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For six decades, Kenyatta National Hospital has borne the weight of a nation’s health. East and Central Africa’s largest referral hospital, a 2,000-bed institution straddling Nairobi’s Upper Hill, has cut open hearts, transplanted kidneys and held the hands of the dying poor who had nowhere else to go.

Today, it is dying itself.

A fresh audit report by Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu for the financial year ending June 30, 2025, documents the formal descent into what she terms ‘technical insolvency’ — the fourth consecutive year in which the hospital has spent more than it earned.

But the auditor’s language, clinical and measured as it must be, barely captures the full horror of what has been happening inside KNH’s walls and procurement corridors.

What the audit cannot say in polite accounting prose, Kenya Insights says plainly: KNH has been systematically looted, its revenues leaked, its infrastructure projects corrupted, and its patients — among them the most vulnerable Kenyans alive — abandoned to a collapsing institution that a succession of managers, contractors and Ministry of Health officials have treated as a personal revenue stream. Four consecutive years of deficit spending are not a fiscal accident. They are the arithmetic of theft.

KNH has been systematically looted. Its procurement corridors became personal revenue streams. Four years of consecutive deficits are not a fiscal accident — they are the arithmetic of theft.

The numbers alone are staggering.

In 2024/25, the hospital’s deficit reached Sh2.6 billion — a figure Sh2.3 billion worse than the Sh299 million shortfall recorded the previous financial year.

Its total expenditure budget stood at Sh22.5 billion yet only Sh17.5 billion in funding was received, a 22 percent underfunding that translated directly into a 19 percent under-absorption of its spending budget. The auditor notes this gap ‘may have affected the hospital’s mandate.’ It has. Patients know it. Doctors know it. The morgue knows it. The only people who appeared not to know it — or more precisely, not to care — are the network of executives, contractors and officials who have spent years feeding off an institution that is supposed to feed the sick.

THE CEO, THE OXYGEN SCANDAL, AND THE SECRET ACCOUNTS

No single episode captures the moral catastrophe at KNH more completely than the oxygen plant scandal that has consumed the institution since 2022. In that year, the Ministry of Health awarded a Sh443.6 million tender to Biomax Africa Ltd for the supply, installation and commissioning of a medical oxygen-generating plant — a plant that would produce 8,000 litres of oxygen per minute and free the hospital from its expensive dependence on commercial oxygen suppliers.

The contractor was given six months to deliver.

Three years later, the plant still does not work.

The facts that have emerged from Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission investigations are damning. Biomax Africa, working with French manufacturer Novair Group, submitted bid documents that were forged.

The Kenya Bureau of Standards quality approval marks were fake.

The performance bonds from CIC Insurance and Intra Africa Assurance were fabricated.

The work history citing a similar project in Machakos County was invented. Former Health Principal Secretary Susan Mochache and other Ministry officials who sat on the tender evaluation committee are accused by the EACC of failing to conduct the most basic due diligence — a failure that handed a Sh443 million public contract to a company armed with fraudulent papers.

The EACC forwarded its investigation report to Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga in June 2025 recommending that Mochache, Biomax Director Leonard Muriuki Njeru and ten other suspects be prosecuted. The DPP was still reviewing the file as of publication.

While the plant collected dust, KNH was haemorrhaging cash buying oxygen from private vendors.

Between July 2023 and February 2024 alone, the hospital spent more than Sh168 million on liquid oxygen.

Since 2022, when the contract was signed, the institution has spent more than Sh565 million purchasing oxygen externally — money that would have been unnecessary had the plant been delivered.

At one point, the oxygen purity coming out of the plant was as low as 60 percent — far below the 95 percent required for medical use — meaning that even when the plant briefly operated, it was pumping substandard air into the lungs of critically ill patients.

This detail alone should have triggered criminal proceedings.

Instead, KNH granted Biomax Africa at least three contract extensions.

Since 2022, KNH has spent over Sh565 million buying oxygen from private vendors — wasted because a Sh443 million plant, paid for by Kenyans, was delivered on forged documents and still does not work.

At the centre of the scandal is Dr Evanson Njoroge Kamuri, the dermatologist-turned-CEO who ran KNH from 2019 until his suspension in mid-2025.

In May 2024, the EACC obtained court orders freezing Sh28 million in Kamuri’s Housing Finance accounts.

A month later, the High Court expanded the freeze to Sh48.5 million held across eight accounts at HFC Bank, National Bank and Standard Chartered, while blocking him from transacting six parcels of land in Nairobi, Kirinyaga and Kajiado.

The EACC’s affidavit stated preliminary investigations found Kamuri had accumulated assets not commensurate with his known income ‘to a tune of Sh800 million’ on a gross monthly salary of Sh278,725.

By August 2025, having concluded its investigations, the EACC returned to court with findings that Kamuri had built assets worth Sh466.5 million between 2015 and 2024, of which Sh229.4 million remained unexplained.

Anti-Corruption Court judge Lucy Njuguna granted preservation orders on those assets pending forfeiture proceedings.

The EACC alleges Kamuri endorsed irregular payments totalling Sh290 million on the oxygen plant contract as well as on a second troubled tender for the hospital’s Enterprise Resource Planning system.

The ERP contract — also flagged in the probe — was meant to digitise KNH’s hospital management but became another procurement controversy that investigators say was used to channel funds to entities linked to the CEO.

Kamuri has denied wrongdoing, insisting the Ministry bore primary responsibility as the procuring entity.

Whether his repeated letters to then PS Harry Kimtai were sincere calls for help or calculated paper trails against a mounting legal threat is a question the DPP will eventually have to answer.

The scandal took a more lurid turn when the EACC and the Financial Reporting Centre discovered that Sh4 million linked to Kamuri had been deposited in May 2024 into the Standard Chartered account of Jacqueline Kavete Mbuli, who told the court she had no idea why the money appeared there and had tried to have the bank reverse it.

Justice Njuguna extended the preservation order on those funds in April 2025, ruling that the need to prevent dissipation of assets under investigation outweighed the CEO’s objections.

Whistleblowers within KNH, speaking to Kenya Insights on condition of anonymity, allege the pattern was broader — that Kamuri used associates to route cash, their loyalty and career advancement intertwined with financial complicity.

On December 29, 2024, Kamuri attended a Board of Management meeting and refused to sign a report that documented anomalies in the Biomax contract, arguing the board had no power to investigate procurement matters.

Seven months earlier, the EACC had already opened its file on exactly those matters. Within weeks, he was suspended.

SH6.7 BILLION IN ROTTING DEBTS AND SH188 MILLION THAT VANISHED

The audit’s financial findings go well beyond the oxygen scandal.

The auditor-general reveals that nearly Sh6.7 billion in patient debts have remained uncollected for more than three years.

Despite the hospital having a credit policy, its unpaid bills grew by over Sh1.6 billion in a single financial year — evidence of a debt recovery operation so dysfunctional it can barely be called one.

