Blog

There is a script that Kenya’s top-tier lenders have rehearsed for decades. Extend credit. Secure it with assets, debentures, and personal guarantees.

Wait.

And when the borrower stumbles, invoke the Insolvency Act with all the force of a sledgehammer. The script, however, appears to have hit a wall in the most expensive and embarrassing fashion possible for NCBA Bank Kenya PLC.

The wall is a Sh88 billion arbitration claim filed before the London Court of International Arbitration, brought by the shareholders of Multiple Hauliers (EA) Limited, a logistics company that NCBA and its co-financier helped fund in 2017 and, the shareholders now allege, helped destroy.

This is not a dispute about a rogue borrower who disappeared into the night with loan proceeds. It is, according to court papers, a claim that the bank and its co-lender Barak Fund SPC Limited, a Mauritius-registered offshore private credit vehicle, agreed to a syndicated facility to fund Multiple Hauliers’ fleet expansion and then failed to disburse the full agreed amount.

That alleged shortfall, the claimants say, set off a liquidity cascade that pushed one of Kenya’s most storied road freight companies into financial ruin and eventual administration. The Sh88 billion claim, which dwarfs the Sh12.7 billion that NCBA says is owed to it, covers alleged lost business, disrupted contracts, and commercial damages stretching across nearly a decade of financial attrition.

If the numbers alone do not concentrate the mind, the timing should. NCBA Group is on the cusp of the most consequential ownership transition in its history. South Africa’s Nedbank has made a formal offer to acquire approximately 66 percent of NCBA for roughly Sh113.7 billion, structured as 20 percent cash and 80 percent newly issued Nedbank shares listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority cleared the deal’s regulatory path in February 2026, granting Nedbank an exemption from mandatory full-offer obligations. Shareholders holding 77.54 percent of NCBA’s equity have committed irrevocable undertakings in support of the transaction, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. The deal, in other words, is all but done. Against that backdrop, an Sh88 billion liability at the London Court of International Arbitration, scheduled for hearing in March 2027, is precisely the kind of disclosure that investors, both existing and incoming, may wish they had seen on the front page of every financial publication in East Africa.

The Anatomy of a Collapsed Financing Deal

The genesis of the dispute lies in a 2017 syndicated financing package that court papers describe as a combination of term loans and working capital lines from NIC Bank (which would later merge with CBA to become NCBA in 2019) and Barak Fund SPC Limited. The facility was secured by debentures over Multiple Hauliers’ assets and by personal and corporate guarantees from the company’s shareholders, principally MG Holdings Limited and individuals including Rajinder Singh Baryan, the Estate of Tarlochan Singh Heer, and Manvir Singh Baryan. The purpose was straightforward: fleet expansion and operational financing for one of Kenya’s oldest and largest road freight operators.

Court papers indicate that Multiple Hauliers attempted to borrow Sh10.8 billion from a consortium of banks in 2017, including NIC Bank. The original consortium also included South Africa’s Standard Bank and its Kenyan subsidiary Stanbic Bank, a detail with a certain irony given that Stanbic is now the vehicle through which Standard Bank had earlier been eyeing NCBA itself. The web of institutional relationships in this case is not incidental. It is constitutive of the problem.

The shareholders allege that the agreed facilities were never fully disbursed. Their claim, filed in London arbitration in 2024, asserts a breach of the financing commitments by both NCBA and Barak Fund. They say the funding shortfall did not merely inconvenience Multiple Hauliers. It strangled it. A logistics company that relies on fleet expansion financing must either expand or contract. The alleged failure to release agreed credit at the critical moment, they say, triggered the liquidity crisis that began the company’s long, painful descent. That descent lasted years. NCBA demanded immediate payment on March 19, 2021, upon the expiry of a standstill agreement that the bank and other participating lenders had signed in March 2020, agreeing to suspend enforcement action for a period of six months.

The timing is worth examining. The standstill agreement, signed in March 2020, coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple Hauliers was already in financial distress, having seen its business eroded in part by the Kenya government’s decision to shift cargo onto the Standard Gauge Railway’s commercial freight service. Logistics firms like Multiple Hauliers had registered significantly lower revenues since 2019 when the government launched the cargo wing of its Standard Gauge Railway business. The combination of a credit shortfall allegedly caused by the lenders, pandemic-era revenue collapse, and SGR competition created a perfect storm in which, the shareholders argue, the bank’s conduct was not merely a contributing factor but the precipitating cause of the company’s ruin.

