The CEO of the Gambling Regulatory Authority (GRA), appointed in February 2026, has now assumed office. Among his priorities, Peter Maina Karimi highlighted stricter enforcement against illegal gambling and stepped-up oversight of responsible gambling.
Appointment and taking office at the GRA
Karimi was appointed to the CEO position back in February 2026, but has only now formally taken office. His arrival coincided with a major institutional overhaul: the former Betting Control and Licensing Board was dissolved and replaced by the newly established Gambling Regulatory Authority. In effect, this amounts to a full reset of the country’s gambling oversight system.
During the transition period, Peter Mbugi served as acting head. His interim leadership was due precisely to the institutional reorganization and the need to ensure continuity of the regulator’s work until a permanent head was confirmed. With Karimi’s arrival, the transition phase has officially ended.
Tightening enforcement on all fronts
Upon taking office, Karimi stated his intention to step up the fight against illegal operators and strengthen responsible gambling mechanisms. According to him, the regulator plans to pursue several lines of action, each with its own set of measures.
Among the key areas, he singled out advertising monitoring, countering unlicensed platforms, protecting minors, and public education efforts.
Advertising to face tighter scrutiny
One of the first steps will be stricter oversight of gambling advertising. The GRA plans to introduce restrictions under which betting ads will be allowed only during late-night broadcast hours. This practice is already used in a number of European jurisdictions and is aimed at reducing the impact of advertising messages on vulnerable groups.
The regulator intends not just to announce the restrictions, but to enforce them through active monitoring of advertising channels.
Illegal sites face blocking
A separate target for the GRA will be unregistered gambling sites operating in Kenya. Karimi emphasized that unlicensed operators undermine compliance standards and reduce the level of player protection. In the event of disputes, users of such platforms are effectively left without a mechanism to protect their rights.
And yet Kenyans often choose offshore sites because these platforms offer more attractive terms and bonuses. For example, residents of Kenya prefer major international iGaming brands. Interestingly, the lists of these brands are remarkably similar to those that can be found in Australia or New Zealand. Industry experts we spoke to ahead of preparing the article told us about this. They showed us online casinos where players can get the popular in Australia free spins no deposit casino offers, and then provided a similar list for Kenya. We really found quite a few overlaps.
However, Kenyans’ approach to gambling differs from that of wealthier Australians. For them, such an offer looks like an opportunity to improve their financial situation. In Kenya, quite a lot of people live below the poverty line, so they view gambling as a chance at a better life. Such people are at higher risk, so the regulator is taking a range of measures to protect them.
Among other things, it plans to step up efforts to identify and shut down such resources, using both technical tools and interagency cooperation.
No minors allowed — violators face shutdown
Kenyan law unequivocally prohibits anyone under 18 from participating in gambling. Karimi warned that operators that allow minors to open accounts will face immediate sanctions, up to and including the full shutdown of the platform. The GRA will exercise control through licensing procedures and regular compliance checks.
Special attention is planned for the online segment, where age verification remains one of the system’s weakest links.
Prevention through partnerships with industry and government
In addition to punitive measures, the GRA is placing emphasis on education and awareness work. The regulator intends to launch joint initiatives with market participants and government bodies. Their goal:
raising awareness among the public about the risks associated with gambling;
fostering a culture of responsible gambling;
creating a more transparent and “compliant” market environment.
Such cooperation, in Karimi’s view, should complement the regulator’s oversight function and reduce the industry’s social costs.
Market grows as regulator prepares new tools
The context in which the GRA is beginning full-fledged work is telling. Kenya’s gambling industry has seen rapid growth, especially in the online betting segment. The regulator intends to use the powers granted under the new law to strengthen licensing procedures, ensure operators’ compliance with requirements, and curb the illegal segment.
Under Karimi, the GRA is preparing to introduce additional regulatory measures within the updated legal framework, which could significantly change the rules of the game for all participants in the Kenyan market.
A Nairobi woman recently posted a six-minute video to social media that deserves to be playing on loop in the boardrooms of every life insurer operating in this country.
In it, she describes how she lost Sh540,000 paid into Britam Holdings’ Akiba Savings Plan after she lost her job and could no longer sustain monthly premiums of Sh90,000.
When she escalated her case to Britam’s customer care desk, she was told her entire contribution had been forfeited. “Where did it go?” she asks, her voice breaking. “This was supposed to be an investment that makes profit.”
Where it went is not a mystery. Her money went exactly where the product was designed to send it. Into commissions, administrative charges, mortality cost reserves, and ultimately into the insurer’s bottom line.
Britam posted a pre-tax profit of Sh7.33 billion for the year ended December 2024, a 52 per cent jump from the Sh4.82 billion it recorded the previous year. The company holds 25 per cent of Kenya’s life insurance market for the eighteenth consecutive year. Business is spectacular. It always is when the product punishes the very income shock that most customers will inevitably face.
But this story is not only about Britam. It is about an entire industry, a regulatory architecture, and a financial culture that has for decades sold endowment and education insurance policies to Kenyan parents under the most emotionally manipulative pretences imaginable, while carefully concealing the structural realities of what those parents were actually buying.
“I personally lost 900k to the same Britam after contributing 30k a month for about 3 years. It is sold as an INVESTMENT, yet it is actually a policy — when you stop paying, you lose everything.” — Kenyan investor, social media
THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE TRAP
Let us strip sentiment from this and look at the structure of the product. An education endowment policy, offered under names such as Britam’s Boresha Elimu and Super Education Plus, Jubilee’s Career Life Plus, CIC’s Academia Policy, ICEA Lion’s Usomi Bora, Old Mutual’s Elimika, and Madison’s Bima ya Karo, is, at its core, a bundled financial product.
It combines a long-term savings commitment with a life insurance wrapper. Policy terms run from five to as long as twenty years. Minimum monthly premiums at most providers start from Sh3,000 and scale upward depending on the sum assured. At the upper end of the market, clients are committing Sh30,000, Sh50,000, even Sh90,000 per month for a decade or more.
Here is the critical detail that almost no agent explains at the point of sale: in most of these products, a policyholder who defaults before a specified threshold — typically the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth policy month — receives nothing. Zero. Not a partial refund, not a surrender value, not an acknowledgement of the premiums paid.
The entire amount is absorbed. It is described in product documents, when they are disclosed at all, as an absorption into administrative charges, agent commissions, and mortality cost reserves.
In practice, this means a parent who commits Sh30,000 per month and loses their job after eighteen months has lost Sh540,000 with no legal recourse and no regulatory backstop.
A parent paying Sh50,000 per month who is retrenched after two years has lost Sh1.2 million.
These are not edge cases. They are predictable outcomes in an economy where formal employment accounts for only fifteen per cent of the total workforce of 20.8 million people, where real private sector wages declined in inflation-adjusted terms for the fifth consecutive year in 2024, and where sudden income disruption is not the exception but the condition of Kenyan economic life.
WHAT THE FIRST MONTHS OF PREMIUMS ACTUALLY BUY
The industry’s own internal logic reveals the deception. In the early months of any endowment policy, the client’s premiums are not primarily accumulating savings.
They are servicing the distribution infrastructure that sold them the policy. Agent commissions on life endowment products in Kenya are paid heavily in the first year, front-loaded to incentivise new business.
Administrative fees are deducted. Mortality charges for the attached life cover are levied. Only the residual portion begins to compound toward the eventual maturity benefit.
This means that a policyholder in their first two years is, in financial terms, primarily funding the system. Their money is paying the agent who signed them up, the overhead of the insurer, and a thin slice of actual savings.
The notion that they are accumulating an investment from day one is a fiction that is rarely corrected by the agent, who is compensated on new business written and not on policy persistency.
Industry insiders have confirmed for years what policy data would show if insurers were required to disclose it: lapse rates in the first two years of education endowment policies are substantial.
Agents are incentivised to sell without adequately stress-testing whether a prospective client can sustain premiums for five, ten, or fifteen years.
The IRA has issued fines to insurers for failure to honour claims, but has published no specific directive requiring insurers to illustrate at point of sale what a client would recover if they lapsed in the first twenty-four months. That gap in regulation is not an oversight. It is a structural benefit to the industry.
“I once tried to enlighten some policyholders that buying term life insurance plus a money market fund is a lot better than an education policy. I was told: ‘Please do not educate our stupid policy holders.’” — Industry practitioner
THE NUMBERS THE SALESPEOPLE WILL NEVER SHOW YOU
Let us conduct the comparison that every Kenyan parent considering an education policy deserves to see before they sign anything.
Assume a parent commits Sh10,000 per month for fifteen years. The insurer’s marketing material will show them a guaranteed lump sum at maturity, with loyalty bonuses and life cover built in.
What the marketing material will not show them is the opportunity cost of locking that money into a product whose real internal rate of return, after fees and charges, typically runs between five and seven per cent per annum.
The same Sh10,000 per month invested in a money market fund generating returns at the current average effective annual rate of around nine to eleven per cent, with complete liquidity and the ability to exit at any time without penalty, would over fifteen years substantially outperform the endowment product.
At peak Treasury bill yields in mid-2024, those instruments were returning as high as sixteen per cent.
Even accounting for the CBK rate cuts that have brought yields down in 2025, Kenya’s government securities market has consistently offered returns that dwarf the embedded return inside an education endowment policy, with zero lock-in, zero lapse risk, and no agent commission being deducted from the first shilling.
Edwin Dande of Cytonn Investments has made the point publicly and precisely: instead of an education insurance policy, buy Government of Kenya treasury bonds with ten, fifteen, or twenty-year maturity dates timed to when your child will enter secondary school or university. You receive biannual coupon payments as income throughout the holding period. Your capital is returned at maturity. Infrastructure bonds carry tax-exempt interest. There is no surrender clause, no lapse provision, no agent collecting a commission from your first twelve months of savings, and no call centre telling you your money has been forfeited.
The insurers know this comparison exists.
Their marketing, relentlessly emotional and emphatically vague on fee structures, exists precisely to prevent parents from making it.
THE PRODUCTS BY NAME
Britam’s Boresha Elimu Plan is marketed as a comprehensive, flexible education insurance solution aligned with Kenya’s new 2-6-3-3-3 curriculum. It offers three guaranteed lump sum payouts in the last three years of the policy term, which can run from six to eighteen years.
Premium waiver in the event of the policyholder’s death or disability is included. What the marketing does not foreground is that a client who stops paying before the twenty-fifth month has no cash value to recover, and that the premium waiver applies only in specified circumstances that explicitly exclude unemployment.
Jubilee’s Career Life Plus is positioned for parents targeting secondary and university education.
It carries an investment-linked component and offers loyalty bonuses for consistent contributors of over ten years.
It is an instructive product to examine precisely because it is marketed as investment-linked, a framing that implies equity participation and growth.
The reality is that an investment-linked endowment is still an endowment: the client bears the fee drag, the early-year commission deductions, and the surrender risk. The investment link does not convert the product from insurance into a transparent, liquid financial instrument.
CIC’s Academia Policy, Old Mutual’s Elimika, ICEA Lion’s Usomi Bora, and Madison’s Bima ya Karo follow substantially the same structural logic across different premium floors and term ranges. All combine savings with life cover.
All carry early-lapse provisions that can result in total forfeiture of premiums paid.
All are sold through agent networks that are compensated on new business and not on the long-term solvency of the client’s relationship with the product.
In each case, the accompanying money market fund product offered by the same institution would have delivered superior, accessible, and penalty-free returns for a client whose income ever came under pressure.
THE REGULATORY FAILURE
The Insurance Regulatory Authority operates under the Insurance Act Cap 487, with a statutory consumer disputes mechanism under Section 204A of the Act. Aggrieved policyholders can file written complaints with the Commissioner of Insurance, whose determinations are subject to appeal to the Insurance Tribunal within thirty days.
The IRA has fined insurers for failure to honour claims. It has not published any directive requiring insurers to provide prospective policyholders with a written illustration of what they would recover if they lapsed before the twenty-fifth month.
That omission is the central regulatory scandal in this story. The IRA mandates disclosure of the maturity benefit. It does not mandate disclosure of the lapse scenario, which is statistically far more likely for a significant proportion of the policyholders being sold these products.
Kenya’s financial consumer protection architecture makes it compulsory to tell a buyer what they will receive if everything goes right. It does not compel the seller to explain what happens when something goes wrong, which in an economy with this level of income volatility, is the scenario that matters most.
Industry voices have for years argued that the IRA should require life insurers to separate the insurance and investment components of endowment products in their disclosures, and that the Capital Markets Authority should assert regulatory jurisdiction over any product sold as an investment.
The proposal has not advanced. The status quo, in which an insurer can market a product as investment-grade to buyers who do not understand that it is an insurance policy governed by insurance law, with insurance surrender terms, and insurance commission structures, continues undisturbed.
“IRA should insist that insurance sells only protection and CMA should insist that any insurance company selling investments brings it under the CMA umbrella. Insurance companies should disclose how much income is coming from forfeited premiums.”
WHAT SMART PARENTS SHOULD DO INSTEAD
The case for education insurance is not wholly without merit in a narrow sense. The death benefit and premium waiver provision is a genuine protection.
If a policyholder dies and the insurer waives remaining premiums while paying out the maturity benefit, a child’s education is secured regardless of the parent’s absence.
Term life insurance provides this protection at a fraction of the cost, without locking the savings component into an illiquid, penalty-laden vehicle.
The rational financial structure for a Kenyan parent planning for a child’s education is to separate the functions.
Buy term life insurance, which is cheap, offers high cover, and can be cancelled without penalty. Then invest the remainder in instruments that are liquid, transparent, and governed by the Capital Markets Authority.
Money market funds averaging nine to eleven per cent in effective annual returns are accessible from as little as Sh1,000 via platforms including Britam’s own asset management division, Sanlam, ICEA Lion, CIC, and the Co-operative Bank unit trust platform.
Government treasury bonds, particularly infrastructure bonds with tax-exempt coupons, provide long-term, inflation-beating returns with capital guaranteed by the state and no surrender clause in existence anywhere in the term.
The insurer does not want you to know this.
The agent does not want you to know this. The product literature is written so that you do not compare. Every page of the Boresha Elimu or Career Life Plus marketing is designed to make you feel that refusing the product is a failure of parental responsibility, rather than the financially literate decision it actually is.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Education insurance policies are not illegal. They are, in the strict technical sense, authorised, supervised, and compliant financial instruments. That is precisely the problem.
The regulatory framework has been designed to make them legal, not to make them fair. It mandates disclosure of what the product delivers when held to maturity. It does not mandate disclosure of what the product costs when life intervenes, as life, in Kenya, has an unfortunate habit of doing.
The woman in the viral video lost Sh540,000. The investor who spent three years paying Sh30,000 a month to Britam lost Sh900,000.
Across the nation, thousands of policyholders who trusted an agent, believed the brochure, and signed a commitment they could not ultimately sustain have lost money that, deployed differently, would have grown, remained accessible, and survived the income shocks that education endowment policies are specifically designed not to cover.
Their losses are not bad luck. They are the intended operating mechanism of the product.
Until the IRA requires that every education endowment policy be sold alongside a written, quantified illustration of the lapse scenario; until the CMA asserts jurisdiction over any product sold as an investment regardless of the insurer’s regulatory domicile; and until insurers are required to publish the annual income they derive from forfeited premiums, this industry will continue to do exactly what it is currently doing: extracting wealth from Kenyan families in the name of their children’s futures, with the full blessing of the law.
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Complaints against insurance companies can be directed to the Insurance Regulatory Authority consumer disputes desk. The IRA toll-free complaints line is 0800 723 225.
For policyholders who have already passed the twenty-fifth month threshold, a surrender value is available from the insurer, though it will be substantially below total premiums paid. Those who believe they were not adequately informed of lapse terms at point of sale may file a formal written complaint with Britam’s customer service and, if unsatisfied, escalate to the IRA.
Inside a nondescript industrial park in Kamakis on the eastern fringes of Nairobi, Kenya Revenue Authority enforcement officers converged on a shipping container being quietly offloaded under the cover of routine logistics activity.
The container, numbered MAGU5438993, had sailed from the United States, been logged through the port at Mombasa, cleared through the Compact Special Economic Zone in Nairobi under circumstances that investigators now describe as deeply irregular, and was within hours of vanishing into the wholesale trade networks that supply Kenya’s sprawling urban markets.
What happened next would unravel one of the most audacious tax evasion and smuggling operations to surface in Kenya in recent memory.
The seizure at Viken Thirty Industrial Park was no accident. It was the product of a whistleblower within the KRA’s own ranks, who had leaked evidence of the irregular clearance to the Commissioner General’s office.
The informant’s tip set off a chain of events that now has Interpol involved, a Kenyan-American dual citizen identified as the alleged architect of the scheme on the police radar, and a clutch of senior KRA verification officers facing interdiction proceedings that could end their careers and place them before criminal courts.
The man at the alleged centre of this web is Peter Mwaniki Maina, a Kenyan national holding dual American citizenship who investigators believe ran a highly coordinated smuggling ring with both international and domestic tentacles.
His second wife, Stacy Wangari Njiri, who reportedly resides in an upmarket residence along Kiambu Road in Nairobi, is accused of being the key local operator, overseeing the deconsolidation, storage and redistribution of imported contraband goods into the Kenyan market.
The two have been publicly promoting a logistics company called Arisilva Logistics across social media, a venture investigators suspect was used to provide a legitimate commercial veneer for an operation that was, in substance, anything but.
Neither Maina nor Njiri had, at the time of publication, been formally charged. Investigators caution that the case remains active and the identities of other participants have not been fully established. Attempts to reach Arisilva Logistics through publicly listed contact details were unsuccessful before publication.
THE MECHANICS OF THE FRAUD
The scheme, as reconstructed by investigators, was built on the exploitation of two well-known vulnerabilities in Kenya’s customs administration: insider access within the KRA’s verification systems, and the structural generosity of the returning residents tax exemption programme.
Under Kenyan law, citizens who have lived abroad and are permanently returning home are entitled to import personal effects, household goods, and one motor vehicle free from import duty, excise duty, value added tax, and import declaration fees.
The exemption is administered through the Integrated Customs Management System, and is a legitimate and widely used facility.
However, investigators allege that Maina, by virtue of his dual citizenship and apparent familiarity with the process, manipulated the scheme using falsified documentation and fake identities to pass off commercial consignments as personal imports, thereby evading millions of shillings in taxes on goods that were never intended for personal use.
The specific container seized at Kamakis had arrived in Kenya aboard the vessel CMA CGM Puccini on February 21, 2026, shipped by ECU Worldwide USA from an American port and forwarded through Compact FTZ Development Ltd and Compact Freight Systems.
KPA tracking records reviewed by investigators showed the container entered via rail link to the inland container depot and was formally cleared by customs with an approval number and a release stamp before being dispatched for offloading at the Kamakis industrial facility.
The fact that it carried a customs release notation despite allegedly containing undeclared goods pointed, investigators said, to the unmistakable hand of an insider.
Sources familiar with the probe say that the shipment is believed to have contained undeclared merchandise, with suspicions extending to counterfeit goods and possibly illicit substances, a development that has widened the scope of the investigation from a pure revenue offence to one with potential public health implications.
If that suspicion is confirmed, the legal exposure for everyone in the clearance chain expands considerably beyond tax fraud into organised crime territory.