The crisis has a face: 17,906 patients who received treatment at KNH and walked out without paying, leaving behind Sh866.6 million in unpaid bills.

The hospital spent Sh74.5 million on outsourced security in 2024/25 yet those guards could not stop nearly 18,000 patients from absconding.

Two murders also took place on the hospital premises during the same period, raising questions about what the security contract was actually purchasing.

More alarming than the absconded patients is Sh188.8 million in revenue the audit found was never officially receipted.

The hospital reported earning over Sh9.5 billion from medical services in 2024/25, but audit teams discovered this substantial sum floating outside the official receipting system, making it impossible to verify whether the income declared was complete or accurate.

When revenue is collected but not receipted, the question is not complicated: where did it go? KNH has not answered that question publicly. The auditor has asked it in the gentlest possible official language. The money, for now, remains a ghost.

Sh188.8 million in revenue was collected but never officially receipted. When money is collected and not recorded, the question is not complicated: where did it go?

The audit further exposes a Sh110 million discrepancy in what KNH says it owes the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority and what KEMSA’s own records show. KNH accounts declare a debt of Sh6.7 million to the supply authority.

KEMSA’s records put the figure at over Sh117 million. The gap of more than Sh110 million is unexplained.

This is not a rounding error.

This is a hospital that either does not know what it owes its medical supplier, or does not want it known.

The finding raises fundamental questions about how KNH manages its procurement liabilities and whether suppliers are being paid double, not at all, or through channels that bypass official accounting entirely.

In the background of all this sits the government’s own failure to honour its obligations.

The audit reveals Sh268 million in grant money owed by the government to KNH for more than three years, with no payment plan and no timeline.

The auditor raised serious doubts about whether this money will ever be recovered.

Combined with the 22 percent underfunding of KNH’s budget, the picture that emerges is of a government that demands accountability from its hospital while exempting itself from the basic obligation of paying what it owes.

A SH10.2 BILLION PENSION HOLE AND THOUSANDS OF RETIREES AT RISK

Hidden beneath the procurement scandals and revenue leakages is a slow-motion human catastrophe that will outlast any individual corruption case.

KNH’s staff pension scheme is sitting on a Sh10.2 billion deficit.

The scheme requires Sh14.6 billion in assets to cover its obligations to current and future retirees. It holds Sh4.3 billion.

That means for every ten shillings it needs, it has less than three.

Thousands of KNH employees — nurses, doctors, radiographers, lab technicians — who have spent their working lives in public service are staring at a retirement system that cannot pay them.

KNH has repeatedly sought government intervention to bridge this gap. The audit found no evidence that any funding has been received and no alternative plan exists to manage the growing liability.

Without a bailout, the hospital faces the prospect of legal action from retirees and the complete collapse of its pension obligations.

A hospital already in technical insolvency, carrying a Sh10.2 billion pension hole it cannot fill, is a hospital that could stop being able to pay its retired staff at any moment.

It is also a hospital struggling to retain its current workforce, who are watching this unfold in real time and calculating their exit.

SHA BILLIONS WITHHELD AS THE HOSPITAL BLEEDS

KNH’s financial collapse has been deepened by the chaotic rollout of the Social Health Authority, the government’s flagship replacement for the National Hospital Insurance Fund.

SHA was launched in October 2024 with promises of faster, more transparent reimbursements.

The reality has been a disaster for facilities across Kenya, and KNH has been no exception. Despite collecting between Sh40 million and Sh60 million daily from patients, KNH was being starved of operational funds by a National Treasury directive, creating critical shortages of blood test reagents, essential drugs and nutritional supplies for inpatients.

The hospital was simultaneously owed approximately Sh1.58 billion by SHA in pending claims.

Nationally, the SHA scandal has taken on dimensions that dwarf individual hospital mismanagement.

A Ministry of Health audit revealed in January 2026 that the authority lost Sh11 billion to fraud between October 2024 and April 2025, with the bulk of false claims submitted by ghost hospitals that existed only on paper.

SHA had paid out Sh50 billion of the Sh93 billion in claims submitted since its inception — a reimbursement rate that hospital associations say proves the scheme cannot cover what it has promised. Parliament’s Health Committee was told SHA owed providers Sh30 billion in pending bills, some inherited from NHIF.

The scheme sold to Kenyans as universal healthcare has become another mechanism for looting, and KNH, already technically insolvent, is caught in the crossfire.

SHA lost Sh11 billion to fraud in its first seven months. KNH is owed Sh1.58 billion in pending claims. The scheme sold as universal healthcare has become another vehicle for looting while patients go without drugs, oxygen and food.

STALLED INFRASTRUCTURE, BROKEN EQUIPMENT AND DEAD PATIENTS

The oxygen plant is not the only stalled project at KNH.

The audit documents a pattern of infrastructure failure that has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions without producing functioning services.

The Sh500 million allocation for a linear accelerator for cancer treatment went unspent because the actual funds were never released.

Existing cancer treatment equipment continues to fail, with patients facing prolonged interruptions to radiotherapy.

Meanwhile, the hospital continues to source oxygen at costs exceeding Sh596 million for the year, keeping 700 patients reliant on external supply for a gas that was supposed to be produced on-site three years ago.

The human consequences of these failures are not abstract.

KNH treated nearly 500,000 Kenyans in the year to June 2025 — 390,000 outpatients and 65,000 inpatients. It performed 37,318 specialised surgeries, 1,045 heart surgeries and 22 kidney implants.

These are people whose lives depended on the hospital functioning.

Two of them were murdered in the wards. Kennedy Kalombotole, arrested in July 2025 for killing Edward Maingi Ndegwa in Ward 7B, was also a suspect in the February 2025 killing of Gilbert Kinyua. Court documents revealed the suspect had first been admitted to KNH’s Intensive Care Unit in November 2022 and migrated through the wards for years without being discharged or expelled.

Security costing Sh74.5 million annually could not detect this. It also could not stop 17,906 patients walking out with nearly Sh867 million in unpaid bills.

The forensic audit KNH itself commissioned in 2023 — to investigate payment irregularities where payee details were manipulated to divert funds to unintended recipients, including fictitious, inflated and unapproved payments — represents yet another thread in the same unravelling cloth. Whether those investigations produced prosecutions has not been confirmed on public record.

The hospital has not updated the public.

Parliament has not pressed for answers. The pattern continues.

THE SYSTEM THAT MADE THIS POSSIBLE

The collapse of KNH is not the story of one bad CEO or one fraudulent contractor.

It is the story of a system that created the conditions for all of it: procurement structures that allow the Ministry of Health to award tenders worth hundreds of millions to entities with forged documents; oversight frameworks so porous that a contractor can deliver oxygen at 60 percent purity and receive extensions rather than termination; and a government that chronically underfunds its flagship hospital while demanding it maintain world-class healthcare standards.

Whistleblowers who spoke to Kenya Insights described KNH under recent leadership as a personal fiefdom where loyalty was rewarded, resistance punished, and the hospital’s considerable financial flows treated as accessible to those with the right connections.