The firm’s failed bid to borrow Sh14.8 billion in 2017 left it unable to pay many of its debts, which spiralled into two insolvency petitions. By the time the dust settled on the immediate legal skirmishing, Multiple Hauliers was in administration, its fleet depreciating, its employees facing NSSF arrears, and its creditors, which numbered over fifteen institutions, jostling for position in an increasingly chaotic insolvency queue.

The Administration Gambit: Enforcement as Strategy

What makes the Multiple Hauliers case particularly illuminating as a study of NCBA’s enforcement playbook is the sequence of moves the bank made after the standstill agreement expired. Within months of the standstill lapsing, NCBA Bank placed Multiple Hauliers under administration on June 7, 2021, appointing Ernst & Young managers Anthony Makenzi Muthusi and Julius Mumo Ngonga to take over Multiple Hauliers’ affairs. The company fought back immediately. Two days later, Multiple Hauliers opposed the administrators and obtained court orders suspending the administration bid, filing an application seeking the revocation of the appointment of the administrators and a permanent injunction restraining them from advertising their appointment.

The bank’s use of administration as an enforcement tool, rather than as a genuine rescue mechanism, is the core accusation that runs through the years of litigation that followed. The shareholders have consistently argued that NCBA’s objective was never the rehabilitation of Multiple Hauliers but the seizure of its assets at a moment when the company was most vulnerable. The bank’s own court papers lend some texture to this reading. In an affidavit sworn on behalf of NCBA, the bank stated that the proposed investor deal was a ruse that had been used by the company to continue delaying the completion of the administration of the company, and it set out a litany of extensions sought by the company to negotiate from October 2021 to June 2024. The bank, in other words, had grown impatient with a restructuring process that had dragged on for years while its security eroded.

This is precisely the argument that borrowers in distress most fear from lenders of NCBA’s scale and legal resources. The bank’s position, reduced to its essentials, was: we are a secured creditor, our security is deteriorating, and we will use every statutory tool available to protect our exposure. There is nothing unlawful about that position on its face. The problem is what happens when a lender invokes those tools while simultaneously being the subject of an arbitration claim alleging that it caused the distress it is now seeking to resolve through enforcement.

The High Court in October 2025 found that NCBA’s enforcement actions during the pendency of the London arbitration constituted a sufficient risk to the arbitral process to warrant a restraining order. The court barred the bank from appointing administrators or enforcing personal guarantees, warning that such steps could undermine the arbitral process and potentially destroy the company before liability was determined. The Court of Appeal subsequently suspended that restraint on the grounds that the bank’s assets were at risk of dissipation under the company’s current management, but the appellate court was careful to note that it was not resolving the underlying dispute. It directed that the appeal be heard on a priority basis and acknowledged that the substantive legal questions, including the critical question of whether a secured lender can use insolvency tools to override arbitration protections, remain fully live.

NCBA’s Asset Finance Footprint: Power Built on Enforcement

To understand why the Multiple Hauliers case is so significant, one must understand the scale and structure of NCBA’s asset financing operation. The bank has built one of Kenya’s largest asset-backed lending portfolios and markets its corporate asset financing as a defining competitive strength. Its own promotional materials describe the product as providing fleet financing, machinery and equipment loans, and operating leases with approval processes that can be completed in a single day. NCBA held vehicles valued at Sh56 billion as collateral from borrowers, while it held broader property security of Sh334 billion, representing 67 percent of its total Sh498 billion in security.

The numbers make clear that asset enforcement is not a peripheral activity for this bank. It is a central pillar of its credit risk management. When a borrower defaults, the bank’s ability to repossess vehicles, machinery, and property and sell them under the statutory power of sale is the mechanism through which its capital ratios are protected. Kenya’s courts have generally been sympathetic to this position. In case after case, judges have upheld the bank’s right to repossess assets and exercise the statutory power of sale, even when borrowers raised questions about the accuracy of outstanding balances.

In Aggarwal v NCBA Bank Kenya PLC, a case decided by the High Court in April 2024, a borrower who had paid over Sh87 million toward settlement of an outstanding facility and offered two properties in full and final settlement found himself facing auction proceedings when the bank resumed enforcement. The court noted that the loan had stood at Sh195,023,495 plus a dollar-denominated portion as at October 2023, and that NCBA had argued that the statutory notices had been properly served, satisfying the requirements for the exercise of the power of sale. The borrower lost.