THE BROADER CRACKDOWN AT MOMBASA PORT
The Kamakis seizure did not happen in isolation. It is part of a wider enforcement wave that KRA announced on March 18, 2026, in which six of its employees, including senior officials, were interdicted and 21 cargo clearing agents had their licences suspended following investigations at the Port of Mombasa that uncovered a separate but related scheme. In that operation, the KRA recovered Sh452.5 million after investigators discovered that consignments of imported cargo had been passing through the port without properly settled tax obligations.
The mechanics of that scheme were equally audacious. Invoices were logged into both the KRA’s iTax system and the Integrated Customs Management System purporting to show that taxes had been paid, with the payments apparently recorded as M-Pesa to M-Pesa transactions. When investigators traced the mobile numbers linked to those transactions, they found no corresponding M-Pesa statements to confirm the money had actually moved. The invoices were, in effect, digital ghosts: they existed on paper but corresponded to nothing in the real financial world. A batch of mobile phone numbers was then reverse-traced to specific individuals, drawing a direct line from the fraudulent records to the KRA staff and clearing agents who have since been interdicted or suspended.
The KRA, confirming the purge in a statement, warned that the investigations were ongoing and that more individuals could be snared as investigators widened their scrutiny of transactions across both the iTax and iCMS platforms. The taxman has also looped in the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, which is now examining the owners of the implicated cargo, not just the agents who cleared it. “These investigations target not only clearing agents but also importers and any other parties who may have participated in or benefited from the fraudulent activities,” the KRA said.
A PORT CHRONICALLY VULNERABLE TO ORGANISED CRIME
Mombasa’s port has long been identified as Kenya’s most exposed trade gateway. It processes the bulk of the country’s import and export traffic and sits astride some of the most significant regional trade corridors in East Africa. That combination of volume and strategic importance has made it a perennial target for sophisticated criminal networks.
The rice scandal of 2025, in which 199 containers of imported rice valued at over Sh120 million disappeared from port custody and found their way into the market without passing through proper inspection, demonstrated the depths to which insider collusion could compromise even a digitised system.
KRA’s own enforcement staff had their system access rights revoked in that case, and enforcement managers at container freight stations were replaced in an attempt to restore integrity. The reverberations of that case were still being felt when the latest dual scandal broke.
Kenya has separately seen a pattern of high-value goods being smuggled under false commodity declarations: luxury vehicles listed as household items, stolen Range Rovers and Mercedes vehicles shipped as transit cargo and then diverted locally, untaxed cigarettes concealed in containers labelled as something else entirely.
In January 2026, KRA intercepted 9.37 million sticks of contraband cigarettes worth Sh281.1 million at Mombasa, with the haul declared as originating from Cambodia via Singapore but stamped “Made in Sudan.” That operation involved a multi-agency team including port police, the Kenya Bureau of Standards, the Anti-Counterfeit Authority, Port Health Services, and KPA customs officers.
In the most recent wave, KRA also announced the seizure of 23 smuggled prime movers in Nairobi’s Industrial Area, found to have tampered chassis numbers and registration plates spanning South Africa, South Sudan, Zambia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tanzania, pointing unmistakably to a cross-border criminal network of considerable reach.
Experts note that criminal networks have become adept at exploiting three perennial weaknesses: tax exemption regimes susceptible to document fraud, insider collusion within customs and port agencies, and the sheer volume of containerised traffic that makes 100 percent physical verification practically impossible without intelligence-led targeting.
Forged passports are used to falsely qualify for tax waivers. Bribery within clearance chains enables goods to slip through systems that are, on paper, robust.
INTERPOL AND THE TRANSNATIONAL DIMENSION
The involvement of Interpol in the Maina investigation has elevated the case beyond a domestic enforcement action. Investigators now believe the syndicate may have international supply chain linkages that could require coordinated cross-border arrest operations and asset tracing across multiple jurisdictions.
Maina’s dual citizenship and the American origin of the seized container give the case a transnational texture that domestic law enforcement alone is ill-equipped to untangle.
If charges are eventually laid and proven, the suspects face exposure under multiple legal frameworks, including the East African Community Customs Management Act, Kenya’s Tax Procedures Act, and potentially the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act.
International dimensions of the offence could trigger extradition proceedings, a realistic prospect given the United States’ robust bilateral law enforcement cooperation agreements with Kenya. Organised crime and trafficking offences of this nature carry penalties that can include substantial custodial terms.
KRA’S INSTITUTIONAL OVERHAUL
The back-to-back scandals have arrived at a particularly uncomfortable moment for the KRA, which has been projecting an image of aggressive modernisation and enforcement capacity.
The taxman recently appointed Mohamed Abdul M’maka, a former field intelligence officer and troop commander in the Kenya Defence Forces with more than two decades of experience in intelligence and security, as the new Commissioner for Investigations and Enforcement. M’maka, who had been serving as chief manager for intelligence collection since August 2025, was brought in specifically to tighten the fight against tax evasion, smuggling, and revenue leakage.
The authority is also procuring an Intelligence Analysis Tool to function as a centralised intelligence repository for its Investigations and Enforcement Department, enabling agents to collect, store, and analyse large volumes of data drawn from multiple sources including social media, government registries, and partner agencies. The Business Registration Service is already supplying data that allows KRA officials to track company ownership, directorship structures, and registration histories. The system is intended to help tax detectives build advanced taxpayer profiles and identify fraud patterns before they escalate to the scale seen at Mombasa.
The internal graft numbers tell their own story. According to KRA records, seven employees were dismissed for corruption-related offences in the first quarter of the 2023/24 financial year, rising to nine in the second quarter. By the first quarter of 2024/25, that figure had leapt to 25, before falling slightly to 19 in the second quarter. The trend suggests either that the problem is growing or that the KRA’s capacity to detect and act on it has sharpened considerably. Probably both.
SYSTEMIC QUESTIONS THE SCANDAL CANNOT AVOID
The Maina case and the Mombasa port crackdown together raise a set of questions that Kenya’s customs and revenue authorities will struggle to deflect. How many similar containers have passed through the Compact SEZ or the Port of Mombasa under equally irregular circumstances without triggering an internal whistleblower? How deep does the KRA verification department’s exposure to organised criminal networks actually run? And critically, if a dual citizen operating a logistics company on social media could apparently coordinate the importation, internal clearance, and Nairobi-bound distribution of a container of contraband goods with the assistance of senior verification officials, what does that say about the state of integrity within one of Kenya’s most consequential revenue institutions?
The DCI, Interpol, and KRA’s own Investigations and Enforcement Department are now working through those questions. Whether the answers, when they come, will be limited to Peter Mwaniki Maina and his wife, or whether they will reach further into the bureaucratic structures that gave the scheme its operational space, is the question that will determine the real significance of this investigation. In Nairobi’s legal and enforcement circles, the betting is that the names already known are merely the surface of something considerably deeper.
Uganda’s Chief of Defense Forces Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba expressed his support for Israel amid the ongoing war with Iran in a series of posts on X/Twitter Thursday.“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it,” he wrote, adding that any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring Uganda into the war. “On the side of Israel!” he concluded.In another deleted post, he claimed that Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), the country’s armed forces, will begin participating in the war “on the side of Israel” if it doesn’t end soon.“Israel has a right to exist and attacks against her must stop,” he stated.Later on Thursday, Kainerugaba said in another post that he offered the help of Ugandan defense forces to both the US and Israel.
“We could have captured Tehran in 72 hours without any bombing,” he claimed, “but of course they never listen to a black man. Why bomb people who support you?”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) walks with Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni (R) after arriving to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Operation Entebbe at the Entebbe airport in Uganda, July 4, 2016. (credit: REUTERS/Presidential Press Unit/Handout via REUTERS)
Uganda-Israel ties warming
Last month, Kainerugaba announced in a post on X that Uganda will soon build a statue honoring Lt.-Col. Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu at Entebbe International Airport.He said the statue would be placed in the exact spot where Netanyahu was killed following the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight that led to the abduction of about 100 Jews and Israelis.Kainerugaba said the monument is a symbol of the ties between the two countries, although no formal government announcement was made regarding the creation of the statue.Prime Minister Netanyahu attended a memorial ceremony held at Entebbe Airport in 2016, marking the fortieth anniversary of Operation Jonathan.“Forty years ago, they landed in the dead of night in a country led by a brutal dictator who gave refuge to terrorists. Today we landed in broad daylight in a friendly country led by a president who fights terrorists,” he said during his public remarks.
When George Musembi Muia retired from the Kenya Revenue Authority in 2022, he had spent decades in government service and imagined the next chapter of his life would be a comfortable one. Perhaps a board chairmanship at one of the country’s better-paying parastatals. A prestigious exit. The kind of post that rewards a man for years of institutional loyalty. What he got instead was the most expensive lesson of his life, and a High Court case he cannot escape.
Musembi, a former senior manager at KRA, is now before the Nairobi High Court fighting to recover Sh63 million he claims was swindled from him by a man he describes as a consummate fraud.
The man in question is one Cosmas Mutati Nzoka, whom Musembi says presented himself as a well-oiled insider with direct access to the innermost rings of the Kenya Kwanza administration.
Names like that of Farouk Kibet, President William Ruto’s powerful personal assistant, Head of Public Service Felix Koskei, then-Transport Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen and the feared Kapsaret MP Oscar Sudi were allegedly dropped into conversation with the casual ease of someone who actually knew them.
Musembi did not know any of those men personally. He had never moved in those circles. But he wanted to, badly enough that he would wire millions in cash, hand over dollar-stuffed brown envelopes inside a grey Mercedes-Benz at Muthaiga Square, and keep paying even as the promised appointment failed to materialise. His account before the court reads, as one observer put it, less like a civil case and more like the plot of a financial thriller.
The Introduction
The saga began, according to court documents, in late 2023, seeded by a seemingly ordinary connection. While still working at KRA before his retirement, Musembi had come to know a man called David Muema, a clearing agent who operated at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. It was Muema who served as the critical bridge, the man who introduced the retired revenue official to Mutati and gave the introduction the kind of credibility only a trusted mutual contact can provide.
Muema, Musembi told the court, vouched for Mutati as a well-connected businessman who moved freely through the corridors of government big offices. More specifically, Muema allegedly told him that Mutati could deliver a board chairmanship position at one of the parastatals falling under the then Ministry of Transport and Roads. The position Musembi had his sights set on was the chairmanship of the Kenya Urban Roads Authority, KURA, a body responsible for the development, maintenance and management of urban road networks across the country. The seat, according to Musembi, was vacant at the time.
The Meeting at a Thika Road Hotel
The first meeting between Musembi and Mutati was arranged for December 2023, at a hotel on Thika Road at 7pm. It was the kind of hour and venue where deals are discussed without too many witnesses. By Musembi’s account, Mutati arrived brimming with names. He spoke of then-Transport CS Kipchumba Murkomen, whom he claimed to have access to, and through Murkomen he allegedly said he could reach Felix Koskei, the Head of Public Service and President Ruto’s Chief of Staff, the most powerful civil servant in the country. He also invoked Farouk Kibet, the personal assistant to the President whose influence within State House has become the stuff of political legend.
The name-dropping did not stop there. Mutati allegedly threw Oscar Sudi’s name into the mix as well. Sudi, the Kapsaret MP, is widely regarded as one of President Ruto’s most politically connected and feared allies, a man whose proximity to the presidency was, by his own design and public perception, near absolute.
Politicians and commentators had long described the Sudi-Farouk axis as the informal gateway to the head of state. For a retiree hunting a parastatal chair with no obvious political connections, Mutati’s name-dropping must have felt like striking gold.
Musembi told the court exactly what he felt in that moment. “When the defendant dropped those big names I felt like I was dealing with the right team to assist me secure the appointment as board chair of KURA since the defendant kept promising me it was easy as long as I was ready to comply with their demands,” he stated in his testimony.
Cash in Dollars, Delivered in Envelopes
The cash demands began almost immediately. On December 21, 2023, just weeks after the first meeting, Mutati allegedly asked for Sh3 million, which he said needed to be handed to Koskei personally as a facilitation fee for the appointment.
Musembi, by his own admission, complied without hesitation. He withdrew the funds, converted them into US dollars in denominations of 100, counting out 191 notes in total, packaged them into a brown envelope and drove to Muthaiga Square to make the delivery.
The scene at Muthaiga Square was, by Musembi’s account, almost cinematic in its understated audacity. “I found the defendant waiting alone in a car, a Mercedes-Benz grey in colour. The defendant took the money in form of dollars and promised me that he was to deliver the money to Felix Koskei the same day,” Musembi told the court. The following day, December 23, 2023, Mutati allegedly returned with an update. The delivery had been made, he said. Koskei had received the funds.
But a new complication had apparently emerged. Koskei, Mutati allegedly told Musembi, did not work alone.
The appointment required sign-off from Murkomen, Sudi and Farouk as well. Each of them, Mutati allegedly said, wanted a cut.
The figure he named was Sh5 million for the trio.
Musembi’s testimony lays bare just how completely the fraud had trapped him by this point. “Because I had legitimate expectations to become the board chair of KURA, I did not want to delay because the defendant was pushing me so much to give out the money so that I do not miss the chance. I mobilised the money as soon as the defendant wanted and handed over the money to the defendant in cash,” he told the court.
The Borrowing Spree and the DCI
With the initial instalments paid and the appointment still not forthcoming, the demands continued to multiply. Mutati allegedly pivoted to a new story entirely, telling Musembi that he was also chasing a Sh3 billion contract with the Kenya National Highways Authority for road construction.
He needed another Sh3 million for facilitation costs, Mutati said, promising it would all be repaid. The pattern, which courts elsewhere have seen in confidence fraud cases, was classic: each payment was justified by a plausible new development, and each new development required another payment.
By the time the total losses crystallised at Sh63 million, Musembi had finally turned to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
The DCI, according to court documents, managed to trace Mutati, and he was subsequently arraigned at Kibera Law Courts on criminal charges arising from the matter. But even that development did not close the saga. The civil suit in the High Court runs parallel to the criminal proceedings, and Musembi has had to navigate both simultaneously.
In a twist that has added a remarkable layer to the proceedings, Mutati has not simply denied the allegations. He has gone on the offensive. According to documents before the court, Mutati turned the tables entirely, claiming that it was in fact Musembi who owed him money.
Specifically, Mutati allegedly sent a counter-demand through his lawyers claiming that Musembi had borrowed Sh47 million from him and had yet to repay it in full. The demand was sent to Musembi’s lawyers, instructing them to ensure their client settled the debt.
The Architecture of the Scam
What the Musembi case lays bare is not just the audacity of the accused but a structural vulnerability in how Kenyans seeking state appointments perceive the route to power.
Farouk Kibet has for years been publicly described, even by senior Kenya Kwanza politicians, as the de facto gatekeeper to President Ruto.
Murkomen himself, before his elevation to cabinet, publicly praised Farouk as an indispensable figure, noting that accessing the President required clearing with his personal assistant first.
Oscar Sudi has cultivated a similar reputation as a political fixer whose endorsement carries real weight. Felix Koskei, as Head of Public Service, holds formal authority over the apparatus through which state appointments flow.
None of those named have been accused of any wrongdoing in this matter. There is no suggestion in the case that any of them received a single shilling of the money Musembi paid.
What Mutati allegedly did was exploit the public mythology that surrounds these figures, their proximity to power, their informal influence, the general belief that appointments in Kenya do not happen through merit alone.
He weaponised reputation, not relationship.
The Musembi case is not an isolated phenomenon. Kenya has in recent years seen a proliferation of what investigators call appointment brokers, individuals who market their alleged connections to the presidency or key government offices and collect fees from desperate job-seekers willing to pay almost any amount for a foothold in the state.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations has handled multiple such cases, though few have involved sums as large as what Musembi claims to have lost.
A Retiree’s Expensive Dream
There is a painful human story beneath the legal arguments. Musembi is a man who spent his working life in public service, retiring from the KRA, one of the country’s more technically demanding revenue agencies.
He was not an obvious mark. He was not naive. He simply wanted something that many retired public servants want, a recognition of his years of service in the form of a prestigious board appointment, and he believed, as many do, that such appointments require navigating informal channels rather than official ones.
That belief, it appears, cost him Sh63 million and his peace of mind. He is now crisscrossing Nairobi’s courts, pursuing a man who has flipped the narrative and is demanding money back.
The KURA chairmanship, meanwhile, has long since been filled through other channels. The seat that was supposed to be his remains, for him, permanently out of reach.
The case continues before the High Court in Nairobi.
The government is considering the use of Kenya Defence Forces naval escorts to protect cargo vessels carrying Kenyan exports to the Middle East, as escalating conflict involving Iran continues to disrupt critical shipping routes.
Industry Principal Secretary Juma Mukhwana said on Tuesday that authorities were exploring options for escorted shipments through high-risk maritime zones, a practice already adopted by several other countries.
Speaking during an interview on NTV’s The Last Word, Mr Mukhwana noted that Kenya lacked a national shipping line and faced rising insurance costs, but collaboration with the Kenya Navy, Kenya Maritime Authority, international coalitions, insurers and diplomatic partners could make the arrangement workable.
“We do not have a shipping line of our own, and the issue of insurance is also there. But with other countries escorting their ships, we should also be able to do that,” he said.
The proposal includes coordinated and consolidated shipments, possibly routed through hubs such as Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, under government-supported frameworks.
A hybrid approach under consideration would see naval escorts provided up to safer zones, after which goods could be moved through alternative means such as airlifts or regional redistribution.
The move comes as exporters report heavy losses due to the disruption of key trade routes, particularly through the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf waters affected by Iranian missile threats and naval actions.
The Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry has warned that the country is losing between Sh800 million and Sh1.2 billion weekly in export revenue. Fresh produce, meat, coffee, tea and other goods destined for Middle East markets, or using the region as a logistics hub, have been hardest hit.
Chamber officials and industry players say the losses threaten thousands of jobs and could force some businesses to scale down or close operations.
Mr Mukhwana acknowledged the immediate challenges but pointed to ongoing government efforts to cushion the sector. He noted that fuel imports remained stable, with vessels already offloading at the Port of Mombasa, despite speculation driving localised price pressures.
He also highlighted diversification measures, including a recent early-harvest duty-free export consignment to China that included avocados, macadamia, coffee, tea and horticultural produce.
The broader context involves Iran’s actions in the Gulf, which have reduced shipping traffic, increased insurance premiums and forced rerouting of vessels at significantly higher costs. Some cargo originally bound for Dubai has been diverted to Kenyan ports such as Lamu.
Kenya’s limited blue-water naval capacity and absence of a merchant fleet present practical difficulties, but officials believe partnerships with allies and private operators could enable escorted convoys where necessary.
No final decision or timeline has been announced, and the proposal remains under active consideration.
Exporters have welcomed the government’s engagement and continue to call for swift measures to safeguard trade interests in one of Kenya’s most important markets.
Former Kenya National Union of Teachers secretary general Wilson Sossion has doubled down on his bid to reclaim the union’s top seat, setting up a direct showdown with incumbent Collins Oyuu ahead of the April 3 national elections.
Sossion maintains he is fully eligible to run, brushing off Oyuu’s claims that the Knut constitution bars him from the race for not being a member.
Oyuu, speaking after a union meeting in Embu on March 18, dismissed Sossion’s candidature, arguing that Knut does not recognise “life membership.”