The EACC’s own documents allege that PS Harry Kimtai was approached to assist the CEO amid the oxygen scandal probe, with a whistleblower dossier claiming Sh20 million was delivered to the PS and Sh80 million routed through legislators on the parliamentary health committee.

These are allegations that Kimtai and the named legislators have denied. But the EACC found the dossier sufficiently credible to incorporate into its investigative trail — a detail that should alarm every Kenyan who pays taxes and, one day, may need care from a hospital that has become a crime scene.

KNH Acting CEO Dr Richard Lesiyampe told Kenya Insights that matters raised in the audit are before the Public Investments Committee of Parliament and that the hospital ‘remains committed to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.’

It is the kind of statement institutions issue when they have no better answer. Parliament’s oversight is real and welcome. But Kenya’s history of parliamentary health committee hearings producing accountability rather than additional negotiating leverage for the accused is not encouraging.

THE VERDICT

Kenyatta National Hospital is not facing imminent collapse because it is poorly managed.

It is facing imminent collapse because it has been deliberately milked.

A Sh443 million oxygen plant that does not work. Sh188.8 million in unreceipted revenue.

A Sh10.2 billion pension hole the government refuses to fill. Nearly Sh6.7 billion in uncollected debts.

A former CEO whose assets have been frozen three times over by the same commission that has now recommended his prosecution.

An SHA scheme haemorrhaging billions to ghost facilities while the real hospital that needs the money descends into technical insolvency. A security contract worth Sh74.5 million that could not stop 18,000 patients walking out on their bills or a murder suspect living in the wards for years.

Every shilling stolen from KNH is a shilling that cannot buy a reagent, cannot stock a ward with drugs, cannot pay a retiring nurse her pension, cannot repair a linear accelerator so that a cancer patient does not die waiting for a machine that costs less than what was paid for an oxygen plant that pumps air at half the required purity.

The institution that millions of Kenyans depend on as their last resort is being destroyed from within. That destruction has names, court files, frozen bank accounts and forged tender documents attached to it.

Kenya Insights calls on the DPP to move without further delay on the EACC’s June 2025 recommendations.

We call on the National Treasury to immediately fund the pension deficit and the SHA reimbursement backlog owed to KNH.

We call on Parliament to stop accepting money from people it is supposed to be investigating.

And we call on every Kenyan who has ever taken a sick child or ageing parent to Kenyatta National Hospital to understand that what is being destroyed is theirs — and to demand that it stop.

The land along Kiambu Road that cradles Paradise Lost, one of Nairobi’s most recognisable recreational destinations, has always attracted covetous eyes. But a petition filed at the Kiambu High Court this week has put names to those eyes, and they are among the most powerful in the Ruto administration.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, Kapseret Member of Parliament Oscar Sudi and his Gatundu North counterpart Elijah Kururia have been hauled before the court by Daniel Mwangi Mbugua and his daughter Wanjiru Mwangi, who want the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate the three for allegedly facilitating the invasion and seizure of the 300-acre Kasarini Coffee Farm, registered under land reference numbers 5974/1, 5972 and 5971. The property, which sits in one of the most premium land corridors in the greater Nairobi area, is conservatively valued at Sh20 billion in court papers.

The petition lands at a peculiar moment for Murkomen. Less than a week before being named in a court filing over an alleged armed land grab, the Cabinet Secretary appeared before a National Assembly committee to denounce, with characteristic confidence, the very nexus of land grabbers and criminal gangs that petitioners accuse him of commanding.

“CS Murkomen was patrolling with a team of six vehicles and a truck with 20 armed goons, wielding machetes and other crude weapons,” Ms Wanjiru Mwangi states in court documents.

A Billionaire’s Estate, A Bitter Inheritance

To understand the full dimensions of the battle now raging in the courts, one must first understand the man whose estate lies at the centre of it. The late Moses Mbugua Mwangi was among the most reclusive of Kiambu’s self-made billionaires, a man whose wealth was built through decades of enterprise conducted largely away from public gaze. He died in 2008, leaving behind an estate of staggering proportions accumulated through his vehicle Ndunde Investments, which he incorporated in 1986 and placed under the joint stewardship of his wife Christine Mithiri and their three sons: Daniel Mwangi, Isaac Gichia and Joseph Mbai Mbugua.

The Ndunde portfolio was not modest. It included Misahara Coffee Estate and the Kasarini Coffee Farm in Kiambu, the Suguror Ranch in Laikipia County, and prime properties in Kangemi, Runda, Ruiru and Karen. It is on the Kasarini Coffee Farm that Paradise Lost, the sprawling recreational facility that generations of Nairobians have visited, is situated. The resort generates an estimated Sh50 million annually, according to affidavits filed by Daniel Mbugua in the long-running succession dispute that has seen the three brothers fighting in the courts of Milimani for years.

That fraternal war is now being weaponised against them. Daniel Mbugua, the petitioner before the Kiambu court, accuses his own brothers of working with the alleged land grabbers to disinherit him and his daughter. He has listed Isaac Gichia and Joseph Mbai as interested parties to the suit. Yet in a twist that complicates any clean narrative of villains and victims, Isaac Gichia has also publicly claimed to be a victim of the same land grab, telling reporters he was shocked when he learnt that a company called Pamat Enterprises had already obtained title deeds to significant portions of the contested land. The family feud has, in effect, created the opening through which outsiders have marched in.

Pamat Enterprises: The Corporate Vehicle at the Heart of the Grab

Business Registration Service documents seen by media reveal that Pamat Enterprises Limited was incorporated in 1984 and operates from Lavington in Nairobi County. Its directors and shareholders are listed as Philip Mulwa Nzioka, Isaya Begi Gesicho, Black Scorpion International Services Limited, ICPHER Consultants Co Ltd and Dawn Innovations. How a Lavington-based company incorporated four decades ago came to hold title deeds to land that the Mbugua family says has never been alienated to any external party is at the core of the petition.

Kururia, the Gatundu North MP, has offered the most detailed public response of the three named politicians. He told reporters that Kasarini Coffee Farm workers were allocated land by the government in the early 1980s, and that Pamat Enterprises was part of that historical allocation. He asserted that the contested parcels, which he identified by LR numbers 5970 and 5969, belong to the community of former farmworkers, and not to the feuding brothers. The petitioners contest this version entirely.

Murkomen and Sudi did not respond to calls and text messages sent to their phones ahead of the story’s publication. Their silence is conspicuous given the gravity of the allegations: the petition asks the court to order the Director of Criminal Investigations and the Officer Commanding Police Station as well as the OCPD of Kiambu to produce title deeds allegedly presented to police for authentication by the alleged invaders, and to explain how the authenticity of those documents was determined.

