Members of Parliament drawn from the united Opposition have intensified their criticism of the Finance Bill 2026 process, alleging that the Majority side pushed the legislation through its second reading without adequate input from all lawmakers.
Addressing the media at Parliament, the MPs claimed the Bill advanced at an unexpectedly rapid pace, thereby limiting participation and undermining parliamentary scrutiny of key tax proposals. They argue that the manner in which the debate was managed reflects a deliberate strategy to fast-track the approval of controversial tax measures.
Kajiado North MP Onesmus Ngogoyo stated that the process denied members a fair opportunity to formally express their position through a division vote and questioned how the Bill reached its second reading.
“We called for a division, 31 members, and the Speaker refused for us to be head counted so that people will know who voted yes and who voted no to the Finance Bill as it was proposed,” he said.
He further argued that the House debated a published Bill while committee proposals and amendments had not been formally released at the time of the debate.
“What was before the National Assembly this morning and yesterday was the Finance Bill as it was published. The report of the committee… has not been proposed,” he said, adding that MPs were effectively being pressured into voting before full scrutiny.
Ngogoyo also warned that changes affecting second-hand clothing traders could have indirect cost implications, despite claims of tax relief.
“It is true they want to zero-rate the issue of mitumba, but what they are not telling you is that the VAT that people who trade in that business have been claiming, they will not be able to claim,” he explained.
Jack Wamboka, MP for Bumula, also accused the Majority side of compressing debate and limiting participation, stating that fewer than 20 MPs were permitted to contribute meaningfully.
“Less than 20 people have contributed to the Finance Bill this morning, and Osoro laid an ambush to us and from there he brought that thing,” he said.
Wamboka argued that the Bill imposes broad-based taxation on digital platforms and everyday transactions, warning of rising cost pressures across essential services.
“They are taxing digital platforms big time. People paying for medical services in hospitals are going to be taxed. Parents paying school fees as low as 200 shillings are going to be taxed,” he stated.
He added that mobile and digital payment systems would be affected, increasing the cost of basic transactions.
Kathiani MP Robert Mbui accused the Majority side of abandoning full debate in favour of expedited voting procedures, suggesting that Parliament risks losing its deliberative role.
“It is the first time that the Majority has conceded defeat by rushing to the media to explain what was happening on the floor of the House,” he said.
Mbui insisted that Parliament should prioritise debate over voting pressure, especially on a major tax law.
“This House cannot turn into a voting machine. We must be able to debate and articulate our issues,” he emphasised.
He also clarified that clause-by-clause scrutiny belongs to the committee stage, not the second reading, and said amendments would be introduced after the debate concludes.
His Matungulu counterpart, Stephen Mule, spoke on technical provisions in the Bill, citing VAT and excise duty changes affecting digital finance and imports.
“Part three of VAT, section 21A, contains the schedule for Value Added Tax amendments,” he said.
Mule argued that mobile money platforms such as M-Pesa and Airtel Money could be affected, warning of what he termed double taxation on everyday transactions.
“When they pay via M-Pesa, they are being taxed again. That is double taxation,” he asserted.
He also raised concern over excise duty structures on imported mobile phones, stating that costs would ultimately be transferred to consumers.
The political truce between President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is facing its most serious test yet after a bitter dispute emerged over the government’s Sh2 billion compensation programme for victims of police brutality and political protests.
What was intended to be a landmark reconciliation initiative has instead exposed growing mistrust within the broad-based government arrangement, with senior ODM figures accusing State House of sidelining the party from a key promise contained in the March 2025 cooperation pact between the two former rivals.
The fallout burst into the open this week during a State House ceremony where President Ruto received a framework prepared by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights for compensating victims of human rights abuses and families of those killed during anti-government demonstrations. The compensation programme is expected to benefit more than 1,800 victims and has been allocated Sh2 billion by the government.
However, instead of showcasing unity between the coalition partners, the event highlighted simmering tensions within ODM.
ODM leader Oburu Oginga used the occasion to publicly express his dissatisfaction after arriving when the ceremony was already underway, claiming he had not been properly invited. In remarks that caught the attention of political observers, Oginga suggested that the treatment reflected the absence of his brother, Raila Odinga, who has been the chief architect of the UDA-ODM rapprochement.
The compensation agenda occupies a special place within ODM’s political calculations. It was one of the flagship commitments contained in the ten-point agreement signed by President Ruto and Raila Odinga in March 2025, a deal that laid the foundation for the broad-based government and eased months of political hostility.
For ODM, compensation is more than a government programme. It is a politically sensitive issue tied to the party’s traditional support base, many of whom suffered injuries, arrests, deaths and economic losses during successive waves of anti-government protests. Party leaders have repeatedly pointed to the compensation pledge as evidence that engagement with President Ruto was delivering tangible benefits for their supporters.
Behind the scenes, the State House event reportedly triggered a stormy discussion among ODM’s top leadership. Senior party officials questioned why key figures, including governors and senior party office holders, were absent from a ceremony involving one of the most politically significant items in the UDA-ODM agreement.
The concerns go beyond protocol.
Some ODM insiders now believe there is a deliberate attempt by UDA strategists to claim sole ownership of a programme that was negotiated jointly between the two parties. The fear within sections of ODM is that if compensation payments begin reaching beneficiaries without visible ODM involvement, President Ruto could reap the political rewards among communities that have traditionally supported Raila Odinga.
That perception has become particularly sensitive as political conversations increasingly shift toward the 2027 General Election. ODM has invested significant political capital in persuading sceptical supporters that cooperation with Ruto’s administration would yield justice for victims of police excesses and political violence.
The compensation programme itself is extensive. Beneficiaries have been identified across six categories of violations, including deaths, enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, unlawful detention and destruction of property. According to government figures, the largest group consists of victims whose freedom and security were violated during demonstrations and related security operations.
President Ruto has framed the initiative as a national healing process aimed at ending a cycle in which protests repeatedly descend into violence, loss of life and destruction of property. He argues that compensating victims is necessary to strengthen democracy and restore public confidence in state institutions.
Yet the politics surrounding the payout may prove more complicated than the compensation exercise itself.
The public protest by Oburu Oginga has revealed underlying tensions that have largely remained hidden since the UDA-ODM pact was signed. While neither side has openly questioned the future of the alliance, the dispute has exposed competing interests over credit, influence and political ownership of flagship programmes.
With billions of shillings now set to flow to victims across the country, the compensation exercise is emerging as more than a human rights intervention. It is becoming an early test of whether the fragile UDA-ODM partnership can survive the political pressures that come with sharing power and claiming achievements.
If the disagreement deepens, the Sh2 billion compensation programme could become the issue that transforms quiet unease within the coalition into a full-blown political confrontation.
Embattled ODM Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna has been removed from the Senate Energy Committee, chaired by ODM leader Oburu Oginga.
The Nairobi Senator has been replaced by Homa Bay Senator Moses Kajwang’ in the reshuffle effected on Wednesday.
The move means Sifuna will no longer serve on the committee chaired by Oburu, who is also the Siaya Senator.
Oburu and Sifuna have had infighting over the running of the ODM party and the decision to enter into a coalition agreement with President William Ruto’s UDA.
In the changes, Garissa Senator Abdul Haji replaced nominated Senator Beatrice Ogolla in the Energy Committee, while Machakos Senator Agnes Kavindu was nominated to the Senate Information, Communication and Technology Committee, also replacing Ogolla.
Ogolla, in turn, replaced Kajwang in the Senate Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Committee.
Unlike the other senators affected by the reshuffle, Sifuna was not reassigned to another committee, leaving him with membership in only two committees — the Senate County Public Accounts Committee chaired by Kajwang’ and the Senate National Security, Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Isiolo Senator Fatuma Dullo.
Announcing the changes, Senate Majority Leader Cheruiyot cited provisions of the Senate Standing Orders and a recommendation by the Senate Business Committee.
“Notwithstanding the resolution of the Senate made on February 12, 2025, on the approval of senators to serve in various standing committees of the Senate and pursuant to Standing Orders 197, 199, 228 and the Fourth Schedule to the Standing Orders, the Senate has approved the following senators nominated by the Senate Business Committee to serve in various committees,” said Cheruiyot.
Sifuna’s removal comes against the backdrop of an increasingly public fallout with Oburu.
Earlier this year, the Nairobi Senator openly declared that he was unwilling to serve under Oburu’s leadership of ODM following his elevation as party leader after Raila Odinga’s exit from the position.
Sifuna has been one of the most vocal members of the Energy Committee and was among senators who aggressively questioned the controversial Adani Group proposal involving the expansion of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport before the government eventually terminated the deal.
The committee changes come amid widening divisions within ODM.
Sifuna is associated with the party’s Linda Mwananchi faction, while Oburu is seen as a key figure in the Linda Ground camp. The two factions have increasingly differed over the party’s relationship with President William Ruto’s administration.
While Sifuna’s allies have maintained a hardline opposition stance and continue to criticise the broad-based arrangement between ODM and Kenya Kwanza, the Oburu camp has been viewed as supportive of continued engagement with the government.
The differences were laid bare in March when Sifuna launched a scathing attack on sections of the party leadership.
“I refuse to be the SG of mediocrity. I refuse to be the SG of Oburu Oginga. These characters do not deserve me. Let them ask for a proper NDC where we shall present candidates for all the party positions,” he said.
Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga has defended her county government’s expenditure of approximately Sh500,000 on the construction of a two-door pit latrine, telling senators that the amount reflects standard costs associated with such projects in parts of the county.
The issue emerged during a session of the Senate Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Tuesday as the governor responded to audit queries touching on county expenditure and pending bills.
The cost of the sanitation facility drew scrutiny from lawmakers, particularly after Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna questioned whether taxpayers had received value for money.
Responding to the concerns, Wanga maintained that the figure was neither unusual nor inflated.
“The standard cost is about half a million shillings. That covers excavation and construction,” she told the committee.
According to the governor, the final cost can vary depending on the terrain and site conditions, with some projects costing slightly less. She said difficult ground conditions in certain areas of Homa Bay can significantly increase excavation expenses.
The explanation, however, quickly sparked debate both inside and outside the Senate chamber, with many Kenyans questioning how a basic pit latrine could attract such a substantial price tag at a time when counties are facing growing financial pressures.
The matter arose against the backdrop of broader audit concerns facing the county government, including questions surrounding pending bills reportedly running into billions of shillings.
While construction costs often vary depending on location, design specifications, labour charges, materials and geological conditions, the Sh500,000 figure has generated intense public discussion, particularly on social media, where users compared it with the cost of similar facilities built in schools, health centres and rural communities across the country.
The Senate committee sought further clarification on procurement procedures, project specifications and whether the expenditure represented value for money.
The debate highlights a recurring challenge in county governments across Kenya, where questions over project costs frequently trigger concerns about efficiency, procurement practices and prudent use of public resources.
For critics, the issue is not simply the cost of a toilet but whether public funds are being spent effectively amid competing demands in sectors such as healthcare, education, water and agriculture.
Supporters of the county administration, on the other hand, argue that infrastructure costs cannot be assessed in isolation without considering site-specific factors, engineering requirements and compliance with public construction standards.
The Auditor-General’s findings and the Senate committee’s review are expected to provide further clarity on whether the expenditure was justified and whether the county obtained value for the money spent.
As scrutiny of county spending intensifies, the Sh500,000 latrine has become the latest symbol in the ongoing national debate over accountability, transparency and the management of devolved funds.
NAIROBI — Pressure is mounting on investigative agencies to examine claims linking Garissa Woman Representative Amina Edo Udgoon Siyad to a series of disputed land and procurement-related transactions that have emerged alongside the wider controversy surrounding the leasing of Nzoia Sugar Company.
The growing demands, amplified through the hashtag #NzoiaSugarLeaseScandal, come as questions continue to be raised about transparency, ownership structures, tender processes and the management of public assets connected to Kenya’s sugar sector reforms.
At the center of the controversy are allegations circulating on social media and in documents shared online claiming that companies associated with individuals linked to the legislator may have benefited from decisions made within the Ministry of Agriculture and related agencies.
Critics are calling for a comprehensive investigation by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the Registrar of Companies and other oversight bodies.
The allegations remain unproven and no court has made findings against the Garissa Woman Representative. Neither has any law enforcement agency publicly announced a criminal investigation into her conduct at the time of publication.
The controversy gained momentum after documents surfaced online purporting to show proceedings before the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board involving agricultural ministry entities and private firms.
Additional company registration records circulating online have fueled speculation about ownership structures and possible links between politically exposed individuals and companies involved in land-related transactions.
Social media users have particularly focused on claims that a company allegedly connected to relatives or associates of the legislator secured favorable treatment during administrative and procurement processes. Some posts further allege that senior government officials may have been influenced in ways that require independent scrutiny.
Those claims have not been independently verified and remain allegations.
The renewed attention comes against the backdrop of the contentious leasing of Nzoia Sugar Company to West Kenya Sugar Company under a 30-year arrangement approved by the government as part of efforts to revive struggling state-owned sugar mills.
The deal has generated intense political and public debate since it was announced in 2025. Critics have questioned the transparency of the leasing process, while supporters argue the arrangement was necessary to rescue a company burdened by debt and years of operational decline.
The controversy deepened after Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu raised concerns regarding documentation surrounding the lease.
In a report tabled before Parliament, the Auditor-General stated that her office had not been provided with certain key records, including a formal handover document and asset valuation reports, making it difficult to fully confirm the regularity of the leasing process.
Those findings reignited concerns among critics who have long argued that public assets in the sugar sector are vulnerable to opaque transactions and political influence.
While the allegations against Edo Udgoon Siyad have largely been driven by online activism and unofficial document leaks, governance experts say the claims warrant proper verification rather than dismissal or unquestioning acceptance.
