Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson denied on Monday holding any talks with the US during the past 24 days, shortly after President Donald Trump said the two sides had found “major points of agreement” in the past few days.
In recent days, friendly countries sent messages indicating that the US had requested talks to end the war, but Iran had not responded, State news agency IRNA quoted the ministry spokesperson as saying.
US President Donald Trump said on Monday he had given instructions to postpone any military strikes against Iranian power plants for five days, just hours ahead of a deadline that threatened further escalation in the conflict now in its fourth week.
Trump said in a post on Truth Social that the US and Iran have had “very good and productive” conversations with Iran over the past two days about a “complete and total resolution of hostilities in the Middle East’.
In his message, written entirely in capital letters, he said he had instructed the defense department to postpone the strikes pending the outcome of current talks.
The price of the Brent crude oil benchmark LCOc1 was down around 7 percent near $104 at 1127 GMT.
On Saturday, Trump had warned that Iranian power plants would be destroyed if Tehran failed to “fully open” the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping within 48 hours. Trump set a deadline of around 7:44 p.m. EDT (2344 GMT) on Monday.
His comments sparked threats of retaliation from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which said in a statement on Monday they would attack Israel’s power plants and those supplying U.S. bases across the Gulf region if Trump followed through with his threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power network.
More than 2,000 people have been killed in the war the US and Israel launched on February 28, which has upended markets, driven up fuel costs, fuelled global inflation fears and convulsed the postwar Western alliance.
The threat of strikes on Gulf electricity grids raised fears of mass disruption to desalination for drinking water, and further rattled oil markets.
March 23 (Reuters) – Leonid Radvinsky, the secretive billionaire owner of OnlyFans who reshaped the porn industry with a subscription model, has died at 43 from cancer, the company said on Monday.
The Ukrainian-American entrepreneur bought Fenix International, the parent company of OnlyFans, from the platform’s British founder Tim Stokely in 2018. He served as a director on Fenix’s board and was its majority shareholder.
Under his ownership, OnlyFans turned from a platform that once avoided explicit content into an adults-only phenomenon with more than 300 million users and over $1 billion in annual revenue, powered by erotic performers and celebrity influencers.
“We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Leo Radvinsky. Leo passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer,” an OnlyFans spokesperson said on Monday.
Radvinsky’s death leaves questions about who will own the platform. His Fenix shares have been held in the LR Fenix Trust since 2024 and he had a net worth of about $4.7 billion, according to the Forbes real-time billionaires list.
Reuters reported in January OnlyFans was exploring the sale of a majority stake to investment firm Architect Capital in a deal valuing the company at about $5.5 billion, including debt.
The platform exploded in popularity during the pandemic as millions of people stuck at home globally turned to the web, fuelling a surge in content and users. OnlyFans takes a 20% fee on most subscriptions and content sold on the platform.
Besides Fenix, Radvinsky also ran Leo, a venture capital fund he founded in 2009 that focuses primarily on investments in technology companies.
The Economist has raised the alarm. Kenya Insights goes further. The sale of the Nation Media Group to Tanzanian billionaire Rostam Azizi is not merely a commercial transaction with uncertain editorial consequences.
It is, on the available evidence, the most structurally dangerous transfer of media power in East African history — timed, whether by design or fortune, to deliver maximum political utility to a Kenyan president fighting for his political survival in 2027.
On March 10, 2026, in the gilded surroundings of the Serena Hotel in Nairobi, two men signed a document that ended 66 years of one of Africa’s most durable institutional arrangements. Sultan Ali Allana, representing the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, handed the keys of Nation Media Group to Rostam Abdulrasul Azizi, Tanzania’s first and most controversial dollar billionaire.
The pen strokes took seconds. Their consequences will unfold across a decade.
NMG is not a media company in the ordinary sense. It is a constitutional fixture. Its Daily Nation, Business Daily, NTV Kenya, The EastAfrican, Uganda’s Daily Monitor, Tanzania’s Mwananchi and The Citizen, and Rwanda Today collectively form the most credible independent information infrastructure in East and Central Africa, reaching over 62 million digital users monthly and thousands more through print and broadcast.
For six decades, that infrastructure was owned by a philanthropic institution — the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development — insulated by both governance design and institutional culture from the transactional pressures of African politics. That insulation is now gone.
In its place stands a man who built his fortune through intimate proximity to power, who resigned from Tanzania’s parliament under the shadow of a corruption scandal that brought down a prime minister, who personally counts among his close associates every sitting head of state in the four countries where NMG operates, and who has a Sh16.8 billion gas plant on the Kenyan coast that depends on continued goodwill from the very government his new newsrooms are supposed to hold to account.
The Economist, in a careful piece published on March 19, noted the conflict of interest with characteristic restraint and asked whether Azizi could deliver on his pledges of editorial independence.
This website — which has reported on Kenya’s political economy, its courts, its regulatory agencies and its media for years — believes the question deserves a blunter answer: the structural conditions for editorial interference are already fully assembled.
Whether Azizi uses them will depend on his character.
But character, history shows, is the least reliable protection any free press has ever had.
THE PRESIDENT AT THE GROUNDBREAKING
Begin with the most conspicuous fact. On February 24, 2023 — five months into William Ruto’s presidency — the head of state personally presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for Azizi’s Taifa Gas liquefied petroleum gas plant at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Mombasa.
Standing beside the Tanzanian tycoon in the coastal heat, Ruto told the assembled crowd: “I know the struggles he has been through to get to this point. The investment should have been done five years ago, but it was delayed due to government shenanigans here in Kenya. I have put that to an end.”
President William Ruto (left) and Taifa Gas Group Chairman Rostam Aziz during the ground-breaking ceremony of the 30,000-tonne plant at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Likoni, Mombasa on February 24, 2023.
The plant — a 30,000-metric-tonne LPG terminal described as the largest private foreign direct investment in Kenya since 1977 — was valued at $130 million.
The Ruto administration had cleared years of regulatory obstruction to make it happen. Azizi’s Taifa Gas was positioned as the vehicle to break the monopoly of Kenya’s domestic gas oligarchy and lower cooking fuel prices, giving the project a powerful populist veneer.
What it also created was a specific, quantifiable financial dependency: Azizi now holds a flagship infrastructure asset on Kenyan soil whose profitability depends on regulatory licensing, port access, energy policy and the goodwill of the executive branch.
Three years later, Azizi owns the newsrooms that cover that same government. The conflict of interest is not theoretical. It is structural, financial and explicit.
Azizi, at a press conference on March 11, attempted to diffuse these concerns by insisting the Taifa Gas permits were obtained under former President Uhuru Kenyatta, not Ruto, and that he maintains relationships with leaders across the political spectrum.
He also invoked his closeness to the late Raila Odinga, who attended his daughter’s wedding in Dar es Salaam.
The deflection, while technically defensible in its narrow framing, misses the material point entirely. The question is not under whose government the permits were issued.
The question is: under whose government the $130 million plant must operate, expand, be relicensed and be protected from competition.
That government is Ruto’s.
That government runs until at least 2027 — and, if its incumbent gets his way, well beyond.
A TELLING COINCIDENCE OF TIMING
Separately — and the word separately is doing significant work here — the Kenyan government moved with unusual urgency in the same week that Azizi’s acquisition was announced to prioritise settlement of a massive Sh410.6 million debt owed specifically to Nation Media Group.
The arrears, accumulated through unpaid MyGov government advertising, had sat unresolved across years of the Ruto administration’s chronic delays in paying media houses.
Budget requests obtained by Kenyan media reveal that settlement of NMG’s debt was elevated to priority status in the same fortnight as the Serena Hotel signing ceremony.
Government sources have offered no formal explanation for the timing. Analysts and NMG insiders who spoke to this newspaper on condition of anonymity described it as, at minimum, a pointed signal.
Whether it constitutes an inducement, a quid pro quo or a fortunate coincidence is, at this stage, a matter for the reader to judge.
What is not in dispute is that a government which The Economist reports makes daily requests to State House to have critical NMG coverage removed suddenly found the money to pay almost half a billion shillings to the group at the precise moment its new owner was taking his seat.
A BILLIONAIRE WHOSE HISTORY SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
Rostam Azizi’s biography is, in the African business tradition, inseparable from politics.
Born in the Tabora region of Tanzania, he was elected to parliament for the Igunga constituency in 1994 as a member of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party.
He served three terms, rising to become CCM National Treasurer and a member of its Central Committee. He served as campaign manager for Jakaya Kikwete’s successful 2005 presidential run — a role in which, revealingly, he took such personal exception to Nation Media Group’s coverage of the candidate that he subsequently sold his stake in the Mwananchi Communications consortium he had co-founded with the Aga Khan’s group, and went out and bought competing media assets instead.
That episode alone — of a media co-owner who exited a shared media venture over unfavourable political coverage of his preferred presidential candidate — should give every NMG journalist and editor serious pause.
It is not a historical abstraction. It is a revealed preference.
When editorial coverage conflicted with his political loyalties in 2005, Azizi voted with his feet. He now controls the newsrooms outright.
Then there is the Richmond scandal.
In 2006, the Tanzanian government awarded an emergency power generation contract to the US-registered Richmond Development Company — bypassing competitive procurement — for the provision of 100 megawatts of diesel generators to the state utility TANESCO.
The contract, valued at approximately TSh172 billion, included a provision guaranteeing payment of $137,000 daily regardless of actual output.
The generators underperformed, arrived late, and Tanzania lost over $120 million on the arrangement.
A parliamentary select committee subsequently found that Richmond’s real proprietors included Prime Minister Edward Lowassa and, in the committee’s own words, “his close friend, Igunga MP Rostam Aziz.” Lowassa resigned. Two ministers resigned. The entire cabinet was dissolved.
Azizi has consistently and strenuously denied wrongdoing. No criminal prosecution followed.
He won a defamation case in 2009 against a Tanzanian newspaper that published the allegations verbatim. But in July 2011, when CCM demanded that leaders tainted by corruption allegations step down, Azizi became the first Tanzanian MP in history to voluntarily vacate his parliamentary seat — citing, with audible bitterness, what he called “gutter politics” within the party.
That exit, widely read as recognition that the reputational damage was terminal, marked his formal pivot from politics to business expansion. The network of presidential relationships, however, never dimmed.
A PATTERN ACROSS FOUR COUNTRIES
What makes Azizi’s acquisition categorically more dangerous than a typical conflict-of-interest scenario is the geographic alignment of his political relationships with the precise governments that NMG newsrooms must hold to account. Consider the map.
In Kenya, where the Daily Nation and Business Daily operate, Azizi has a $130 million energy asset and a documented personal relationship with President Ruto.
In Tanzania, where Mwananchi and The Citizen publish, Azizi is intimately connected to President Samia Suluhu Hassan and to former President Kikwete — figures from his own party, CCM, a party he served for nearly two decades at the highest levels.
In Uganda, where the Daily Monitor is one of the few remaining credible independent voices in an increasingly hostile media environment, Azizi has declared himself close to the leadership.
In Rwanda, where the press freedom environment is among the most restrictive on the continent, NMG publishes Rwanda Today.
This is not a portfolio of coincidental relationships. It is a complete political coverage of every jurisdiction in which NMG operates.
A media owner who needs to maintain functional working relations with Ruto in Nairobi, Samia in Dar es Salaam, Museveni in Kampala and Kagame in Kigali — simultaneously — faces structural pressure to ensure that his newsrooms do not produce the kind of sustained, evidence-based investigative journalism that has historically been NMG’s distinguishing contribution to democratic life in the region.
The Uganda evidence is already instructive. Long before Azizi’s acquisition was announced, Nation Media Group’s Ugandan publications — NTV Uganda and the Daily Monitor — were banned from covering President Yoweri Museveni’s events and barred from parliamentary grounds during his re-election campaign last year.
The Committee to Protect Journalists documented the ban in detail, noting that security personnel cited unspecified “instructions” in refusing NMG journalists entry.
Museveni’s deputy presidential press secretary confirmed on social media that the president had personally ordered the exclusion over what he termed “persistent instances of misreporting.” Museveni had previously threatened to force the Daily Monitor into bankruptcy and called journalists “parasites.”
This is the media environment Azizi now inherits as majority owner in Uganda — a country where he has simultaneously declared himself close to the leadership.
The tension between those two positions is irreconcilable in any democracy. It is the defining test he faces, in four countries at once, on day one.
THE RSF RECORD AND THE RUTO PATTERN
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has been explicit about what Ruto’s presidency has meant for Kenyan media.
Its country assessment states that Ruto’s election in August 2022 marked the start of a difficult period, with heads of major press groups including Nation Media Group and leading outlets such as the Daily Nation being removed from their positions as a direct result of political pressure.
RSF notes that authorities can influence the appointment of media managers and editors through the regulator — described as nominally independent but practically government-aligned — and that this governmental presence generates systematic self-censorship.
The Economist, drawing on a senior NMG company insider, reports that State House has made daily requests to have critical coverage removed from NMG platforms since Ruto took office in 2022. During the 2024 Gen Z protests — when Kenyan youth briefly came close to storming parliament — major advertisers including Safaricom withdrew revenue from NMG following its investigations into state surveillance of protesters.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s 2025 Kenya report confirmed that mainstream media houses faced mounting pressure to align their coverage with the government’s narrative following those protests, with the result that audiences migrated in significant numbers toward YouTube, TikTok and independent digital platforms regarded as less susceptible to capture.
Against this backdrop, the timing of the Azizi acquisition — with Kenya’s 2027 general election eighteen months away and Ruto campaigning for a second term amid significant public discontent — is not an inconvenient coincidence to be dismissed. It is a structural fact to be confronted.
The president who wants Kenya’s most influential newspaper on his side for 2027 now has a media owner in place who has a quantifiable financial interest in keeping that president happy.
WHAT AZIZI SAYS — AND WHAT HISTORY SAYS BACK
Azizi, to his credit, has not hidden from the scrutiny. At the March 11 press conference and in a subsequent television interview on NTV Kenya, he offered detailed rebuttals: the gas permits predated Ruto; his relationships span the political spectrum; he has 26 years of media experience; he is a “great believer in print media”; and a newspaper that loses credibility loses its commercial value — therefore editorial independence is in his financial interest too. These are not unreasonable arguments. They deserve engagement rather than dismissal.
The argument about commercial logic is the strongest, and in normal circumstances it would carry significant weight.
The problem is that East African media economics do not operate in normal circumstances. Government advertising revenue is a structural lifeline for every major media house in the region. The threat to withhold it — or the promise to pay Sh410 million in arrears — is not a market signal but a political one. A media owner who holds a Ksh16.8 billion gas plant, who depends on regulatory goodwill for its continued operation, and who needs government advertising revenue to keep a loss-making media group solvent, faces a fundamentally different cost-benefit calculation than a purely commercial media investor insulated from state power.
Tito Magoti, a Tanzanian human rights lawyer, put it bluntly in comments to Semafor: people of Azizi’s stature, he said, would never advocate for press freedom because it is against their business interest.
Former NMG editor-in-chief Mutuma Mathiu, writing publicly after the deal was announced, asked two questions that have not been adequately answered: whether Azizi is a front for background investors whose identities have not been disclosed, and what the Aga Khan’s departure signals for the region’s democratic infrastructure.
Churchill Otieno, president of the Africa Editors Forum, wrote on LinkedIn that NMG has for decades functioned as part of East Africa’s democratic infrastructure, and that when ownership shifts, the critical issue is not merely who buys, but what vision of the public sphere accompanies that purchase.
THE MECHANISM OF INTERFERENCE
Editorial interference in media institutions of NMG’s scale and institutional culture rarely arrives through the front door.
It does not manifest as a proprietor calling a newsroom and ordering the removal of a story — at least not initially, and not in the early months when reputations are still being established and assurances are still being honoured.
It manifests through appointments.
The selection of editors and managing directors, decisions about which investigations receive resources and which are left unfunded, choices about which advertising campaigns to pursue and which state contracts to accept, and the accumulated effect of dozens of small decisions made by editors who understand, without being told, where the new owner’s interests lie.
RSF has already noted that under the current Kenyan regulatory environment, authorities can influence media management appointments through the state-aligned media regulator.
Azizi now sits above an editorial structure that is simultaneously subject to that external regulatory pressure and directly accountable to a single majority shareholder whose political relationships span every government in the region.
The Aga Khan’s governance model — a philanthropic fund with institutional values embedded in its mandate — created structural insulation against precisely this dynamic. Taarifa Ltd, a private Mauritius-registered vehicle wholly owned by a single individual, creates none.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, in its public statement on the acquisition, recommended that Azizi introduce binding editorial charters, independent editorial boards with genuine enforcement powers, transparent ownership disclosure across all subsidiary structures, and formal protections for editors against proprietorial interference.
None of these recommendations has been adopted as policy. Azizi’s stated commitment to editorial independence remains exactly that: a stated commitment, backed by nothing more contractually binding than his personal assurance.
THE PRECEDENT AZIZI HIMSELF SET
There is one precedent that cuts through every assurance and every pledge with singular clarity. In 1999, Azizi co-founded Mwananchi Communications Limited with the Aga Khan’s media group — the very institution from which he has now acquired NMG.
The partnership produced The Citizen, Mwananchi and Mwanaspoti newspapers, real vehicles of Tanzanian journalism.
In 2005, serving as campaign manager for Jakaya Kikwete’s presidential run, Azizi took personal exception to NMG’s coverage of his candidate. He did not write a letter of complaint.
He did not invoke editorial independence provisions. He sold his stake and walked out — and then went out and acquired competing media assets that he could control without the inconvenience of a partner with different political preferences.
Two decades later, he has returned to those same newsrooms — as the sole controlling shareholder, with no institutional partner to check his preferences, and with a Kenyan president heading into an election whose outcome will determine the regulatory environment for his gas empire for the next decade.
The structural logic of that arrangement does not require conspiracy to function. It operates through incentives. And the incentives all point in the same direction.
WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW
The transaction remains subject to regulatory approval by Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority, the Communications Authority and the Nairobi Securities Exchange, as well as equivalent bodies in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda.
Those regulatory agencies must exercise genuine scrutiny — not the formality of a rubber stamp — over the governance structures Azizi proposes for NMG’s editorial function.
Specifically, they should require: binding editorial independence charters with independent oversight mechanisms; transparent disclosure of all beneficial ownership behind Taarifa Ltd; the establishment of an independent editorial board with genuine enforcement powers; and formal conflict-of-interest protocols requiring disclosure and recusal whenever NMG coverage touches on Azizi’s business interests or his political relationships.
NMG’s journalists, editors and senior management have their own obligations. The real test of editorial independence is not what happens in the comfortable months after a proprietor’s honeymoon press conference.
It is what happens the first time a Daily Nation investigation exposes a regulatory failure that touches on Taifa Gas’s licensing. It is what happens the first time NTV Kenya’s political desk publishes polling analysis that shows Ruto’s re-election campaign in serious trouble. It is what happens the first time a Business Daily reporter follows the money on a public procurement contract linked to a company in Azizi’s portfolio.
The answers to those questions will tell East Africa everything it needs to know about what was really signed at the Serena Hotel on March 10.
THE KENYA INSIGHTS ASSESSMENT
The Economist asks whether Azizi can deliver on his pledges of editorial independence. We do not think that is the right question. The right question is whether any single individual — facing this specific matrix of financial dependencies, political relationships and regulatory exposure, in these four specific countries, at this specific moment in the East African political cycle — could resist the accumulated pressure of those incentives even if his personal intentions were entirely honourable. The structural answer, based on the evidence, is: probably not. The historical answer, based on what Azizi himself did when editorial coverage last conflicted with his political preferences, is: he won’t.
Former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju was at his Karen home the entire time the country agonised over his disappearance, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations declared on Monday, announcing that what was reported as a shocking abduction was in fact a carefully engineered deception that has now landed the veteran politician in police custody.
DCI Director Amin Mohammed, speaking at a press conference that landed like a thunderclap in a political week already crackling with tension, said investigators had established beyond all reasonable doubt that Tuju never left his residence on Miotoni Lane during the period his family and allies were raising the alarm with police. His phone was switched off at exactly 6:18 p.m. on March 21, 2026, the DCI said, and at that precise moment Tuju was still inside the compound of his Karen home.
“The DCI conclusively, and I am saying this without an iota of doubt, established that Tuju was physically present within his residence throughout the period in question,” Amin said. “Even at the precise time his mobile phone was switched off at 18:18 hours on 21st March 2026, he was at his Karen residence.”
The disclosures cast an entirely different light on a drama that gripped Kenya through the weekend. On Saturday evening, Tuju had allegedly gone missing together with his aide Steve Mwanga. A missing person report was filed at Karen Police Station for both men. Tuju’s vehicle was later found abandoned along Miotoni Lane with its hazard lights still blinking into the night, a discovery that set off frantic speculation about the fate of the former Jubilee secretary-general, who has been entangled in a bitter property dispute involving his Dari Park estate in Karen.
The disappearance triggered a wave of concern from political quarters. ODM chairman Oburu Odinga publicly called for a swift probe. Wiper Patriotic Front Leader Kalonzo Musyoka was among those who converged on the scene when Tuju eventually resurfaced. The abandoned car, the switched-off phone, and the silence had all combined to make the situation look like the kind of enforced disappearance that has haunted Kenya’s political landscape — a suspicion some of Tuju’s supporters voiced openly.
It now turns out that none of it was what it appeared.
According to the DCI, the investigation escalated dramatically after Tuju’s family denied police access to his residence when officers went to check on his welfare. That refusal triggered an immediate tactical response. A multi-agency team of uniformed officers and experienced plainclothes detectives was deployed late at night to cordon off the Karen compound while investigators pursued a court-issued search warrant.
“Following the family’s initial denial of access to Mr. Tuju’s residence, the National Police Service escalated the matter with utmost urgency and resolve,” Amin said. “A combined operational team was immediately deployed to secure the location and, in particular, the residence of Raphael Tuju.”
It was during that nocturnal operation, the DCI says, that intelligence gathered at the scene confirmed Tuju’s physical presence inside the home throughout the period under scrutiny. Then, when investigators were closing in on the truth and the fiction could no longer be held together, Tuju emerged.
“When confronted with the reality that police were closing in on the truth and that his deception could no longer be sustained, Mr. Tuju chose to resurface, thereby confirming the investigators’ well-founded suspicion that this was a carefully staged disappearance rather than a genuine case of abduction,” Amin said.
