established and assurances are still being honoured.

    It manifests through appointments.

    The selection of editors and managing directors, decisions about which investigations receive resources and which are left unfunded, choices about which advertising campaigns to pursue and which state contracts to accept, and the accumulated effect of dozens of small decisions made by editors who understand, without being told, where the new owner’s interests lie.

    RSF has already noted that under the current Kenyan regulatory environment, authorities can influence media management appointments through the state-aligned media regulator.

    Azizi now sits above an editorial structure that is simultaneously subject to that external regulatory pressure and directly accountable to a single majority shareholder whose political relationships span every government in the region.

    The Aga Khan’s governance model — a philanthropic fund with institutional values embedded in its mandate — created structural insulation against precisely this dynamic. Taarifa Ltd, a private Mauritius-registered vehicle wholly owned by a single individual, creates none.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists, in its public statement on the acquisition, recommended that Azizi introduce binding editorial charters, independent editorial boards with genuine enforcement powers, transparent ownership disclosure across all subsidiary structures, and formal protections for editors against proprietorial interference.

    None of these recommendations has been adopted as policy. Azizi’s stated commitment to editorial independence remains exactly that: a stated commitment, backed by nothing more contractually binding than his personal assurance.

    THE PRECEDENT AZIZI HIMSELF SET

    There is one precedent that cuts through every assurance and every pledge with singular clarity. In 1999, Azizi co-founded Mwananchi Communications Limited with the Aga Khan’s media group — the very institution from which he has now acquired NMG.

    The partnership produced The Citizen, Mwananchi and Mwanaspoti newspapers, real vehicles of Tanzanian journalism.

    In 2005, serving as campaign manager for Jakaya Kikwete’s presidential run, Azizi took personal exception to NMG’s coverage of his candidate. He did not write a letter of complaint.

    He did not invoke editorial independence provisions. He sold his stake and walked out — and then went out and acquired competing media assets that he could control without the inconvenience of a partner with different political preferences.

    Two decades later, he has returned to those same newsrooms — as the sole controlling shareholder, with no institutional partner to check his preferences, and with a Kenyan president heading into an election whose outcome will determine the regulatory environment for his gas empire for the next decade.

    The structural logic of that arrangement does not require conspiracy to function. It operates through incentives. And the incentives all point in the same direction.

    WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

    The transaction remains subject to regulatory approval by Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority, the Communications Authority and the Nairobi Securities Exchange, as well as equivalent bodies in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda.

    Those regulatory agencies must exercise genuine scrutiny — not the formality of a rubber stamp — over the governance structures Azizi proposes for NMG’s editorial function.

    Specifically, they should require: binding editorial independence charters with independent oversight mechanisms; transparent disclosure of all beneficial ownership behind Taarifa Ltd; the establishment of an independent editorial board with genuine enforcement powers; and formal conflict-of-interest protocols requiring disclosure and recusal whenever NMG coverage touches on Azizi’s business interests or his political relationships.

    NMG’s journalists, editors and senior management have their own obligations. The real test of editorial independence is not what happens in the comfortable months after a proprietor’s honeymoon press conference.

    It is what happens the first time a Daily Nation investigation exposes a regulatory failure that touches on Taifa Gas’s licensing. It is what happens the first time NTV Kenya’s political desk publishes polling analysis that shows Ruto’s re-election campaign in serious trouble. It is what happens the first time a Business Daily reporter follows the money on a public procurement contract linked to a company in Azizi’s portfolio.

    The answers to those questions will tell East Africa everything it needs to know about what was really signed at the Serena Hotel on March 10.

    THE KENYA INSIGHTS ASSESSMENT

    The Economist asks whether Azizi can deliver on his pledges of editorial independence. We do not think that is the right question. The right question is whether any single individual — facing this specific matrix of financial dependencies, political relationships and regulatory exposure, in these four specific countries, at this specific moment in the East African political cycle — could resist the accumulated pressure of those incentives even if his personal intentions were entirely honourable. The structural answer, based on the evidence, is: probably not. The historical answer, based on what Azizi himself did when editorial coverage last conflicted with his political preferences, is: he won’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Firm With A Problem Wherever It Goes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The European Investment Bank went further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Procurement Battle And Its Convenient Victims

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

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

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

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

    The PPARB agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Sh7 Billion Question Kenya Must Answer

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

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

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

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

    The Other Side Of The Coin: CCECC Is No Innocent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What Policymakers Must Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Damning Anatomy of Demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Valuation Question the Government Cannot Escape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Pension Funds, Political Pressure, and the Rescuer Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sovereignty Sold, Sovereignty Bought

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

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

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

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

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

    Where the Money Goes and What It Does Not Do

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

    The problem is that the Fund’s legal standing is currently before the High Court, which is examining whether its establishment bypassed constitutional safeguards.

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

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

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

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

    What This Tells Capital Markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • EXPLAINER: Why Judges Break Pens After Death Sentences

    EXPLAINER: Why Judges Break Pens After Death Sentences

    On the morning of Thursday, 19 February 2026, the Nyeri High Court was packed. Families of the victim, curious members of the public, and journalists crowded the gallery as Justice Kizito Magare prepared to deliver judgment on Nicholas Macharia, a 35-year-old man who had defiled and murdered seven-year-old Tamara Blessing Kabura. The Grade One pupil had gone missing from her mother’s market stall on 24 May 2025. Two days later, CCTV footage from a nearby spare parts shop placed Macharia walking with the child. Officers arrested him and he led detectives to his house, where the little girl’s body lay buried beneath his bed.

    The court described the crime as premeditated and executed with utter disregard for human life. Macharia had pleaded guilty after two reversals of his plea, and even his mitigation counsel, Mahugu Mbarire, conceded the gravity of what his client had done, asking only that the court consider rehabilitation as an alternative. The court was unmoved. Justice Magare imposed the death sentence.

    Then he broke his pen.

    To the gallery, the act was dramatic. On social media within the hour, it was sensational. To legal historians, it was an echo of something far older and far more profound — a gesture that traces its origins across centuries of empire, colonial ambition, and the philosophy of justice.

    A Quill Broken in Delhi

    The practice of breaking a pen or quill after pronouncing a death sentence is most commonly traced to the Mughal Empire, which dominated the Indian subcontinent from 1526 until its slow unravelling in the eighteenth century. The Mughal court system, anchored in Islamic jurisprudence and Persianate traditions of imperial justice, treated the administration of capital punishment as a profound moral and ceremonial act. When a Mughal Emperor or his designated authority signed a farmān — an imperial decree — ordering an execution, the quill with which that decree was signed would be broken. The symbolism was unambiguous: an instrument that had ordered the extinguishing of a life could not be used again for any ordinary purpose. It had been consecrated, in the most terrible sense, to a singular and irreversible act.

    The Mughal courts achieved a degree of judicial independence remarkable for their era. Historical records show that during the reign of Aurangzeb, the courts were sufficiently autonomous to decline even the Emperor’s personal request to execute a convict who had already been sentenced. That independence gave the ceremony of sentencing its weight. The breaking of the quill was not theatre. It was the Emperor’s acknowledgement that he had exercised a power he could not rescind, and that the instrument of that power must be retired accordingly.

    When the British East India Company began absorbing Mughal governance structures from the mid-eighteenth century onward — drawing selectively, as scholars have shown, on Mughal protocols for adjudicating disputes — several judicial customs crossed with them. British colonial judges in India adopted the tradition of breaking the pen after capital sentencing, and it persisted long after Indian independence in 1947. It survives in Indian courts to this day, though with diminishing frequency as younger judges either remain unaware of the practice or choose not to observe it.

    The Parallel European Tradition

    The Mughal origin is the most frequently cited, but it is not the only thread in this tradition’s genealogy. In medieval and early modern Europe, particularly in the courts of the German states, France, and parts of Eastern Europe, a parallel practice existed. Judges presiding over capital cases would snap a quill upon pronouncing sentence, sometimes accompanied by words to the effect that the judgment was final and could not be altered. The symbolism varied by region but consistently converged on the same themes: finality, gravity, and the moral weight of ordering a death.

    Some European traditions went further. In certain German jurisdictions, the judge would lay down his staff of office after sentencing, a gesture signifying that his authority in the particular matter had ended — that the court had done its work, and the matter passed now to the executioner and, ultimately, to God. These traditions of marking the boundary between judicial authority and the act of execution carried deep theological as well as legal significance in societies where the taking of life was understood as an act that required divine sanction.

    From European courts, the custom spread through colonial legal systems. Britain’s vast empire carried with it the common law and, with it, a clutch of judicial customs that took root in Commonwealth jurisdictions from the Caribbean to East Africa. The colonial penal code introduced to Kenya by the British in 1893 stipulated the mandatory death penalty for murder, treason, and armed robbery. The rituals of capital sentencing arrived quietly alongside those provisions.

    What the Breaking Pen Says

    The gesture carries at least four distinct layers of meaning, each speaking to a different dimension of what capital punishment represents.

    The first is finality. As Indian lawyer Poorvi Sirothia has written, once a judge signs a death sentence, the trial court loses the authority to withdraw or revise that order. The pen is broken to mirror that irreversibility in the physical world. What has been written cannot be unwritten; what has been broken cannot be unbroken. This is not merely poetic. It is a solemn acknowledgement that the court has crossed a threshold from which there is no judicial return.

    The second is closure of role. By breaking the pen, the judge declares that the court’s work in the matter is done. The sentence passes from judicial hands to the executive machinery of the state — to prison authorities, to the office of the Attorney General, to the President who may or may not exercise the prerogative of mercy. The pen’s destruction marks that transfer of responsibility.

    The third is moral weight. Capital punishment is the most severe order a court can issue. The gesture insists that this sentence is categorically different from any other — that it is not a longer prison term or a heavier fine but a matter of life and death in the most absolute sense. Nairobi-based criminal law practitioners who spoke to this publication confirmed that the act is understood precisely in these terms: as a marker of the extraordinary nature of the sentence just delivered.

    The fourth, and perhaps the most haunting, is personal distance. Some interpretations hold that the breaking of the pen is a judge’s silent declaration that they never wish to use that instrument for such a purpose again — a rejection, however symbolic, of the act even while carrying out a legal duty. Lawyer Erastus Orina, who confirmed that the practice has no basis in Kenyan statute or criminal procedure, described it as reflecting the solemn responsibility borne by any judge who imposes capital punishment. The pen that wrote the ultimate sentence, he said, should not be used again for such a purpose.

    Kenya’s Peculiar Position

    Against this historical backdrop, the gesture acquires an additional layer of meaning in Kenya specifically, because Kenya occupies a singular and increasingly uncomfortable position on the death penalty.

    Capital punishment has been part of Kenyan law since 1893 and remains so today. Section 203, read alongside Section 204 of the Penal Code, provides that any person convicted of murder shall be sentenced to death. The Prisons Act specifies that such a person shall be hanged by the neck until dead. Death warrants are issued. The machinery of execution exists on paper. But Kenya has not hanged anyone since July 1987, when Hezekiah Ochuka and Pancras Oteyo Okumu — masterminds of the 1982 coup attempt — were executed for treason. Nearly four decades have passed without a single execution.

