Detectives in Kakamega are investigating a shocking suspected murder–suicide after two university students were found dead inside a house in Maraba, Kakamega Central.
Police said the two victims were students at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology (MMUST). Their bodies were discovered in the same house, sending shockwaves through the local community.
Preliminary investigations indicate that one of the victims may have fatally stabbed the other before taking their own life. However, police say the motive behind the incident remains unclear.
Relatives of one of the deceased, a 21-year-old third-year student identified as Dariel Jedidah Luvunga, said they last spoke to him on the evening of March 8, 2026.
Their concern grew after repeated attempts to reach him the following day failed. On March 10, family members visited the house where he lived, only to find the door locked from the inside.
According to police, the relatives peeped through a small opening and spotted someone lying motionless on the floor, prompting them to alert authorities.
Officers arrived at the scene and forced their way into the house, where they discovered two bodies. One man was lying on the floor with multiple stab wounds to the head and stomach, while the other was found hanging in the bathroom.
Police confirmed that the body found hanging was that of Dariel. A blood-stained kitchen knife believed to have been used in the attack was recovered at the scene. Investigators also said no suicide note was found.
The bodies were moved to the Kakamega General Hospital mortuary for postmortem examination as investigations continue.
The incident drew a large crowd of residents who gathered at the scene as police removed the bodies.
Authorities have urged residents to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activities as detectives work to establish the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.
In a separate incident in Vihiga County, police are searching for a 43-year-old woman accused of fatally stabbing her 79-year-old father in Chamasilihi village in Mbale Sub-location.
Police said the victim, identified as Mundanya Hezron Madaga, died after being stabbed in the neck during the attack. The suspect reportedly fled the scene immediately after the incident.
The body was taken to Vihiga Teaching and Referral Hospital mortuary as police launched a manhunt for the suspect.
According to police statistics, murder cases have been rising in the country, with authorities reporting up to eight incidents daily, many of which remain under investigation.
On the morning of March 9, 2026, NTSA Director General Nashon Kondiwa stepped before cameras at the Sarova Stanley in Nairobi and announced that Kenya had entered a new era of automated traffic enforcement.
More than a thousand cameras were live, fines would arrive by SMS, and motorists had seven days to pay or face lockout from every NTSA service.
The country, he declared, would no longer tolerate the culture of bribery that had made Kenyan roads among the deadliest on the continent.
What Kondiwa did not dwell on at that morning briefing was the commercial architecture beneath the road safety rhetoric.
The cameras, the digital licences, the automated fines system, the entire Sh42 billion machine now grinding into gear, exist principally to generate revenues for a private consortium over the next 21 years.
At the core of that consortium sits Pesa Print Limited, a firm that only months earlier had drawn the attention of investigators for the identity of its newest shareholders.
Two men, Faryd Abdulrazak Sheikh and Jabir Abdul Nassir Abdalla Al-Kindy, had quietly acquired a combined 41.17 percent stake in Pesa Print through companies incorporated in August and October 2023, respectively.
The timing was not coincidental. The National Treasury had approved the smart driving licence project’s feasibility study in July 2023. By the time the ink had dried on those government approvals, Simbabanc Investments and Cropharmony Africa, the vehicles through which Faryd and Jabir made their entry, were already registered.
“If these guys are as powerful as you say, why are we being given more steps to follow?” — David Njane, Pesa Print founder
The men are not, by conventional measure, strangers to power. Faryd is the co-owner of the Dolphin Resort in Shanzu, Mombasa, a Sh600 million beachfront property that then Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i listed in Parliament in 2021 among assets linked to the then-Deputy President William Ruto and afforded round-the-clock police protection at taxpayer expense.
President Ruto did not dispute the inclusion of the Dolphin Resort in Matiang’i’s list, even as he rejected other allegations.
That defence of public funds for a private commercial interest was itself a scandal. That the same co-owner now holds a 41 percent stake in the company positioned to earn billions from Kenyan motorists is the more consequential one.
Jabir’s links to presidential property are, if anything, more direct. Company registry searches establish him as a shareholder of North Mogor Holdings, the entity through which President Ruto is reported to have acquired the Murumbi Farm, a roughly 1,000-acre tract in Kilgoris, Narok County. The property was among those Matiang’i identified as belonging to Ruto and guarded by the State.
When the former Interior CS made his parliamentary disclosure, North Mogor Holdings was a company whose ownership records had, curiously, vanished from the government’s online portal. They have since resurfaced.
Jabir is listed alongside Abdul Karim Abdulrak, who himself serves as a director of Kazi ni Kazi Ventures, a company whose sole shareholder is the United Democratic Alliance, President Ruto’s own political party. The web does not so much connect these men as wrap itself around them.
The depth of the presidential relationship extends into social ceremony. In May 2023, President Ruto attended the wedding of Faryd’s son Idris to Salma Konse. Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale, who accompanied the President, marked the occasion on social media.
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The attendance of a sitting head of state at the nuptials of a man who would subsequently acquire a controlling stake in a company seeking a 21-year, Sh42 billion state contract is the kind of detail that, in a functioning transparency architecture, would have been disclosed and scrutinised. It was not.
A PROJECT BORN IN DELAY, SHAPED BY CRISIS
The smart driving licence project is not new. Its origins trace to March 2017, when NTSA signed a Sh2.03 billion contract with a consortium led by the National Bank of Kenya and Pesa Print for the supply, installation, and maintenance of five million second-generation chip-embedded licences.
The contract was budgeted from public coffers and was meant to run three years.
It ran into the ground instead.
By the time the Kenya Kwanza administration came to power in 2022, the Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu had recorded the project as four years behind schedule. NTSA had managed to produce fewer than two million licences against a target of five million.
Meanwhile the government had accumulated close to Sh2 billion in pending bills owed to Pesa Print. The state, in short, had failed as a client. It turned to the private sector to fix what public procurement had broken.
The restructuring into a PPP was, on its face, defensible. Kenya’s roads kill more than 5,100 people annually. The economic cost of road accidents has been pegged at Sh450 billion per year, equivalent to approximately five percent of GDP.
The case for digital enforcement, biometric licences, and a merit-and-demerit points framework is a real one. The problem is not the policy logic. The problem is the procurement.
The government opted for direct procurement under the PPP Act rather than competitive bidding. NTSA has offered the explanation that Pesa Print is the only company with the relevant technology and that the project’s history makes competitive tendering impractical.
David Njane, Pesa Print’s founder, who holds 58.83 percent of the company through Kenya Twelve Ventures and his own personal shares, echoed the same justification. ‘We designed the licences from scratch, using Kenyan artists,’ he has said. The PPP Directorate confirmed that contract negotiations are underway.
What neither NTSA nor Pesa Print has adequately addressed is how the PPP Act’s direct procurement provision, designed for rare circumstances of unique capability, came to be applied to a project where the primary beneficiary has, at precisely the moment of government approval, welcomed shareholders with documented proximity to the presidency.
The question is not whether Pesa Print has a legitimate historical claim to the project. It is whether the entry of Faryd and Jabir into the company’s ownership structure, timed as it was to the approval of the feasibility study, represents the kind of political capture of public procurement that Kenya’s laws are supposed to prevent.
Sources familiar with the deal estimate a gross return of at least 120 percent on the initial Sh42 billion investment over 21 years.
THE ECONOMICS: WHO EARNS, AND HOW MUCH
The financial architecture of this project is extraordinary by any measure. The KCB-Pesa Print consortium is committing an estimated Sh42 billion in capital over the first two to three years, entirely through private debt and equity.
Not a single shilling of public money is meant to fund the implementation phase. In exchange, the consortium will operate and maintain the infrastructure for 21 years and recoup its investment through user charges.
Sources familiar with the deal indicate a projected return of at least 120 percent over the concession period, suggesting gross earnings in the region of Sh50 billion on the initial investment.
The revenue streams are layered. Motorists will pay Sh3,000 for the issuance, renewal or replacement of each smart driving licence.
With a target of five million licences every three years, that licensing fee alone is projected to yield around Sh15 billion to the consortium and NTSA combined. Then come the fines.
Treasury data shows Kenya collected an average of Sh1.7 billion annually in traffic fines over the five years to June 2024.
The new system is designed to multiply that figure dramatically. Over 1,000 cameras, 700 fixed and 300 mobile, deployed across the major highways and high-risk corridors of the country will detect violations in real time, transmit offence data to a central command system, and generate fines payable electronically within seven days.
The scale of potential fine revenue, across an enforcement system that detects at least 37 categories of offence ranging from Sh500 for a missing seatbelt to Sh10,000 for driving without a valid inspection certificate, is not projected in any public document. What is clear is that the private investors have modelled returns on a very different order of magnitude than anything the current system generates.
KCB’s role in the project came about through the acquisition of National Bank of Kenya by Nigeria’s Access Bank, completed on May 30, 2025. The Central Bank of Kenya approved the transfer and issued Gazette Notice No. 4666 in April 2025 clearing KCB to assume all functions NBK had held under the original 2017 contract.
The bank will now handle enrolment, distribution and licence issuance, while Pesa Print manages card design and production.
NTSA retains oversight of enforcement and data governance. At the end of the 21-year concession, core infrastructure including cameras, enrolment systems and the command centre will revert to NTSA. The private partners will retain non-core assets.
THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST PARADOX
There is a bitter irony embedded in the timing of all this. Shortly before the NTSA announced the rollout of its instant fines system, President Ruto signed the Conflict of Interest Act into law.
The legislation, demanded by the International Monetary Fund as part of Kenya’s fiscal adjustment programme, was intended to bring greater transparency to public appointments and government contracts. In practice, lawmakers diluted the bill’s most critical provisions before passing it, rendering the final version significantly weaker than the original draft.
The Conflict of Interest Act, in its enfeebled form, did not reach backward to examine contracts already in the pipeline. It did not trigger a review of the ownership structures of companies positioned to receive state revenues through PPP arrangements.
It did not ask why two men with documented personal relationships with the President had, within weeks of a Treasury feasibility approval, incorporated new companies and immediately acquired a combined 41 percent stake in the project vehicle.