In Ndungu v NCBA Bank Kenya PLC, decided in March 2025, a borrower complained that the bank had unilaterally changed the conversion rate on a dollar-denominated loan when her salary currency changed, resulting in a higher outstanding balance than she expected. The bank proceeded to recover Sh759,461.95 directly from the plaintiff’s bank account in January and February 2024, which caused her to move her salary account to another bank to stop what she described as the bank raiding her finances, and the bank then threatened to report her to the Credit Reference Bureau. The court declined to grant an injunction, ruling that the value of the mortgaged property could be quantified and that any improper exercise of the power of sale could be compensated in damages. The borrower’s house remained at risk of auction.

In NCBA Bank v Nyaata, a 2024 case at the High Court, a borrower raised the argument that NCBA had repossessed an asset during the pendency of a consent agreement on loan restructuring. The borrower stated that the bank’s action of instructing a repossession agent to repossess the subject motor vehicle during the pendency of the parties’ consent agreement on restructuring of the loan was ill-intended, and the borrower further alleged that an overpayment had been made on the loan facility. The pattern across these cases is remarkably consistent: a distressed borrower challenges the bank’s enforcement, raises questions about the accuracy of its accounts or the terms of its agreements, and finds the courts largely unmoved.

The Multiple Hauliers case represents the mirror image of this pattern. For once, the borrower’s shareholders did not wait for NCBA to foreclose and then challenge in a Kenyan court where the institutional weight of a Tier One lender looms large. They took the fight to London, before an international tribunal where the playing field is genuinely level and where a Sh88 billion damages claim demands the same forensic scrutiny as any other commercial dispute, regardless of which party holds the debentures.

The Ownership Transition: What Nedbank Is Buying Into

The Multiple Hauliers arbitration does not exist in isolation from NCBA’s ownership story. That story has grown considerably more complicated in recent years. NCBA Group is primarily owned by the family of former Central Bank of Kenya Governor Philip Ndegwa, which, as of December 2024, had overtaken the Kenyatta family to become the largest shareholder. Through First Chartered Securities, the Ndegwa family holds a 14.44 percent stake in NCBA Group, amounting to Sh8 billion, after acquiring an additional 31.6 million shares. The Kenyatta family, through Enke Investments, retains a 13.2 percent stake, while D&M Management Services holds 11.54 percent. In December 2025, Muhoho Kenyatta, the son of the late President Jomo Kenyatta and brother of former President Uhuru Kenyatta, was appointed a Non-Executive Director, formalising the family’s renewed board presence at a bank they have been associated with since CBA’s era.

The Nedbank transaction adds a further layer. Nedbank Group has secured a Kenyan regulatory waiver from the Capital Markets Authority that clears the way for its plan to acquire about 66 percent of NCBA Group, with the exemption granted on February 19, 2026, relieving the South African lender from the requirement to make a mandatory offer for 100 percent of NCBA shares. The transaction, expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, would make NCBA a subsidiary of the South African lender while the remaining 34 percent of its shares continue to trade on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Shareholders holding 77.54 percent of NCBA’s equity have committed irrevocable undertakings in support of the offer.

Nedbank is not acquiring a blank slate. It is acquiring a bank that is the principal defendant in an Sh88 billion international arbitration, a bank with Sh56 billion in vehicle collateral and Sh334 billion in property security that it has shown itself willing and able to enforce with speed and aggression, and a bank whose asset financing portfolio has generated a paper trail of borrower grievances stretching from individual vehicle repossessions to the near-liquidation of one of Kenya’s oldest transport companies. Whether the South African lender has conducted due diligence on the full scope of that liability, and whether the arbitration claim is disclosed in the transaction documents with the prominence it deserves, are questions that minority shareholders left behind on the Nairobi Securities Exchange may wish to press at the next annual general meeting.

What Every Borrower Should Know

The Multiple Hauliers case offers lessons that extend far beyond the transport sector. They speak directly to any business that has entered, or is considering entering, a large asset-backed or syndicated financing arrangement with NCBA or any comparably aggressive lender.

The first lesson is that a standstill agreement is not a ceasefire. NCBA and the other participating lenders signed a standstill deal in March 2020 agreeing to suspend enforcement action for six months, and then NCBA demanded immediate payment in March 2021 upon its expiry, and moved to appoint administrators within months. A standstill buys time. It does not change the fundamental dynamic of power between a secured lender and a distressed borrower.