    In that period, presidents have periodically commuted death sentences en masse. President Mwai Kibaki commuted the sentences of over 4,000 death row inmates in 2009. President Uhuru Kenyatta did the same for 2,747 prisoners in October 2016, citing the inhuman conditions of long-term death row imprisonment and the state’s unwillingness to actually carry out executions.

    Then in December 2017 came the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Francis Karioko Muruatetu and Another v Republic, which transformed the legal landscape entirely. A six-judge bench declared the mandatory nature of the death sentence for murder unconstitutional, holding that subjecting convicted persons to a predetermined sentence without any opportunity to present mitigating circumstances violated their right to a fair trial and their dignity. The court was emphatic: it did not outlaw the death penalty itself, which Article 26(3) of the Constitution permits, but it stripped away its mandatory character. Judges were henceforth required to weigh aggravating and mitigating factors before deciding whether death was the appropriate penalty in any given murder case.

    The Muruatetu ruling produced significant confusion in the lower courts, which attempted to apply its reasoning to other capital offences including treason and robbery with violence. The Supreme Court was compelled to issue further directions in July 2021, making clear that the ruling was confined to murder under Sections 203 and 204 of the Penal Code and that challenges to mandatory death penalties for other offences had to proceed through the courts separately.

    Today, death sentences continue to be handed down in Kenya — as Justice Magare demonstrated last week — but they are reserved for what the Supreme Court characterised as the rarest of rare cases involving intentional and aggravated acts of killing. The crime against seven-year-old Tamara Blessing Kabura plainly met that threshold. Macharia had sexually assaulted the child before killing her, concealed her body beneath his bed, and then tried to deceive investigators. The post-mortem confirmed she died of suffocation following the assault.

    The Tradition in Regional Context

    The practice of pen-breaking is not unique to Kenya on the African continent, though its observance varies considerably across jurisdictions. In Nigeria, where the death penalty remains in force across multiple states and is actively carried out in some of them, judges have been observed breaking pens after capital sentencing, most notably in cases involving armed robbery, terrorism, and murder. The Nigerian Supreme Court’s Chief Justice has participated in sentencing proceedings where the practice was observed, lending it a degree of institutional visibility.

    In Ghana, the tradition was observed until that country’s Parliament voted in July 2023 to abolish the death penalty entirely — a decision that followed a broader African trend toward abolition that has seen Equatorial Guinea, Benin, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Chad, and the Central African Republic remove capital punishment from their statute books in recent years. When Ghana abolished the penalty, the pen-breaking tradition became, in that jurisdiction, a relic.

    Tanzania, which shares Kenya’s British colonial legal inheritance and Common Law framework, has its own death penalty jurisprudence. The landmark case of Republic v Mbushuu in 1994 tested the constitutionality of the death penalty under Tanzania’s Bill of Rights and produced a nuanced finding that the method of execution — hanging — was inhuman and degrading, even as the penalty itself was held to be constitutionally permissible. Tanzanian judges have been observed observing the pen-breaking tradition, though infrequently.

    In India, the tradition is perhaps most deeply embedded, traceable directly to Mughal precedent through British colonial transmission. Indian High Courts and the Supreme Court have seen judges break pens after pronouncing death sentences in cases involving particularly heinous murders. The practice gained widespread public attention in India in recent years as social media amplified moments that would previously have been confined to courtroom observers.

    Symbolism in an Age of Digital Records

    There is an undeniable tension in the survival of this ritual into the twenty-first century. Modern courts produce digitised records, typed judgments, electronically stored evidence, and appellate processes that are themselves documented across multiple platforms. A judge who breaks a pen after sentencing will typically then sign several further documents — a certified copy of the judgment, the death warrant, court orders — using another pen entirely. The symbolism is understood by participants to be precisely that: symbolic rather than operational.

    Some legal scholars argue that this makes the gesture more, not less, valuable. In a system that has become bureaucratised to the point where even the most extreme sentences can feel like administrative decisions, the physical act of destruction insists on presence. It says: something irreversible happened here, in this room, today. A life has been placed in the hands of the state’s coercive machinery. That deserves more than a signature.

    Critics, on the other hand, suggest that such gestures risk introducing an element of theatre that is inappropriate to judicial proceedings. Courts are expected to project objectivity and procedural neutrality. A dramatic act — however historically grounded — can appear to personalise a decision that is meant to be strictly legal. In Kenya, where most judges simply deliver the sentence and sign the necessary orders without any ceremony, Justice Magare’s gesture stood out precisely because it departs from the norm.

    The gesture does not, of course, alter the legal reality in any respect. Nicholas Macharia retains the right to appeal his conviction and sentence, and given Kenya’s consistent pattern of commuting death sentences before they reach execution, there is a reasonable probability that his sentence will eventually be reviewed or commuted. The death warrant transmitted to the competent authority within thirty days does not guarantee an execution. In Kenya’s legal history, it almost never has.

    The Weight of the Gesture

    What remains, then, when the cameras stop rolling and the courtroom clears, is the question of what this tradition actually says about the relationship between law and morality, between the state’s power to kill and the individual conscience of the judge who orders it.

    In the Mughal Empire, the Emperor who broke the quill was acknowledging that he had exercised the highest and most terrible prerogative of sovereign power. In the colonial courts of British India, the practice carried with it the colonial state’s ambivalent relationship to the lives of its subjects. In post-independence Kenya, where the death penalty is theoretically available but practically suspended — where the sentence is handed down but never carried out — the pen-breaking takes on yet another resonance: it is a symbol of finality deployed in a system that has itself refused to be final.

    Justice Magare’s gesture, in that packed Nyeri courtroom, was an act of acknowledgement. It said: a child is dead, the man who killed her has been condemned, this court has done the most serious thing a court can do, and that must be marked. Whether the sentence is ultimately carried out is a question for other hands. The pen is broken. The court’s work is done.

    For Susan Wanjiru, the mother of Tamara Blessing Kabura, who seven-year-old disappeared from her market stall on an ordinary afternoon and never came home, no gesture — however ancient, however symbolic — can restore what was lost. But the solemnity of the court’s response, and the centuries of judicial conscience it invoked, is perhaps the closest thing the law can offer to an acknowledgement of the weight of what happened.

  • KPC IPO Set To Flop Ahead Of Deadline, Here’s The Experts’ Take

    KPC IPO Set To Flop Ahead Of Deadline, Here’s The Experts’ Take

    NAIROBI. The Kenya Pipeline Company initial public offering was meant to be a triumph: a flagship privatisation that would flood Treasury coffers with Ksh106.3 billion, mint up to two million new shareholders, and announce to the world that the Nairobi Securities Exchange had come of age.

    With barely 48 hours left before the subscription window closes on the evening of February 19, 2026, none of that appears likely to materialise without an extraordinary and largely unprecedented surge of last-minute demand.

    As of close of business last Thursday, four independent brokers, all speaking on condition of anonymity citing fear of State reprisals, placed total subscriptions at approximately 10 per cent of the offer, equivalent to roughly Ksh11 billion of the Ksh106.3 billion target.

    For the transaction to proceed at all, regulations require valid applications representing at least 50 per cent of the shares on offer, or Ksh53.1 billion. That means the government must attract nearly five times the volume of orders it has collected across four weeks, within the span of two days. The arithmetic alone makes the case.

    “You know how Kenyans behave, even when the IEBC is registering voters, they all come at the last minute. Let us wait for the final week, I am sure we will have enough investors.” Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi

    Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi has offered what is fast becoming the official line of comfort: Kenyans, he says, behave like procrastinating voters, and the last-minute rush will save the day. It is a colourful analogy.

    It is also, on the available evidence, the fiscal equivalent of wishful thinking.

    Kenya’s most comparable precedent, the Safaricom IPO of March 2008, generated enormous popular enthusiasm from its very opening day, driven by brand recognition, accessible pricing, and a company whose services millions used daily.

    KPC has none of those tailwinds, and its pricing structure has generated precisely the opposite of enthusiasm among professional investors.

    The Valuation Chasm That Doomed Retail Confidence

    The central wound in this offering is not demand, it is price. The government, advised by Faida Investment Bank and Dyer and Blair, set the offer at Ksh9 per share, implying a total company valuation of Ksh163.56 billion. Independent analysts, almost without exception, have arrived at a figure considerably lower. The divergence is not marginal. It is a chasm.

    Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda, in a January 2026 initiation note, values KPC at Ksh4.61 per share, implying a discount of 49 per cent to the offer price and an equity value of Ksh77.4 billion.

    Its methodology is rigorous: a discounted cash flow model using a 16.04 per cent weighted average cost of capital and a 3.0 per cent terminal growth rate produces Ksh4.26 per share; a relative valuation exercise benchmarking KPC against regional utilities including KenGen and Kenya Power, alongside midstream oil operators such as Seplat and Aradel, yields Ksh5.27.

    The blended result is Ksh4.61, with an accumulation band of roughly one shilling either side. The fund manager recommends waiting for a post-listing price correction before entering.

    NCBA Investment Bank has placed fair value at approximately Ksh6.35, arguing the IPO implies a premium earnings multiple for what is, structurally, a mature, regulated utility. Standard Investment Bank valued KPC’s equity at around Ksh102 billion on the post-IPO share base, implying roughly Ksh5.61 per share.

    Its senior research associate Wesley Manambo has offered a buy recommendation, but only for investors with a time horizon of at least seven years.

    For anyone seeking short-term capital appreciation, or even a competitive dividend yield, his language is striking in its candour: the opportunity cost is higher relative to other propositions in the market.

    Wider independent market analysis has produced fair-value ranges as low as Ksh3.28, citing stretched valuation multiples and a dividend yield that cannot compete with double-digit, tax-free government infrastructure bonds currently on offer in the Kenyan fixed-income market. That last point deserves emphasis.

    An investor who allocates capital to KPC at Ksh9 and receives a 50 per cent dividend payout on projected earnings must calculate their yield against instruments that currently offer 14 to 16 per cent, risk-free and tax-exempt. The comparison is brutal.

    Source

    Valuation (KSh/share)

    Stance

    Faida Investment Bank (Lead Advisor)

    9.00

    Buy / Offer price

    Dyer & Blair (Sponsoring Broker)

    9.00

    Buy / Offer price

    NCBA Investment Bank

    6.35

    Below offer / Cautious

    Standard Investment Bank (SIB)

    ~5.61

    Strategic long-term buy

    Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda

    4.61

    Avoid / Post-listing entry

    Independent range (multiple analysts)

    3.28 to 5.41

    Overvalued at offer price

    Table: Independent valuations of KPC versus the government’s offer price of Ksh9.00 per share. Sources: Faida Investment Bank, NCBA Investment Bank, Standard Investment Bank, Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda, independent market analyses.

    The Dividend Cut That No One Is Pretending Is Irrelevant

    KPC is, on its balance sheet, a genuinely impressive asset. The company holds infrastructure worth Ksh163 billion across Kenya’s fuel supply network. It operates 1,342 kilometres of pipeline connecting the Port of Mombasa to Nairobi and landlocked markets including Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan and northern Tanzania, where it commands a 91 per cent market share.

    Its EBITDA margins average roughly 45 per cent. It carries zero debt. It posted a profit of Ksh7.49 billion in its most recent financial year and paid Ksh10.5 billion in dividends to the Treasury.