The man who directly connects these threads is Charles Tela Alusala, Faryd’s business partner in the Dolphin Resort. Alusala co-owns Easton Industrial Park alongside President Ruto’s daughter June Ruto.
He is a shareholder in Jipe Fisheries with First Lady Rachel Ruto.
At Amaco Insurance, where Alusala holds 100,000 shares amounting to a 10.83 percent stake, the Ruto family’s investment vehicle Yegen Farms, owned by the First Lady and her daughter Charlene, holds 190,000 shares.
Alusala is listed as the contact person at Koilel Farm, where the First Lady and her son Nick are co-owners, and at Urban Groove Apartments, where Rachel Ruto and Charlene hold equity. The business constellation between Faryd’s circle and the first family of Kenya is dense, documented, and commercially active.
In that context, Pesa Print’s Njane insists the political affiliations of his co-shareholders are irrelevant to the company’s operations and its legitimate historical claim to the project. His frustration at persistent scrutiny is understandable.
He built the company, won the 2015 competitive tender under the previous administration, and has waited through years of state failure to be paid and to have the project advanced.
Yet the question of whether Faryd and Jabir’s entry was motivated by technical value or political access is not answered by the sincerity of Njane’s belief. It is answered by the evidence of timing, ownership structure, and the network of relationships that surrounds the deal.
LEGAL BATTLES ALREADY QUEUING
This is not the first time NTSA has attempted instant fines and been slapped down by the courts. In 2016 and again in 2020, the High Court invalidated similar frameworks, with Justice Roselyne Aburili ruling that any instant fines regime that does not give a motorist the option to either pay or contest the matter in court violates the constitutional right to a fair trial.
The current system has already attracted a constitutional petition from Nairobi motorist Kennedy Maingi Mutwiri, filed on March 10, 2026, one day after the system went live. Mutwiri argues that the automated framework, fully operational without human intervention and requiring payment within seven days on pain of interest accrual and service lockout, presumes guilt, bypasses judicial oversight, violates the separation of powers, and constitutes an unconstitutional exercise of quasi-judicial authority by an executive agency.
The High Court declined an urgent injunction but scheduled the matter for mention on April 9.
The Motorists Association of Kenya has written to the NTSA Director General raising procedural concerns about due process and accountability in the revenue management framework.
Transport operators, while broadly supportive of the road safety rationale, have called for clarity on how liability is allocated between vehicle owners, drivers, and SACCO management when cameras detect violations in PSVs.
The Federation of Public Transport Sector, in a statement welcoming the system’s anti-corruption potential, simultaneously flagged the absence of a clear and publicised offence register and warned of compliance failures if motorists remain uninformed.
The legal and operational challenges facing the system are not, in themselves, fatal to the project. The government has cleared multiple procedural milestones: the PPP Committee conditionally approved the project in June 2024, the Attorney General signed off in January 2025, and Cabinet gave final approval in December 2025.
The project is, by every administrative measure, properly authorised. The constitutional objections to the instant fines mechanism, however, represent a genuine vulnerability.
If the courts rule, as they twice have before, that the administrative fine regime violates the right to a fair trial, the revenue projections undergirding the entire 21-year investment case collapse.
The courts have twice ruled instant fines unconstitutional. A third challenge is already in court.
The NTSA smart driving licence project is not an isolated procurement anomaly. It is the latest and perhaps most financially significant chapter in a pattern of politically connected investors securing stakes in infrastructure concessions structured as PPPs under the Kenya Kwanza administration.
The Rironi-Mau Summit superhighway land valuations, the SGR Phase 2B contractor selection, the Affordable Housing Programme procurement controversies, each story traces the same anatomy: private investors with verifiable personal ties to the political establishment acquiring positions in high-value public projects at the precise moment those projects gain government momentum.
The PPP model, conceived as a mechanism for attracting competent private capital to compensate for a constrained public purse, has in practice become the preferred instrument through which political access is converted into generational commercial advantage. The 21-year concession period is not incidental. It means the men who entered Pesa Print in 2023, weeks after a Treasury approval, will be drawing revenues from Kenyan motorists’ fines and licence fees until 2047, irrespective of who governs after Ruto.
Faryd Abdulrazak Sheikh’s business biography has been described by those who have studied it as a masterclass in strategic proximity to power. He has built and dissolved companies, entered and exited sectors, and emerged consistently from each transition closer to the next contract. He is the kind of businessman who surfaces in the margins of every major procurement story of this administration, photographed at presidential weddings, registered in company records just ahead of approvals, invisible during the hard work of implementation and entirely present when revenues begin to flow.
Kenya’s legal and constitutional architecture theoretically prohibits this dynamic. The Conflict of Interest Act, however weakened in its parliamentary passage, establishes at minimum that public officials must not advance private interests that intersect with their public duties. The PPP Act requires that direct procurement be justified by genuine uniqueness of the private partner’s capability. The Constitution mandates transparency and accountability in the use of public resources. Against that framework, the story of how Faryd and Jabir entered Pesa Print and positioned themselves to earn a share of Sh42 billion from Kenya’s roads demands more than the silence currently emanating from State House and the relevant ministries.
Njane, the man who built Pesa Print and endured years of non-payment and administrative obstruction to reach this moment, says his company represents a Kenyan solution to a Kenyan problem. He is probably right. The solution, however, now carries passengers whose journey into this deal was not earned through technical innovation or competitive risk-taking. It was purchased through proximity to power at exactly the moment that power had money to distribute.
A PREDAWN raid on a lakeside hotel in Kisumu has ignited a high-voltage political and business dispute, with former Principal Secretary and Democracy for Citizens Party (DCP) patron Irungu Nyakera squarely accusing Interior PS Dr Raymond Omollo of masterminding what he calls a hostile takeover of his Sh235 million investment.
Nyakera, who built a reputation as a no-nonsense technocrat before aligning himself with former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua and the opposition, says that at around 5am on Tuesday, more than 100 men stormed his hotel, damaging property and assaulting members of staff, including tying up a female security guard who was on duty at the time.
Nyakera says he rushed to the scene and fired two warning shots into the air before the attackers fled.
“I called the OCS and asked for backup, but an hour later, when no backup was forthcoming, I sent him a message that I intend to shoot anyone stepping into my property,” Nyakera said in a statement published on his social media accounts, adding that he hoped the OCS had shared the warning through the relevant security communication channels.
Nyakera Irungu.
The incident is not the first of its kind. Nyakera says that three weeks prior, goons working alongside the Lake Basin Development Authority (LBDA) arrived at the premises, carted away merchandise belonging to his business and locked him out. He says he subsequently reported the matter to Kisumu security agencies, where officials told him something that now forms the centrepiece of his allegations against the Interior PS.
“Upon reporting the matter to the security agencies in Kisumu, I was informed that PS Raymond Omollo had directed that I cannot continue being a tenant in a government building because I am in DCP,” Nyakera said.
He went further, claiming that the Nyanza Region DCI boss told him that PS Omollo has personal interests in the property, a claim that Nyakera said made perfect sense given that Omollo is a former Chief Executive of LBDA, the state agency that owns the premises, and that Omollo’s cousin currently serves as LBDA’s chief executive.
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LBDA is a regional development authority established by Parliament in 1979 under Cap 442 to coordinate and implement development programmes across 18 counties in the Lake Victoria basin region, with its headquarters in Kisumu.
Dr Omollo served as its Managing Director from 2019 before being appointed Principal Secretary for Internal Security and National Administration in December 2022 by President William Ruto, making him one of the most powerful civil servants in the country and the youngest person ever to hold that office.
A Nation investigation published in February 2023 had earlier linked Omollo, while at LBDA, to an alleged scheme in which retrenched employees were denied benefits worth at least Sh100 million through fictitious court processes involving a string of lawyers. Omollo denied any knowledge of or involvement in the alleged fraudulent arrangement at the time.
Nyakera, who has invested in the LBDA-owned premises since 2019, says he holds a 50-year lease on the property and that court records confirm he has sunk more than Sh235 million into developing what was a shell when he took it over. He was blunt in his message to the PS.
“If he indeed wants to take over the property, let him come and we do a valuation and I sell it to him. Sending goons here, chanting ‘hatutaki Mkikuyu,’ will not drive me away. I am an investor, but I am not stupid,” Nyakera said, using language that raises the spectre of ethnic targeting in what he frames as a politically motivated campaign of intimidation.
The ethnic dimension of the alleged chants adds a volatile layer to an already combustible standoff. Nyakera, who hails from Murang’a in Central Kenya, is a prominent critic of the Ruto administration and a key organiser for Gachagua’s DCP in Nairobi, where he is the party’s patron and an aspirant for the Nairobi governorship in the 2027 elections. He had previously served on state boards, including as chairman of KEMSA and KICC, before President Ruto revoked both appointments, moves Nyakera has attributed to his refusal to dissolve his political affiliations.
Kenya Insights sought a response from Dr Omollo’s office and the Interior Ministry regarding the allegations but had not received a statement by the time of going to press.
The LBDA communications office also did not respond to queries on whether it had authorised any action against Nyakera’s tenancy or whether any formal eviction proceedings had been initiated.
If Nyakera’s account is accurate, it raises serious governance questions.
The Interior PS not only oversees national security and law enforcement coordination across Kenya, but also sits on the board of the Communications Authority of Kenya.
An allegation that a serving PS is directing a parastatal over which he previously held executive authority to act against a political opponent, and that security agencies are declining to respond to distress calls from that opponent, strikes at the heart of Kenya’s constitutional guarantees of equality before the law and protection of property rights.
Political observers will note that the timing is not incidental. Nyakera has become one of the more vocal and visible faces of the DCP opposition project, lending financial credibility and policy weight to Gachagua’s platform. His public profile has grown sharply since his sacking from the KICC board in April 2025, which he described at the time as a badge of honour. That trajectory, from government insider to opposition irritant, appears to have attracted consequences that now extend beyond the political arena and into his business affairs.