“Some people are coming back to say ‘I’m a life member of the union’. In Knut leadership there’s no life member, the constitution is very clear; membership is by contribution and a member who we pick,” Oyuu said.
“We want to tell you, loud and clear before central region, Knut is not a banana republic. Take your time and go elsewhere, fetch for other things.”
But Sossion has hit back, framing Oyuu’s remarks as panic in the face of a serious challenger.
He insisted the union is democratic and does not discriminate against members who comply with its rules.
“I’m a fully paid-up member of Knut since September 1, 1993 when I joined the teaching service. Even when I stepped out in 2021, I have paid my union dues in full up to and including June 2026, and even paid supplementary dues, which is allowed internationally,” Sossion said.
The Knut constitution requires members to pay a Sh100 entrance fee alongside annual subscriptions and any levies set by the National Executive Council or Annual Delegates Conference.
It also limits membership to those who are or have been actively engaged as teachers. Any disputes over membership are referred to the National Executive Council for review by the union’s Professional Standards Committee.
Sossion’s eligibility question was effectively settled on February 27 when the Court of Appeal ruled that his deregistration and removal from the teachers’ register by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) in 2019 were unlawful.
While the court acknowledged that TSC had grounds to terminate his employment following his political nomination, it found the process flawed and procedurally unfair.
KNUT Secretary General Collins Oyuu
The ruling restored his status as a teacher, clearing the way for his participation in union elections.
Sossion, who led Knut from December 2013 to June 2021 before resigning to focus on his role as a nominated MP, says his comeback is driven by pressure from teachers.
Speaking during a radio interview, he claimed the union had lost its voice under current leadership.
“The clamour for me to go back to Knut is not my initiative. It is the initiative of teachers across Kenya because Oyuu and his group have reduced the union from a vibrant Marxist union to a silent social union that sees nothing, hears nothing and says nothing about teachers,” he said.
He added that he had initially stepped back, hoping for a government role, but teachers urged him to return.
“They’re telling me, ‘No, don’t wait for government. Come and do this one because we know you can do it well for us.’”
Sossion likened his return to the Biblical Moses responding to the cries of Israelites in Egypt.
“I have heard the cries of my teachers in Egypt and I will go back,” he said.
The Knut elections are scheduled to be held at the Tom Mboya Labour College in Kisumu on April 3, preceded by nominations at a special delegates conference a day earlier.
Sossion challenged Oyuu to organise a democratic election process and prepare to face him at the ballot during elections.
The elections will be through secret ballot by all delegates accredited to participate at either the Annual Delegates Conference or a Special Delegates Conference.
“I’m eligible. Oyuu should prepare for a democratic process and accept both our names on the ballot, or alternatively, because he is retired, step aside,” Sossion said.
He criticised what he termed a growing trend of retirees clinging to union leadership.
“We have a bad culture where retirees are running unions. That is wrong. They cannot speak for their grandchildren. I want to face a teacher under 60 on the ballot,” he added.
Sossion, 57, said he would not have contested if a younger teacher had stepped forward to challenge for the secretary general position.
According to Knut’s constitution, every full time officer of the union shall vacate office upon serving his full five-year term in office, age notwithstanding, but will not be eligible for re-election upon attainment of 65 years of age.
Oyuu was 56 when he took over Knut leadership from Sossion in June, 2021.
About 32 bodies, mostly children, have been dug up from a mass grave in the western Kenyan town of Kericho as investigations continue into the shocking discovery.
The exhumation was done after the police obtained a court order to retrieve 14 bodies that were initially believed to have been buried at the site.
Government pathologist Richard Njoroge told journalists on Tuesday evening that what they found was “quite unusual” with bodies “stacked in gunny bags”, after a day-long process that was interrupted by heavy rains.
A post-mortem examination is expected to begin on Wednesday, amid calls to promptly identify the bodies and investigate the circumstances of the deaths.
Njoroge said there were “seven adults and 25 children”, with the children being infants and foetuses. A number of body parts were also retrieved.
The pathologist added that some of the bodies appeared to have originated from hospitals and mortuaries but that would be further determined after autopsies.
He noted that the adult remains were highly decomposed, with those of the children less so, which he said indicated that they died at different times.
On Tuesday, homicide detectives and forensic teams, wearing white protective suits, gloves and face masks, worked under tight security as they dug at the site.
Some bodies were recovered intact, while others were found as partial remains and bones, and placed in evidence bags.
Police sealed off the area while a crowd of residents gathered nearby. Some appeared visibly shaken as investigators documented each stage of the exhumation.
The exhumation followed a tip-off from a whistleblower, which prompted police to launch an investigation.
On Monday, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said their initial findings indicated that 13 unclaimed bodies had officially been released from a hospital in neighbouring Nyamira county and transported to Kericho for burial last Friday.
However, many questions remain about the additional bodies and the manner of burial.
It is also not clear how the bodies came to be buried at the site that belongs to the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), which has denied links to the secret burial.
An official of the organisation told the local Daily Nation news website that the burial was conducted without their approval and caught NCCK officials by surprise.
The DCI had earlier said it was investigating whether there was any criminal activity besides the reported irregularities in the burial process.
Two suspects, a public health officer from Nyamira and a cemetery caretaker, have reportedly been arrested in connection with the matter, with others being questioned.
Human rights group Vocal Africa said the discovery was a “staggering and horrific escalation that exposes the true scale of this tragedy”.
“With reports of mutilation and dismemberment among the remains, the discovery points to a level of violence that demands immediate, transparent investigation and national accountability,” it said.
“Identification of these victims must be done as soon as possible,” outgoing Law Society of Kenya president Faith Odhiambo said.
The discovery comes after hundreds of bodies were found in a remote forest in 2023 near the coastal city of Malindi in one of the country’s worst cases of cult-related mass deaths.
Self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie was arrested after 429 bodies, including children, were dug up from mass graves in the remote Shakahola forest.
He was accused of ordering his followers to starve themselves to death – charges he has denied.
MAR 25 – OpenAI has shut down its artificial intelligence (AI) video-generation app Sora less than two years after its launch made headlines for creating realistic clips based on simple prompts.
OpenAI told the BBC on Wednesday that it has discontinued Sora so that it can focus on other developments, such as robotics “that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.”
A spokesperson for The Walt Disney Company said “we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere”.
Disney will engage with other AI platforms to find ways to responsibly use the technology without infringing on intellectual property rights, a spokesperson said.
OpenAI said it is shutting down both its Sora consumer app and the internet-based platform that professional install to generate videos.
The BBC understands that with the closure of Sora, OpenAI will no longer focus on developing video-generation tools.
The firm said it aims to create other forms of advanced AI, including “agentic” technology capable of autonomously completing tasks with little human oversight.
OpenAI plans to apply the same technology used to teach AI how to produce realistic videos to training robots.
Image-making tools on ChatGPT have not been affected by Sora’s closure, OpenAI said.
Sora launched in 2024 to huge interest around the world due to the high quality of its AI-generated videosthat looked as if a professional studio had produced them.
But the app also sparked concerns about copyright violations and the threat it posed to the media industry.
In December, Disney became the first major studio to license intellectual property (IP) to OpenAI to use in its AI video tools.
The three-year deal allowed Sora users to create AI videos with Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Yoda from Star Wars.
The agreement was seen as a turning point for the tech industry and Hollywood, coming after major studios had issued legal challenges to AI firms over the use of their IP.
Some in the media industry also raised concerns that the deal would mark a major step toward AI replacing entertainment industry talent.
Sora also faced a growing number of competitors in the AI video-making market. That list includes China’s Seedance, which created controversy in February after realistic videos featuring Hollywood characters that were generated using the app went viral online.
Kenya has ordered that every mobile phone, tablet and feature phone sold or used in the country must carry a USB Type-C charging port, a regulatory shift that will accelerate the exit of cheap, low-end handsets from the market and lock out older Apple devices that still run on the proprietary Lightning connector.
The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) published the requirement on Tuesday in its Technical Specifications for Mobile Cellular Devices, 2026, signed off by Director General David Mugonyi. The directive applies to equipment vendors, manufacturers, local assemblers, and buyers, and will govern the type-approval process through which all devices must pass before they can be legally sold or distributed in the country.
“The charging solution for mobile cellular devices shall be USB Type-C,” the specifications say. “The charging solution shall be such that the charging cable is detachable from the power adapter.” The authority did not specify a grace period or the penalties that vendors would face for non-compliance, and had not responded to requests for comment as of Tuesday evening.
“The charging solution for mobile cellular devices shall be USB Type-C. The charging cable is detachable from the power adapter.” — CA Technical Specifications 2026
The move mirrors the European Union’s Common Charger Directive, which since December 28, 2024, has required all mobile phones, tablets, cameras, headphones, handheld gaming consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice and earbuds sold across the 27-member bloc to support USB-C. Laptops in the EU are required to comply from April 28, 2026, just weeks away.
USB Type-C, commonly known as USB-C, is a reversible connector that can be plugged in either orientation and supports charging power of up to 240 watts and data transfer speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second. It has rapidly become the de facto global standard for consumer electronics, superseding older connectors including Micro-USB, Mini-USB, and USB-A, which remain the primary charging interface on the vast majority of low-cost feature phones circulating in Kenya.
The kabambe problem
The specification’s sharpest edge falls on the mass market for feature phones, locally known as kabambe, which dominate the Kenyan market at the entry-level and are the primary communication device for tens of millions of Kenyans, particularly in rural areas. These handsets, overwhelmingly imported from Chinese manufacturers, almost universally carry Micro-USB ports and retail at between Sh500 and Sh3,000.
Kenya’s nascent local assembly industry is already aligned with the new standard. Phones produced by East Africa Device Assembly Kenya, M-Kopa, and HMD all carry USB-C connectors. But the burden of compliance falls heavily on importers of the budget Micro-USB models that flood informal markets from Gikomba to Garissa.
Kabambe phones.
Apple devices manufactured before the iPhone 15, released in 2023, are also locked out. The company only shifted from its Lightning connector to USB-C in September 2023 to comply with the EU’s directive, meaning all earlier-generation iPhones and iPads pre-dating the third-generation iPad with USB-C will no longer be eligible for import into Kenya under the new rules.
The CA last month moved to tighten the market further. On February 10, it published a list of 21 mobile phone brands that had been detected through market surveillance as circulating without the required type-approval certification. The authority warned those brands posed safety and health risks and directed vendors to immediately stop selling them, previewing the more comprehensive crackdown that Tuesday’s specifications represent.
Battery, accessibility and socket standards
The Type-C charging requirement is not the only substantive change buried in the CA’s new specifications. The watchdog has introduced a battery performance floor: all mobile phones and tablets must support a minimum of eight hours of talk time and 24 hours on standby. The rule is intended to weed out devices with substandard battery cells that fail prematurely and generate unnecessary e-waste.
On power plugs, the CA has aligned the country with its existing infrastructure standard. Where a device is sold with a plug, it must conform to Kenya’s three-pin Type G socket standard. Devices arriving with non-compliant plugs must include an adapter.
The specifications also introduce mandatory accessibility standards that will be new territory for many manufacturers selling into the Kenyan market. All smartphones and tablets must now ship with screen readers, text-to-speech functionality, real-time captioning, and compatibility with assistive technologies designed to support users with visual, hearing, speech, and mobility impairments.
The CA framed the package of reforms in terms of consumer protection and environmental ambition, saying the specifications were intended “to ensure that mobile devices are interoperable with existing and future telecommunication networks, and compliant with applicable environmental standards related to device manufacturing, use, and disposal.”
A global wave
Kenya’s directive makes it one of the latest jurisdictions to formally adopt the USB-C standard, in a regulatory wave that began in Europe and is now spreading across both the developed and developing worlds.
The EU’s Common Charger Directive, approved by the EU Council in October 2022, gave manufacturers a 24-month transition before it became binding in December 2024. The European Commission estimated that the proliferation of proprietary chargers had been generating roughly 11,000 tonnes of e-waste annually across the bloc, and that standardisation would save consumers an estimated 250 million euros a year in unnecessary charger purchases.
Saudi Arabia implemented a phased USB-C mandate from January 1, 2025, covering mobile phones, tablets, cameras and a range of handheld devices, with laptops coming into scope in April 2026. India mandated USB-C for all smartphones and tablets from mid-2025, with laptops to follow by the end of 2026, though New Delhi exempted basic feature phones and wearables from the initial tranche of requirements.
Kenya’s specification makes no such exemption for feature phones, meaning the country’s rules are in some respects more sweeping than India’s. Whether enforcement will match that ambition remains to be seen. The CA has the power under the Kenya Information and Communications Act to prohibit the sale of non-type-approved devices and to fine vendors who flout the rules, but market surveillance of the country’s sprawling informal retail sector has historically been patchy.
Consumers can currently verify whether a handset has received type approval by dialling *#06# to retrieve its 15-digit IMEI number and sending it via SMS to 1555, or by checking the register of approved devices on the CA’s website at ca.go.ke.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has so far registered 250,391 new voters since the launch of the Enhanced Continuous Voter Registration (ECVR) exercise.
Then exercise was launched on September 29, 2026.
Overall, Kenya’s total number of registered voters now stands at 22,352,923 as of 2026.
IEBC Commissioner Dr. Alutalala Mukhwana revealed on Citizen Tv the new registrations have largely been concentrated in urban and peri-urban areas, with Nairobi leading the pack.
Kiambu, Machakos, Nakuru and Mombasa counties follow closely, reflecting a trend where population density and access to services continue to shape voter turnout.
There is a drive for young voters to register.
The commissioner expressed concerns over the persistently low registration numbers in arid and semi-arid regions.
He spoke on a tv show.
He noted that counties such as Isiolo, Mandera and Tana River are lagging significantly, which he attributed to sparse populations, nomadic lifestyles driven by harsh climatic conditions, and systemic barriers in accessing identification documents.
“There are also the issues of do they get their ID cards in time? There are cases in Turkana, for example, where elderly people don’t have birth certificates, leave alone IDs,” he said.
“The youth engagement, as of today, remains low, but the overall percentage of the (newly registered) youth aged 35 and below stands at 32.65%. The 18-20 year olds are worst hit, we only have 67,888 of them.”
Dr. Mukhwana pointed to delays in acquiring national IDs after leaving school and a lack of civic awareness as key factors behind the low uptake among this age bracket.
He called for early civic education within schools to ensure young people are better prepared and motivated to register once they become eligible.
Of the newly registered voters, 50.9 per cent are male while 49.1 per cent are female, indicating a near gender balance.
In terms of county performance, Nairobi leads with 49,055 new voters, followed by Kiambu with 20,404. Together, Dr. Mukhwana revealed, the two counties account for 27 per cent of all new registrations.
Mombasa ranks third with 15,140, followed by Machakos (11,687); Nakuru (10,432); Kitui (9,401); Kisii (8,871); Kakamega (8,078); Meru (7,499); and Murang’a (7,267).
At the bottom of the scale, Isiolo has registered just 112 new voters, Tana River 241, Lamu 578, Elgeyo Marakwet 552 and Mandera 994, underscoring the stark regional disparities.
Dr. Mukhwana further noted that older voters dominate the new registrations, with those aged above 35 accounting for 67.35 per cent, compared to 32 per cent among younger voters.
The trend suggests that the momentum in voter registration is currently being driven more by middle-aged citizens than by first-time voters, raising questions about long-term electoral participation if youth engagement is not improved.
There is a campaign ongoing dubbed “Niko Kadi” aimed at attracting more young people to register.
The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier arrived at a port on a Greek island after leaving Middle East operations against Iran due to a laundry-area fire, but the vessel faces broader underlying problems, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
The aircraft carrier arrived Monday at Crete’s Naval Support Activity Souda Bay for “maintenance and repairs following operations in the Red Sea,” the US Navy said Monday.
Earlier this month, a fire broke out aboard the carrier in its main laundry area, prompting a large damage control response.
US officials said the blaze was not combat-related and was contained, but reports said more than 600 sailors were displaced from their sleeping quarters.
Bloomberg reported that the concerns around the aircraft carrier range from the potentially grave to the mundane, according to a new assessment from the Pentagon testing office, with many issues surfacing after it started combat testing in October 2022.
The report cited concerns as there is not enough current test data to assess the carrier’s “operational suitability,” or the reliability of several key systems, including its jet launch and recovery system, its radar, its ability to keep operating if hit by enemy fire, and its elevators for moving weapons and munitions for warplanes from the hold to the flight deck.
A recent Pentagon testing assessment found that, nearly a decade after delivery, there is still insufficient data to determine the ship’s “operational effectiveness” under realistic combat conditions.
Key systems, including its advanced aircraft launch and recovery technology, radar and weapons elevators, remain under scrutiny, with questions about their reliability during sustained wartime use.
The aircraft carrier’s extended deployment has added to the strain. Originally deployed in June 2025, the carrier has spent roughly nine months at sea, significantly longer than the typical seven-month deployment, with operations spanning from the Caribbean, including missions related to Venezuela, to the Middle East.
Regional escalation has continued since the US and Israel launched a joint offensive on Iran on Feb. 28. Iranian authorities say over 1,300 people have been killed since the war began, along with senior leaders, including then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior official Ali Larijani.
Tehran has retaliated with drone and missile strikes targeting Israel, along with Jordan, Iraq, and Gulf countries hosting US military assets, causing casualties and damage to infrastructure while disrupting global markets and aviation.
He was handed a lifeline that most accused persons can only dream of. Released on a Sh500,000 cash bail while facing criminal charges of obtaining money by false pretence, Derrick Cornelius Van Houten was trusted by the Milimani courts to return and face the music. He did not.
On Tuesday, Milimani Magistrate Caroline Mugo issued a warrant for Van Houten’s arrest after the court clerk called his name and was met with silence. His lawyer, too, was absent, leaving the prosecution fuming. The state prosecutor wasted no time, urging the court to act decisively against what had become a pattern of evasion by a man who, the record shows, has been gaming Kenya’s judicial system for well over two years.
Van Houten, a South African national who once commanded the sprawling Java House food empire as its chief executive, now faces the ignominy of being a wanted man. But his troubles in court are not new, and the brazenness of his conduct throughout this saga is nothing short of extraordinary.
“It took five months to locate him for arrest.” — State prosecutor, April 2024
The story of Van Houten’s alleged fraud begins not in a dark alley but in the gleaming executive corridors of one of Kenya’s most recognisable restaurant chains. Van Houten had been appointed Java House Africa Group chief executive in March 2021, crossing over from KFC East Africa, where he had built his regional food and beverage reputation over a long tenure. He came with credentials, with charm, and apparently, with ambition that extended well beyond his formal salary package.
Barely months into the job, in late 2021, he is alleged to have embarked on an audacious scheme targeting a Narok businessman named Awil Abdirahman Adulle. Adulle owns a petrol station in Narok and had first been approached as far back as 2018 by a Java House property manager with a proposal to host a Java outlet at his premises. The idea made commercial sense: a branded coffee shop on a fuel forecourt, the kind of low-risk franchise model that has made chains like Java rich.
What Adulle could not have anticipated was that by the time the deal moved to formal agreements in 2021, the man sitting across the table and taking his money was allegedly running a personal racket under cover of Java House’s corporate letterhead.