Tuju was arrested barely hours after resurfacing. The apprehension, captured on camera by media and bystanders, was swift and intensely physical, and it drew immediate cries of outrage from his legal team. His lawyer Ndegwa Njiru, speaking after the incident, alleged that officers had forcefully pushed Tuju into a vehicle, aggravating a pre-existing back injury and leaving the former CS in acute pain. Njiru said doctors had been called to assess his client and that an ambulance had been summoned to transfer Tuju to hospital, describing the situation as a medical emergency.
“They pushed him into the car. He hurt his back, and as we speak, Honourable Tuju is not well,” Njiru told journalists. He also accused officers of attempting to drive off with Tuju before making a formal entry at the police station, and said it was only the physical intervention of those present, including Kalonzo Musyoka, that prevented an immediate removal from the premises.
Njiru further revealed that even at the time of his remarks, no formal charges had been communicated to the defence. “We have just been told Honourable Tuju is under arrest, but we cannot tell the reason for the arrest,” he said, characterising the entire incident as conduct that fell well short of due process. “That was not an arrest. Had it not been for our presence, Tuju might not have been able to speak. They were actually abducting him at a police station.”
The DCI, however, was unmoved by those characterisations and unapologetic about the force of its response. Amin said Tuju has been booked at Karen Police Station and is required to record a comprehensive statement explaining his whereabouts over the weekend, the circumstances surrounding the abandoned motor vehicle, the reports filed by his family, and the identity of the so-called good Samaritans who reportedly provided him with shelter somewhere in Kiambu during the period he was reported missing.
Amin framed the arrest not merely as a response to a single incident of false information but as part of a pattern the DCI says it has grown weary of.
“This is not an isolated occurrence. The DCI has documented numerous similar incidents involving staged disappearances or false abduction claims, often by public figures and even including politically exposed persons, in a disturbing pattern designed to undermine public trust in our law enforcement agencies,” he said.
The director was also pointed in his assessment of Tuju’s motivation, going beyond a finding of deception to attribute a political calculation to the conduct. “This deliberate conduct by Raphael Tuju appears to be a calculated effort to deceive the public, to generate unwarranted sympathy, and to undermine the integrity of the National Police Service, and for that matter, the DCI, for apparent political or personal motives,” Amin said.
The arrest comes against the backdrop of Tuju’s ongoing legal battles over his Karen property. Courts have been the arena for a high-stakes contest between Tuju and creditors, with eviction proceedings and judicial orders playing out in full public view. Related articles by The Star have also documented serious allegations surrounding that dispute, including claims of judicial impropriety connected to the handling of cases involving the property.
Tuju himself, in remarks made after he resurfaced, said fear of police tactics had driven him into hiding, and that a vehicle he believed was trailing him had no number plates, which heightened his alarm. But with the DCI’s findings now on the table, those explanations face a severely hostile reception from the country’s law enforcement leadership.
The National Police Service has made clear it considers the provision of false information a matter of the utmost gravity. Amin warned that such incidents divert critical security resources, generate unnecessary public panic, and carry serious national security implications.
“The National Police Service views the provision of false information to authorities as a very serious offence,” Amin said. “Raphael Tuju has been arrested and booked at the Karen Police Station to record a comprehensive statement.”
The nation, which spent much of a tense weekend worrying whether a senior political figure had been seized by unknown forces, is now absorbing a very different story.
For a long time, the world of gambling was perceived as a closed men’s club – a space of brutal excitement and complex strategies. Today, women are actively embracing the game and making it part of their lifestyle.
How the online gaming audience changes
Just a few years ago, the profile of a gaming platform user was quite uniform. However, the situation is different now: women make up 30% to 40% of the audience on global platforms, and their share continues to grow. This shift is described as a changing casino audience.
It is not a short-term spike, but a stable trend. Women find accessibility, safety, and aesthetics in online entertainment. AfroPari believes that, for female audiences, gaming is becoming part of everyday life rather than a special occasion.
Mobile has changed the rules
The key driver of such a tendency has been the industry’s shift into the user’s pocket – in the most literal sense. With the emergence of mobile apps, the concept of a mobile casino has become synonymous with freedom. For the modern woman, whose day is a complex mix of work, family, personal projects, and meetings, flexibility is crucial. The smartphone has erased boundaries and lowered the barrier to entry.
The AfroPari platform was originally designed with a focus on the mobile experience – users don’t have time to figure out complicated interfaces, so simplicity and speed matter. When slots launch in seconds, and navigation remains intuitive even for beginners, gaming easily fits into the rhythm of life, whether it’s a commute or a short coffee break.
Why women are entering the niche
Women’s motivation differs from men’s. While for many men gaming is associated with risk and competition, for women it’s primarily a way to switch off and take a break.
In this case, online gaming is about time for yourself. It’s a chance to pause everything, step away from routine, and get emotional relief. It’s less about tension and more about comfort and the quality of visual content. This demand for “smart leisure” is what is shaping the growing audience of women players.
The role of slot games
The easiest way to appreciate the advantages of this format is through slot games. There are several obvious factors.
First, visual appeal. Modern slots increasingly resemble high-quality video games or animation.
Second, dynamics. Short sessions allow players to jump into a game for a few minutes and leave at any time.
And finally, the absence of pressure. You’re one-on-one with the process, and even if luck isn’t on your side now, it might be next time.
Today, for a growing number of players, slot games online are small but vivid adventures. Examples like Royal Fruits 5: Hold ‘n’ Link, Fruit Island, or Piggy Cash: Hold and Win combine simple mechanics, visual appeal, and a comfortable pace. AfroPari emphasizes intuitiveness: when everything works quickly, the game easily fits into the rhythm of modern life.
Convenient design is complemented by bonuses that make the start feel natural. For instance, a 200% welcome package or special Friday offers in the Casino and Games sections increase engagement without overwhelming the user.
Inclusivity as the new norm
The gaming industry is becoming more inclusive, and this is changing the user experience. As casino players are no longer divided by gender, casinos move beyond stereotypes and become a familiar form of entertainment, as natural as watching TV series or scrolling through social media feeds.
The new casino experience is built around the real needs of players and respect for their choices. AfroPari is evolving alongside its audience, relying on feedback and real-world usage scenarios. The company creates an environment where gaming remains simple, accessible, and comfortable for everyone.
Ultimately, gaming is no longer defined by who plays, but by how seamlessly it fits into a lifestyle. Women have already become an important part of the industry and the new norm.
Former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju resurfaced Monday afternoon, ending nearly two days of mounting national anxiety over his whereabouts and putting to rest fears, voiced even by senior politicians, that he had been abducted.
Appearing live on Citizen TV at lunchtime, Tuju disclosed that he had spent the intervening period in hiding after he noticed a vehicle with no number plates pursuing him through the streets of Karen on Saturday evening.
Tuju said he had been driving when he became aware of the tail. Using his familiarity with the Karen road network, he executed a sharp turn into Nandi Road, shook off his pursuers and then abandoned his vehicle before going to ground.
“Fortunately, I know Karen well. I branched into Nandi Road. That is how I lost them,” he said at a press conference flanked by opposition leaders including Wiper Democratic Movement leader Kalonzo Musyoka, DAP-K leader Eugene Wamalwa and former National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi.
His driver Steve Mwanga, who had also been reported missing and was present at the briefing, said he was too shaken to recount in detail what had transpired. “Mheshimiwa was the one driving. I am traumatised. I do not want to describe what happened. It is a very bad state we are in,” Mwanga said.
Tuju thanked a family in Kiambu County for sheltering him through the ordeal, though he declined to name them. He explained why he had chosen not to seek police protection, invoking the recent deaths and ordeals of other public figures.
“I consider myself blessed. I know Cyrus Jirongo died. I know Albert Ojwang was killed. Gaitho was abducted at Karen Police Station where he sought safety,” he said, his remarks drawing an uncomfortable parallel between the institution tasked with his protection and the very source of the danger he feared.
Surveillance Report Filed Days Before Disappearance
The sequence of events that led to Tuju’s two-night disappearance stretched back to the Friday before he vanished. On Saturday, March 21, he walked into Karen Police Station and filed a report, recorded as OB 21/21/03/2026, stating that he had the previous day been trailed by a white Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Series with no number plates. He told officers he felt he was under surveillance.
That same Saturday evening, the former CS was due on air at Ramogi FM for a scheduled interview at 7pm. He never arrived. His phone went dark. His son Mano Tuju received a call from the Officer Commanding Station at Karen Police Station the following Sunday morning, while at church, informing him that his father’s vehicle had been found abandoned on Miotoni Lane, hazard lights still blinking, keys nowhere in sight. A missing person report was subsequently filed as OB 17/22/03/2026.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations deployed a specialised team and began forensic processing of the abandoned vehicle.
However, investigators said they were denied entry to Tuju’s Mwitu Drive residence by family members and called for full cooperation. Tuju’s lawyer Paul Nyamondi confirmed the missing persons report had been filed and noted that the non-appearance at a scheduled radio interview was out of character for his client.
The news of Tuju’s disappearance triggered a cascade of alarm across Kenya’s political class and the wider public. Siaya Governor James Orengo told a church congregation in Narok on Sunday that Tuju had been kidnapped. “Nataka niwajulishe, ndugu yetu Tuju ametekwa nyara,” Orengo said, urging Kenyans to pray. University of Nairobi students took to Uhuru Highway, University Way and Lower State House Road, burning tyres and clashing with police in protests that demanded answers.
ODM leaders convened a chorus of concern. Senator Oburu Oginga, speaking at his installation as a Luo elder in Bondo, Siaya, described the incident as deeply unsettling and warned that a slow official response would tarnish Kenya’s reputation internationally. Rarieda MP Otiende Amolo called on police to do everything in their power to locate Tuju. Nyando MP Jared Okelo went further, appealing to Oburu to lobby President William Ruto personally to direct the DCI to act. “The President has the power to bring Mr Tuju back to us alive,” Okelo said.
Suba South MP Caroli Omondi offered a different framing, suggesting the incident may be rooted in commercial conflicts rather than political persecution. “Commercial disputes should not be resolved unlawfully. The people after Tuju’s property are the same people after Miwani and Koguta land in Kisumu,” he said. Former Cabinet Secretary and presidential hopeful Eliud Owalo invoked the constitutional duty of the state, urging the National Police Service to act with urgency and keep the family informed.
Property Battle That Preceded the Disappearance
Tuju’s disappearance did not occur in a vacuum. It came at the tail end of an escalating confrontation over his Karen real estate portfolio, including Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park, all tied to a debt dispute with the Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank (TDB, formerly EADB) estimated at more than $15 million. On March 13, Tuju alleged that over 100 armed police officers, some in balaclavas and driving vehicles with covered number plates, raided Dari Business Park in the early hours without a court order and stationed themselves on the premises for days.
On March 18, the Commercial Court declined to grant Tuju temporary orders stopping the auction of the contested properties, with Justice Moses Ado ruling that respondents had to be heard first and scheduling the matter for April 7.
Just three days before his disappearance, Tuju wrote an open letter to Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja, seeking protection and citing what he described as sustained pressure linked to his property and personal safety.
With Tuju’s reappearance, attention now shifts from his whereabouts to the identity and intent of those who trailed him through Karen’s leafy streets on a Saturday evening.
The DCI’s forensic examination of the abandoned vehicle is ongoing, while the former Cabinet Secretary’s legal battles over some of Nairobi’s most valuable real estate remain unresolved.
The Kenya Revenue Authority is preparing to detonate a tax bomb on the millions of small traders who form the beating heart of Kenya’s informal economy, plotting the total elimination of the Sh5 million annual turnover threshold that has for nearly two decades shielded hustlers, kiosk operators and mama mbogas from mandatory Value Added Tax registration.
A KRA policy document, seen by this newspaper’s sister publication Business Daily, proposes to cut the VAT registration threshold to zero, meaning that every business in Kenya, regardless of how small, would be legally required to charge customers the full 16 percent VAT on all goods and services not specifically exempted under the VAT Act. The directive, if adopted in the Finance Bill due before Parliament this July, would repeal Section 34(1)(a) of the VAT Act, which since 2007 has protected small traders from the compliance burden carried by larger commercial enterprises.
The immediate casualty will be the consumer. A customer walking into a neighbourhood kiosk to buy a Sh50 bottle of water, a Sh200 gas refill or a bundle of data could soon find those prices ratcheted upward to recover VAT charges that were never factored into the business model of traders who collectively turn over less than Sh5 million annually and have never issued a tax invoice in their lives.
The KRA document names the specific products that will feel the heat: mobile phones, soft drinks, bottled water, cosmetics, snacks, cooking gas and petroleum products. Freelance consultants and service providers below the current threshold would equally be roped in, required to slap a 16 percent surcharge on every invoice. The goods exempted from VAT, a thin list, include staples like maize flour, unprocessed green tea, raw milk, bread and select medical products such as syringes — cold comfort for consumers who spend the bulk of their household budgets on items that are not exempt.
The driving arithmetic at Times Tower is stark. Kenya currently counts only 230,000 registered VAT taxpayers against a projected base of 800,000, leaving the taxman nursing a Sh378 billion VAT gap that KRA Commissioner General Humphrey Wattanga has publicly committed to closing. The authority believes that zeroing out the registration threshold, combined with a crackdown on exemptions, could drive VAT collections above Sh1 trillion, nearly double the Sh653 billion collected in the most recent financial year.
The KRA document is unsparing in its diagnosis of the problem. “Key challenges in closing Kenya’s Sh378 billion VAT gap include threshold exclusion which limits the tax base; high VAT leakage through exemptions; weak visibility of the informal economy and a narrow tax base with just 230,000 VAT taxpayers registered,” the document states, making no apology for the scale of disruption the proposed remedy would unleash.
The compliance obligations awaiting newly conscripted small traders would be crushing by any standard familiar to Kenya’s informal sector. Registered traders would be required to file and pay VAT to KRA by the 20th of every month without fail, maintain detailed sales records to support their returns, notify the authority of any change in business name, address or nature of trade, and — crucially — integrate with the Electronic Tax Invoice Management System (eTIMS), transmitting every sales invoice to KRA in real time.
The eTIMS requirement is particularly savage in its irony. It was only in December 2024 that the government specifically freed small traders with annual sales below Sh5 million from the obligation to issue electronic invoices, having watched large corporations ruthlessly drop compliant micro-suppliers unable to generate digital tax receipts. The new proposal would reverse that relief at a stroke, dragging traders back into the very compliance maze that nearly strangled their supply relationships less than two years ago.
The KRA itself acknowledges the uphill climb: barely 41 percent of the non-VAT registered taxpayers it has already targeted have successfully onboarded eTIMS, a damning indictment of the digital readiness of Kenya’s micro-trader ecosystem. Instructing the remainder to register, file, invoice and remit simultaneously is a gamble that tax consultants say could generate mass non-compliance rather than the revenue bonanza the authority is banking on.
The political backdrop is equally combustible. The Treasury has been explicitly cautious about new or higher taxes since the Gen Z protests of 2024 forced President William Ruto to abandon the Finance Bill that year in humiliating retreat. That reluctance to be seen raising rates has pushed the KRA toward base-broadening instead, a strategy that technically avoids new taxes while materially increasing the tax burden on Kenyans who were previously outside the net. Critics argue the distinction is cosmetic.
The KRA’s own medium-term ambitions underline the scale of its appetite for the informal sector. The authority has set a target to grow the number of active taxpayers from the current seven million to 11.5 million by June 2027, and to increase annual income tax collections from micro and small businesses from Sh17 billion to Sh500 billion, a near thirty-fold escalation. The February 2026 roundtable between KRA Commissioner George Obell and the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya confirmed that eliminating the Sh5 million VAT threshold was among the reforms formally on the table, with KRA integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and pursue businesses operating below the radar.
The VAT Special Table introduced in June 2025 provides a glimpse of the enforcement machinery awaiting small traders who fail to comply once registered. Traders placed on the table by KRA are blocked from filing VAT returns and have their input VAT claims suspended, effectively freezing their ability to trade compliantly until the authority is satisfied. The categories of non-compliance targeted include repeated failure to pay, suspected VAT fraud and failure to transition to eTIMS invoicing.
The Sh5 million threshold has its roots in 2007, when it was raised from the previous Sh3 million mark. Eighteen years later, the KRA has decided that inflation, digital systems and aggressive revenue targets have overtaken whatever economic wisdom underpinned the exemption. The Finance Bill for the year commencing July 2026, expected to land in Parliament by end of April, will reveal whether the Treasury is willing to hand the taxman the legislative ammunition to carry out the most sweeping expansion of Kenya’s VAT net in living memory.
For the mama mboga in Mathare, the mitumba trader in Gikomba and the kiosk owner in Kibera, the question is simple and brutal: does a business that survives on margins thinner than the paper a KRA return is printed on have any chance of absorbing 16 percent VAT, monthly filings and digital invoicing without shutting its doors? The answer, economists warn, may not be what the taxman is hoping for.
Kenya’s telecommunications industry has been handed a stunning legal setback after the High Court declared that mobile phone numbers constitute protected digital identities, delivering a potentially costly blow to the long-standing industry practice of automatically recycling and reassigning inactive SIM cards to new subscribers.
Justice Lawrence Mugambi, ruling last Thursday on Constitutional Petition No. E290 of 2024, declared that a registered mobile phone number is a digital identifier linking directly to an individual’s private affairs and is fully protected under Articles 31(c) and (d) of the Constitution of Kenya, which safeguard the right to privacy. The judgment, delivered virtually, marks the most far-reaching judicial intervention into the country’s telecommunications sector in a generation.
The petition was filed in June 2024 by Erastus Ngura Odhiambo, an inmate serving a 20-year prison sentence, and a co-petitioner. Odhiambo’s plight encapsulated the hazards that SIM recycling poses in an era when a phone number is no longer merely a communication tool but the skeleton key to an individual’s entire digital existence. During his incarceration, his dormant mobile line was recycled and reassigned by a service provider, cutting him off from family communications, mobile banking access and other critical personal affairs, all without his knowledge or consent.
Justice Mugambi found that the risks were not theoretical. When a recycled number falls into new hands, the incoming subscriber can receive M-Pesa transfers intended for the original owner, intercept one-time passwords for bank accounts, get added to family or work WhatsApp groups, and harvest verification messages for email accounts, government portals and social media platforms. The consequences, the court noted, range from financial loss to identity theft and the unauthorised disclosure of the most intimate personal data.
The ruling takes direct aim at Legal Notice 90 of 2025, which had permitted telcos to deactivate numbers after defined periods of non-use. The court declared the notice unreasonable and arbitrary for its failure to account for subscribers who are inactive through no fault of their own, citing prisoners, students in restricted environments and Kenyans living abroad in non-roaming zones as examples of those unlawfully disadvantaged by blanket inactivity thresholds.
Operators are now prohibited from reassigning deactivated numbers except under strict new conditions: they must obtain the previous subscriber’s informed and verifiable consent, or issue a public notice and wait a reasonable period after failing to locate the original owner, and must in all cases erect hard technical barriers preventing any new subscriber from accessing the previous owner’s linked personal data. Justice Mugambi issued a blunt warning: if the government fails to implement the required regulatory framework by midnight on September 19, 2026, all reassignment and recycling of deactivated numbers will automatically and unconditionally stop.
The Attorney General has been directed to work with the Communication Authority of Kenya, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, the Kenya Prisons Service and the relevant ministry to formulate the new regulatory scheme within six months. For prisoners specifically, the court ordered that registered mobile numbers be preserved throughout the period of incarceration, with the Prisons Service required to establish supervised access mechanisms allowing inmates to activate or update their numbers when necessary, in line with the Persons Deprived of Liberty Act.
COST SHOCK FOR OPERATORS
For the telecommunications industry, the judgment is a commercial earthquake. Telcos have historically relied on number recycling to manage the finite pool of mobile numbers allocated by the regulator, ensuring continuous availability for new subscribers. With Kenya hosting more than 76 million active SIM subscriptions as of the middle of last year, and Safaricom alone commanding a 65 per cent market share with nearly 50 million subscribers, the scale of the dormant line problem is immense. Inactive SIM cards continue to occupy routing databases, signalling systems and other network infrastructure, generating costs without generating a single shilling of revenue.
Neither Safaricom nor Airtel Kenya had responded to inquiries on the precise per-line cost of maintaining dormant numbers by the time of publication, a silence that underscores just how sensitive the financial implications are. Industry observers, however, have said that as Kenya’s subscriber base continues to grow and the ruling forces operators to retain millions of inactive lines for extended or indefinite periods, operational overheads will surge at the worst possible time. The telcos are already navigating pressure from falling voice revenues, mounting competition in data and digital financial services, and the rising infrastructure costs of 5G network rollouts.
The judgment will also force operators to invest heavily in consent management systems, public notification frameworks and the technical safeguards the court has ordered to prevent data leakage from recycled numbers. Each of these represents a fresh and unbudgeted expense. Legal and compliance teams will need to be strengthened, and new subscriber lifecycle management systems will need to be built, all while telcos scramble to meet the September deadline.
SAFARICOM’S DAIMA LIFELINE UNDER SCRUTINY
Safaricom had already anticipated part of the problem through its Daima Service, launched in 2022, which allows customers to pay to keep inactive lines alive without topping up. Under the scheme, subscribers pay Sh200 to retain a line for six months, Sh500 for a year and Sh1,000 for two years, effectively transferring part of the maintenance cost burden from operator to user. The service specifically targets customers who may be temporarily inactive, including those living abroad, in military or police training, managing multiple lines, or preserving numbers linked to vehicle tracking or financial accounts.
The court’s ruling now compels Safaricom and its rivals to extend comparable retention frameworks far more broadly, including to users who have not opted into any paid service but who retain constitutional rights over their registered numbers. That creates a structurally lopsided situation: the operator bears the ongoing cost of maintaining dormant lines while collecting no corresponding revenue from the inactive subscriber. Unless regulators introduce specific pricing allowances or the operators push new fee structures through the Communications Authority, the mismatch could prove a significant drag on margins.
NUMBERING PLAN AT RISK
Beyond the direct financial pressure, the ruling raises alarm over the long-term viability of Kenya’s numbering plan. Like most countries, Kenya operates a finite number pool, and it was precisely the exhaustion of traditional 07xx prefixes that forced the Communications Authority to issue new 01xx prefixes to Safaricom and Airtel starting in 2020. If operators are now barred from recycling dormant numbers back into circulation without the original subscriber’s consent, the pipeline of available numbers will narrow at precisely the moment demand from a still-growing subscriber base remains robust.
Industry experts warn that without either an expansion of number allocations by the regulator or the introduction of alternative identifier systems, the market could face a numbering shortage in the medium term. The Communications Authority will now be under pressure to accelerate planning on both fronts, even as it works to meet the court’s September deadline for a new consent and reassignment framework.