For now, Nyakera says he is not going anywhere. His message to those behind the raids was unambiguous: come with a valuation, not with goons.
In a second statement published hours after the attack, Nyakera appeared to validate a recent Standard Media Group investigation into the security situation in Kisumu under PS Omollo’s watch, and issued a stark warning to the investor community.
“Standard Media was right. PS Raymond Omollo has turned Kisumu into goons territory. The chants of ‘Hatutaki wakikuyu’ cut deep for me after all the investments I have made. Anyone from outside Nyanza planning to invest in Kisumu, hold off till the security situation here improves. It’s 2007 all over again.”
The 2007 reference will send a chill through anyone who lived through Kenya’s post-election violence, which claimed over 1,300 lives and displaced more than 600,000 people, with Kisumu and the Lake Region among the worst-affected areas.
Nyakera is not alleging that organised political violence of that scale is imminent, but his invocation of that period as a frame for the current security climate in Kisumu is a measure of how seriously he regards the threat he says he and his staff now face.
His investor warning carries its own economic weight. Kisumu is the third-largest city in Kenya and has in recent years positioned itself as a regional hub for trade with Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo through the Northern Corridor and the LAPSSET development framework.
An allegation by a prominent businessman that the county has become unsafe for non-Nyanza investors, made in the context of ethnically charged attacks and alleged state complicity, will not be ignored by the business community or by development finance institutions with exposure in the region.
PS Omollo’s office, the Interior Ministry, LBDA and the Kisumu County Commissioner had not responded to media requests for comment by the time of publication.
The Ministry of Mining and Blue Economy recently published notice that Halal Mining Company Limited, Shanta Gold Kenya Limited, Royal DFC Limited, Rotor Systems Limited and Altona Mining Ltd have submitted formal applications for mining licenses. Cabinet Secretary Hassan Joho has granted the public 42 days to file objections.
Kenya Insights’s investigations desk spent time dissecting each applicant. What we found should give the Cabinet Secretary serious pause.
Kenya’s mining sector has historically been a stage for spectacular wealth extraction and equally spectacular betrayals of communities and the public purse.
From the Goldenberg scandal of the 1990s, which bled the state of the equivalent of ten percent of GDP through fictitious gold exports, to the phantom Mrima Hill licensing scandal of 2013, which was so riddled with irregularities that the incoming Kenyatta administration cancelled every license issued in the transition period, this country has been here before.
The five firms now standing at the gate are not all equal in their problems.
But none of them arrives without questions that demand answers before a single license is signed.
“Kenya has been here before. The five firms now standing at the gate are not all equal in their problems. But none arrives without questions that demand answers.”
I. SHANTA GOLD KENYA LIMITED — BLOOD ON THE GROUND IN KAKAMEGA
Of the five applicants, Shanta Gold Kenya Limited carries the most immediate and viscerally documented record.
The British-owned firm, incorporated locally as Shanta Gold Kenya Limited in 2010 and listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market as the parent Shanta Gold, has become the most politically explosive name in Kenya’s extractive sector. Its application concerns gold mining rights in Kakamega County, a county the company has already turned into a war zone.
On December 4, 2025, a National Environment Management Authority public participation forum in Ikolomani’s Emusali Primary School disintegrated into deadly violence.
At least four people were killed when police opened fire on artisanal miners and residents opposing the company’s bid to acquire 337 acres of ancestral land to establish what it describes as an underground mining operation at the Isulu-Bushiangala site. Six others were hospitalised, including two police officers. Scores were arrested. Journalists covering the forum were assaulted and had their equipment seized.
Two days after the December 4 killings, a mine shaft in the same district collapsed at Wangoto village, killing three more artisanal miners who had been scrambling for survival since Shanta’s arrival began displacing their livelihoods. These deaths did not occur in a vacuum.
The artisanal mining community of Kakamega has consistently levelled a damning accusation against Shanta Gold: that the company has been conducting mining operations in Ikolomani under the legal pretence of conducting mere exploration. Artisanal miners who have worked the Isulu and Bushiangala sites for generations accused the firm of exploiting local resources for years while its exploration license technically barred it from commercial extraction. The accusation is not new. Similar allegations preceded Shanta’s operations in Siaya County, where the government issued a mining license in late 2025 over the objections of residents in seven villages. No member of affected communities attended the stakeholders’ workshop in Kisumu at which the government proclaimed the project would benefit locals.
Shanta Gold’s own Environmental Impact Assessment, submitted to NEMA and prepared in partnership with South Africa’s Digby Wells Environmental, confirmed 1.27 million ounces of gold at the Isulu-Bushiangala site, placing its total value at an estimated Ksh 683 billion. The arithmetic of extraction that follows from these figures has detonated public fury. The national government stands to collect between Ksh 555 million and Ksh 607 million in annual royalties, plus Ksh 193.8 million through the Mineral Development Levy. Kakamega County would receive approximately Ksh 111 million from its 20 percent share. The 800 households being displaced from their ancestral land would collectively receive a community share of approximately Ksh 55 million per year, which breaks down to less than Ksh 7,000 per household annually from a Ksh 683 billion operation built on their land.
Trans-Nzoia Governor George Natembeya and Kakamega Senator Dr. Boni Khalwale, speaking on behalf of leaders from five Western counties, were categorical: the proposed Ksh 3 billion compensation package for relocation is a grotesque insult when the gold beneath these villages is worth more than Ksh 680 billion. They accused the national government of enabling a foreign-driven land grab disguised as development. Their demands included the immediate suspension of Shanta’s operations and full accountability for the deaths on December 4.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission added its institutional voice to the chorus of condemnation. In a formal press release on December 8, 2025, KHRC registered outrage at the killings, arbitrary arrests and procedural chaos at the December 4 forum, noting that what should have been a lawful civic process had degenerated into intimidation and impunity. The Commission found that artisanal miners had been systematically excluded from the consultations required by law under the Mining Act 2016, that no transition or inclusion plan had been presented to thousands of families whose sole livelihood depended on small-scale mining, and that the approval process itself was riddled with what it called flawed NEMA approvals and violations of the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent.
Environmental research compounds the human rights indictment. Soil, sediment and water analysis from 19 artisanal and small-scale gold mining villages in Kakamega and Vihiga counties found arsenic concentrations at mining and ore processing sites reaching up to 7,937 times the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s safety standards for residential soils. Chromium, mercury and nickel concentrations in a majority of samples exceeded applicable safety thresholds. These are the villages into which Shanta Gold proposes to sink its billion-shilling operation.
The governance pattern visible in Shanta’s Kenyan trajectory raises a legal question that the Mineral Rights Board must answer before any further license is granted: can a company whose exploration activities in Siaya have been formally challenged by community groups for procedural flaws, and whose December 2025 public participation forum in Kakamega produced four civilian deaths, lawfully be granted an additional mining license in the same political and social environment before those deaths have been accounted for?
“800 households face displacement from Ksh 683 billion of gold. Their annual community share works out to less than Ksh 7,000 per family.”
II. HALAL MINING COMPANY LIMITED — A NAME THAT DEMANDS SCRUTINY
Halal Mining Company Limited presents a different category of concern. The company is seeking a mining license in Kilifi County to extract lead, zinc and barytes. On its surface, it is an application for a relatively conventional industrial mining operation. But the name itself, in the context of Kenya’s extractive history and the documented trajectory of similarly-named entities in the Horn of Africa, demands a level of due diligence that goes beyond routine bureaucratic processing.
Nairobi Law Monthly’s research found no publicly available records establishing the ownership structure, directorship or corporate history of Halal Mining Company Limited in Kenya’s official registries or in the mining ministry’s publicly accessible license database. This opacity is in itself a compliance issue. The Mining Act 2016 requires prospective license holders to demonstrate technical and financial capacity, and the ministry’s due diligence framework is premised on the assumption that it knows who it is dealing with.
The naming concern is not merely semantic. In March 2024, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on a network of entities across the Horn of Africa that raised and laundered funds for al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated terror organisation responsible for some of the worst attacks in East African history. Among the sanctioned Kenya-based entities was Haleel Commodities Limited, a business identified as a key node in al-Shabaab’s financial facilitation network. Though Haleel and Halal are distinct names and distinct entities, the pattern of naming in the region’s informal financial networks frequently involves deliberate proximity to established, credible-sounding names. The ministry owes the public a transparent disclosure of the full ownership and directorship of Halal Mining Company Limited, its source of capital and its previous commercial activities.
Beyond the naming question, the mineral combination that Halal Mining proposes to extract in Kilifi requires careful environmental scrutiny. Lead and zinc mining carries significant contamination risks to groundwater and coastal ecosystems, particularly in Kilifi’s topography where rivers flow toward the Indian Ocean and where communities depend heavily on subsistence agriculture and fishing. Barytes extraction, while commercially low-risk from a toxicity standpoint, is frequently used in the oil and gas drilling sector as a weighting agent, raising the question of who the end buyer for Kilifi barytes would be and whether Kenya’s royalty calculations reflect the market value of what is being exported.
The Kilifi region has already experienced the political fallout of mining ambitions that went badly for local communities. Marula Mining’s acquisition of the Kilifi manganese processing plant through its subsidiary Muchai Mining Kenya has proceeded under conditions of limited public transparency, while community expectations around employment and environmental management have frequently outpaced the delivery. Halal Mining Company Limited must demonstrate, before any license is granted, that its Kilifi application is not another instance of extractive opportunism cloaked in a thin corporate structure.
III. ALTONA MINING LTD — A DELISTED SHELL CHASING COASTAL SAND
Of all five applicants, Altona Mining Ltd presents perhaps the most structurally ambiguous profile. The company has submitted two applications seeking rights to mine heavy mineral sands in Kwale County. Kwale is a county whose extractive history is deeply instructive, and the timing of Altona’s applications, coming as the county’s residents continue to await royalty payments owed to them from a decade of titanium extraction under Base Titanium, makes it among the most sensitive license decisions the ministry will face.