Between November 2021 and August 2022, Adulle transferred a total of Sh13.2 million to Van Houten across multiple transactions. The payments were made via M-Pesa and bank transfers and were supposed to cover construction renovation deposits, contractor fees, equipment procurement and the supply of coffee beans. The charge sheet is clinical in its precision: Van Houten obtained Sh7,911,000 from Adulle on diverse dates between October 1, 2021 and January 31, 2022, by falsely pretending he was in a position to approve and construct a Java Hotel in Narok, a fact he knew to be false.
A six-year lease agreement was signed in December 2021, lending the arrangement an air of corporate legitimacy. Yet by October 2022, Java House abruptly terminated the project, citing it as not commercially viable. Not a single brick had been laid. Not a cup of coffee had been poured. Van Houten promised Adulle a refund of Sh6.35 million. The refund never came.
“No Java House was ever built, and the accused gave me fake documentation. I have never seen anything from him.” — Awil Abdirahman Adulle, in court
But the Sh7.9 million fraud case is not even the full extent of the alleged criminality. Van Houten faces a separate charge of obtaining Sh3 million from the very same Adulle under a different scheme entirely. In this second case, he is accused of falsely pretending he could franchise to Adulle a Kukito or Java Express coffee shop business, an enterprise Van Houten knew he had no authority to deliver. Adulle deposited Sh2 million directly into Van Houten’s personal bank account and handed over Sh1 million in cash, based on a franchise price proposal of Sh6.9 million that Van Houten had personally drawn up.
The two cases, running concurrently, were the subject of an attempted dismissal by Van Houten’s legal team. That gambit failed spectacularly in September 2024 when Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga personally reviewed the case files and rejected the application to drop charges. Ingonga concluded there was sufficient evidence to take both matters to their logical conclusion, and directed that they be consolidated and referred to Magistrate Gilbert Shikwe for further directions.
By then, Van Houten had already demonstrated an alarming contempt for court process. The Star can reveal that as early as April 2024, the Milimani Chief Magistrate’s Court had already issued a first warrant for his arrest, after he failed to appear for plea-taking in the earlier sitting of his case. The prosecution told the court that it had taken five months to even locate him for the initial arrest. After that arrest, he was released on a police bond of just Sh50,000 before the higher cash bail was set. Within days, he was a no-show again.
His lawyers at that stage attempted to explain his absence by claiming he was ill and had been advised by a doctor to observe five days of bed rest. The court accepted that explanation once and directed him to return. He did not. A warrant was issued then. The pattern was already set.
Now, in March 2026, the same script has played out again, this time with considerably more judicial fury behind it, because a High Court has already spoken.
On February 12, 2026, Justice Josephine Mongare of the Milimani High Court delivered a comprehensive civil judgment against Van Houten that left him and his legal strategy in tatters. The judge found that Adulle had proved his case on a balance of probabilities, despite the fact that Van Houten and his co-defendant, Kiss Cosmetics Limited, chose not to call a single witness or produce a single document in their defence.
The court entered judgment for Adulle against Van Houten and Kiss Cosmetics Limited, jointly and severally, for Sh9,465,000 together with interest at the court rate of twelve per cent per annum from the date of judgment until full payment. The award comprised Sh6,840,000 verified through receipts as direct payments to Van Houten, and Sh2,625,000 paid to Kiss Cosmetics under a financing arrangement.
Van Houten had run a bold counter-narrative in the civil suit, arguing that he could not be held personally liable because he was at all times acting in his corporate capacity as Java House chief executive. He went further, filing a counterclaim demanding that Adulle pay him Sh19 million, asserting that the two men had separate personal business dealings entirely distinct from the Java transaction. Justice Mongare rejected both arguments without equivocation. Given the complete absence of any rebuttal evidence from Van Houten’s side, the court found the evidence against him compelling.
The court also found that the kiss Cosmetics connection, a financing and supply vehicle allegedly used to route money for coffee equipment and beans that were never delivered, formed part of the same fraudulent transaction rather than a separate commercial arrangement as Van Houten had claimed.
Van Houten’s total civil liability now stands at Sh9.465 million. His total criminal exposure across the two fraud cases amounts to Sh10.9 million. He has paid neither a cent of one nor attended court to answer the other.
Van Houten left Java House in November 2022, barely twenty months after joining the chain, under circumstances the company never publicly explained. His replacement, Priscilla Gathungu, was the third person to lead the company in fewer than four years. Industry analysts at the time noted that the high turnover of chief executives pointed to serious structural problems at Java, though the fraud allegations against Van Houten were not public knowledge until the criminal charges were laid. He subsequently described himself on LinkedIn as a turnaround specialist and chief executive of a venture called Bottomline, a title that sits uneasily against a mounting court record.
For Adulle, the ordeal has lasted nearly five years. He testified in the civil case that he had first been approached about hosting a Java outlet in 2018, long before Van Houten was even at the company. By the time Van Houten arrived and elevated the deal to C-suite level discussions, Adulle had every reason to believe the arrangement was legitimate. Meetings with senior Java executives, formal lease agreements bearing corporate seals, specific franchise pricing documents: all of it gave the transaction the outward appearance of orthodox commerce. Instead, he alleges, it was a sophisticated personal fraud by a man using a corporate job title as a fishing licence.
With a High Court judgment already entered against him and a criminal arrest warrant now in force, Van Houten’s options are narrowing rapidly. He cannot leave Kenya’s judicial reach by simply ignoring it, as the escalating court response demonstrates. The prosecution has made clear it will not be deterred. The DPP has personally declined to drop the charges. And Magistrate Caroline Mugo, faced with yet another empty chair where the accused should have been sitting, moved without hesitation.
The warrant is live. The clock is running. The Narok businessman who put his faith and his millions into a coffee shop that was never built is still waiting for justice. And somewhere in Nairobi, a former restaurant chief executive who once told the Business Daily that franchising was a good model if you want to grow a brand quickly, is apparently testing that theory on the courts.
The queues are back. The dry pumps are back. The excuses are back. And, if the evidence emerging from Kenya’s petroleum sector is any guide, so too is the corporate playbook that transformed a localized supply concern into a nationally orchestrated shakedown in 2022. This time, the architects of the crisis have cloaked their operation in the fog of war, invoking the Middle East conflict as justification for what is, at its core, a premeditated squeeze on the Kenyan consumer.
Mohammed Hersi, the immediate past chairman of the Kenya Tourism Federation and one of the country’s most credible private-sector voices on matters of economic governance, has had enough. In a statement that detonated across social media and industry boardrooms with equal force, Hersi posed the question that government regulators appear to lack the courage to ask: has any new shipment, purchased at the higher war-era prices, actually landed in Kenya? The answer, as EPRA’s own data confirms, is an unambiguous no. The logical conclusion from that fact is one that the industry’s lobby groups would rather the public did not dwell upon.
“You should punish Shell Vivo heavily if they are playing games,” Hersi stated, directing his sharpest fire at the company whose green-and-yellow livery dominates Nairobi’s street corners. Hersi’s target was deliberate. So is ours.
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THE ARCHITECTURE OF A MANUFACTURED CRISIS
To understand what is happening in Kenya’s forecourts, one must first understand what is not happening in the Strait of Hormuz as far as Kenyan consumers are concerned.
The Iran conflict is real. Its disruption of global shipping is real. Crude oil prices, having hovered near USD 63 per barrel in February 2026, rocketed past USD 100 per barrel in the weeks following the military strikes of February 28.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply passes, is the most significant supply disruption the global energy market has witnessed in decades.
None of that justifies what is happening at Kenya’s pumps right now. None of it. And here is precisely why.
EPRA, in its March 14 price announcement, was admirably transparent about the data underlying its decision to freeze pump prices for the March 15 to April 14 cycle.
The regulator’s Director General, Daniel Kiptoo Bargoria, stated explicitly that the calculations were based on vessels received and discharged between February 10 and March 9, 2026. He then added the sentence that the industry does not want repeated: “Most of these vessels are February-priced cargoes and the effect of the situation in the Middle East has not had an effect on the prices yet.”
Read that sentence again. The fuel sitting in the tanks at Vivo’s Nairobi and Mombasa depots, the fuel that Rubis, TotalEnergies, Ola Energy and other marketers are rationing, was bought and imported at pre-war prices.
The conflict began on February 28. The bulk of Kenya’s March stock was already in transit or had already been discharged before that date. The “war premium” that Unepa chairperson Irene Kimathi is now screaming about does not apply to a single litre of fuel currently in the country. Charging Kenyans crisis prices on pre-crisis stock is not a market reality. It is profiteering.
Murban crude oil, Kenya’s pricing benchmark, stood at just USD 63.06 per barrel in February 2026, down sharply from USD 80.22 in March 2025. The exchange rate has held remarkably stable, with the shilling anchored near 129 to the dollar.
The EPRA price stabilization fund recorded a deficit on diesel of just Sh6.53 per litre and Sh6.66 on kerosene, figures well within manageable bounds before the war’s effects on new cargo manifested. The dealers are not bleeding money on current stock. They are sitting on inventory purchased at favorable prices while demanding that prices be reset to reflect a crisis that has not yet hit their balance sheets.
VIVO ENERGY: THE MARKET LEADER, THE LOUDEST SILENCE
In the Kenyan petroleum market, size confers power. Vivo Energy, the Vitol Group-owned operator of Shell-branded stations across 23 African countries, is the undisputed market leader in Kenya, controlling approximately 20 percent of the retail market by volume.
That dominance gives the company an outsized ability to shape supply conditions, pricing signals and public perception. It also gives the company an outsized responsibility that it is conspicuously failing to honour.
When fuel stations began running dry this week, the most affected outlets in Nairobi were, by multiple credible accounts, Shell-branded.
A spot check confirmed that the company’s outlet at Kipande House ran out of diesel on Monday morning, with petrol stocks expected to be depleted the same day.
Stations along Magadi Road and in Kiserian had been intermittently dry since the weekend. This was not an isolated malfunction at a single pump. It was a pattern.
Vivo Energy Kenya CEO Peter Murungi’s response to these developments was a masterclass in corporate deflection. High consumption over a long weekend, he said.
Supplies would be replenished. He was, he said, unaware of any fuel crisis. “I am not aware of any fuel crisis to be frank,” Mr Murungi told Business Daily. “It is just a long weekend with high consumption.”
This from the CEO of a company that, according to its own regulatory filings, is legally required to maintain minimum stocks of petrol and diesel lasting 20 and 25 days respectively.
This from the CEO of a company that, in April 2022, had executives summoned to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to account for precisely this kind of market manipulation.
This from the CEO of a company whose parent group, Vitol, is one of the world’s largest independent energy traders, with the market intelligence to know exactly what is in its tanks, what is en route, and what the gap between purchase price and proposed selling price would yield on the order of millions of litres.
The silence of Vivo Energy in the face of mounting evidence of supply manipulation is not merely corporate caution. It is an insult to a country it has profited from for over a decade.
THE 2022 PRECEDENT: THIS SCRIPT HAS BEEN READ BEFORE
The most damning aspect of the current crisis is not that it is happening. It is that it has happened before, with the same actors, using the same methods, to the same effect. Those who forget their history, as the saying goes, are condemned to repeat it. Those who engineer their history are condemned by it.
In April 2022, Kenya was gripped by a fuel shortage that lasted three weeks. Motorists queued for hours. Diesel, critical for the transport sector that keeps food moving, was virtually impossible to find.
The Energy Cabinet Secretary at the time, Ambassador Monica Juma, stood outside the Kawi complex and called it what it was: economic sabotage. “We have been witness to an action that has distorted the market and supply chains, created artificial shortages, caused panic and anxiety, negatively affected productivity,” she said.
The government had the data to prove it. EPRA’s own stock records showed the country had over 212 million litres of petrol in strategic storage while forecourts were supposedly running dry. The fuel was there. It was simply not being moved.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations was deployed.
Executives from ten oil marketing companies, including Vivo Energy, TotalEnergies, Ola Energy, Gapco Hass Petroleum, Petro Oil, Galana Oil, and Lake Oil Petroleum, were summoned and interrogated. The government invoked the Energy (Minimum Operational Stock) Regulations, 2008, which carry a penalty of two years in prison or a fine of up to Sh2 million.
The government invoked the Petroleum Act, which categorizes deliberate market manipulation as economic sabotage, a capital offence. The CEO of Rubis Energy Kenya, Jean-Christian Bergeron, was deported and had his work permit revoked.
What happened next is the most important lesson for 2026. Prices were reviewed upward. The “shortage” evaporated.
The fuel that had been invisible in Nairobi reappeared at filling stations across the country within days of the price hike.
There were no criminal convictions. There was no accountability. The playbook worked, and the industry knows it.
As Juma herself observed at the time, some marketers had even been diverting cargo earmarked for Kenya into the regional export market in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, “to further enhance their abnormal profits.”
Fast forward to March 2026. Unepa’s Kimathi is using almost identical language to 2022, warning that prices are unsustainable and that dealers will halt sales.
Lawmaker Nelson Koech has publicly named “speculation, panic buying and hoarding, particularly hoarding by oil marketers in anticipation of a price jump” as the primary driver of current demand surges.
POAK chairman Martin Chomba has confirmed that dealers are likely to hold back stock in anticipation of a price hike.
The Petroleum PS, Mohamed Liban, delivered a statement during Koech’s live television interview confirming the government’s view: the shortages are primarily the result of hoarding, not genuine supply disruption.
The script is the same. The only question is whether the government’s response will also be the same, which is to say, toothless.
THE COMPENSATION SCANDAL: PAYING THE ARSONIST FOR FIGHTING THE FIRE
As if hoarding were not audacious enough, reports have now emerged that EPRA is considering a compensation mechanism for oil marketing companies, pegged at approximately Sh11 per litre on excess fuel volumes imported during the March pricing cycle.
The Consumers Federation of Kenya, COFEK, has fired a broadside at this proposal in a letter addressed directly to Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi, and the federation’s concerns deserve to be treated as a matter of urgent national policy.
COFEK’s central argument is legally and morally sound: EPRA does not possess a compensatory mandate. Its role under the Petroleum Act 2019 is to regulate, not to subsidize.
By channeling public funds to oil marketing companies as a make-whole payment for inventory that was imported at pre-crisis prices, EPRA would effectively be converting a windfall opportunity for the companies into a taxpayer-funded guarantee. It would be rewarding behavior that the PS has already characterized as hoarding. It would be paying the arsonist to fight the fire they lit.
The optics are staggering.
Kenya is a country where the government is simultaneously asking ordinary citizens to absorb the cost of a housing levy, a social health insurance contribution, and a fuel levy of Sh7 per litre that MP Ndindi Nyoro has called deeply regressive.
Against that backdrop, the prospect of the regulator siphoning public money into the coffers of Vivo Energy, TotalEnergies, and Rubis is politically explosive and economically unconscionable.
THE REGIONAL REALITY: NOBODY ELSE IS BUYING THE STORY
The oil lobby’s argument that the war necessitates an immediate emergency price revision in Kenya collapses when measured against what is happening in the country’s immediate neighbors.
Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda all face the same global supply disruption.
All three are landlocked or near-landlocked economies heavily dependent on the same Indian Ocean shipping lanes through which Kenya’s fuel also passes. None of them have capitulated to the narrative that existing stock must be repriced at war-level rates.
In Tanzania, the Petroleum Bulk Procurement Agency has reported reserves of 230 million litres of petrol, sufficient for 38 days, and 180 million litres of diesel, sufficient for 47 days.
When accounting for incoming shipments already en route, Dar es Salaam’s effective cover extends to 78 days of petrol and 50 days of diesel.
The government has not entertained emergency price hikes on existing inventory. It has instead called a sectoral meeting, reviewed its supply chain, and communicated transparently with the public. Dar es Salaam is doing what Nairobi should be doing.
In Uganda, the government has gone further, publicly warning petroleum companies against what it has characterized as “superficial” pump price increases.
Kampala has maintained that immediate fuel supply remains secure and has made clear that it will not accept manipulation of market pricing on inventory purchased at pre-conflict rates.
That position, from a landlocked country that cannot even reach Mombasa without transiting Kenya, is a direct rebuke to the argument being made by Nairobi’s oil lobby.
The African fuel price survey for March 2026 presents a broader picture that is equally instructive. While the global average retail price per litre has nudged upward modestly to approximately USD 1.34, multiple African countries including Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda have avoided the dramatic spikes that the Kenyan oil lobby is now demanding. Some countries in the region have even recorded price declines.
The idea that Kenya alone must act immediately to protect oil marketer margins on pre-war stock is not a market argument. It is a negotiating position dressed up as one.
SHIPPING DATA: WHEN THE FACTS DON’T FIT THE NARRATIVE
The shipping data emerging from the Port of Mombasa is, admittedly, genuinely alarming, but not for the reasons the oil lobby would have you believe.
Reports indicate that of approximately 52 vessels expected at the port through early April, none is scheduled to carry petroleum products.
That is a real supply gap. It is a supply gap caused by the war, by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, by the rerouting of vessels to the longer Cape of Good Hope passage that adds weeks to transit times and significantly inflates freight costs.
This is the legitimate face of the crisis, and it is a crisis that Kenya will eventually have to confront with an honest price conversation.
But here is what the lobby groups refuse to acknowledge: that future crisis is not this present manufactured shortage.
The oil marketers are using a real, looming problem as cover for a present, self-created one.
The incoming supply disruption, which will genuinely affect cargoes purchased at post-war pricing, is being conflated with the current stock, purchased at pre-war pricing, to create the impression that an emergency price hike must happen now, on existing inventory, before the actual crisis materially arrives. It is a bait-and-switch of extraordinary cynicism.
It is also worth noting that the International Energy Agency, which has characterized the current situation as the greatest energy security challenge in its history, has coordinated the release of nearly 400 million barrels of emergency crude from member country reserves specifically to stabilize global prices.
That intervention is designed to moderate precisely the kind of price shock that the Kenyan oil industry is trying to pass on to the consumer in unmodified form. Kenya may not be an IEA member, but the stabilizing effect of that release on global markets benefits Kenyan importers whether they acknowledge it or not.
KENYA’S STRATEGIC VULNERABILITY: THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM NOBODY WANTS TO SOLVE
The current crisis exposes a structural weakness in Kenya’s energy security architecture that has been talked about, reported on, and ignored for years. Kenya’s legal framework requires oil marketing companies to maintain operational stocks of 20 days of petrol and 25 days of diesel.
In practice, most marketers maintain reserves of between 15 and 18 days, leaving the country dangerously exposed to any disruption lasting more than a fortnight.
The National Oil Corporation, which holds the statutory mandate to maintain 90-day strategic reserves, has been financially paralyzed for years and holds virtually nothing of consequence.
This is not a regulatory accident. It is a regulatory failure that is structurally advantageous to the major oil marketing companies. Thin strategic reserves create scarcity conditions faster, scarcity conditions justify price hikes faster, and faster price hikes on existing stock translate directly into windfall margins. If Kenya held 90-day strategic reserves as international standards require, no oil marketer could manufacture a shortage in the space of a weekend.
The structural failure is, in a very meaningful sense, the business model.
By comparison, Tanzania’s PBPA centralized procurement model has delivered buffers exceeding 47 days on diesel without emergency measures. Uganda has maintained functional reserves.
Both countries are poorer than Kenya on a per capita basis. The difference is not resources. It is political will and regulatory courage.
THE TOURISM SECTOR PAYS THE PRICE. AGAIN.