The second lesson is that the bank’s internal documentation and account statements should be subject to independent verification at every stage of a large loan relationship. The Ndungu case, the Aggarwal case, and the Nyaata case all share a common feature: borrowers who disputed the accuracy of the bank’s outstanding balance calculations and found those disputes treated as legally insufficient to restrain enforcement. In the Multiple Hauliers dispute, the shareholders take that grievance to its logical extreme: they allege not just that the bank miscalculated what was owed, but that the bank never disbursed what was agreed, and that the entire subsequent debt edifice rests on a foundation of alleged breach.

The third lesson is structural. NCBA’s general terms and conditions, as revealed in Mbogo v NCBA Bank Kenya, contain a clause permitting the bank to terminate or vary its business relationship with the customer at any time upon notice, and to freeze any account without prior notice in a wide range of circumstances including, remarkably, circumstances where the bank has doubt for any reason, whether or not well founded, as to the person or persons entitled to operate the account. The General Terms and Conditions of NCBA Bank provide that the bank may at any time, upon notice to the customer, cancel credits which it has granted and require the repayment of outstanding debts resulting therefrom within such time as the bank may determine. That contractual asymmetry, standard across Kenyan banking but rarely examined in isolation, means that the bank retains near-unlimited discretion to alter the terms of engagement in its favour, subject only to the limits imposed by statute and case law.

The fourth lesson is jurisdictional. The Multiple Hauliers shareholders’ decision to file their claim in London rather than Nairobi was not merely a tactical choice. It was a recognition that Kenyan courts, while increasingly sophisticated in commercial matters, operate within a context where institutional lenders carry structural advantages: deeper legal resources, greater familiarity with insolvency procedures, and an implicit presumption, visible in judgment after judgment, that secured creditors have rights that borrowers in default cannot easily override. The London Court of International Arbitration does not carry those assumptions. Before it, NCBA must answer the shareholders’ claim on its merits, with no home advantage.

Conclusion: The Trial of a Business Model

NCBA is not a rogue institution. It is a properly regulated, NSE-listed bank that has generated consistent profits for its shareholders, including two of Kenya’s most powerful business dynasties, and that is about to become a subsidiary of one of Southern Africa’s largest lenders. But the Multiple Hauliers case is a stress test of whether the bank’s asset financing model, built on aggressive security enforcement and the liberal use of insolvency tools, can withstand scrutiny before a forum that it cannot home-court.

The arbitration hearing is fourteen months away. The Sh88 billion claim is not going anywhere. If the shareholders’ version of events withstands the scrutiny of an international tribunal, the implications for NCBA’s commercial reputation in the transport and logistics sector, and for the confidence of large syndicated borrowers more generally, will be severe. Every corporate borrower who has signed a syndicated loan agreement with NCBA, every business that has pledged its assets as security for a working capital facility, and every investor who is considering buying into the bank through the Nedbank transaction should read the particulars of this case with the attention it demands.

The London arbitration is, in essence, the bill coming due for a model of lending that extracts maximum security, enforces it at maximum speed, and bets that the Kenyan courts will always see the matter from the lender’s side. The bet may be about to be tested before judges who have no interest in that outcome.

The London Court of International Arbitration hearing in the Multiple Hauliers matter is scheduled for March 2027. Kenya Insights will continue to report on developments in this matter.

Kenyans woke up last weekend poorer. Not because of a robbery, a failed business, or an economic shock. Poorer because their telecommunications provider, Safaricom PLC, had quietly reached into their M-Pesa wallets and extracted money for alleged Fuliza debts, some of which the affected customers insist they never incurred. By Monday morning, a single lawyer’s post on X had torn open a wound that goes far deeper than a billing glitch.

Eric Muriuki, founding partner of MKA Law, is not easily rattled. But he was rattled. He published a screenshot of his exchange with Safaricom Care in which the company admitted it had, as a result of what it described as a “system issue,” failed to bill him accurately for Fuliza taken between February 26, 2026, and March 20, 2026. The “correction” came in the form of a KSh 60 deduction from his account without forewarning, without an itemised statement, and without consent. Muriuki’s response was blunt: “I don’t believe you. This is theft.” He declared, with a finality that resonated across the platform, that Kenyan money was not safe with Safaricom, calling out what he described as the company’s “klepto ways.”

It should have ended there, as a single angry post from a lawyer. It did not. It became a flood.

Writer and commentator Beatrice Wanjiru, known on X as @Wordslinger__, captured the broader alarm when she described the situation as “actually a huge scandal,” noting that Safaricom appeared to be arbitrarily deducting money from M-Pesa accounts in the name of unexplained Fuliza debts, with some customers claiming to have never activated Fuliza in the first place and others insisting they had long repaid any balances. Dozens of users replied with their own screenshots. The deductions ranged from KSh 27 to over KSh 1,300. The justification in each case was virtually identical: the same vague three-week window, the same absence of exact dates, the same take-it-or-leave-it tone.