YOUR NUMBER IS YOUR LIFE
What has made the ruling so resonant with ordinary Kenyans is that it codifies in constitutional law something millions already experience as lived reality: that a phone number is no longer merely a way to make calls. It is the linchpin of the entire digital economy. A registered Safaricom or Airtel line is an individual’s gateway to M-Pesa, mobile banking, KRA tax filings, Huduma Centre services, government disbursements, school fee payments, healthcare platforms, NTSA transactions and social media identity verification. To lose that number, involuntarily and silently, is to lose access to all of those services simultaneously.
Kenyans on social media platforms erupted in support of the ruling, sharing stories of numbers sold by telcos after the death of a loved one, lines of two decades quietly reassigned while the original owner was abroad, and newly acquired numbers that arrived pre-loaded with the financial histories, loan obligations and message inboxes of strangers. One widely circulated account described a woman who tried to call her late mother’s number months after the burial, only to discover that a stranger had been assigned the line and, through it, had already accessed the deceased’s digital footprints.
The ruling intersects with a broader push to tighten the link between physical and digital identity in Kenya, following the recent nationwide SIM registration exercise that made the National Identity Card a mandatory anchor for all mobile line registrations. In that context, Justice Mugambi’s conclusion that a mobile number is by definition personal data under the Data Protection Act carries particular force: the state itself demanded that Kenyans tie their identities to their phone numbers, and the court has now ruled that the state and the private sector alike must protect that linkage.
The Communications Authority, whose Legal Notice 90 of 2025 has now been declared unreasonable, is expected to issue a formal response in the coming days. Safaricom and Airtel Kenya had not commented by the time of going to press.
Kenyans enlisted to fight for Russia in the war against Ukraine will be granted amnesty on their return home, the East African nation’s foreign minister has said.
Under Kenya’s laws it is illegal for the country’s citizens to be conscripted into foreign armies – an offence that can carry up to a 10-year prison sentence.
The foreign ministry estimates that 252 Kenyans have been illegally conscripted to fight on the front line – a trend that began about six months ago and has also involved recruits from other African countries.
Some Kenyans have said they were lured to fight for Russia with promises of well-paid civilian jobs, only to find themselves forced into fighting in Ukraine – often signing contracts in Russian without understanding what was involved.
“So far 44 Kenyans have been safely repatriated back home while 11 have been reported missing in action/killed in action, 38 are currently hospitalised in various Russian hospitals under restricted access, leaving 160 Kenyans officers still actively involved,” Mudavadi said in a statement.
Mudavadi also negotiated a deal that allowed Kenyans currently on the front line and “unwilling to continue in the assignment disengaged and freed to travel back home”, the foreign ministry said.
Moscow had already agreed to put Kenya on what it called a “stop list” to prevent further recruitment, it said.
Russia has previously insisted that all foreign fighters joined voluntarily ”in full compliance with Russian law”.
Mudavadi said he and his Russian counterpart had agreed to put Kenya on what was called a “stop list” to prevent the further recruitment of Kenyans. Reuters.
According to Kenya’s foreign ministry, the two countries will begin efforts to “thwart human trafficking, smuggling and illegal recruitment” to the Russian war effort. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mudavadi’s trip to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov followed growing public pressure from the relatives of those who had travelled to Russia calling for Kenya’s government to take action.
Ukrainian intelligence assessment has estimated that more than 1,700 people from 36 countries in Africa have been recruited to fight for Russia.
Working as a mercenary or fighting on behalf of another government is also illegal in South Africa, unless the government authorises it.
Kenya’s foreign ministry explained that Kenyans could fight for other armies if they were citizens of another country or had the written permission of the Kenyan president.
Otherwise it contravened section 68 of Kenya’s penal code and attracted up to 10 years in jail unless a court was satisfied the enlistment was not voluntary.
There is a scene playing out in Kenya’s courts right now that ought to chill every taxpayer, every infrastructure planner, and every diplomat in Nairobi who has laboured over the vision of a modern Railway City rising from the 13 acres of Kenya Railways land in the central business district.
A Chinese state-owned firm, China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, known universally as by, has dragged the Kenyan government before two separate High Courts simultaneously, one in Nairobi and one in Kisumu, over a single procurement dispute.
The stated cause is righteous indignation at having its engineers deported.
The unstated consequence, whether intended or not, is that a transformative Sh30 billion project is now frozen in a web of litigation so dense that no contractor can be engaged, no ground can be broken, and no timetable can be assured.
Kenya’s courts, it must be said without equivocation, are not CCECC’s procurement appeals department. They never were.
The Railway City project is not a ministerial pet scheme. It is a centrepiece of Nairobi’s urban regeneration, a scheme designed to decongest the gridlocked city centre by creating a mixed-use hub of office blocks, retail malls, a light industrial zone, new railway lines, and connections to the planned Bus Rapid Transit network.
The UK government has pledged Sh11.9 billion towards it, representing 39 per cent of the total project cost. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is separately procuring a technical assistance contract worth nine million pounds to run from mid-2026 to at least 2028.
The project has already been modelled as a Kenyan answer to the regeneration of London’s King’s Cross station. It is not hyperbole to say that the Railway City is perhaps the single most consequential urban infrastructure investment in Nairobi’s recent history. The fact that it is being held hostage by the internal commercial rivalry of two Chinese state enterprises is a scandal that demands a reckoning.
To understand what is actually happening here, it is necessary to understand who CCECC is, what it has done elsewhere, and what the pattern of its behaviour reveals about the firm that now asks Kenyan courts to protect it.
A Firm With A Problem Wherever It Goes
CCECC was incorporated in 1979 by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, growing out of the foreign aid department of the Ministry of Railways.
Its foundational project was the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, the TAZARA line, a 1,860-kilometre Cold War-era infrastructure gift from Beijing to southern Africa. On the strength of that legacy, CCECC has expanded into over 50 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, positioning itself as one of the world’s top 100 international contractors as ranked by the Engineering News Record.
What the glossy corporate profile does not mention is that CCECC’s global footprint is shadowed by a trail of procurement irregularities, regulatory sanctions, and outright misconduct findings that span at least three continents.
In August 2019, the World Bank debarred CCECC and five of its affiliated entities in Nigeria from eligibility for any World Bank-financed contract. The listed companies included CCECC Nigeria Railway Company Limited, CCECC Nigeria Lekki (FTA) Company Limited, and CCECC Nigeria Company Limited.
They were found to have violated the bank’s fraud and corruption policy, specifically provisions bordering on fraudulent practice, defined as any act or omission that knowingly or recklessly misleads a party to obtain a financial benefit or avoid an obligation in the procurement process.
The debarment was a direct consequence of cross-sanctioning triggered by the World Bank’s sanctions against CCECC’s parent, China Railway Construction Corporation Limited, and its affiliates worldwide. When confronted, CCECC Nigeria Limited initially denied it was among the blacklisted entities and issued a public statement claiming mistaken identity.
The World Bank confirmed to reporters that the sanction extended to all affiliates and subsidiaries under CRCC’s direct and indirect control, and that it would not speak further on the matter. CCECC’s denial, investigators noted, was false.
That same year, it emerged that CCECC had in 2018 allowed Nigerian government ministers and senior officials to hijack a scholarship programme the firm had offered for young Nigerians to study railway engineering abroad.
Rather than open the 40 slots to qualified applicants, the opportunities were distributed among the children and cronies of officials in the Federal Ministry of Transportation. No minister was punished.
The European Investment Bank went further.
In August 2023, the EIB and CCECC entered into a formal settlement agreement addressing what the bank described as past misconduct by CCECC as a tenderer in procurement procedures for EIB-financed projects.
The misconduct was not confined to one country or one incident. The EIB explicitly identified the affected projects as spanning Ecuador, Egypt, Malawi, Montenegro, Serbia, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Zambia, a sweep of eight countries across four continents. As part of the settlement, CCECC was required to enforce compliance standards, report on its material developments to the EIB for twelve months, and cooperate with ongoing EIB investigations into prohibited conduct, including misconduct committed by third parties.
In Malawi, procurement observers have documented an even more brazen pattern. Civil society auditors found that CCECC was awarded contracts to both relocate water pipelines and upgrade the same Kenyatta Road project in Lilongwe, effectively being paid twice for overlapping work.
The firm was the fourth-lowest bidder on the pipeline relocation component, yet it received the award. Governance and transparency experts publicly questioned the arrangement.
Roads Authority officials were accused by civil society organisations of being so captured by political interests that professional evaluation of Chinese firms’ technical qualifications was effectively suspended.
The Kenyatta Road project, launched with presidential fanfare in August 2021 and supposed to be complete in 18 months, had shown no progress by 2022.
This is the firm that now asks Kenyan courts to shield it from the consequences of what Kenyan immigration authorities say are legitimate administrative actions.
The Procurement Battle And Its Convenient Victims
The Kenya Railways Corporation launched the Railway City tender in late 2025. Three bidders emerged: CCECC at Sh22.9 billion, China Road and Bridge Corporation at Sh29.9 billion, and a consortium of China Overseas Engineering Group and China Railway Group at Sh32.5 billion.
Kenya Railways’ evaluation committee gave CRBC the highest technical score and, on that basis, declared it the best bidder despite it being the middle bidder on price.
CCECC and the China Overseas-China Railway consortium challenged the decision before the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board.
Their argument was specific and procedural: CRBC had submitted its technical and financial proposals on two separate flash disks placed inside the same envelope, a clear breach of procurement rules set by Kenya Railways itself.
The PPARB agreed.
On January 26, 2026, the board nullified the award to CRBC and directed Kenya Railways to re-evaluate the remaining compliant bids. The board’s language was categorical, finding that CRBC’s bid should not have progressed to financial evaluation and that the scoring of its financial proposals had been erroneous and misguided.
Any reasonable reading of that ruling would suggest that CCECC, as the lowest bidder among compliant submissions, stood to benefit substantially from the re-evaluation. But Kenya Railways, in a move that defies both logic and its own procurement history, again declared CRBC the best bidder on February 16, terming the flash disk confusion a minor error.
CCECC and the consortium promptly filed a second appeal. CRBC responded by running to the High Court in Nairobi to argue that the second PPARB appeal was an abuse of process and to challenge the board’s jurisdiction to hear it.
On March 11, the Nairobi High Court granted CRBC an interim order suspending the PPARB proceedings.
Two days later, on March 13, Kenyan security agencies moved with extraordinary speed and precision.
A project manager, Li Fangyi, was picked up from CCECC’s camp along the Kisian-Usenge road in Kisumu at 2pm by men who identified themselves as police officers.
They drove him to Nairobi. That same evening, a separate team stormed CCECC’s Riverside Drive compound in Lavington without identifying themselves and arrested Zhang Hongze, a CCECC engineer.
Both men were reunited at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and bundled onto Kenya Airways flight KQ886 to Guangzhou, which departed at ten minutes past midnight. A third CCECC official, Director Li Wei, narrowly escaped the dragnet but had his passport seized.
The timing, two days after the court order silencing the PPARB, is not lost on anyone with a functioning memory. CCECC’s petition to the Kisumu High Court says so without equivocation, arguing that the arrests and deportations were orchestrated to intimidate the firm into abandoning its procurement challenge and clearing the way for CRBC to collect the Sh7 billion premium that separates the two bids.
The Sh7 Billion Question Kenya Must Answer
The arithmetic here is stark and should offend every Kenyan. CCECC bid Sh22.9 billion. CRBC bid Sh29.9 billion. If CRBC is awarded this contract, Kenya will pay Sh7 billion more for what the PPARB has already found should not have been awarded to CRBC in the first place.
The Railway City project is partly funded by UK taxpayers through FCDO. A Sh7 billion overcharge on a UK-backed, publicly scrutinised project is not a rounding error. It is a policy catastrophe.
There are questions that the courts, the public, and policymakers must now force into the open. Why did Kenya Railways, after being ordered by the PPARB to re-evaluate, simply re-run the same outcome? Was there political direction behind that decision? Who benefits from a Sh29.9 billion contract being awarded when a Sh22.9 billion compliant bid sat on the table? Why did Kenya’s security apparatus respond with the speed of a counter-terrorism operation to deport the employees of a company that had done nothing more than exercise its legal right to challenge a procurement decision before the appropriate administrative body? And why, of all the crowded procurement disputes in Kenya, did this one trigger a midnight deportation flight?
None of these questions are answered by CCECC’s litigation.
The Other Side Of The Coin: CCECC Is No Innocent
It would be a grave error, however, to conclude from the above that CCECC is simply an aggrieved bidder whose rights have been trampled. The firm’s conduct in this dispute also demands scrutiny, and the pattern it is establishing in Kenya is troubling.
CCECC has now triggered multiple parallel legal proceedings across two courts in two cities over a single procurement dispute. At the PPARB, it filed two appeals.
At the Nairobi High Court, proceedings initiated by CRBC have already blocked the PPARB. At the Kisumu High Court, CCECC has filed a constitutional petition seeking to restrain Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen, Immigration Director-General Evelyn Cheluget, Inspector-General Douglas Kanja, and Attorney-General Dorcas Oduor from taking any action against its employees.
This proliferation of simultaneous proceedings across multiple jurisdictions is precisely the kind of behaviour that legitimate procurement review systems are designed to prevent.
It is not impossible that the Kisumu petition is tactically timed, filed in a court far from Nairobi’s familiar procurement bar, to secure broader injunctive relief than CCECC could obtain in Nairobi.
The effect, whatever the intention, is jurisdictional confusion and institutional paralysis.
Courts in two cities are now issuing orders that touch on the same underlying dispute, and no one can be entirely certain which orders prevail.
There is also a deeper irony that should not escape the notice of any reader who has followed CCECC’s record. Here is a firm that the European Investment Bank has formally found engaged in procurement misconduct in eight countries, a firm whose Nigerian affiliates were debarred by the World Bank for fraud, a firm caught in Malawi receiving payments for overlapping contracts, now appearing before Kenyan courts wrapped in the constitutional language of due process, fair hearings, and freedom from arbitrary detention. The principle is sound. The messenger is compromised.
This does not mean its engineers deserved to be deported in the middle of the night.
If Kenyan authorities used immigration law as a weapon of commercial intimidation, that is a serious constitutional violation that must be remedied.
The Kisumu court was right to issue interim orders protecting CCECC’s employees from further harassment pending full hearing. Due process does not belong only to firms with clean hands.
But courts must also be alert to the risk of becoming instruments in a corporate war between two Chinese state enterprises that have both demonstrated, in different ways, a willingness to bend the rules in pursuit of African infrastructure contracts.
The question before the Kenyan judiciary is not simply whether CCECC’s employees were wrongly deported. It is also whether the entire architecture of litigation being constructed around this procurement dispute serves the public interest or subverts it.
What Policymakers Must Do
The Kenyan government has created this crisis for itself. Kenya Railways was told by the PPARB to re-evaluate the bids after CRBC’s procedural breach. Instead of doing so transparently, it arrived at the same conclusion a second time, triggering a second round of challenges that the state then attempted to short-circuit through midnight deportations.
This sequence, regulatory order, defiance, intimidation, litigation, is not the sequence of a government that respects its own procurement laws.
Parliament should demand an urgent statement from the Transport Cabinet Secretary on why Kenya Railways disregarded the PPARB’s first ruling.
The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority should conduct an independent review of the entire Railway City tender process.
The FCDO, as a major funder, has both the standing and the responsibility to make clear that UK taxpayer funds will not be committed to a project whose procurement integrity is under active judicial challenge in two courts simultaneously.
Above all, Kenya must recover control of this process from the courts and return it to where it belongs: a transparent re-evaluation of compliant bids, conducted in full public view, with documented justification for every scoring decision.
The Sh7 billion difference between the two leading bids is not a technicality.
It is a number large enough to build several secondary schools, equip several district hospitals, or resurface hundreds of kilometres of rural roads.
The Railway City is supposed to be Kenya’s King’s Cross. It would be a profound national embarrassment if the project that was to redefine Nairobi’s skyline were to become instead a monument to procurement capture and judicial abuse.
The courts can protect individual rights without allowing themselves to become battlegrounds for Chinese state-enterprise commercial rivalry. They must try to do both.
The author writes on governance and infrastructure policy. Views are the author’s own.
EY Kenya | Debarment: 30 months from June 2024 | Offences: Fraudulent practices, corrupt practices, concealment of conflict of interest, irregular allowances paid to project officials | Project: Somalia SCORE and PFM II programmes | Internal fallout: Laban Gathungu, senior partner, terminated; High Court awards him Sh43.12m for unlawful removal but orders him to repay EY Sh148m in related costs
PwC Kenya, PwC Rwanda, PwC Associates (Mauritius) | Debarment: 21 months from 17 March 2026, running to 16 December 2027 | Offences: Collusive practices, fraudulent practices, misrepresentation of key experts, failure to disclose sub-consultants | Project: Eastern Electricity Highway Project, Ethiopia-Kenya, valued at Sh149.8 billion | Cross-debarment: AfDB, ADB, EBRD, IADB
For decades, the four giant accounting and advisory firms — Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and KPMG — have built their global empires on a singular, unassailable promise: that they are the guardians of financial probity in a world riddled with fraud. Corporates and governments have paid them hundreds of millions of dollars to audit their books, certify their accounts and keep the dishonest honest.
That promise lies in ruins in Kenya.
In a staggering sequence of admissions that has no parallel in the history of East African professional services, both Ernst & Young Kenya and PricewaterhouseCoopers Kenya have now confessed, under formal World Bank investigation, to the precise categories of misconduct their industry exists to combat. Bribery. Collusion. Fraudulent misrepresentation. The secret purchase of insider information from government officials. The Bank, which does not announce debarments lightly and investigates with the methodical thoroughness of a criminal court, has banned them both.
EY Kenya was the first to fall. On 26 June 2024, the World Bank Group announced a 30-month debarment against the Nairobi-based arm of the global firm, citing fraudulent and corrupt practices committed in the course of World Bank-funded programmes in Somalia. It was a sentence that would bar EY Kenya and any entity it controlled from all World Bank Group-financed operations for two and a half years, a punishment simultaneously extended to the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Inter-American Development Bank Group under a 2010 mutual enforcement agreement.
EY Kenya had not yet completed nine months of that sentence when PwC was next.
On 18 March 2026, the World Bank Group announced the 21-month debarment, with conditional release, of PricewaterhouseCoopers Associates Africa Ltd, based in Mauritius, alongside PricewaterhouseCoopers Limited Kenya and PricewaterhouseCoopers Rwanda Limited.
The sanction relates to the Eastern Electricity Highway Project, the flagship Sh149.8 billion infrastructure initiative designed to construct more than a thousand kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines connecting a power substation at Wolayta-Sodo in Ethiopia to the Kenyan grid at Suswa, allowing Addis Ababa to export electricity to Nairobi while cutting power costs for Kenyan consumers.
The project was everything development finance is supposed to look like: a $1.26 billion multilateral collaboration between the World Bank, the governments of Kenya and Ethiopia, and the African Development Bank, conceived to reduce energy poverty and bind regional economies through shared infrastructure.
It was precisely the kind of high-value, high-visibility contract that the Big Four have fed on for generations, and precisely the kind that the World Bank scrutinises most ferociously.
“It suggests that something is broken in the profession.”
Kwame Owino, Chief Executive, Institute of Economic Affairs
What PwC and its African affiliates are accused of is not complexity. It is straightforward corruption of the most degrading variety.
According to the World Bank’s findings, the three PwC entities obtained confidential procurement information from Ethiopian project officials in 2019 and used that information to gain an improper advantage in the competition to win a consultancy contract for implementing International Financial Reporting Standards at the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation.
Rival firms, including South Africa’s Aurecon, BDO Consulting, a joint venture between Argentina’s Levin and Estudios Energeticos, Grant Thornton Ethiopia and Australia’s RHAS, competed on the assumption that the process was clean. It was not.
The World Bank found that the PwC entities did not stop there. They sought further to steer the award of a second contract, for Fixed Asset Inventory and Revaluation for the Ethiopian Electric Utility, to PwC Associates.
During both the selection and execution phases of that contract, PwC Associates misrepresented the availability, qualifications and employment status of key experts it was putting forward for the work, and failed to disclose all sub-consultants it was deploying on the project.
The World Bank’s conclusion was unambiguous: this conduct constituted collusive and fraudulent practices under its Consultant Guidelines.
PwC has not issued a public statement on the ban. A firm that would, in ordinary circumstances, advise a corporate client to communicate early, clearly and with contrition in the face of reputational crisis, has chosen silence.
The EY Scandal: Bribery in the Horn of Africa
The EY Kenya case, adjudicated before PwC’s, is arguably the more lurid of the two. EY Kenya had been engaged as a consultant under the Somalia Core Economic Institutions and Opportunities Programme, known as SCORE, and under the Second Public Financial Management Capacity Strengthening Project, both World Bank programmes designed to rebuild Somalia’s public financial architecture after decades of conflict and state collapse. The programmes carried a weight of humanitarian purpose that made the betrayal all the more pronounced.
What the World Bank’s investigators found, after drilling through correspondence, financial records and the testimony of insiders, was a pattern of deliberate misconduct. EY Kenya failed to disclose a conflict of interest during the selection and implementation of four contracts under those programmes.
It involved an unauthorised agent in those contracts. And during the execution of at least one contract, EY Kenya made provision for allowances to be paid to project officials, a transaction the World Bank characterised, without equivocation, as bribery.
The man at the centre of it all was Laban Gathungu, a senior EY Kenya partner who led the firm’s operations in Somalia. Court papers filed in subsequent litigation in Nairobi reveal that Gathungu had secret and unethical communication with a Somali government official who provided him with confidential information about procurement discussions between the Intergovernmental Authority on Development and the African Development Bank, including intelligence on the proposed project price for the Drought Resilience and Sustainable Livelihoods programme.
That subcontractor, Horn Economic and Financial Institute, was later identified by forensic investigators as central to the alleged arrangement between Gathungu and the Somali official.
A whistleblower letter dated 10 March 2018 was sent to Gathungu while he was operating in Mogadishu. He did not escalate it. When the firm’s chief executive eventually confronted him in October 2018, Gathungu’s response was found unsatisfactory and his partnership was terminated immediately.
Gathungu then sued for wrongful removal, seeking Sh450 million in damages.
EY countersued. The High Court ruled that both sides had proven their respective claims, awarding Gathungu Sh43.12 million for procedurally unlawful removal while simultaneously allowing EY Kenya to recover Sh148 million from him, a sum comprising $1.053 million paid to EY India for a forensic review, ZAR850,000 paid to EY South Africa to investigate the fraud allegations, and Sh5.69 million in related costs.