Mohammed Hersi’s fury is not merely the outrage of a Twitter commentator. It is the anguish of an industry that depends on cheap, reliable fuel in ways that the petroleum boardrooms prefer not to contemplate.
Tourism is, by the Tourism Research Institute’s own data, Kenya’s second-largest source of foreign exchange after diaspora remittances, contributing over 10 percent of GDP.
It is an industry built on game drives, bush flights, airport transfers, generator-dependent lodges and cold chains that cannot afford interruption.
Hersi has watched the cost of fuel rise by over 70 percent in the two years preceding this latest crisis. His contracts with tour operators, signed months or years in advance, leave him exposed when input costs shift suddenly.
Every artificial shortage, every manufactured price hike, every weekend of rationed diesel is a cost that tourism operators cannot pass on in real time. It is a cost absorbed by the margins of businesses that already operate under intense competitive pressure from regional destinations.
It is a tax on Kenya’s ability to position itself as a world-class destination, levied not by the government but by oil marketers in pursuit of abnormal profits.
Hersi’s call to “punish Shell Vivo heavily” is therefore not irrational anger. It is the rational demand of a sector participant who has run out of patience with a recurring pattern of market manipulation that inflicts disproportionate harm on businesses that cannot hedge, cannot diversify their energy sources overnight, and cannot wait for regulatory courage to materialize at the pace of bureaucratic comfort.
WHAT THE LAW ACTUALLY SAYS, AND WHAT MUST NOW HAPPEN
Kenya is not without legal tools.
The Energy Act 2019 grants EPRA sweeping powers to investigate, sanction, and where warranted, revoke the licenses of companies found to be in breach of minimum stock requirements or found to be manipulating supply. Section 99 of the Petroleum Act explicitly prohibits the sale of fuel above regulated maximum prices. Show-cause letters were issued in 2022.
Deportations were ordered in 2022. The apparatus of enforcement exists. It has simply not been applied with sufficient consistency to create a deterrent.
Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi has assured the public that Kenya holds adequate reserves and that supply is secure.
If that assurance is accurate, and the government’s own data suggests it is, then the shortages being reported at filling stations across Nairobi, Eldoret, Kitale, and rural areas of the North Rift are not a supply problem.
They are a conduct problem. They are the product of deliberate decisions by oil marketing companies to withhold product from the retail market in anticipation of a price hike. That is the definition of economic sabotage under Kenyan law. It should be prosecuted as such.
EPRA must not compensate oil marketing companies for existing stock. That proposal should be withdrawn immediately. What EPRA must do, instead, is dispatch inspection teams to the bulk storage depots of every major oil marketer in the country, cross-reference actual stock levels against EPRA’s own data, and prosecute every company found to be holding stock below the required minimum while simultaneously withholding product from the retail market. The law is clear. The mandate is clear. The only thing that is unclear is whether the regulator has the political backing to use it.
Wandayi must make that backing explicit, in public, and today. CS Monica Juma did it in 2022. It worked. The fuel appeared. The lesson is available. The question is whether this government has the stomach to apply it.
CONCLUSION: THE NATION IS WATCHING
Kenya stands at a precipice whose contours should by now be familiar. The oil cartel is running the same play it ran in 2022. The lobby groups are using the same language. The Vivo pumps are running the same dry-station theater.
The government is issuing the same assurances of adequate supply while the industry ignores them. The difference in 2026 is that the public has a longer memory, a shorter tolerance for corporate impunity, and a louder platform from which to demand accountability.
The fuel in Kenya’s tanks was bought at prices that reflect a world before February 28, 2026. Selling it at prices that reflect a world after February 28, 2026, is not market economics. It is extraction.
It is a transfer of wealth from Kenyan consumers and businesses to the balance sheets of multinational petroleum corporations that have, in the case of at least one company, faced criminal investigation in this country for doing precisely this before and suffered no lasting consequence.
Mohammed Hersi is right. The punishment must fit the crime. And the crime, if the evidence leads where it appears to lead, is economic sabotage, not a market adjustment. EPRA has the law. The government has the mandate.
The public has the patience of a country that is watching very closely. The only remaining question is whether the “thugs in suits” will be held to account this time, or whether they will once again be rewarded with an upward price review and walk away with the country’s money in their pockets.
The Consumer Federation of Kenya has formally petitioned the Central Bank of Kenya to launch an immediate forensic audit into the explosive financial turnaround of Sidian Bank, a mid-tier commercial lender whose net profit surged 502 per cent to Sh1.73 billion in the year ended December 31, 2025, from Sh287 million in the prior year.
In a written petition to the banking regulator, Cofek secretary general Stephen Mutoro described the bank’s ascent as one that bore the hallmarks of political capture rather than organic market competition, and called on the CBK to determine whether the allocation of billions of shillings in public sector deposits to a relatively obscure institution had followed due process under Kenya’s public finance management laws.
“What we are witnessing is not a turnaround story. It is the capture of public resources by a politically connected institution,” Mr Mutoro said in an interview.
“Taxpayer money parked in county governments, the Social Health Authority, the National Social Security Fund, and the housing levy is being used to inflate the balance sheet of a bank that should be lending to small businesses but is instead hoarding government securities. The Central Bank must act before this becomes a full-blown scandal.”
The petition places Sidian at the centre of a growing national debate about the relationship between political power and the allocation of public sector banking mandates in Kenya, a conversation that has already drawn scrutiny from the Senate, the High Court, and from as senior a figure as former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, who alleged in a televised interview in February 2025 that a senior state official had strong-armed public institutions to channel funds into a favoured bank.
Gachagua declined to name the institution, but the breadcrumbs left by the subsequent cascade of public sector mandates won by Sidian led many analysts and commentators to draw their own conclusions.
The Numbers That Shocked the Market
Sidian Bank’s financial disclosures for 2025 read less like the results of a small commercial lender and more like the sudden materialisation of a systemic shift in the Kenyan banking landscape.
Customer deposits surged 63 per cent to Sh72.3 billion over the course of the year, nearly tripling the Sh27.6 billion the bank held at the end of 2023 and catapulting it from the lower end of the Tier 3 bracket to a position where it commanded 1.83 per cent of total industry deposits by September 2025. Total assets grew 51 per cent to Sh90.8 billion.
Net interest income rose 54.4 per cent to Sh4.4 billion, while non-interest income surged 129 per cent to Sh3.8 billion.
Within that latter figure lies one of the most striking and unexplained items in the bank’s published results: a line described as “other income” that vaulted from Sh188.76 million to Sh2.09 billion, an elevenfold increase that constituted 55 per cent of total non-interest income for the year.
The bank has not disclosed the composition of this item in its published financial extracts, a silence that Mr Mutoro said the CBK should require it to explain.
Equally striking is what the deposit bonanza did not produce.
Despite customer deposits nearly doubling, Sidian’s loan book expanded by only 10.7 per cent to Sh27.5 billion.
The bulk of the new public sector money was channelled instead into Treasury bills and government bonds, a portfolio that rose to Sh48.6 billion by the end of September 2025, up from Sh19.3 billion a year earlier.
The bank was, in effect, borrowing at low or zero cost from the state and lending straight back to the state at sovereign rates, generating a virtually risk-free spread that accounts for the lion’s share of its profit surge.
“The bank is effectively trading on the idle deposits of public agencies to generate risk-free returns,” Mr Mutoro said.
“It is not fulfilling its mandate to SMEs. It is not creating credit. It is simply arbitraging the gap between what it pays on deposits, if it pays anything at all, and what it earns from government securities. That is not banking. That is rent-seeking enabled by political connections.”
The Architecture of Public Sector Capture
The mechanics of Sidian’s transformation are traceable to a series of public sector mandates that began accumulating from late 2023 and accelerated sharply in 2024 and 2025.
The pattern reveals a lender that progressed systematically through the constellation of state institutions, winning mandates from a succession of parastatals whose combined deposits provided the raw material for an unprecedented balance sheet expansion.
The most significant single mandate came from the National Social Security Fund. In the financial year ended June 30, 2024, the NSSF designated Sidian Bank as the recipient of Sh800 million in fixed deposits, its single largest placement with any bank that year.
The allocation was all the more remarkable given that Sidian had received zero from the pension fund in any prior year, and that the NSSF simultaneously slashed its total fixed deposit portfolio by more than 75 per cent compared to the previous year, from Sh10.8 billion to Sh2.6 billion.
Even as the fund shrank its overall exposure to term deposits, it concentrated more than a third of what remained in a bank with which it had no prior relationship.
The Social Health Authority, launched in October 2024 as the replacement for the defunct National Hospital Insurance Fund, designated Sidian as one of only six authorised collection agents for SHIF contributions, placing the bank in the same category as KCB, Co-operative Bank, Absa, Equity, and Diamond Trust Bank, lenders whose assets and deposit bases dwarfed Sidian’s at the time of the appointment.
The bank was simultaneously authorised to receive housing levy deductions from employers across Kenya, a stream of statutory payments that flows monthly from the payroll of every formal sector worker in the country.
The Nairobi County Government delivered the most visible and politically charged mandate in November 2025, when County Secretary Godfrey Akumali issued a circular on October 28 directing the chief executive officers of all county health facilities to close their accounts at Co-operative Bank, a Tier 1 institution with a long and stable track record in public sector banking, and reopen them at Sidian.
The directive followed a resolution passed at the 69th meeting of the Nairobi County Executive Committee, and was to take effect by November 7, 2025, giving health facility managers nine days to execute one of the most consequential banking switches in the history of Nairobi county government.
Senator Edwin Sifuna, Nairobi’s ODM senator, was unsparing in his assessment of the directive. “The health facilities in Nairobi have been banking with Co-operative Bank, a tier-one bank with a solid history and reputation,” he said in a letter to Governor Johnson Sakaja dated November 12.
“How you wake up one day and direct all of them to move to a tier-three bank cannot be explained any other way than corruption at play.”
Governor Sakaja appeared before the Senate Committee on Devolution and Intergovernmental Relations on November 24 to defend the decision.
He said the previous bank had delayed salary processing for county health workers, that its interest rates were unfavourable, and that Sidian had presented the best commercial offer in a competitive process. “Sidian had a cheaper interest rate and gave us a better offer. It is a good deal. We invited many banks, and Sidian presented the best package. As for ownership, every bank has owners, but what matters is good service,” the governor told the committee.
Senator Richard Onyonka pressed Sakaja directly on whether the bank’s ownership structure had influenced the decision, a question the governor declined to answer with specificity.
The committee did not receive documentation of the competitive process or comparative offers from other banks.
The relationship between Nairobi County and Sidian has since deepened further.
Documents tabled before the Nairobi City County Assembly budget committee reveal that the county is pursuing a memorandum of understanding with the bank that would place Sidian at the heart of Nairobi’s revenue collection architecture, managing billions in annual inflows from parking fees, business permits, and land rates.
The proposed arrangement would also cover the management of the Facility Improvement Fund for county hospitals and donor funds. The budget committee’s report was silent on the fee structure, raising questions about the cost to the county government that its members have noted remain unanswered.
The Shareholders and Their Connections
The story of Sidian’s ownership transformation is inseparable from the story of its deposit bonanza. Centum Investment Company, which had held a majority stake in the bank through its subsidiary Bakki Holdco since 2015, began divesting in October 2023 after a planned Sh4.3 billion sale to Nigeria’s Access Bank collapsed in January of that year.
The piecemeal divestiture that followed introduced an entirely new group of shareholders whose identities and connections have drawn sustained public interest.
The largest individual block in the bank is now held by Wizpro Enterprises Limited, a company incorporated in September 2017 with Solomon Muriithi Maina as its sole director and shareholder.
Wizpro holds 24.95 per cent of Sidian’s issued share capital. Mr Maina is the chairman of KTDA Management Services Limited, the firm that manages the affairs of the Kenya Tea Development Agency, one of the most powerful agricultural institutions in the country and an entity whose patronage networks extend deep into tea-growing communities in the Mount Kenya region, a political heartland of President William Ruto.
The second-largest block, at 24.36 per cent, is held by Afram Limited, a company registered in July 2016 and controlled by a single director and shareholder, James Maina Muthoni.
Pioneer General Insurance Limited holds 16.89 per cent, with its UAE-based shareholders, including Abcon International LLC, Parkview Investments Limited, and Medillon Trading FZE, providing international capital to the consortium.
Former Ugandan Attorney-General William Byaruhanga, a close confidant of President Yoweri Museveni and a major real estate investor in Kampala, holds 14.63 per cent through Kenbe Investments, a vehicle he built by acquiring 50 per cent of Centum’s Bakki Holdco in May 2024 for Sh1.032 billion.
Telesec Africa, which had previously been owned by Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro before he transferred ownership to John Mbugua Maina in 2020, holds 3.47 per cent.
Centum completed the sale of its final remaining 13.6 per cent interest in Sidian on March 12, 2026, closing a 22-year investment that began when the bank operated as K-Rep Bank.
Total cash recoveries by Centum across all transactions now stand at approximately Sh5.2 billion against an original investment of Sh4.7 billion, a modest nominal return that the investment firm acknowledged was likely negative in real terms across the full holding period.
The board was overhauled in October 2025, when former Cabinet Secretary James Macharia was named chairman, succeeding Centum’s James Mworia. Mr Macharia, who served as Cabinet Secretary for Health and later for Transport and Infrastructure under President Uhuru Kenyatta before leaving government in 2022, had previously been Group Managing Director of NIC Bank, where he had worked alongside Chief Executive Chege Thumbi, who now leads Sidian.
Mr Mutoro said the accumulation of politically connected shareholders and the board appointment of a former senior state official, followed immediately by an unprecedented flood of public sector deposits, represented a pattern that regulators could not afford to ignore.
“This is not a bank that grew by competing in the marketplace,” he said. “It grew by winning state business through connections. The question the CBK must answer is whether the threshold for being classified as a Tier 2 bank was met through prudent banking or through executive fiat.”
Reclassification Achieved Three Years Ahead of Schedule
The Central Bank of Kenya formally reclassified Sidian from Tier 3 to Tier 2 in September 2025, after the bank’s deposit market share crossed the 1 per cent threshold for the first time.
At the time of reclassification, Sidian’s deposits represented 1.83 per cent of all customer deposits in the Kenyan banking system, up from 0.7 per cent at the start of the year. Its asset base of Sh94.8 billion constituted 1.2 per cent of the industry.
The reclassification came three years ahead of the schedule that Sidian’s management had originally set when presenting the new ownership’s strategic plan to shareholders.
The bank had targeted mid-tier status by 2028. That a goal intended to take five years was achieved in less than twenty-four months of the new ownership taking control has astonished analysts who track the Kenyan banking sector.
No other Kenyan lender has grown deposits by 162 per cent in two years while simultaneously vaulting from Tier 3 to Tier 2 and delivering a sixfold profit jump.
“When a bank grows this fast, this suddenly, and entirely on the back of public sector cash, you have to ask whether the risk management frameworks are adequate, whether the governance structures are sound, and whether the allocation of public deposits followed due process,” Mr Mutoro said.
“The CBK’s own prudential guidelines are premised on the assumption that growth of this nature emerges from competitive market dynamics. When it emerges from politically allocated state mandates, the supervisory calculus is entirely different.”
The Loan Book That Did Not Grow
For a bank whose founding mission was to provide financial services to small and medium enterprises, the divergence between deposit growth and lending growth in 2025 represents a fundamental departure from its stated purpose.
Sidian was established in 1984 as K-Rep Bank by Kimanthi Mutua under the Kenya Rural Enterprise Program, a project designed explicitly to channel credit to informal sector traders and microenterprise owners who were excluded from mainstream commercial banking.
Forty years later, the bank’s deposit base has nearly tripled in twenty-four months. Its loan book, by contrast, grew by only 10.7 per cent in the full year to December 2025.
At the nine-month mark in September, the loan book was effectively flat at Sh25.1 billion, a situation that chief executive Chege Thumbi attributed to the sluggish economy. “As the economy picks up, in line with our mission to empower the entrepreneurs, we expect the loan book to grow in months ahead,” he said in November 2025.
Interest income from loans and advances actually fell 4.9 per cent to Sh4.48 billion in 2025 despite the nominal increase in the net loan balance, suggesting tighter yields on the existing portfolio.
The gap was more than covered by the explosion in government securities income.
The bank’s holdings of Treasury bills and bonds nearly doubled over the course of the year, with the stock reaching Sh48.6 billion by the end of September, generating Sh3 billion in earnings from government paper in the nine-month period alone, up 134.7 per cent from Sh1.3 billion a year earlier.
The bank’s base lending rate stands at 16 per cent, a level that consumer advocates say remains punitive for the SMEs it claims to serve, particularly when the deposit base from which it funds that lending consists in large part of public sector funds earning minimal interest.
The bank’s cost of funds remained suppressed at Sh3 billion in nine months despite the deposit base nearly doubling, a statistic that reflects the low or zero cost of public sector deposits relative to the market rates that commercial deposits attract.
Bunge La Mwananchi Petitions the High Court
The consumer lobby’s petition to the CBK is not the only legal challenge Sidian’s relationship with the state has attracted. Civil rights group Bunge La Mwananchi, together with activists Lawrence Oyugi and Komrade Bush, petitioned the High Court in November 2025, arguing that Nairobi County’s directive to move public health facility accounts to Sidian breached multiple constitutional provisions.
The petition named the Nairobi City County Government, the County Executive Committee Member for Finance and Economic Planning, the acting County Secretary, and the Attorney-General as respondents, citing Articles 10, 35, 43, 201, 227, and 232 of the Constitution, provisions relating to public participation, access to information, social and economic rights, and integrity in public service.
The petition remains before the court. Sidian Bank maintained in its public statements around the SHA controversy that it “only facilitates collections, remitting directly to SHA accounts” and does not hold or manage the funds collected on behalf of the authority.
The distinction, while legally significant, has done little to quieten concerns about the accumulation of public money in a lender whose governance and ownership have become, in the perception of critics, intertwined with political power.
Capital Injections and the Empire Being Built
Sidian’s shareholders have not been passive beneficiaries of the deposit windfall. They have been active participants in capitalising the bank to handle the growth.
A Sh3 billion rights issue was completed in the year, with chief executive Chege Thumbi confirming in November 2025 that the final Sh580 million tranche had been received and was awaiting allotment.
This followed an earlier Sh3 billion capital injection, meaning shareholders have collectively deployed at least Sh6 billion in fresh equity since the new ownership consortium took control in late 2023.
The bank’s shareholders’ funds grew 41.1 per cent to Sh9.72 billion in 2025, bolstered by retained earnings of Sh2.33 billion alongside the rights issue proceeds.
Core capital stood at approximately Sh6.8 billion as of September 2025, above the CBK’s new minimum of Sh3 billion, the interim threshold that ten other Kenyan banks failed to meet by year-end.
Despite the record profitability, no dividend was declared for 2025, with retained earnings directed toward balance sheet expansion.
Mr Thumbi confirmed in November that the bank was in discussions with shareholders about raising an additional Sh3 billion in new capital.
“The shareholders are building an empire on the back of the taxpayer,” Mr Mutoro said.
“The question is whether this empire is being built in compliance with banking laws and prudential guidelines, or whether it is being built through the selective allocation of state business to politically connected individuals. The CBK has a duty to find out.”