One user reported being charged KSh 78 despite swearing they had not activated Fuliza. Another lost KSh 213. A third was hit twice in consecutive days. Several customers noted they received no SMS notification before the deduction, only a puzzling message after the fact that referenced a date range too broad to verify against any specific transaction. “They can’t even pinpoint the exact date,” one post read, capturing a frustration shared by hundreds.

Safaricom’s official explanation, offered through customer care channels and later amplified by local media, is that a technical fault prevented the system from billing daily Fuliza fees between February 26 and March 20, 2026. A one-time catch-up adjustment was applied across all affected accounts simultaneously, and the company insisted that no further deductions would follow. “This one adjustment has been made to cover all, and there won’t be any further adjustments,” the company told at least one customer.

But the explanation invites more questions than it answers. Why was the adjustment applied without notice? Why were no itemised statements provided? If the fault was purely in the billing cycle, how do customers who claim never to have activated Fuliza appear in the affected pool? And perhaps most damning: who audits the audit? Safaricom has not offered to publish aggregate figures on the total amount recovered through this exercise, the number of accounts touched, or the basis on which individual deduction amounts were calculated. For a company handling billions of shillings in daily transactions on behalf of over 30 million subscribers, this silence is its own indictment.

This is not the first time. It will not be the last.

The Fuliza scandal of March 2026 does not exist in isolation. It is the latest episode in a long-running pattern of Safaricom controversies touching on money, data, and the accountability deficit of a monopoly that has grown too large and too politically connected for ordinary Kenyans to effectively challenge.

In February 2026, weeks before the latest deductions surfaced, Nairobi businesswoman Eunice Nganga filed a constitutional petition challenging Safaricom’s policy of automatically applying erroneous M-Pesa transfers to settle recipients’ Fuliza debts. Nganga had accidentally sent KSh 2,700 to the wrong mobile number in September 2024 and immediately initiated Safaricom’s standard reversal procedure. Safaricom refused, citing the unintended recipient’s outstanding Fuliza overdraft. The funds were automatically redirected to clear that debt without Nganga’s consent and without the recipient ever accessing or withdrawing the money. 

Nganga’s central legal argument is that her contract with Safaricom does not extend to settling another customer’s debts using her funds, particularly where no valid transaction existed between her and the Fuliza debtor.  The case, assigned to Justice Lawrence Mugambi, was scheduled for mention on March 25, 2026. She is seeking a declaration that the policy is unconstitutional and unlawful, a refund of the KSh 2,700, broader restitution for other affected customers, and KSh 50 million in general and punitive damages.  It is a case of profound public interest. Many Kenyans have never heard of it.

Before Nganga, there was a class-action suit that shook Safaricom’s boardroom in 2023. Three M-Pesa users, Gichuki Waigwa, Lucy Nzola, and Godfrey Okutoyi, sued Safaricom, Vodafone Group, the Central Bank of Kenya, and the Communications Authority of Kenya, alleging that the Fuliza overdraft facility illegally used money belonging to non-borrowing M-Pesa users and that Safaricom was effectively engaged in banking business without being licensed as a bank under the Banking Act.  They further claimed that the trust account into which M-Pesa funds were collected was a “sham trust,” and that Safaricom and M-Pesa Holding had commingled funds, resulting in Vodafone Group owing M-Pesa account holders KSh 305 billion.  The case, still winding through the courts, represents perhaps the most sweeping legal challenge to M-Pesa’s financial architecture.

In September 2025, Safaricom was forced to temporarily suspend Fuliza following a technical disruption that halted repayment transactions. Customers were left uncertain about their loan status, with some worried that fees would accumulate unnoticed before normal billing resumed.  That fear, it turns out, was not unfounded. Five months later, Safaricom was telling customers that fees had indeed been accruing unseen in the background, and was now reclaiming them in bulk.

Even Fuliza’s criminal underbelly has been documented. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations alleged that a syndicate of eight young men in Nakuru and Trans-Nzoia defrauded Safaricom of close to KSh 500 million by using fraudulently registered SIM cards to take Fuliza loans with no intention of repayment.  Over 123,000 new mobile numbers opted into Fuliza in a single month before being switched off or vacated, leaving no trace of the borrowers.  The scale of that fraud raises its own disturbing question: if the Fuliza system was penetrated so comprehensively by outside actors, what assurance do ordinary subscribers have that the billing infrastructure tracking their personal balances is accurate?