A CS Who Wages War on Land Grabbers, Allegedly While Conducting One

The irony of Murkomen’s situation is difficult to overstate. On April 21, just one day before this petition came to public light, the Cabinet Secretary for Interior was before the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Administration and Internal Security, delivering a sweeping account of criminal gangs and political violence. He told lawmakers that some land grabbers were working with criminal gangs to frustrate court-ordered evictions. He said that organised criminal groups were operating in well over one hundred identifiable formations across Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa and outlying counties. He warned, with the authority of the state’s chief security officer, that any leader financing such groups would be investigated.

Within twenty-four hours, he was the subject of a court petition alleging precisely the conduct he had just publicly condemned. According to affidavits filed by Wanjiru Mwangi, on the 11th of April 2026, she received a phone call reporting that Murkomen was on the contested Kasarini land, leading a convoy of six vehicles and a truck carrying twenty armed individuals. She says the men brandished machetes. Two days later, on April 13, she claims she was nearly attacked by the very individuals who had taken control of the farm.

The petitioners allege that police have illegally occupied the family land without any court order, and that Kiambu Police Station, under its commanding officer, has been compromised.

The petition asks the Inspector General of Police and the Internal Affairs Director to explain why the alleged invaders appear to have a comfortable working relationship with officers at Kiambu Police Station. The family says that despite recording statements, police have been unresponsive. They have asked the court for an order compelling the production of the title deeds the alleged grabbers presented to officers for authentication. They have also warned the court of an imminent plot to murder the petitioners, a claim the court will need to assess carefully when the matter returns for mention on May 19.

Oscar Sudi: A Recurring Presence in Land Controversies

For Oscar Sudi, this is not his first encounter with land-related allegations. The flamboyant Kapseret MP, who grew up as a squatter’s son on the Moi University farm belt and built himself into one of the Rift Valley’s most polarising political figures, has been named in a series of land disputes stretching back years.

In 2020, the National Assembly’s Lands Committee summoned Sudi to appear before it over allegations that he was involved in a scheme to grab 1,515 acres of Moi University land in Kesses, Uasin Gishu County, to the detriment of squatters who had occupied the land for over four decades. Sudi refused to appear, posting a video from his social media platforms dismissing the matter and insisting the land belonged to the university. The committee’s chairperson, then-North Mugirango MP Joash Nyamoko, confirmed that Sudi had been adversely mentioned during site visits and demanded that he present himself to answer for the allegations.

In a separate and earlier case, Sudi was accused of acquiring a 50-acre piece of land in Eldoret from a widow named Eunice Talai under circumstances that members of the late Chief Talai’s family described as exploitative and irregular. A section of the family went to court arguing that Sudi had taken advantage of his proximity to the deceased patriarch to obtain land that rightfully belonged to the widow and her children. Sudi’s lawyers denied the claims and maintained he had followed due procedure in the acquisition.

In January of that same period, Sudi led a group of youths in demolishing structures on a contested 20-acre parcel in Kamagut, Uasin Gishu County, reportedly acting on instructions from above. The incident occurred despite an existing court order. It was, observers noted at the time, a brazen demonstration of how proximity to political power in Kenya can insulate actors from the ordinary consequences of defying judicial authority.

The Sudi-Murkomen Axis and a Recruitment of Their Names

The two men named in the Kasarini petition have a political history that goes deeper than a shared parliamentary benches. Murkomen has publicly described Sudi as part of the innermost circle around President William Ruto, a man through whom access to the presidency is brokered. In a Nairobi High Court case that emerged separately in March 2026, a former Kenya Revenue Authority senior manager, George Musembi Muia, accused a fraudster called Cosmas Mutati Nzoka of having extracted Sh63 million from him by dangling the names of Murkomen, Sudi, Felix Koskei, the Head of Public Service, and Farouk Kibet, the President’s personal assistant. Musembi says Mutati presented himself as a man with access to these power brokers, and that he paid millions for an introduction that would secure him a chairmanship at the Kenya Urban Roads Authority.

The case is instructive not because Murkomen or Sudi are defendants in it, but because it shows the market value their names command in Kenya’s political economy of access. Fraudsters invoke them because the public believes in their power. That same reputation for power is now being cited against them in a different kind of fraud, one played out not in brown envelopes at Muthaiga Square, but on three hundred acres of prime Kiambu farmland at the gates of Paradise Lost.

The Kasarini Land: A History Older Than All the Players

The land at the centre of this dispute carries a history that predates the current litigants by generations. Colonial settlers identified the Kasarini area along Kiambu Road as suitable for coffee farming research in the early twentieth century. In 1964, the Kasarini Farmers’ Co-operative Society was formally registered, bringing together families who had worked the land and whose relationship to it stretched back decades further. By 1974, disputes over control had begun to emerge, with settler-linked management moving to assert exclusive authority over the land and the coffee grown on it. Claims and counter-claims about the legitimate chain of title have wound through Kenya’s courts and, for a period, before the National Land Commission, ever since.

The wider Kasarini-Paradise Lost corridor has for years been among the most litigated patches of land in Kiambu County. A separate group, the Kasarini Ancestral Families’ Self-Help Group, has filed NLC claims asserting that their forebears were violently dispossessed of over nine hundred acres in the area, land that now hosts not only Paradise Lost but also Runda Paradise, Kencom Sacco Homes, Woodsman Villa, Prime Presidential Runda, Runda Palm Gardens, St Mary’s School, and several churches. The sheer volume and value of the developments that have gone up on contested land, estimated at over Sh100 billion in aggregate, speaks to how systematically the resolution of historical land questions has been evaded in favour of commercial exploitation.

Into this already volatile landscape, the petition filed this week drops three of the most politically significant names in the current administration. The High Court in Kiambu has directed the petitioners to serve all named parties and appear on May 19 for further directions. Whether the EACC investigation the petitioners have asked for will materialise, whether the DCI will explain the title deeds authenticated at Kiambu Police Station, and whether the named politicians will now be compelled to break their silence are questions that will define the coming weeks of this case.

One thing is already clear: Paradise Lost is misnamed. For the Mbugua family, paradise was not lost in a mythological fall from grace. It appears to have been taken, in broad daylight, by men in motorcades.

MOMBASA, Kenya — In a nation that has grown wearily accustomed to spectacular impunity, Mohamed Hussein Jaffer has long occupied a category of his own. The 78-year-old patriarch of the MJ Group, whose commercial footprint at the Port of Mombasa is without precedent among private individuals, now finds himself at the intersection of two explosive scandals simultaneously: a criminal investigation into the importation of 60,000 tonnes of condemned petrol aboard the tanker MT Paloma, and fresh allegations that he deployed a proxy company to seize ancestral land from an elderly Mombasa resident and thousands of his neighbours, with the alleged connivance of an Environment and Land Court judge.

The land story concerns ELCC 67/2021, a case filed in the Mombasa Environment and Land Court in which elderly resident Juma Abdalla Munyau Kathenge and his co-petitioner Asma Ndugu Juma accused Mayport Company Limited of unlawfully acquiring their prime Mombasa plot.