Expansion Plans and Branch Growth
Alongside the financial engineering, Sidian has been pursuing a physical expansion that has accelerated sharply since the new ownership took control.
The bank opened its 47th branch in Bomet Town in April 2025, part of a stated plan to expand from its current footprint to more than 100 locations, a trajectory that management has linked to its SACCO partnerships, which now number more than 120 institutions across Kenya.
The expansion is being funded by the capital raised through successive rights issues and by the retained earnings generated by the government securities strategy.
The appointment of James Macharia as chairman in October 2025 was widely interpreted by market observers as a signal that the bank intended to shift its lending strategy toward larger corporate and institutional mandates, drawing on his experience at NIC Bank, where he oversaw the lender’s expansion into Tanzania and Uganda.
The board’s composition, now featuring an economics professor, a global accounting firm partner, and a former Cabinet Secretary with extensive public sector connections, reflects an institution positioning itself for a qualitatively different tier of business.
Regulators Silent, Opposition Intensifies
The Central Bank of Kenya did not respond to requests for comment on whether it intended to act on Cofek’s petition.
The NSSF did not respond to queries about why it shifted the bulk of its 2024 term deposits to Sidian, a bank with which it had no prior relationship, at a time when it was simultaneously cutting its overall term deposit exposure by more than three-quarters.
The Social Health Authority has maintained that its selection of collection agents followed consultations with employers about preferred payment channels. Nairobi County has stood by Governor Sakaja’s assertion that the bank selection followed a competitive process in which Sidian offered the most favourable terms.
Mr Mutoro said Cofek would pursue the matter through parliamentary oversight channels if the CBK failed to act on the petition. He said the organisation was in contact with members of the National Assembly’s Finance and National Planning Committee, as well as with senators who had already raised questions about the Nairobi County mandate.
“We are not making accusations without evidence. The evidence is in the bank’s own financial statements and in the public procurement records,” he said. “What we are asking for is an independent, transparent inquiry into how a small bank with a marginal market share became the preferred repository for billions in public money in the span of two years.”
Sidian Bank declined to comment on Mr Mutoro’s call for a CBK investigation.
A source close to the bank, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described Cofek’s allegations as unfounded and motivated by political considerations, without elaborating on what those considerations might be.
What Regulatory Standards Require
The Banking Act and the CBK’s prudential guidelines impose specific obligations on the regulator when a bank undergoes growth of the magnitude Sidian has experienced.
The guidelines on liquidity risk management require institutions to stress-test their funding structures against scenarios in which large institutional depositors withdraw funds simultaneously, a risk that is acutely relevant for a bank whose deposit base has tripled on the back of a small number of state-linked relationships.
The concentration risk provisions further require banks to monitor and limit excessive dependence on single depositors or categories of depositors.
Sidian’s liquidity ratio, at 69 per cent in the first quarter of 2025, was well above the 20 per cent regulatory minimum, suggesting the bank was managing the excess liquidity through its government securities strategy rather than extending credit.
The core capital adequacy ratio of 12.4 per cent against a minimum of 10.5 per cent indicated the bank remained within prudential bounds.
But the question Mr Mutoro and other critics are raising is not whether Sidian is presently solvent.
It is whether the process by which public funds were allocated to it was transparent, competitive, and consistent with the Public Finance Management Act’s requirements for the banking of public money.
SIDIAN BANK: KEY FINANCIAL INDICATORS 2025
Net profit: Sh1.73 billion (up 502% from Sh287 million in 2024)
Total assets: Sh90.8 billion (up 51% from Sh60.2 billion)
Customer deposits: Sh72.3 billion (up 63% from Sh44.38 billion)
Net loans and advances: Sh27.53 billion (up 10.8%)
Government securities portfolio: Sh48.6 billion (September 2025)
Net interest income: Sh4.43 billion (up 54.6%)
Non-interest income: Sh3.8 billion (up 129%)
Shareholders’ funds: Sh9.72 billion (up 41.1%)
CBK classification: Tier 2 (reclassified from Tier 3 in September 2025)
Branch network: 47 branches (target: 100+)
SIDIAN BANK: PRINCIPAL SHAREHOLDERS (as at March 2026)
Kenya Airways has long been a repository of broken promises. Since the carrier last sustained a full year of profit in 2012, it has accumulated more than Sh172 billion in net losses, absorbed successive government bailouts drawn from taxpayer funds, cycled through chief executives, and lurched between restructuring plans bearing the kind of names that inspire confidence at board level but rarely at the bottom line. Kifaru. Project Kifaru.
The Pride of Africa. Each iteration repackages the same painful truth: that the national carrier remains one of the most financially distressed airlines on the continent, propped up by state patronage and perpetually one crisis away from catastrophe.
The audited group results for the year ended December 31, 2025, published this Tuesday morning, confirm what investors and aviation analysts had quietly accepted since August last year: the one glimmer of profitability that made Kenya Airways the brief darling of Nairobi Securities Exchange watchers is gone.
The airline recorded a net loss of Sh17.2 billion in 2025, a savage reversal from the Sh5.4 billion profit posted in 2024 that management had trumpeted as the carrier’s first net profit in over eleven years. Total income collapsed from Sh188.5 billion to Sh161.47 billion.
The airline’s operating loss stood at Sh5.61 billion, against an operating profit of Sh16.62 billion the previous year.
Finance costs alone consumed Sh12.4 billion, dwarfing the paltry Sh79 million in interest income and producing a loss before tax of Sh17.93 billion. After a tax credit of Sh764 million, the net loss attributable to shareholders was Sh17.13 billion. Total comprehensive loss for the year reached Sh13.81 billion.
It is a set of numbers that should horrify any board of directors. And yet, against the backdrop of what Kenya Airways has endured across the past decade and a half, it lands with a peculiar, wearying familiarity.
A Decade of Ruin, a Flicker of Light
The story of Kenya Airways’ financial decline is by now a well-worn narrative in Kenyan business journalism, but its scale bears repeating. The carrier’s accumulated net losses from 2013 to 2022 exceeded Sh172 billion.
In financial year 2022 alone, the airline posted a loss of Sh38.26 billion, the tenth consecutive year in which the once-celebrated airline had delivered red ink to its shareholders. The trajectory was not merely bad. It was catastrophic. By 2023, equity had fallen to negative Sh138.1 billion. The airline’s shareholders had long ceased to own anything of value.
Yet something unexpected happened. Under the stewardship of Allan Kilavuka, who took the helm in April 2020 at the nadir of the global pandemic, the airline embarked on a structural reset it called Project Kifaru.
The three-stage plan, launched in 2021, converted aircraft to cargo operations, diversified revenue beyond passenger traffic, renegotiated lease agreements, and enforced a stringent regime of cost control.
Kilavuka, a former General Electric executive who had spent years understanding balance sheets before ever running an airline, pursued the debt restructuring with uncommon discipline. In 2023, Kenya Airways converted 85 percent of its foreign-currency debt into shilling-denominated loans, a move that dramatically curtailed the foreign exchange losses that had ravaged prior years. The 2023 full year results delivered an operating profit of Sh10.5 billion, a 287 percent improvement over the prior year, and the first operating profit in six years.
Then, in March 2025, Kilavuka announced what no Kenya Airways chief executive had been able to say since 2012: the airline had turned a net profit.
At Sh5.4 billion, the figure was modest against the scale of accumulated losses and deeply negative equity, which had improved but still stood at negative Sh118.2 billion by year-end 2024.
A stronger Kenyan shilling provided Sh10.55 billion in foreign exchange gains against a Sh15.04 billion forex loss the previous year. Cargo revenues had risen sharply. Passenger numbers reached 5.2 million.
EBITDA margin hit 20 percent, above the industry average of 17 percent. The airline carried more freight and more passengers than at any point in its history. Kilavuka declared Kenya Airways no longer merely an airline in recovery, but an airline in ascent. The board extended his contract. The press called it a miracle.
It lasted one year.
Dreamliners Become Nightmares
The mechanism of Kenya Airways’ return to loss is brutally specific. The airline operates nine Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft, its entire wide-body fleet and the backbone of its long-haul operations to Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East.
These nine jets, averaging just over ten years in service and all powered by General Electric GEnx-1B engines, are the aircraft that fly to London, Paris, New York and Amsterdam. They are the planes on which Kenya Airways generates the yield that sustains everything else.
Beginning in late 2024 and accelerating through the first quarter of 2025, a global shortage of spare engine parts caused the maintenance overhaul timelines for GEnx-1B engines to balloon. Overhauls that had previously taken sixty days began taking ninety to one hundred and twenty days.
Kenya Airways found itself unable to return aircraft from maintenance on schedule. By the time the first-half results were published in August 2025, three of its nine Dreamliners, a full third of the wide-body fleet, were on the ground.
The aircraft are 5Y-KZA, named The Great Rift Valley, one of the oldest in the fleet and grounded in Nairobi; 5Y-KZC; and 5Y-KZH. Capacity dropped 16 percent year-on-year. Available seat kilometres fell from 7,991 million to 6,715 million.
Passenger numbers fell 14 percent. Revenue for the first half of 2025 alone came in at Sh75 billion, a 19 percent decline against the Sh91 billion recorded in the same period of 2024.
Kenya Airways is not alone in suffering from this malaise. British Airways has made repeated changes to its 787 schedule. Air New Zealand grounded units of its own Dreamliner fleet. Vietnam Airlines reported maintenance overruns of more than 30 days beyond contracted timelines.
The crisis is an industry-wide indictment of a global aviation supply chain still unwinding from the dislocations of the Covid-19 pandemic. For airlines with large, diversified fleets and deep pockets, the grounding of a handful of widebodies is a manageable irritant.
For Kenya Airways, with its slim fleet, its precarious capital structure and its still-negative equity, the loss of one-third of its long-haul capacity was existential in impact.
By November 2025, the airline had issued a formal profit warning, telling investors that full-year 2025 earnings would fall by at least 25 percent against 2024.
That estimate, it now emerges, was optimistic. The audited results reveal a swing from a Sh5.4 billion profit to a Sh17.2 billion loss. One aircraft returned from maintenance in July 2025.
The remaining two remained grounded through the full financial year. Fleet ownership costs rose 29 percent as lease remeasurements bit. Operating costs fell slightly to Sh167.08 billion from Sh171.87 billion as the airline scaled back flying, but the revenue collapse overwhelmed any cost savings.
It is the mathematics of a company running on thin ice that simply could not replace the income it had lost.
A CEO Departs, a Vacuum Opens
The financial collapse of 2025 was not the only turbulence Kenya Airways absorbed. In December of that year, Allan Kilavuka exited the airline, proceeding on terminal leave ahead of the formal expiry of his contract on March 31, 2026. It was a muted departure for the man credited with engineering the carrier’s brief return to profit
The board appointed Captain George Kamal, the airline’s chief operating officer, as acting group managing director and CEO effective December 16, 2025.
Kamal is an experienced aviation executive with nearly three decades in the industry, having held senior roles at Etihad Airways, Air Arabia and Iraqi Airways, where he was chief operations and executive officer.
He holds a doctorate in business administration and an MSc in aviation management. He is not, however, a permanent appointment.
The search for a substantive successor to Kilavuka was ongoing at the time the 2025 full-year results landed. The leadership vacuum is compounded by a separate governance gap at board level: Michael Joseph, who chaired the Kenya Airways board, retired in June 2025 and has not been replaced.
Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi acknowledged in December that the government was focused on filling both positions before advancing the search for a strategic investor.
The sequencing tells its own story about where Kenya Airways stands. An airline seeking a strategic partner to inject capital into its deeply negative balance sheet must do so simultaneously while finding new permanent leadership and reconstituting its board. It is a demanding set of tasks under ideal conditions. Under current conditions, it constitutes a governance crisis that no amount of buoyant load factor data can fully obscure.
The Middle East Windfall
And yet, on the very morning that Kenya Airways released the worst results in recent memory, acting chief executive George Kamal stood before reporters in Nairobi to announce something quite different: demand for seats on the airline’s flights is surging, and the reason is war.
The US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which escalated dramatically with strikes against Iranian territory on February 28, 2026, has redrawn the global aviation map.
Middle Eastern carriers, among the most powerful in the world, have been thrown into operational chaos. Emirates, operating out of Dubai, fell to roughly three-quarters of its pre-conflict capacity. Flydubai was running at approximately a third.
Qatar Airways, which had built much of its transcontinental dominance on its Doha hub, was operating at around 20 percent of normal levels. More than 20,000 flights were cancelled across the region in the immediate aftermath of the strikes.
Airports in the Gulf that serve as critical transit nodes for traffic between Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas were disrupted at a scale not seen since the pandemic.
Kenya Airways, whose network routes through Nairobi rather than any Middle Eastern hub, found itself in an unexpected position of competitive advantage. Passengers who would ordinarily transit through Dubai, Doha or Abu Dhabi on the way between Europe and East or Southern Africa began seeking alternatives.
The airline’s seat load factor, which had averaged 70 percent as recently as January 2026, climbed rapidly from February onward. By the time Kamal addressed reporters on March 23, it had reached between 90 and 99 percent on some routes. The gains are concentrated on the airline’s most valuable corridors: Europe, the United States and Asia.
The airline is planning to add flights on a number of routes in response to the demand surge. It is sourcing additional jet fuel from India, with its flight operations head Paul Njoroge disclosing that the airline currently holds approximately 56 days of supply.
The Iran conflict has also driven up global oil prices, adding Brent crude costs that will filter into operating expenses in the months ahead. At Sh12,950 per barrel as of this week, fuel is a growing concern.
But for an airline with planes flying at near-maximum capacity after a year in which those same planes sat half-empty on thinned-out long-haul schedules, full aircraft in 2026 represent a potentially transformative revenue opportunity.
The irony is not lost on analysts watching the stock. Kenya Airways has spent the past twelve months haemorrhaging income because its aircraft were on the ground.
The Iran war has generated demand that the airline can, for the first time in a difficult period, actually meet, because by March 2026 its Dreamliner fleet has been progressively restored to service. One aircraft returned in July 2025. The other two returned later in the second half of the year.
The full-year results thus reflect a period in which the revenue damage was done before the capacity was recovered, a cruel timing mismatch that will not be lost on the new acting CEO.
The Balance Sheet That Never Heals
Behind the demand surge, the underlying financial architecture of Kenya Airways remains deeply alarming. Despite the Sh5.4 billion profit of 2024, the airline’s equity position had improved only marginally to negative Sh118.2 billion.
The 2025 loss of Sh17.13 billion attributable to shareholders will push that figure deeper into negative territory when the 2025 balance sheet is fully analysed.
Total comprehensive loss for 2025 was Sh13.81 billion. The airline’s basic loss per share was Sh2.94, against basic earnings per share of Sh0.95 in 2024. The trajectory is a reminder that a single profitable year, however celebrated, does not reverse twelve years of structural destruction.
The airline’s recapitalisation plan remains the missing centrepiece of any credible recovery narrative.
Management has articulated a target of raising approximately $500 million by early 2026 to expand the fleet from its current base to more than 50 aircraft over five years, to retire the aging Embraer 190s that serve as the workhorses of regional operations, and to bring in Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft.
The government, which holds a 49 percent stake, has been working with National Treasury on plans to convert a portion of novated government debt into equity to make room for a strategic investor without diluting the state beyond acceptable political limits. That investor has not materialised.
The leadership gaps have, in the Treasury’s own words, complicated the process. The $500 million target may require recalibration against a balance sheet that has just deteriorated by more than Sh17 billion in a single year.
What the Iran conflict cannot fix is the fundamental equation facing Kenya Airways: that it operates a small fleet on a continent with limited aviation infrastructure, with a capital base that is deeply negative, a fuel bill that is rising, engine maintenance costs that remain elevated, and a governance structure that is in transition at precisely the moment it most needs stability.
The load factors of March 2026 are real. The revenue they generate is real. But the airline’s finance costs were Sh12.4 billion in 2025, and that number does not diminish because passengers are fleeing a war.
The Wider Diagnosis
Kenya Airways’ story is not merely the story of one airline. It is the story of African aviation’s structural condition.
The continent’s carriers operate older fleets, face higher maintenance costs because the continent lacks major MRO capability, service their dollar-denominated debt with currencies that are chronically weak, and compete on long-haul routes against state-subsidised behemoths in the Gulf, East Asia and Europe.
When those Gulf carriers are grounded by war, the mathematics change briefly and dramatically. When they return to full capacity, as they inevitably will, the structural pressures return with them.
Allan Kilavuka, who built the most credible recovery Kenya Airways has seen in over a decade, was fond of pointing out that the airline’s EBITDA margin in its best year was competitive with global industry averages. He was correct.
But EBITDA margin measured against revenues does not pay down negative equity of Sh118 billion. It does not retire dollar-denominated debt. It does not replace a fleet whose average age is climbing.
And it does not survive a year in which a third of your most important aircraft are on the ground because a supply chain for engine components, disrupted first by a pandemic and then by years of underinvestment, has not recovered.
George Kamal inherits an airline that is flying full today, losing heavily on paper, and searching for money, leadership and a strategic direction simultaneously.
The Pride of Africa has been here before. The question is whether the Iran war’s unexpected dividend can be converted into something more durable than the one-year miracle that preceded it.
Kenya Airways (KQ) is listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. The airline’s 2025 audited group results were published on March 24, 2026. All figures in Kenya shillings unless otherwise stated.
A freshly dug grave in the red soil of Kositei, Tiaty, received the body of 13-year-old Bill Lorupe Ballot Kassait on Monday, March 23, 2026. But it was not grief alone that hung over those hills in Baringo County. It was fury. And that fury, directed squarely at Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital in Muthaiga, came from the boy’s father — outspoken Tiaty Member of Parliament William Kamket — in a graveside declaration that has since exploded into national controversy.
Standing before a crowd of mourners, MPs and church choirs dressed in white at the requiem mass, a visibly shaken Kamket said what many grieving Kenyan parents have felt but rarely had the platform or the political capital to say aloud.
He accused the hospital of administering medication to his son before conducting proper diagnostic tests, of failing to carry out a critical chest X-ray in a timely manner, and of allowing a window of clinical inaction during which the boy’s condition likely became irreversible. “Doctors are being careless; it has become a business, not treatment,” the legislator declared. “I will talk with regulators. I will talk with the government.”
His son, known affectionately as Ballot, died at approximately 8 a.m. on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, reportedly from pneumonia complications — a diagnosis that Kamket says should have been identified far sooner. Bill had a documented history of asthma, a condition that renders pneumonia particularly lethal, and had reportedly developed breathing difficulties over the previous weekend before being admitted to Gertrude’s flagship Muthaiga facility.
The MP’s wife, Kenya’s inaugural Data Protection Commissioner Immaculate Kassait, spoke at a separate memorial held at the Shrine of Mary Help of Christians at Don Bosco Catholic Church in Upper Hill. Her account added devastating emotional context to her husband’s clinical accusations.
As the boy was being wheeled into the intensive care unit, his last words to his mother were: “Mum, I love you.” The day before he died, she said, he had asked her: “Mum, will I make it? Mum, am I dying?” She found herself unable to answer. Within hours, she no longer had to.
“That Is My Question As Parents Here In Gertrude’s Hospital”
In his roughly three-minute graveside speech, Kamket posed a pointed question that has since circulated widely on social media: “Why did it take so long for an X-ray to be conducted?” He claimed that while a chest X-ray was purportedly completed at 9 a.m., the results were not acted upon promptly, a delay he believes cost his son his life.