The Altona Mining referenced in Australian Securities Exchange records was an ASX-listed copper company, ticker code AOH, which focused its operations on a copper-gold project in Queensland, Australia. That company was acquired by Canadian copper producer Copper Mountain Mining Corporation in 2018, through a scheme of arrangement approved by courts on both the ASX and Toronto Stock Exchange. Following the acquisition, the Altona Mining entity on the ASX was delisted. The company that acquired Altona’s Cloncurry Project was subsequently itself absorbed, creating a chain of corporate succession that makes the lineage of any entity currently trading under the Altona Mining name in Kenya deserving of the most rigorous verification.
Nairobi Law Monthly’s research could not confirm that the Altona Mining Ltd applying for Kwale heavy mineral sand mining licenses has any verified structural or operational connection to the Australian entity that was previously publicly traded. The ministry must establish and publicly disclose whether the Altona Mining Ltd appearing in the Gazette notice is a genuine mining enterprise with documented technical capacity and capital resources sufficient for heavy mineral extraction, or a shell incorporation.
The Kwale heavy mineral context raises the stakes considerably. Base Titanium, which operated the Kwale Mineral Sands Project as Kenya’s largest mining project from 2013 until depletion of its ore reserve in December 2024, was absorbed by Arizona-based Energy Fuels Inc in October 2024. In 2023, its final substantial year of production, Base Titanium paid Ksh 2.9 billion in royalties, of which Kwale County was entitled to Ksh 1.2 billion under the 20 percent county allocation stipulated in the Mining Act. As of early 2026, Kwale County Governor Fatuma Achani has publicly stated that not a single shilling of those royalties has reached the county. The community’s 10 percent share, mandated by law, has similarly vanished into the national government’s account without disbursement.
Governor Achani’s response to new mining applications in Kwale has been unambiguous. Speaking in the context of prospecting interest in Mrima Hill, she stated that she would not allow any new mining until the government could demonstrate that Kwale residents would actually benefit, referencing the billions in unpaid royalties as proof that formal legal frameworks are routinely ignored when it comes to revenue sharing. Altona Mining Ltd’s two applications land directly in this political environment. For the Ministry of Mining to grant Kwale heavy mineral sand licenses to an entity of uncertain provenance while the county waits for Ksh 1.2 billion in lawfully owed royalties from the previous operation would be an act of institutional contempt toward both the county government and the communities it serves.
The Kwale coastal ecosystem adds a further dimension. Heavy mineral sand extraction involves hydraulic mining and wet concentrator processing that historically creates significant pressure on water sources, coastal vegetation and marine environments. Kwale’s communities have already lost agricultural land, fishing resources and cultural assets in the course of Base Titanium’s operations. Any entity proposing to commence a new extraction cycle in this environment must face the highest level of technical, financial and corporate scrutiny the ministry can apply.
“Kwale County is still waiting for Ksh 1.2 billion in royalties from the last mining operator. Granting Altona a license before that debt is settled would be institutional contempt.”
IV. ROTOR SYSTEMS LIMITED — GOLD IN SAMBURU, QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS
Rotor Systems Limited is seeking gold mining rights in Samburu County. Of the five applicants, it is perhaps the most opaque. Nairobi Law Monthly’s exhaustive search of public records, corporate registries, mining databases and media archives produced no substantive information about the company’s ownership, directors, financial standing, technical capacity or previous mining or commercial activities. It does not appear in any publicly accessible list of licensed mining operations in Kenya. It does not appear in media coverage of Kenya’s extractive sector. It is, for practical purposes, invisible.
This invisibility is itself a serious red flag. Any company seeking a gold mining license in Kenya is expected to demonstrate, under the Mining Act 2016, that it possesses the technical expertise, financial resources and institutional capacity to conduct mining operations responsibly, manage environmental impact and fulfil its royalty and reporting obligations. A company with no verifiable public footprint cannot satisfy that standard on the available evidence.
The Samburu context sharpens the concern. Samburu County is home to one of Kenya’s most historically marginalised pastoralist communities, the Samburu people, who have experienced repeated cycles of state-facilitated displacement from their ancestral grazing lands. The Samburu have been subjected to what Cultural Survival and other international human rights organisations have documented as systematic land dispossession, often justified through development framings. The history of Laikipia, which borders Samburu and hosts overlapping Samburu pastoralist land claims, is a chronicle of eviction, violence and legal subordination of indigenous land rights to commercial and political interests.
Kenya’s record on mineral rights in pastoralist and indigenous counties is troubling. Gold deposits have been identified in Samburu’s Nachola area. Copper, chromite and other minerals are documented across northern Kenya’s geological belt. The Ministry of Mining’s own critical minerals catalogue acknowledges that most of these areas remain at reconnaissance or early exploration stages, with limited systematic evaluation of economic viability. The rush to license before adequate assessment exposes communities to speculative operations that will extract and depart without adequate accountability.
Rotor Systems Limited must, before any license decision is made, publicly disclose its directors, shareholders, source of capital, technical team, previous corporate activities in Kenya and elsewhere, and evidence of its capacity to meet the financial assurance requirements for environmental rehabilitation mandated by the Mining Act 2016. In the absence of that disclosure, the Ministry should decline the application on grounds of insufficient documentation.
V. ROYAL DFC LIMITED — KITUI’S RARE METALS AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Royal DFC Limited is seeking a mining license in Kitui County to extract minerals classified under Group E: Base and Rare Metals. This is a broad and commercially significant category that includes niobium, tantalum, cobalt, lithium, manganese and related strategic minerals that have become the focus of intense global competition as demand for battery technology and defence manufacturing accelerates. Kitui County is known to host deposits of iron ore, coal, copper, amethyst and sapphire, and its geological profile makes it a legitimate target for base and rare metal exploration.
Like Rotor Systems Limited, Royal DFC Limited has left no visible trace in the public record. Nairobi Law Monthly found no company by that name in publicly accessible Kenyan corporate or mining license databases, no media coverage, no industry association membership and no prior licensing history. Its application for what is potentially a strategically important category of minerals in a politically sensitive county arrives without a public identity.
The rare metals dimension places Royal DFC’s application in a geopolitical context the Ministry of Mining cannot afford to treat lightly. Kenya’s Critical Minerals Catalogue, released in August 2024, explicitly identifies Kitui as among the counties with the highest mineral wealth prospects. The global scramble for rare earth elements and critical minerals has seen Kenya targeted by interests from the United States, China, Europe and the Gulf states, all seeking to secure supply chains for the energy transition and advanced manufacturing. In this environment, opaque license applications for rare metal extraction in high-value counties represent a potential national security concern, not merely a regulatory compliance issue.
The Ministry of Mining must conduct a full beneficial ownership disclosure process for Royal DFC Limited before this application is processed. The source of the company’s capital, the nationality of its ultimate beneficial owners and the identity of any foreign partners or investors must be placed on the public record. Kenya has no sovereign wealth fund stake, no mandatory state equity participation requirement and no publicly disclosed critical minerals strategy that would ensure the national interest is protected in any licensing arrangement. Until those gaps are addressed, granting a rare metals license to an entity with no public profile is a gamble with Kenya’s long-term strategic mineral wealth.
VI. THE SYSTEMIC ROT: WHAT THESE FIVE APPLICATIONS REVEAL
Taken individually, each of these five applications presents specific concerns that the Ministry of Mining and the 42-day public objection window should be used to address. Taken together, they reveal something more troubling: a licensing system that consistently serves the interests of capital over community, obscures corporate identity behind bureaucratic form-filling and deploys the language of development to justify extraction that leaves counties poorer and communities displaced.
The figures are stark. Kenya’s total mineral production value stood at Ksh 25.5 billion in the most recent official reporting period. Gold accounted for Ksh 3 billion. Base minerals added Ksh 801 million. Against the Ksh 683 billion sitting beneath Ikolomani’s fields alone, the scale of what Kenya is giving away is extraordinary. The Goldenberg scandal of the 1990s, which cost the state between Ksh 158 billion and the equivalent of Ksh 3.4 trillion in today’s money depending on the estimate used, was a lesson about what happens when licensing is captured by political and commercial interests that have no accountability to the communities above whose land extraction occurs.
The pattern has not broken. Kwale County is still owed Ksh 1.2 billion in royalties from an operation that closed more than a year ago. Affected residents of Tiomin’s original titanium operations in Kwale were displaced from their land in 2007 and have spent seventeen years seeking adequate compensation. The Ramula and Mwibona communities in Siaya, where Shanta Gold has already been granted a license, conducted a community survey showing that most households had not reviewed the Environmental Impact Assessment document they were supposedly consulted on. The EIA for Kakamega was prepared in Kiswahili, which a significant proportion of the affected Luhya-speaking community could not read.
Mining Cabinet Secretary Hassan Joho is not without options. The 42-day objection window is not a formality designed to absorb public comment before a predetermined outcome. It is, in law and in constitutional principle, a genuine accountability mechanism. The Kenya Human Rights Commission has already placed its formal objection to Shanta Gold’s Kakamega application on the public record. Civil society organisations, county governments, artisanal mining associations and individual residents in all five affected counties have both the right and the legal standing to submit objections that the ministry is constitutionally obligated to consider.
What is required, before any of these five licenses is granted, is a transparent public hearing process that discloses the full beneficial ownership of every applicant, publishes their financial and technical capacity documentation, mandates community impact assessments in accessible languages, establishes binding royalty disbursement mechanisms with independent oversight, and holds any company with a documented record of community harm to the highest possible standard of justification.
“The 42-day objection window is not a formality. It is a constitutional accountability mechanism. Communities, counties and civil society have every right to use it.”
Five firms. Five counties. Five applications that between them could reshape Kenya’s mineral landscape for decades. The question is not whether mining should happen. The question is whether it can happen in a Kenya where the law means what it says, where communities own what the Constitution says they own, and where no company gets to build its profits on the graves of the Kenyans who had the misfortune to live above what their country calls wealth.