The court’s refusal to award Gathungu the higher sum he sought, citing his own questionable behaviour, encapsulated the moral wreckage of the entire affair: a firm that polices the conduct of others, policed by the very courts to which it sells its governance expertise.
The Regulator’s Silence is Deafening
The Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya, which regulates all players in the Kenyan accountancy and audit industry and which wields the power to suspend or revoke practising certificates, has not publicly responded to either the EY Kenya or the PwC debarments.
It did not respond to queries from the press following the EY ban in 2024. It did not respond after the PwC announcement in March 2026. Its silence, in the face of the two most damaging regulatory events in the history of Kenyan professional services, has itself become a story.
Kwame Owino, chief executive of the Institute of Economic Affairs, says the debarments expose a structural failure that extends well beyond the firms themselves. He argues that after every World Bank ban, ICPAK should have taken visible, deterrent action to signal that the conduct was unacceptable under Kenyan professional standards, and that the absence of such action has contributed to a permissive environment in which firms calculated that the risk of exposure was manageable.
Owino is not entirely without sympathy for the commercial pressures these firms face in markets where corruption is deeply entrenched, where government officials with information of financial value sell it as a matter of routine, and where firms that decline to play the game may simply find that their competitors do not share their scruples. But his sympathy stops well short of absolution.
He notes that the World Bank is not an institution that is easily fooled, pointing out that the development lender typically deploys outside investigators to scrutinise its projects with exceptional rigour, and that anyone who decided to commit misconduct on a World Bank contract was not making a calculated bet so much as registering an eventual certainty of being caught.
That EY Kenya and PwC proceeded regardless, he says, is among the most disturbing aspects of the entire scandal.
A Global Giant Drowning in Scandal
The Kenya PwC debarment arrives at a moment of profound institutional crisis for the global firm. Mohamed Kande, who became PwC’s global chair in July 2024, the first Black professional to hold the role and the first from a consulting rather than audit background, inherited a firm already on fire across multiple continents.
In China, PwC’s auditing business was suspended for six months and fined $62 million by regulators who found that it had concealed or condoned fraud at the collapsed property developer Evergrande, which had accumulated more than $300 billion in debt before its spectacular implosion. Chinese state-owned enterprises departed the firm in a cascade.
In Australia, a senior tax partner was found to have passed confidential government information to colleagues to help them win business from multinational technology companies, triggering a political furore and forcing PwC to sell its government consulting division entirely.
In Saudi Arabia, the Public Investment Fund, the $925 billion sovereign wealth fund, severed its advisory relationship with the firm. By April 2025, PwC had shut down operations across more than a dozen African countries, including nine it exited simultaneously in a single announcement, as the firm scrambled to contain risk and distance itself from markets it could no longer guarantee it could police.
Kenya, conspicuously, was not on that list of exits. Within months of that African retreat, PwC Kenya’s Africa affiliates stood accused before the World Bank.
Kande has spoken publicly about rebuilding trust in the firm’s operations. The settlement that ended the World Bank’s Kenya investigation is, in one sense, a testament to his strategy: admit, cooperate, remediate, and accept a reduced sentence.
PwC Associates, PwC Kenya and PwC Rwanda pleaded guilty in exchange for 21 months rather than the longer sanction that would otherwise have applied. The ban took effect on 17 March 2026 and will run until 16 December 2027 unless the firms satisfy the World Bank’s conditions for early release.
PricewaterhouseCoopers Africa Limited, the continental coordination entity that sits above the national member firms and is responsible for compliance oversight across the network, was required to sign the settlement agreement as a non-sanctioned party. The World Bank’s insistence on that signature is itself a pointed commentary: the failure in Kenya was not an isolated deviation by a rogue unit but a failure of oversight at the continental level.
Half the Big Four, Half the Industry, All of the Shame
Kenya ranks second among African nations whose involvement in African Development Bank-financed projects has attracted multilateral sanctions, a grim statistic that speaks to the depth of the procurement corruption problem in the country’s public contracting ecosystem.
The Big Four, with their air of unimpeachable rectitude and their global brand equity, are supposed to be the corrective force in that ecosystem. Instead, the evidence now before the World Bank shows they were participants in it.
The commercial consequences are already visible. Both EY Kenya and the PwC affiliates face mandatory exits from the personnel involved in the misconduct, the forced termination of relationships with implicated sub-consultants and the obligation to construct from scratch integrity compliance programmes that satisfy the World Bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency.
They must submit to monitoring. They must train staff. They must demonstrate, to the satisfaction of an institution that was deceived by their own employees, that they have reformed.
The question that neither firm has answered publicly, and that ICPAK has declined even to acknowledge, is the one that now confronts the entire East African professional services industry: if the firms that are paid to certify integrity do not have any themselves, who is left to certify them?
NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 23 — Family members denied detectives investigating the disappearance of former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju access to his residence, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said Suunday night, as efforts to trace his whereabouts continue.
In a statement, the DCI said Tuju was reported missing by his family on Sunday at Karen Police Station after his vehicle was discovered abandoned in Nairobi’s Karen suburb.
Police said the car was found along Miotoni Lane with its hazard lights on after a security guard from a nearby institution alerted authorities.
Officers from Karen Police Station responded to the scene, and crime scene investigators later processed the area before towing the vehicle to the station for forensic examination.
However, the DCI said investigators attempting to access Tuju’s residence along Mwitu Drive were denied entry by family members.
“While progress is being made, the DCI notes that an attempt by investigators to access Mr Tuju’s residence along Mwitu Drive was denied by the family,” the agency said.
“We urge full cooperation from all parties, including unrestricted access to relevant locations and prompt provision of information, for a swift and thorough resolution.”
The DCI added that a specialised investigative team has been deployed and is working with other government agencies to trace Tuju.
Appeal for information
Authorities also appealed to members of the public with information about his whereabouts—or who may have witnessed suspicious activity in the Miotoni Lane area before, on or after March 21—to come forward.
Earlier Sunday, Siaya Governor James Orengo said Tuju had gone missing under unclear circumstances following the discovery of his abandoned vehicle in Karen.
Speaking during a church service in Narok, Orengo suggested the former minister may have been kidnapped and urged Kenyans to pray for him.
Lawyer and legislator Otiende Amollo said Tuju’s legal team was working to establish his whereabouts while pressing authorities for answers.
Tuju’s reported disappearance comes amid a prolonged legal dispute over the ownership and planned auction of Dari Business Park in Karen.
On March 18, the Commercial Court declined to grant temporary orders sought by Tuju to block the auction of the property and related assets.
Justice Moses Ado ruled that the application could not be granted without allowing the respondents to be heard and directed that the matter be heard on a priority basis.
The dispute involves lenders seeking to recover debts totaling more than $15 million linked to properties owned by Tuju’s company, Dari Limited.
Authorities have not commented on Tuju’s earlier claims that powerful government figures were pressuring him to vacate the Karen property after he declined an offer to sell it.
The numbers are staggering. Over the past three years, Equity Bank Group has lost the equivalent of more than Sh4 billion to a cascading wave of fraud and cybercrime that has struck the lender in nearly every market it operates: Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and with further exposure expected in Tanzania, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The losses have come through hacked payment systems, stolen staff credentials, insider-facilitated transfers, cryptocurrency laundering, and now a cross-border digital heist involving the bank’s Rwandan subsidiary.
The question that Kenya’s banking establishment and its regulators refuse to answer publicly is blunt: at what point does a pattern of catastrophic, recurring financial crime stop being a series of unfortunate incidents and start being evidence of systemic failure?
Equity Group Holdings, which styles itself Africa’s leading financial inclusion champion and holds the distinction of being East Africa’s largest bank by market capitalisation, has framed every theft as a trigger for reform.
Each successive heist has been met with a press release, a CEO speech and, eventually, a mass dismissal.
In 2025, the bank fired more than 1,500 employees in successive waves across its Kenyan and Ugandan operations, in what CEO James Mwangi called the most aggressive internal anti-fraud campaign in East African banking history.
Then, barely eight months later, Equity Bank Rwanda was looted of Rwf 4.9 billion — roughly USD 3.4 million — in a five-day digital heist coordinated across two countries. The mop-up had not even finished before the next attack arrived.
The Blueprint: How The Looting Has Unfolded
The first recorded systematic assault on Equity’s digital infrastructure in recent memory began quietly in April 2023, when unknown actors penetrated the bank’s CyberSource payment and fraud management system. Security configurations for three registered merchants were downgraded from three-dimensional authentication — which requires multiple layers of verification — to two-dimensional, which offers far weaker protection.
For the next three months, fraudulent credit card scripts were run silently against the three merchants, with payments debited straight from Equity Bank’s settlement account.
No goods changed hands. No services were rendered. The money simply disappeared.
By the time Equity Bank discovered what had happened and filed a report with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, it had lost Sh322.1 million. Correspondence between the DCI and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, subsequently seen by Nation Africa, traced the stolen funds through multiple local bank accounts before a portion landed in the United Arab Emirates through a private company in Abu Dhabi, operated via a Kenyan-British businessman who is among four suspects recommended for prosecution.
The DCI noted that forensic analysis of a seized laptop was expected to reveal whether an Equity Bank staff member facilitated the breach from inside.
Whether the employee-collusion angle was ever conclusively resolved has not been made public. Whether the Abu Dhabi funds were ever recovered remains unknown.
One year later, almost to the month, the credit card fraud vector was struck again.
Between April 9 and 15, 2024, Sh179.6 million was fraudulently paid out to 551 bank accounts and mobile money wallets.
Investigators determined that an Equity Bank employee had installed malware in the bank’s main system specifically to delay detection, buying time for the stolen funds to be dispersed.
Equity managed to freeze Sh60 million; the remaining Sh118.9 million had already been moved — Sh63 million to M-Pesa accounts and Sh39 million to accounts in competing banks.
The CBK said nothing publicly. Equity Bank said nothing publicly. The incident was disclosed only through investigative reporting.
The Sh1.5 Billion Payroll Heist: An Inside Job At The Heart Of The Group
July 10, 2024, was the date that changed everything for Equity Group. Through 47 transactions designed to mimic routine salary payments, cybercriminals siphoned Sh1,545,553,374.59from the bank’s salary suspense general ledger — an internal account used to process payroll for corporate clients — in a single day.
The scheme was breathtaking in its sophistication: the transactions looked, on every internal system, like legitimate corporate payroll disbursements to employees of various companies.
In reality, Kenya’s second-largest bank was being drained in one of the most audacious bank heists this country has ever seen.
At the centre of the investigation was David Kimani Machiri, a general manager at Equity Bank’s Group Processing Centre, Salary Processing Unit, who held direct system access to the compromised account.
The digital fingerprints of every one of the 47 transactions pointed to his credentials. Machiri had, investigators noted with particular suspicion, taken sick leave immediately before the theft.
Yet somehow, his access codes were live and fully operational on the day of the heist. When confronted, his explanations did not satisfy investigators. He was arrested on July 12, 2024, and granted bail of Sh500,000 — then, on August 11, 2024, he was allegedly abducted and reportedly held in a forest, in a twist that raised immediate questions about who, precisely, needed him silenced.
As investigators followed the money, a second name surfaced: Ruth Muthoni Kamau, a businesswoman whose companies — Goodmans Fresh Ltd and Blue Kenfresh Ltd — received Sh105 million directly, with additional funds flowing into personal accounts.
A third suspect, Owen Karanja, received Sh215 million through his companies and, according to police, converted the entire sum to bitcoin deposited into a Binance cryptocurrency wallet registered in Muthoni’s name.
A fourth suspect, initially identified only as “Geoffrey”, was revealed through fingerprint analysis to be Geoffrey Kahungi Kiragu, founder of Lesedi Developers, a real estate firm that had defrauded more than 800 investors of at least Sh1 billion before its collapse in 2023. Kiragu had simply moved on to bigger scores.
Five individuals with Somali-sounding names received Sh463 million and were detained while attempting to access further funds at Equity Bank’s headquarters, pointing to the involvement of Hawala networks — the traditional Islamic money transfer system that operates entirely outside conventional banking channels — alongside cryptocurrency conversion.
The theft, in other words, was not opportunistic. It was a planned, multi-layered, professionally executed financial crime involving serial fraudsters, an insider, conversion to crypto to defeat tracing, offshore routing through forex bureaus, and hawala for the final clean-out.
The Cover-Up That Made A Scandal A Crisis
What elevated the Sh1.5 billion heist from a serious crime to a potential institutional crisis was the allegation of systematic interference in the investigation itself.
Inspector Bonface Maina Kamau, the lead Banking Fraud Investigation Unit detective on the case, found himself at the centre of what internal police correspondence suggests was an orchestrated campaign to derail the probe after he challenged inconsistencies in Ruth Muthoni’s witness statement — including a document that bore the wrong year, 2023 instead of 2024, and an improperly initialled recording.
When Inspector Kamau pushed for a corrected statement, Muthoni filed a complaint against him with the Directorate of Public Complaints, accusing him of demanding a Sh10 million surety and orchestrating an illegal abduction.
The complaint triggered Kamau’s sudden transfer to Baragoi in Samburu County — one of Kenya’s most remote postings — effectively removing the most knowledgeable investigator from the most complex financial crime case in the country.
In protest letters to senior police officials, Kamau alleged that two senior DCI officers from the Transnational Organised Crime Unit had “incessantly tried to help Ms Muthoni wriggle out of the investigation”, that ODPP bureaucrats had made similar approaches, and that Muthoni had made WhatsApp calls to “senior officers in the DCI and the National Police Service” while being processed and had met an officer who provided her with a BFIU contact for “furtherance in assistance she needed.”
Muthoni has since obtained a court order blocking the police from investigating or arresting her, claiming the investigation is tainted.
A Nairobi lawyer, Esther Bitutu Kadiki, was arrested in May 2025 and charged in connection with the heist, with court papers alleging she was instrumental in orchestrating the fraudulent siphoning of funds.
The Group’s own Chief Internal Auditor was sacked in October 2024 after being blamed for oversight failures that preceded the theft. Multiple legal proceedings now run concurrently in different courts. The investigation, in short, is as fragmented as the stolen funds.
Uganda: Years Of Looting Under The Bank’s Nose
Kenya’s losses, spectacular as they are, represent only part of the story.
In Uganda, Equity Bank has suffered a slow-motion catastrophe that should have raised alarm bells at the board level years ago.
Between 2018 and 2024, the Ugandan subsidiary was consumed by a massive insider fraud scheme in which UGX 65 billion — approximately USD 17 million — in unsecured loans was issued through the bank’s Eazzy Stock digital lending platform to fake companies, unqualified borrowers, and employees’ relatives, without adequate due diligence.
At least eight staff members were prosecuted. Managing Director Anthony Kituuka resigned. The scheme contributed to Equity Bank Uganda recording a UGX 18.8 billion net loss in 2023, a figure that has since been partially reversed — but not without leaving a deep scar on the subsidiary’s credibility.
In 2022 and 2023, a wave of SIM-swap and mobile banking frauds hit Ugandan customers.
In 2024, the bank was separately exposed to an additional UGX 4 billion in losses from the negligent failure to reconcile thousands of Visa card transactions, a failure investigators linked to two employees in the bank’s monitoring team. When the bank moved to recoup those losses by placing liens on affected accounts, it placed them on accounts that were already dormant or had been closed — aggravating customers who had nothing to do with the fraud.
Beyond the human toll, the UGX 4 billion card fiasco exposed a monitoring team that was either incompetent or complicit.
In one additional case, an Equity Bank Uganda operations manager was charged in court over the alleged theft and laundering of USD 2.8 million from the lender.
By mid-2025, when Mwangi extended his Kenyan anti-fraud purge into Uganda, Equity Bank Uganda’s fraud-related provisions had ballooned to UGX 191.2 billion — a figure that, taken alone, would be a national banking scandal in any country on the continent.
Rwanda 2026: The Purge Did Not Hold
Rwanda was supposed to be different. Equity Group had explicitly named it as one of the subsidiaries that would be swept through the integrity audit Mwangi had launched.
The CEO had gone on record in May 2025 promising to be “consistently ruthless.” Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan and the DRC were named destinations for the crackdown. Eight months later, on February 14 to 18, 2026, attackers executed a five-day digital assault on Equity Bank Rwanda that drained Rwf 4.9 billion — approximately USD 3.4 million — from the bank’s mobile money float system. Equity detected and contained the breach, reversing a majority of transactions within 24 hours. Approximately USD 2.5 million — 74 percent of the total — remained outstanding.
On March 15, 2026, Equity Bank Rwanda confirmed the incident. On March 23, 2026, six Ugandan nationals — Mugisha Solomon, Enock Mpanga Kazige, Katerega Benedicto, Kiyimba Faruk, Oketcho Gerard, and Katamba Isma — were arraigned at Kampala Metropolitan Police under CRB: 215/2026, charged with electronic fraud under Section 18(1) and (2) of Uganda’s Computer Misuse Act, Cap 96.
The Rwanda Investigation Bureau had separately detained 35 individuals in Rwanda, including two Equity Bank Rwanda IT staff connected to data centre operations.
Investigators told sources that “there must have been physical access to the data centre.” The reference in the Ugandan charge sheet to “others still at large” confirmed the operation was wider than the six individuals in custody.
The 2026 attack was not Rwanda’s first encounter with criminals targeting Equity Bank. In November 2019, twelve people — eight Kenyans, three Rwandans, and a Ugandan — were arrested in Kigali while attempting a similar cyber-fraud operation against the bank.
They were convicted in 2021 and sentenced to eight-year jail terms. That history makes the 2026 breach more damning, not less: Equity Bank Rwanda had been on notice since 2019 that it was a cross-border target.
The 2026 attack was, by all accounts, far more technically sophisticated — exploiting the mobile money float mechanism, deploying a cross-border human mule architecture, and apparently gaining entry through a third-party vendor’s system rather than through a frontal assault on the bank’s own network.
The Rogue Employee At Sh387M: A Fourth Attack In The Same Year
Even as the Sh1.5 billion payroll heist dominated headlines, Equity Bank Kenya was simultaneously absorbing a fourth major loss. Between May 17 and June 14, 2024 — while the payroll investigation was still live — a rogue employee illegally transferred Sh386.5 million to eight companies: Ubahashi Traders Limited, Calabash Adventures Limited, Jahnur Investment, Kariye Investment, Flowerish International, Kariye Salah Ali, Hotho Investments, and Sasa Pay Trust.
Equity Bank rushed to court for freezing orders and reported the matter to the BFIU. This was a separate theft, a separate employee, separate beneficiary companies — yet sharing names with some of the Hawala-linked suspects already implicated in the payroll heist, a connection that raises questions about the breadth of the criminal network that had embedded itself inside the institution.
The Audit Chief Is Fired, Not The System
One of the more revealing episodes in this saga is what happened to Equity Bank’s most senior internal watchdog.
Court papers filed in the Employment and Labour Relations Court reveal that a senior bank official who had served as Group Chief Internal Auditor since 2016 and was reassigned as Director Internal Audit in February 2024 was suspended in August 2024 and dismissed in October 2024, after the bank identified “omissions and/or commissions, failure or negligence” linked to his oversight role as contributing causes to the Sh1.5 billion loss.
The man had spent 22 years at the institution. His termination was treated as a solution. The structure that allowed an internal salary suspense account to be drained of Sh1.5 billion through 47 transactions without real-time alert — that structure received no public scrutiny whatsoever.
What The Numbers Actually Say
Tallied conservatively across the documented incidents from 2023 to early 2026, Equity Group has lost or been exposed to fraud and cybercrime losses approaching the equivalent of Sh5.5 billion across its regional operations.
The figure includes the Sh322.1 million CyberSource credit card fraud (2023), the Sh179.6 million repeat credit card fraud (April 2024), the Sh386.5 million rogue-employee transfer (May to June 2024), the Sh1.545 billion payroll heist (July 2024), the UGX 65 billion Eazzy Stock digital lending scandal in Uganda (2018 to 2024, equivalent to approximately Sh2.2 billion at current rates), the UGX 4 billion unreconciled Visa card losses in Uganda (2024), and the Rwf 4.9 billion Rwanda digital heist (February 2026, approximately Sh475 million).
Not counted in this figure are the USD 2.8 million Uganda operations manager fraud, the title deed fraud of Sh490 million, forged payment instructions of Sh26.2 million, or fraudulent teller transactions of Sh39 million — all separately disclosed in court documents.
The bank’s own internal audit, which led to the dismissal of between 1,200 and 1,500 employees across Kenya and Uganda by mid-2025, confirmed total losses over two years of at least Sh2 billion (approximately USD 15.4 million) from staff collusion alone.
These are not allegations. These are figures drawn from the bank’s own public statements, court filings, police charge sheets, and DCI correspondence with the ODPP.
The Structural Problem The Bank Will Not Name
Every statement issued by Equity Bank Group in the wake of these incidents has shared a common theme: the problem is the people, not the system. James Mwangi has said he will be ruthless. He will clean the bank.
He will protect mama mboga’s chicken. He will remove those who have compromised themselves. And so the bank has fired employees: 195 in May 2025, then 287 by mid-May, then 1,200 in a single wave on May 29, 2025 — nearly nine percent of the entire Kenyan workforce, handed two-day ultimatums to prove their innocence. By the time the Uganda purge was added, more than 1,500 people had been dismissed.
What has not been publicly examined, by the bank, by the Central Bank of Kenya, by the Bank of Uganda, or by the National Bank of Rwanda, is this: how does a bank of Equity’s scale and sophistication — with a market capitalisation of Sh1.3 trillion, operations in seven countries, and a customer base exceeding 12.9 million — allow a single manager’s credentials to authorise 47 transactions totalling Sh1.5 billion from a salary suspense account without a single real-time flag? How does a credit card fraud scheme run undetected for three consecutive months before the bank notices? How does the same fraud vector succeed again, one year later, by a different set of criminals? How does an employee install malware in the main system without detection? And how does the Rwanda subsidiary, explicitly named for a post-Kenya integrity audit, end up being looted eight months after the CEO’s pledge to sweep it clean?
The answer, which no one in authority is publicly willing to give, is that the problem is not primarily the employees.
The problem is a digital banking architecture that expanded faster than the controls designed to govern it. Equity Bank has transformed itself, with extraordinary commercial success, from a building society for the unbanked into a seven-country digital financial services group processing millions of transactions daily across mobile money platforms, agent networks, and third-party technology integrations.
In doing so, it has multiplied not just the opportunities for financial inclusion but the attack surfaces for financial crime. Every new integration is a potential entry point. Every new market is a new set of local fraudsters studying the system. Every new credential is a potential key.