The case finally concluded in March 2026 with a judgment delivered by Justice Lucas Naikuni, currently stationed in Kwale, in which he declared Mayport Limited the lawful and registered proprietor of Subdivision Number 6234, Original Number 5220/4, Section I Mainland North, CR No. 20722, and issued a permanent injunction barring the petitioners and any persons acting under them from entering or interfering with the property. The outcome has sent shockwaves through a community whose survival hangs on the same parcel of ground.

The stakes could not be more staggering. Activists and community representatives say more than 50,000 residents of Mombasa face eviction and the demolition of their village following the ruling.

The land, estimated to be worth Ksh 15 billion, had been described by the petitioners as ancestral land held by generations of coastal families who had occupied it in good faith for decades.

THE PROXY STRUCTURE

Corporate registry documents examined by Kenya Insights establish that Mayport Company Limited was incorporated on February 9, 2012, as a private limited company with a nominal share capital of Ksh 100,000.

The firm’s two directors, who are also its shareholders, are Shaniz Chatur, identified in court filings as a former legal adviser at Grain Bulk Limited, one of Jaffer’s flagship companies, and Yakatali Amirali Lamuwalla, described as a personal assistant to Mohamed Jaffer himself.

The directorship structure is what legal experts describe as a signature Jaffer arrangement: valuable assets held in the names of employees and associates, insulating the principal from direct liability while ensuring operational control.

Chatur’s prior role at Grain Bulk Limited, the company that anchored Jaffer’s port logistics empire for three decades, establishes an institutional link that the petitioners’ lawyer argued should not be dismissed as coincidence.

Lamuwalla’s status as Jaffer’s personal assistant removes even the pretence of arm’s length ownership.

“This is a case we already knew the outcome. The tycoon has never lost any cases, especially within the Mombasa court.” — Harrison Charo, Justice For All

Equally damaging was the conduct of the two Mayport directors during the hearing itself.

According to court records reviewed by this publication, neither Chatur nor Lamuwalla produced the original title deed for the disputed land, nor were they able to furnish payment documents establishing that the property had been legitimately purchased from the petitioners.

Senior High Court counsel Steve Ogola, who represented the petitioners, drove the point further by raising a procedural irregularity that lies at the heart of the fraud allegations: the sale agreement for the land had been prepared not by the seller, as the law requires, but by Advocate Oloo, a lawyer who is described in court proceedings as having links to Mohamed Jaffer and who was simultaneously acting for the purported purchaser.

The implication of this arrangement is legally significant. Under Kenyan conveyancing practice, the preparation of a sale agreement by a lawyer acting for the buyer, rather than the seller, is a recognised red flag for fraud, suggesting that the transactional documentation was manufactured to support an acquisition rather than to memorialise a genuine sale.

Ogola put the question directly to the two directors in court. Neither provided a satisfactory answer.

THE JUDGE AND HIS DELAYS

What makes the case more troubling than the proxy structure alone is the conduct of the proceedings. Justice Naikuni adjourned the delivery of judgment in ELCC 67/2021 more than ten times over the life of the case.

Those delays, now a matter of public record, drew intense scrutiny from community advocates and legal observers who noted that the case had been fully argued and was awaiting only the judicial pronouncement.

Court records show that Justice Naikuni, then based in Mombasa, had on multiple earlier occasions cited his caseload as the reason for postponements.

One previous adjournment in September 2025, saw the judge personally apologise to the parties for what he acknowledged had become an unreasonable delay, telling them: “I understand that the continuous delays have been frustrating for all parties involved.”

He scheduled judgment for October 17, 2025, then failed to deliver it on that date. The ruling was eventually handed down on March 13, 2026, the digital seal on the judgment confirming the date and time as 10:06:37 hours. The judgment was delivered remotely, through Microsoft Teams, signed and dated at Mombasa.

Harrison Charo, Executive Director of Justice For All, a Mombasa-based civic organisation that had monitored the proceedings, was unsparing in his assessment of the outcome.

The judgment, he told this publication, was not a surprise. “This is a case we already knew the outcome. The tycoon has never lost any cases, especially within the Mombasa court,” he said. Charo’s words carry particular resonance against the backdrop of a national conversation about judicial corruption that has only intensified in recent months.

The court awarded the petitioners a nominal Ksh 6 million against the Chief Land Registrar for misfeasance and negligence in maintaining the land register, a sum that community representatives dismissed as insulting against the backdrop of a 50,000-person displacement and a Ksh 15 billion property claim.

Justice Naikuni ordered each party to bear its own costs and directed the Chief Land Registrar to file a compliance report within 60 days confirming rectification of the register in line with his orders.

THE WIDER JUDICIAL PATTERN

The Mayport case does not exist in isolation. It forms one chapter in a long dossier of litigation involving Mohamed Jaffer and Kenyan courts that has consistently raised questions about institutional capture and the commercialisation of judicial outcomes.

In one of the most documented episodes, Jaffer’s company Miritini Free Port Limited was found by Mombasa High Court Judge Eric Ogola to have irregularly received Ksh 1.475 billion in SGR land compensation from the National Land Commission in December 2015.

Justice Ogola’s 2020 ruling established in forensic detail how the Commissioner of Land had cancelled survey plans belonging to genuine squatters, consolidated their plots into a single parcel designated MN/VI/4688, and allocated the consolidated title to a company called Miqdad Enterprises, which then sold it to Miritini Free Port.

The judge found that the NLC had been aware of the squatters’ prior claims yet proceeded with acquisition and compensation without regard for their interests.

“This court cannot allow this kind of corruption for rewards to individuals who can bribe their ways to obtain taxpayers’ money at the expense of genuine needy Kenyans,” Justice Ogola declared.

Miritini Free Port then did something that became emblematic of the Jaffer litigation playbook: it filed a constitutional review petition seeking to set aside Ogola’s ruling.

The resulting proceedings dragged on for years before the Mombasa High Court under Justice Olga Sewe, whose repeated failures to deliver a ruling in that case attracted their own scrutiny. Sewe cited, at various hearings, her court’s sitting schedule in Kwale, incomplete preparation, assignment to a three-judge bench, and official duties in Nairobi as reasons why the ruling was not ready.

The matter had failed to reach resolution at least six times by the time it emerged in the public record in 2024, allowing the money to remain unrecovered while the legal merry-go-round continued.

Jaffer’s associates were heard boasting: ‘We know the system.’ In the corridors of Mombasa, that phrase is not interpreted as legal brilliance. It is shorthand for something uglier.

Then there is ATTA Kenya Limited versus Grain Bulk Handlers Limited, case number E30/2020, in which ATTA accused Grain Bulk of illegally auctioning 13,000 metric tonnes of its wheat stored at the company’s Mombasa silos, valued at Ksh 730 million.

Mombasa High Court Judge Florence Macharia presided over the proceedings, during which Grain Bulk’s legal representatives twice failed to appear.