    That last figure contains its own problem. KPC has historically paid out 94.5 per cent of profits as dividends, a ratio that makes it unusual even by the standards of regulated infrastructure companies globally.

    The offer memorandum proposes reducing that payout ratio to 50 per cent, which would fund a major capital expenditure programme including laying a new pipeline between Mombasa and Nairobi. For income-oriented investors, who represent the natural constituency of a utility IPO, this is not a footnote. It is the entire investment case, and it points in the wrong direction.

    The company is transitioning from a mature cash distributor to an infrastructure builder, right as it is asking the public to value it at a peak multiple.

    At the offer price, an investor is buying a toll road that has just announced it will reinvest most of the tolls, at a valuation that assumes those tolls will grow at rates the market has not corroborated.

    The government will retain a 35 per cent stake. Of the 65 per cent on offer, 20 per cent is reserved for individual Kenyans, 20 per cent for Kenyan institutional investors, five per cent for KPC employees, 15 per cent for oil marketing companies, 20 per cent for East African Community investors, and 20 per cent for foreign and international investors.

    Institutional and international tranches have moved faster than retail, according to multiple brokers, with some segments having oversubscribed early. But the retail portion, which the government had hoped would attract two million first-time equity investors, has been the most conspicuously sluggish.

    The Policy Context: Privatisation as Fiscal Necessity

    The KPC IPO does not exist in isolation. Kenya’s fiscal position is among the most constrained in its history. Annual debt repayments now consume 40 per cent of government revenues.

    The State has simultaneously announced the sale of a 15 per cent stake in Safaricom to South Africa’s Vodacom for Ksh204 billion. Both transactions are part of a broader Treasury strategy to mobilise capital through divestiture, in lieu of tax increases that have already triggered popular protests and a borrowing ceiling that international creditors are watching with diminishing patience.

    The government has also indicated that proceeds from the KPC sale will be channelled through a new National Infrastructure Fund intended to attract further private capital, and that Kenya aims to expand power generation from three million to ten million megawatts. These are ambitious targets. Their credibility depends, at least in part, on whether the KPC IPO is seen by markets as a success or a warning.

    Former Chief Justice David Maraga, among others, has publicly questioned the wisdom of privatising strategic national assets, warning of rising inequality and the risk that productive state enterprises are sold below fair value to benefit narrow interests.

    His concerns are not universally shared, but they reflect a real tension in Kenyan public life between developmental statism and the fiscal pragmatism that constrained governments must practise.

    The Regional Dimension: Uganda’s Stake in the Outcome

    Uganda’s relationship with the KPC offer is more than financial. The country accounts for over 30 per cent of KPC’s throughput and revenue, with more than 90 per cent of Uganda’s fuel imports transiting through Kenya’s pipeline infrastructure.

    President Ruto, at a regional event in late 2025, stated that Uganda would be invited to acquire a stake in KPC as part of a deeper East African integration agenda. The offer memorandum reserves up to 20 per cent of the divested stake for EAC governments.

    Cabinet Secretary Mbadi has noted that Ugandan investors are, by his account, clamouring for more shares and irritated that only 20 per cent of the offer falls within the East African pool.

    It is a notable data point, though it raises an obvious question: if regional institutional demand is as strong as officials suggest, why is the aggregate subscription figure sitting at 10 per cent with 48 hours to go? Either the institutional commitments remain verbal rather than converted into paid applications, or the total picture is considerably more complicated than official statements imply.

    Technology Access: The M-Pesa Bet

    One genuine innovation in this offering is distribution. The government launched Ziidi Trader on February 10, a Safaricom-backed platform allowing M-Pesa users to purchase KPC shares directly from their mobile phones without engaging a broker.

    The offer has also been open for a full month, longer than most Kenyan IPOs, reflecting deliberate efforts to widen access. President Ruto personally promoted mobile participation. The NSE has been on a sharp upward trajectory, posting its largest single-week gain on record in the weeks preceding the offer’s close.

    None of it has been enough to drive meaningful retail volume. Heavy marketing through roadshows, advertising campaigns, and influencer-driven social media activity preceded the launch. Yet the mass-market participation the government was banking on has not materialised at the scale required.

    This is not simply a story about access or awareness. It is a story about price. Kenyans, particularly those with limited disposable income, are unlikely to buy a financial instrument that sophisticated professional analysts value at roughly half its asking price, regardless of how conveniently it is packaged.

    What Happens If The Numbers Do Not Come In

    Under the terms of the offer, the IPO must receive valid applications from no fewer than 250 applicants representing at least 50 per cent of the shares on offer. If that threshold is not met, the transaction cannot proceed on its current terms.

    Regulations permit share reallocation across categories in cases of undersubscription, beginning with local retail investors.

    But reallocation addresses imbalances between categories, not a wholesale shortfall in aggregate demand. If total subscriptions remain near Ksh11 billion by Thursday evening, reallocation provisions offer no remedy.

    The most likely outcomes in a failure scenario are extension of the subscription period, renegotiation of terms, or withdrawal of the offer pending restructuring. Each carries reputational costs. An extension would signal to regional and international capital markets that Kenya’s privatisation programme is in difficulty. A price reduction would be damaging for a government that has staked political capital on the Ksh9 valuation. Withdrawal would be the worst outcome of all: a direct blow to the credibility of the NSE as a venue for major primary issuances, and an implicit validation of every sceptical analyst report that has circulated since the offer opened.

    If subscriptions do not surge in the next 48 hours, the government faces a choice between three bad options. There is no fourth door.

    Faida Investment Bank, the lead transaction advisor, has expressed continued optimism, citing momentum in e-IPO platform enhancements and describing institutional interest as strong.

    Francis Drummond, co-sponsoring broker, said it expected institutions to act on their decisions within the closing days.

    These are not implausible scenarios. Institutional investors do routinely wait until the final hours of a book-build before converting expressions of interest into hard orders. The question is whether the institutions’ eventual commitments will be sufficient to bridge a gap that, as of last week, represented 90 per cent of the total offer.

    Verdict: Structurally Sound Company, Structurally Flawed Offer

    The tragedy of this IPO, if it fails, will not be that KPC is a bad company. It is not. It is a regulated national infrastructure monopoly with dominant market share, healthy margins, a debt-free balance sheet, and strategic importance to an entire region’s energy supply. In different circumstances, it would be an unambiguously attractive listing.

    The problem is price, and more precisely, the gap between what the government believes the company is worth and what the market is prepared to pay. That gap did not emerge after launch. It was visible from the moment independent analysts began publishing their valuations.

    When four distinct research houses, applying different methodologies, converge on a range of Ksh3.28 to Ksh6.35 against an offer price of Ksh9, the message is not ambiguous. Markets work by aggregating information. The information available on KPC says the offer is expensive.

    Treasury CS Mbadi’s voter-registration analogy may yet prove prescient. Stranger things have happened in capital markets. But a miracle requires both faith and mechanics, and right now the mechanics are worrying.

    The government needs applications representing five times current volume in less than two business days. The brokers need their institutional clients to convert intent into cash. The retail investors need a reason to believe they are not paying a 50 to 95 per cent premium above fair value on day one.

    None of those conditions are comfortably in place. What is in place is a deadline, a shortfall, and a government that has tied its fiscal credibility to an outcome the market has been reluctant to underwrite. By Friday morning, Kenya will know which side was rightEast Africa’s largest-ever local-currency equity offering closes Thursday at 5pm. With subscriptions marooned at roughly 10 per cent of the target after four weeks of marketing, the numbers demand an honest reckoning. The government is betting on a last-minute miracle. The market is not convinced..

    Key Facts: KPC IPO closes February 19, 2026 at 5pm. 11.81 billion shares at Ksh9 each. 65% stake sale. Target: Ksh106.3 billion. Minimum threshold: Ksh53.1 billion (50% subscription). Trading start (if successful): March 9, 2026, Nairobi Securities Exchange. Allocation results: March 4, 2026.

  • Israel-Kenya: Africa’s Intelligence Front Line

    Israel-Kenya: Africa’s Intelligence Front Line

    By Jose Lev Alvarez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Revealed: Inside Ruto-ODM Plot For A Grand Coalition For 2027

    Revealed: Inside Ruto-ODM Plot For A Grand Coalition For 2027

    Kenya’s political theatre has always been a game of careful choreography, but what is unfolding between State House and Orange House is perhaps the most audacious political ballet since the 2007 grand coalition.

    The recent by-election sweep by the United Democratic Alliance and Orange Democratic Movement alliance has done more than deliver victories at polling stations.

    It has pulled back the curtain on what may be the most consequential political realignment since independence: the making of Kenya’s next super-coalition.

    The numbers from November 27 tell only half the story.

    UDA secured five parliamentary seats and multiple ward positions while ODM maintained its stranglehold in Nyanza and the Coast, winning all three seats it contested.

    Together, the broad-based partners claimed 18 of 24 contested positions. But beneath these electoral tallies lies a more intricate narrative of political positioning, legacy preservation, and the raw mathematics of power.

    What began nine months ago as a memorandum of understanding to stabilize a government reeling from Gen Z protests has quietly metamorphosed into something far more ambitious.

    The ten-point agenda signed between President William Ruto and the late Raila Odinga in March was sold to Kenyans as a crisis intervention mechanism. It has instead become the architectural blueprint for 2027.

    Raila-Ruto handshake.
    President William Ruto and ODM leader Raila Odinga.

    National Assembly Minority Leader Junet Mohamed has confirmed that half of the ten-point agenda has been implemented, with the remainder on track for completion by March 7, 2026, exactly one year after the original pact was inked.

    That date, insiders in both parties reveal, could mark the formal transition from cooperation to coalition.

    The Zani-led implementation committee, reporting bi-monthly to both party principals, has already delivered on devolution funding increases, IEBC reconstitution, youth empowerment programs, and debt restructuring milestones.

    The remaining deliverables, particularly compensation for protest victims currently held up in court, remain the final hurdles.

    But make no mistake, this is not simply about policy implementation.

    It is about political survival for UDA and political ascendancy for ODM. For Ruto, the arithmetic is brutal. Mount Kenya, once his fortress, has become contested territory following Rigathi Gachagua’s impeachment.

    The by-election victory in Mbeere North by a mere 494 votes, despite Deputy President Kithure Kindiki’s intensive campaigning, exposed the fragility of UDA’s grip in the region.

    Western Kenya remains unpredictable, with movements like George Natembeya’s DAP-K threatening to splinter the vote.

    And Coast region loyalty, historically fluid, cannot be taken for granted.

    Enter ODM.

    With Raila’s death in October, the party under interim leader Oburu Oginga has shed any pretense of playing coy.

    Oburu’s declaration that ODM will accept nothing less than the deputy presidency in any coalition arrangement was not political posturing.

    It was a negotiating position staked with the confidence of a party that knows its value.

    ODM brings to any coalition table what Ruto desperately needs: the Nyanza vote bloc, coastal influence through leaders like Hassan Joho and Abdulswamad Nassir, and a measure of legitimacy in Western Kenya through its historical organizing structures.

    The by-elections validated this proposition.

    While the United Opposition led by Gachagua, Kalonzo Musyoka, and Martha Karua made noise about dismantling the broad-based arrangement, they were comprehensively routed.