Anti-corruption campaigners argue that any allegations involving elected leaders, public officials and entities seeking government contracts should be subjected to forensic examination. They are calling for investigators to review company ownership records, correspondence between public officials, procurement documentation, land registry records and any transactions connected to the disputed deals.
The Garissa Woman Representative has built her political profile around advocacy for women, youth empowerment and development initiatives in northern Kenya. Supporters say she is being unfairly targeted through unverified online campaigns and insist any accusations should be tested through lawful investigations rather than social media trials.
Nevertheless, the controversy has continued to grow as activists and political commentators demand greater transparency over dealings involving public resources.
The broader Nzoia Sugar debate has become symbolic of larger national concerns about accountability, privatization and the management of strategic public assets. While courts have previously cleared the way for the Nzoia lease to proceed and government officials have defended the arrangement as a necessary economic intervention, questions about governance and oversight have persisted.
As calls for investigations intensify, attention is now shifting to whether anti-corruption agencies will formally examine the allegations surrounding the companies and individuals named in the online claims.
Until such investigations are conducted and findings made public, the accusations against Edo Udgoon Siyad remain allegations. However, the growing public pressure underscores the demand for transparency and accountability in all transactions involving public assets, land allocations and government-linked procurement processes.
A routine State House communication meant to showcase President William Ruto’s participation at the G7 Summit in France has instead turned into an embarrassing lesson on the cost of getting basic facts wrong.
State House Spokesperson Hussein Mohamed found himself at the center of online ridicule after publishing an official press release that identified Japan’s Prime Minister as Shigeru Ishiba, a leader who is no longer in office. The statement was later deleted after social media users pointed out that Japan is currently led by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
The now-deleted release announced President Ruto’s attendance at the G7 Summit in Evian, France, where Kenya was expected to represent African interests on issues ranging from trade and investment to climate financing and job creation.
Among the list of world leaders expected at the gathering was “Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan.” It did not take long for the error to attract attention.
Screenshots of the statement quickly circulated online, with users questioning how such a fundamental diplomatic mistake could make it into an official State House communication.
Critics argued that identifying the leader of one of the world’s largest economies should have been among the easiest details for a communications team to verify before publication.
The backlash intensified because the mistake came from an office that is supposed to represent the highest standards of government communication. Within a short time, the original statement disappeared from Hussein Mohamed’s social media platforms, but by then screenshots had already spread widely.
For many observers, the incident was not simply about confusing one foreign leader with another. It raised uncomfortable questions about the quality control systems inside government communication structures and whether official statements are subjected to adequate fact-checking before publication.
The irony was difficult to ignore. President Ruto was heading to a summit designed to project Kenya as a serious player in global diplomacy, yet the communication announcing the trip contained a glaring factual error involving one of the summit’s most important participants.
The episode has also revived memories of previous communication blunders that have embarrassed senior government officials.
One of the most notable cases involved Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Korir Sing’oei, who in February 2025 shared an artificial intelligence-generated deepfake video purporting to show CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria praising Kenya’s diplomatic role in Sudan. The video was later exposed as fake, forcing Sing’oei to delete it and issue a public apology. He admitted that he had unknowingly shared AI-generated content disguised as a genuine CNN commentary and thanked those who flagged the deception.
The incident became international news and was viewed by many as one of the most embarrassing moments for Kenya’s foreign affairs establishment. The fact that a senior diplomat responsible for representing the country abroad had fallen victim to a deepfake triggered widespread debate about digital literacy and verification standards within government.
Hussein Mohamed has also faced scrutiny before over inaccuracies in official communication that later required clarification. While not every mistake attracts the same level of attention, critics say the growing number of corrections and retractions suggests a recurring problem within government messaging.
Communication experts argue that such mistakes are becoming increasingly costly in an era where every official statement is instantly scrutinized by millions of people online. A single factual error can overshadow the intended message and dominate public conversation.
For the Kenya Kwanza administration, the latest State House mishap comes at a time when the government is aggressively promoting Kenya’s role in global affairs. President Ruto has repeatedly positioned himself as a continental voice on climate financing, debt reforms, trade, peace and security.
Yet diplomatic credibility is often built on attention to detail. Misidentifying a foreign head of government in an official State House release may appear minor to some, but in diplomatic circles such errors can be interpreted as carelessness.
The swift deletion of the statement prevented the mistake from remaining on official channels, but it could not prevent the internet from preserving it.
As the screenshots continue circulating online, the episode serves as another reminder that in modern politics, the smallest errors can become the biggest stories. For a government seeking to project competence and global influence, critics argue that getting the names of world leaders right should be the easiest part of the job.
Instead, a press release intended to celebrate Kenya’s presence at one of the world’s most influential gatherings ended up becoming a talking point for all the wrong reasons.
The Wajir North Member of Parliament, Ibrahim Abdi Saney, has expressed displeasure over the 2026/2027 Budget presented by the Treasury Cabinet Secretary.
Speaking during an interview with members of the press on Thursday, June,11,2026 shortly after CS Mbadi read the budget before the National Assembly, the MP accused the Treasury of sidelining Northern Kenya in the country’s development agenda.
On his part, the 2026/2027 Budget has failed to address the needs of Wajir North constituency and the wider Northern region, drawing in the conversation around the exclusion of the region.
“What are they producing? For me, probably there will be good things in the last year. So far, I’m not happy, and I can’t offer even a smile. I’m excluded, marginalised, and yet there’s always the talk of inclusion, which I feel is not honest of them,” Abdi said.
The UDA MP further argued that the budget allocations demonstrated continued exclusion of Northern Kenya from national development priorities despite a recent apology by President William Ruto on the past neglect of the region from development.
“It is just out of it we are further excluded. So this budget is for others, not me. There is nothing for Northern Kenya,” he explained.
A missed call to the North Eastern leaders
At the same time, the legislator accused leaders from the North-Eastern region of failing to stand up to the occasion and demand their rights, warning that the impact shall lead to a long-term marginalisation of the region.
“And until those who represent Northern Kenya rise to the occasion and demand their rights, we will ever be marginalised. The unfortunate thing, MPs from Northern Kenya are silent, sleeping, pretending to be part of this development, when we have nothing for our people,” Abdi stated.
“This is budget for south of the equator, nothing for the north of the equator, nothing for Wajir North,” he added.
President William Ruto waving at the crowd during Madaraka feter in Wajir.
Ruto’s apology to Wajir
Meanwhile, his concerns come just under a month after President Ruto issued a formal apology to Northern Kenyans for what he termed decades of historical marginalisation and economic neglect.
Speaking during the Madaraka Day celebration at the Wajir Stadium in Wajir County on Monday, June 1, 2026, President Ruto said that the people of northern Kenya have long been subjected to decades of historical marginalisation and economic neglect, committing to them that this is going to be a thing of the past.
“Decades after independence, this region was left behind. Fellow citizens, I want to tell you that on behalf of the people of Kenya today, as I stand HERE as president and leader of our great nation, to the people of Kenya in northern Kenya for this marginalisation, I want to apologise on behalf of the nation of Kenya,” Ruto said.
Reflecting on the historical trajectory of the nation, President Ruto emphasised that the celebration was far more than an exercise in public relations.
Instead, he framed the occasion as a structural turning point for how the Kenyan state interacts with its northern frontier.
“It is not a mere ceremonial gesture; it is a national declaration, it is a moment of affirmation that Madaraka, our freedom, our dignity, and our self-determination were never meant for some Kenyans, never meant for some region and withheld for others,” Ruto added.
For years, Governor Paul Simba Arati has cultivated the image of a fearless political fighter, a combative leader willing to take on rivals, security agencies and entrenched interests in Kisii politics. Since his election in 2022, he has positioned himself as a reformer determined to clean up county government and accelerate development.
But a growing chorus of current and former county officials now claims that the biggest challenge facing Kisii County is not political opposition, budget constraints or interference from Nairobi. They allege that power has quietly shifted away from formal government offices into the hands of an unelected figure operating from the governor’s rural home in Motonto, Bobasi Constituency.
At the centre of the claims is Mei Arati, the governor’s Chinese-born wife, popularly known across Kisii as “Kwamboka” because of her fluent command of Ekegusii and her deep immersion in local culture. Over the past two years, she has built a public reputation as a community mobiliser and peace broker, often appearing at public functions and political gatherings.
Behind that public image, however, county insiders describe a vastly different reality.
Multiple officials who spoke on condition of anonymity claim that Mei Arati has become the most powerful figure in the county administration, allegedly influencing payments, procurement decisions, personnel matters and the movement of public funds through the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS).
The allegations paint a picture of what some officials describe as a “parallel government” operating outside constitutionally established structures.
The Battle for IFMIS
The most explosive allegations concern control of IFMIS, the digital platform through which government entities process payments, manage budgets and monitor expenditure.
County officials claim that key financial decisions increasingly require informal approval before payments are processed. Sources allege that access to critical financial systems has been concentrated around a small circle of individuals loyal to the governor’s inner circle, effectively determining which contractors, suppliers and service providers get paid and when.
Several officials interviewed for this story alleged that resistance to the arrangement has contributed to friction within the county’s finance department and may explain the departure of some senior officers over the last two years.
If proven, such actions would raise serious questions about compliance with the Public Finance Management Act, procurement laws and constitutional principles governing public administration.
A Government Run From Motonto?
Perhaps the most troubling claims involve allegations that major county decisions are being discussed and sometimes made at the governor’s private residence in Motonto rather than from official county offices.
Senior officials allege that chief officers and executive members are occasionally summoned to meetings at the residence where sensitive discussions involving budgets, pending bills and personnel matters take place.
These allegations have drawn attention because Governor Arati’s administration has frequently portrayed itself as a champion of transparency and accountability. The governor has previously spoken publicly about rooting out corruption and removing officials accused of wrongdoing.
Critics now argue that if county business is indeed being conducted outside formal structures, it would represent a fundamental breakdown of public accountability mechanisms.
Climate of Fear Inside County Hall
Interviews with county insiders reveal allegations of intimidation, public humiliation and growing fear among senior officials.
Some sources claim that officers who challenge directives or question financial decisions risk isolation, transfers or removal from influential positions.
Others allege that several county officials have chosen to leave government service altogether rather than continue operating in what they describe as an increasingly hostile environment.
While many of these claims remain difficult to independently verify, the consistency of accounts from multiple sources points to deep internal tensions within the county administration.
The allegations have gained renewed attention following reports involving senior county officers who allegedly found themselves at odds with individuals perceived to wield influence outside formal government structures.
The Rise of Kwamboka
The allegations are particularly striking given Mei Arati’s popularity among sections of the Kisii community.
Her journey from China to the heart of Kisii politics has become part of local folklore. Residents affectionately call her Kwamboka, a name she earned through her command of Ekegusii and willingness to embrace local customs. She has attended church functions, community gatherings and political meetings, often attracting attention for her ability to connect with residents in their native language.
Political observers say her visibility has helped soften tensions in a county often marked by intense political rivalry. Yet that same visibility has also fueled speculation about the extent of her influence within government circles.
The debate raises broader questions that have confronted county governments across Kenya since devolution began: where should the line be drawn between a governor’s family members and the official machinery of government?
Development Questions Persist
The controversy comes at a time when Kisii County continues to face pressure over development delivery.
The county government has highlighted major investments in roads, healthcare facilities, water projects and other infrastructure programmes under Governor Arati’s administration. Official county records point to ambitious flagship projects, including a new county headquarters complex, a mother and child hospital and an industrial park.
At the same time, sections of the county assembly and political opponents have repeatedly questioned the pace and visibility of some development projects, creating an environment of persistent political contestation.
The result is a county government facing scrutiny from both inside and outside its ranks.
Calls for Investigation
As the allegations continue to circulate, pressure is mounting for independent oversight bodies to intervene.
County officials who spoke to this publication say the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the Auditor-General, the Controller of Budget and the Senate should examine the claims and establish whether unauthorized individuals have exercised influence over public financial systems and county operations.
At stake is more than political reputation.
The allegations touch on fundamental questions of public accountability, financial transparency and the integrity of devolved governance.
For many residents, the issue has become increasingly simple: who is making decisions on the use of billions of shillings allocated annually to Kisii County?
Is authority resting with elected and legally appointed public officers, or has power migrated to an informal centre beyond public scrutiny?
Those questions remain unanswered.
Neither Mei Arati nor Governor Simba Arati had publicly issued detailed responses to the specific allegations referenced in this report at the time of publication. The claims remain allegations and have not been tested in court.
What is beyond dispute, however, is that the controversy has exposed growing unease within sections of the Kisii County administration and intensified calls for a thorough and independent examination of how power is exercised inside one of Kenya’s most politically significant counties.
Saboti Member of Parliament Caleb Amisi has announced plans to form a new movement separate from Linda Mwananchi, saying that it has deviated from its original course.
Speaking during an interview with a local media station on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, the outspoken MP, who is an integral member of Linda Mwananchi, also stated that the movement will aim to bring credible people to Parliament in the next general election who are focused on changing society.
“The Linda Mwananchi did not understand its initial assignment, and it has deviated from its original course, and that is why I want to form a new movement that will continue with the struggle,” Amisi said.
He went on to state that Linda Mwananchi, which was created as a quality alternative for young people seeking an overhaul in the governance sector, has begun conforming to the status quo and has veered off the path it was supposed to navigate. He went on to state that he has a team of think tanks who have already begun drafting the issues and agenda that the movement will pursue.
A section of Linda Mwananchi leaders during the Linda Mwananchi engagements in Vihiga.
Amisi further added that the movement will be a renaissance movement or people’s movement but will be different from the People’s Renaissance Movement (PRM) that has been widely associated with him. He insisted that this is a movement and not a party, which, according to him, will ensure that a new crop of leaders are elected into Parliament who are credible and can even impeach a president whenever he goes wrong, something he argued the current Parliament cannot attempt.