Kamket further alleged that doctors began administering treatment before basic tests had been run — a practice that, he argued, amounted to diagnostic recklessness in a child presenting with respiratory distress and a pre-existing asthma history. “Be very careful,” he told the mourners, many of them Nairobi parents who had made the journey to Tiaty for the burial. “There are a lot of parents here in Nairobi and I am talking from the worst experience.”
He pledged to escalate the matter to Parliament and to engage health regulators, vowing to speak on behalf of those who “cannot and are suffering in silence.” The implicit acknowledgement was sharp: only his public stature ensured his complaint would receive a hearing that thousands of Kenyan families never get.
National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang’ula, who was present at the burial and conveyed condolences from President William Ruto, pledged to dedicate one sitting hour when Parliament resumed to eulogise the boy. As of press time, Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital had issued no public response to the specific allegations raised by Kamket. An earlier report noted the facility denied claims that it had detained the boy’s body over unpaid bills before repatriation.
Bill Ballot Kassait was born in August 2011, during the period his mother was serving at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission overseeing voter registration — hence his middle name, a tribute to democracy. His siblings described him as the youngest of them all but with the biggest presence. Teachers at the Aga Khan Academy, where he studied, remembered a dedicated student with a passion for the Japanese language and a faith-rooted confidence that drew peers and teachers alike to him. He was 13 years old.
A Hospital With a History: Past Negligence Accusations At Gertrude’s
Kamket’s accusations do not fall into a vacuum. Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital, established in 1947 and widely marketed as the most established paediatric facility in Eastern and Central Africa — the first in Sub-Saharan Africa to earn accreditation from the United States-based Joint Commission International — has in fact accumulated a significant legal and disciplinary record that the hospital’s polished branding has consistently obscured.
The most striking precedent dates to 2008, when a 10-year-old named Master Leroy Rapenda Odundo was first taken to the Othaya Road clinic of Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital following a trip to Siaya County, where malaria is endemic. Leroy was subsequently admitted to the hospital’s Muthaiga flagship. His condition worsened during his stay; he was eventually transferred to Aga Khan Hospital on September 6, 2008, where he died. What followed was a protracted disciplinary saga that dragged the hospital by name before the Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board Tribunal.
The tribunal found Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital guilty and ordered the institution to put in place proper systems, including the employment of an adequate number of specialist paediatricians available on a 24-hour call-cover basis. A senior doctor at the hospital was found to have put in place “inappropriate systems of work” that contributed to the child’s death. Among the disturbing facts that emerged at the proceedings was evidence that quinine, a key malaria treatment drug, was not available at Gertrude’s during the earlier period of Leroy’s treatment.
The tribunal’s indictment of the hospital, however, was later overturned on appeal by the High Court, which found that the proceedings against Gertrude’s as an institution were procedurally defective because the hospital had not been formally charged nor given the opportunity to appear and defend itself. Critically, the High Court’s intervention was on grounds of procedural fairness, not a finding that no negligence occurred. The civil suit filed by Leroy’s father, James Odundo, against both the doctor and Gertrude’s, proceeded separately and turned on the same factual claims.
In a further negligence-adjacent matter, the Kenya Law database reflects an appeal filed in 2019 — Amadiva v Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital and Two Others (Civil Appeal 177 of 2019) — in which a complainant sought to pursue claims against the hospital. The appeal was dismissed for want of prosecution by 2025, not on its merits, after the applicant failed to advance it despite the passage of six years, a pattern that lawyers who represent patients in negligence claims say is distressingly common. Families run out of money, will, or legal support long before institutions with deep pockets and experienced legal teams exhaust their options.
Online reviews and consumer feedback platforms also paint a picture inconsistent with Gertrude’s international accreditation.
Multiple parents have described alarming encounters with clinical errors at its satellite facilities. One account described a six-month-old baby being prescribed five medicines after a visit, three of which contained allergens that the parent had flagged on every prior hospital visit. When the infant broke out in a severe rash and the parent returned for a review, a different doctor at the facility proposed a hydrocortisone injection at double the medically recommended dose for the child’s age. At the hospital’s Nairobi West branch, reviewers have cited waits of over an hour for emergency consultations involving children with actively bleeding injuries. Such accounts are anecdotal, but they accumulate.
The Broader Collapse: Kenya’s Medical Negligence Crisis
What the Kamket case has ignited is a deeper and more disturbing national conversation about whether Kenya’s private healthcare sector has made accountability structurally impossible for ordinary families. As a legislator married to the country’s Data Commissioner, William Kamket possesses social and political capital that most Kenyan parents never will. His graveside speech reached millions within hours. For the grieving mother in Kisumu whose child died after a misdiagnosed respiratory infection, or the father in Mombasa fighting a hospital over a botched surgical procedure, the path to justice is profoundly different.
Kenya’s courts have in recent years seen a sharp increase in medical negligence litigation, with landmark awards signalling a judiciary increasingly willing to hold health institutions to account.
In June 2025, the High Court awarded Naila Qureshi Ksh157 million in a negligence case against Aga Khan University Hospital, in a ruling that established critical new standards for informed consent and institutional accountability in Kenya. In December 2025, the High Court ordered Ladnan Hospital to pay Sh3 million to a woman whose ovaries were removed without her consent during a separate procedure, in a ruling that legal advocates described as a watershed for patient rights.
The court found that performing surgery beyond the scope of a patient’s consent violates foundational principles of Kenyan medical ethics and constitutional rights to dignity.
The Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board has, since 1997, received at least 985 recorded complaints of medical negligence — a figure analysts believe represents a fraction of actual incidents, as the majority of families never file a formal complaint, lack knowledge of their rights, or cannot afford the years-long legal battle that follows.
In February 2025, a High Court judge called on the Attorney-General, the Kenya Law Reform Commission, and the Health Principal Secretary to urgently review the Medical Practitioners and Dentists Act after finding it structurally incapable of disciplining hospitals as institutions. The judge noted that many patients had died in the custody and care of hospitals that could not be formally disciplined under existing law, because the Act’s provisions applied primarily to individual practitioners rather than institutional actors.
That legislative gap is precisely the architecture that has shielded institutions like Gertrude’s from sustained accountability in the past. The Quality Healthcare and Patient Safety Bill 2025, currently before Parliament, proposes fines of up to Ksh50 million and jail terms of up to 10 years for gross negligence, but it remains the subject of fierce opposition from medical professional unions who argue it concentrates regulatory power in ways that threaten both clinical independence and patient safety.
What Kamket’s Fight Could Mean
The MP’s threat to take this to Parliament is not idle bluster. He serves as vice-chair of the National Assembly’s Justice and Legal Affairs Committee, placing him strategically within striking distance of the legislative levers that govern health regulation. His political proximity to the Ruto administration, having aligned himself with Kenya Kwanza after years on the Azimio side, also gives him access to executive ear that opposition figures routinely lack.
Should Kamket follow through on his pledges and trigger a parliamentary inquiry into clinical standards at Gertrude’s, it would be the most significant political scrutiny the institution has faced in its 78-year history. The hospital’s JCI accreditation and its status as a not-for-profit institution have long insulated it from the kind of reputational damage that profit-driven hospitals face. An MP-driven investigation, especially one backed by the emotional gravity of a child’s death, could crack that insulation in ways no previous legal case has managed.
For the moment, the story remains unresolved at almost every level. No independent medical review of Bill Ballot Kassait’s treatment has been publicly announced. The Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board has not confirmed whether a complaint has been lodged. Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital has said nothing. And in Kositei, the family is still burying a child who, by his siblings’ account, was the youngest of them but carried the biggest presence. His older brother, assigned as his guardian after finishing high school, had been tasked with driving Bill to school and to hospital. He found himself doing the latter for the last time on the morning of March 17, 2026.
As the political and regulatory battle begins to take shape, one question posed at the graveside by a grieving father remains unanswered: why did it take so long?
The most dangerous revelation to emerge from the arrest of former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju on Monday was not that the DCI believes he faked his own disappearance.
It was the casual, almost incidental manner in which DCI Director Mohammed Amin disclosed that investigators had obtained precise, timestamped phone location data on a sitting Kenyan citizen — within hours of a missing person report — without producing a single piece of paper showing a court had authorised it.
That disclosure, buried inside a press briefing designed to humiliate Tuju, has detonated a far larger conversation about Safaricom’s role as what critics are now openly calling the intelligence arm of the Kenyan state — a company that tracks, traces and hands over subscriber data to security agencies on demand, constitution and data protection law notwithstanding.
By Monday evening, the debate had acquired a human face: Tuju, a man who underwent spinal surgery in 2020 with metal plates inserted into his vertebrae, was sitting on a plastic chair inside Karen Police Station in visible agony.
Doctors from Karen Hospital were crouched around him. His lawyers said officers had been given strict orders from above not to allow him to be transferred to a proper medical facility.
Tuju getting medical attention from the police station as his condition deteriorated.
Outside the gate, Wiper Patriotic Front leader Kalonzo Musyoka, former Attorney General Justin Muturi, DAP-K leader Eugene Wamalwa, Senator Dan Maanzo and constitutional scholar PLO Lumumba had planted themselves and were not moving.
WHAT THE DCI REVEALED — AND WHAT HE DID NOT
Amin’s press briefing was intended to be a moment of institutional triumph. Instead it handed Tuju’s lawyers, the Law Society of Kenya, and privacy campaigners the single most incriminating public statement yet made by a Kenyan security chief about the telco-state surveillance pipeline.
Standing before cameras at DCI headquarters, Amin announced that forensic analysis had established, without an iota of doubt, that Tuju had never left his Mwitu Drive Karen residence during the entire period of his reported disappearance. Investigators knew, the DCI boss said, that Tuju’s phone was switched off at exactly 18:18 hours on Saturday, March 21 — and that at the moment it went dark, the device was inside his compound.
That is not information a police officer deduces from observation. That is telecommunications data: call detail records and cell tower triangulation, held exclusively by Safaricom as the network operator, tied to Tuju’s registered SIM. Obtaining it in real time, within hours of a missing person report being filed, requires — under Section 31 of Kenya’s Data Protection Act and Article 31 of the Constitution — a court order or equivalent judicial authorisation. Amin mentioned no such order. None has been produced. None has been shown to Tuju’s legal team. None has been cited in any subsequent police document.
Safaricom did not issue a statement. It has not been asked by any official body to explain the basis on which it released the data. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, which has jurisdiction over exactly this type of alleged breach, had also not commented as of Monday evening.
‘DCI-SAFARICOM AXIS OF EVIL’
On X, hundreds of posts made the connection within minutes of Amin’s briefing airing on Citizen TV. One widely shared post stated: “DCI chief confirming that Safaricom gave them all access to track, trace, dox and geolocate Tuju’s phone number, including the exact time it was switched off. DCI didn’t get a court order. DCI-Safaricom axis of evil.” Another, rephrasing the legal concern in starker terms, read: “What the DCI is conveying is that Safaricom, without authorisation from Tuju, provided Tuju’s private information to the DCI to track his whereabouts. Safaricom is a government entity that is putting vulnerable Kenyan citizens at risk.”
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Legal observers pointed out a detail that sharpened the concern considerably: Amin stated that investigators had simultaneously sought a court-sanctioned search warrant to enter Tuju’s compound after the family denied them access. That warrant application confirms investigators knew they needed judicial authority to enter a building. They appear to have formed no equivalent view about obtaining the telecommunications data that told them what was inside it.
THE COURTS HAVE ALREADY HEARD THIS STORY
The Tuju case has arrived at the worst possible moment for Safaricom’s public position. Its long-standing assurance that subscriber data is only released on receipt of a valid court order has been contradicted, in open court, by one of its own employees.
In February 2026, Moi University student David Ooga Mokaya was acquitted by Nairobi magistrate Caroline Nyaguthi after a Safaricom employee, Daniel Hamisi, testified that a senior DCI officer, Michael K. Sang, had obtained Mokaya’s subscriber details, call records and precise location data in November 2024 by writing a letter. No court order.
When defence counsel Ian Mutiso asked the DCI officer whether he knew judicial authorisation was required, the officer admitted he did not know. Mokaya, whose life was effectively derailed by a prosecution built on unlawfully obtained data, is now suing Safaricom for Sh200 million in damages. A High Court restraining order bars the telco from sharing his data further, with the matter set for mention on March 30.
The Law Society of Kenya last week moved to scale that individual case into a systemic constitutional reckoning. Its petition, filed in the Milimani Constitutional and Human Rights Division, names Safaricom, the DCI, the Inspector General of Police, the DPP, the National Forensic Lab and Kenya Power as respondents.
The LSK alleges an organised conspiracy to illegally surveil Kenyan citizens, drawing a direct line from Mokaya’s case to the mass surveillance of Gen-Z protesters during the 2024 demonstrations. The petition demands a court-supervised audit of every data request the DCI made to Safaricom between June 2024 and December 2025, a formal apology published in national newspapers for fourteen consecutive days, the expungement of charges against anyone prosecuted on illegally obtained data, and the establishment of a Victims Compensation Fund.
Earlier investigations by human rights organisations had alleged that Safaricom maintained a near-real-time backend access arrangement with security agencies, and that this pipeline had been linked directly to enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.
Safaricom has never publicly addressed those specific allegations. On Monday, March 24 — the same day Tuju was arrested on the basis of data its network provided — the company quietly announced a new privacy initiative to partially mask phone numbers in M-Pesa transactions as a gesture toward data minimisation. The timing struck most Kenyans following the story as staggering.
THEN THEY BEAT HIM
Tuju had agreed to present himself at Karen Police Station voluntarily, with Kalonzo driving him there personally. What unfolded after his arrival is contested in its characterisation but documented in its consequences.
Lawyer Ndegwa Njiru told journalists that officers moved to force Tuju into a waiting Subaru before a single entry had been made in the Occurrence Book and before any charge had been communicated to the defence. “Even before he started going into the OB, they started pushing him into a Subaru,” Njiru said. “That was not an arrest. Were it not for our presence, we would have been talking about something else. That was serious violence.”
Tuju being whisked away by police officers from his Karen home accompanied by his lawyer Njiru.
The violence struck directly at a catastrophic pre-existing injury. Tuju underwent spinal surgery in 2020 following a near-fatal road accident; metal plates were inserted into his vertebrae during the procedure. A doctor at the scene told officers that three discs had been affected by the way he was handled during the arrest and that moving him without a full medical assessment risked gravely worsening his condition. He required a stretcher. He was instead kept on a plastic chair inside the station. His blood sugar levels, sources said by Monday evening, were fluctuating. His overall condition was described as deteriorating.
Kalonzo did not mince words. “I personally drove him to Karen Police Station to record a statement in good faith, in the spirit of due process. What followed was unacceptable. Tuju was carried away in a manner that no Kenyan, indeed no human being, should ever experience,” he said. When asked why a man with documented spinal injuries and worsening vital signs could not be transferred to hospital, a senior police officer at the station delivered the answer that has since been shared across social media thousands of times: “This is a matter under orders from above. We are following instructions and cannot release him at this time.”
SECTION 129: THE CHARGE BEING READIED
If prosecutors proceed, the charge will be brought under Section 129 of the Penal Code, which makes it a misdemeanour — punishable by up to three years in prison — to give a public officer information one knows or believes to be false. To secure a conviction, the state must prove that the information Tuju provided was false, that he knew or believed it to be false when he gave it, and that it caused officers to act on it. The DCI has already established the third limb: plainclothes detectives were deployed, forensic teams were mobilised, and a court-sanctioned search warrant was sought — all triggered by the family’s missing person report.
Tuju’s defence dismantles the first two. He reported a genuine threat to his safety at Karen Police Station on Friday, March 20, the day before his disappearance, logging it under OB 21/21/03/2026.
He told reporters the same unregistered white Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Series he had reported on Friday reappeared behind him on Saturday evening as he was heading to record a Ramogi FM interview. He turned onto Nandi Road, lost the tail, abandoned his vehicle on Miotoni Lane, and sought shelter with a family near the Karen-Kiambu border. “I want to thank a family in Kiambu who gave me shelter,” he told journalists.
“They did not care about my tribe. They simply saw me as a human being.” If that account is supported by the family who sheltered him, by CCTV footage from Karen’s roads, or by any corroboration of the vehicle he described, the false-information charge does not survive.
Amin posed a question intended to undermine Tuju’s account: “Why would a mother whose husband has disappeared for the last couple of hours fail to cooperate with the police and share whatever information she had with the investigating officers?” It is a question that cuts both ways. If the family knew Tuju was safe inside the house throughout, their refusal to admit police is inexplicable. If they genuinely did not know where he was, their caution about admitting armed officers in the middle of the night into a home that had already been forcibly entered by over a hundred people ten days earlier is rather easier to understand.
THE PROPERTY SIEGE THAT PRECEDED EVERYTHING
Tuju after being thrown out of his Dari property.
Understanding the full weight of what happened on Monday requires understanding what happened on March 14. On that morning, more than a hundred people arrived before dawn at Dari Business Park in Karen — the property at the centre of Tuju’s decade-long debt dispute with the East African Development Bank.
Some came on motorbikes. The officers who accompanied them covered their faces and, according to Tuju, carried no visible court documentation. Everyone on the premises was evicted. Tuju broadcast the scene live from outside his own gate.
That eviction was the enforcement of an October 2024 auction that sold Dari Business Park and Tamarind Karen to Ultra Eureka Limited, a company controlled by Stabex International chairman Jackson Kiplimo Chebett, for Sh450 million. Tuju has valued the 6.8-acre estate at Sh3.5 billion. The sale resolved a debt that began as a USD 9.1 million loan in 2015, grew to USD 15.1 million by an English High Court judgment in 2019, and has been upheld by every Kenyan court since. On March 9, Justice J.W.W. Mong’are struck out Tuju’s final amended plaint as res judicata, lifted all remaining interim orders, and cleared the way for Ultra Eureka to enforce its title. He filed his police report about being followed five days later. He disappeared ten days after the eviction.
The DCI says the chronology is suspicious. Tuju’s lawyers say it is explanatory.
THE QUESTIONS THAT WILL OUTLAST THIS CASE
Whether Tuju is charged, acquitted, or released without prosecution, Monday has left three questions embedded in Kenya’s public life that will not be dislodged by any single court outcome. The first and most consequential is whether Safaricom is functioning as a real-time intelligence asset for the Kenyan state, releasing location data to the DCI on the basis of written requests alone, in systematic violation of the Data Protection Act, the Constitution, and the rights of every subscriber on its network.
The second is whether the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner — an institution that has shown a new willingness to act in minor commercial cases — has the independence, the resources, and the political protection to pursue that question against the country’s most powerful private company. The third is whether a citizen who presents himself voluntarily to record a statement can be kept in a police station, denied hospital access, denied a formal charge, and held under pain on instructions from unnamed officials above, without any of the legal safeguards the Constitution guarantees.
As this edition went to press, Tuju was still at Karen Police Station. Kalonzo was still at the gate. The doctors were still inside. No charge had been read. No court order authorising the telecommunications data had been produced.
And on X, the same question was being asked — about Tuju, about Mokaya, about the Gen-Z protesters, about everyone whose movements have been mapped and monetised by a system that the Data Protection Act was written to restrain: who gave Safaricom permission to hand over this man’s life, and when?