    Their only consolation prize was three ward seats for Gachagua’s Democratic Congress Party, hardly the foundation for a 2027 insurgency.

    The defeat in Mbeere North, where Gachagua personally led campaigns, was particularly stinging and raised uncomfortable questions about his ability to deliver Mount Kenya against an incumbent president.

    What Ruto and ODM have created, perhaps inadvertently, is a political stranglehold. UDA dominates the Rift Valley, has made inroads in Mount Kenya East, and controls pockets of Northern Kenya.

    ODM commands Nyanza, holds significant sway in the Coast, and retains organizational muscle in Western Kenya.

    Together, they form a electoral coalition that would be extraordinarily difficult to defeat, even accounting for voter apathy, which saw turnout crater below 40 percent in most constituencies.

    The sticking points, however, remain significant. Oburu’s insistence on the deputy presidency directly collides with Kindiki’s position, creating a zero-sum game that Ruto must navigate with surgical precision.

    Mount Kenya East leaders view Kindiki’s elevation as belated recognition for a region long overshadowed by its western counterpart.

    Displacing him for an ODM running mate would trigger political tremors Ruto can ill afford.

    Yet ODM, emboldened by its by-election performance and the political capital of Raila’s legacy, is negotiating from strength, not weakness.

    Then there is the Edwin Sifuna problem. ODM’s Secretary General remains the party’s most visible skeptic of the Ruto alliance, publicly questioning whether the broad-based arrangement even exists and accusing the government of continuing abductions and extrajudicial killings.

    His resistance represents a genuine ideological current within ODM, one rooted in the party’s activist DNA.

    Sifuna’s camp believes ODM should field its own presidential candidate in 2027, preserving party independence rather than becoming a UDA appendage.

    But the pragmatists, led by Oburu, Gladys Wanga, and Junet Mohamed, have won the internal battle.

    Their argument is coldly transactional: ODM was not formed to protest but to govern.

    The ten-point agenda, if fully implemented, provides sufficient policy cover to justify the alliance.

    And in Kenyan politics, power in government always trumps moral purity in opposition. The calculus is simple.

    Would ODM rather be a junior partner in government with guaranteed Cabinet positions, county funding, and a realistic shot at the deputy presidency, or the largest opposition party with no leverage and diminishing relevance?

    UDA, for its part, appears willing to accommodate ODM’s ambitions, at least publicly.

    Party officials like Deputy Secretary General Omboko Milemba and Organizing Secretary Vincent Kawaya have signaled openness to negotiations, acknowledging that ODM’s voter base and organizational capacity make it the coalition’s most valuable partner.

    Only the presidency, they insist, is non-negotiable.

    Everything else, including the deputy presidency, is on the table.

    Oburu Odinga at a past event.
    Oburu Odinga at a past event.

    What remains to be seen is whether this emerging grand coalition can survive contact with 2027’s political realities.

    Voter apathy, particularly among Gen Z who dominated the 2024 protests but largely boycotted the by-elections, suggests deep disillusionment with the political class generally.

    The United Opposition, despite its by-election drubbing, will have two years to regroup, rebrand, and rebuild. And coalitions in Kenya have a notorious habit of imploding under the weight of their own contradictions.

    But for now, the trajectory is unmistakable.

    The Ruto-ODM arrangement has evolved from crisis management to campaign strategy.

    The ten-point agenda has become the covenant binding two political formations that recognize they are stronger together than apart.

    And the by-election results have provided the empirical validation both parties needed to proceed with confidence toward formalization.

    The making of a grand coalition is rarely announced with fanfare. It happens quietly, through incremental trust-building, policy implementation, and the cold calculation of electoral mathematics.

    What we are witnessing is not a sudden political romance but a methodical courtship between parties that understand power in Kenya is won through addition, not subtraction.

    Whether it culminates in a formal coalition agreement or remains an informal alliance will depend on how faithfully both sides honor their commitments over the next fifteen months.

    But make no mistake, the foundation is being laid.

    The pieces are being positioned.

    And Kenya’s political future is being shaped not in loud rallies or televised debates, but in quiet meetings between party strategists who understand that 2027 will be won or lost based on who builds the bigger tent.

    Right now, that tent is being erected by UDA and ODM, and it is beginning to look large enough to house the next government.

  • Wantam, Kasongo Slogans Will Not Make United Opposition Win In 2027 As Proven in the By Elections: Change or Perish

    Wantam, Kasongo Slogans Will Not Make United Opposition Win In 2027 As Proven in the By Elections: Change or Perish

    Thursday’s by-election results have delivered a cold, unsparing verdict on Kenya’s United Opposition: catchy slogans are no substitute for coherent policy, and mockery is not a political strategy.

    The broad-based government swept all seven parliamentary seats, leaving Rigathi Gachagua, Kalonzo Musyoka, Eugene Wamalwa and their allies nursing wounds that should have been entirely predictable.

    When your entire political arsenal consists of nicknaming your opponent “Kasongo” and chanting “Wantam” at rallies, you shouldn’t be surprised when voters hand you a humiliating defeat.

    The numbers tell a brutal story.

    In Malava, where the opposition threw everything including the kitchen sink, UDA’s David Ndakwa won with 21,564 votes against DAP-K’s Seth Panyako’s 20,210.

    In Mbeere North, Gachagua’s personal battleground where he went door to door trying to prove he still commands Mount Kenya, Leonard Muriuki wa Muthende scraped through with 15,802 votes against Newton Kariuki’s 15,308.

    Even in ODM strongholds like Magarini, Kasipul and Ugunja, the party’s dominance only underscored how thoroughly the opposition has been boxed into irrelevance outside their ethnic enclaves.

    Let’s be clear about what happened here.

    This wasn’t a close call where a few more rallies or better ground organization might have tipped the scales.

    This was a referendum on substance versus noise, and noise lost decisively.

    The United Opposition spent months perfecting their insult repertoire while President Ruto was busy forming a broad-based government that neutralized ODM as an opposition force.

    They were busy creating TikTok-ready moments while their opponents were doing the unglamorous work of coalition building and voter mobilization.

    The Malava race perfectly encapsulates the opposition’s delusion.

    Here was a seat they considered winnable, backed by heavyweights like Eugene Wamalwa on home turf.

    They had momentum, they had crowds, they had social media buzz.

    What they didn’t have was a compelling reason for voters to choose them beyond “Ruto is bad.” In 2025, with Kenyans grappling with the cost of living, unemployment, and a healthcare system in crisis, telling them that the president reminds you of a Congolese musician is not exactly policy gold.

    Gachagua’s humiliation in Mbeere North deserves special attention.

    The former deputy president has spent the better part of this year positioning himself as the kingmaker of Mount Kenya, the region’s authentic voice against Ruto’s alleged betrayal.

    He campaigned as if his political life depended on it, which frankly it did.

    And he lost. Not by a landslide, granted, but in politics, losing your own backyard by even a single vote is a loss that echoes.

    If Gachagua cannot deliver a constituency where he personally knocked on doors and made the contest a personal plebiscite on his influence, what exactly is his value proposition to other opposition leaders looking for a 2027 standard bearer?

    The opposition’s strategic bankruptcy runs deeper than poor candidate selection or weak ground games. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the Kenyan voter in 2025.

    This is not 2007 or 2017 when ethnic mobilization and anti-government sentiment alone could deliver victories. Ruto has shrewdly blunted that approach by co-opting ODM, historically the most formidable opposition outfit.

    President William Ruto at a past event.
    President William Ruto at a past event.

    The broad-based government has created a political traffic jam where the opposition’s traditional routes to power are blocked.

    Yet instead of finding new roads, the opposition is standing at the roadblock honking angrily and hoping someone will move.

    “Kasongo” was supposed to diminish Ruto by portraying him as foreign, as somehow not authentically Kenyan.

    It’s a dog whistle that has failed spectacularly because voters have moved past ethnic dog whistles in favor of what matters to them: jobs, security, healthcare, education.

    Meanwhile, “Wantam” – a juvenile attempt at painting the government as thieves, Ruto as a one term president – sounds increasingly hollow when your alternative platform is… what exactly? The opposition has spent so much time defining what they’re against that they’ve forgotten to articulate what they’re for.

    Compare this to 2002 when Mwai Kibaki’s NARC coalition swept to power not just on anti-Moi sentiment but on a concrete platform promising free primary education, anti-corruption drives and constitutional reform.

    Or 2013 when Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto sold Jubilee with specific infrastructure promises.

    Even Raila Odinga’s most successful campaigns combined charisma with policy specifics, from devolution advocacy to economic blueprints. What does the United Opposition offer? Slogans that would struggle to win a high school debate.

    The violence and chaos that marred several polling stations should also shame the opposition into reflection.

    When your supporters are disrupting vote counting because you’ve conditioned them to believe that any loss must be rigged, you’re not building a democratic movement.

    You’re building a mob.

    The scenes in Malava where opposition supporters attempted to storm counting centers, the allegations of voter intimidation in Mbeere North, these are not signs of a movement confident in its ideas.

    They’re the death throes of a political coalition that knows it’s losing and would rather burn the house down than accept defeat gracefully.

    Perhaps most damning is how thoroughly the opposition has been outmaneuvered by Ruto politically.

    The man they love to mock as intellectually inferior has systematically dismantled their coalition, absorbed their strongest partner, isolated their leaders, and forced them into an alliance of convenience with Gachagua, a figure whose impeachment was supported by many in their own ranks.

    They’re so busy calling Ruto names that they haven’t noticed he’s already won the chess game.

    The path forward for the opposition should be obvious but will require a humility that seems in short supply.

    First, develop an actual policy platform. What is your alternative economic plan? How will you address youth unemployment? What’s your healthcare proposal? Your education reform? Your anti-corruption strategy that goes beyond pointing fingers? Voters need answers, not slogans.

    Second, build a real coalition, not a temporary marriage of convenience between bitter rivals. Gachagua, Kalonzo and Wamalwa don’t trust each other, and voters can smell the cynicism from a mile away.

    Either commit to a genuine partnership with shared principles and a clear power-sharing formula, or accept that you’ll keep losing.

    Third, stop insulting voters’ intelligence.

    Kenyans are not stupid. They can see through empty rhetoric and performative outrage. They want leaders who take them seriously, who speak to their aspirations and fears with concrete solutions, not soundbites designed for viral moments.

    Fourth, acknowledge that ethnic mobilization alone will not win 2027.

    The demographics have shifted, the youth vote is decisive, and young Kenyans are tired of politics that revolves around tribal arithmetic. They want transformation, not more of the same dressed up in new slogans.

    The by-elections were a dress rehearsal for 2027, and the opposition just delivered the worst opening night performance imaginable.

    They have less than two years to completely reinvent their approach or resign themselves to irrelevance. History is littered with opposition movements that mistook noise for momentum, that believed their own propaganda, that thought anger alone could be a governing philosophy. None of them are in power today.

    The choice facing Gachagua, Kalonzo, Wamalwa and their allies is stark: either become a serious alternative capable of winning power, or remain a sideshow of bitter men trading insults while the country moves on without them. “Kasongo” and “Wantam” might get laughs at rallies and retweets on social media, but they won’t win elections. Thursday proved that conclusively.