The movement’s goal
According to Amisi, the plans to remove President William Ruto from power in 2027 through the ballot failed. He argued that the movement, which is concentrating on ensuring credible people are elected to Parliament, would then be in a position to succeed in that mission and remove him immediately through impeachment after he is elected into office.
“We are starting a renaissance movement, what we call the people’s movement. The purpose of this movement is to ensure a new crop of leaders is elected. The goal of the movement is that I want new people in parliament who are credible, who even when a president goes wrong,” he added.
Amisi went ahead to state that he was the brain behind Linda Mwananchi and even selected Edwin Sifuna to be its leader. He contended that were it not for him, after Sifuna’s ouster from ODM party leadership, he would not have had a landing site and would have been roaming around without any portfolio or the crowd hype he has been receiving recently.
However, he insisted that he formed the vehicle and that Sifuna’s removal from ODM only catapulted his popularity.
This comes at a time when Caleb Amisi appears dissatisfied with the direction that Linda Mwananchi is taking. He has also rejected their calls to get into a partnership with the United Opposition, maintaining that the movement should remain independent and focused on its original objectives.
He further intimated that since they have deviated from the original plan, the course must continue, and that is why, according to him, he has decided to form a separate movement to champion the cause.
Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has dismissed the Sh50 million compensation awarded to him by the High Court following his impeachment case.
Speaking at a press conference, Gachagua said the amount as an insult to his constitutional rights and freedoms.
He said the award failed to reflect the gravity of the violations he suffered during the impeachment process.
“The Sh50 million awarded to me is an insult to my fundamental rights and freedoms and a mockery of the Constitution,” Gachagua said.
The former Deputy President insisted that his court battle had never been about financial compensation but rather the protection of the Constitution and the rule of law.
“Money was never the issue here; justice and constitutional supremacy was,” he said.
Gachagua maintained that he could not be persuaded by monetary awards to overlook what he termed violations of constitutional principles.
“I am one Kenyan leader who will not and cannot be swayed by promises of money to allow violation of the Constitution. I stand as a matter of principle to protect constitutional rights and to defend the Constitution,” he said.
“This is an oath that I swore and Kenyans know me for that. No offer, no amount of money can stand between me, my rights and the rights of the citizens of Kenya under the Constitution.”
His remarks came after a three-judge bench of the High Court awarded him Sh50 million in damages after finding that his constitutional right to a fair hearing had been violated during the Senate proceedings that culminated in his impeachment from office.
The bench, comprising Justices Eric Ogola, Freda Mugambi and Anthony Mrima, ruled that the Senate erred when it declined to adjourn proceedings despite Gachagua’s request for additional time on medical grounds.
According to the judges, the refusal denied him a reasonable opportunity to fully participate in the proceedings and amounted to a violation of his right to a fair hearing as guaranteed under the Constitution.
However, while finding that Gachagua’s rights had been infringed, the court upheld the impeachment itself, concluding that Parliament had acted within its constitutional mandate in removing him from office.
The judges found that the National Assembly had conducted adequate public participation and that the impeachment process substantially complied with constitutional and legal requirements.
As a result, the court declined to overturn the Senate’s decision, meaning Gachagua remains impeached despite the award of damages.
The ruling delivered a mixed verdict for the former Deputy President.
On one hand, it vindicated his argument that aspects of the impeachment proceedings violated his constitutional rights
On the other hand, it affirmed Parliament’s decision to remove him from office, closing the door on efforts to reverse the impeachment through the courts.
A growing public backlash has engulfed Garissa Governor Nathif Jama after a viral video showed him handing Sh1,000 to a visibly sick woman before directing her elsewhere for treatment, a gesture that many Kenyans have condemned as humiliating, dismissive and unbefitting a public leader.
What began as outrage over a 21-second clip has now evolved into a symbolic revolt, with residents and social media users reportedly sending Sh1,000 back to the governor through M-Pesa in protest against what they describe as arrogance and a shocking lack of empathy toward a vulnerable citizen seeking help.
Screenshots circulating online show multiple transactions of Sh1,000 sent to a phone number associated with the governor. The transactions have become a powerful expression of anger from members of the public who say the issue is not the money itself, but the manner in which the woman was treated.
In the now-viral video, the woman approaches the governor seeking assistance. Nathif is seen handing her a Sh1,000 note and telling her to seek treatment from a private doctor, saying there was “no SHA issue” to discuss.
To many viewers, the exchange appeared less like assistance and more like a public dismissal of a struggling woman whose plight deserved compassion and meaningful intervention.
The video struck a nerve across the country, reigniting frustrations over the state of healthcare services and the widening gap between political leaders and ordinary citizens.
“This was not help. This was humiliation,” one social media user wrote as screenshots of the returned Sh1,000 payments spread across Facebook, X and WhatsApp groups.
Others questioned how a county chief responsible for healthcare services could appear to brush aside a sick resident while simultaneously dismissing concerns surrounding the Social Health Authority (SHA), a programme designed to ensure Kenyans can access affordable healthcare.
The controversy quickly attracted political attention.
Lagdera MP Abdikadir Hussein accused the governor of unfairly blaming SHA for failures that fall under county governments. Speaking at a public function, the legislator noted that Garissa County had received billions of shillings through healthcare funding streams and argued that questions should instead be directed at the quality of services available in county facilities.
“If people are not receiving services despite the resources available, then leadership must be held accountable,” he said.
East African Legislative Assembly MP Falhado Iman also weighed in, questioning the county government’s efforts to educate residents about SHA and ensure they can access healthcare benefits.
The criticism has intensified pressure on Nathif, whose administration has sought to dismiss the controversy as a politically motivated attack.
Officials close to the governor argue that the viral clip was selectively edited and stripped of context. They claim Nathif has previously assisted the woman and that the Sh1,000 was intended to facilitate her travel to seek medical care rather than cover treatment costs.
According to county officials, political rivals have weaponised a brief interaction to portray the governor in the worst possible light.
But those explanations have failed to stem the public outrage.
The sight of residents voluntarily returning Sh1,000 to the governor has transformed the controversy into something larger than a single viral moment. It has become a referendum on the state of public healthcare and growing public frustration with leaders perceived to be offering handouts instead of solutions.
For many Kenyans, the incident reflects a troubling reality where vulnerable citizens must still appeal directly to politicians for help despite years of promises about universal healthcare and improved county services.
The symbolism of the Sh1,000 refunds has resonated widely. By sending the money back, residents appear to be making a simple but powerful statement: dignity cannot be bought, and healthcare should not depend on the generosity of politicians.
As the backlash continues to grow, the controversy threatens to become one of the most damaging political crises of Nathif’s tenure.
What may have been intended as a routine act of assistance has instead become a national conversation about leadership, compassion and accountability.
And for many watching the drama unfold online, the question is no longer whether Sh1,000 was enough. It is whether a leader entrusted with the welfare of thousands should ever have treated a sick and vulnerable woman in a manner that so many Kenyans have found deeply humiliating.
In a ruling that will reverberate across Kenya’s constitutional landscape for years to come, the High Court on Monday delivered a verdict as contradictory as the political theatre that spawned it: Rigathi Gachagua’s impeachment stands, his removal from the office of Deputy President is permanent and lawful, yet the Senate that tried and convicted him has been ordered to pay him Sh50 million for violating his constitutional rights in the very process it used to throw him out.
The three-judge bench of Justices Eric Ogola, Anthony Mrima and Fridah Mugambi dismissed consolidated petitions in which Gachagua had challenged his October 2024 impeachment, ruling that both the National Assembly and the Senate had acted within the bounds of the Constitution and that the public participation process had satisfied the requisite constitutional threshold. The court declined, entirely, to interrogate whether the charges against Gachagua were meritorious, holding that the question of whether he deserved to be removed is one reserved exclusively for Parliament and is non-justiciable.
What the court did not let go of was the Senate’s treatment of Gachagua during the trial itself. Delivering the bench’s finding on the right to a fair hearing, Justice Mugambi drew a sharp and damning distinction between a litigant who is heard and then outvoted, and one who is actively prevented from completing his defence. Gachagua, she held, was the latter. The Senate’s refusal to grant an adjournment he had sought during proceedings amounted to a violation of Article 50 of the Constitution, a provision so fundamental that it is listed among the non-derogable rights under Article 25, rights that cannot be suspended even during a state of emergency.
“This is not a case of a party who was heard and then outvoted. It was a case of a party who was prevented from completing his hearing.” Justice Fridah Mugambi
The violation was real. The remedy, however, stopped far short of what Gachagua had hoped for. The court ruled that acknowledging the breach warranted constitutional compensation but could not, and would not, unwind the impeachment itself. The bench anchored this position on two pillars: the finality clause in Article 145(7) of the Constitution and the practical constitutional absurdity of reinstating Gachagua when his successor, Kithure Kindiki, had already been lawfully nominated, approved and sworn in. To nullify the impeachment at this stage, the judges reasoned, would produce the constitutionally intolerable prospect of two sitting Deputy Presidents, an outcome the Constitution could not conceivably be taken to have contemplated.
Gachagua during an appearance in court.
Sh50 Million: A Constitutional Rebuke That Leaves Gachagua on the Outside
The court awarded Gachagua constitutional damages of Sh50 million, payable by the Senate, framing the sum not merely as compensation but as a deterrent signal to Parliament that future impeachment proceedings must scrupulously observe due process. The award is intended, the bench stated, to vindicate the Constitution, restore the dignity of the affected party and serve notice that procedural violations in high-stakes parliamentary hearings carry a legal price.
It is a remarkable outcome. The Senate tried Gachagua, denied him an adjournment he was entitled to, upheld his impeachment, and has now been ordered by a court to reach into public coffers and pay the man it convicted. The Sh50 million will not buy back the office. It will not restore the motorcade, the security detail or the ceremonial title. But it places on record, in black judicial ink, that Kenya’s upper house conducted a constitutionally flawed trial and that its refusal to grant Gachagua breathing room during proceedings was not merely a procedural oversight but a breach of a fundamental right.
“The award is intended as a constitutional remedy to vindicate the Constitution, restore the dignity of the affected party and serve as a deterrent against future violations of similar nature in parliamentary proceedings.”
On Bias and Predetermination: The Court Was Unsparing
Gachagua’s legal team had argued strenuously that the impeachment was a coordinated scheme, that the Speaker and members of both houses had predetermined the outcome and that political bias had corrupted the proceedings from the outset. Justice Ogola, delivering the bench’s findings on this issue, was dismissive of the claims in terms that left little ambiguity about the evidentiary threshold the petitioners had failed to meet.
The allegations of bias, predetermination and conflict of interest advanced against the Speakers, members of Parliament and senators, Ogola held, amounted to nothing more than bare and unsubstantiated assertions grounded in political inference and suspicion rather than objective evidence. The mere fact that legislators had supported or opposed the impeachment was not, standing alone, capable of establishing constitutional bias. Impeachment, the court noted, is an inherently political-constitutional process. Lawmakers are not expected to approach it as blank slates devoid of political opinion. What the Constitution demands is not the absence of political inclination but a genuine openness to considering the evidence and discharging constitutional responsibilities in good faith.
The court further confirmed its own jurisdiction in unambiguous terms, holding that impeachment proceedings are justiciable and subject to judicial scrutiny wherever constitutional violations are alleged. The separation of powers, Justice Ogola stated, does not mean separation from the Constitution. Courts may not substitute Parliament’s political judgment with their own assessment of the gravity of charges, but they can and must police the process for constitutional compliance.
Public Participation: The Door Was Opened Widely
One of the more contested fronts in the litigation was the adequacy of the public participation process conducted by the National Assembly before the impeachment vote. Gachagua had argued that the exercise was a choreographed facade, that logistics had failed in material ways across the country and that his own response to the charges had not been made publicly available during the participation window, rendering the process defective.
The court found otherwise. The bench acknowledged that logistical and operational challenges will inevitably arise in any large-scale, nationally coordinated exercise conducted under time pressure. Such localised deficiencies, it held, do not invalidate an otherwise lawful process. The evidence showed that the process was conducted openly and in good faith. The fact that Gachagua’s response to the charges was not circulated to the public during the participation window did not render the exercise constitutionally deficient because public participation in an impeachment process is, by design, functionally and substantively distinct from the adversarial hearing to which the respondent is entitled. It was never intended to be a mini trial of the charges.
The Senate, additionally, was not required to conduct its own separate and independent public participation process. The court similarly rejected statistical anomaly claims relating to participation data, finding the figures mathematically sound and within acceptable limits.
Standing Orders, Timelines and the IEBC: All Arguments Dismissed
The petitioners had also assailed the constitutional validity of the Parliamentary Standing Orders governing impeachment timelines, particularly the seven-day framework in the National Assembly and the Senate’s self-imposed ten-day plenary arrangement. The court declined to declare either unconstitutional. On the seven-day framework, the bench held that the duration alone is not constitutionally determinative. What matters is whether Parliament took substantive steps within that period to discharge its constitutional obligations. It did. On the Senate’s ten-day framework, the court noted that neither the Constitution nor the Standing Orders prescribe a specific timeline for plenary proceedings. The Senate’s adoption of a ten-day arrangement was a self-imposed procedural choice. The petitioners failed to demonstrate that adopting such a timeline was itself a constitutional violation.
The court also dispensed with arguments relating to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. No clearance or involvement of the IEBC was constitutionally or legally required in the process of filling the office of Deputy President. The President and the National Assembly acted with expedition in discharging their obligations under Article 149 following the vacancy. Acting swiftly, the bench noted pointedly, is not evidence of predetermination. Compliance with a constitutional duty, performed promptly, cannot without more be construed as wrongdoing.