NOTE
This investigation relied on government gazette notices, court records, parliamentary transcripts, environmental impact assessments, official corporate registries, US Treasury OFAC records, documented media reporting from accredited outlets, and statements by county governments, civil society organisations and human rights bodies. All claims attributed to named parties are drawn from publicly available documents and verified statements. Readers, affected communities, county governments and members of civil society are encouraged to utilise the 42-day objection mechanism by submitting formal objections to: The Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Mining, Blue Economy and Maritime Affairs, Works Building, Ngong Road, P.O. Box 30009-00100 Nairobi, or by email to [email protected]. You can also write a confidential report to us.
Kenya’s roads entered a new era on Monday when the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) activated its Instant Fines Traffic Management System, a fully automated enforcement platform that silently watches every vehicle on Nairobi’s busiest corridors and dispatches SMS penalty notices to offenders within minutes of a detected violation.
By mid-morning on the system’s first day of operation, motorists across the city were already reporting fine alerts on their phones. One driver shared an Sh10,000 penalty notice he had received after travelling at 128 km/h on Thika Road, a stretch where the posted speed limit is 110 km/h. Others took to social media to complain that they had been fined before they had any idea the system was live, let alone what the rules were.
“This is extortion at this point,” the Thika Road motorist wrote on X. His frustration reflects a sentiment shared widely among Nairobi’s driving public: a technology-driven enforcement regime has arrived swiftly, with limited public education and lingering legal questions about its constitutionality.
NTSA insists the rollout is lawful, necessary and overdue. Road crashes killed more than 5,100 people in Kenya in 2025, imposing an estimated Sh450 billion in economic costs through medical expenses, lost productivity and property damage.
The authority attributes a large share of those deaths to weak enforcement driven by a shortage of cameras, corrupt roadside policing and low enrolment in the smart driving licence programme. The instant fines system, NTSA says, is the antidote.
THE CAMERAS: WHERE THEY ARE AND HOW THEY WORK
One of the speed enforcement cameras installed by NTSA between Ruiru and Thika along the Thika Superhighway. The device is part of a nationwide rollout of about 700 stationary speed cameras on major highways and high-risk road sections, alongside 300 mobile speed cameras for targeted operations and spot enforcement. The camera network is linked to a National Command and Control Centre, enabling real-time monitoring of traffic violations, automated detection of offences, and the immediate issuance of penalties.
The enforcement infrastructure consists of more than 1,000 high-definition smart cameras deployed under a Sh42 billion public-private partnership between NTSA, KCB Bank Kenya and technology firm Pesa Print. The project, approved by Cabinet in December 2025, will run for 21 years, with the camera network ultimately transferred to state ownership at the end of the contract.
Of the 1,000 units, 700 are fixed cameras mounted at permanent positions along major highways and what NTSA describes as high-risk corridors. The remaining 300 are mobile units that enforcement teams will deploy at speeding hotspots and accident-prone zones on a rotating basis.
The cameras are linked to a National Command and Control Centre that monitors traffic in real time, detecting violations and automatically triggering the fine notification system without human intervention.
The system connects to NTSA’s smart driving licence database, which means every fine is tied directly to the individual driver’s profile rather than to the vehicle’s registered owner.
Once a violation is logged, the motorist receives an SMS notification containing the alleged offence, the location, and an image of the vehicle at the time of capture.
In practice, the cameras are concentrated along the roads that carry the highest volumes of traffic in Nairobi, routes where speeding and lane indiscipline have historically caused the greatest harm.
Thika Road, Mombasa Road, the Southern Bypass, the Northern Bypass, the Nairobi Expressway and Waiyaki Way are all under camera surveillance, with speed limits varying significantly from one section to another.
What has frustrated many motorists is that the camera positions are not publicly disclosed and, on many stretches, are not prominently signed.
Critics, including technology commentators and transport operators, argue this approach prioritises revenue collection over behavioural change.
Rwanda’s equivalent system, widely cited as a regional benchmark, marks every enforcement camera clearly so that drivers are warned in advance and have the opportunity to slow down. In Nairobi, the cameras are, for now, invisible.
SPEED LIMITS BY ROAD AND SECTION
Speed limits on Nairobi’s major roads are not uniform. They vary not only between roads but between sections of the same road, depending on the infrastructure, surrounding land use and historical accident data. The table below sets out the applicable limits on each major corridor currently under camera surveillance.
ROAD / SECTION
LIMIT
Thika Road — Safari Park to Thika Road
110 km/h
Thika Road — Roysambu / TRM
80–100 km/h
Thika Road — Jomoko to Thika Turnoff
80 km/h
Thika Road — Allsops / GSU HQ
80 km/h
Thika Road — Pangani / Muthaiga Interchange
80 km/h
Nairobi Expressway — Museum Hill to Westlands
80 km/h
Nairobi Expressway — After Nyayo Stadium
80 km/h
Mombasa Road — Mombasa Road to Nyayo Stadium
80 km/h
Mombasa Road — Sameer Business Park / GM
80 km/h
Southern Bypass — to Virtual Weighbridge
80 km/h
Southern Bypass — Ngong Road Interchange
80 km/h
Northern Bypass — After Gitaru
80 km/h
Northern Bypass — Ruaka / Wangige
80 km/h
Waiyaki Way — Kangemi / Uthiru
60–80 km/h
The most important figure for most Nairobi commuters is the 110 km/h limit on the section of Thika Road between Safari Park and the Thika Road exit. This is the highest posted speed limit on any Nairobi urban road and is the stretch where the first widely reported fine under the new system was issued. Below Safari Park, limits drop to 80 km/h or a variable 80 to 100 km/h range depending on the specific interchange.
The Nairobi Expressway, which carries significant cross-city traffic between Mlolongo and Westlands, is capped at 80 km/h throughout, including from Museum Hill to Westlands and after Nyayo Stadium. The Southern and Northern bypasses similarly sit at a flat 80 km/h limit. Waiyaki Way, which runs through heavier residential and commercial zones, applies the most conservative limits of 60 to 80 km/h depending on the section.
THE SPEEDING PENALTY SCALE
Speeding forms the backbone of NTSA’s enforcement model. The system applies a graduated penalty structure that becomes sharply more expensive as the excess speed increases. Crucially, the same scale applies regardless of the posted speed limit on the particular road: whether you exceed an 80 km/h or a 110 km/h limit, the bands and amounts are identical.
EXCESS SPEED BAND
PENALTY
1–5 km/h above limit
Warning only
6–10 km/h above limit
Ksh 500
11–15 km/h above limit
Ksh 3,000
16–20 km/h above limit
Ksh 10,000
The graduated structure means that a motorist travelling at 91 km/h on a road posted at 80 km/h will face a Sh3,000 fine for exceeding the limit by 11 km/h. If the same motorist had been travelling at 101 km/h on the same stretch, the fine would jump fourfold to Sh10,000.
Legal experts note that the sudden escalation from Sh3,000 to Sh10,000 for just five additional kilometres per hour creates what amounts to a cliff-edge penalty with no intermediate step.
THE FULL FINES SCHEDULE: ALL 37 OFFENCES
Beyond speeding, the system is designed to detect and penalise a broad range of traffic violations. NTSA has published a schedule of 37 offences that fall within the instant fines framework. The complete schedule is reproduced below.
OFFENCE
PENALTY
No identification plates / improperly fixed plates
Ksh 10,000
No valid vehicle inspection certificate
Ksh 10,000
No licence endorsement for vehicle class
Ksh 3,000
Failure to renew driving licence
Ksh 1,000
Failure to produce driving licence
Ksh 1,000
Unqualified PSV driver
Ksh 5,000
Driving on pavement / pedestrian walkway
Ksh 5,000
Ignoring police officer direction
Ksh 3,000
Ignoring traffic sign
Ksh 3,000
Failure to stop for police
Ksh 5,000
Causing road obstruction
Ksh 10,000
No reflective triangles / lifesavers
Ksh 3,000
Driving on footpath
Ksh 5,000
Driver using phone while driving
Ksh 2,000
Body part outside moving vehicle
Ksh 1,000
Unlicensed PSV driver or conductor
Ksh 5,000
Employer hiring unlicensed PSV staff
Ksh 10,000
Failure to refund fare (incomplete trip)
Ksh 3,000
Touting
Ksh 3,000
PSV driver / conductor without badge or uniform
Ksh 2,000
Undesignated person driving PSV
Ksh 3,000
PSV driver allowing unauthorised driver
Ksh 3,000
PSV with tinted windows / windscreen
Ksh 3,000
PSV without fire extinguisher / fire kit
Ksh 2,000
PSV picking / dropping at unauthorised stop
Ksh 3,000
No speed governor in PSV / commercial vehicle
Ksh 10,000
PSV seat belts not maintained
Ksh 500
Vehicle without seat belts
Ksh 1,000 per seat
Not wearing seat belt
Ksh 500
Vehicle without reflective warning signs
Ksh 2,000
Motorcycle rider without protective gear
Ksh 1,000
Motorcycle with more than one pillion passenger
Ksh 1,000
Learner without ‘L’ plates
Ksh 1,000
Pedestrian obstructing vehicles
Ksh 500
Passenger boarding / alighting at unauthorised stop
Ksh 1,000
Among the most significant fines is the Sh10,000 penalty for causing a road obstruction, a common issue in Nairobi where matatus stop mid-road to pick up or drop off passengers. Operating a public service vehicle without a speed governor will also attract Sh10,000, as will employing an unlicensed PSV driver or conductor.
The Sh1,000-per-seat penalty for vehicles without seat belts is notable for its potential cumulative impact: a matatu found to be missing seat belts across its full complement of seats could face a fine of Ksh14,000 or more from a single stop. Drivers using their mobile phones while driving face a Sh2,000 penalty, while those who fail to wear their own seat belt will be charged Sh500.
HOW TO PAY AND WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T
All fines issued through the automated system must be paid through the branch network of KCB Group within seven days of the SMS notification.
The seven-day window is strict: failure to pay within the deadline will result in interest accruing on the outstanding amount, and the vehicle or driver record will be blocked from conducting any transaction on NTSA’s service platforms.