    The broad-based government is far from perfect. It has vulnerabilities on economic management, corruption, and service delivery.

    A competent opposition could exploit these weaknesses and offer voters a genuine alternative. But that requires work, strategy, coalition-building and policy development. It requires treating politics as a serious business rather than a comedy show.

    As it stands, the United Opposition looks less like a government-in-waiting and more like a support group for the politically dispossessed. Unless they fundamentally change course, 2027 will not be a changing of the guard.

    It will be a coronation. And when they lose, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves. You cannot slogan your way to State House.

    Thursday proved it. Now the question is whether the opposition is capable of learning the lesson, or whether they’ll spend the next two years perfecting new nicknames while Ruto perfects his re-election strategy.

    The ball is in their court. Change or perish. It really is that simple.

  • While Kenyans Looked Away, NCBA Shamelessly Tried to Dodge Its Tax Bill

    While Kenyans Looked Away, NCBA Shamelessly Tried to Dodge Its Tax Bill

    There is something deeply offensive about watching a bank owned by Kenya’s wealthiest families fight tooth and nail to avoid paying taxes that ordinary Kenyans cannot escape.

    While the rest of us dutifully watch stamp duty deductions chip away at every property transaction, every lease agreement, every financial instrument we touch, NCBA Group has spent months in court deploying expensive lawyers to argue why it should not pay Sh384.5 million in taxes that were illegally waived during a merger completed under the Uhuru Kenyatta administration.

    The audacity is breathtaking.

    This is not a struggling institution pleading poverty. This is a tier-one bank controlled by the Kenyatta family, holding 13.2 percent through Enke Investments, and the Ndegwa family, with 14.94 percent through First Chartered Securities.

    Between them, these two families control more than a quarter of one of Kenya’s largest financial institutions. Yet here they are, through their corporate vehicle, claiming that being asked to follow the same tax laws as everyone else would cause “irreversible business consequences” and “great hardship.”

    Let us be clear about what happened here.

    In June 2019, as NIC Bank and CBA merged to create NCBA, the Treasury issued Legal Notice No.112 exempting the transaction from stamp duty.

    This was not a small favor.

    We are talking about Sh384.5 million, a sum that could build several health centers, equip dozens of schools, or provide clean water to thousands of rural households.

    The waiver was granted during President Uhuru Kenyatta’s tenure, benefiting a bank in which his family holds substantial interest. The optics alone should have triggered alarm bells. The legality, as the courts have now confirmed, was always questionable.

    Senator Okiya Omtatah, then an activist, saw what many chose to ignore and challenged the exemption in court.

    In April 2025, more than two years after Uhuru Kenyatta left office, the High Court vindicated Omtatah’s petition, declaring the waiver unconstitutional.

    Former President Uhuru Kenyatta.
    Former President Uhuru Kenyatta.

    Justice ruled that the exemption violated both the Stamp Duty Act and Article 201 of the Constitution, which demands that the burden of taxation be shared equitably.

    In other words, even the elite must pay their fair share.

    One would think that a bank claiming to uphold corporate governance and regulatory compliance would accept this judgment with grace, pay what it owes, and move on.

    Instead, NCBA returned to court with a desperate application to freeze the order, arguing that immediate payment would destabilize its operations and harm depositors.

    The bank’s lawyers painted apocalyptic scenarios: liquidity disruptions, shareholder value erosion, customers suffering as operational funds, including deposits, would need to be tapped to meet the tax obligation.

    This is corporate melodrama at its finest. NCBA is not some fragile microfinance institution operating on razor-thin margins.

    It is a banking behemoth that reported healthy profits even as it fought this case

    The suggestion that paying Sh384.5 million, a sum it should have budgeted for in 2019 had the law been followed, would cripple its operations is an insult to public intelligence.

    Banks manage billions in assets daily.

    They stress-test for economic shocks, currency fluctuations, and regulatory changes.

    Yet we are supposed to believe that following a court order to pay legitimately owed taxes represents an existential threat?

    The bank’s argument that it acted “in good faith” when applying for the exemption is equally hollow.

    Good faith does not absolve illegality.

    If I evade taxes because I genuinely believed I was exempt, the Kenya Revenue Authority does not pat me on the back for my sincere confusion.

    It demands payment, with interest and penalties.

    Why should NCBA be treated differently?

    The law is supposed to be blind to wealth and connection, though this case suggests it squints generously when billionaire families are involved.

    NCBA’s lawyers also claimed that KRA lacks mechanisms to refund the money if the bank’s appeal succeeds, therefore the payment should be stayed.

    The judge rightly dismissed this as incorrect, noting that KRA, as a public entity, is perfectly capable of issuing refunds.

    But the argument reveals the entitled mindset at play here: the assumption that the burden of uncertainty should fall on the public purse rather than on the bank that benefited from an illegal waiver.

    Ordinary taxpayers who overpay wait months, sometimes years, for KRA refunds without the luxury of court injunctions. NCBA expects special treatment.

    What makes this fight particularly galling is the timing and the context.

    Kenya is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. The government has been forced to implement unpopular tax measures, from the controversial Finance Acts to increased levies on basic goods, all justified by the need to shore up revenue and service mounting debt.

    Citizens have taken to the streets in protest.

    Young people, tired of being squeezed at every turn, have become a force of resistance against what they see as an extractive state that serves the wealthy while bleeding the poor.

    Against this backdrop, watching a bank owned by dynasties that have accumulated wealth across generations fight to avoid paying taxes it never should have been exempted from is a masterclass in tone-deaf privilege.

    It reinforces every cynical belief Kenyans hold about the tax system: that it is designed to trap the many while offering escape routes to the few, that connections matter more than compliance, that the law applies selectively based on who you know and how much power you wield.

    The Treasury’s decision to grant the waiver in the first place raises serious questions that have not been adequately answered.

    What public interest justified exempting this particular merger from stamp duty when countless other corporate transactions proceed without such favors?

    The law allows for exemptions in specific circumstances, but they must be transparently justified and meet constitutional standards.

    The court found that this exemption failed that test.

    Yet nobody in the Treasury has faced consequences for issuing an illegal notice that cost the public hundreds of millions of shillings.

    No investigation has been launched into whether proper procedure was followed or whether influence was improperly exerted.

    The merger itself was presented as a strategic move to create a stronger banking entity capable of competing regionally.

    Fine.

    But why should Kenyan taxpayers subsidize the commercial ambitions of private shareholders? If the merger made business sense, it should have proceeded with or without the tax break.

    The fact that NCBA now claims the waiver was “a central element in the financial structuring of the merger” suggests the transaction’s viability was built on the foundation of an illegal benefit. That is not sound corporate planning. That is opportunism dressed in business-speak.

    The High Court’s refusal last week to freeze the judgment was legally sound and morally necessary.

    As the judge noted, granting a stay would effectively revive an unconstitutional act, contradicting Article 2(4) of the Constitution, which voids illegal actions immediately.

    Public interest cannot preserve laws already deemed invalid.

    To allow NCBA to continue enjoying the benefits of an illegal exemption while it appeals would make a mockery of the judicial process and send a chilling message: that the powerful can ignore unfavorable rulings simply by filing appeals and claiming hardship.

    NCBA’s case now moves to the Court of Appeal, where it will argue that the High Court misapplied principles of public interest and constitutional tax burden sharing.

    Perhaps the appellate judges will see things differently.

    But the bank should not hold its breath. The legal reasoning against it is solid, grounded in constitutional principles that courts have consistently upheld.

    More importantly, the court of public opinion has already rendered its verdict.

    Kenyans are tired of being told to tighten their belts while the elite loosen theirs.

    This case is about more than Sh384.5 million.

    It is about whether Kenya will enforce its laws equally or continue operating a two-tier system where the connected negotiate their obligations while the rest of us simply comply.

    It is about whether our institutions have the spine to hold the powerful accountable or will perpetually find reasons to accommodate their convenience.

    It is about whether we are serious about building a nation governed by law or content to maintain a façade of legality that crumbles whenever it inconveniences the right people.

    NCBA should pay what it owes, apologize for wasting judicial time and public patience, and commit to exemplary corporate citizenship going forward. Its shareholders, among the wealthiest Kenyans alive, will not miss the money.

    But the principle at stake, that everyone must contribute their fair share to the nation’s coffers, is one we cannot afford to compromise. Not now. Not ever.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

    The Writer is an analyst at a leading financial think-tank in the region.

  • From His Gravesite, Raila Continues To Influence The Kenyan Politics

    From His Gravesite, Raila Continues To Influence The Kenyan Politics

    The fresh earth at Kang’o ka Jaramogi has barely settled, yet the political tremors emanating from that sacred ground in Bondo are already reshaping Kenya’s power landscape in ways even the veteran opposition leader could scarcely have imagined during his lifetime.

    Two weeks after Raila Odinga’s sudden death from cardiac arrest at a hospital in Kerala, India on October 15, 2025 , the unthinkable has happened.

    The man who never wore the presidential crown in five attempts is now wielding more influence over Kenya’s political architecture from six feet under than many sitting leaders command from the comfort of State House.

    At the heart of this extraordinary phenomenon lies a gravesite that has transformed from a family burial ground into what can only be described as Kenya’s newest political shrine.

    The stream of visitors has been nothing short of astonishing.

    From dawn until the sun dips behind Lake Victoria, the Bondo-Nyamira road witnesses an endless procession of convoys carrying everyone from powerful governors to humble boda boda operators, from Kikuyu elders seeking reconciliation to Arsenal football fans paying tribute to their fellow Gunner.

    The magnetism is palpable and unprecedented. Former President Uhuru Kenyatta made a solemn return to the grave, while Agikuyu elders, religious groups, and even local Arsenal supporters have trooped to pay their respects.

    Political delegations from Kisii, Homa Bay, Busia, Kakamega, Nairobi, and remarkably, from the very Mount Kenya heartland that once viewed him with suspicion, have all made the pilgrimage.

    But the real story is not merely about mourning.

    It is about power, succession, and the dangerous vacuum left by a political colossus whose shadow stretched across four decades of Kenyan history.

    In the corridors of power in Nairobi, panic is setting in.

    President William Ruto openly admitted at the burial that Raila’s death was “a big blow” to him, acknowledging the veteran politician as his “political teacher, mentor and adviser.”
    The confession was startling in its vulnerability.

    Ruto needed Odinga.

    The ODM holds the second largest share of seats in Kenya’s parliament, and Odinga was the leader who decided most of the party’s policy positions on legislative issues, with Ruto needing Odinga’s control of these votes to advance his agenda. 

    The broad-based government that Ruto and Odinga cobbled together after the tumultuous 2022 election now teeters on the edge of chaos.

    Without Odinga’s steady hand to keep ODM’s restive troops in line, the coalition threatens to unravel spectacularly.

    The Council of Governors visited Kang’o Ka Jaramogi, to condole with the family of the late Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga
    The Council of Governors visited Kang’o Ka Jaramogi, to condole with the family of the late Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga

    Already, factional wars have erupted within ODM over whether to maintain the pact with Ruto or break away and reclaim the party’s opposition identity ahead of the 2027 polls.