Kindiki’s Appointment: Open, Transparent and Constitutional
The nomination and approval of Kithure Kindiki as Gachagua’s successor was separately subjected to constitutional scrutiny. Justice Mugambi, delivering this segment of the verdict, held that the National Assembly proceedings were conducted in a fully open and transparent manner. The debate was televised, proceedings were recorded in Hansard, the press reported freely and members of Parliament were directly accountable to their constituents for how they voted. Not every parliamentary decision automatically triggers a requirement for structured public participation, particularly where the decision involves a vote within the Assembly exercising its constitutional mandate on a binary question. Public participation, the court observed with some tartness, would have added nothing of constitutional value to a binary vote of this character.
The verdict closes the principal judicial chapter of Kenya’s most politically explosive constitutional moment since the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution. Gachagua’s impeachment stands confirmed. Kindiki’s tenure is judicially insulated. The Senate pays Sh50 million. And the Court of Appeal now awaits, with Gachagua’s legal team having signalled their intention to escalate the matter to the next tier of the judiciary.
“The separation of powers does not mean separation from the Constitution.” Justice Eric Ogola
What the Ruling Means
At its core, the judgment is a study in judicial restraint pushed to its constitutional limits. The bench found a real rights violation, named it, punished it financially and then refused to let the punishment undo the act it censured. The reasoning is rooted in constitutional pragmatism rather than strict remedial logic: the court feared the chaos of dual incumbency more than it was committed to the symmetry of having a breach followed by nullification.
The implications are significant. Parliament now knows it can impeach a sitting deputy president, violate his right to a fair hearing in the process and still have the impeachment survive judicial review provided the violation is not egregious enough to attract nullification rather than damages. The court has, in effect, created a constitutional category of a survivable fair hearing breach, one serious enough to cost the Senate Sh50 million but not serious enough to cost it the outcome it sought.
For Gachagua personally, the award is a pyrrhic vindication. The Sh50 million is a considerable sum by any measure but it is cold comfort against the backdrop of a removed, constitutionally confirmed and court-certified ouster. The political arithmetic of a return to power through the courts has now been permanently foreclosed at the High Court level. Whether the Court of Appeal will be persuaded to reach a different conclusion on the remedial question is the singular issue that will define the next phase of a legal battle that has already made Kenyan constitutional history.
For years, supporters of former Prime Minister and ODM leader Raila Odinga have maintained that he won several presidential elections only to be denied victory through electoral manipulation, state interference and political intrigues. Now, one of the men who spent years closest to him has offered a different perspective, arguing that Raila’s greatest challenge was not merely what happened at the ballot box but what happened beyond Kenya’s borders.
Speaking in a candid interview on Citizen TV, Raila’s longtime communications aide Dennis Onyango painted a portrait of a politician who excelled at connecting with ordinary Kenyans but struggled to appreciate the influence that foreign powers and international interests wield over Kenya’s political landscape.
Onyango, who served alongside Raila through some of the most turbulent periods of the country’s politics, said the ODM leader remained deeply committed to pursuing an independent political course even when doing so put him at odds with powerful international actors whose approval can shape political outcomes in developing democracies.
According to Onyango, Raila consistently believed that the will of Kenyan voters should be sufficient to determine who governs the country. But in his view, Kenya’s political reality is far more complicated.
He argued that presidential contenders must not only convince citizens that they are fit to lead but must also reassure influential foreign governments, investors and international institutions that they are reliable partners who can safeguard stability and economic interests.
Onyango described this as Raila’s biggest political blind spot, saying the veteran opposition leader never fully internalised the extent to which external interests intersect with domestic politics.
His remarks revive a long-running debate that has followed Raila’s political career for nearly three decades. Few politicians in Kenya have come as close to the presidency as often as Raila, who unsuccessfully contested the top seat in 1997, 2007, 2013, 2017 and 2022.
The former aide was particularly emphatic when discussing the disputed 2007 presidential election between Raila and the late President Mwai Kibaki. Although Onyango was not yet working for Raila at the time, he said he remains convinced that the ODM leader won the vote.
That election plunged Kenya into one of the darkest chapters in its history after the declaration of Kibaki as the winner triggered widespread violence that left more than 1,000 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands. The crisis eventually led to international mediation headed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the formation of the Grand Coalition Government, with Raila becoming Prime Minister.
Yet Onyango suggested that the lessons Raila drew from that experience differed from his own. While many of Raila’s supporters focused on electoral injustice and state interference, Onyango believes the larger issue was the failure to sufficiently engage influential international stakeholders whose opinions could shape the political environment before and after elections.
To illustrate his point, he recounted an episode from 2009 when Raila travelled to the United States while serving as Prime Minister. According to Onyango, elements within Kenya’s diplomatic establishment allegedly sought to frustrate the visit by circulating stories suggesting Raila would fail to secure a meeting with then US President Barack Obama.
Onyango said he later concluded that some of the negative narratives surrounding the trip originated from Kenya’s own diplomatic channels in Washington and were intended to diminish Raila’s standing internationally.
The incident, he recalled, became one of the most difficult assignments he handled during his years working for the former Prime Minister.
His revelations offer a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battles that accompanied Raila’s rise as one of Africa’s most recognisable opposition figures. They also add a fresh layer to the enduring mystery of why a politician who commanded massive support across several election cycles repeatedly fell short of capturing State House.
For decades, explanations for Raila’s defeats have ranged from electoral fraud allegations and ethnic voting patterns to state machinery and elite political deals. Onyango’s assessment introduces another factor into that conversation: the importance of international perception in a country whose economy, security partnerships and diplomatic relations remain closely linked to powerful global actors.
Whether one agrees with Onyango’s analysis or not, his comments are likely to reignite debate about the invisible forces that shape Kenyan politics and the extent to which presidential ambitions are determined not only by voters at home but also by interests beyond the country’s borders.
Coming from a man who spent years inside Raila’s inner circle, the remarks provide one of the most revealing reflections yet on the successes, frustrations and missed opportunities that defined the ODM leader’s long pursuit of the presidency.
Nearly eight months after the death of opposition icon Raila Odinga, one of the men who spent decades by his side has offered perhaps the most revealing account yet of the former Prime Minister’s final years, exposing strained political relationships, trusted allies, succession anxieties and the unfinished dreams that occupied his mind until the very end.
In a candid interview on Citizen TV’s Sunday Live with Jeff Koinange, longtime spokesperson Dennis Onyango painted a portrait of a leader who remained politically sharp, fiercely protective of his influence and deeply invested in shaping Kenya’s future even as he quietly contemplated his own mortality.
The interview has ignited intense debate within ODM and across the political spectrum, with Onyango disclosing how Raila privately viewed some of the most influential figures around him.
How Sifuna Lost Baba’s Confidence
Among the most explosive revelations was Onyango’s assertion that Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna gradually lost Raila’s trust following a television interview that left the ODM leader feeling embarrassed and undermined.
According to Onyango, Raila had initially embraced Sifuna as one of the party’s brightest young leaders and had even incorporated him into strategic discussions involving key advisers. However, a Citizen TV appearance by Sifuna reportedly created the impression that Raila was out of touch with developments within his own party.
The remarks deeply upset the veteran politician.
Onyango said Raila spent hours making calls after watching the interview and never looked at Sifuna the same way again. While the two remained within the same political orbit, the relationship allegedly never recovered to its previous level of trust.
The disclosure offers a rare glimpse into the tensions that simmered beneath the surface of ODM as younger leaders increasingly positioned themselves for influence in a post-Raila era.
Why Raila Saw Babu Owino as a Political Risk
Onyango was equally frank about Embakasi East MP Babu Owino.
Despite Babu’s popularity among younger supporters and his attempts to market himself as the future face of the movement, Onyango claimed Raila viewed him as impatient and potentially disruptive.
According to Onyango, Raila believed giving Babu too much prominence risked destabilising the political base he had spent decades building. The former Prime Minister reportedly felt the outspoken MP was in too much of a hurry to inherit leadership and could upset the delicate balance of power within ODM.
The comments are likely to fuel fresh debate over succession battles that have intensified since Raila’s death.
Trusted Lieutenants and Loyal Foot Soldiers
While some relationships had cooled, others remained rock solid.
Onyango described Junet Mohamed as one of Raila’s most trusted political operatives, saying the Suna East MP remained unwaveringly committed to his presidential ambitions and was particularly devastated by the disputed 2022 election outcome.
Former Royal Media Services chairman SK Macharia was also singled out for praise. Onyango said the media mogul genuinely believed Raila should become president and committed significant resources toward that goal, though some campaign insiders allegedly dismissed his ideas as outdated.
Former Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho emerged as perhaps the most trusted political ally in Raila’s final years.
According to Onyango, Joho’s loyalty was unquestionable.
“If Raila had told Joho to leave Cabinet, he would have left immediately,” Onyango said, describing a relationship built on trust and absolute political discipline.
Sharp Criticism of Makau Mutua
One of the harshest assessments was reserved for constitutional lawyer Makau Mutua, who served as a key public face of Raila’s 2022 presidential campaign.
Onyango accused Mutua of contributing little strategic value and blamed him for helping propagate the controversial narrative surrounding an alternative tallying centre after the election.
He argued that some of the decisions taken during the campaign misled supporters and created unrealistic expectations about the election outcome.
Defence of Oketch Salah
On businessman Oketch Salah, Onyango strongly pushed back against attempts to distance him from Raila’s legacy.
He described Salah as a trusted business associate who travelled extensively with the former Prime Minister and remained close to him during crucial moments.
Onyango revealed he was with Salah in Karen shortly before Raila departed for India for treatment and even used Salah’s phone to speak to him.
He questioned why some individuals were now trying to portray Salah as an outsider despite his longstanding association with the former Prime Minister.
Raila’s Surprising Trust in Ruto
Perhaps most unexpectedly, Onyango insisted that Raila genuinely trusted President William Ruto.
According to him, the two leaders shared similar thinking on several policy issues, particularly affordable housing and broad-based governance.
He suggested that ODM’s participation in government after the political rapprochement was not accidental but reflected Raila’s deliberate belief that cooperation could advance national development.
The Final Days and an Unusual Request
Away from politics, Onyango offered deeply personal reflections on Raila’s final months.
He revealed that Raila had spoken openly about death and had specifically instructed that he be buried within 72 hours of his passing, a request that was ultimately honoured.
The conversation reportedly took place after the death of former Chief of Defence Forces General Francis Ogolla.
According to Onyango, Raila referenced Ogolla’s burial arrangements and remarked that he wanted the same treatment when his own time came. At the time, Onyango thought the veteran politician was joking. He later discovered the instruction had formally been included in Raila’s will.
Even during treatment in India, Onyango said Raila remained optimistic and sounded upbeat during their final conversations, telling him he expected to recover and travel briefly to Dubai before returning home.
The Dreams Raila Never Lived to See
The interview also revealed several projects Raila hoped would outlive him.
Among them were plans for a Raila Odinga School of Democracy and Governance, a foundation bearing his name and a comprehensive archive of speeches chronicling his decades-long struggle for democracy and Pan-Africanism.
Onyango disclosed that he is currently working on compiling those speeches into a book, fulfilling a task Raila personally assigned to him.
Despite discussions about legacy, Raila reportedly remained remarkably relaxed whenever the subject of death arose.
“Raila talked about death very casually,” Onyango recalled, describing a man who believed unfinished work could still be completed after his passing through institutions and ideas.
A Legacy Still Shaping Kenyan Politics
Taken together, Onyango’s revelations portray Raila as a complex political strategist who balanced loyalty and suspicion, rewarded commitment and carefully guarded his influence until the end.
The interview has reopened questions about ODM’s future leadership, exposed old tensions within the party and offered the clearest picture yet of how Raila viewed those closest to him during the final chapter of a political career that shaped Kenya for more than four decades.
Long after his death, the battles over his legacy, his succession and the movement he built appear far from over.
What began as a spirited rebellion against President William Ruto’s broad-based government experiment and ODM’s perceived drift from its founding ideals is now exposing the familiar fault lines of Kenyan opposition politics.
The Linda Mwananchi movement, which attracted large crowds to rallies in Nakuru, Kisumu, Mombasa and other towns, is increasingly grappling with an identity crisis. At the heart of the debate is a growing tension between collective resistance and individual political ambition. Despite repeated public declarations of unity, signs of strain are becoming harder to ignore.
Embakasi East MP Babu Owino moved swiftly this week to dismiss speculation about a fallout with Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna. Speaking in an interview with Namlolwe FM, Owino insisted that the two leaders are pursuing different political paths. According to him, Sifuna is focused on a future presidential bid, while he is eyeing the Nairobi governorship in 2027 before eventually seeking the presidency in 2032.
“There is no conflict between us,” Owino said.
Yet the same interview revealed frustrations that have simmered beneath the surface for years. Owino recounted how he allegedly had to threaten chaos at Orange House in 2017 to secure an ODM ticket. He spoke of fighting legal battles after his election victory was nullified and claimed he received the party ticket for the 2022 elections only two days before the primaries.
He also accused Dr Oburu Oginga of failing to convene a delegates’ conference for fresh ODM elections and declared that he would never again serve under another party leader. According to Owino, Raila Odinga would be the last leader under whom he served politically.
Those are hardly the words of a politician content with a supporting role.
Owino also reminded listeners that he played a central role in organising and mobilising the massive Linda Mwananchi rally in Kisumu, a remark many interpreted as an assertion of influence within the movement at a time when Sifuna’s profile appears to be rising fastest.
A TIFA survey released in May appeared to underscore that reality. The poll showed Owino’s national support within the Linda Mwananchi camp dropping from 8 percent to 2 percent, while Sifuna registered 10 percent nationally and emerged as one of the movement’s strongest performers in Western Kenya.