On one occasion, the firm’s lawyer was reported to have fabricated the death of a relative as an excuse for non-attendance.

Judge Macharia warned the firm in open court that one more adjournment would result in judgment being entered against it.

The case was eventually dismissed in Jaffer’s favour, an outcome that provoked considerable public debate given the procedural history of the proceedings.

Further clouding the picture is an older case, Petition 17/2018, involving a claim of Ksh 1.8 billion against companies linked to Jaffer, and HCCE025/2020, a Ksh 90 million claim by Mombasa Maize Miller against Grain Bulk Limited. Both cases remain unresolved within a legal system whose pace, critics argue, disproportionately benefits well-resourced defendants who can afford to run out the clock.

In the commercial arena, Jaffer’s capacity to prevail in court reached its most spectacular expression in June 2025, when the Supreme Court, in a ruling hailed by his associates as a decisive triumph, nullified the Kenya Ports Authority’s award of a Sh5.8 billion grain handling facility contract to Portside Freight Terminals Limited, a company linked to former Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho’s family.

A five-judge bench led by Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu declared that the KPA had violated constitutional procurement procedures, preserving Jaffer’s Bulkstream Limited in its exclusive position at the port.

The ruling overturned a Court of Appeal decision that had cleared the way for the competing facility, restoring a three-decade commercial monopoly that rivals had described as suffocating.

It was in the context of that Supreme Court victory that a remark made within Jaffer’s business circle attracted widespread condemnation.

As Kenya Insights reported in January 2026, associates linked to the tycoon were heard boasting within hours of a High Court order that had paused a multimillion defamation suit brought by the Joho family: “We know the system.”

The remark, which spread rapidly through legal and business networks in Mombasa, was not read as confidence in the rule of law.

It was read, as this publication noted at the time, as shorthand for something uglier: the belief that outcomes can be managed, that delay is a commodity, and that some men are simply too rich to lose.

THE FUEL SCANDAL: A CRISIS ENGINEERED?

Against this background of courtroom controversies, the MT Paloma scandal has arrived with the force of a reckoning. On March 27, 2026, the tanker docked at the Port of Mombasa carrying 60,200 metric tonnes of Premium Motor Spirit imported by One Petroleum Limited, a company whose shareholder register lists Mohamed Jaffer, his sons Mujtaba, Ali Abbas, and Mohamed Husein Jaffer, as well as Mbaraki Holdings Limited, a Mauritius-registered entity whose offshore structure investigators note is commonly used to obscure beneficial ownership.

The cargo was found to contain sulphur levels four times above the limits permitted under Kenyan standards. It also failed tests for manganese and benzene concentrations. Despite these failures, the consignment was discharged into the Kenya Pipeline Company’s storage network over the Easter weekend, its movement facilitated by a waiver granted on March 28, 2026, by Trade and Investments Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui, whose letter acknowledged that the fuel contained high levels of manganese, sulphur and benzene. The letter authorised commingling the sub-specification fuel with existing pipeline stock to dilute the contaminants.

Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi announced on April 7, 2026, that he was ordering the immediate withdrawal of the consignment from the market, declaring that it had been illegally imported outside the government-to-government framework.

One Petroleum, in a statement issued hours later, confirmed it would comply but maintained that the importation had been authorised through a legitimate emergency procurement process, noting that it had been one of four firms that responded to an emergency request issued by the Energy Ministry in March following the disruption to Gulf supply caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran.

By the time Wandayi issued his order, the fuel, according to multiple industry executives who spoke to Kenya Insights, had already been absorbed into the pipeline.

The Kenya Pipeline Company’s system does not segregate cargo by importer once product enters the network, meaning that the condemned consignment had effectively become untraceable. The withdrawal order, as this publication reported on April 8, had arrived too late to be meaningful.

Three senior government officials have since resigned: Petroleum Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban, Kenya Pipeline Company Managing Director Joe Sang, and Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority Director-General Daniel Kiptoo.

Energy Ministry Deputy Director Joseph Wafula and KPC Supply and Logistics Manager Joel Mburu were taken into custody and charged. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations has launched a probe spanning multiple jurisdictions and has initiated mutual legal assistance requests with foreign investigative agencies to trace the cargo’s origin and ownership chain.

Narok Senator Ledama Ole Kina, appearing before the Senate Energy Committee, named Jaffer, Mburu, and Wafula as the central figures in what he described as an engineered fuel shortage designed to create the conditions for a lucrative non-G2G import. Ole Kina’s timeline is damning: a National Security Council Committee meeting on March 9, chaired by Chief of Staff Felix Koskei, was convened to address the Iran-driven supply disruption; within sixteen days, an emergency import authorisation had been signed by PS Liban; two days after that, MT Paloma docked in Mombasa with a vessel that had no prior track record of importing Premium Motor Spirit into Kenya. The tanker had been diverted from an original destination of Angola after One Petroleum acquired the cargo in a ship-to-ship transfer off Fujairah in the UAE.

All the evidence, Ole Kina argued, pointed to a scheme in which the emergency was not merely exploited but deliberately manufactured. Jaffer has denied wrongdoing and his company has insisted the importation was legitimate.

No criminal charges have been filed against him in connection with the fuel matter. All allegations remain subject to investigation and court proceedings and have not been finally adjudicated.

THE LSK SPEAKS

Into this accumulation of controversies has stepped the Law Society of Kenya, whose newly elected council has adopted an unusually confrontational posture toward judicial misconduct.

In a formal statement, the LSK called on judges facing serious corruption allegations to voluntarily suspend their judicial duties or face heightened public scrutiny, describing this as both an ethical imperative and an institutional necessity.

The council announced the establishment of a confidential reporting mechanism allowing advocates to flag judicial misconduct, and pledged to file litigation to enforce accountability and to participate as a party in cases where prima facie evidence of wrongdoing exists.

The LSK also condemned what it described as the practice of using judicial transfers to shield incompetence or corruption, demanding that the Judiciary publish all transfer decisions together with their stated rationale. The statement followed the publication of the 2025 National Gender and Corruption Survey by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, which found that 5.5 percent of all judicial interactions in Kenya involved the payment of bribes, a figure that legal practitioners described as a conservative undercount of a problem that pervades every tier of the court system.

Justice Naikuni, who delivered the Mayport ruling in the Mombasa land case, has not responded to requests for comment. His name appears in recent court seal records as a sitting judge of the Mombasa Environment and Land Court, currently posting in Kwale.

His inclusion in stories published on local blogs, which first raised questions about the Mayport judgment and its connection to Jaffer, has not attracted a public response from the Judiciary.

WHAT THE COMMUNITY FACES

For the 50,000 residents whose futures were adjudicated in a remote hearing on Microsoft Teams on the morning of March 13, 2026, the legal architecture of the case is a secondary concern. What they face is eviction.

Their homes, built over decades on what they understood to be community land, now sit on property the court has declared to belong to Mayport Company Limited.