That includes licence renewals, vehicle inspections, transfers of ownership and any other government transport service.
Critics, have pointed out the awkward contradiction in this arrangement: NTSA is marketing a digital enforcement revolution yet directing motorists to a bank branch to settle fines, a manual bottleneck that sits at odds with the system’s stated ambitions.
NTSA has said a Mobile Driving Licence wallet is in development that will allow motorists to carry digital copies of their licences, access offence records and pay fines through mobile and USSD channels.
NTSA has not disclosed whether repeat offenders will face escalating penalties beyond the standard fine amounts, nor has it clarified how the system treats special-category vehicles such as those transporting perishable goods, whose operators have raised concerns about the practical implications of being held up by fine-related transaction freezes.
THE LEGAL CHALLENGE
The system’s most consequential question is not how much it will cost motorists but whether it is lawful. Advocate Marvin Onyango has argued publicly that NTSA may have overstepped its mandate by treating automated camera captures as proof of guilt.
“Traffic offences are criminal in nature,” Onyango said. “Automated enforcement raises questions because it presumes guilt without considering the right to a fair hearing under Article 50. They cannot simply declare someone guilty and impose a fine without a hearing and proper evaluation of evidence.”
Article 50 of the Constitution of Kenya guarantees the right to a fair hearing. In the criminal law context, that right includes the presumption of innocence, the right to be heard and the right to challenge evidence presented against you. An automated system that issues a fine on the basis of a camera image and sends payment demands with a seven-day deadline provides none of those procedural safeguards.
Onyango’s position echoes a concern raised by the Federation of Public Transport Sector (FPTS), which, while broadly welcoming the system, has called for clear guidelines on who bears liability when a commercial vehicle is fined: the registered owner, the SACCO managing the route, or the individual driver behind the wheel at the time of the violation. The federation has also called for a consultative meeting with NTSA, the Judiciary and the National Police Service to address these gaps before the system’s enforcement bites more deeply into the sector.
NTSA had not responded to requests for clarification on the outstanding legal questions as of the time of going to press.
THE POLITICAL PRESSURE THAT DROVE THE LAUNCH
The speed with which NTSA activated the system has raised eyebrows in transport circles. The instant fines programme had been in the pipeline for years before President William Ruto’s intervention on March 2, 2026, when he used a road safety meeting convened by the National Council on the Administration of Justice at State House to publicly rebuke the authority for its inaction.
“I have always wondered why we have taken forever. Why don’t we enforce the instant fines programme? Why haven’t we rolled out the cameras on our roads? Rolling out cameras is not rocket science. Let us roll out the cameras in the five or six major towns within one month,” the President said, directing Transport Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir to begin implementation immediately.
Within a week, NTSA had announced the system was live.
What the authority has not explained publicly is how 1,000 cameras were procured, installed, calibrated and connected to a functional enforcement back-end in that timeframe, unless the infrastructure was already substantially in place before the presidential directive was issued.
The Sh42 billion public-private partnership with KCB and Pesa Print had been approved by Cabinet in December 2025, suggesting months of preparation had already occurred.
What is clear is that political will has finally translated into operational deployment, and Nairobi’s motorists are now navigating a transformed enforcement landscape whether they were ready for it or not.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR NAIROBI DRIVERS
For the average Nairobi motorist, the practical implications of the new system are significant. The most immediate risk is speeding on Thika Road, the single corridor where the first fine was already reported on day one of operations. The 110 km/h stretch between Safari Park and the Thika Road exit is where the risk of an Sh10,000 fine materialises fastest, particularly given Nairobi’s tendency for variable traffic flow that can tempt drivers to accelerate on open sections.
Matatu operators and their SACCOs face the broadest exposure across the full range of offences, from tinted windows and missing fire extinguishers to touting and fare refund failures. The industry has been warned. Commercial truck operators face particular risk from the speed governor requirement, a penalty of Sh10,000 that could land on fleets where vehicles have had governors tampered with or disabled.
For all motorists, the most important practical step is to verify their mobile number is correctly registered with NTSA, since the fine notification system operates entirely via SMS. A number that is outdated or unregistered will mean fines accrue unnoticed until a transaction block triggers an unpleasant discovery at a licensing office.
The National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA), in collaboration with the National Police on December 4, 2025 conduct crackdown on traffic violators at Salgaa, along Nakuru-Eldore Highway as part of a renewed effort to curb road accidents, particularly during the festive season.
The Sudanese government has urged the United States to designate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a terrorist organisation. Sudan’s foreign ministry, in a statement issued on Tuesday, said all groups that violate international humanitarian law and commit terrorism, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the country should be designated as terrorist groups.
“The US should therefore designate the RSF militia as a terrorist group, given its proven crimes and documented violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and terrorism,” the statement read in part.
The government’s demand comes a day after the US designated the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, labelling it a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) and planning to formalise it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) starting March 16, 2026. The United States accused the group of widespread violence and links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
RSF members. Credit: Al Jazeera
The RSF was formed around 2013, evolving from the Janjaweed militias, which were infamous for committing atrocities during the Darfur conflict.
Initially, they were government-backed militias used to fight rebel groups in Darfur and maintain control in conflict regions, but they have now grown into a powerful political and economic actor, controlling resources such as gold mining in Sudan.
The group has also been accused of war crimes and human rights abuses, especially during the Darfur conflict and crackdowns on protests in Khartoum.
A United Nations inquiry found the RSF to have committed acts of genocide in Darfur.
The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development issued a statement from Geneva on Tuesday that was polite, dignified and retrospective.
It spoke of six decades of editorial independence, of a free press built from a Kiswahili-language weekly purchased in 1959, of 30 brands and 62 million digital users and a legacy of democratic contribution. What the statement did not adequately reckon with was the character of the man now inheriting all of that.
Rostam Abdulrasul Aziz, Tanzania’s first dollar billionaire, former CCM parliamentarian, and the man Tanzanian parliamentary investigators linked to the Richmond Development Company corruption scandal that toppled a prime minister, has acquired the 54.08 per cent controlling stake in Nation Media Group PLC that the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) held through NPRT Holdings Africa Limited.
The deal, announced simultaneously in Geneva and confirmed by Nairobi market filings, transfers 92,618,177 ordinary shares to Aziz’s vehicle Taarifa Ltd. The transaction price has not been disclosed.
The combined platform that Aziz now effectively controls includes the Daily Nation, Business Daily, NTV Kenya, Nation FM, The EastAfrican, the Daily Monitor in Uganda, The Citizen and Mwananchi in Tanzania, and a regional digital audience that the group itself values at over 62 million users. In any country, that would be a significant accumulation of editorial power for a single private owner with active business interests across the region.
In Kenya in 2026, a country hurtling toward a general election while its press freedom ranking dropped from 102nd to 117th out of 180 countries in a single year according to Reporters Without Borders, it is something else entirely.
THE MAN WHO JUST BECAME KENYA’S MOST POWERFUL PUBLISHER
Aziz was born in August 1960 in the Igunga District of Tabora Region, the son of one of the wealthiest trading families in East Africa. He was educated at the University of Exeter before returning to Tanzania to multiply a fortune that eventually earned him a Forbes billionaire designation in 2013. He was, at the time, the only dollar billionaire in East Africa according to the Henley and Partners Africa Wealth Report, a distinction he held as recently as 2022.
His business empire has ranged across telecommunications, mining, agriculture, real estate, and energy. He was the man who facilitated Vodacom South Africa’s entry into Tanzania, eventually accumulating a 35 per cent stake in Vodacom Tanzania before exiting in two tranches in 2014 and 2019, earning a combined $460 million from those transactions alone.
He controls Caspian Limited, which operates as Tanzania’s largest contract mining company, servicing DeBeers and Barrick Gold. He controls MIC Tanzania, giving him ownership of Tigo Tanzania and Zanzibar Telecom, together reaching over 13 million mobile customers.
He owns Taifa Gas Group, a company whose journey into Kenya is central to understanding how Aziz came to acquire NMG.
He has also always been in media. In 1999, Aziz co-founded Mwananchi Communications Limited in Tanzania in partnership with Ambassador Ferdinand Ruhinda. The company later launched The Citizen, an English-language daily.
Critically, he brought in Nation Media Group itself as a partner in that venture. NMG purchased the controlling shares of Mwananchi Communications in December 2002.
The commercial relationship that began more than two decades ago has now been inverted. The junior partner has purchased the parent.
Through his vehicle New Habari (2006) Limited, Aziz also maintains ownership of several influential Swahili newspapers in Tanzania including Mtanzania, The African, Bingwa, Dimba and Rai, though critics have long noted that his control there is exercised through proxies.
The acquisition of NMG adds a regional media dimension that dwarfs anything he has previously owned, placing him in command of editorial operations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda simultaneously.
The man who once forced Nation Media Group to pull down stories about him now owns Nation Media Group.
THE RUTO CONNECTION AND THE GAS EMPIRE THAT OPENED EVERY DOOR
To understand what the NMG acquisition means for press freedom in Kenya specifically, one must understand what happened in Mombasa in February 2023.
Taifa Gas Investments SEZ Ltd, Aziz’s energy company, had for years been attempting to build a $130 million cooking gas terminal at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Likoni, Mombasa.
The project, intended to house a 30,000-tonne liquefied petroleum gas terminus, had been blocked by regulatory opposition in Kenya during the Uhuru Kenyatta era. Then came September 2022, and the election of William Samoei Ruto as Kenya’s fifth president.
On February 24, 2023, five months into his presidency, Ruto personally presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for Aziz’s Mombasa gas plant.
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.
At that ceremony, Ruto said of Aziz: ‘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.’ The project was then described by Tanzanian and Kenyan media as the largest single private foreign direct investment in Kenya since the collapse of the East African Community in 1977.
The Ruto administration’s clearing of the path for Aziz’s gas investment was not incidental.
Analysts and business press had been explicit for years that the Aziz camp was closely allied with Ruto while Uhuru Kenyatta was in power.