Bonga Points, Vanishing in the Night

As if the Fuliza scandal were not enough, the very same weekend it erupted, a second alarm was going off inside Safaricom’s ecosystem. On March 29, reports surfaced of Bonga Points being transferred to unknown recipients in a series of early-morning transactions, with message logs showing multiple redemptions occurring between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m., draining account balances without user authorisation. 

Safaricom confirmed on Sunday, March 29, that it had detected irregularities involving unauthorised redemption of Bonga Points, indicating that some users may have had their points accessed without consent.  The timing of the Bonga fraud, arriving in the same news cycle as the Fuliza deductions scandal, is devastating for a company already under intense public scrutiny. Two separate incidents, both involving Safaricom customer value being removed from accounts without consent, surfacing within 48 hours.

The Bonga Points story also carries its own deeper history of bad faith. In 2022, Safaricom attempted to expire Bonga Points accumulated before December 31, 2019, citing liabilities of KSh 4.5 billion sitting on its books. A High Court judge later quashed the move, ruling that Bonga Points, once awarded, become the customer’s property and Safaricom ceases to have any right over them.  The court’s declaration was unambiguous. That Safaricom attempted such a seizure in the first place, targeting KSh 4.5 billion in customer-owned value through a clause change, speaks to a corporate culture comfortable with taking from subscribers when the legal landscape appears permissive.

A Company That Ignores Parliament

What makes Safaricom’s accountability crisis truly remarkable is its apparent contempt for the oversight institutions meant to hold it in check. The Senate Standing Committee on Information, Communication and Technology had convened a meeting on March 17, 2026, specifically to hear from Safaricom’s Chief Executive Officer on matters of service delivery and data protection. Safaricom did not appear. 

The committee had also sought to deliberate on a statement from Migori Senator Eddy Oketch regarding alleged breaches of confidential subscriber information by Safaricom. Senators warned that continued failure to honour parliamentary invitations may attract further action and expressed concern that the company’s absence undermines the oversight mandate on matters directly affecting millions of subscribers. 

That snub sits within a broader pattern of parliamentary frustration. Senators have been trying for over a year to extract answers from Safaricom on data privacy. The central question is whether Safaricom shares subscriber data, including location information, with government agencies without customer consent.  Safaricom has denied doing so without court orders. But two former senior managers at the company were accused of harvesting personal data on 11.5 million subscribers, including names, ID numbers, phone contacts, betting histories, and geolocation data, and attempting to sell the trove to a sports betting firm.  At the time the court case was filed, Safaricom admitted it had been unable to access or delete the compromised data from the Google Drive where it had been stored. 

In other words: the private information of nearly a quarter of Safaricom’s entire customer base was floating somewhere on the internet, and the company that collected it could not even reach it to delete it.

The Economics of Micro-Theft

Commentators on X this week raised the darkest arithmetic of the Fuliza billing scandal. If Safaricom deducted an average of KSh 100 from each of even one million accounts through this “adjustment,” that is KSh 100 million recovered without court order, without notice, and without the possibility of meaningful individual challenge. Few Kenyans will file a consumer complaint over KSh 60. Fewer still will sue. This is precisely why the amounts are small. The aggregate sum, however, is not.

Safaricom’s Fuliza book is enormous. It disburses the equivalent of tens of millions of US dollars daily. Even fractional billing irregularities, applied across that base, generate material sums. The company has offered no aggregate disclosure of the total recovered through the March correction, no explanation of why the system failed to bill for three full weeks, and no independent audit. It has, instead, offered apologies.

For millions of Kenyans, M-Pesa is not a convenience. It is the only financial infrastructure they have. Their rent, their children’s school fees, their hospital payments, their small business cash flows, all of it moves through Safaricom’s pipes. The question being asked on the streets of Nairobi and in the replies of thousands of X posts is the same one lawyers are now beginning to formalise into court papers: who gave Safaricom the right to help itself?

What Must Happen

The Communications Authority of Kenya has a mandate. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has teeth. The courts have, when pushed, sided with consumers. What is missing is the political will to push. Safaricom is part-owned by Telkom South Africa through Vodacom, is listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, and its M-Pesa operations are so deeply embedded in Kenya’s financial architecture that destabilising the company is not an option anyone in authority wants to pursue. That very indispensability has become its greatest protection against accountability.