The emerging tensions are not only personal. They are also strategic.
Sifuna has consistently argued that defeating an incumbent president will require a united opposition front. His willingness to engage with the emerging opposition alliance associated with Rigathi Gachagua and Kalonzo Musyoka has positioned him as a possible kingmaker or running mate in a broader coalition arrangement.
Siaya Governor James Orengo has taken a different approach. He has doubled down on the idea of reclaiming ODM from within, presenting himself as the party’s de facto leader and signalling readiness for a presidential run. For Orengo, the battle is ideological as much as it is electoral.
Saboti MP Caleb Amisi has added a generational dimension to the debate by openly describing Sifuna as the most credible presidential prospect among younger leaders. He has questioned whether veteran politicians such as Orengo can generate the level of excitement needed to mount a serious challenge against Ruto.
Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s longtime ally Caroli Omondi has gone even further, warning that ODM faces an ideological split between the Linda Mwananchi wing and the Oburu-aligned “Linda Ground” faction. Omondi has even referenced Raila’s dramatic departure from Ford-Kenya in 1996 as a possible blueprint should ODM abandon what he views as its founding principles.
The Registrar of Political Parties’ decision to reject attempts to register the Linda Mwananchi Party of Kenya only highlighted the movement’s uncertainty without resolving it. Although key leaders opposed the registration bid, the episode exposed the lack of consensus on the movement’s future direction.
Should Linda Mwananchi become a political party? Should it remain a pressure group? Or should it merge into a broader opposition coalition?
Those questions remain unanswered.
Political analysts argue that the current turbulence is predictable. Many personality-driven political movements enjoy rapid growth during periods of public anger but struggle once they are forced to develop structures, define leadership hierarchies and identify candidates for elective office.
For a movement that gained momentum through public frustration over taxation, the rising cost of living and perceived opposition compromises, the internal power struggles carry significant risks.
Meanwhile, the evolving relationship between the Democracy for the Citizens Party (DCP) and Wiper has already complicated calculations in Nairobi. Their cooperation is widely viewed as a potential obstacle to Owino’s gubernatorial ambitions, particularly with reports that some influential figures favour Embakasi North MP James Gakuya for the city’s top seat.
Every day spent managing internal rivalries and positioning for 2027 is a day the broader opposition risks failing to present a coherent alternative to Ruto’s re-election campaign.
Public denials of discord are understandable. Few within the movement would want to hand the government an early political victory by openly acknowledging divisions.
Yet polling trends, public statements and competing visions for the future tell a more complicated story.
What once appeared to be a brotherhood forged in anti-government rallies is increasingly looking like a contest over leadership, influence and political succession. The real test for Linda Mwananchi may not be whether it can mobilise crowds, but whether it can prevent personal ambitions from eclipsing its founding mission of championing ordinary citizens.
Kenyan voters have seen similar stories unfold before. The question now is whether Linda Mwananchi can rewrite the script before today’s cracks become tomorrow’s craters.
Wiper Patriotic Front leader Kalonzo Musyoka has unveiled a 13-point presidential agenda that he says will restore good governance, revive the economy and improve the lives of ordinary Kenyans if elected to power.
The agenda, which has been published online, outlines Kalonzo’s vision for the country and seeks to rally Kenyans behind what he describes as a transformative national movement anchored on constitutionalism, accountability and inclusive development.
In a statement accompanying the launch of the agenda, Kalonzo said the framework was designed to address the challenges facing the country while laying the foundation for sustainable growth and prosperity.
“This is a comprehensive policy framework anchored on the restoration of good governance, the rule of law and constitutionalism, charting a clear path toward a secure, productive and inclusive Kenya,” said Kalonzo.
At the heart of the agenda is a commitment to protect human rights and civil liberties. Kalonzo pledged to guarantee the rights and freedoms of all citizens while rebuilding a culture of tolerance and respect for dissenting views.
The former Vice President also placed the fight against corruption high on his list of priorities, promising to audit public programmes, recover stolen public funds and eliminate the misuse of state resources.
Under the banner “Komesha Ufisadi,” Kalonzo said his administration would take decisive measures to ensure accountability in government and channel recovered resources into development projects that benefit citizens.
Addressing the high cost of living, which remains a major concern for many households, Kalonzo promised to implement an economic recovery programme aimed at reducing taxes on basic goods and services while creating jobs and supporting wage growth.
“Our focus will be on easing the burden on families through practical economic reforms that stimulate growth and create opportunities for all,” he said.
The agenda also outlines plans to modernise agriculture, expand irrigation, strengthen small and medium-sized enterprises and boost tourism through targeted investments. Kalonzo said these sectors would form the backbone of economic recovery and job creation.
On infrastructure, he pledged to expand energy generation capacity to 6,000 megawatts, improve roads, railways and ports, and ensure nationwide access to water and digital connectivity.
Kalonzo further promised reforms in education and healthcare, including stabilising curriculum reforms, improving school funding and aligning training with labour market demands. In the health sector, he pledged to restructure health financing, equip hospitals adequately and improve the welfare of healthcare workers.
The Wiper leader also outlined plans to strengthen social protection programmes for persons with disabilities, the elderly and other vulnerable groups, while restoring merit-based recruitment and professionalism in the public service.
On security, Kalonzo pledged to restore professional policing, strengthen community policing initiatives and eliminate criminal gangs.
He also emphasised the importance of foreign relations and regional integration, promising to pursue an interest-based foreign policy while deepening cooperation within the East African Community and the African Union.
When David Maraga took the colours of the United Green Movement in October 2025 and declared himself a presidential candidate, the optics were perfectly assembled.
The man who had annulled a presidential election on constitutional grounds, who had warned the country about the rot in its institutions, who had built a public identity around the language of restoration and justice, was stepping forward to finish what the constitution started.
The crowd at the Green Action House in Nairobi was animated. The party founder, former Ndhiwa MP Agostinho Neto Oyugi, spoke warmly of what he called a liberation exercise. Kenya, he said, was ready to be saved.
What was not assembled with the same care was the internal machinery of the campaign that was supposed to deliver that salvation.
Within weeks of Maraga’s unveiling, reports began circulating inside the campaign secretariat about conduct that would prove deeply uncomfortable for a candidate whose entire pitch to voters rests on the idea that he is different.
The conduct was attributed not to a minor functionary or a peripheral volunteer. It was attributed to Neto himself, the man who built the party, who owns its founding structures, and who selected Maraga as its presidential standard-bearer.
This is the story of how that conduct surfaced, who carried it forward at enormous personal cost, what the party chose to do with the evidence it received, and what all of it means for a presidential bid that Kenya’s reform-minded voters had dared to take seriously.
THE MAN BEHIND THE MOVEMENT
Agostinho Neto Oyugi was born in Homa Bay County on the first day of 1976. He was the fourth child of Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Oyugi, educated first at Homa Bay and Asego primary schools before proceeding to Alliance High School, one of the most prestigious secondary institutions in the country. He then read law at the University of Nairobi, where he distinguished himself sufficiently in human rights advocacy to be named Africa’s fourth best oralist in human rights in 2004 at an event organised by the Centre for Human Rights in Pretoria, held at the University of Dar es Salaam.
The human rights pedigree was not merely decorative. It fed directly into a political career built on a particular kind of defiance.
In 2012, Neto contested and won the Ndhiwa Constituency parliamentary seat in a by-election on an Orange Democratic Movement ticket. He was re-elected in the March 2013 general election.
In that same period, he was part of a coalition of activists that mounted a High Court challenge seeking to disqualify both Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto from the 2013 presidential race, positioning himself firmly in the camp of constitutional activism against the political establishment.
During his parliamentary term, he was credited with infrastructure development in Ndhiwa roads, schools, healthcare facilities and a bursary programme that supported students from the constituency attending national schools. He presented as a lawmaker with a genuine local constituency and a broader progressive identity.
He was a politician of the sort that Kenyan reform circles produce periodically: someone with real credentials whose trajectory seemed set towards something larger.
What happened instead was a long and winding departure from the path he had set for himself. He lost the ODM primaries ahead of 2017 and ran as an independent, failing to retain his seat. The loss drove a wedge between him and the party infrastructure through which he had risen.
Over the years that followed, the wedge became a chasm.
By 2019, Neto was publicly attacking ODM leader Raila Odinga, accusing him of selfishness and charging that he used his following to enrich himself rather than deliver on the promises of revolution.
He urged the Luo community to abandon Raila politics and, in a move that shocked many in his traditional political circle, urged support for Deputy President William Ruto, whom he credited with having stood with the community in 2007 when Raila and Ruto had worked together in the disputed election that preceded the post-election violence.
The pivot towards Ruto was not a quiet one.
Neto publicly vowed support, claiming there was a silent majority within the Luo community that was tired of ODM’s dominance and ready for a different political alignment.
It was a calculation that placed him firmly outside the Luo political mainstream at a moment when that mainstream remained overwhelmingly loyal to Raila Odinga.
Whether the calculation was driven by conviction, injury at his treatment within ODM, or a reading of where power was moving was a matter of debate in Homa Bay political circles. What was not debatable was that it cost him standing within the community he claimed to speak for.
By 2022, as the presidential race hardened around William Ruto and Raila Odinga, Neto had already been building the United Green Movement, a party whose name invoked environmental consciousness and whose stated values emphasised total inclusivity, youth empowerment, anti-corruption, and green innovation.
He positioned himself as the party’s founding force and eventually as co-party leader alongside other figures. The party became the vehicle through which he would re-enter national politics, not as a candidate himself this time, but as the man who could hand a credible name a platform and shape the politics of the 2027 race.
The credible name he found was David Maraga.
A FOUNDING FORUM AND A PRESIDENTIAL CERTIFICATE
When Maraga arrived at the United Green Movement in October 2025, Neto was unambiguous about the power structure.
As the party’s founding member and co-leader, it was Neto who presided over the founding members forum that served as an internal electoral college and pre-selected Maraga as the party’s presidential flagbearer, pending approval at the National Delegates Conference scheduled for early 2027.
Neto was explicit in articulating this. The forum, he told those gathered, was mandated by the UGM party constitution to act in this capacity. It was his party. He had built it. He was now deploying it.
Maraga, for his part, accepted the framework.
He expressed alignment with the party’s ideology on rule of law, human rights, and democratic governance. He committed to building the party so that it would hold not only the presidency but the majority of seats in the next elections.
He positioned himself as the face of the liberation campaign, the Ukombozi that Neto and UGM had been preaching. The partnership appeared clean and complementary: Neto’s party infrastructure and organisational muscle combined with Maraga’s irreproachable public reputation.
What that arrangement obscured, and what was about to become devastatingly relevant, was the reality that in any dispute involving the party apparatus, the party and its grievance processes belonged to the man whose name appeared on the founding documents. The accused and the institution were, in the most functional sense, the same person.
OCTOBER COMPLAINTS AND THE COST OF SPEAKING
The trouble began in early October 2025, barely days after Maraga’s formal unveiling as the campaign’s presidential flagbearer.
According to Shakira Wanjira Nalia Wafula, who had been appointed Secretary of the Political Committee within the campaign, she and other women on the team began raising concerns about harassment on or around October 7.
The concerns were not anonymous whispers or corridor gossip.
They were specific, they involved multiple women, and they were directed at someone with decisive authority within the party structure.
Shakira was not an inconsequential voice to attach these concerns to.
She had risen to national prominence during the June 2024 Gen Z protests that rocked the country, her face becoming one of the defining images of that uprising after video of her boldly confronting police officers and refusing to leave went viral. She was a fitness coach, a certified lifeguard, a civic educator, and the vice-chairperson of Kikao, an organisation focused on youth engagement and social impact. When Maraga’s campaign was being assembled, her recruitment was a signal to Gen Z voters that this was a candidacy attuned to their generation. She was not someone the campaign could easily dismiss.
A meeting between the women and Maraga reportedly occurred on October 22. A formal written complaint was submitted on November 3. Four women of standing within the campaign had at that point registered their concerns.
The name at the centre of those concerns was Agostinho Neto Oyugi.
What happened next illustrated precisely why women in politics so often conclude that internal reporting mechanisms are not designed for their protection. Rather than an independent investigation, the matter was referred to an ad-hoc committee convened under the auspices of UGM.
The party. Neto’s party. The party whose founding documents bear his name and whose leadership structure he dominates. From the perspective of the women bringing the complaint, they were being asked to participate in a process presided over, at its deepest structural level, by the man they were accusing.
Shakira refused to participate and made her reasons clear. She had already resigned from the campaign. She had never been a UGM party member. And she regarded the referral to a party process controlled by the accused as a gesture lacking in any genuine goodwill.
The ad-hoc committee proceeded without her full cooperation. It conducted its hearings. It recorded that the complainants had not provided written complaints or fully engaged with the process. It produced a finding of no evidence. Case closed, from the party’s perspective.
THE RESIGNATION AND ITS AFTERMATH
On November 17, 2025, Shakira published her resignation from the Political Committee and from all responsibilities associated with the campaign. The statement was carefully worded, diplomatic in its phrasing, and entirely legible to those who knew the internal context.
She cited divergence in foundational values and priorities. She referenced the campaign’s Reset, Restore, Rebuild slogan and suggested that achieving those ideals required a depth of commitment to values that was not present in the campaign’s leadership. She extended best wishes to remaining team members and declared her continued commitment to a Kenya anchored in integrity and accountability.
The media covered it as an interesting internal split. Several outlets noted it as a blow to Maraga’s Gen Z credibility. Radio 254 reported that within hours of the resignation being published, speculation was already circulating online that the diplomatic public letter was a stripped-down version of a more detailed account referencing misconduct allegations against a senior official.