Where Are The Regulators?
The Central Bank of Kenya has, to date, made no public statement specifically addressing the string of fraud incidents at Equity Bank. The Communications Authority of Kenya reported 7.9 billion cyber threats in the first eight months of 2025 — double the figure for 2024 — and the CBK has described Kenya’s banking sector as “resilient.”
This is the same regulator that is mandated under the Banking Act to ensure the soundness and stability of institutions under its watch.
The Bank of Uganda has been similarly silent on the Equity Uganda fraud provisions of UGX 191.2 billion. The National Bank of Rwanda confirmed only that it was cooperating with the Rwanda Investigation Bureau on the February 2026 attack.
No regulator in any of the three primary jurisdictions has publicly demanded an independent audit of Equity Group’s cybersecurity architecture. No regulator has disclosed whether the bank faces any supervisory sanction for repeated material control failures.
This silence is itself a regulatory failure. Kenya’s Banking Act grants the CBK sweeping powers to inspect, investigate and direct remedial action at licensed institutions.
The Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act creates obligations that the bank’s own transactions with the Abu Dhabi-routed funds, the bitcoin conversions, and the Hawala networks should have triggered.
That the investigation into who precisely engineered the 2023 CyberSource hack — and whether an insider was involved — appears to have produced no public outcome three years later is not a point of comfort. It is a point of alarm.
The Questions That Must Be Answered
Is Equity Bank’s digital infrastructure fundamentally vulnerable to insider exploitation in ways that individual dismissals cannot fix? Why has no regulator in Kenya, Uganda or Rwanda publicly demanded an independent third-party cybersecurity audit of Equity Group’s core banking systems? How much of the combined Sh5-plus billion stolen from the bank across its markets has actually been recovered, and where is the money that reached Abu Dhabi in 2023? What happened to the investigation into Inspector Bonface Kamau’s allegations that senior DCI officers and ODPP bureaucrats attempted to shield Ruth Muthoni from prosecution? Are the criminal networks that have targeted Equity Bank in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda linked — and if so, is there a coordinated organised crime operation running across the group’s footprint that law enforcement has failed to map and dismantle? And why, after the largest internal purge in East African banking history, did Equity Bank Rwanda’s data centre apparently suffer a physical or near-physical access breach just eight months later?
These are not rhetorical questions.
They are the questions that the bank’s 12.9 million customers, its 14,000 remaining employees, its shareholders on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the Uganda Securities Exchange and the Rwanda Stock Exchange, and the regulators in seven countries are entitled to have answered.
The money belongs to ordinary Kenyans, Ugandans, and Rwandans. Some of it is mama mboga’s chicken. And it keeps disappearing.
On the evening of Friday March 20, 2026, a De Havilland Dash 8 carrying 34 passengers and five crew skidded off the runway at Wilson Airport after landing from Kisumu. It was, by the reckoning of those on board, a matter of seconds from becoming an inferno. It was also, by any fair reckoning of the record, anything but a surprise.
Vihiga Senator Godfrey Osotsi, who was among the 39 occupants of the aircraft operated by ALS Limited on behalf of Safarilink Aviation, later posted on Facebook shortly after 11pm to tell Kenya he was alive.
He praised the pilot for steering the Dash 8 off the sealed surface and forcing it to stall on the grass near the intersection of Runways 07 and 14, thereby preventing what he described as a catastrophic fire.
What he did not praise was anyone at Wilson Airport itself: no ambulance came. No emergency response team materialised. Kenya Airports Authority confirmed the aircraft remained on site while recovery efforts were ongoing, and said operations at the airport continued normally.
For Senator Osotsi, the ordeal did not come out of nowhere. Eight days earlier, on March 12, he had stood in the Senate chamber and listed five pointed questions about the state of Wilson Airport’s runway, drainage, rescue and firefighting facilities, air traffic systems and power backup. Nobody answered them before his plane nearly burned.
That gap between the warning and the disaster is the story of Safarilink and Wilson Airport in miniature: alarm bells that ring loudly, followed by institutional silence, followed by another incident.
Kenya Insights has reconstructed the airline’s safety record over more than a decade and found a pattern that Kenya’s civil aviation establishment has consistently failed to confront.
THE AIRLINE THEY TRUSTED TO FLY THEM TO PARADISE
Safarilink Aviation Limited, headquartered at Wilson Airport and carrying the IATA code F2, was founded in 2004 to do something deceptively simple: fly tourists to the Maasai Mara and back.
Over two decades it built a reputation as the premium domestic carrier for safari-bound travellers, with scheduled and charter routes connecting Nairobi to remote game reserve airstrips across the country.
Its current fleet includes several Cessna 208B Grand Caravans and De Havilland Canada Dash 8 variants, and the airline carries tens of thousands of passengers a year, many of them foreign visitors whose first and last impression of Kenya’s aviation infrastructure is formed aboard a Safarilink flight.
That image of reliability is not without foundation.
Safarilink has never lost a single paying passenger or crew member in a crash of its own aircraft. Against the backdrop of African aviation more broadly, that is a record worth noting.
The problem is the growing list of serious incidents that surrounds it, incidents that in other jurisdictions would have prompted regulatory intervention, public inquiries and fleet audits, but which in Kenya have been absorbed into the national conversation and then forgotten, one after another, until the next one arrives.
A CHRONOLOGY OF CLOSE CALLS
December 2007: The Apron Collision at Wilson
The airline’s first documented serious incident occurred even before it had firmly established its safari routes. On 12 December 2007, a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan registered 5Y-SLA sustained substantial damage at Wilson Airport in a ground collision on the apron involving a turning propeller from another aircraft.
No passengers were on board and no injuries resulted, but the episode exposed the congestion and ground handling risks that would shadow the airline for years to come.
August 2019: Wildebeest on the Runway at Kichwa Tembo
The most cinematically dramatic entry in Safarilink’s incident log came in August 2019. Its De Havilland Canada DHC-8-200, registration 5Y-SLM, was on a scheduled flight from Wilson to Kichwa Tembo Airstrip deep in the Maasai Mara.
As the aircraft touched down, several wildebeest dashed onto the strip.
The left main landing gear collapsed on impact and the number one propeller was damaged. The aircraft was written off as a total loss. Two wildebeest died. Every passenger and crew member walked away.
The incident was widely reported internationally, presented as a spectacular collision with the African landscape, but the underlying questions it raised about wildlife management at remote airstrips received little regulatory follow-through.
October 2019: Tyre Burst at Wilson
Just weeks after the Mara wildlife strike, a Safarilink Cessna Caravan, registration 5Y-SLJ, skidded off the runway at Wilson Airport after a tyre burst on landing from Lamu. Ten passengers and two crew members were on board. None were injured.
The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority closed the runway for 30 minutes while the aircraft was towed clear. The KCAA called the incident ‘regrettable.’
What it did not call it was part of a pattern, even though it followed a Silverstone Air wheel incident and preceded a second Safarilink tyre failure on a Dash 8 within days, prompting the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office to issue a travel advisory warning Britons to scrutinise the safety records of airlines operating from Wilson Airport.
March 5, 2024: Mid-Air Collision Over Nairobi National Park
This is the incident that should have changed everything and did not change enough. At 09:34 on the morning of March 5, 2024, Safarilink Flight 053, a Dash 8-315 registered 5Y-SLK, climbed out of Wilson Airport’s Runway 14 bound for Ukunda with 39 passengers and five crew.
Simultaneously, a Cessna 172M registered 5Y-NNJ, operated by the Ninety-Nines Flying School and based at Wilson, was conducting touch-and-go circuit training on Runway 07. Air traffic control had issued see-and-avoid instructions to both crews.
The aircraft collided. The Dash 8’s crew heard a loud bang, felt severe yaw and levelled off, eventually returning safely to Wilson with part of the right horizontal stabiliser’s de-icing boot torn away.
The Cessna spun out of control and fell into Nairobi National Park, 1.6 nautical miles from the airport perimeter.
The instructor pilot, 25 years old and holding a Commercial Pilot’s Licence, and the 20-year-old student pilot with 49 total hours in his logbook were both killed on impact. Their deaths remain the only passenger or crew fatalities ever linked to a Safarilink flight.
Kenya’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Department launched an investigation and issued a preliminary report. As of March 2026, a final report had not been publicly released.
The AAID noted that ATC had issued see-and-avoid instructions and that the Dash 8 crew reported what appeared to be clear traffic before impact.
The fundamental question of how Wilson Airport’s congested mixed-use airspace, shared daily by commercial turboprops, training aircraft and private planes operating under visual flight rules, can be made safe remains unanswered.
December 28, 2024: ALS Dash 8 Runway Mishap at Wilson
Less than a year before the March 2026 excursion, an ALS-operated Dash 8, registration 5Y-MRE, experienced a landing mishap at Wilson when its main tyres burst, temporarily closing the runway. No injuries were reported.
The significance of this incident lies partly in the aircraft: ALS, the same operator that would the following year handle Flight 090 on behalf of Safarilink, was already registering incidents at the very airport where another of its aircraft would come to grief.
THE NIGHT A SENATOR’S QUESTIONS CAME TRUE
The March 2026 runway excursion has a quality that separates it from those that came before: it was anticipated in formal legislative terms with extraordinary precision. On March 12, Senator Osotsi had asked the Standing Committee on Roads, Transportation and Housing for a statement covering the state of Wilson Airport’s runway, its drainage, its rescue and firefighting facilities, its air traffic control systems and its power backup installations.
He had asked for findings from investigations into recent accidents around Wilson. He had asked for timelines on the demolition of buildings rising above the prescribed height restrictions along the flight path.
His senatorial colleagues agreed with the thrust of his concerns.
Senate Majority Leader Aaron Cheruiyot, who represents Kericho, stated during the March 12 session that ‘any user of that airport must be concerned for their safety.’
He flagged the airport’s lax security arrangements and noted that runway repairs were progressing, in his phrase, ‘extremely slowly,’ such that planes on certain runways must overfly Lang’ata Road and the playing compound of Lang’ata Primary School during approach.
Marsabit Senator Mohamed Chute raised concerns about repairs to Runway 07 and called on airport management to appear before a Senate committee.
Mombasa Senator Faki Mwihaji cited encroachment by a developer who had constructed a playing field near the airport perimeter and blocked an emergency access road. Wajir Senator Mohamed Abass declared the airport ‘a disaster in waiting.’
Eight days later, Flight 090 arrived from Kisumu in rain and darkness. According to Senator Osotsi, writing from the scene that night, the runway was flooded and the lighting system was not functioning properly.
He noted that it is widely known that such conditions regularly force evening flights to divert to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and he demanded to know why this particular flight had not been redirected. Kenya Airports Authority said operations at Wilson remained normal.
WHAT THE RECORD REVEALS
Examined as a body of evidence rather than a series of isolated episodes, Safarilink’s incident history reveals several recurring failure modes. Runway excursions are the most frequent category: the 2007 apron collision, the 2019 tyre burst, the ALS Dash 8 tyre failure in December 2024 and the March 2026 skid-off share a common geography, Wilson Airport, and a common theme, an aircraft leaving its intended surface.
The 2019 Mara wildebeest strike represents the hazard of operating into unsecured bush strips where wildlife management is inconsistent. The 2024 mid-air collision stands alone as an airspace management failure of the gravest kind.
What is notably absent from this list is the category of failure that most frequently features in African aviation fatality statistics: catastrophic mechanical failure leading to controlled-flight-into-terrain, or crew incapacitation in cruise.
Safarilink’s aircraft have largely performed as designed; the incidents have occurred at the margins, during takeoff, landing, ground operations and low-level flight near an airport that senators now describe as structurally inadequate.
That distinction matters for how regulators should respond, because it points away from Safarilink’s maintenance culture and toward the operating environment.
Wilson Airport is 97 years old. It was established in 1929 in what was then open land outside Nairobi.
The city has since grown around and over it. Buildings encroach on its perimeter. Developers obstruct emergency access roads. Runway 07 is under repair at a pace senators describe as incompatible with safety. Drainage fails in heavy rain. Evening lighting malfunctions.
And Nairobi’s upper airspace continues to mix commercial turboprops with training aircraft under visual-separation rules that, as March 2024 demonstrated, can have fatal consequences.
THE WET LEASE QUESTION
One detail of the March 2026 incident deserves specific scrutiny that it has not yet received. The aircraft that skidded off Wilson’s runway on Flight 090 was not owned or crewed by Safarilink in the conventional sense.
It was a De Havilland DHC-8-100, registration 5Y-BXI, operated by ALS Limited under a wet lease arrangement, meaning ALS provided not just the aircraft but also the pilots and cabin crew.
KAA’s statement confirmed that 5Y-BXI is an aircraft normally deployed for humanitarian operations on behalf of the World Food Programme and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The wet lease is a legitimate and common commercial arrangement in African aviation. But it raises questions that regulators and the public should be pressing Safarilink to answer: what are the standards by which it selects wet lease partners?
What oversight does it exercise over their crew training, recency and qualifications? Does it conduct its own safety audits of operators flying its routes under its brand? And when an ALS aircraft on a Safarilink flight number runs off the runway at an airport where another ALS aircraft had already suffered a tyre failure fifteen months earlier, what does the contractual framework require the airline to do?
WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority has repeatedly described itself as committed to international safety standards.
The Kenya Airports Authority issues statements after incidents confirming everyone is safe. Investigations are launched and preliminary reports are filed. Final reports, with binding recommendations, are slower to materialise.
The AAID’s investigation into the March 2024 mid-air collision has not produced a final public report as of the date of this publication, more than two years after two pilots died above Nairobi National Park.
Senator Osotsi has called for Wilson Airport to be closed and comprehensively upgraded before it resumes full operations.
Senate Majority Leader Cheruiyot has said something must change. Marsabit’s Chute wants management summoned before a committee.
These are the right instincts, but Kenya has heard similar demands before. The KCAA convened a closed-door meeting with Wilson-based operators after the 2019 tyre burst incidents. The UK government issued a travel warning. Airlines issued statements. And then the moment passed, until the next one.
What Kenya’s aviation sector requires is not another round of statements and closed sessions but a published, time-bound action plan for Wilson Airport’s runway, drainage, lighting and emergency response infrastructure; a public final report on the March 2024 mid-air collision; an enforceable framework for wet lease safety oversight; and meaningful wildlife management standards at bush airstrips that receive commercial passenger traffic.
Safarilink, for its part, should publish the safety audit criteria it applies to wet lease operators and confirm what additional measures it has taken since March 2024.
Thirty-nine passengers survived March 20. Two pilots did not survive March 5, 2024. The arithmetic of Kenya’s aviation near-misses is still, for now, tolerable. The question is how much longer that tolerance can reasonably be extended before the luck runs out.
When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on 28 February 2026, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering the most severe disruption to global maritime trade since the Second World War, nobody in Nairobi was thinking about Lamu. Kenya’s policymakers were, like everyone else, braced for the shocks: surging fuel costs, crumbling trade routes, a currency under pressure.
What nobody anticipated was that a port on a UNESCO-listed island paradise, 340 kilometres north of Mombasa, would emerge as one of the more improbable commercial beneficiaries of the worst geopolitical crisis of the decade.
In the three weeks since Operation Epic Fury began, the Strait of Hormuz has effectively been closed to Western-linked shipping. Iran declared the waterway off-limits within days of the strikes, and the IRGC backed the threat with action.
Since 1 March, at least 16 vessels have been struck in or near the strait. Tanker traffic has fallen by roughly 90 per cent compared to pre-war volumes, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, which described conditions in the region as representing “maximum disruption.”
The four titans of container shipping, Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM, all suspended passages through the strait simultaneously. Jebel Ali, Dubai’s giant container port and the ninth busiest in the world, was struck by Iranian missiles on 1 March and temporarily closed.
The Red Sea, already partly strangled by Houthi attacks since the Gaza war, became wholly impassable.
Vessels that had nowhere safer to go turned south. They turned towards Kenya.
The White Elephant That Wasn’t
Lamu Port was announced in 2012 as the anchor of the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor, a $23 billion regional infrastructure plan designed to link Kenya’s northern coast to landlocked Ethiopia and South Sudan via a network of roads, rail, pipelines and airports.
Critics were brutal.
The port struggled to attract commercial traffic after opening three of its planned 32 berths in 2021, and operated at roughly five per cent capacity. It received just two container ships in the entire first quarter of last year. For over a decade, it was the favourite exhibit for those who argued that Kenyan public infrastructure spending was, at best, optimistic.
The Iran war has rewritten that narrative in a matter of days. By 11 March, the Kenya Ports Authority reported that Lamu had already received 43 vessels in the year to date. By 19 March, that figure had jumped to 74, representing roughly a third of all ships the port had serviced since it opened. KPA Managing Director Captain William Ruto confirmed that revenues already run into “hundreds of millions of shillings” from the current surge alone.
“We are overwhelmed. The conflicts come with both blessings and challenges in business.” — Captain William Ruto, KPA Managing Director
The physics driving the diversion are straightforward. Lamu is one of East Africa’s closest deep-water gateways to the Middle East, lying roughly 3,300 to 3,600 kilometres from Dubai. Its 17.5-metre draught is deeper than Mombasa’s 15-metre berths, allowing it to accommodate the ultra-large vessels that the crisis is sending southward.
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Its 400-metre quay lengths can berth ships capable of carrying up to 12,000 twenty-foot equivalent units, compared with Mombasa’s capacity of 10,000 TEUs. With Jebel Ali under Iranian missile threat and war-risk insurance premiums on vessels entering the strait running at multiples of their pre-war levels, Lamu’s infrastructure advantages have translated into commercial reality at a speed no government promotional campaign could have achieved.
Porsches in a Paradise
The arrival that captured global attention came on the second Tuesday of March, when the MV Grande Auckland, a 9,000-capacity pure car carrier operated by Italy’s Grimaldi Lines, made its maiden call at Lamu’s Kililana terminal.
It had left Europe with a full load of high-end vehicles bound for Jebel Ali. Instead, it discharged 469 of those cars at Lamu, including gleaming Porsches that were photographed inside a port warehouse in images that circulated internationally, before continuing to Mumbai with the remainder.
Days later, the MV Grande Florida Palermo arrived from Yokohama laden with 3,800 motor vehicles originally destined for the same Gulf port.
Another vessel with 5,000 cars is expected imminently.
The total vehicles already offloaded at Lamu exceed 4,000 units, all effectively stranded there until the security situation in the Gulf improves sufficiently for onward movement.
Munir Minas Hussein, Chartering and Business Development Manager for Africa at Nisomar Group, the official East African agent for Grimaldi Shipping Line, was candid about the calculation that brought his vessels south. “As an agency, we managed to convince the vehicle owners to divert and bring the vessel to Lamu Port, which has substantial economic advantages compared to other countries and ports within the Indian Ocean,” he said.
The port charges ten dollars per car for storage after a free ten-day period, a figure that will generate modest but real revenue as thousands of high-end vehicles sit waiting for the Gulf to reopen.
Shipping lines that have made maiden calls at the facility have already signalled interest in returning on a long-term basis. What years of government promotion could not achieve, the deaths of thousands of kilometres away, apparently has. Lamu Port General Manager Abdulaziz Mzee was measured in his response to the windfall.
“There are still ships with cargo that are destined for the Gulf, but since the situation there has deteriorated, those ships are more or less just wandering or drifting at sea,” he told local media. “It is not something to celebrate, but at the same time it is a commercial blessing.”
Mombasa: Feast and Famine on the Same Quay
Mombasa Port, Kenya’s dominant maritime gateway and the principal entry point for landlocked Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is experiencing the crisis as both opportunity and ordeal simultaneously.
The Shippers Council of Eastern Africa has confirmed that one shipping line alone increased its vessel calls to Mombasa from eight to twenty following disruptions at regional transshipment hubs.
Vessels that would ordinarily call at Jebel Ali or transit through the Suez Canal are being redirected around the Cape of Good Hope, adding ten to fourteen days to transit times and over one million dollars in additional costs per journey.
That longer routing is delivering more ships to Kenyan shores than normal schedules would ever produce.
The other side of the ledger is less cheerful. KPA’s Captain Ruto acknowledged that the surge in vessels is straining handling capacity. “We are overwhelmed,” he said. The longer voyages around southern Africa reduce the frequency and volume of inbound shipments of manufactured goods, electronics, grain and edible oils. The goods arriving are fewer, later and far more expensive. Importers will eventually pass those costs on. The irony of Kenya’s coastal ports is that they may simultaneously bustle with diverted vessels and feed imported inflation into the inland economy.
The Bunkering Bonanza
Beyond cargo handling, the maritime crisis is generating revenue in a form that rarely makes headlines but is proving highly lucrative along Kenya’s coast: bunkering.
Ships rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope travel thousands of additional nautical miles, exhausting fuel reserves and requiring reprovisioning at Indian Ocean ports. Mombasa and Lamu are among the closest viable stops.
The Shippers Council of Eastern Africa has identified the surge in demand for vessel provisioning, spares, stores and refuelling as creating “a ripple effect of job creation and economic stimulation in the coastal regions” that extends well beyond the port gates themselves.
The closure of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea has effectively redirected the arterial flows of global commerce through the Indian Ocean and around Africa’s southern cape, and Kenya sits squarely athwart that rerouted corridor.
Freight rates from Shanghai to Jebel Ali more than doubled within days of the initial strikes.
CMA CGM applied a $3,000 emergency surcharge per container on Gulf-bound cargo. Shipping charter rates quadrupled. Each of those cost increases generates revenue at some point along the new route, and Kenya’s ports are positioned to capture a share.
The Fuel Bill That Cancels the Party
The same war producing revenue at the port is extracting a steep price at the fuel pump, and the arithmetic is unambiguous. Kenya imports virtually all of its refined petroleum products, the great majority of them historically sourced from the United Arab Emirates and the broader Gulf region.
Murban crude oil, the principal grade Kenya imports, had been trading at approximately $76 per barrel in early March.
By 17 March, Cash Dubai crude hit a record $157.66 per barrel. The Middle Eastern blends that Kenya depends on have, in the assessment of geopolitical economist Aly-Khan Satchu, “effectively doubled” in price. “The biggest expense item for Kenya is the monthly fuel bill, and that has effectively doubled,” Satchu told local media. “The government of Kenya will have to be dynamic and innovative.”
The exposure is structural. More than 75 per cent of refined petroleum imports into Eastern and Southern Africa originate in the Middle East, according to energy consultancy CITAC, making the region disproportionately exposed to exactly this kind of shock.
Iranian drone strikes on the UAE’s major bunkering hub and crude export terminal in mid-March compounded the supply disruption. Kenya’s government controls retail fuel prices and will eventually have to pass the higher import cost to consumers in what analysts describe as a regressive increase that will hurt lower-income households most severely.