Mayport’s directors, both of them employees or personal staff of Mohamed Jaffer, hold the title. The elderly petitioner Juma Abdalla Munyau Kathenge, who spent five years pursuing justice through a court that adjourned his case more than ten times, was awarded Ksh 6 million in nominal damages against the Chief Land Registrar and told to pay his own costs.

The case now enters its appeal phase, with community advocates indicating they will challenge the ruling. But the appeals process in Kenya’s Environment and Land Court structure has its own reputation for delay, and Mayport’s ownership of the title remains in force pending any application for stay of execution.

The community has 30 days from the date of judgment to file an appeal before the Court of Appeal.

Mohamed Jaffer, through his companies, controls port infrastructure that moves a substantial portion of Kenya’s food and fuel supply. He has been honoured by President William Ruto at a state ceremony. He has survived decades of litigation, criminal inquiries, and regulatory scrutiny. He has, as his associates reminded anyone willing to listen following a procedural victory in January 2026, long insisted that he knows the system.

The question that Kenya now confronts, as detectives count the contaminated petrol molecules coursing through its pipelines and as 50,000 families contemplate homelessness on the margins of Mombasa, is whether the system, at last, also knows him.

The script is always the same. Days before a presidential motorcade rolls into a remote constituency, flatbed lorries bearing Kenya Power and REREC insignia arrive with ostentatious theatre. Transformers are offloaded. Technicians in high-visibility jackets mill about with clipboards. Extension ladders lean against poles that have stood dead for years.

Then the President speaks, the ribbon is cut, the cameras flash, and the helicopters lift off. Within hours, the trucks are gone.

The poles remain dead. The darkness returns. And the people are left holding a promise that was never meant to be kept.

This is the operating model, according to a growing chorus of lawmakers who confronted Energy Principal Secretary Alex Wachira before the National Assembly Public Accounts Committee on April 15, 2026. What emerged was not merely a story of administrative failure or contractor indiscipline.

What emerged was a picture of deliberate political theatre, stage-managed at the highest levels of the energy bureaucracy, designed to manufacture the appearance of development for a president running an early 2027 re-election campaign.

Wachira, an investment banker by formation and a political operator by practice, has since December 2022 been the face of the Kenya Kwanza administration’s most visible development promise: universal electricity access.

He has stood at dozens of launches across the country, from the Kilifi Coast to the Turkana plains, declaring communities connected, projects commissioned, and futures illuminated. The auditors, the community residents, and now the MPs who support the very government he serves have a different account.

THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF DECEPTION

Lugari MP Nabii Nabwera, a UDA legislator who has staked his political future on the Ruto administration’s delivery record, did not mince his words when he addressed the PS across the committee table.

He accused Wachira of personally orchestrating a pattern in which Kenya Power and REREC equipment is deployed to constituencies ahead of presidential visits, only to vanish the moment the official delegation departs.

“You even came to my constituency and launched a ghost project, my brother, and because it has never taken off, what is going on? The MPs feel that you are directly jeopardising their chances of re-election.”

Nabii Nabwera, Lugari MP, to PS Alex Wachira, PAC, April 15, 2026

Mary Emase, the Teso South MP, raised the specific crisis engulfing western Kenya, identifying Busia, Vihiga, and Siaya counties as blackspots where projects have been launched with great ceremony but zero subsequent implementation.

She put to Wachira the allegation that a single contractor had been awarded the bulk of implementation work across multiple regions, becoming so overwhelmed by the scale of commitments that none of the sites were receiving adequate attention.

Wachira’s response was the standard bureaucratic pivot: he had taken note of the concerns.

Turkana Central MP Joseph Namuar delivered perhaps the most withering testimony of the session. A UDA MP representing one of Kenya’s most energy-deprived regions, he told the committee flatly that nothing had been done in Turkana over the entire four-year lifespan of the Ruto government.

Not one connection. Not one functioning substation. Only the assurances, the launches, and the wait.

Funyula MP Wilberforce Oundo pressed the same wound with surgical precision, reminding Wachira that the President had visited Nambale constituency in 2024 for an electrification project launch marked by the full apparatus of a state visit. The fanfare had been considerable. The project had never moved.

THE AUDITOR’S RED LEDGER

The parliamentary outrage did not arrive in a vacuum. It is the political face of a paper trail that the Auditor General has been building for years, a trail of stalled projects, unreconciled billions, and procurement processes that bypass every guardrail of public accountability.

Auditor General Nancy Gathungu’s 2022/2023 report on REREC exposed the systemic rot beneath the launch culture. She found that rural electrification projects across five regions, which were supposed to have commenced implementation in 2013 and were to be delivered at a cost of Sh5.8 billion, remained critically behind schedule at the time of audit.

Only 65 percent of the scope of work had been executed despite 105 of the total 111 months of the project timeline having elapsed. Projects worth Sh1.52 billion out of the total budget had not started at all.

The financing agreements were set to lapse in December 2024. The management of REREC could not explain to the auditors how they intended to fast-track delivery within the residual time.

The Auditor General’s findings on the Kenya Electricity Expansion Project were equally damning. Contracts for the three lots under the project had been signed in June 2020, with works expected to complete by June 2022. By the time the audit was conducted, over 26 percent of contracted works remained unexecuted despite the contract period having lapsed.

The project was supposed to close in December 2023.

In the island communities of Mageta, Takawiri, and Ngodhe in Lake Victoria, auditors found projects where the contradictions between the ministry’s launch rhetoric and the ground reality were most stark. At Takawiri, a project being implemented at a cost of Sh3.7 million had no workers on site at the time of audit.

Civil works were undone. Solar panels were unfixed. Windows were broken. The floor was cracked. At Mageta, auditors found that civil works had not been done, lighting fixtures had not been connected, and the paint on ceiling board was peeling off.

“Delay in project implementation has affected the project’s planned activities and therefore impacting negatively on service delivery to the public.”

Auditor General Nancy Gathungu, 2022/23 REREC Audit Report

In July 2025, the National Assembly’s Public Investment Committee on Commercial Affairs and Energy summoned REREC CEO Rose Mkalama to account for Sh8.59 billion in unreconciled variances in the corporation’s books of accounts.

The sitting was called off in disarray after REREC tabled documents that had not been shared with the Auditor General’s office, making it impossible to proceed.

When the committee resumed hours later, the auditors declared they could not continue due to missing documents. Committee Chair David Pkosing’s rebuke was unsparing.

The same audit cycle flagged Sh571 million paid to three firms for land survey services for projects that could not be specified.

There was no evidence of budgeting for the services, no inclusion in the annual procurement plan, no competitive procurement, no local service orders, no contract agreements, and no reports from the firms showing what surveying work had actually been done. The expenditure, in the Auditor General’s clinical formulation, could not be confirmed as regular.

THE JIKO THAT WAS NOT THERE

The ghost project syndrome is not confined to high-voltage infrastructure. A parliamentary committee is now demanding procurement documents for 5,500 energy-saving jikos purchased by the Ministry of Energy at a cost of Sh18.9 million, after the Auditor General raised serious questions about whether a single Ksh 3,436 jiko can be accounted for in the hands of a genuine low-income beneficiary.