By Tuesday evening, Maraga was trending alongside phrases that were deeply unflattering for a candidate built on the promise of principled governance.
Within the broader online discourse, activist Hanifa, laid out the allegations in greater detail in a thread that named Neto Agostinho as the central figure. Hanifa described Maraga in personal terms as a person she trusted and believed in while insisting that the problem was Neto and the team around him.
She detailed the experiences of the four women who had left, challenged the framing of victims as people who did not fit the stereotype of the perfect victim, and made the argument that removing Ruto from power was not a goal worth pursuing if the means required women to endure harassment and remain silent about it.
This was not, she argued emphatically, kushikwa shikwa udaku. This was not gossip. This was a political crisis with real victims.
Screenshot
Online discourse fractured in predictable ways. Defenders of Neto claimed that the women had formed a WhatsApp group specifically to remove him from the party structure and feminise the organisation, and that when that campaign failed through legitimate means it turned to social media smears. Critics pointed out that this defence was precisely the kind of structural delegitimisation that harassment complainants routinely face, and that the question of what actually happened to those four women remained unanswered by a party finding of no evidence produced by a process the complainants had declined to validate.
FEMICIDE MARCHES AND THE POLITICS OF HYPOCRISY
The matter did not resolve itself quietly. It smouldered through the early months of 2026 as UGM continued its grassroots mobilisation and Neto continued appearing publicly alongside Maraga at campaign events across the country, including in Homa Bay Town and during Maraga’s visits to Nyanza.
The two men were photographed together, presented together, and continued to frame their partnership as the cornerstone of a liberation campaign built on integrity.
Then came June 1, 2026. Thousands of Kenyans, predominantly women, took to the streets of Nairobi in one of the largest demonstrations against gender-based violence the capital had seen in months, organised by the End Femicide movement alongside women’s rights and human rights organisations. They carried empty coffins symbolic of the women killed. They held placards. They brought parts of the central business district to a standstill. And David Maraga joined the march, lending his voice to calls for stronger government action against femicide.
For Shakira Wafula, this was too much. She called it political theatre. The characterisation was precise and devastating. Here was a man marching in solidarity with women against gender-based violence while the sexual harassment allegations against his party co-leader remained unresolved, cloaked behind a party process that the complainants themselves had refused to validate, and while that same co-leader continued to appear beside him at campaign rallies. The optics were not ambiguous. They were a direct collision between the performance of values and the reality of how those values had been applied inside the campaign itself.
On June 3, 2026, UGM issued a formal statement detailing its internal process. The party described an ad-hoc committee that had conducted hearings. It noted that complainants including Shakira had not provided written complaints or fully participated.
It reiterated its finding of no evidence.
It emphasised due process, noted that no police reports had been filed, and pushed back against what it characterised as defamation aimed at undermining Maraga’s candidacy.
The statement did not meaningfully address the central question of why the process had been administered by a party apparatus over which the accused himself exercises foundational authority.
WHAT THE SCANDAL MEANS FOR MARAGA
Maraga and Neto in a past event.
David Maraga is running for president on a single compelling asset: the idea that he is constitutionally serious about accountability in a way that Kenya’s political class has never been. His most celebrated act in public life was annulling the 2017 presidential election on the grounds of constitutional irregularities, a decision that cost him and his family personally and that he has consistently described as having been made from a place of principle rather than calculation. Everything about his campaign, the Ukombozi language, the Reset Restore Rebuild slogan, the appeal to Gen Z idealism, the positioning as a jurist stepping into politics to finish what the constitution demands, rests on the credibility of that reputation.
That credibility is now being measured against a different standard. The question being asked is not whether Maraga himself harassed anyone. It is whether a man who built his brand on accountability has chosen to stand beside someone accused of harassment while the mechanism designed to address those accusations was run by the accused’s own party infrastructure, and whether that choice reflects the same constitutional seriousness he has always projected.
The political cost disaggregates across several lines. Among women voters and feminist civil society, who were already among Maraga’s natural constituents and who are now in a state of sustained mobilisation over femicide and gender-based violence, the image of the candidate joining a femicide march while his co-leader faces unresolved harassment allegations is a precise articulation of a hypocrisy they have seen before in Kenyan politics. It will not be forgotten by the demographic he most needs to energise.
Among Gen Z voters, who represent perhaps the most volatile and consequential emerging electoral bloc ahead of 2027, the loss of Shakira’s credible endorsement and her subsequent public identification of the campaign as a space where women were harassed and then referred to the harasser’s own institutional process represents a rupture that is difficult to repair without concrete action. Shakira is not simply a former staffer. She is one of the iconic faces of the 2024 protests. Her departure and her subsequent framing of events carries weight proportional to her public standing.
For Neto himself, the position is both more insulated and more exposed than it might initially appear.
He is insulated because the party’s formal process, which he effectively controls, has produced a finding in his favour and because no criminal charges have been filed.
He is exposed because his continued public visibility alongside Maraga, in Homa Bay, in Nyanza, at rally after rally, keeps the question alive and transforms every platform appearance into a reminder of what has not been resolved.
The deeper problem for UGM is structural and has existed since Maraga joined the party.
A presidential campaign built on a man’s personal integrity being handed to a party whose foundational owner is the subject of harassment allegations is not a combination that resolves itself through press statements.
It resolves itself either through the accused stepping back and submitting to a genuinely independent investigation, or through the candidate making a public and irreversible demonstration that the values he campaigns on are not suspended at the party gate.
As of early June 2026, neither of those things has happened.
THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN
Neto Agostinho Oyugi is a trained lawyer who spent years in human rights advocacy, who was once named among Africa’s best young oralists on human rights questions, and who built a political party around values of inclusivity and justice.
That biography makes what he is alleged to have done more troubling, not less. Men who build institutions around the rhetoric of rights are not immune to the exercise of power over vulnerable women in informal spaces. In some cases the rhetoric serves as precise cover for behaviour that the institution it produces will never be equipped to address.
The party process UGM deployed was not independent. The founding members forum that has the power to select and deselect presidential flagbearers belongs structurally to Neto.
A committee reporting to that structure cannot be independent of him regardless of the personal integrity of its individual members. The complainants understood this. Their refusal to validate the process was not obstruction. It was a rational recognition that the process was asking them to submit their complaints to the man the complaints were about.
Four women left a presidential campaign in the space of weeks. One of them was a nationally recognised activist with the credibility and the social media following to make her departure consequential. A party statement saying there was no evidence is not evidence that nothing happened. It is evidence of what a process controlled by the accused tends to find.
Kenya goes to the polls in 2027.
The question of whether David Maraga can mount a serious presidential challenge depends, as it always has, on whether the values he campaigns on are real or rhetorical.
That question now has a very specific test case attached to it, with four names behind it, a June resignation, and a femicide march that a former Chief Justice attended while the women in his own campaign were still waiting for justice.
Every government accumulates embarrassments. Some are policy failures, some are acts of God, some are the ordinary friction of a bureaucracy too large and too underfunded to be consistently competent. But there is a different category of scandal, rarer and more corrosive, the kind that attaches itself to one individual and follows him from ministry to ministry, compounding with each posting, and still the man does not go. Prof. Julius Kipyegon Bitok, Ambassador and Principal Secretary for Basic Education, is now that story.
Since President William Ruto placed him in charge of the State Department for Immigration and Citizen Services in September 2022, Bitok has presided over or been directly implicated in three of the most consequential public administration failures of the Kenya Kwanza era. A passport scandal with international dimensions that drew censure from the United States and the European Union. A ghost learners fraud so vast it is estimated to have bled the public education budget of at least five billion shillings annually. And a chain of dormitory fires, the latest at Utumishi Girls Academy killing sixteen children, that exposes a ministry unable or unwilling to enforce its own safety directives.
On June 2, 2026, the Consumers Federation of Kenya formally petitioned the Public Service Commission seeking Bitok’s removal from office. The seven-page document, signed by COFEK Secretary General Stephen Mutoro, catalogues six constitutional grounds including gross misconduct, incompetence, abuse of office, violation of public finance management provisions, and conduct unbecoming a State officer. It asks the PSC to suspend him pending investigation, commission a full integrity audit of the State Department for Basic Education, and refer the passport matter to the DCI, EACC and National Intelligence Service.
The petition is damning not because it introduces new allegations but because it assembles everything that is already in the public record and forces the question that Ruto’s administration has conspicuously refused to answer: at what point does a pattern of failure become a reason to act?
CHAPTER ONE: THE PASSPORT PIPELINE
When Ruto appointed Bitok as Immigration PS in September 2022, the assignment was framed as placing a trusted technocrat in a critical security-adjacent role. Bitok held a PhD in Business Management from Oklahoma State University, had diplomatic credentials, and had moved in government and academic circles long enough to carry the look of competence. The Immigration department, long troubled by corruption and document fraud, was presented as a docket that needed steady administrative leadership.
What happened instead was the emergence, under Bitok’s watch, of what investigators and critics have described as a passport pipeline that handed Kenyan travel documents to some of the most wanted individuals on the African continent.
On February 19, 2026, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its sanctions listing for Algoney Hamdan Dagalo Musa, the youngest brother of Rapid Support Forces commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally known as Hemedti. The updated entry added to the existing Sudanese documentation a Kenyan passport and a United Arab Emirates identification number. Algoney is sanctioned for leading the procurement of weapons for the RSF, the paramilitary force accused by the United Nations of crimes against humanity including mass murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s catastrophic civil war. The European Union added him to its own sanctions list on January 29, 2026.
A Kenyan passport, issued under Kenyan law, bearing the name of a man whose weapons procurement for a genocidal militia earned him the personal attention of the US Treasury. The document did not materialise by accident.
His tenure at Immigration is now directly associated with a passport issuance scandal of national security dimensions, attracting adverse international commentary and implicating Kenya in the facilitation of sanctions evasion.
COFEK petition to the Public Service Commission, June 2, 2026
COFEK’s petition names Algoney Hamdan Dagalo Musa, holder of Kenyan passport number AK1586127, as the younger brother of RSF commander Hemedti. But the Hamdan family’s exposure in the Kenyan passport system does not end with one individual. The petition references multiple family members, including Mayada Hamdan, Abdaraheem Hamdan, Zahra Hamdan, Zariwa Hamdan and Musa Hamdan Musa, as also appearing on the leaked passport list. The US and the EU have both imposed sanctions on Algoney personally.
The Standard reported in March 2026, alongside Daily Nation and other outlets, that senior government officials, including Bitok by name and Immigration Director General Evelyn Cheluget, had been photographed together inspecting passport booklets. That image, taken in the ordinary course of administrative duty, acquired a different weight once the leaked documents and the US sanctions update surfaced. The same officials who physically handled the passport infrastructure now stood associated with the same infrastructure’s worst documented abuse.
Photographs of Bitok and Cheluget examining passport consignments circulated widely in the press under headlines that used words like ‘impunity’ and ‘betrayal.’ The government’s initial response was silence. A subsequent statement from the Immigration department under Bitok’s replacement, Belio Kipsang, claimed no non-Kenyan held legitimate documents. That denial satisfied no one and was rejected by the investigative reporting that had already named names, cited passport numbers and referenced US Treasury documents.
What made the scandal structurally significant was its geopolitical context. For years Kenya had styled itself as a neutral regional mediator in Sudan’s conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF. Kenya hosted RSF leadership at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in January 2025. President Ruto had personally met Hemedti at State House, a meeting that drew immediate backlash and a Sudanese decision to recall its ambassador. Kenya’s tea exports to Sudan faced retaliatory trade restrictions. Against that backdrop, the revelation that Hemedti’s brother held a Kenyan passport, obtained through the system Bitok oversaw, was not merely an immigration scandal. It was a foreign policy wound that Kenya inflicted on itself.
Kenya’s neutrality posture was already strained before the Algoney disclosure. The disclosure made it untenable. Sudan’s military government, the Sudanese diaspora, international human rights organisations and US senators all commented on what the passport’s existence implied about Nairobi’s true loyalties in the conflict. Not one of those comments mentioned Julius Bitok by name. But the question of how such a document was issued and who authorised or failed to prevent it pointed back to the same desk.
Bitok was moved to the Education ministry in March 2025, a full year before the February 2026 Treasury update that made the scandal fully visible internationally. The reshuffle came just as investigative reporting on the passport irregularities was intensifying. Whether the timing was coincidence or calculation, it had the practical effect of shielding Bitok from the most intense scrutiny at the exact moment it was forming. He was no longer the Immigration PS. The next man would have to answer.
CHAPTER TWO: THE GHOST SCHOOL EMPIRE
The education sector had its own crises before Bitok arrived. But the scale of what emerged under his watch as Basic Education PS has been staggering, even for a system long accustomed to audit findings and revenue leakages.
An Auditor-General’s report examined by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee found that falsified enrolment figures had cost the country more than four billion shillings in capitation funds over four years. A subsequent verification exercise ordered by Parliament and implemented by the Ministry of Education uncovered something that dwarfed the audit’s preliminary numbers.
Basic Education PS Julius Bitok confirmed to Parliament that the exercise had identified approximately 87,000 ghost students in secondary schools and close to 800,000 non-existent learners in primary schools, a combined figure exceeding 880,000 fictitious enrolments drawing government capitation. In the third term of 2025 alone, ghost learners had received over 912 million shillings in government funding. On an annualised basis, COFEK’s petition estimates taxpayers are losing as much as five billion shillings annually through the fraud.
The mechanics of the scheme were not complicated. Inflated enrolment data was submitted to the government to trigger higher capitation allocations. Non-existent schools, 33 of which the PAC audit found receiving government funds, collected payments against learner populations that did not exist. Secondary schools were collectively overpaid by 3.59 billion shillings through falsified figures. Two hundred and seventy primary schools received funding for non-existent learners. The fraud was widespread, involving multiple counties, hundreds of school heads, and at least 28 Sub-County Directors of Education against whom the ministry eventually issued show-cause letters.