Safaricom House along Waiyaki Way Nairobi pictured on March 4, 2025. Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation
Kenya woke up on Monday, March 23, to a quiet but unmistakable crisis. Shell-branded Vivo Energy stations along Magadi Road and in Kiserian had been running intermittently dry since Saturday.
The company’s outlet at Kipande House in Nairobi’s central business district exhausted its diesel stocks by morning and expected its petrol supplies to disappear before nightfall.
Across the city, taxi drivers were making five-stop odysseys searching for fuel. Boda boda operators in South B, South C and Nairobi West found nothing. A Westlands-based taxi driver named Steve Wakio told reporters he was forced to abandon his car and borrow a motorcycle to locate a dispensing pump near Wilson Airport.
That same morning, the United Energy and Petroleum Association, the lobby group representing Kenya’s network of independent petroleum dealers, dropped what can only be described as an ultimatum. Through its chairperson Irene Kimathi, UNEPA warned that its members would halt fuel supply nationwide unless the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority reviewed pump prices upward immediately.
The threat was stark. The framing was urgent. And the timing, delivered against the backdrop of the worst global oil supply shock since the 1970s, was carefully chosen.
This story is not simply about a fuel shortage. It is about who is exploiting that shortage, who is being hurt by it, and whether the regulatory architecture of Kenya’s downstream petroleum sector is fit to withstand the kind of geopolitical earthquake currently unfolding in the Middle East.
The War That Started Everything
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a coordinated airstrike campaign targeting military, nuclear and leadership infrastructure inside Iran, including attacks that resulted in the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Iran’s response was immediate and strategically catastrophic for global energy markets. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued prohibitions on vessel passage through the Strait of Hormuz, backed up by missile and drone attacks on commercial shipping. By March 12, Iran had confirmed 21 attacks on merchant vessels.
Tanker traffic through the strait, which in normal times carries roughly 20 percent of global seaborne oil trade, collapsed by approximately 70 percent, with more than 150 ships anchoring outside the chokepoint rather than risk transit.
The numbers are staggering. Brent crude surpassed $100 per barrel on March 8 for the first time in four years. It peaked above $126. By March 23, Brent was trading above $113 per barrel, a jump of more than $40 from the pre-war baseline of roughly $70.
The International Energy Agency, in language it has never previously used, described the situation as the greatest global energy and food security challenge in history.
The IEA’s member countries responded with the largest coordinated release of emergency oil reserves ever recorded, nearly 400 million barrels, equivalent to one-third of total government reserve holdings.
East and southern Africa are disproportionately exposed.
According to CITAC energy consultancy executive director Elitsa Georgieva, approximately 75 percent of the fuel imports consumed by the region originate from the Middle East.
Kenya, which consumes about 100,000 barrels of petroleum products daily and imports 100 percent of its refined fuel requirements, sits at the sharp end of that vulnerability.
The country’s sole refinery at Mombasa has been dormant for years after being shut down on grounds of economic unviability, a decision that left Kenya permanently dependent on refining capacity in the Gulf, India and Southeast Asia. That capacity is now under siege.
“The biggest fuel suppliers to Kenya are rationing product. A few distributors are experiencing stockouts in the villages.” — Martin Chomba, Petroleum Outlets Association of Kenya
Industry insiders speaking to the Daily Nation indicated that one vessel expected to deliver 85 million litres of fuel arrived having loaded only 60 million litres, the shortfall directly attributable to safety concerns during transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
Of approximately 60 vessels expected at Mombasa over a two-week window, only two were carrying petroleum products. The Shimanzi petroleum depot in Mombasa was being warned by fuel transporters of impending stockouts.
Saudi Arabia simultaneously announced reduced crude supply allocations to its Asian refinery clients for April 2026, a second consecutive month of cuts that will squeeze the secondary supply chains India, South Korea and Southeast Asian refiners use to produce the finished petroleum products that Kenya imports.
The G-to-G Deal Under Pressure
Kenya’s primary fuel import mechanism, the government-to-government arrangement originally designed to avert the dollar crisis of 2023, provides the country with a 180-day credit period for purchases from Saudi Aramco, the Emirates National Oil Company and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
The deal was renewed and extended to 2028. It was supposed to represent supply security. Instead, it has become the primary source of anxiety, because all three suppliers have reported attacks on their refining infrastructure since the war began, have experienced facility shutdowns and have begun rationing the cargoes they allocate to importers.
Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi summoned oil marketers for an emergency meeting as early as March 10, assuring the public that Kenya held adequate reserves and that G-to-G contingency planning with Aramco, ADNOC and ENOC was underway.
He said imports had been secured through to the end of April 2026.
However, the situation on the ground contradicted official assurances almost immediately. Petroleum Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban was reduced to issuing a statement through a Member of Parliament’s live television interview on March 23, blaming the apparent shortages on hoarding by oil marketers who were speculating on price increases.
Industry insiders described a market in which wholesalers were refusing to sell to independent dealers at regulated prices, prioritising franchised outlets or simply withholding stock in anticipation of higher margins following the next EPRA price review.
Who is UNEPA, and What Does It Actually Want?
Understanding the UNEPA ultimatum requires understanding what UNEPA represents and what it has been demanding from the regulatory system for years, because this is not the first time Irene Kimathi and the association have threatened fuel supply disruption as a lever against the regulator.
UNEPA is the umbrella body for Kenya’s independent, non-franchised petroleum dealers.
These are the roughly 800 retail outlets operating outside the direct supply networks of multinationals like Vivo Energy, TotalEnergies and Rubis. Independent dealers occupy the bottom rung of the downstream market hierarchy.
They do not import fuel.
They purchase from wholesale Oil Marketing Companies who do, and they retail it to end consumers at EPRA-regulated maximum prices. Their margins, their operating costs and their profitability are all tightly constrained by EPRA’s monthly pricing formula.
The structural grievance is genuine and documented. EPRA’s pricing formula sets both a maximum retail price and an OMC wholesale margin.
For years, independent dealers complained that large oil marketing companies were selling to them at wholesale prices that, once dealer transport and operating costs were added, left margins so thin as to make the business unviable.
A 2022 statement by Kimathi, then serving as Mt Kenya East Petroleum Dealers Association chairperson, captured it plainly: large OMCs were selling to independent dealers at prices near the retail cap in Nairobi, making it impossible for rural dealers who bore additional transport costs to operate profitably.
The complaint was that wholesale price caps, while officially set by EPRA’s formula, were not being enforced in practice against the major suppliers.
EPRA did respond, over time. In March 2025, the regulator implemented the first phase of recommendations from its Cost of Service Study for Petroleum Products, raising OMC operating margins for super petrol from Ksh 12.39 per litre to Ksh 15.24, with comparable increases for diesel and kerosene.
A second phase increase followed in July 2025, producing the largest single pump price spike in over a year.
A third phase increase is scheduled for July 2026. In total, the cost-of-service study identified that combined retail margins should be raised from the then-current Ksh 8.19 per litre to Ksh 12.78, a revision that the IEA Kenya research unit warned could reflect industry self-interest, given that oil marketing companies themselves were key informants in the data collection underpinning the study.
The point is this: the regulated margin for fuel dealers in Kenya has been increasing. EPRA has been responsive to dealer cost pressures. The claim that current prices are unsustainable because margins have not been reviewed since 2019, which Kimathi made in 2022, is factually superseded by the 2025 revisions.
What UNEPA now demands is something categorically different: the suspension of price regulation altogether during the present crisis, to allow market forces to set the pump price at whatever the global disruption dictates. That is not a margin adjustment. That is deregulation by emergency decree.
The retail margin for super petrol was Ksh 12.39 per litre in early 2025. After EPRA’s phased revisions, it stands at over Ksh 15 per litre. The claim that margins have been frozen is false.
The Hoarding Problem: Blackmail or Business Reality?
The government’s own account of what is driving the visible shortage is damning. PS Liban on March 23 explicitly stated that oil marketers are hoarding fuel in anticipation of higher prices.
This is a precise description of speculative inventory behaviour: a dealer acquires or holds stock at current prices, withholds it from the pump, and waits for the regulatory review to set a higher price that will inflate the margin on the withheld volume.
It is not illegal.
It is, however, a manufactured shortage, and it is happening to ordinary Kenyans who need fuel to commute, farm, operate small businesses and access healthcare.
The Star’s spot check on March 23 found Nairobi’s Langata Road, one of the busiest arterial corridors in the capital, with multiple stations either dry or rationing supplies.
Reports from the North Rift indicated that Eldoret, Kitale, Kapsabet, Bungoma and parts of West Pokot had run out of diesel entirely, directly disrupting the planting season for large-scale farmers dependent on diesel-powered machinery.
Across a two-week shipping window at Mombasa, only two of 60 expected vessels were carrying petroleum products. The structural supply problem is real and worsening. The hoarding layer on top of it is a business calculation by dealers who believe EPRA will blink.
UNEPA’s threat to divert fuel to neighbouring countries, where prices are unregulated and therefore more profitable, deserves to be taken seriously not because it is economically easy but because it is legally possible and commercially rational. Kenya’s borders with Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia are not hermetically sealed.
Arbitrage across unregulated markets has occurred before. If a dealer can sell diesel at free-market prices in a neighbouring state and earn a higher margin than the EPRA formula permits in Kenya, the incentive exists. The warning is calibrated.
The EPRA Calculation and Its Defenders
The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority’s decision on March 14 to maintain pump prices at their existing levels for the March to April cycle was not capricious.
EPRA Director General Daniel Kiptoo gave a specific technical explanation: the price review was based on vessels received and discharged between February 10 and March 9, 2026.
Most of those were February-priced cargoes, acquired before Operation Epic Fury began on February 28.
The landed cost data fed into the March formula therefore reflected pre-war pricing. Kiptoo was transparent about this: the impact of the Middle East situation had not yet been reflected in prices.
This means that the current Nairobi pump prices of Sh178.28 for super petrol, Sh166.54 for diesel, and Sh152.78 for kerosene are priced against a world that no longer exists.
The April 15 review, when EPRA calculates prices based on cargoes discharged in the post-war period, will capture the full landed cost shock of crude above $110 per barrel plus dramatically higher shipping insurance premiums.
Dealers know this.
The market knows this. Everyone knows that April 15 will bring a very large price jump, and the UNEPA threat is, at its core, a demand to bring that jump forward now rather than wait three weeks for the formal regulatory process to catch up with reality.
Epra’s timeline is legally defensible but economically awkward. The landed cost of diesel already rose 8.46 percent between January and February 2026, from $586.80 to $636.45 per cubic metre.
Kerosene rose 6.79 percent over the same period.
These were pre-war increases. The March figures, which will underpin the April 15 review, are expected to reflect far more severe increases.
If Brent has averaged above $110 per barrel throughout March while shipping costs and insurance premiums have also spiked, the next pricing cycle will produce a shock that EPRA cannot absorb within the existing formula without either passing it directly to consumers or deploying a fuel subsidy.
The Subsidy Trap and the Sceptics
The government has pledged to subsidise the increase in landed costs. Dealers are openly sceptical, and their scepticism is grounded in recent history.
Kenya’s 2022-2023 fuel subsidy programme accumulated billions of shillings in unpaid claims to dealers, creating a backlog that destroyed the working capital of smaller independent operators.
Kimathi herself described the historical pattern precisely: the government is often unable to refund subsidy claims on time, making it difficult for businesses to operate effectively. Given the current political climate, business people are not prepared to take such risks.
This is not an unreasonable position.
The Sh104 billion Hustler Fund has logged default rates exceeding 50 percent. The Affordable Housing Programme has generated procurement controversies. The SHA health insurance transition haemorrhaged billions in mismanaged funds.
The Kenyan state’s track record for honouring commercial obligations on schedule is poor.
A dealer who accepts regulated prices below their landed cost, on the basis that the government will reimburse the differential, is essentially extending unsecured credit to a state that has demonstrated a structural inability to pay on time.
The risk is not theoretical.
At the same time, the argument that dealers cannot wait three weeks for the April 15 review to formally capture war-era costs deserves scrutiny.
The EPRA formula exists to prevent price shocks from being passed to consumers instantaneously, precisely because immediate price pass-through of global commodity spikes is regressive: it hits the poorest households, who spend the highest proportion of their income on transport and cooking fuel, with the greatest force.
The cost of kerosene, at Sh152.78 per litre, is not an abstraction for households in Kibera, Mathare or Mukuru who use it for cooking.
The Market Structure Problem Nobody Wants to Discuss
There is a deeper problem underneath the immediate crisis that neither UNEPA nor EPRA nor the Ministry of Energy has chosen to address publicly.
Kenya’s downstream petroleum market is an oligopoly at the wholesale level disguised as a competitive retail market. EPRA tracks 144 registered Oil Marketing Companies.
The actual import and wholesale market is controlled by a handful of them. Vivo Energy alone controls 21.34 percent of total sales volume by the regulator’s own December 2024 figures. Rubis holds 15.4 percent. TotalEnergies holds 14.8 percent. The top three OMCs collectively command over 51 percent of the market.
The Open Tender System, through which fuel cargoes are imported and distributed to the downstream market, concentrates power in the hands of whichever OMCs win the tender round.
Independent dealers who are not participants in the Open Tender System purchase from these large importers.
When the large importers choose to ration supply, as they are doing now, independent dealers have nowhere else to go. The UNEPA complaint about large OMCs refusing to sell at regulated prices is a structural market power problem, not simply a crisis-specific phenomenon. The crisis has amplified an existing dysfunction.
Kenya lacks the strategic petroleum reserves that would give the state any leverage in this situation. The National Oil Corporation of Kenya was mandated to maintain a 90-day strategic reserve.
NOCK’s prolonged financial difficulties have prevented it from fulfilling that mandate. Oil marketing companies are legally required to maintain stocks for 20 to 25 days. Most maintain 15 to 18 days of cover.
Kenya entered this crisis structurally underprepared, and the government’s assurances of adequacy are harder to credit against that backdrop.
What Should Actually Happen
The UNEPA demand for immediate price deregulation is dangerous and should be rejected. Deregulating pump prices during a supply shock of this magnitude would not stabilise supply.
It would transfer the full cost of a geopolitical war, a war that ordinary Kenyans had no hand in starting, directly onto the most economically vulnerable consumers in the country.
The 2022-2023 subsidy experience was painful but it prevented the kind of cascading inflation that unregulated fuel pricing during a supply shock would produce. The regulatory floor exists for a reason.
What EPRA should do is initiate an emergency mid-cycle review. The regulator has the legal authority, under Section 101(y) of the Petroleum Act 2019, to adjust its formula parameters. If the landed cost data from March cargoes already reflects war-era pricing, there is no legal or policy reason to wait until April 15 to incorporate it.
An emergency review that reflects actual current landed costs, with a transparent accompanying explanation, would remove the speculative incentive for hoarding and reduce the arbitrage pressure that is driving dealers to consider diverting fuel across borders.
The government’s subsidy pledge needs to be backed by a concrete payment mechanism and timeline, not another vague assurance.
If dealers are expected to absorb temporarily elevated landed costs in exchange for government reimbursement, a ring-fenced payment facility with a defined settlement period, administered through a mechanism independent of the general treasury payment process, is the minimum credible commitment.
The alternative is a repeat of 2022, where small dealers were destroyed by subsidy arrears while large OMCs absorbed the losses and passed them forward.
The hoarding accusation deserves regulatory enforcement, not just a public statement. If EPRA or the Ministry of Energy has evidence that specific OMCs are withholding stocks in anticipation of price increases, the Petroleum Act provides for investigation and sanction.
The Cabinet Secretary has convened emergency meetings. Those meetings should produce legally enforceable undertakings from the major OMCs, not press releases.
The Verdict on UNEPA’s Ultimatum
Is UNEPA’s demand justified? Partially, and on very narrow grounds. The structural complaint about independent dealers being squeezed between regulated retail prices and unregulated wholesale behaviour by dominant OMCs has been a legitimate and documented grievance for years.
The current crisis has intensified that squeeze to breaking point for many small operators.
The claim that the government cannot be trusted to pay subsidy arrears on time is historically accurate.
But the specific demand, suspend price regulation now and let the market set the price, is a different matter entirely. It is a demand that would benefit large OMCs with market power far more than it would benefit the small independent dealers UNEPA claims to represent.
It would immediately raise pump prices for every Kenyan consumer at a moment of maximum economic stress. It would disproportionately harm the rural poor, who have the fewest alternative transport options and the least capacity to absorb inflation. And it is being pressed in a window chosen precisely because the geopolitical crisis makes the government more susceptible to pressure.
The threat to halt supply is, at its core, a negotiating position. It is a demand dressed as a warning. Some of what underlies it is legitimate market distress. Much of it is opportunism, and in the current environment, where matatu fares are already climbing, where North Rift farmers cannot access diesel for planting, and where Nairobi commuters are traversing the city on motorcycles looking for petrol, the opportunism is worth calling out by name.
The Kenyan state, for its part, has no standing to be righteously indignant.
Its failure to build strategic reserves, its refusal to maintain a functioning national refinery, its extension of a G-to-G deal that tied the country’s fuel security to three Gulf suppliers whose refining infrastructure is now under military attack, its tolerance of a wholesale market structure that systematically disadvantages independent dealers, these are the policy failures that made this crisis as dangerous as it is.
EPRA, the Ministry of Energy, the National Treasury, and decades of administrations that treated petroleum infrastructure as a patronage vehicle rather than a strategic asset all bear responsibility for the position Kenya is in today.
Kenya lacks strategic reserves. Its refinery is idle. Its three G-to-G suppliers are under attack. Its OMCs are hoarding. Its dealers are threatening a blackout. The state’s vulnerability is entirely self-inflicted.
What Kenya cannot afford, in the middle of a war-driven supply crisis, is for the downstream petroleum sector to become a theatre of regulatory paralysis and commercial brinkmanship. EPRA must act on its emergency review authority. The government must back its subsidy pledge with a credible payment mechanism.
The large OMCs must be held to their mandatory stock obligations. And UNEPA must understand that the public will remember who chose to manufacture scarcity during a national emergency, regardless of how legitimate the underlying grievance may be.
The pump must flow. That is not a business proposition. It is a public necessity. The regulatory machinery exists to make it so. Whether the people operating that machinery have the courage to use it is now the only question that matters.
Israel believes the United States is likely holding indirect negotiations with Iran’s parliament speaker towards ending the current war, Israeli media reported Monday.
“In Israel, it is estimated that the United States is holding talks with Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf,” said daily Yedioth Ahronoth.
It added, however: “The negotiations are mostly conducted indirectly, and it is unclear whether the Americans are in direct contact with Qalibaf.”
Separately, Israeli public broadcaster KAN, citing an informed Israeli source, said US President Donald Trump’s optimistic statement about alleged US-Iranian talks was “surprising,” stressing that “it is too early to know whether these talks will lead to ending the war.”
Trump said Monday he had ordered a five-day pause on strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure, citing what he called “very good and productive” talks with Tehran over the past two days. Iran has denied any talks are taking place.
Regional escalation has continued to flare since the US and Israel launched a joint offensive on Iran on Feb. 28, so far killing over 1,340 people, including then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Tehran has retaliated with drone and missile strikes targeting Israel, along with Jordan, Iraq, and Gulf countries hosting US military assets, causing casualties and damage to infrastructure while disrupting global markets and aviation.