But indispensability is not impunity. The Senate ICT Committee must compel Safaricom’s CEO to appear and answer, under oath if necessary, for the Fuliza billing collapse, the Bonga Points fraud, and the data protection failures. The Communications Authority must formally investigate whether the mass deductions of March 2026 comply with Section 83C of the Kenya Information and Communications Act. The Central Bank of Kenya, whose M-Pesa oversight role was explicitly criticised in the KSh 305 billion class-action suit, must explain what safeguards exist to prevent Safaricom from conducting bulk account adjustments outside the normal consumer consent framework.

And every affected Kenyan, whether they lost KSh 27 or KSh 1,300, should file a formal complaint with the Communications Authority. The CA’s complaint registry is a public record. Volume is evidence. Evidence is leverage.

For now, the most honest thing that can be said about Kenya’s relationship with Safaricom is this: millions of Kenyans trust it with their money, their identity, their location, and their communication. Safaricom, on the evidence accumulated across years of litigation, regulatory evasion, and parliamentary no-shows, has not earned that trust. It has merely inherited it, in the absence of any viable alternative.

That is not a business model. That is a hostage situation.

Kenya Insights will continue tracking the Fuliza deductions case, the Eunice Nganga constitutional petition, and the Senate ICT Committee proceedings. Affected subscribers are encouraged to document their deductions and file formal complaints with the Communications Authority of Kenya via their website or by calling 0800 221 772.

The Orange Democratic Movement has never been accused of doing things quietly. But the scale of extravagance at its Special National Delegates Convention at the ASK Jamhuri Grounds last Friday made even hardened political observers raise an eyebrow. A party currently locked in a bitter and public feud over money, legitimacy and leadership reportedly spent at least Sh40 million in a single day to put on the most ostentatious show of political force seen in Nairobi since the last general election.

Three thousand delegates. Branded merchandise. Chartered buses. Catered meals served in shifts. Mobile money disbursements handled by a contracted firm. Security so tight that journalists were shepherded in and out of the venue on party buses. It was not a political convention so much as a carefully produced political spectacle, and every shilling of it was designed to send one message: ODM is still here, still powerful and, above all, still very much open for business.

“The entire process is estimated to cost about Sh40 million,” a senior party official on the organising committee told The Star, speaking in confidence. “Posters, merchandise, food, transport, accommodation, everything that has gone into making the event a success is around that figure.”

The money, according to party officials, was drawn from ODM’s accounts and disbursed through a structured system, with delegates receiving transport and sitting allowances via mobile money from a third-party firm. Delegates from within Nairobi collected approximately Sh5,000 each, while those making the journey from far-flung regions pocketed upwards of Sh20,000. Delegates from Kisumu, a four-hour drive away, received Sh9,000 per head. Across 3,000 delegates, that delegate facilitation alone runs into the tens of millions before a single crate of water is factored in.

Nairobi County branch chairman George Aladwa confirmed that capital-based delegates received their dues without incident, a rare and notable achievement at large-scale political gatherings, where delayed payments have historically sparked chaos and stampedes. That the money flowed on time, through a single contracted firm, points to a level of financial management that ODM has not always been able to demonstrate. It also raises pointed questions about where, exactly, the money came from.

The question of funding has become the most combustible issue in ODM’s savage internal war. Secretary General Edwin Sifuna, now removed from his position by a NEC resolution but still fighting through the courts, has repeatedly alleged that the Linda Ground faction’s rallies and gatherings have been bankrolled by “outsiders,” with some in his camp pointing directly at State House. Sifuna claimed in February that he, as a signatory to ODM’s accounts alongside National Treasurer Timothy Bosire, had not authorised any withdrawal sufficient to fund the string of Linda Ground rallies held across Kisumu, Kakamega, Busia and Kisii. “The money you see being spent in ODM rallies is not coming from ODM headquarters,” he said at the time. “There is parallel funding for activities clothed in ODM colours.”

The allegations stung. ODM National Chairperson and Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga moved swiftly to douse the flames. She explained that the national treasurer’s signature is the only mandatory one required to release party funds and that six other signatories can co-authorise expenditure. “There is political party funding in this country, and ODM is entitled to the second largest share. We have money as a party,” she said. Oburu Oginga, now the ratified party leader following the death of his brother Raila Odinga in October 2025, denied that State House had any hand in ODM’s activities.

But the questions have not gone away. The Political Parties Fund, administered by the National Treasury, is at the centre of a long-running legal dispute between ODM and the government. ODM claims it is owed Sh12.6 billion in accumulated, unpaid statutory party funding. That dispute has escalated to the point where the party’s Central Committee resolved last year to pursue execution proceedings against the Treasury. Yet on Friday, Sh40 million appeared to flow with seamless efficiency.