Bitok’s defenders would point out that he was the one who ordered the verification exercise, appeared before Parliament to announce the findings and initiated disciplinary action against the identified officials. That is accurate. It is also insufficient. The scale of the fraud, nearly a million phantom learners drawing billions from the public education budget, did not materialise in a single term. The PAC’s special audit had flagged ghost students in 723 of the 1,039 sampled schools. The Auditor-General’s report had already sounded the alarm before Bitok was moved to the Education department. The system had been hemorrhaging for years. The question that deserves answering is not whether Bitok discovered the problem, but why, under his watch as the ministry’s accounting officer, remediation was so slow that by the time he confirmed the full scale of the fraud to Parliament in early 2026, the losses had already accumulated into the billions.
We have 28 Sub-County Directors of Education who are expected to be culpable and should show cause why they should not be disciplined.
PS Julius Bitok, Lenana Primary School, February 17, 2026
Parliament’s PAC had summoned Bitok to account for the Auditor-General’s findings months before the full ghost learner numbers emerged. When he appeared, the committee did not find a PS in confident command of his brief. What it found, according to accounts of the session, was a man seeking more time and more resources, managing the optics of a crisis rather than resolving it.
The broader context of the education sector’s financial problems deepened the concern. The ministry was simultaneously managing a capitation funding shortfall, delayed payments to KNEC examination supervisors, teacher rationalisation disputes, the contested rollout of the CBC and the administrative chaos of Junior Secondary School autonomy. Each of those crises was significant in isolation. Together, under a PS simultaneously associated with the ghost learner scandal and the immigration scandal, they painted a portrait of a ministry in structural difficulty at the top.
That difficulty was reflected in Bitok’s own budget requests. In March 2026 he appealed to Parliament for an urgent 66 billion shillings in supplementary estimates. In May 2026, before the Departmental Committee on Education, he requested an additional 71.77 billion shillings to avert what he described as a critical funding crisis threatening capitation, textbooks, examination payments, and the school feeding programme. Kenya’s education sector was not short of funding demands. It was short of confidence that the funds already committed were being properly accounted for.
CHAPTER THREE: THE BURNING SCHOOLS
At 2 AM on May 28, 2026, a fire tore through the Meline Waithera Dormitory at Utumishi Girls Senior Secondary School in Gilgil, Nakuru County. Sixteen girls died, burned beyond recognition near an emergency exit that was locked or inaccessible during the inferno. Approximately 79 others were injured. Survivors described waking to flames and pressing toward exits that would not open. DCI subsequently arrested eight students as persons of interest in what investigators believe was a planned arson attack.
The immediate tragedy is irreducible. But its institutional context is indicting. Less than two years earlier, on the night of September 5, 2024, twenty-one boys had burned to death in a dormitory at Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri County. That dormitory was overcrowded, its exit doors dangerously narrow. The National Gender and Equality Commission called for an inquiry. President Ruto declared national mourning and ordered a safety audit of all boarding schools. Education CS Julius Ogamba committed to holding the culpable accountable. Head of Public Service Felix Koskei ordered immediate infrastructure inspections. The government promised to prosecute violators.
Post-Endarasha safety directives were issued. The Kenya National Building Code 2024, which came into force in March 2025, mandated emergency lighting, fire detection systems, outward-opening exit doors, and fire compartmentalisation in large dormitories. The directives were clear, the legal framework was in place, and the accountability rhetoric from State House had been explicit.
Eighteen months later, the emergency exit at Utumishi was locked. Girls died at a door that should never have been capable of being locked against them. Business Daily’s analysis of the Utumishi fire against the 2024 building code’s requirements found that at minimum four mandatory safety provisions, escape routes, emergency lighting, fire detection, and fire compartmentalisation, were absent or inoperative. The two-and-a-half-hour gap between when the fire started and when it was officially reported suggests no automatic detection system was active. The Basic Education PS had been overseeing schools through this entire period. The safety directives his own ministry issued after Endarasha had not reached Utumishi in time.
COFEK’s petition holds Bitok directly responsible for the conditions that led to the Utumishi fire, citing the unimplemented post-Endarasha directives and noting that a comprehensive boarding school safety audit had been ordered following the 2024 disaster but had demonstrably not reached one of Nakuru County’s largest girls’ boarding schools before the next catastrophe.
Bitok’s response was to announce, on May 31, three days after the fire, that the ministry was ordering a fresh round of inspections of all 3,200 boarding schools, to be completed within ten days. The announcement was almost a ritual repetition of what had been said after Endarasha. An inspection order. Serious warnings to non-compliant principals. Firm language about consequences. The structural problem, a ministry that issues safety directives without the verification capacity to enforce them, remained unaddressed in the announcement. The cycle of tragedy, announcement, and inaction appeared to be repeating itself in real time.
We are going to take very serious action against any principal, any teacher, or any school that deliberately violates the provisions of the safety standards.
PS Julius Bitok, Wajir County, May 31, 2026 (three days after sixteen girls died at Utumishi)
CHAPTER FOUR: THE ABSENTEE PS
Beyond the three crises of substance, a fourth problem has undermined Bitok’s authority in a way that is harder to dismiss as misfortune: his relationship with Parliament’s oversight function.
In February 2026, the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Education, chaired by Tinderet MP Julius Melly, convened to review the education budget and receive a briefing on capitation and key education programmes including SEQUIP and KPEEL. Bitok did not appear. The committee, which had not received timely communication about his absence, was furious. Committee Chairman Melly said he was deeply saddened by what he described as the casual manner in which Bitok was carrying out his work, warning the committee would explore the harshest punitive measures available under parliamentary standing orders.
It was not an isolated incident. Luanda MP Dick Maungu confirmed that Bitok had consistently failed to attend committee meetings since his transfer to the Education ministry, including in the period before the February confrontation when a similar summons had been issued and equally ignored. Mandera South MP Abdul Haro called for Bitok to be made an example to every other PS in government who might be tempted to treat Parliament with the same disdain. Igembe North MP Julius Taitumu said the House was done talking. The committee resolved to schedule an emergency accountability session.
Bitok’s explanation, when he eventually appeared, was that the absence had been the result of a miscommunication. He apologised. He pledged respect for parliamentary oversight. He appeared before the committee at the rescheduled session. Then, in April 2026, with the committee having scheduled a comprehensive briefing for April 23, the State Department wrote to Parliament the day before the meeting requesting a further postponement to May 6, citing prior engagements. The letter, dated April 22, offered no elaboration on what engagement took precedence over a scheduled parliamentary accountability session.
What made the social media dimension particularly combustible was that on the day he was supposed to appear before the aggrieved committee in February, Bitok instead posted photographs of himself inspecting schools in Kikuyu constituency, the constituency of an Education Committee member. The gesture, whatever its intent, communicated that field visits to schools were considered more important than facing elected representatives asking questions about how the ministry’s budget was being managed.
Bumula MP Jack Wamboka called on President Ruto directly to remove Bitok from office, describing him as a politician unfit for a technical reform role and accusing him of presiding over systemic failures that had frustrated key government education reforms. Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wa, at a January 2026 parliamentary retreat in Naivasha, had reportedly described Bitok as the most clueless Principal Secretary in government, accused him of being out of touch with realities on the ground, and cited failures in teacher rationalisation where some schools of one hundred students had twenty-eight teachers while neighbouring schools with six hundred had none.
CHAPTER FIVE: RUTO’S IMPOSSIBLE BARGAIN
The question that follows from all of this is not complicated but its answer has remained conspicuously elusive. Why does Julius Bitok still have a job?
This is not a rhetorical question. It is a governance question, and it is one that President Ruto himself has given the tools to answer. In November 2024, standing before Cabinet Secretaries and their Principal Secretaries at a performance contract signing ceremony at State House, Ruto said: ‘There is no room for excuses or delayed failure. Accountability must cascade through all levels of ministries, departments and agencies to individual officers.’ He said performance reports would carry ‘recognition, rewards or sanctions, which will be applied without fail.’
His government is simultaneously developing a policy, advanced publicly by Public Service CS Geoffrey Ruku in February 2026, to move all civil servants from permanent terms to five-year renewable contracts tied to performance targets. Those who meet their obligations will be renewed, those who do not will not. The policy has been presented as a modernisation of accountability in public service. It is also a framework under which Julius Bitok’s record would be scored.
By the metrics Ruto’s own administration has established, that record is not close. A national security scandal at Immigration. A multi-billion-shilling fraud in education. Sixteen children dead in a dormitory fire after his ministry’s own post-Endarasha safety directives were not implemented. A pattern of parliamentary contempt so consistent that multiple MPs from the government’s own benches have publicly demanded his removal. An international embarrassment touching Kenya’s credibility as a regional mediator. These are not disputed allegations. They are documented facts, sourced from government audits, US Treasury sanctions updates, parliamentary Hansard, and official investigation reports.
The structural argument for retaining Bitok, to the extent one exists, would be continuity during a sensitive period of CBC rollout and junior school transition, and the implicit assumption that a replacement might need time to find their feet while the reforms are mid-stream. That argument is weaker than it appears. CBC’s implementation challenges are being driven by policy and resource decisions that predate Bitok. The junior school autonomy confusion is a governance design problem, not one created by the personality of a single PS. There is no reform so delicate that its stewardship cannot survive a change of administrative leadership.
The likelier explanation for Bitok’s continued tenure is political, and it is not flattering to anyone involved. Bitok is a Kalenjin PS from a community central to Ruto’s political base. Removing him would require the President to absorb a political cost for a decision driven entirely by accountability rather than electoral arithmetic. That is not a calculation that the current administration has demonstrated willingness to make. The Cabinet dissolution of July 2024, forced by Gen Z protests rather than internal performance review, was an aberration of accountability driven from the street, not from the top.
A Principal Secretary is not untouchable. Article 155(4) of the Constitution is clear, and the Public Service Commission has both the mandate and the obligation to act.
COFEK Secretary General Stephen Mutoro, June 2, 2026
The cost of that political logic is not abstract. It is borne by the family of every girl who died at Utumishi. It is borne by every Kenyan whose tax payment was absorbed by a ghost learner in a school that did not exist. It is borne by the Sudanese diaspora who watched a Kenyan passport enable a sanctioned weapons procurer to evade international accountability. It is borne by the reputation of a country that spent years arguing it was a neutral peace broker in a war and then discovered its own immigration infrastructure was serving one side’s hierarchy.
President Ruto has said accountability must cascade through all levels of government. The cascade, apparently, stops at Julius Bitok.
THE LEDGER
The Public Service Commission’s mandate under Article 155(4) of the Constitution is not discretionary. COFEK has invoked it. The grounds it cites are not speculative. They are drawn from parliamentary records, government audit reports, official casualty figures, and an international sanctions document bearing the imprimatur of the United States Treasury.
The PSC must now decide whether it agrees with COFEK’s core proposition: that no Principal Secretary is above accountability, and that the cumulative weight of what has occurred under Bitok’s watch crosses the constitutional threshold for formal proceedings.
There are accountability institutions in Kenya, formal and informal, that have shown capacity to act when the political will exists. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has been called to investigate the passport dimension. The DCI has been asked to examine the same. The NIS operates in the space where passport fraud intersects with national security. The PAC continues to track the ghost learner money. Any one of those investigations, pursued seriously, could clarify the legal dimension of Bitok’s exposure.
What none of those investigations can substitute for is the political decision that should already have been made. In Kenya, the most reliable indicator of whether a senior public officer will face consequences is not the severity of what they did but how close they stand to power. Bitok’s proximity to Ruto has, so far, been a more effective shield than any legal argument he could mount in his own defence.
The question COFEK has put to the PSC, and through it to the presidency, is whether that shield is constitutionally legitimate. The Constitution, as COFEK correctly notes, says nothing about a PS being untouchable. It says the opposite.
Julius Bitok has a PhD in Business Management. He was appointed with the implicit promise that he would bring technocratic discipline to whichever docket he led. The record of his stewardship, measured against his own government’s stated accountability framework, has not delivered on that promise. It has delivered a passport scandal with international repercussions, a fraud that saw nearly a million children’s names used to drain the public education budget, sixteen dead in a fire that a more diligent ministry might have prevented, and a relationship with Parliament characterised by absence and contempt.
That is the record. The man who carries it is still in office. The president who retains him has staked his credibility on accountability without exception. One of those two things, the record or the rhetoric, has to give. As things stand, it is the rhetoric that is losing.
It was supposed to be a moment of solemn solidarity. On June 1, 2026, former Chief Justice David Maraga arrived at the anti-femicide sit-in on Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi carrying what witnesses described as an exceptionally large bouquet of red flowers.
He worked his way through the crowd to the front of the demonstration, waved at protesters, and reportedly requested to address the gathering a request that was declined.
Thousands had gathered that morning to mourn women killed at the rate of at least one per day in Kenya, to demand that President William Ruto declare femicide a national crisis, and to carry symbolic coffins through the city’s central business district in memory of victims like gospel singer Rachel Wandeto, doused in petrol and set alight in May.
For Shakira Wanjira Wafula, watching that scene unfold on her screen broke something open that months of careful silence had held in place.
“Someone who was not seeking attention would not have come to a gathering where people were seated on the ground, made his way up to the front, carrying an exceptionally big and beautiful bouquet of flowers, and waved to the crowd, even requesting to speak.” — Shakira Wanjira Wafula
Within hours, Wafula who had resigned from Maraga’s presidential campaign in November 2025 citing what she described diplomatically as differences in foundational values posted an account on social media that has since detonated inside Kenya’s political and feminist conversations.