    In an extraordinary meeting, ODM moved to forestall a succession fallout by endorsing the 82-year-old Oburu Oginga as acting party leader and announced its commitment to remain in Ruto’s broad-based government until 2027.

    But the declaration has only intensified the power struggle. Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna, while flanked by party officials, announced the party was in the broad-based arrangement to stay, despite his previous insistence that it was Raila’s wish for ODM to field its own candidate in 2027. 

    The succession battle is fierce and multi-layered. Within the larger Jaramogi Oginga family, Oburu has assumed leadership of the wider clan, while Raila Odinga Junior has been crowned customarily as heir to his father’s immediate household.

    But can either truly fill the shoes of a man who commanded loyalty across ethnic lines, who could mobilize millions with a single speech, who turned every political setback into a stepping stone?

    The vultures are circling. Political operators from across the spectrum see opportunity in the chaos. Kalonzo Musyoka of Wiper steps forward with the poise of a veteran, while Martha Karua holds her brief for rule of law that can rally urban and professional classes.

    Even within ODM, younger turks like Embakasi East MP Babu Owino and his ilk are positioning themselves as the future, challenging the old guard’s cautious embrace of the Ruto government.

    Back in Bondo, the political theater continues to unfold against a backdrop of genuine grief.

    Local businesses have sprung up overnight, with women selling tea, porridge, and mandazi to visitors, while vendors hawk miniature portraits of Raila, orange wristbands, and flags emblazoned with ODM symbols.

    The atmosphere blends mourning with commerce, reverence with calculation.

    What Raila achieved in death may prove more consequential than his lifetime struggles.

    He has forced Kenya’s political elite to reckon with fundamental questions.

    Who inherits his massive support base spanning Nyanza, Western, Coast, and parts of Nairobi? Who will be the voice of opposition when opposition is most needed? Who will dare challenge Ruto in 2027 without the Odinga machine behind them?

    ODM faces competing ideological camps: those supporting the broad-based government led by Oburu, Gladys Wanga and John Mbadi; those like James Orengo and Professor Anyang Nyong’o who insist ODM must remain vibrant, strong and principled; and the youth-driven faction demanding a complete break from Ruto. 

    The gravesite visits continue unabated.

    Charlene Ruto visits the grave of the late Raila Odinga and condoles with the Odinga family in Bondo, Siaya county.
    Charlene Ruto visits the grave of the late Raila Odinga and condoles with the Odinga family in Bondo, Siaya county.

    Each delegation that bows before the marble tomb at Kang’o ka Jaramogi is making a statement, staking a claim, seeking legitimacy from a man who can no longer speak but whose silence thunders louder than any speech he delivered while alive.

    Raila Odinga may have lost five presidential elections, but in death, he has won something far more enduring.

    He has become the ghost at Kenya’s political feast, the absent presence that every ambitious politician must acknowledge, the question that every power calculation must answer.

    From his gravesite, Baba continues to shape the destiny of a nation that celebrated him but frustrated him, that revered him but denied him, that needed him even when it rejected him.

    The soil of Bondo may hold his body, but his spirit roams free through the corridors of power, unsettling the mighty, inspiring the faithful, and reminding Kenya that true influence transcends the grave.

    The 2027 election campaigns may not officially begin for months, but make no mistake, they have already started at that grave in Siaya County, where every wreath laid is a political statement and every prayer whispered is a plea for a share of the Odinga legacy.

    Kenya has entered uncharted political waters, and the only certainty is uncertainty.

    The man who taught Kenya how to resist, how to question, how to fight for democracy even from prison cells and torture chambers, has left behind a nation struggling to find its voice without him.

    At Kang’o ka Jaramogi, the winds still carry that new rhythm. And in those winds, if you listen carefully, you can almost hear Raila’s trademark chuckle, watching the political chess game continue without him on the board, yet somehow still controlling every move.

    A cracked glass art work of Raila Odinga by Wicky Mane.
    A cracked glass art work of Raila Odinga by Wicky Mane.
  • The Curtain Falls on Raila Odinga: Marking The End Of An Era of Kenya’s Most Consequential Political Leader in History

    The Curtain Falls on Raila Odinga: Marking The End Of An Era of Kenya’s Most Consequential Political Leader in History

    The silence that descended over Kang’o ka Jaramogi on that Sunday evening was profound. As the seventeenth gunshot echoed across the ancestral homestead in Bondo, followed by the roar of military aircraft overhead, Kenya bid farewell to a man who had defined its political landscape for over four decades without ever occupying its highest office.

    Raila Amolo Odinga, who died on October 15, 2025, while receiving treatment in India at the age of 80, was laid to rest beside his father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first Vice President, completing a story that began with independence and ended with a nation transformed.

    The funeral itself was a study in contrasts and contradictions, much like the man it honored. Here was the state he had fought, challenged, and occasionally partnered with, according him full military honors.

    The same government that had once imprisoned him without trial for six years now draped his coffin in the national flag and positioned soldiers in crisp formation to salute his departure.

    President William Ruto, who had defeated him in the 2022 presidential election, led the mourners and openly acknowledged Raila as his political mentor.

    Former President Uhuru Kenyatta, once his bitter rival before their famous 2018 handshake, eulogized him as a close friend and statesman.

    Former President Uhuru Kenyatta viewing Raila Odinga's body at Kasarani Stadium
    Former President Uhuru Kenyatta viewing Raila Odinga’s body at Kasarani Stadium

    The irony was not lost on the thousands who had gathered at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology grounds to witness history.

    What made Raila Odinga so consequential was not what he achieved in formal office, though his tenure as Prime Minister in the Grand Coalition Government from 2008 to 2013 saw significant infrastructure development and reform initiatives.

    Rather, it was his ability to shape Kenya’s political destiny from outside the presidency that cemented his place in history. He was, as President Ruto aptly described him, a man who ruled without the instruments of power.

    His fingerprints are visible on nearly every major chapter of Kenya’s modern political evolution, from the multiparty democracy struggles of the early 1990s to the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution that restructured governance and introduced devolution.

    Born on January 7, 1945, in Maseno to a family already steeped in nationalist politics, Raila inherited both privilege and burden.

    His father Jaramogi had been a fierce ally of Jomo Kenyatta in the independence struggle but fell out with Kenya’s founding president over ideological differences, particularly regarding land distribution and the treatment of opposition voices.

    This schism would define the Odinga family’s relationship with power for generations. Where Jaramogi represented the old guard of African nationalism with its pan-African socialist ideals, Raila would become something more complex and contemporary: a democrat, a reformer, a coalition builder, and a master of political theater.

    His political awakening came through suffering. After studying engineering in East Germany and returning to lecture at the University of Nairobi, Raila’s trajectory changed dramatically in 1982. Following the failed coup attempt against President Daniel arap Moi’s regime, he was detained without trial for six years, accused of treason though never charged.

    The years in Kamiti Prison and later in the notorious Nyayo House cells transformed him. He emerged not broken but hardened, with nothing to lose and everything to fight for. As he would later write in his autobiography, “You can imprison a man’s body, but not his ideas.”

    The 1990s saw Raila at the forefront of the second liberation struggle, the movement that broke the one-party stranglehold of KANU and paved the way for multiparty democracy. Alongside veterans like Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, he risked everything to demand political pluralism. It was a dangerous era to challenge Moi, but Raila’s voice only grew louder.

    In 1992, he won his first parliamentary seat representing Lang’ata Constituency, beginning a legislative career that would span decades and establish him as one of the most effective opposition leaders in African politics.

    Yet it was in 2002 that Raila demonstrated his most audacious political skill: the ability to sacrifice personal ambition for a larger strategic goal. His declaration of “Kibaki Tosha” during that year’s presidential campaign, endorsing Mwai Kibaki and uniting the opposition under the National Rainbow Coalition, engineered the defeat of KANU’s 39-year grip on power.

    It was a political masterstroke that elevated him from opposition agitator to national kingmaker.

    The fact that he was subsequently betrayed by the Kibaki administration, which reneged on a pre-election memorandum of understanding promising him the prime minister’s position, only added to his mythology as a leader repeatedly denied what was rightfully his.

    The disputed 2007 presidential election and its aftermath remain the most controversial chapter in Raila’s political journey. The violence that erupted, claiming over 1,000 lives and displacing more than 600,000 people, exposed the fragility of Kenya’s democracy and the depth of its ethnic divisions. Yet even in this national trauma, Raila found a path to redemption.

    The power-sharing agreement brokered by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which created the position of Prime Minister for him, allowed Kenya to step back from the brink. His tenure in that office, alongside President Kibaki in the Grand Coalition Government, demonstrated that he could govern responsibly and deliver tangible results.

    Raila Odinga’s body lying in state.
    Raila Odinga’s body lying in state.

    Perhaps his most enduring contribution to Kenya was his relentless advocacy for constitutional reform. The 2010 Constitution, which fundamentally restructured how Kenya is governed, bears his imprint more than any other political leader of his generation. The devolution of power and resources to county governments, the strengthened Bill of Rights, the creation of independent commissions to check executive power, these were reforms Raila had championed for decades.

    As Kisumu Governor Anyang’ Nyong’o noted at the funeral, without Raila, Kenya might not have realized the transformative constitution it now enjoys.

    His subsequent presidential campaigns in 2013, 2017, and 2022 all ended in defeat, though his supporters consistently claimed electoral manipulation. The 2017 election was particularly dramatic.

    After the Supreme Court nullified the initial results and ordered a fresh poll, which he boycotted, Raila participated in a mock swearing-in ceremony as the “People’s President” at Uhuru Park. It was a moment of maximum tension, with the nation teetering on the edge of another crisis.

    Yet within months, he would stun the country again by shaking hands with President Kenyatta on the steps of Harambee House, initiating the famous handshake that would redefine his final years.

    The handshake marked Raila’s evolution from perpetual opposition leader to elder statesman. The Building Bridges Initiative that followed, though ultimately struck down by the courts, represented his vision of a more inclusive political system.

    ODM leader Raila Odinga and President William Ruto. (Photo: Handout)
    ODM leader Raila Odinga and President William Ruto. (Photo: Handout)

    His subsequent engagement with the William Ruto administration, which saw ODM members join a broad-based government in 2024, was controversial among his supporters but consistent with his belief in dialogue over confrontation.

    As former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo observed at the funeral, “Tolerance is a lesson of love. Raila tolerated accommodation.”

    What distinguished Raila from other African opposition leaders was his ability to maintain relevance across generations. While many of his contemporaries faded into irrelevance or were consumed by bitterness after electoral defeats, Raila continually reinvented himself.

    He built the Orange Democratic Movement into arguably Kenya’s most enduring political party, marking its 20th anniversary just weeks after his death.

    He cultivated a fanatical following that transcended ethnic boundaries, though his base remained strongest in Nyanza and parts of coastal Kenya. His nicknames spoke to his multifaceted persona: Enigma, Agwambo (the mysterious one), Tinga, Nyundo (the hammer), Jakom (the chairman), and simply Baba (father).

    The Raila brand was built on more than political platforms or policy positions. It was emotional, visceral, rooted in symbols and stories.

    His trademark cap, his rolling gait, his finger-wagging speeches, his ability to quote Shakespeare and traditional proverbs in the same breath, his famous laugh, these elements created a political identity that existed somewhere between myth and memory.