“We haven’t received about Sh12 billion from the exchequer, but we get our quarterly shares, so we were able to fund the programme,” a senior official involved in organising Friday’s convention told The Star. The quarterly disbursements, officials insist, are sufficient to bankroll a convention of this magnitude. Independent analysts are less certain. Sh40 million is a substantial sum for a party that simultaneously claims financial persecution at the hands of the Treasury and faces the additional complication of a sitting secretary general who refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the NDC that authorised the expenditure.

The convention itself unfolded against the backdrop of the most serious internal rupture in ODM’s 20-year history. While Oburu and his Linda Ground faction occupied the ASK Dome at Jamhuri Grounds, Sifuna led a parallel “People’s Convention” eight kilometres away at Ufungamano House, forcing his way through a police blockade with allies including Siaya Governor James Orengo, Vihiga Senator Godfrey Osotsi and Embakasi East MP Babu Owino. Anti-riot police had sealed off Ufungamano House early in the morning, turning away delegates and journalists before Sifuna’s contingent breached the cordon. The symbolism was hard to miss: two events, one party, and a police force whose deployment favoured one side over the other.

Sifuna’s faction dismissed the Jamhuri convention as constitutionally illegitimate. He argued that only the secretary general, under the ODM constitution, can legally convene a National Delegates Conference and that the 21-day notice issued by his rival Catherine Omanyo, whom he does not recognise as acting secretary general, was therefore void. “Convention bandia,” was his verdict. His allies were more blunt. “Who said Oburu should be ODM’s party leader? Did you elect him?” Sifuna demanded, in a remark that landed heavily given that Oburu was installed, in Sifuna’s telling, even before Raila’s body had arrived back in Kenya from India.

The Political Parties Disputes Tribunal declined to stop the convention. In its ruling on March 26, the tribunal struck out Sifuna’s petition on the procedural ground that he had not exhausted ODM’s internal dispute resolution mechanisms before approaching the tribunal. The ruling cleared the runway for Jamhuri. It did not resolve the underlying constitutional questions, which remain live and may yet find their way back to a higher forum.

At Jamhuri, in the meantime, the theatre was spectacular. The convention ratified Oburu Oginga as substantive party leader, installed Kisii Governor Simba Arati and Mombasa Governor Abdulswamad Nassir as deputy party leaders, and removed Osotsi from his position as deputy leader. The delegates also ratified a National Executive Committee resolution under Article 87 of the ODM constitution, formally authorising the party to open coalition talks with President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance, a decision that represents ODM’s most dramatic strategic pivot since its founding.

Junet Mohamed, the Suna East MP and Minority Leader in the National Assembly, struck a combative tone that drew roars from the crowd. “Anyone in this country who wants to negotiate with ODM, we will not negotiate on our parliamentary strength,” he declared, hinting heavily at a zoning arrangement for the 2027 elections. “Anywhere we have an MCA, MP, Senator, Governor, Woman Rep, it will remain with ODM. Don’t joke with ODM because if they are angered, they can cause problems.” The implicit threat was aimed at UDA, but it was loud enough to reach Sifuna at Ufungamano as well.

Winnie Odinga, daughter of the late Raila and until recently an ally of Sifuna’s faction, chose to appear at Jamhuri, delivering a carefully worded speech that congratulated Oburu while pressing for youth inclusion and a more open party culture. Her presence was read as a significant political signal, a cautious swing toward the mainstream Oburu structure even as she continued to advocate for reforms from within. “When we talk about the new ODM, we want a party that opens doors, not closes them,” she said. Oburu responded with a conciliatory promise not to expel rebels, though he stopped well short of inviting Sifuna back to the table.

Wanga, ratified as national chairperson, described the event as “inspiring, engaging, productive and historic,” a characterisation that her rivals at Ufungamano would contest every word of. The party’s organisational prowess on the day was genuine and, for ODM’s purposes, politically valuable. The buses ran on time. The mobile money transferred without drama. The delegates ate. The leadership was installed. The coalition mandate was secured. The event was, by any operational measure, a success.

The harder test comes next. ODM now enters coalition talks with UDA carrying a fractured internal structure, a disputed secretary general, a Sh12.6 billion funding grievance against the government it is proposing to partner with, and questions about the provenance of the very money it spent to get here. Forty million shillings can buy a spectacular day. What it cannot buy, as ODM is about to discover, is a united party.