In meticulous chronological detail, she disclosed that the real reason she left was the campaign’s handling of sexual harassment and assault allegations involving two senior officials close to the campaign leadership, and what she called a systematic effort to gaslight complainants, sideline them from campaign activities, and engineer a party process from which the accused emerged practically untouched.
The United Green Movement has not issued any detailed public statement responding to Wafula’s specific allegations. David Maraga has not addressed the substance of the claims.
What is not in dispute is the timeline Wafula has reconstructed in extraordinary detail a timeline that maps the distance between a reform candidate’s stated values and the actual experience of women inside his machine.
THE WOMEN AT THE DINNER TABLE
The crisis traces its origins to October 7, 2025. Wafula met with two other women from the campaign for dinner in Nairobi. She had gone to share frustrations about the campaign’s direction. What emerged, she says, was far more alarming: a recognition across the table that sexual harassment within the campaign was not an isolated incident. Multiple women had been affected. The pattern had gone unreported and unaddressed.
The group brought in a fourth woman a lawyer also embedded in the campaign and formed a private chat group to agree on a path forward. Almost immediately, they discovered that the campaign had no safety policy of any kind.
There was no formal mechanism for women to report misconduct, no designated safe contact, and no written protocol for handling complaints.
A presidential campaign premised on institutional reform and ethical governance had not even written down what to do when a woman said she had been harassed.
“We realized there was no safety policy for the campaign.” — Wafula
On the lawyer’s advice, the group approached a senior figure in the campaign someone they trusted, though Wafula is careful to note he did not hold a formal position.
They convened a virtual call on October 11 and laid out what had happened.
The man listened, she says, and promised to organize a follow-up meeting with officials who held defined roles inside the secretariat. That meeting was delayed by the death of Raila Odinga’s elder brother, a period of national mourning that disrupted the campaign’s schedule.
THE MEETING THAT MADE THINGS WORSE
When the group finally convened a wider call on October 16, the allegations that surfaced went beyond harassment. Wafula describes what she heard that day as even more serious allegations of predatory behavior that she believed eclipsed the original complaints. The response they received from the officials on the call would become the sentence she has not been able to forget.
“Women have been through worse, and we would be taught how to fight.”
Having listened to accounts of sexual misconduct by members of their own team, the men in the room told the complainants that women had endured worse, and that the women would be equipped to defend themselves.
Then, in a move Wafula describes as staggering, the officials gave the complainants themselves the responsibility for drafting the policy guidelines that should have existed before any of them set foot in the secretariat.
From that moment, she says, the gaslighting began in earnest. The complainants found themselves progressively sidelined from campaign activities. Attempts were made to approach and manage them individually rather than as a group a divide-and-rule dynamic that Wafula recognized and rejected. The accused, she says, remained front and center in the campaign’s public-facing operations throughout.
THE CHIEF JUSTICE IS TOLD — AND HIS FIRST CONCERN IS NOT THE WOMEN
The women requested a direct meeting with Maraga. They got it on October 22. Wafula could not stay for the full meeting, but she communicated her account directly to the former Chief Justice. She says he appeared genuinely surprised by some of what she shared, and that he promised personally to handle the matter.
The following day October 23 Wafula drafted a proposed code of conduct for the campaign and circulated it within a WhatsApp group that had by then grown to include seven young members of the secretariat.
On October 28, a message arrived from the official they had originally reported to, suggesting the campaign had been waiting to hear from the complainants about how they wanted the situation resolved a framing Wafula found deeply troubling given that the situation had been in the campaign’s hands for nearly three weeks.
On October 29, Maraga called several of the complainants individually.
He asked them to put their concerns in writing as a formal complaint. They did so on November 3, submitting both the complaint and a code of conduct proposal.
The response arrived on November 5: the matter would be handed to the UGM Party itself — the party of which the accused officials were members and which Maraga leads.
On November 13, the complainants received an email from a UGM committee informing them that the legal process had officially begun thirty-three days after the October 11 call when the campaign was first formally notified.
Three days later, on November 16, Wafula attended a scheduled campaign meeting and made a decision.
She would tell Maraga directly that she was resigning, and she would tell him exactly why. His response, she says, was not what she expected from a man campaigning on protecting the vulnerable.
“His biggest concern from that conversation was not the safety of the women around him, but rather the public scrutiny that would come after my resignation.”
Wafula sent her resignation letter that evening.
The public statement she posted the next day, November 17, said nothing about what had happened. It cited differences in foundational values. Several media outlets and political commentators noted at the time that her letter appeared to have been stripped of something.
Reports circulated that an earlier draft had explicitly referenced the sexual assault allegations. She confirmed this week that the more detailed version existed but did not specify who redacted it.
On the same day she posted her resignation publicly November 17 Wafula received a formal invitation to participate in a hearing before the UGM’s ad-hoc committee. She declined.
Her reasoning is direct: she had already resigned, she had never been a member of the UGM Party, and she saw no evidence of good faith in referring the matter to a party structure effectively controlled by the accused’s political home. ‘Extracting the resolution to the party, where the accused is termed as the owner or party leader — at that point, I was convinced there was obviously no goodwill in the process,’ she wrote.
The other official complainants did participate in the hearing. On January 13, 2026, Wafula received a copy of the NEC report along with her response to it. She says she never received a reply to her email. None of the parties involved were satisfied with the process, the findings, or the final outcome.
Since her exit in November, she says at least five additional women she knows personally have also left the campaign.
The June 1 demonstration on Kenyatta Avenue was among the largest anti-femicide protests Nairobi had seen in months.
It was organized by the End Femicide movement alongside women’s rights groups, human rights organizations, and child protection advocates who had issued the government a 40-day ultimatum in May.
Participants carried symbolic coffins, wore white, and held red roses. The Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya has reported handling roughly seventy gender-based violence cases per week across its offices in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. According to government data, at least 10,500 child protection cases were recorded between January 2025 and March 2026 alone.
Former Chief Justice Maraga, one of the more prominent men present, joined the march in a show of solidarity. His presence was noted and reported widely as evidence of cross-political commitment to the cause.
What those reports did not know because Wafula had not yet spoken was what had been happening inside his campaign for the preceding seven months.
Shakira Wafula on the streets during 2025 protests.
Wafula’s reaction to seeing him there was what finally moved her to publish her account publicly. ‘On a day meant for us to grieve and send a message to the world to protect women and children, the sight of someone who should have protected women, and had failed to do so, broke something in me,’ she wrote.
“A presidency that protects potential sex offenders is not the type of presidency I would have any confidence in. Not in an age where we are screaming and crying every day about the safety of women.”
THE CREDIBILITY CATASTROPHE
The political damage this scandal inflicts on Maraga’s candidacy is proportional to the pillar it strikes. His entire presidential proposition rests on the claim that he is different from Kenya’s political establishment: more principled, more accountable, more serious about institutional reform.
His party, the UGM, promotes social justice, equality, and a vision of ethical governance that Kenya’s mainstream political culture has consistently failed to deliver.
That proposition was already being tested by the realities of building a national political machine from scratch funding pressures, coalition tensions, and the brutal arithmetic of Kenyan presidential politics.
But a scandal about how the party handled sexual misconduct complaints internally is a different kind of test. It does not ask whether Maraga can build a winning coalition. It asks whether he means what he says. And the answer emerging from Wafula’s account, and from the silence of the UGM in response, is deeply uncomfortable.
Political analysts who follow the 2027 field note that Maraga’s appeal has been strongest among women, young Kenyans, and civil society constituencies precisely the people most attuned to questions about how organizations treat survivors of sexual misconduct.
These are also the people most familiar with the enduring pattern in Kenyan politics where accountability rhetoric dissolves the moment it becomes inconvenient for those in power.
Supporters of Maraga argue, with some validity, that he is not personally accused of misconduct and that holding a leader responsible for every action by team members sets an unworkable standard. Critics counter that leadership accountability is not merely about personal conduct.
It is about what happens under your authority when serious complaints are raised. Did the accused remain front-facing in the campaign while complainants were sidelined? Did the formal process take over a month to begin? Was the matter handed to a party structure controlled by the accused’s political home? Wafula says the answer to all three questions is yes. The UGM has not disputed her account.
FIVE MORE WOMEN GONE
Perhaps the detail in Wafula’s account that carries the heaviest weight is the one that follows the formal process. She did not invent a dramatic conclusion. She offered a quiet statistic: since she left in November, at least five more women she knows have also departed the campaign.
That figure, if accurate, points to something more systemic than one complaint that was badly handled. It suggests an environment in which women calculated, rationally, that the campaign was not a safe or rewarding place to work and left.
Women like Wafula, who gave months of her life to a political project she believed in, who drafted a code of conduct at her own initiative, who asked to meet with the leader directly, who stayed longer than she wanted to because people reminded her of the big picture.
‘Leaving his campaign was honestly a painful and not easy decision,’ she wrote. ‘But tolerance to the indignification and harassment of women, even in the slightest, is not something I could comfortably sit with.’
She has made clear that she holds Maraga in personal high regard. She is not calling for his campaign to collapse. She is calling for what the campaign promised in its own slogan a reset, a restoration, a rebuilding this time applied to the protection of its own people.
“Silence is what creates room for these matters to continue rising. It is what emboldens this kind of behavior and normalizes abuse of women.”
As of press time, neither Maraga nor the United Green Movement had issued any public statement directly addressing Wafula’s detailed allegations. The party faces a decision that will reveal more about its character than any policy launch or press conference. It can acknowledge the failures she has described, publish the findings of the NEC process, and commit to an independent review. Or it can stay silent and hope the news cycle moves on.
The second option carries the greater risk. Wafula has shown over months that she is not a person given to impulsive disclosure. She stayed quiet when it was painful. She offered the campaign every opportunity to resolve the matter internally. She only spoke after watching Maraga stand at the front of Kenya’s most prominent anti-femicide protest, holding flowers, seeking a microphone.
Kenya’s EndFemicide movement is not going away. The FIDA-Kenya figures, the child protection statistics, the murder of Rachel Wandeto, the government’s failure to implement a single recommendation from the femicide task force it commissioned in January all of these ensure that gender-based violence will remain at the center of Kenyan political discourse through 2027. Every major candidate will be forced to answer for their record on women’s safety. David Maraga’s record inside his own campaign is now part of that conversation.
Whether the UGM can recover from this moment depends not on political strategy, but on whether it does what it has always claimed distinguishes it from the parties it seeks to replace: tells the truth, protects the vulnerable, and holds power accountable beginning with itself.
Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has launched a sharp attack on President William Ruto over the decision to hold this year’s Madaraka Day celebrations in Wajir County, arguing that residents continue to grapple with poverty, inadequate infrastructure and limited access to essential public services.
In a statement issued on Monday as the country marked its 63rd Madaraka Day, Gachagua questioned the rationale behind staging the national event in a region he says still faces serious development challenges despite years of funding from both the national and county governments.
The former deputy president said the celebrations should have provided an opportunity for the Head of State to account for the state of development in Wajir and explain what tangible gains residents have received from public investments over the years.
“Holding the celebrations in Wajir is mocking them as they have nothing to celebrate,” Gachagua said, insisting that many residents continue to struggle with access to clean water, reliable electricity, quality healthcare, education and security.
His remarks came as President Ruto presided over the historic Madaraka Day celebrations at Wajir Stadium, the first time in Kenya’s history that the national event has been hosted in Northern Kenya. During his address, Ruto described the occasion as a symbolic declaration that no region should be excluded from the country’s development agenda.
Questions Over Development Priorities
Gachagua accused leaders from the region of failing to explain why basic services remain inadequate despite years of devolved funding and allocations through national government programmes.
He cited challenges ranging from poor road networks and unreliable electricity supply to inadequate sanitation infrastructure and recurring water shortages, arguing that these issues should have been addressed before investing in high-profile projects associated with hosting a national celebration.
The former deputy president also questioned whether resources used to prepare for the event could have been directed toward projects with a more direct impact on residents, including schools, hospitals, water systems and sewerage infrastructure.
He further challenged the government to provide a detailed account of how billions of shillings allocated to Wajir County since the advent of devolution in 2013 have been spent, saying residents deserve transparency on the use of public funds and the outcomes achieved.
Ruto’s Message of Inclusion
The criticism came only hours after President Ruto used the national celebrations to acknowledge decades of neglect suffered by Northern Kenya and issue a rare public apology on behalf of the Kenyan state.
Addressing thousands of residents gathered at Wajir Stadium, the President admitted that past governments had failed the region through policies that concentrated development in areas considered economically productive while leaving vast parts of Northern Kenya behind.
“Poleni sana,” Ruto told residents, describing the marginalisation of Northern Kenya as a historical injustice that should never have happened. He pledged to accelerate investments in roads, healthcare, water projects, education and other critical infrastructure to bridge the development gap.
The President also defended the decision to host Madaraka Day in Wajir, saying it was intended to demonstrate that every Kenyan region matters and that national celebrations should not be confined to major urban centres.
Political Undertones
Gachagua’s latest remarks are likely to deepen the growing political rivalry between the former deputy president and his former boss as both leaders intensify efforts to shape the national political conversation ahead of the next General Election.
Beyond development concerns, Gachagua urged the President to address historical grievances in the region, including the legacy of the Wagalla Massacre, and reassure residents that such tragedies would never recur.
The exchange highlights the competing narratives emerging around Wajir’s hosting of Madaraka Day. While the government has portrayed the event as a landmark moment of national inclusion and recognition for a historically neglected region, critics argue that symbolism alone cannot substitute for improvements in the daily lives of residents.
As celebrations concluded in Wajir, the debate shifted beyond the festivities themselves to a broader question that has long shaped Kenya’s politics: whether promises of inclusion and development are translating into meaningful change for communities that have spent decades on the margins of the country’s growth.