    When his daughter Winnie carried that iconic cap at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport as his body was returned from India, she was not merely carrying a hat but the weight of an entire political legacy.

    Throughout his career, Raila demonstrated an almost supernatural ability to survive political obituaries.

    After each electoral defeat, analysts would declare his career finished, only to watch him reemerge stronger. This resilience was rooted in his genuine connection with ordinary Kenyans who saw in him a champion of their aspirations and grievances.

    Whether he was crusading against corruption, demanding electoral reforms, or fighting for the rights of the marginalized, Raila positioned himself as the voice of those locked out of power.

    His decades-long fight for democracy, human rights, and constitutional reform is well documented and forms the core of his historical legacy.

    The state funeral accorded to him, complete with a 17-gun salute and military fly-past, was unprecedented for someone who had never been president. As Siaya Governor James Orengo noted, it was the first such honor for a leader from Nyanza region.

    His father Jaramogi, despite serving as Vice President, never received a state funeral.

    Tom Mboya and Robert Ouko, other prominent leaders from the region who met tragic ends, were not honored in this manner.

    The recognition reflected not just Raila’s individual achievements but also a national acknowledgment of historical injustices and the need for inclusive commemoration of Kenya’s heroes.

    State funeral of Raila Odinga
    State funeral of Raila Odinga

    Yet even in death, mysteries remained. The 1982 coup that first thrust him into the national spotlight has never been fully explained. Despite promises to write a comprehensive account, Raila took to his grave the full details of his role in that failed attempt to overthrow Moi.

    His 2006 biography was vague on the matter, and his 2013 autobiography described his involvement as merely “peripheral.” The question of whether his release from detention without prosecution involved a political deal with Moi remains unanswered. These ambiguities, rather than diminishing his legacy, seemed to enhance the enigma that defined him.

    The tributes at his funeral revealed the breadth of his influence. Speaker after speaker, from current leaders to liberation struggle comrades, acknowledged his role in shaping modern Kenya.

    Former Speaker Justin Muturi, despite political differences, praised his tenacity and deep love for country. Senior Counsel Paul Muite recalled their shared struggles for justice.

    Former Imenti Central MP Gitobu Imanyara spoke of lives that “are lived out loud, with conviction and cost, shaped by purpose and defined by endurance.” Even those who had opposed him politically could not deny the magnitude of his impact.

    State funeral for Raila Odinga in Bondo.
    State funeral for Raila Odinga in Bondo.

    For the Luo community, Raila’s death represented something beyond the loss of a political leader. He was the custodian of their identity and pride, the embodiment of their long exclusion from the presidency and their determination to remain relevant in national politics. Yet even here, he challenged traditions.

    His funeral arrangements, reportedly kept deliberately simple by his wishes, symbolized a break from the often financially ruinous excesses of Luo burial customs.

    It was a final statement about values and priorities, about substance over spectacle, even as the state provided the spectacle he had never sought.

    The question of succession looms large. ODM has named his elder brother Oburu Odinga as party leader, a gesture toward continuity. But the crowds at his funeral did not chant “Oburu.” They chanted “Baba.” And in the absence of Baba, eyes turned to Winnie Odinga, his daughter, who has emerged as perhaps the most visible keeper of his political flame.

    Winnie Odinga stands as she delivers last speech during father’s funeral in Bondo.
    Winnie Odinga stands as she delivers last speech during father’s funeral in Bondo.

    Whether she or anyone else can inherit the Raila brand remains an open question. As Siaya Governor Orengo reminded mourners, “There are those who lead political parties and have abused Raila without knowing that without Raila, they would not be leading those parties.”

    What is certain is that Kenya’s political landscape will look profoundly different without Raila Odinga. For over 40 years, he was the constant thread running through every major political development. He set agendas, framed debates, and forced governments to reform even from opposition.

    He transformed what it meant to lose elections in Kenya, showing that defeat need not mean political death or descent into violence. He demonstrated that leadership is not confined to formal office, that influence can be exercised through moral authority and popular legitimacy.

    History will debate where Raila ranks among Africa’s political giants. He never achieved the continental profile of a Nelson Mandela or a Julius Nyerere.

    He did not lead his country to independence or preside over decades of nation-building like Jomo Kenyatta or Julius Kambarage Nyerere. But in the specific context of democratic struggle and constitutional reform in a multiparty era, few African leaders have left a more substantial mark.

    Raila Odinga.
    Raila Odinga.

    He proved that opposition politics could be principled and consequential, that one could challenge power without destroying the state, that reform was possible within the system even when the system seemed designed to resist change.

    As the soil covered his coffin at Kang’o ka Jaramogi, next to his father who had died 31 years earlier, the symbolism was complete. Two generations of Odingas, both denied the presidency they arguably deserved, both crucial to Kenya’s political evolution, now rested together.

    The son had surpassed the father in impact and reach, had taken the family legacy from regional grievance to national transformation. He had changed Kenya without ever ruling it, had left institutions and freedoms as his monument rather than buildings or statues.

    The curtain has fallen on Raila Odinga’s chapter in Kenyan history, but the pages he wrote will be studied for generations. He leaves behind a more democratic Kenya, a more devolved system of governance, a more vibrant civil society, and a political culture where opposition is not treason and dialogue is possible even after bitter contests.

    He leaves millions who called him Baba and meant it, who saw in him not just a political leader but a father figure fighting for their rights and dignity. He leaves a wife, Ida, who stood by him through detentions, exiles, and five presidential campaigns. He leaves children who must now decide what to do with a name and a legacy that loom so large.

    Most importantly, he leaves an example. In an era when African politics often seems defined by strongmen clinging to power, corruption eating away at institutions, and opposition leaders either co-opted or crushed, Raila Odinga showed a different path.

    He showed that one could fight the system without becoming what one fought against, that one could lose elections and maintain dignity, that power could be challenged and even changed through persistence and principle.

    He was not perfect; he made political calculations, struck deals that disappointed supporters, and sometimes seemed to compromise on ideals. But he never stopped fighting for a better Kenya.

    As President Ruto said at the funeral, capturing perhaps the essential paradox of Raila’s life, “He was fondly referred to as the people’s president. We honor him with a lot of respect because of his contribution to the nation.”

    A people’s president who never won a presidential election. A man who ruled without occupying the seat of power. A political engineer who built a more democratic Kenya while repeatedly being denied its leadership.

    This was Raila Amolo Odinga, and the curtain that has fallen on his life marks the end of the most consequential opposition leadership in Kenya’s history. The stage will not see his like again.

    President Ruto throws soil into the grave of Raila Odinga.
    President Ruto throws soil into the grave of Raila Odinga.
  • The Enigma’s Final Act: How Raila Odinga Orchestrated His Own Succession

    The Enigma’s Final Act: How Raila Odinga Orchestrated His Own Succession

    A master strategist to the end, Kenya’s opposition stalwart spent his final years quietly arranging the political furniture for a community that had followed him through five decades of struggle

    The signs were always there, hidden in plain sight like clues in a detective novel that only make sense when you reach the final page.

    When Raila Amollo Odinga breathed his last in an Indian hospital on the morning of October 15, 2025, those who had watched him closely over the preceding two years realized they had been witnessing something extraordinary: a political titan preparing for his own exit with the same meticulous care he had brought to five presidential campaigns.

    At 80, Raila had lived what Africans call a full life, the kind that earns a man the right to be called an elder without irony.

    But unlike many leaders who cling to relevance until their final breath, Raila seemed to understand that his greatest service to the Luo community might be ensuring they would not be orphaned by his death.

    The question that has consumed political analysts since his passing is not whether he knew his time was coming, but rather how deliberately he prepared for it.

    Consider the sequence of events. In early 2025, Raila threw himself into the Piny Luo Festival in Siaya with an enthusiasm that surprised even his closest allies.

    This was no ordinary cultural gathering.

    Representatives came from South Sudan, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, all united by the Dholuo language that had scattered across East Africa over centuries of migration.

    Raila was installed as the titular head of this transnational community, and witnesses say his excitement was palpable, almost childlike.

    For a man who had spent decades in the hard-nosed world of Kenyan politics, this sudden embrace of cultural ceremony seemed anomalous. But viewed through the lens of what came after, it takes on new meaning.

    Raila was claiming his place in history not just as a politician but as a custodian of his people, ensuring that the Luo would remain united even as his own chapter closed.

    The more dramatic shift came in his political posture.

    After a lifetime of confrontation with the establishment, after detention without trial, after elections he believed were stolen from him, after the 2007 violence that nearly tore Kenya apart, Raila suddenly became an apostle of reconciliation.

    He extended hands to Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, men who had been his bitterest rivals.

    He accepted positions in government that his supporters viewed as capitulation. He became, in his twilight years, a peacemaker.

    When the Gen Z protests of June 2024 threatened to topple President Ruto’s government, it was Raila who stepped in to calm the waters.

    Young people who had idolized him for his fighting spirit were bewildered.

    Why was their champion now counseling patience and dialogue? Why was he, of all people, telling them to trust constitutional processes? The backlash was fierce.

    Social media exploded with accusations of betrayal. The hashtag that had once celebrated him now turned on him with venom.

    Raila-Ruto handshake.

    But Raila held firm, insisting that Kenya had mature democratic structures capable of addressing political grievances without descending into chaos.

    For those who had lived through the destruction of 2007 and 2008, his position made sense. For younger Kenyans who had not experienced that trauma, it looked like surrender.

    Political analysts now suggest something more profound was at work.

    After spending decades fighting to build democratic institutions in Kenya, Raila could not countenance leaving those institutions in ruins.

    He had broken the rules of dictatorship, expanded democratic space, and midwifed a new constitution. To let Kenya burn as he departed would have negated everything he had fought for.

    The shrewdest move, however, was one that only became apparent after his death.

    Raila had quietly placed the Luo community under the political protection of President Ruto. This was not surrender but strategy, a lesson drawn from Kenya’s political history.

    When Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978, the Kikuyu community found itself under the guardianship of Daniel arap Moi, who had become president against the wishes of powerful figures in Kenyatta’s inner circle.

    Moi became their foster political parent until he could hand them back to one of their own, Mwai Kibaki, who in turn prepared the way for Uhuru Kenyatta. When Moi’s own tenure ended in controversy in 2002, the Kalenjin faced hostility as collateral damage for his excesses.

    It was Raila who took them under his wing, protecting them politically until William Ruto emerged as their natural leader.

    Now the cycle completes itself.

    The Luo, who have never tasted the presidency despite Raila’s five attempts, find themselves tucked under Ruto’s political umbrella. This arrangement serves multiple purposes.

    It prevents the community from fragmenting into rival factions in the power vacuum left by Raila’s death. It ensures they retain political relevance at the national level. And it buys time for organic leadership to emerge from within.

    Those hoping to harvest Luo votes for the 2027 elections may find themselves disappointed. The community that followed Raila through decades of struggle is unlikely to scatter at the first opportunity.

    More probably, they will remain in their current political home until a new leader emerges naturally, someone with the stature to claim Raila’s mantle without the artifice of appointment.

    In his final two years, Raila handled the subjects of death and the afterlife with what observers described as admirable stoicism.