Business insiders pointed to rivalries with coast-based businessman Muhammed Jaffer of Africa Gas and Oil, who was seen as aligned with the late Raila Odinga camp that Kenyatta had backed before the 2022 election. When Ruto won, the Aziz gas investment, which had been stalled for years, suddenly had a presidential champion.
That Ruto and Aziz share a bond warm enough for a sitting head of state to publicly launch a private business investment and describe its regulatory delays as ‘government shenanigans’ that he personally corrected is not a matter of speculation. It is on camera. It is on record. And it is now the backdrop against which journalists employed by Aziz’s newly acquired media house must decide how to cover William Ruto’s government in the run-up to the 2027 general election.
THE RICHMOND SHADOW: A CORRUPTION SCANDAL THAT NEVER FULLY WENT AWAY
Aziz’s path to extraordinary wealth has not been without shadow. The most significant of those shadows is the Richmond scandal, which shook Tanzania in 2007 and 2008 and ultimately forced the resignation of Prime Minister Edward Lowassa along with two cabinet ministers.
In 2006, Tanzania faced a crippling electricity shortage caused by drought. The government, bypassing standard procurement procedures, awarded an emergency contract to Richmond Development Company, a US-registered entity, to supply 100 megawatts of diesel generators to the state utility TANESCO.
The contract, valued at approximately TSh 172 billion, included a provision guaranteeing payment of $137,000 daily regardless of actual output. The generators arrived late, underperformed, and the deal was ultimately passed to another entity, Dowans Holdings. Tanzania lost over $120 million on the arrangement.
A parliamentary select committee chaired by Dr Harrison Mwakyembe investigated and tabled its findings in February 2008. The committee found that Richmond was a briefcase company with no relevant experience, financial capacity, or clear US registration.
The report found that Aziz had been granted power of attorney by Richmond by late 2005, making him the legal representative of the company at the critical time it won the tender in 2006.
The report further stated that the real proprietors of Richmond were Prime Minister Lowassa and, in the committee’s words, ‘his close friend, Igunga MP Rostam Aziz.’ Lowassa resigned. Two ministers resigned. The entire cabinet was dissolved.
Aziz denied the allegations then, as he has consistently since. He called for a panel of judges to review the committee’s findings, insisting the report was wrong about his role. No criminal prosecution followed. But the scandal’s association with his name never disappeared.
In July 2011, when the ruling CCM party called on leaders tainted by corruption accusations to resign, Aziz became the first Tanzanian MP in history to voluntarily vacate his parliamentary seat, citing what he called ‘dirty politics’ within the party. He has remained outside active politics since, though his business influence and his relationships with sitting governments have never diminished.
WHEN NMG WAS HIS ADVERSARY
There is a particular irony sharpening Tuesday’s transaction.
During the Taifa Gas regulatory battles in Kenya, Aziz’s lobbying machinery was pointed, among other targets, directly at Nation Media Group. Business news monitoring services reported that the group was forced to pull down critical stories about the Taifa Gas investment and apologise to Aziz. The details of those interactions have not been independently verified in full, but the broad pattern is on record.
The man who once used political leverage to neutralise NMG coverage of his own business interests now sits at the top of NMG’s ownership chain.
Journalists at the Daily Nation, Business Daily, NTV, and The EastAfrican are now ultimately employed by a proprietor whose business empire has active interests in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
Their reporting on the Ruto administration, on energy policy, on telecommunications regulation and on regional business affairs will all occur within an ownership structure in which the proprietor has documented commercial relationships with the very governments and industries being reported on.
Press freedom organisations have been watching NMG with concern for reasons entirely separate from the ownership change.
Reporters Without Borders documented in December 2024 that Safaricom threatened the group with SLAPP suits, suspended advertising contracts, and demanded internal hearings following NMG’s investigation into surveillance practices.
Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria threatened to withdraw all government advertising from NMG in 2023 after the group published an investigation into a cooking oil import scheme allegedly involving government officials.
The Kenyan government was estimated to owe NMG alone approximately Ksh 800 million in unpaid advertising debts as of 2024, a structural leverage point that no commercial media organisation can afford to ignore.
Kenya’s press freedom ranking fell from 102nd to 117th place in a single year. Now its biggest media house has a new owner with active business deals involving the sitting government.
A FINANCIALLY WOUNDED INSTITUTION
NMG arrived at this ownership transition in a condition of significant financial distress. From a profit peak of over Ksh 2.5 billion in 2013, the group recorded its first back-to-back annual losses in more than a decade in 2023 and 2024. The net loss for 2024 was Ksh 254.4 million, following a Ksh 205.7 million loss the year before. Group turnover fell 12.5 per cent to Ksh 6.23 billion in 2024. The board suspended dividend payments to shareholders.
The group has closed regional newsrooms in Mombasa, Meru, Kakamega and Kisii, in addition to implementing multiple rounds of staff reductions since 2016.
These financial pressures are not unique to NMG. The global collapse of print advertising revenue, the rise of social media platforms that have captured advertising spend from legacy media, and the specific challenge of building viable digital subscription businesses in relatively low-income markets have combined to squeeze media economics across East Africa.
NMG has been investing in its digital transformation, reaching 83 per cent digital content delivery by end of 2024 and targeting $55 million in digital revenue by 2027.
But a financially distressed media institution is also a more vulnerable one. Advertisers, regulators, and now a new proprietor with active business interests across the region all have structural leverage over a newsroom that needs revenue to survive.
Aziz and Taarifa Ltd have committed publicly to investing in NMG’s digital transformation, and Sultan Allana of AKFED has expressed confidence that editorial independence will be maintained. Those are the correct things to say at the moment of announcement.
The harder test comes when a Taarifa-linked story needs investigating or when the Ruto government applies pressure to a newsroom whose majority owner has a Ksh 16 billion gas plant to protect in Mombasa.
WHAT FOLLOWS IN THE REGION
The implications extend beyond Kenya’s borders. NMG’s Daily Monitor in Uganda is one of that country’s most credible independent news organisations in a media environment that has become increasingly hostile under the Museveni government.
The Citizen and Mwananchi in Tanzania, two publications that Aziz himself helped found before selling his stake, now return under his indirect control in a country where the ruling CCM, the party he served for nearly two decades, remains in government under President Samia Suluhu Hassan. Rwanda, a market where press freedom rankings are among the continent’s most restrictive, rounds out the group’s regional footprint.
Aziz told the media at announcement: ‘NMG is an institution of profound importance to East Africa, and we will uphold its editorial independence while investing in its continued success as the region’s leading independent media organisation.’ The commitment is noted.
But Aziz also has a documented history as both a political actor and a commercial operator whose interests regularly intersect with the state. The confidence of AKFED’s Sultan Allana that ‘NMG will continue to uphold the values of independent journalism’ is understandable from a departing shareholder who built those values over 66 years. It does not bind the incoming majority owner in any legally enforceable way.
There is a school of thought that argues private billionaire ownership is neutral or even beneficial for media, that financial stability provided by a deep-pocketed proprietor is preferable to the slow death of a loss-making independent institution.
That argument has merit in the abstract.
It loses considerable force when the billionaire proprietor has publicly documented commercial ties to the sitting head of government in the group’s most important market, when that proprietor has a history of using business relationships to manage media coverage of himself, and when the country involved is approaching an election in an environment of documented government pressure on the press.
The Daily Nation was founded on the conviction, articulated by its founder the late Aga Khan IV, that a free press is indispensable to democratic society.
For 66 years, that conviction had the backing of an owner with no commercial interests in Kenya beyond the media house itself, and whose development mission was structurally incompatible with editorial capture.
What backs that conviction now is the word of a Tanzanian billionaire with a gas terminal in Mombasa, a telecommunications empire in Dar es Salaam, and a warm relationship with the man in State House.
Whether those assurances prove sufficient will not be determined in Geneva announcement rooms. It will be determined the next time a Daily Nation editor receives a call she would rather not have received, and decides whether the story runs.
Madagascar’s military ruler Col Michael Randrianirina has dissolved the government unexpectedly, dismissing the prime minister and the entire cabinet, according to a statement from his spokesperson.
“The government has ceased its functions” it said, adding that Randrianirina will appoint a new prime minister “in line with the provisions stipulated by the constitution”.
No reason was given for the move.
Randrianirina seized power last October from Andry Rajoelina, following weeks of youth-led protests on the Indian Ocean island. Rajoelina had been elected president for a third term in a disputed poll in 2023.
The demonstrations were over persistent power and water shortages, culminating in the army siding with the demonstrators.
Randrianirina has pledged to call new elections within two years.
Last December, the regional bloc, the Southern African Development Community (Sadc), directed Madagascar’s military authorities to submit a roadmap for restoring democracy including plans for fresh elections by the end of February.
But in a surprise on Monday, Randrianirina sacked his entire government and assigned permanent secretaries to run ministries’ day-to-day operations until a new cabinet is formed.
Randrianirina has not explained the motivation for the mass sackings, but leaders of the Gen Z movement, whose grassroots mobilisation helped bring the military leader to power, have called for more inclusiveness in the transition process and greater representation in decision-making structures.
Activist groups, calling themselves Gen Z and Gen Y movements, had recently issued a 72-hour ultimatum for Randrianirina’s resignation, citing frustration with his performance, local media reported.
Businessman Herintsalama Rajaonarivelo had been appointed prime minister in October in an effort to bridge the divide between military leadership and civilian government.
The the Gen Z movement leaders rejected his appointment at the time, saying it was made in a “non-transparent” manner and “without consultation”.
The group demanded to know how Rajaonarivelo was selected given what it said were his connection to the previous government.
They then said that the decision “runs contrary to the desired structural change” the movement was seeking.
Monday’s dissolution of the government could mark a significant shift in the country’s political landscape with the military leader seeking to establish a new administration.
Nairobi, March 10 — Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi has summoned oil marketers for an emergency meeting as the government races to contain fears of a potential fuel shortage triggered by escalating disruptions in global petroleum supply chains.
The urgent consultations come just hours after Wandayi held discussions with companies supplying fuel to Kenya under the government-to-government (G-2-G) petroleum import arrangement, which anchors the country’s fuel procurement system.