Annual inflation had been running at 4.3 per cent in February; economists warn that if disruptions persist, the energy shock alone will add significant upward pressure.
Kenya and other African importers are now exploring emergency alternatives. According to multiple sources, Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Nigeria has received enquiries from Kenya and Ghana about sourcing refined products.
The refinery, which operates at 650,000 barrels per day with roughly 25 per cent of capacity available for export, has emerged as a potential lifeline for countries cut off from Gulf supply chains. “Availability is currently more important than price,” Dangote told The Economist.
For Kenyan oil marketing companies, that sentiment captures the entire dilemma: the war has separated supply from price logic, and Kenya must navigate both simultaneously.
Exporters Counting the Losses
Kenya’s exporters are not sharing in the bonanza. The country’s meat industry, which relies on the Middle East for the overwhelming share of its foreign sales, has seen shipments collapse to under five per cent of usual levels since the war began, according to Geeska.
The UAE historically takes the largest share of Kenyan meat exports, particularly during the high-demand Ramadan period.
The combination of suspended Middle East flights, closed airspace across Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Syria and the UAE, and sky-high cargo insurance premiums has made air freight prohibitively expensive.
Prices per kilogram for perishable exports have more than doubled. Slaughterhouses are struggling with excess stock. Some processing facilities have cut casual labour by as much as 80 per cent.
If the disruption extends beyond Ramadan, industry players warn of structural damage to a sector that was previously registering strong growth.
Tea, coffee, avocados and horticultural produce face less immediate disruption given their routing through European markets, but longer voyage times and elevated freight costs are beginning to feed through. Exporters warn that extended delivery timelines threaten product quality for time-sensitive goods.
Renewable energy expert Juliana Kainga framed the currency dimension bluntly: “We might see an ease in our exports in terms of the people who import our goods, which means there is a lot less that is coming into our country in terms of dollars, and we need a lot more to pay out for the oil. So this puts a lot of pressure on the shilling.”
LAPSSET’s Moment, and Its Limits
The war has done more to advance the strategic case for the LAPSSET corridor than fifteen years of diplomatic promotion managed.
The argument that Lamu could serve as a regional maritime hub, providing landlocked Ethiopia and South Sudan with an alternative to Djibouti and a safer entry point for Indian Ocean trade, has been validated in weeks by commercial reality.
Shipping lines that previously had no interest in Lamu are now calling, some for the first time. Minas of Nisomar Group said what the port’s advocates had long argued but struggled to demonstrate: “Once the hinterland infrastructure of East Africa is well built and lit, we will be able to discharge more vehicle cargo and other goods destined for Kenya and neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and South Sudan.”
The corridor’s incomplete infrastructure remains the binding constraint.
The highways connecting Lamu to South Sudan and Ethiopia are unfinished. Without those road links, diverted cargo can be stored at Lamu but not efficiently distributed into the hinterland markets that justify the port’s full commercial logic. The LAPSSET corridor’s full 32 berths remain unbuilt, with only three operational. The war has delivered commercial validation at scale; it has not delivered the infrastructure needed to absorb it.
The Reckoning
Kenya’s relationship with the US-Israel-Iran war is, ultimately, a study in simultaneous gain and loss. The country is harvesting real revenue from Lamu, real bunkering income along its coast and real commercial visibility for infrastructure that had struggled to attract attention. It is absorbing a fuel bill that has effectively doubled, pressure on the shilling, collapsing export earnings in its most Middle East-dependent sectors and the certainty of consumer price increases that will eventually arrive at the pump. Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi, addressing an audience at Chatham House in London, called on African nations to use the crisis as a warning to “reassess their global role and strengthen their economic independence.”
The net position is deeply uncertain. Kenya is a net importer of oil products. Every barrel that costs more erodes purchasing power, raises production costs and amplifies the pressure on an economy that was already navigating fiscal tightening.
The shipping revenue and bunkering gains are real but bounded. The fuel cost increase is real and systemic. Whether the former outweighs the latter depends on how long the war lasts, how quickly Iran’s pressure on the Hormuz can be degraded, and whether the commercial relationships forged in crisis survive into calmer conditions.
What the war has already settled is the question nobody was seriously asking before 28 February: whether Lamu Port was worth building. Scores of Porsches, parked in an Indian Ocean warehouse on a UNESCO World Heritage island, have answered that definitively.
The question Kenya now faces is whether it can extract lasting commercial advantage from a tragedy it did not cause, cannot control, and cannot fully afford.
There is a particular species of Kenyan politician who treats the court system as an inconvenient hobby, the DCI as a public relations problem, and the treasury of foreign investors as a personal ATM.
Trans Nzoia Senator Allan Kiprotich Chesang has, with remarkable consistency, embodied all three.
By the time the ink was dry on the latest scandal to bear his name, a Sh60.08 million fake ambulance tender engineered from the very heart of Harambee House, Kenya’s corridors of power were buzzing with a question that is no longer rhetorical: is this man constitutionally incapable of staying out of a con?
The allegations are serious, specific and, for anyone who has been paying attention, depressingly familiar.
Chesang, alongside Interior Principal Secretary Raymond Omollo, has been named in connection with a fraud that targeted Talal Yousef Yousef Zaitoun, a Swedish businessman who arrived in Kenya in January 2026 believing he was about to secure a legitimate government contract for 500 high-roof diesel Toyota Hiace ambulances.
What he actually walked into, investigators allege, was an elaborate wash-wash theatre staged across multiple floors of a government building that is supposed to represent the highest authority of the Kenyan state.
Seven suspects were arrested on March 10, 2026, in a DCI sting that caught them mid-negotiation on the 12th floor of Harambee House.
The eight accused were arraigned on March 17. Chesang and Omollo, the alleged architects of the enterprise, remained free. The impunity was, for anyone who has followed this senator’s career, entirely on brand.
The Laptop Scam That Started It All
To understand what Chesang has allegedly done now, you have to understand what courts allege he did before.
In 2018, long before anyone had heard of Senator Chesang, a businessman named Charles Musinga of Makindu Motors walked into Harambee House Annex believing he had won a genuine government tender to supply 2,800 HP laptops to the Ministry of Devolution.
He lost Sh181 million. The people he trusted turned out to be operating an elaborate fraud ring linked to then-Deputy President William Ruto’s office. And the person courts say drove to collect those laptops, flanked by a police escort in a Range Rover bearing stickers from Parliament and the Office of the Deputy President, was Allan Chesang.
The charges laid against Chesang and six co-accused, namely Teddy Awiti, Kevin Matundura Nyongesa, Augustine Wambua Matata, Joy Wangari Kamau, James William Makokha alias Mr. Wanyonyi, and Johan Ochieng Osore, included conspiracy to defraud, making a document without authority, obtaining goods by false pretences, handling stolen goods, and abuse of office.
Seven counts in total. The case has wound its way through Milimani Law Courts for years.
As recently as March 2024, the Ksh221 million fraud case, the figure had grown as additional claims were assessed, was adjourned because Chesang could not be reached for the afternoon session.
He had attended the morning session virtually from Switzerland, claiming parliamentary business. His absence did not amuse the prosecution.
One witness testimony, recorded in court, described how Chesang and associates would entertain their victims at Ole Sereni Hotel and Karen before directing them into Harambee House Annex via the VIP lift.
The same witness recalled that after the laptops were successfully collected, the ring members told him that their next target would be an ambulance tender. That detail, surfacing in court proceedings from 2021, reads today like a playbook rather than a prophecy.
The Defence Tender That Would Not Die
If the laptop case is the headline crime, the Department of Defence tender saga is the subplot that reveals his character most nakedly.
Chesang and co-accused stand charged with obtaining Sh25 million from one Johnson Wambua Mwanzia by pretending they had acquired a tender to supply Jute Gunny Bags to the DoD. Standard wash-wash template. Forged documents. False pretences. The victim parted with his money.
What makes this case particularly illuminating is what happened next. Chesang did not fight the charges on the merits.
He applied to have them withdrawn on the grounds that he was prepared to repay Sh17 million, the amount deposited into his account.
When the magistrate declined to dismiss the case without confirmation of full repayment, and when the complainant disputed that the full sum had even been returned, Chesang watched the withdrawal application collapse for the third consecutive time. By May 2025, the court was still untangling the disputed payment. Three failed bids to quietly exit a fraud case is not bad luck. It is a strategy.
Gold, Syndicate, and a Billion-Shilling Problem
In September 2023, a fake gold syndicate was exposed operating from a house in Garden Estate, Nairobi. Among those linked to it were Nyaribari Chache MP Zaheer Jhanda and Lang’ata MP Felix Odiwuor, also known as Jalang’o. The senator in the same category was Chesang.
The DCI described a scheme targeting a Tunisian businessman who had been kept waiting in the country for nearly two weeks before the suspects were ready to execute the final con, at which point DCI officers moved in and arrested ten people. Two suspects fled by tearing through a shade net fence.
One month later, in October 2023, it happened again. A South African national, Ralph Manyaka, had purportedly imported 30 kilograms of gold from Sierra Leone.
He was told it had been confiscated in Nairobi and that he needed to pay Sh5.3 million to release the consignment. He flew to Kenya. He was taken to Kilimani, then driven to a palatial home in Runda.
The DCI, which had laid an ambush, arrested three suspects: Fauzia Wanjiru alias Issa, Shallo Fatma alias Tett, and Jackson Ochieng.
Investigators say the scam was connected to an international criminal ring spanning Kenya, Sierra Leone and DR Congo, with a Congolese national and a Sierra Leonean national among the masterminds being pursued.
The DCI published Chesang’s name as an associate of the arrested suspects. Within 24 hours, the senator and his lawyer, Rarieda MP Otiende Amollo, were at the DCI’s Kiambu Road headquarters brandishing a demand letter and threatening defamation suits.
Chesang has never sued the DCI. The deadline expired. The noise moved on. The senator remained.
The Harambee House Ambulance Con: How the Net Was Cast
The architecture of the latest scam is, frankly, audacious. On January 27, 2026, one day after Talal Yousef Yousef Zaitoun arrived in Kenya on a Turkish Airlines flight, he was escorted to Harambee House, where he was introduced to individuals who presented themselves as representatives of the National Treasury and the Ministry of Health.
They told him the Kenyan government required 500 high-roof diesel Toyota Hiace ambulances, that the contract was worth $36,025,000, and that before he could sign, he needed to provide either a performance bond or insurance coverage of three percent of the contract value.
Zaitoun chose the insurance option: $1,080,750. He transferred $470,750 equivalent to Sh60.08 million. It is this sum that the prosecution says was stolen.
Investigators say the scam relied on forged award letters and contracts purportedly signed by Ministry of Interior officials.
The key suspect, Michael Musyoki Ngumbi, has been charged with producing the forged documents.
Meetings were held in official government chambers to provide the impression of legitimacy. When Zaitoun returned on March 9 with his brother Hatim for the final stage of the deal, DCI officers were waiting. Seven suspects were arrested in real time, mid-transaction, on the 12th floor of Harambee House.
The whistle was blown by an aide inside the PS’s own office.
When investigators traced the chain of authority back, it led, according to the Nyakundi Report’s sources, directly to Raymond Omollo’s orbit. And entangled in that orbit, sources allege, was Senator Chesang.
The Ruto Connection: How Proximity to Power Buys Impunity
Chesang’s relationship with William Ruto predates his senatorial career and forms the backbone of the impunity his critics say he has enjoyed.
Before he became a senator, before he was elected on a UDA ticket in 2022, Chesang was already a visible fixture in Ruto’s political circuit, photographed with the then-Deputy President, close to Oscar Sudi and Caleb Kositany, operating within the orbit that would eventually form Kenya Kwanza.
The original laptop scam itself was executed from the Office of the Deputy President’s premises.
Witnesses in that case described Chesang arriving at Harambee House with police escorts, using Range Rovers fitted with DP office stickers, moving through the VIP channels of the government’s most protected address.
That proximity has never been purely ceremonial. When Ruto became President, Chesang became part of the loyalist Senate choir: endorsing the UDA-ODM pact, urging national unity, praising Ruto’s leadership at every available platform.
In March 2025, when the UDA-ODM cooperation agreement was formalised, Chesang was at the podium urging Trans Nzoia leaders to rally behind the president’s unity agenda.
He is described by his own supporters as a close ally of the head of state. The value of that proximity, in Kenya’s political economy, is not incidental.
There is a documented pattern with Chesang’s legal troubles: cases drag. Applications stall. Hearings get adjourned when the senator is conveniently abroad. Charges that should have resulted in prosecution years ago are still crawling through the courts.
Critics have long argued that his political insurance has made him effectively untouchable, that the same executive access which allegedly enabled his schemes also shields him from their consequences.
The ambulance case, in which Chesang and Omollo remained free as eight lower-level suspects were arraigned, fits that pattern with uncomfortable precision.
The Natembeya Problem: When Your Fiancee Worked for the Man You Were Attacking
Even outside the criminal courts, Chesang’s political career has been defined by a special brand of self-inflicted turbulence.
His running battle with Trans Nzoia Governor George Natembeya became a soap opera that the county could not look away from.
Chesang repeatedly alleged that over Sh800 million in devolved funds went unaccounted for under Natembeya’s watch, presenting himself as the accountability hawk, the man holding the executive to account.
Natembeya’s counter was devastating in its simplicity. While Chesang was publicly excoriating his administration, his own fiancee, Chanelle Kittony, was serving as a Cabinet Executive Committee member in Natembeya’s county government, first overseeing Gender, Sports and Youth, then Roads, Energy and Infrastructure.
The governor named the appointment publicly. The hypocrisy was naked and complete. A man attacking corruption with one hand while his future wife drew a salary from the accused government with the other.
The Luxury Fleet and the Lifestyle Questions Nobody Is Supposed to Ask
When Chesang first surfaced in public consciousness, he was a young man who liked to boast that he made his first million in Form One, playing table tennis at a tournament in Congo Brazzaville.
Whether one believes that particular origin story is, at this point, beside the question.
What is verifiable is the lifestyle that followed. Before he became a senator, he was already rotating through high-end vehicles, Range Rovers, E-class Mercedes Benzes, some fitted with stickers from the Office of the Deputy President, others bearing parliamentary plates.
He owned a share in entertainment venues including Blend Club in Nairobi and The Garage in Thika. He ran the Allan Chesang Foundation, positioning himself as a philanthropist. At 31 he was photographed in a private jet.
Investigators recovered DCI exhibits from his premises during the laptop case: KRA stickers, a document showing suspects had signed a deal for equipment worth Sh317 million, and 700 laptops.
Kenya Insights is aware of additional allegations, sourced from investigative accounts, that Chesang ran a network involving loan schemes operated through a company called Amspex, which banked at Standard Chartered, with proxies routing proceeds through Dubai-linked investment fronts. These allegations have not been tested in court and Chesang has denied association with such ventures.
A Pattern, Not a Coincidence
There is a consistent anatomy to what Chesang is alleged to have done across multiple cases. First, access to a government building gives the scheme its veneer of legitimacy. Second, forged documents, whether tender award letters, contracts, or purchase orders, provide the paperwork to convince the victim.
Third, a network of complicit intermediaries, lawyers, brokers, government-adjacent fixers, receive and disperse the proceeds.
Fourth, when the walls close in, legal guns come out, demand letters are fired at investigators, political friends are activated, and the matter is dragged through the courts until everyone loses interest. Fifth, the senator remains free.
The Department of Defence gunny bags. The September 2023 garden estate gold syndicate. The October 2023 Runda gold scam. Now the Harambee House ambulance fraud.
Five separate matters in which Chesang’s name has appeared, in court records or in DCI publications, in connection with the same template: forged government documents, foreign or domestic victims, large sums extracted, and the senator at or near the centre.
His consistent response to each: I know nothing, I am being persecuted, my lawyers will act. And yet the pattern accumulates.
What Happens Next
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission face a straightforward test. Eight people of lesser political standing have been arraigned. The two men who are alleged to have designed the system, Omollo and Chesang, have not. Legal experts have stated publicly that holding high-ranking officials accountable is essential if the ambulance case is to serve as anything more than theatre.
Pressure is mounting. International investors, and the Swedish businessman who lost his money is not the last such investor Kenya needs to attract, are watching.
For his part, Chesang has made no public statement on the ambulance scandal at the time of publication. His Senate profile continues. His political connections remain intact. The wedding photographs from November 2025 are still up, all lilac florals and Ruto in the front row.
But the questions are louder now than they have ever been.
A man can deny one scandal. He can call the second politically motivated. By the time the fifth finds his name in the same kind of documents, featuring the same kind of forged contracts, targeting the same kind of credulous foreign investor, the denials require an audience that is running out of patience.
It began as another Nairobi road-rage clip. A dashcam video, thirty-three seconds long, filmed along a tree-lined Nairobi thoroughfare on Monday, March 17, and uploaded to X by motor assessor Wangai Mwaniki. The grey 2023 Range Rover Vogue in the clip, registration KDT 579P, cuts aggressively through gridlocked lanes, its dashboard blazing red and blue emergency lights, forcing matatus, sedans, trucks and boda-boda riders to scramble out of its path.
Overlaid text reads: “In Kenya when you have money traffic rules don’t exist.” Within hours, 290,000 views. By the time Nairobi woke up Tuesday morning, the clip had become something far more consequential than a viral rant.
The vehicle’s registered owner, confirmed through official National Transport and Safety Authority records circulated in the thread by a follow-up user, is Ahmed Hussein Ayoub Ali Dinar, the Sultan of the Fur tribe, Sudan’s largest ethnic community and the people over whom the Darfur conflict has been most catastrophically waged.
And in January 2024, that same Sultan sat across a table in a Nairobi hotel from Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known universally as Hemedti, the commander of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary militia that the United States government formally designated a perpetrator of genocide in January 2025.
The screenshot of that meeting, posted in the replies beneath the traffic video by user Shoba Gatimu with the caption “The plot thickens”, detonated a second wave of outrage. Nairobi was no longer discussing dangerous driving. It was discussing who, exactly, was behind the wheel and why he appeared to be moving through its streets entirely untouchable.
A NAME WEIGHTED WITH HISTORY
The name Ali Dinar is not merely a family surname in Sudan. It carries the freight of an entire civilisational epoch.
The original Sultan Ali Dinar ruled the independent Darfur Sultanate from 1898 until 1916, when British colonial forces killed him and annexed Darfur into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, ending more than two centuries of Keira dynasty sovereignty over a territory the size of France.
He is remembered across Darfur as a symbol of resistance, a man who proclaimed jihad against British occupation and whose capital, El Fasher, was a seat of Islamic scholarship, trade and culture connecting central Sudan to the whole of northern Africa.
It is precisely that symbolic weight that makes the modern Sultan’s political choices so contested. Ahmed Hussein Ayoub Ali Dinar was elected in June 2015 by the Fur tribe’s Shura and Notables’ councils as Sultan for the entire Fur people, renewing his family’s ceremonial claim to the seat his great-grandfather died defending.
He has presented himself publicly as a mediator, a voice for peace in Sudan’s devastating civil war, and a traditional leader committed to dialogue between all parties. Kenyan President William Ruto received him at State House, publicly engaging with him as the leader of the Fur in Darfur, alongside Sudan Liberation Movement figures.
Yet the RSF, the militia now fighting to dismember the Sudanese state and which the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission has documented committing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Darfur’s non-Arab communities, including the Fur, has invested heavily in the Sultan’s legitimacy. And by all available evidence, that investment appears mutual.
THE HEMEDTI MEETING IN NAIROBI
In January 2024, Hemedti arrived in Nairobi on what analysts described as a tour designed to legitimise the RSF as a governing force.
He met President Ruto at the Kenyan State House, receiving what multiple media accounts described as an elaborately warm reception, complete with traditional dancers and a full presidential pavilion welcome at JKIA that observers noted was notably more extravagant than that afforded to Sudanese Armed Forces Commander General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Khartoum recalled its ambassador in protest.
Hemedti also met Ahmed Ali Dinar in Nairobi. The RSF commander posted about the encounter on X, saying he appreciated what he described as the Sultan’s neutral stance in rejecting the war and devoting himself to supporting Darfurian communities.
Both men, according to the Sudan Times, pledged to coordinate efforts to alleviate suffering and achieve what they called sustainable peace and security.
To critics and to many Sudanese from Darfur, that characterisation of neutrality was grotesque. The RSF and its allied Arab militias were by that point already implicated in the massacre of up to 15,000 people in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, a slaughter the UN Panel of Experts documented in a January 2024 report.
The RSF’s predecessor formations, the Janjaweed, had been responsible for the ethnic killing, mass rape, and displacement of some 2.7 million people and the deaths of up to 300,000 in the original Darfur conflict beginning in 2003. A militia meeting with the paramount traditional leader of the Fur people and framing it as a peace gesture was, to Sudanese human rights organisations, a provocation dressed as diplomacy.
DARFUR’S WOUND THAT NEVER HEALED
To understand the stakes of any alignment between the modern Sultan and the RSF requires understanding Darfur’s history not as a series of events but as a continuous, unresolved trauma. When rebels from Darfur’s non-Arab communities launched an uprising against Khartoum in 2003, accusing the Arab-dominated government of systematic discrimination, then-President Omar al-Bashir responded by deploying the Arab tribal militias known as the Janjaweed.
The United States designated the resulting campaign as genocide in 2004. The UN Security Council referred the situation to the International Criminal Court in 2005, the first such referral in ICC history and the first involving allegations of the crime of genocide.
Al-Bashir formally reconstituted the Janjaweed into the RSF in 2013, giving the militia institutional form and placing it under Hemedti’s command.
Between 2013 and 2023, the RSF evolved from a counterinsurgency instrument into an autonomous economic and military power, controlling gold mines, border trade networks and a private army. When the RSF broke from the Sudanese Armed Forces in April 2023, the war that erupted was devastating in its speed and its savagery.
The RSF seized most of Khartoum and swept through Darfur. By late 2024 and into 2025, the RSF had laid siege to El Fasher, the last SAF stronghold in Darfur and the ancestral capital of the Darfur Sultanate that the historical Ali Dinar died defending, holding 1.5 million people under conditions the ICC’s deputy prosecutor described to the UN Security Council as a campaign of widespread mass criminality and collective torture.
The RSF, during this siege, also destroyed the Sultan Ali Dinar Palace in El Fasher in January 2025, a site African human rights organisations called a deliberate act of cultural erasure, an attempt to wipe out the symbols that give Darfur’s communities their collective identity. The same militia had been meeting with the historical sultan’s modern claimant in Nairobi hotel rooms.