    He spoke of ancestors and legacy with the ease of a man who had made peace with mortality. He put his entrepreneurial affairs in order, his vast interests in oil and gas, hospitality, real estate and farming distributed according to plans he had laid carefully.

    This was not the behavior of a man caught off guard by death. This was the behavior of someone who had received what Africans call the signs, the intimations from nature that a man’s time on earth is drawing to a close.

    In traditional African thought, respected elders are granted this foreknowledge so they can arrange their affairs and ease the transition for those they leave behind.

    Whether Raila received such signs, or whether he simply read the state of his health with clear eyes, the effect was the same. He took control of his narrative one final time.

    The man who had been Kenya’s perennial opposition leader spent his last act becoming its statesman, the father figure who could put the nation’s interests above his own ambitions.

    His critics have called this final transformation a betrayal, a capitulation to the forces he had spent a lifetime fighting.

    His defenders see something nobler: a leader who loved his country more than he loved the fight, who understood that his legacy would be measured not by the elections he won but by the democracy he helped to build and the people he left behind in capable hands.

    Raila Amollo Odinga, called Agwambo, the enigma, has exited the stage. But unlike actors who simply disappear when the curtain falls, he has left detailed stage directions for those who remain.

    Whether they follow his script remains to be seen, but they cannot say he left them unprepared. In death as in life, Raila made sure he had the last word.

    President Ruto pays last respect to Raila Odinga lying in state in parliament building.
    President Ruto pays last respect to Raila Odinga lying in state in parliament building.
  • Jowi! Why Raila’s Funeral Is The First of a Kind in Kenyan History

    Jowi! Why Raila’s Funeral Is The First of a Kind in Kenyan History

    The lakeside city of Kisumu stood still on that Saturday morning, its streets transformed into rivers of grief as tens of thousands poured out to bid farewell to their political colossus.

    When the Kenya Air Force Leonardo C-27J Spartan, call sign Enigma01, descended through the early morning mist and touched down at Kisumu Airport at precisely 7:20am, two fire trucks released twin arcs of water over the aircraft in a ceremonial salute reserved for the most distinguished of the nation’s sons.

    Inside that military craft lay the body of former Prime Minister Raila Amolo Odinga, draped in the national flag, making his final journey home not as the president he never became, but as something perhaps more remarkable: a leader whose influence transcended the very office he perpetually sought but never attained.

    The Kenya Air Force jet hands over Raila Odinga's body to Kenya Air Force chopper that will directly lift the body to Mamboleo Grounds in Kisumu.
    The Kenya Air Force jet hands over Raila Odinga’s body to Kenya Air Force chopper that will directly lift the body to Mamboleo Grounds in Kisumu.

    The spectacle that unfolded across four days, from the moment news broke of Odinga’s death in India to his interment at Kang’o ka Jaramogi in Bondo, represented an unprecedented convergence of state power, cultural tradition, and popular emotion that Kenya had never witnessed for anyone outside the presidency.

    That Raila Odinga received full military honours comparable only to those accorded former heads of state speaks to a profound shift in how the Kenyan state chooses to remember its most consequential figures, regardless of whether they ever occupied State House.

    The honours bestowed upon Odinga were methodical in their symbolism.

    His casket, borne by military pallbearers on a gun carriage through the streets of Nairobi, his body lying in state in Parliament, the military processions in three cities, and the gun salute at his burial site represented a checklist of ceremonial dignity that only four other Kenyans had received before him: presidents Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi, and Mwai Kibaki, along with General Francis Ogolla, who died in office as Chief of Defence Forces.

    Even Michael Kijana Wamalwa, who perished while serving as vice president in 2003, did not receive the full complement of these military honours.

    President Ruto pays last respect to Raila Odinga lying in state in parliament building.
    President Ruto pays last respect to Raila Odinga lying in state in parliament building.

    The decision by President William Ruto to accord Odinga a state funeral marked a historic departure from Kenya’s traditional treatment of opposition figures.

    For decades, the relationship between the state and its most vocal critics remained adversarial even in death. But Ruto’s gesture, political though it undoubtedly was, signalled something deeper about Kenya’s maturing democracy.

    It acknowledged that Odinga’s contribution to the nation’s political evolution, his decades of struggle for constitutional reform, his role in the return of multiparty democracy, and his capacity to mobilise millions made him a statesman whose legacy belonged to all Kenyans, not merely to his Orange Democratic Movement party or to his Luo community.

    The spontaneous outpouring of public grief disrupted even the most carefully laid government plans.

    At Jomo Kenyatta International Stadium in Kisumu, what was intended as an orderly public viewing descended into controlled chaos as the 30,000-capacity facility overflowed with mourners, thousands more locked outside its gates.

    Security planners had envisioned a stately procession from Kisumu to Bondo, but the sheer weight of humanity forced Interior Principal Secretary Raymond Omollo to abandon those plans and instead airlift the body by military helicopter.

    The people, it seemed, would not be choreographed.

    State funeral for Raila Odinga.
    State funeral for Raila Odinga.

    This popular defiance of official protocol had precedent in Kenyan history. When Jaramogi Oginga Odinga died in January 1994, tens of thousands followed his body from Kisumu to Bondo on foot, chanting freedom songs and waving palm branches in what became a spontaneous demonstration of love that no government decree could contain. But where Jaramogi’s funeral occurred during the tense early years of Kenya’s renewed multiparty democracy, when the state viewed the Odinga influence with suspicion and maintained oppressive security measures, his son’s sendoff unfolded in a vastly different political climate.

    The government was not merely tolerating the mourning; it was orchestrating it.

    Yet for all the state’s involvement, Raila’s funeral remained authentically rooted in Luo cultural traditions, creating a fascinating hybrid of military precision and ancestral ritual.

    The performance of Tero Buru, the ceremonial driving away of death from the homestead, saw mourners break through security barriers at Odinga’s Opoda farm, dressed in traditional attire, armed with spears and shields, driving cattle and invoking ancestral spirits.

    The Anglican Church, under Bishop David Kodia of Bondo Diocese, negotiated this cultural minefield with diplomatic skill, allowing traditions deemed not harmful while maintaining that the actual burial service would be a Christian affair.

    The choice of burial site itself became a matter of cultural and familial negotiation that revealed the tensions inherent in honouring a man who straddled tradition and modernity.

    Some elders argued that Odinga should rest at Opoda, the home he had established after leaving his father’s compound, following the Luo custom of goyo dala, where sons create their own homesteads. Others insisted he belonged beside Jaramogi at the family cemetery in Kang’o ka Jaramogi.

    The latter view prevailed, and a mausoleum was constructed to house Raila alongside his father, physically reuniting in death two men who had shaped Kenya’s political consciousness across seven decades.

    What distinguished Raila’s funeral most profoundly from any that preceded it was this unique combination of elements: the full machinery of state power deployed for an opposition leader, the integration of indigenous cultural practices into official ceremony, and the sheer scale of public participation that repeatedly overwhelmed security arrangements.

    When mourners in Nairobi forced their way past barricades at Kasarani Stadium on Thursday, or when they stormed into the viewing at Jomo Kenyatta Stadium in Kisumu on Saturday, they were not merely grieving; they were asserting ownership over the narrative of Odinga’s life and death.

    Mourners gather to receive the body of former Prime Minister Raila Odinga at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on October 16, 2025. Photo credit: PCS
    Mourners gather to receive the body of former Prime Minister Raila Odinga at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on October 16, 2025. Photo credit: PCS

    This was, as one headline captured it, the people’s funeral.

    The symbolism extended beyond ceremony into political reconciliation. Just as Jaramogi had reconciled with President Daniel arap Moi before his death in 1994, so too had Raila reached an accommodation with President Ruto in the final year of his life.

    But where Jaramogi’s rapprochement with Moi was viewed with suspicion by younger opposition leaders who saw it as betrayal, Raila’s working relationship with Ruto appeared to have Bishop Kodia’s blessing.

    The cleric urged mourners to respect decisions Odinga had made before death, including his cooperation with the government, suggesting that even in his final political pivot, Raila retained the trust of his supporters.

    The funeral also marked a generational shift in how Kenyans mourn their leaders. Mzee Onyango Radiel, who served as Jaramogi’s aide and witnessed both father and son’s funerals, observed that where people gathered for Jaramogi out of traditional loyalty, they came for Raila out of something resembling spiritual connection.

    Raila, he suggested, had inspired faith in democracy the way prophets inspire faith in divinity.

    This transformation from ethnic champion to national icon, from regional kingpin to statesman, was perhaps Odinga’s greatest achievement, one that only became fully visible in the breadth of mourning that accompanied his passing.

    The contrast with Jaramogi’s funeral illuminated how far Kenya had travelled in 31 years. When the elder Odinga died, the state maintained nervous distance, wary of the opposition’s capacity for mobilisation.

    At Jaramogi’s first anniversary in 1995, that wariness proved justified when police clashed with mourners in violence that left the event blood-stained and saw even visiting Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo later arrested and charged with treason upon his return home for allegedly plotting with Kenya’s opposition. No such tensions marred Raila’s sendoff.

    The teargas incident at Kasarani that so distressed Oburu Oginga, who pleaded that his brother not be subjected to the chemical irritant in death as he had been countless times in life, was an aberration rather than the norm.

    Public viewing of Odinga’s body at Mamboleo Grounds, Kisumu.
    Public viewing of Odinga’s body at Mamboleo Grounds, Kisumu.

    The media coverage itself represented a departure from tradition. Where Jaramogi’s death struck suddenly with no advance warning, Raila’s passing in a hospital in India allowed for preparation, for the mobilisation of resources, and for the kind of saturation coverage that social media enables.

    The hashtags, the live streams, the minute-by-minute updates transformed a funeral into a national event experienced simultaneously by millions, collapsing the distance between Bondo and Nairobi, between Kenya and its diaspora.

    The traditional mourning song “Jowi! Jowi!” became a viral phenomenon, its haunting refrain carrying across digital networks and physical spaces alike.

    In the final analysis, what made Raila Odinga’s funeral the first of its kind in Kenyan history was not any single element but rather the unprecedented combination of factors that converged in those October days.

    It was the first time the full apparatus of state honour was extended to someone who never held executive office.

    It was the first time military tradition, Christian ceremony, and indigenous cultural practices were so deliberately and publicly interwoven.

    It was the first time a funeral became both a state occasion and a popular uprising, where official protocol repeatedly gave way to the will of mourners who refused to be contained.

    Most significantly, it represented the first time Kenya buried a leader whose legitimacy derived not from state power but from moral authority, not from electoral victory but from decades of struggle, not from the office he held but from the millions who believed in the vision he represented.

    As dusk settled over the twin tombs at Kang’o ka Jaramogi, father and son reunited beneath marble and earth, it became clear that Kenya had found a new way to honour its heroes.

    The presidency, that office Raila Odinga pursued through five elections and never attained, suddenly seemed less important than the question President Ruto posed during the memorial service: “Who will cry when you die?”

    For Raila Amolo Odinga, the answer thundered across four days and three cities, delivered by a nation that wept.

    A mourner overwhelmed by grief at Mamboleo grounds where thousands da turned up for the public viewing of Raila’s body in Kisumu.
    A mourner overwhelmed by grief at Mamboleo grounds where thousands da turned up for the public viewing of Raila’s body in Kisumu.