The audit of the Petroleum Development Levy Fund for the 2023/24 financial year found that 2,000 of the jikos were distributed through six county women MPs for Nyeri, Laikipia, Nakuru, Uasin Gishu, Bomet, and Kitui counties, with no documented justification for how the MPs were selected or what criteria they would use to identify beneficiaries.

Of the 3,500 jikos purchased in the year under review, physical verification could confirm distribution to only 660 beneficiaries. The remaining 2,840 jikos, acquired at a cost of Sh9.8 million, were unaccounted for.

The audit noted that no prerequisite studies had been conducted on indoor air quality, no surveys had been carried out to identify target households, signed distribution lists had not been provided, no records showed the jikos had been received at the fund before distribution, beneficiary records lacked names and contact information, and the jikos were not branded for identification.

When Wachira appeared before the National Assembly Special Funds Accounts Committee this week, he told lawmakers that all Auditor General queries had been resolved. The Auditor General herself appeared before the same committee and said that was not the case.

FUNDS EXHAUSTED, PROJECTS FROZEN

The money problem that underlies the launch theatre is one that Wachira himself has now been forced to acknowledge in public.

In testimony before MPs on April 15, he disclosed that funds allocated for the 2025/2026 financial year had been exhausted by December 2025, forcing the ministry to seek emergency financing under Article 223 to clear pending bills.

The ministry burned through an entire year’s allocation in the first half of the financial year, leaving contractors unpaid and projects frozen for the remaining months.

Wachira attributed the delays to funding constraints and procurement challenges, particularly in donor-funded projects where contractors carry responsibility for both materials and execution.

He said that most contractors had by then been paid and expected faster implementation going forward.

The MPs sitting across from him had heard this particular assurance before, across multiple budget cycles and multiple committee appearances, in constituencies that remain without power years after their official launches.

The northern Kenya crisis adds a further dimension to the accountability question.

By August 2025, a parliamentary committee had to convene an emergency roundtable to unlock Sh600 million for REREC and Kenya Power to restore electricity to the 56 mini-grids supplying Turkana and the North Eastern counties. Most of the generators had stalled due to lack of lithium batteries and insufficient fuel storage.

The two parastatals had been mired in a stand-off over a Sh30 billion unpaid debt, with Kenya Power arguing the burden made it impossible to operate and maintain the off-grid infrastructure. Wachira’s position during that crisis was to propose that since Kenya Power owed the government Sh70 billion, the Treasury could simply offset the amounts. The Treasury disagreed. The lights remained off.

A BANKER AMONG BULBS

Alex Wachira is not an engineer.

He is not an energy technician.

He is an investment banker, trained in bond markets and capital mobilisation, who served at Faida Investment Bank, Dyer and Blair, and Genghis Capital before President Ruto appointed him PS in December 2022.

His supporters credit him with mobilising substantial development finance from partners including the Agence Francaise de Developpement, the European Investment Bank, JICA, and the World Bank. His own website proclaims that under his tenure Kenya’s electricity connectivity rate has reached 76 percent.

The picture that emerges from parliamentary testimonies and audit reports is more complicated. The financing mobilised by Wachira has, in significant part, flowed into a broken implementation machinery. Contractors are awarded large contracts across multiple constituencies and then disappear.

Procurement is conducted without adequate budgetary allocation. Surveys are not done before projects are launched. Distribution lists are not maintained.

The audit queries pile up. The launches multiply. And the PS continues to appear at each ribbon-cutting, assuring whoever is listening that this project, unlike the last one, is the real thing.

Even within his own ministry’s political coalition, the patience has snapped. Mathioya MP Edwin Mugo put on record at the April 15 sitting the precise mechanism by which the charade operates: public participation is organised, social media pages are updated with camera-ready images, contractors are procured, the launch happens, the contractor vanishes, and the MP is left to face constituents who want to know what happened to the lights.

The question Mugo asked was how procurement could be done before the funds to pay for it were even available. It was a question the PS did not adequately answer.

THE POLITICAL FALLOUT

What makes the current confrontation particularly combustible is that the accusers are not from the opposition. Nabwera, Emase, Namuar, and Mugo are all government-side legislators.

They are UDA MPs or allied representatives who have tied their 2027 re-election campaigns to the delivery record of a government they helped install.

They are not criticising Wachira from a position of ideological hostility.

They are doing it because their constituents are enraged, because they have been made to look complicit in a fraud they did not originate, and because they fear the political consequences if the government’s most high-profile development programme is exposed as a systematic campaign of staged illusions before the next election.

The warning Nabwera delivered to Wachira in the committee room was as much a political ultimatum as an accountability complaint.

He told the PS that his actions were jeopardising the re-election prospects of the very government they both serve.

For Wachira, who has cultivated a close relationship with the presidency and whose personal thanksgiving event in Kieni in 2023 was graced by both President Ruto and former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, the implosion of that political cover would be consequential.

Wachira’s response to the barrage was consistent with his pattern before parliamentary committees: measured acknowledgement, statistical defences, and promises of corrective action.

He cited the increase in electricity connections from 8.8 million in 2022 to 10.1 million in 2026.

He said that contractors on the red line had been given Rapid Results Initiatives to meet and warned that those who failed to comply would have their contracts cancelled. He did not address the specific allegation that the launches themselves, the choreography of trucks and technicians and speeches, were themselves the fraud.

THE STANDARD OF PROOF

The PAC and the Auditor General together provide a documentary record that is difficult to rebut with connectivity statistics. Audit queries worth billions of shillings remain uncleared.

Specific projects in identifiable constituencies with identifiable launch dates remain unexecuted years after the ribbon was cut.

Procurement records for equipment worth tens of millions of shillings cannot be produced. An entire year’s ministerial budget was consumed by December of the year it was allocated, and the ministry required emergency financing to operate for the remaining months.

Against this record, the claim that 1.3 million additional Kenyans have been connected to the grid since 2022 does not resolve the central question: how many of those connections were announced in presidential launches that created the impression of immediate delivery, when the actual implementation came months or years later, or in some cases not at all? How many launches were real, and how many were trucks that left with the helicopters?

These are not questions that can be answered by a PS citing aggregate connectivity figures before a parliamentary committee.

They require a project-by-project audit matching announced launch dates against verified connection records, a procurement review examining whether contractor awards are competitive and adequately funded before they are made, and an independent assessment of why REREC’s books contain Sh8.59 billion in unreconciled variances that its own management could not explain in committee.

Until those questions are answered, the darkness that Alex Wachira has left in Lugari, in Funyula, in Turkana, in Teso South, and in the island communities of Lake Victoria will speak louder than the statistics on his website.

The trucks can leave whenever the helicopters do. The poles remain. The wires hang dead. And the people know the difference between a launch and a light.