In January 2025, the outgoing Biden administration formally declared that the RSF and allied militias had committed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, a determination that led to direct sanctions on Hemedti and several RSF-linked companies.
The European Union and United Kingdom followed with their own designations and sanctions on RSF commanders. The ICC’s deputy prosecutor signalled in early 2025 that arrest warrants for crimes committed since April 2023 in West Darfur were imminent.
KENYA AS RSF’S CONTINENTAL BASE
The Sultan’s comfortable presence in Nairobi, Range Rover and emergency lights included, does not exist in a vacuum. Kenya has become, whether by deliberate policy or geopolitical convenience, the RSF’s most important continental staging ground. President Ruto’s administration has extended to the RSF a degree of access and hospitality that has placed Kenya in direct diplomatic confrontation with Khartoum and drawn formal censure from rights organisations, civil society coalitions and, ultimately, the United States Senate.
In February 2025, RSF leadership and allied armed movements gathered at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi and signed a political charter creating what they called the Government of Peace and Unity, a parallel administration for RSF-controlled territories in Sudan.
The Kenyan government, through Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi, admitted providing the RSF with the platform and defended it as an exercise in Kenya’s long tradition of conflict mediation.
Sudan declared it an act of hostility, recalled its ambassador and imposed a ban on Kenyan imports. Human rights organisations, including the International Commission of Jurists Kenya chapter and the Kenya Human Rights Commission, issued a joint statement describing Kenya as complicit in mass atrocities.
They noted the RSF killed more than 433 civilians, including women and children, in an assault in Southern White Nile State during the very days its leadership was gathered in Nairobi.
The Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, in a November 2025 report, documented Kenyan-registered aircraft landing in RSF-controlled Nyala and offloading supplies, and separately transporting wounded RSF fighters.
Bellingcat published an investigation in June 2025 revealing Kenyan military ammunition crates in an RSF depot near Khartoum. The Kenyan government denied arms supply to the RSF. In August 2025, the United States Senate opened a review of Kenya’s major non-NATO ally status, conferred in 2024, in part over the Kenya-RSF question.
In late 2023, Ruto had flown to Juba on the presidential jet alongside RSF Deputy Commander Abdulrahim Dagalo, Hemedti’s brother, who carries US sanctions for allegedly fuelling Sudan’s civil war.
Analysts and critics noted that the RSF had essentially treated Nairobi as a de facto capital for its international diplomacy, its political charter-signing ceremonies and, apparently, the residential arrangements of at least one prominent ally.
ILLEGAL LIGHTS AND A LEGAL FRAMEWORK THAT APPLIES TO EVERYONE ELSE
Under Section 34 of Kenya’s Traffic Act Cap 403 and Rule 83 of the Traffic Rules, red and blue flashing emergency lights and sirens are restricted to police vehicles, fire engines and ambulances. The Order of Precedence Act of 2014 extends the privilege of sirens to the President, Deputy President, Speakers of Parliament and the Chief Justice.
The law is explicit that no private vehicle may be fitted with flashing lights, LED light bars or strobe systems of any kind without NTSA authorisation, which is not granted to private citizens or foreign nationals living in Nairobi.
The NTSA issued a circular to all Regional Police Commanders as recently as May 2024 directing law enforcement to take legal action against any unauthorised use of strobe lights, light bars, sirens or lead-and-chase vehicles, citing complaints about harassment on Nairobi roads and highways by unauthorized persons.
Section 58 of the Traffic Act makes the offence punishable by a fine of up to Sh400,000, imprisonment of up to two years, or both.
The Range Rover Vogue in the video, registered to the Sultan in April 2025 according to NTSA records circulating in the viral thread, appears fitted with exactly the kind of emergency lighting the law prohibits for private vehicles. The vehicle’s Kenyan registration raises its own questions. The Sultan is Sudanese.
He is resident in Nairobi. His vehicle carries a 2025 registration. Whether he travels on a diplomatic passport, holds a residency permit or relies on some other protected status that Kenya’s authorities have extended to him remains, as of publication, a question that neither the NTSA, the Kenya Police nor the relevant ministries have addressed.
As of Thursday morning, the NTSA had issued no public statement on the incident. The Sultan’s office had not responded to requests for comment.
‘NTSA HAIWEZI GUZA YEYE’
Mwaniki’s original post tagged the NTSA with a knowing laugh: “@ntsa_kenya huyu arudi driving school pia?” Should this one go back to driving school too? The replies swelled with a mixture of outrage, dark humour and the particular resigned fatalism of Nairobi motorists who have watched high-powered vehicles move through the city as though the law existed for everyone else. “NTSA haiwezi guza yeye,” wrote one commenter. NTSA cannot touch him. “He is not even Kenyan!” wrote another. “Unless that fool is a police officer responding to an emergency, he has no right of way!!” a third commenter added.
What distinguishes this episode from the regular catalogue of Nairobi road impunity complaints is not merely the identity of the registered owner. It is what that identity represents in the context of Kenya’s increasingly fraught entanglement with Sudan’s civil war.
A man publicly photographed alongside the commander of a militia designated a perpetrator of genocide, whose formal traditional role as Sultan of the Fur people makes his RSF alignment all the more symbolically charged, appears to be moving through Nairobi roads with what the video depicts as the confidence of someone who knows no traffic officer will flag him down.
Kenya’s roads are among the most dangerous in Africa. The NTSA records thousands of road fatalities annually, with reckless driving, impunity and corruption at traffic enforcement level repeatedly identified as systemic causes. Each incident like this one feeds a public narrative that Kenyan road law is, in practice, a tiered system: merciless toward matatu drivers and boda-boda operators, invisible when the vehicle is expensive enough, the plates are the right kind, or the owner is connected to the people who make the rules.
QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED
Several questions arising from this incident demand formal answers, and Kenya Insights has submitted enquiries to the NTSA, the Directorate of Immigration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Under what immigration and residency status does Sultan Ahmed Ali Dinar reside in Kenya? Has he or any entity on his behalf applied for and received any form of diplomatic status in Kenya? Who authorised, if anyone, the installation of emergency-grade flashing lights on the vehicle registered to him? Has Kenya’s government, in extending hospitality to RSF-linked figures including the Sultan, conducted any due diligence on the implications given the US genocide designation against the RSF?
The broader question, which the Sudanese diaspora community in Nairobi and human rights organisations have been raising with increasing urgency since the February 2025 RSF parallel government ceremony at KICC, is whether Kenya’s political relationship with Hemedti and his allied civilian and traditional leaders has extended into a permissive environment in which those figures operate in Nairobi with privileges that Kenyan law does not formally recognise and that Kenyan institutions appear unwilling to examine.
The irony that the RSF, which in January 2025 dynamited the palace of the Sultan Ali Dinar in El Fasher, the very monument to the Fur people’s sovereignty and cultural identity that the historical sultan built and died defending, should simultaneously be cultivating his modern successor in Nairobi hotel rooms and Nairobi streets will not be lost on those Sudanese who have lived through the war.
The RSF erased the old sultan from the landscape of Darfur. In Nairobi, his descendant drives with emergency lights, and no one seems willing to ask who gave him permission.
It was barely past two in the morning when the vehicles arrived. More than fifty officers, some in police uniform, others in balaclavas and arriving in unmarked vehicles, pushed through the gates of Dari Business Park on Ngong Road in Karen and sealed every entrance. Staff at the adjacent Tamarind Restaurant, who had done nothing wrong in their lives, were bundled out into the cold.
Raphael Tuju, roused from sleep at his nearby residence, walked out to find a small army in possession of everything he had spent three decades building.
They produced no court orders. They offered no explanation. They simply occupied. And behind that occupation, if you follow the trail of money and litigation far enough back, you find the East African Development Bank.
The scenes that played out in the early hours of Saturday, March 14, 2026, brought an otherwise dry banking dispute crashing into public consciousness.
Kenyans watched their television screens and social media feeds in astonishment as a former Cabinet Secretary, a former Jubilee Party Secretary-General, a man who had served his country in senior office across more than two decades, found himself locked out of his own business and speaking to a camera in the dark like a man who had lost everything.
In a sense, he had. And the institution at the centre of it all, the Kampala-headquartered EADB, retreated behind a terse press statement about the rule of law and the finality of court orders.
That statement, released on March 16, 2026, was clinical in its detachment. “The EADB distances itself from the ongoing public theatre of the borrower’s distortion of facts and disinformation,” it read. “There must be finality of court matters.”
In eleven years of dealing with Tuju and his company Dari Limited, those are among the most revealing words EADB has ever committed to public record.
They reveal an institution that is congenitally incapable of self-examination, that processes its borrowers through a machinery of foreign jurisdictions and immunity shields, and that walks away from the wreckage of ruined projects with the serene confidence of an entity that knows the courts will always give it the last word.
This is the story of how that machinery worked, why it was allowed to work, and what it has cost the borrowers who dared believe in the bank’s development mandate.
The Promise: A Two-Phase Deal, a Prestigious Karen Project
To understand why Tuju is standing outside his own gates, you must go back to April 10, 2015, when Dari Limited, his project vehicle, signed a facility agreement with EADB for USD 9,197,084.
The money was for a development that was, at first blush, exactly the sort of project a development bank should celebrate: the acquisition of a 20-acre prime parcel in Karen’s Tree Lane area, the rehabilitation of a 94-year-old Victorian bungalow originally built by Scottish missionary Dr. Albert Patterson into a high-end restaurant, the construction of luxury wellness villas under the Entim Sidai brand, and the creation of the Dari Business Park commercial complex off Ngong Road.
Tuju himself, his three children Mano, Alma and Yma, and a related company, S.A.M Company Limited, signed on as guarantors and co-directors.
The loan was structured in two tranches. Phase one, amounting to the bulk of the facility, was to finance the land acquisition, with EADB paying the vendor directly.
Phase two, valued at Sh294 million, was earmarked for construction of the residential units: thirty three-bedroom maisonettes on the Tree Lane property and a further eighty-five units on a nearby seven-acre plot along Mwitu Road.
The sale of these high-end units was the engine that was supposed to generate the revenue to service the debt. Without them, the project was a restaurant, and a restaurant alone, as Tuju and his lawyers have argued repeatedly, cannot service a loan of that magnitude.
The first tranche was drawn on July 29, 2015. The first interest instalment fell due in October 2015, and Dari paid it. It would be the only payment EADB ever received.
That single, faithful payment is a detail that tends to get buried in the avalanche of legal proceedings that followed, but it matters. It tells you that Tuju was not a man who borrowed money with no intention of repaying.
It tells you that the project was at a stage where service was possible. And it tells you that whatever broke between October 2015 and the second quarter of 2016, when the loan formally fell into default, something went catastrophically wrong with the project’s cash flow.
“I cannot explain why the second tranche was not disbursed since I was not in senior management. Conditions were to be met to release the money, but I did not know what happened.” – David Odongo, EADB’s own Kenya Country Manager, testifying in court, 2024
According to Tuju, what went wrong was that EADB refused to disburse phase two. The bank, he alleges, suddenly introduced new conditions for the release of the construction funds, including additional security over an Upper Hill property that was already charged to the Bank of Africa.
Without the construction money, the villas could not be built, the anticipated revenues never materialised, and the loan became unpayable. The bank counters that conditions for release were never met by Dari Limited and that it was never formally committed to the second disbursement.
The truth, in the form of sworn court testimony, arrived in July 2024 when David Odongo, EADB’s own former Kenya Country Manager, the very officer who had appraised and presented the project for board approval, appeared before High Court Judge Alfred Mabeya and recanted. He confirmed the loan was two-phased.
He confirmed the second tranche was for construction of the residential units. He confirmed that proceeds from food and beverage at the restaurant alone could not service the loan without the real estate component. And, most devastatingly, he said he could not explain why the second tranche was never disbursed. “I was not in senior management,” he told the court. In a related statement to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Odongo had confirmed that EADB’s board had approved both phases, including the additional Sh290 million for rehabilitation of structures and construction of demonstration villas.
He also told the court that the affidavit bearing his name that had been filed in the UK proceedings, the document that helped obtain the English judgment against Tuju, had not been sworn before a Commissioner for Oaths in the usual manner.
It was drafted by the bank’s lawyers, presented to him, and he signed it in good faith. Among the claims in that affidavit that he now said were not accurate: that Dari’s restaurant operations were generating revenues and profits sufficient to meet loan repayments without the construction component.
That is not a minor discrepancy. That goes to the heart of whether EADB obtained its landmark UK judgment on the basis of evidence that its own witness now admits was inaccurate. Tuju has since returned to London seeking a review of the 2019 ruling in light of this new testimony. But the Kenyan courts have already closed that door, citing res judicata and the principle that issues already determined cannot be relitigated. The bank’s argument, echoed by every court that has since ruled in its favour, is that this matter is settled. Finality of courts must be upheld.
The London Gambit: How EADB Armoured Itself Against Kenya’s Courts
There is a clause buried in virtually every facility agreement EADB signs with its Kenyan borrowers, and prospective clients should read it with the greatest care before putting pen to paper.
That clause specifies that disputes arising from the loan shall be resolved before the High Court of Justice in England, under English law, with the judgment to be registered and enforced in Kenya. For an institution whose mandate is to promote East African development, the choice of a London jurisdiction is remarkable.
It means that when things go wrong, the borrower, whether a small Ugandan transport company or a prominent Kenyan businessman, must fight their corner against a well-resourced multilateral bank in a foreign court whose daily operating costs in lawyers’ fees alone can dwarf the original loan.
EADB invoked that clause in December 2018 after years of correspondence with Dari Limited produced no payment. The case went before Judge Daniel Toledano of the High Court of Justice in London, who on June 19, 2019, granted summary judgment in EADB’s favour for USD 15,162,320.95, covering the outstanding principal, accrued interest, and penalties. Tuju’s appeal to the Court of Appeal in London, heard by Lord Justice Leggatt, was dismissed.
The UK judgment was then registered by Kenya’s High Court on February 13, 2020, and when Tuju challenged it all the way up through the Kenyan court system, the Court of Appeal in Nairobi reaffirmed it on April 20, 2023.
By that point, what had started as a USD 9.197 million loan had ballooned to the equivalent of Ksh1.9 billion, and depending on which party’s calculations you believe, the total exposure including continuing interest and legal costs may have reached Ksh4.5 billion by the time the auctioneers arrived.
A loan that began at roughly Ksh943 million had more than quadrupled through the mechanics of compound default interest, currency movements, London legal fees, and a decade of enforcement costs. No payment was ever made after that single October 2015 instalment.
The EADB Act that governs Kenya’s obligations to the bank was declared unconstitutional in March 2025 by a Machakos High Court judge, who found it allowed the Finance CS to channel public money out of the consolidated fund without parliamentary oversight or public participation.
The London jurisdiction clause is also where EADB’s status as an international organisation becomes most consequential for borrowers. Article 44 of the EADB Charter grants the bank immunity from legal process in its member states.
When Blueline Enterprises of Tanzania tried to execute an arbitration award against EADB’s bank accounts in the early 2000s, the Tanzanian Court of Appeal ultimately upheld the bank’s immunity, ruling that it enjoyed absolute immunity in the exercise of its lending powers, which is precisely the context in which a borrower would need to sue it.
A judge warned prospective counterparties in plain terms: secure an express written waiver of immunity before you engage. Most borrowers, dazzled by the prospect of development financing, do not.
Tuju has sought to test this immunity shield directly, filing a case at the East African Court of Justice challenging whether EADB’s blanket immunity is compatible with modern jurisprudence on the accountability of multilateral lenders.
That case would be the first time the regional court had been asked to examine EADB’s charter in this light, making it one of the most consequential institutional law proceedings in East Africa’s recent history.
The outcome remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is that immunity has functioned, in case after case, as a near-impenetrable shield for the bank and a near-insurmountable obstacle for anyone seeking redress against it.
The Auction: A Ksh4.5 Billion Debt Recovered at Ksh450 Million
On October 1, 2024, EADB auctioned the Ngong Road property that had been pledged by Dari Limited as loan security. Garam Investment Auctioneers, acting on behalf of the bank, conducted what it described as a competitive bidding process.
The winning bid was Ksh450 million, accepted from a company called Ultra Eureka Limited. Court papers filed subsequently reveal that Ultra Eureka paid the full purchase price and was issued with completion documents, including the transfer instrument.
By February 18, 2025, a certificate of lease had been issued in the company’s name. By March 2026, Ultra Eureka had charged the property to KCB Bank Kenya, meaning the asset had been refinanced within months of its purchase.
Tuju was incandescent. He argued, publicly and in court, that the Ksh450 million sale price bore no relationship to the true value of the asset. He noted that EADB was simultaneously claiming a debt of Ksh1.9 billion to Ksh4.5 billion, and that even the lower figure was more than four times what the auctioned property fetched.
At what price, exactly, were Knight Frank Valuers Limited, who conducted the valuation, placing the remaining assets? Tuju contested the valuation fiercely, and it was on the basis of that challenge that a temporary court injunction stopped the auction of the remaining properties, Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary and Tamarind Karen, until March 9, 2026, when Justice Josephine Wayua Mong’are of the Milimani Commercial Court struck out the amended plaint as barred by res judicata and set aside all interim orders.
Six days later, on March 14, the masked operatives arrived at Dari Business Park. Ultra Eureka, which had hired Lavington Security Limited to guard the premises from March 10, moved to take physical possession.
The police, specifically officers from the Rapid Response Unit, provided the muscle. No court order was shown to Tuju, despite his repeated requests on camera.
He was allowed neither to collect his personal belongings nor to protect the interests of the tenants and employees whose livelihoods depended on the businesses operating within the park.
The Judiciary, evidently stung by the optics, issued a clarifying statement on March 18 emphasising that the March 9 ruling had been delivered lawfully on grounds of issue estoppel and that the plaintiffs had since filed an appeal before the Court of Appeal.
It urged all parties to exercise restraint.
That plea for restraint came after the cameras had captured everything, after a former Cabinet Secretary had spent a night in the cold, and after dozens of workers had been locked out of their source of income in the early hours of a Saturday morning.
The Allegations That Will Not Die: Bribery, the DCI, and a Petition to the Chief Justice
No account of this dispute is complete without confronting its most explosive dimensions. Tuju, in a press conference outside the Supreme Court buildings after delivering a petition to Chief Justice Martha Koome on March 13, 2026, levelled an allegation that should send shockwaves through Kenya’s legal establishment.
He claimed that agents of a commercial court judge had approached him for weeks demanding a bribe of Ksh10 million in exchange for a favourable ruling. He said he refused to pay.
He said he instead chose to work with the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. He did not name the judge publicly, but he was clear that the bribe demand preceded the adverse rulings he subsequently received.
These are unproven allegations. They are denied by the EADB. But Tuju made them in his own name, in public, outside the Supreme Court, with cameras rolling. He also recorded a formal statement at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
The DCI, it should be noted, has previously summoned Tuju, his children, David Odongo, and other EADB officials in connection with the same dispute, suggesting the criminal investigation dimension of this case is very much alive.
In the same press statement, Tuju applauded Justice Esther Maina of the Machakos High Court, who declined to dismiss a separate constitutional challenge to the EADB Act, allowing it to proceed to full trial.
That case had already yielded a devastating ruling in March 2025, when Justice Francis Rayola Olei declared Sections 2(1) and 2(2) of the EADB Act 2014 unconstitutional, finding that they allowed the Cabinet Secretary for Finance to channel money out of Kenya’s consolidated fund into EADB without parliamentary oversight and without the public participation required by Article 10 of the Constitution.
The judge ordered the Finance CS to produce records of all payments made to EADB since 2014, to be submitted to Parliament within sixty days. He also ordered the Auditor General to conduct a full audit.
Kenya’s Machakos High Court declared the EADB Act 2014 unconstitutional, finding it allowed the Finance CS to funnel public money out of the consolidated fund and into a multilateral bank without parliamentary oversight, accountability, or public participation.
Read that carefully.
Kenyan taxpayer money has been flowing into EADB since 2014 through a legal mechanism that a court has now found to be unconstitutional.
The bank whose charter grants it absolute immunity from judicial process in its own member states has been capitalised, in part, by public funds channelled in a manner that a Kenyan court has said violated the constitutional right to public participation.
The same bank then uses that capital to sue its Kenyan borrowers in London courts, obtain judgments that dwarf the original loans, and auction prime Kenyan assets to buyers whose acquisition prices bear little obvious relationship to market value.
At the East African Legislative Assembly in Arusha, a whistleblower petition filed by Peter Odhiambo of the Justice Alliance put additional allegations on the parliamentary record: board members clinging to seats for up to eighteen years, four times beyond what the EADB charter permits; allegations of insiders borrowing from the bank and sitting on the board that approves write-offs of the same loans; accusations that former Director General Vivienne Yeda leveraged her dual roles at EADB and as Kenya Power and Lighting Company chair to push dubious transactions.
Vivienne Yeda Apopo
Tanzanian EALA legislator Dr. Abdullahi Makawe told the assembly he had been served with an arrest warrant simply for speaking to the media after raising questions about the bank before the House. Whether those allegations are established or not, they describe an institution for which transparency has historically been an afterthought.
A Pattern Older Than Tuju: The Blueline Enterprises Precedent
Those inclined to view the Tuju affair as an aberration, a unique collision of political timing, personal financial misfortune, and legal bad luck, need only read the dossier on Blueline Enterprises Limited of Tanzania.
In March 1990, EADB advanced a loan of approximately USD 2.279 million in Special Drawing Rights to Blueline, a Tanzanian transport company, to finance the purchase of trucks, trailers, and haulage equipment for a petroleum logistics project serving Tanzania, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and neighbouring states.
The project was exactly the kind of real-sector development financing that development banks are established to support. Blueline defaulted. EADB exercised its right to appoint a receiver-manager under the floating debenture.
Blueline obtained an ex parte court order restraining the bank and the receiver from taking over its business. What followed was more than two decades of litigation across multiple courts and jurisdictions.
The arbitrator, Mr. A.T.H. Mwakyusa, eventually awarded Blueline damages of USD 61,386,853 against EADB for losses allegedly occasioned by the bank’s conduct in the receivership. When Blueline commenced execution proceedings in 2006, a Tanzanian High Court allowed a garnishee order to attach EADB’s accounts at Standard Chartered Bank in Dar es Salaam. EADB invoked its immunity shield under Article 44 of its charter and the East African Development Bank Act.
The High Court dismissed the immunity plea, finding that a liquid bank account was not the type of asset that enjoyed immunity.
On appeal, the Court of Appeal reversed that finding in a landmark 2011 judgment, holding that EADB enjoyed absolute immunity from all forms of legal process arising out of the exercise of its lending powers, and declared all proceedings against the bank a nullity.
Blueline was left holding a USD 61 million arbitration award it could not enforce against an institution whose charter placed its assets beyond the reach of any court.
The member states of EADB declined to step in with taxpayer funds to satisfy the award. EADB emerged intact. Blueline did not.
The structural parallel with Tuju’s situation is striking. In both cases, EADB advanced a loan for a project that was supposed to generate revenues enabling repayment. In both cases, the borrower alleges that the bank’s own conduct in the transaction contributed to the default.
In both cases, the bank pursued recovery through courts and enforcement mechanisms that placed it at an overwhelming procedural advantage, while the borrower’s avenues for counterclaims against the institution were constrained by the immunity shield. And in both cases, the bank won.
The Broader Portfolio: Write-Offs, Bad Loans, and the Quiet Reckoning
EADB has, to its credit, openly acknowledged the toll its lending portfolio has taken. Its audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2023, revealed that the bank wrote off loans amounting to USD 13.03 million during the year, a dramatic escalation from the USD 140,000 written off in 2022. Those written-off assets, secured by landed properties including apartment blocks and land in various locations across the region, were being offered for sale.
The bank noted that the sale process was expected to take approximately one year and that the estimated sale values had been discounted to present value, meaning the assets were being marketed at figures below what the bank itself estimated they would ultimately fetch.
That is the institutional version of the discount at which prime properties disappear from borrowers’ portfolios.
At the time of reporting, Tanzania held the largest share of EADB’s gross loan balances at USD 72.83 million, representing 63 percent of the total. Uganda accounted for 28 percent at USD 33.03 million, with Kenya at six percent and Rwanda at three percent. Uganda had a non-performing loan balance of USD 1.02 million as of that reporting period. Kenya had resumed repayment of its loans after defaulting on a USD 5.2 million repayment in 2022. These are not the figures of a bank with a pristine lending record operating in a straightforward development environment.
They are the figures of a multilateral institution managing a complex and contested loan book across four jurisdictions, with a history of defaults, receiverships, and contested recoveries.
In 2024, EADB announced a significant policy shift, moving from dollar-denominated lending to local currency financing through currency swap agreements worth USD 90 million signed with Rwanda and Tanzania. The stated purpose was to eliminate exchange rate risks for borrowers and reduce the cost of loans.
That is a welcome and long-overdue reform. It is also an implicit acknowledgment that lending in US dollars to borrowers earning in Kenyan shillings, Tanzanian shillings, or Ugandan shillings created a structural vulnerability in every loan it originated, a vulnerability that contributed to defaults across its portfolio when exchange rates moved adversely.
It is a vulnerability that, in Tuju’s case, meant that a loan originally equivalent to Ksh943 million had, through interest, penalties, and currency movements, become a debt of Ksh1.9 billion to Ksh4.5 billion, depending on the calculation date.
The Warning Every Borrower Must Heed
This story is not, at its core, about Raphael Tuju. Tuju is the most visible casualty of an institutional structure that has, over decades, created conditions systematically unfavourable to borrowers across East Africa.
The combination of factors that define EADB’s relationship with its clients is worth stating plainly, because every prospective borrower walking through its doors deserves to understand what they are signing.
First, the dispute resolution clause. When you borrow from EADB, you agree that any dispute will be resolved in England under English law. You are consenting, in advance, to fight any grievance you have against a Kampala-headquartered institution in a foreign court thousands of miles from your business, your assets, and your country’s legal system. The cost of that fight, in London lawyers’ fees alone, can render a legitimate defence economically impossible.
Second, the immunity shield. Article 44 of the EADB Charter, interpreted by courts from Tanzania to Kenya, grants the bank absolute immunity from legal process arising from its lending activities.
If the bank’s conduct in relation to your loan contributes to your default, whether by refusing a second tranche, by introducing new collateral conditions, or by any other means, your ability to sue it for those actions is severely curtailed.
You can lose. It cannot. That is not a metaphor. It is the legal architecture within which EADB operates.
Third, the dollar denomination risk. Until 2024, every loan EADB advanced to East African borrowers was denominated in US dollars. If the shilling fell against the dollar during the life of your loan, your debt grew in local currency terms without any new borrowing. Tuju’s original facility of approximately Ksh943 million became Ksh1.9 billion in part because of this mechanism, compounded by default interest rates that the facility agreement permitted the bank to apply.
Fourth, the affidavit problem.
Evidence from the Tuju case shows that EADB’s own Kenya Country Manager signed court affidavits prepared by the bank’s lawyers in proceedings before the English court, affidavits that he subsequently recanted under cross-examination before a Kenyan judge.
The same affidavits were used to obtain the UK summary judgment that forms the foundation of the entire enforcement action against Tuju and his family. That a Kenyan court has repeatedly declined to give effect to this recantation, citing issue estoppel and res judicata, does not make the underlying factual problem disappear. It simply means it cannot be relitigated domestically.
Fifth, the valuation and auction mechanics. When EADB auctions a property to recover a debt, the valuation is conducted by a firm it appoints. The bidding process is managed by an auctioneer it appoints.
The first Dari property, Tamarind Karen and Dari Business Park, was reportedly sold for Ksh450 million against a debt the bank simultaneously valued at Ksh1.9 billion.
Whatever remained of that gap, after the auction proceeds were applied to the outstanding balance, continued to accrue interest. The remaining properties, Entim Sidai and the others, were next in line. If those too are sold at prices significantly below the bank’s stated debt, Tuju could lose everything and still owe money.
When a development bank’s own official recants the evidence used to obtain a foreign judgment, but the courts say that judgment can no longer be questioned, something has gone wrong with the system. The question is who pays the price. In this case, it is the borrower.
What EADB Says, and What It Does Not Say
In fairness to EADB, its position is not without foundation. Contracts, once signed, must be enforced. A development bank that let every defaulting borrower walk away on the basis of hardship stories would cease to exist as a viable institution within a decade. The English court, the Kenyan High Court, and the Court of Appeal have all examined the facts and found for EADB. That is not nothing.
The bank also makes a point that deserves to be taken seriously: it says it received no credible or verifiable repayment proposal from Dari Limited throughout the seven years of this dispute.
Tuju’s counter-claim, that he made multiple settlement offers including an immediate Ksh1.29 billion payment and a KCB refinancing proposal that would have cleared the debt in cash, has not been established to the satisfaction of any court. The bank says those offers were not verifiable.
Tuju says the bank refused to engage or issue a redemption statement. A decade of litigation has not settled this factual dispute to the satisfaction of the public, even if the courts have moved on.
But here is what EADB does not say, and what no court has compelled it to explain. It does not explain why the second tranche of Ksh294 million, the construction money without which the project was designed to fail, was never disbursed.
It does not address the recantation by its own Kenya Country Manager. It does not explain why the facility was originally denominated in a currency that would automatically inflate the borrower’s obligations as the shilling weakened.
It does not explain what a property valued at Ksh4.5 billion in outstanding debt was doing selling at the auction for Ksh450 million.
And it does not explain why, when the moment of enforcement came, it deployed masked operatives in unmarked vehicles in the middle of the night rather than the unambiguous production of court orders that the rule of law it purports to represent would seem to require.
The Reckoning
Tuju has appealed to the Court of Appeal. He has petitioned the Chief Justice. He has recorded a statement at the DCI. He has filed at the East African Court of Justice. He has returned to London seeking a review of the foundational judgment.
Every door he knocks on has, so far, been closed by the same combination of res judicata, issue estoppel, and the formidable procedural architecture that EADB has built around itself over decades. Courts do not easily second-guess other courts, especially foreign ones whose judgments have been formally registered. That is the system working as designed.
But behind the legal formalism, a set of questions that go to the heart of what development finance is supposed to be for remain stubbornly unanswered. EADB was created in 1967 to promote sustainable socio-economic development in East Africa through long-term lending to viable projects.
It is owned by the governments of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda, capitalised partly by their taxpayers’ money, and endorsed by the African Development Bank, the Netherlands Development Finance Company FMO, and Germany’s DEG. It has won awards.
It has been rated. It has been celebrated. And yet the pattern that emerges from decade after decade of its lending record is of an institution that extends credit under contractual terms that systematically disadvantage its borrowers, pursues enforcement through foreign courts that most borrowers cannot afford to match, hides behind a charter immunity that places it above accountability, and auctions its way to recovery at values that bear no obvious relationship to the outstanding debt.
As for Tuju, he is outside his gates. His children, who signed as guarantors and whose properties are pledged as security, face the same enforcement machinery.
The Tamarind Restaurant that once served Karen’s moneyed classes has a new owner. The Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary is next. What was once a Ksh943 million loan, drawn in the full confidence that a development bank was a partner in a legitimate enterprise, has become the instrument of demolition of everything he built.
EADB calls it the rule of law. It calls it the finality of court orders. It calls it the inevitable consequence of a borrower who refused to pay.
Raphael Tuju, standing in the predawn dark outside the gates of his own business park, calls it something else entirely.
And the growing body of evidence from its loan book, its affidavits, its immunity battles, and its courtroom record across four countries and more than three decades suggests that this is not the last time East Africa will have this conversation about the bank that was built to develop the region and has become, for far too many of its clients, the institution that showed up in the night and took it all away.
On March 21 and 22, the CAF Champions League enters its decisive phase: the quarter finals second legs are set to kick off. This is a test of fortitude, where there’s no room for mistakes. AfroPari takes a look at the upcoming weekend, when the tournament will eliminate the weaker teams and keep only those who are ready to fight for the trophy.
What to expect from the quarter-finals?
Each pair has already played the first leg and is now approaching the decisive second leg. It’s the aggregate score from the two legs that will determine who will continue their journey towards the trophy and who will be watching the semi-finals on TV.
The competition is still dominated by the top African football clubs: Pyramids, Al Ahly, Espérance de Tunis and AS FAR. However, those who have been following the match analysis on AfroPari know that the outcome isn’t that predictable.
Mamelodi Sundowns are still a strong team capable of upsetting the established balance, while RS Berkane have already made it clear they have serious ambitions, despite this being their debut season in the CAF Champions League. Stade Malien deserve a special mention – they are one of the standout stories in this season’s knockout stage.
March 21: Pyramids vs AS FAR
The first leg in Rabat ended in a 1-1 draw, keeping the intrigue alive. Pyramids are still the defending champions, but the first match has already shown that this status doesn’t necessarily give them an advantage on the pitch. The return leg will see two contrasting approaches clash: the home team’s strong, aggressive attack against the solid structure of AS FAR.
March 21: Al Ahly vs Espérance de Tunis
The main battle at this stage is between two sides with such a rich history that it would be a shame to focus solely on the present. The teams have met three times in the CAF Champions League finals, and on each occasion, the trophy has gone to Al Ahly.
Following their 1-0 victory in the first leg, Espérance de Tunis want more. The team will travel to Cairo with a narrow lead, but this is familiar territory for Al Ahly: the Egyptian giants traditionally play differently at home, and the fans are confident that their team can regain control of the tie. High hopes are pinned on Trézéguet – it was in Cairo that he scored 4 of his 5 goals in the current Champions League.
March 22: Stade Malien vs Mamelodi Sundowns
Having won the first leg 3-0, Sundowns are virtually through to the semi-finals – there’s no doubt that they are the clear favorites here. For the South African club, this is a chance to reach their third CAF Champions League semi-finals.
Stade Malien have already become the biggest sensation of this season’s knockout stage. Not only did the Malian club reach the quarter-finals for the first time in its history, but also comfortably won its group, conceding only 2 goals in 6 games. And yet the question remains: can the team that has already exceeded all expectations do so once again?
March 22: Al Hilal vs RS Berkane
After a 1-1 draw in the first leg, this match could prove to be the most intriguing fixture of the quarter-finals. Al Hilal are approaching the game as group winners and in good current form. An additional advantage for the home side is Abdel Raouf, who has scored 5 goals in this Champions League campaign and is among the tournament’s top scorers. But in decisive matches, these factors may not be enough.
RS Berkane play a different style – calmly and with no fuss. And this isn’t just a feeling: the club is playing its debut season in the CAF Champions League, yet has confidently reached the quarter-finals, having gained 10 points in the group stage, only surpassed by Pyramids. That’s why matches like this are particularly appreciated by those who like to bet on African football relying not on emotion but on analysis and dispassionate calculation.
CAF Champions League reaches its peak
Teams with different levels of experience and histories are set to face off in thrilling football battles very soon. Some are used to playing on such stages, while others are just learning how to turn their ambitions into results. To add even more excitement to the weekend, AfroPari has prepared a special CAF Champions League promo: a bet of at least 2 USD on a CAF Champions League match can bring you 1,000 USD or even 2,000 USD. Turn the moment into rewards!
Rows of gleaming Porsches and Japanese sedans sit under guard in a warehouse at Lamu Port, their intended home — the glittering port of Jebel Ali in Dubai — now under the shadow of Iranian missile strikes and an effective naval blockade that has convulsed global shipping to its foundations.
The cars, more than 4,200 of them landed in two voyages within a week, are among the most vivid symbols of the extraordinary commercial earthquake rippling out of the US-Israel war on Iran and washing up, improbably, on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast.
Since February 28, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury — killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering a furious Iranian counter-offensive — the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply and enormous volumes of global cargo normally flow, has been effectively shut.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait closed, began attacking vessels attempting to transit, and sent insurance rates for the corridor soaring by up to four times in days. By mid-March, just two cargo vessels and a single tanker had openly transited the choke point eastbound. Before the war began, approximately 138 ships passed through every single day.
The consequences have been seismic. Jebel Ali, Dubai’s giant container port and the ninth busiest in the world, was struck by Iranian missiles on March 1, temporarily suspending operations. Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd, the four titans of global container shipping, all suspended passages through the strait. Shipping charter rates quadrupled. War-risk insurance premiums on Middle East-bound cargo surged. And hundreds of vessels, caught in a deadly no-man’s sea, anchored off the Gulf of Oman and waited. Some, with nowhere better to go, turned south.
They turned towards Kenya.
Lamu’s Moment of War
The MV Grande Auckland, a 9,000-capacity pure car carrier operated by Italy’s Grimaldi Lines, made its maiden call at Lamu Port on the first Tuesday of this month. It had left Europe with a full load of high-end European vehicles bound for Jebel Ali. Instead, it discharged 469 of those cars at Lamu’s Kililana terminal and continued to Mumbai with the rest. What followed was even more dramatic.
Last Wednesday, March 18, the MV Grande Florida Palermo, also operated by Grimaldi Lines, arrived from Yokohama, Japan, carrying 3,800 vehicles and assorted spare parts — all originally destined for Dubai. It made its maiden Lamu call and handed over the entire consignment to port warehouses. Another vessel is expected next week, this one carrying 5,000 motor vehicle units.
Munir Minas Hussein, Chartering and Business Development Manager for Africa at Nisomar Group, which serves as the official agent for Grimaldi Shipping Line in East Africa, told reporters that convincing vehicle owners to divert to Lamu made clear commercial sense.
The port’s proximity to the Middle East gives it a decisive advantage over rival East African alternatives. According to maritime data, Lamu sits approximately 3,300 to 3,600 kilometres from Dubai and about 3,400 kilometres from Jebel Ali, making it closer to the embattled Gulf than either Mombasa or Dar es Salaam, while also benefiting from direct Indian Ocean access that shortens sailing time and cuts fuel costs.
“As an agency, we managed to convince the vehicle owners to divert and bring the vessel to Lamu Port, which has substantial economic advantages compared to other countries and ports within the Indian Ocean,” Minas told journalists gathered for the MV Grande Florida Palermo’s reception.
Kenya Ports Authority Managing Director Captain William Ruto said Lamu’s deep-water stature was the technical factor clinching the decision for major shipping lines. The port boasts a depth of 17.5 metres and 400-metre quay lengths, capable of accommodating vessels of up to 12,000 twenty-foot equivalent units. Mombasa Port’s berths, by contrast, are 15 metres deep and 300 metres long, limiting it to smaller vessels. High-quality mobile harbour cranes, rubber-tyred gantry cranes, and modern terminal trailers add to the facility’s appeal for roll-on/roll-off operations — the specialised vessel type designed to carry wheeled cargo like vehicles and trucks.
The cars will remain at Lamu until shipping agents are satisfied the security situation in the Persian Gulf permits their safe onward movement.
Mombasa Strains as the World Reroutes
While Lamu basks in an unlikely windfall, its older sibling is feeling the strain. Mombasa Port, the economic engine of the Kenyan coast and the principal maritime gateway for East and Central Africa, is grappling with a surge in vessel traffic as global shipping lines scramble to reroute around the twin blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.
Vessels that would ordinarily call at Jebel Ali or transit through the Suez Canal are now being redirected around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 10 to 14 days to transit times and over one million US dollars in additional costs per journey.
That longer routing is delivering more ships to East African shores than normal schedules would ever produce.
Shippers Council of Eastern Africa Chief Executive Agayo Ogambi confirmed the pressure bearing down on Mombasa. One shipping line alone increased its vessel calls to the port from eight to twenty following disruptions in other ports that produced congestion and longer waiting times. “This put pressure on Mombasa,” Ogambi said.
Kenya Ship Agents Association Chief Executive Elijah Mbaru was blunter about the fallout. He told journalists that the conflict had inflated charter fees from $100,000 to $400,000 per vessel, making exports prohibitively expensive and forcing cargo onto costly detours.
Emergency war-risk surcharges are being piled onto shipping costs and are expected to find their way to Kenyan consumers as higher prices on imported goods.
Cargo volumes handled through Mombasa reached a record 45.45 million metric tonnes in 2025, a near 11 percent jump on the prior year. The port’s infrastructure is now being tested to absorb a sudden and unplanned spike on top of that record base.
A War That Rewired the World’s Oceans
The magnitude of the disruption unleashed by the US-Israel strikes on Iran is difficult to overstate. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow corridor just 39 kilometres wide at its tightest point, carries approximately 20 million barrels of oil every day — about 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption. It is the only maritime exit from the Persian Gulf. When it closes, cargo does not simply slow down. It stops.
Iran’s IRGC has made good on its threats. By mid-March, Iranian forces had conducted at least 21 confirmed attacks on merchant ships in and around the strait. A large wave of coordinated strikes on March 11 damaged or sank multiple vessels. The Thai-flagged bulk carrier Mayuree Naree caught fire and 20 crew members were rescued by the Royal Navy of Oman. Oil tankers were struck by Iranian drone boats off the Port of Basra in Iraq. US military intelligence confirmed that Iran had begun planting naval mines in the strait’s navigation lanes, prompting the US military to destroy 16 Iranian minelayers in a single operation.
The Houthis in Yemen, seizing their moment, simultaneously reversed a ceasefire of several months and resumed attacks on Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Tehran, closing off the Suez Canal route at the same time the Persian Gulf route went dark.
For the first time in modern history, both of the two great maritime shortcuts connecting Asia to Europe and the Middle East were simultaneously blocked.
Cargo that once took 25 days from Asia to Europe now faces a 49-day journey around the Cape of Good Hope. The global container market absorbed an immediate shock: freight rates from Shanghai to Jebel Ali more than doubled within days. CMA CGM slapped a $3,000 emergency surcharge per container on Gulf-bound cargo.
Oil prices broke through $100 per barrel within days of the strikes, after opening the prior week below $72. The International Energy Agency launched what it described as the largest emergency reserve release in its history. At its peak, tanker traffic through the strait had fallen by 90 percent compared to pre-war volumes.
Kenya’s Bittersweet Bonanza
Lamu Port General Manager Abdulaziz Mzee gave voice to the moral complexity hanging over Kenya’s commercial windfall. “There are still ships with cargo that are destined for the Gulf, but since the situation there has deteriorated, those ships are more or less just wandering or drifting at sea,” he said. “It is not something to celebrate, because people there are suffering and facing difficulties, but at the same time it is a commercial blessing.”
The Kenya Ports Authority posted that Lamu was “geared up for a spike in vessel calls in the coming days.” The port recorded 74 vessels between January and March this year alone, roughly a third of the total ships it serviced in the entire period since it first opened in 2021. Last year, cargo throughput at Lamu exploded to 799,161 metric tonnes, up from just 74,380 metric tonnes in 2024, a performance already driven by the previous disruption of the Dar es Salaam port during post-election instability in Tanzania. The Iran war is adding a fresh and potentially far more powerful engine to that growth.
Shipping lines that have made maiden calls at Lamu have already signalled interest in returning on a long-term basis. The port is offering incentives for sustained commercial commitments. Captain William Ruto confirmed that KPA revenues from the current surge already run into “hundreds of millions of shillings.”
The strategic promise of the LAPSSET corridor, the $23 billion regional infrastructure plan linking Lamu to South Sudan and Ethiopia through ports, highways and pipelines, has for years outrun the commercial reality of a port struggling to attract business from major international lines.
Before the Iran war, Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, mainly routed its trade through Djibouti, and international shippers overwhelmingly preferred Mombasa for its road and rail connections to the Ugandan market. In a matter of days, a war thousands of kilometres away has delivered what years of government promotion could not.
But the ceiling of Lamu’s ambition remains constrained by unfinished infrastructure. Highways linking the port to South Sudan and Ethiopia remain incomplete, limiting how much cargo can be moved inland and dampening the port’s ability to serve as a full regional transit hub. Minas himself acknowledged the gap directly: “Once the hinterland infrastructure of East Africa is well built and lit, we will be able to discharge more vehicle cargo and other goods destined for Kenya and neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and South Sudan.”
The War That Has No End in Sight
US President Donald Trump has called for an international naval coalition to force the Strait of Hormuz open, naming China, France, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom as countries he hoped would dispatch warships.
The response has been tepid. Security analysts noted that most US allies opposed the war to begin with and have little appetite for a naval escort mission that would put their ships in the path of Iranian mines, drones and missiles. An Iranian commander declared on March 15 that Iran would continue to use the strait as a pressure point for as long as the war continued.
Iran has selectively permitted vessels from neutral countries to pass. Two Indian-flagged LPG tankers crossed safely on March 15 after negotiation with Tehran. A Pakistan-flagged tanker became the first confirmed non-Iranian cargo vessel to openly transit while broadcasting its location. China-linked vessels have largely been spared targeting, reflecting Beijing’s critical dependence on Gulf oil and its ongoing diplomatic leverage with Tehran.
For Kenya’s ports, that geopolitical arithmetic is straightforward. The longer the strait remains effectively closed, the longer ships will need somewhere to go. And for the foreseeable future, at least some of them will keep turning south.