Speaking in Nairobi on Tuesday during the official listing of shares for Kenya Pipeline Company at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the CS sought to calm mounting anxiety among consumers and transport operators who fear that the turmoil in global energy markets could spill over into local pump prices or supply disruptions.
Wandayi said Kenya remains in close contact with its key suppliers under the G-2-G framework, including Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Emirates National Oil Company, as part of contingency planning aimed at protecting the country’s fuel supply.
“We continue to engage very closely with our government-to-government suppliers in terms of contingency planning,” Wandayi said, adding that current stock levels remain stable.
“For that reason, there is really no cause for alarm. In the short to medium term we have security of supply and we continue to monitor the situation very closely,” he said.
The emergency meeting with oil marketing companies, scheduled for later Tuesday, is expected to review supply flows, stock levels and potential response measures should the international crisis deepen.
“From here I am going to a meeting with oil marketers to continue close review and monitoring of the situation,” Wandayi said.
The government on Monday had already moved to reassure Kenyans that the country holds sufficient petroleum stocks to cushion it against immediate supply disruptions linked to the unfolding crisis in the Middle East.
According to Wandayi, Kenya has secured scheduled petroleum imports through to the end of April 2026, a move designed to guarantee stable supply even as geopolitical tensions rattle global oil markets.
“Kenya has sufficient petroleum products to cover both the country and the region in the wake of the crisis in the Middle East,” he said.
Kenya relies almost entirely on imported refined petroleum products, leaving the economy exposed to external shocks whenever geopolitical conflicts disrupt supply chains or trigger price spikes.
The current turmoil follows a wave of military escalation in the Gulf region, where coordinated airstrikes by the United States and Israel on Iran — and Tehran’s retaliatory missile attacks — have shaken energy markets and threatened exports from one of the world’s most critical oil-producing corridors.
Energy analysts warn that prolonged disruption could tighten global supply and drive up prices, a scenario that would quickly filter through to import-dependent economies such as Kenya.
For now, officials insist the country’s forward-contracting strategy and the G-2-G supply arrangement are providing a buffer against immediate shortages, even as authorities intensify monitoring of the volatile global oil market.
In the year ending June 2025, a single patient underwent open heart surgery four times in one day. All four claims were paid. In the same period, at least one woman gave birth ten times within a single calendar year. Kenya’s public health insurer paid for every delivery. These are not isolated clerical errors. They are the fingerprints of an organised plunder conducted at scale inside the Social Health Insurance Fund, the flagship health financing vehicle of President William Ruto’s Universal Health Coverage programme.
The Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu, whose office has a constitutional mandate to scrutinise the use of public funds, has now produced what amounts to the most damning forensic catalogue of the Social Health Authority’s financial conduct since its inception.
The report, covering the financial year 2024/25, flags a total of Sh49.29 billion in irregular, unsupported, or fraudulent transactions, a figure that obliterates earlier official estimates and reframes the SHA scandal as one of the most audacious raids on public resources in Kenya’s post-independence history.
The fund only raised Sh57.7 billion in total contributions during the entire year. The queried amount is more than 85 percent of everything SHIF collected. It is a figure that should shock even the most jaded observer of Kenyan public finance.
Sh26.8 billion paid without a single supporting document. That is 29.3 per cent of all SHIF payments in one year.
THE NUMBERS THAT CONVICT
The Auditor-General’s report itemises the irregularities with forensic precision. At the top of the register, dwarfing every other line item, sits Sh26.84 billion described simply as unsupported claims: payments made by SHIF to health facilities without any records to confirm that the services claimed were ever rendered to any patient. This single category represents 29.3 percent of every shilling SHIF disbursed during the year.
Beyond the unsupported payments, a further Sh7.32 billion was paid to 1,091 health facilities for services not authorised under the SHIF benefit framework.
Facilities that had not even been contracted by SHA at all received Sh1.57 billion. Another Sh4.78 billion was disbursed using service codes that have not been gazetted, a breach that strips any payment of its legal basis and opens the fund to virtually unlimited manipulation.
Some 50,045 claims had multiple service codes consolidated into single entries, generating Sh1.45 billion in overpayments.
Then there are the transfers that have simply disappeared. SHIF reported sending Sh7.3 billion to SHA, but SHA says it received only Sh3.9 billion.
The difference of Sh3.37 billion is untraced. More alarming still, Sh1.34 billion was transferred from SHIF into the bank account of the defunct National Hospital Insurance Fund between January and June 2025.
NHIF ceased to exist in law on the day SHA was established. There is no explanation on record for what the money was for or where it went.
BILLIONS QUERIED BY THE AUDITOR-GENERAL IN SHIF OPERATIONS (FY 2024/25)
CATEGORY OF FRAUD/IRREGULARITY
AMOUNT (KSH)
Unsupported Claims
Sh26.84 billion
Claims for Unauthorised Medical Services
Sh7.32 billion
Untraced SHIF-to-SHA Transfer
Sh3.37 billion
Claims Using Unapproved Service Codes
Sh4.78 billion
Claims by Non-Contracted Facilities
Sh1.57 billion
Unsupported Payables
Sh1.67 billion
Overpayments via Consolidated Codes
Sh1.45 billion
Irregular SHIF-to-NHIF Transfer
Sh1.34 billion
Unapproved/Repeat Surgical Cases
Sh445 million
Multiple Child Delivery Claims
Sh148 million
Manual Claims
Sh366 million
Cash Paid in Excess of Amount Claimed
Sh2.4 million
TOTAL QUERIED
Sh49.29 billion
Source: Auditor-General’s Report, Financial Year Ending June 2025
THE SURGICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES
The report’s most viscerally scandalous findings concern the surgical claims. Open heart surgery is, under SHIF’s own operational rules, limited to one procedure per patient per year.
The clinical basis for this is self-evident: the procedure involves stopping the heart, placing the patient on a bypass machine, and exposing the chest cavity under general anaesthesia. Recovery spans months. The idea that any patient could undergo the procedure four times in a single day is not merely implausible. It is physiologically impossible.
Yet that is what the claims records show. In total, there were 3,235 instances of unapproved or repeat surgical cases during the year, at a total approved payment of Sh445.4 million. The total amount originally claimed for these phantom repeat procedures was Sh463.8 million. The claims were processed and paid. Nobody stopped them.
The repeat birth claims tell a similar story of systematic abuse. SHIF’s auditors identified 6,392 instances where the same patient record showed multiple deliveries within a single year. One patient’s record showed ten deliveries.
The total claimed amount for these medically impossible repeat interventions was Sh161.3 million, of which Sh148.5 million was approved and paid. Gathungu’s report observes that the pattern exposes fraud at SHIF, possible data integrity issues or system abuse, all of which result in financial loss and undermine the credibility of the claims approval process.
THE SYSTEM BUILT TO FAIL
How did any of this pass through a digital claims system backed by a Sh104.8 billion technology contract? That question goes to the heart of the second scandal nested inside the first. The benefits payment system at SHIF is operated by a private consortium that includes Safaricom PLC as lead bidder, alongside Apeiro Limited and Konvergenz Network Solutions Limited.
The contract was awarded without competitive bidding, with no defined scope of work, and critically, ownership of the system was left with the contractor consortium rather than SHA. The government does not own the platform through which its citizens’ health insurance premiums are being processed.
The Auditor-General is scathing on this point. Her report states that the system was deployed before any comprehensive user requirement testing was conducted, meaning it was rolled out without SHA ever fully verifying that it met the fund’s operational needs.
She further flags the absence of IT governance structures, standard operating procedures, service level agreements with the operating consortium, and IT compliance protocols. In plain terms: a Sh104.8 billion system was handed to a private consortium, deployed without testing, and operated without any enforceable accountability framework.
COTU Secretary-General Francis Atwoli, who sits on the SHA board, made a revelation that has largely been absorbed without adequate outrage: the SHA does not control the IT systems used to verify claims.
The authority that is responsible for disbursing billions of shillings in public funds cannot independently audit, interrogate, or override the technology infrastructure through which those payments flow.
The government does not own the platform through which citizens’ health insurance premiums are processed.
THE REGULATORY INSIDE JOB
The Auditor-General’s findings on the fraud’s systemic architecture are now being corroborated by criminal prosecutions.
In late February 2026, Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga approved charges against eight hospital owners and one regulatory official following investigations by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations covering the period between January 28 and February 24, 2026.
The official is Harun Liluma, a senior employee of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council, the state body responsible for licensing health facilities.
Liluma faces over 40 counts spanning conspiracy to defraud, unauthorised access to KMPDC’s computer systems, abuse of office, and computer fraud under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act.
He is accused of using his access to KMPDC’s registration systems to fraudulently facilitate the licensing of eight medical facilities, none of which met statutory requirements, so that they could receive payments from SHA.
The eight facilities named in the charges include Danaba Care Hospital, Kamishawa Medical Centre, Kaafi Nursing Home, Mama Nerbeel Nursing Home, Alati Nursing Home, Julun Nursing Home, Adfaal Kids Care Medical Centre, and Dimtu Nursing Home Limited.
In one documented case, a facility was approved by the Ministry of Health before it was even incorporated as a legal entity. It was registered with KMPDC before it existed on paper, began receiving SHIF payments, and only later appeared in the company registry.
Critics, including the Rural and Urban Private Hospitals Association of Kenya, have posed the structural question that the prosecution of eight individuals does not answer: how did unlicensed facilities access the SHA payment system if the same facilities must be accredited by KMPDC before being empanelled by SHA? Whether the KMPDC registry communicates with the SHA registry at all remains, publicly, unanswered.
A SYSTEM BLEEDING DRY
The audit’s findings on SHIF’s financial sustainability are as alarming as the fraud disclosures. The fund collected Sh57.7 billion in contributions during the year but spent Sh96.1 billion on claims and operations, leaving it operating in a Sh38.3 billion deficit.
The SHA management’s own figures show that benefits paid out amounted to 158 percent of contributions collected. The fund is paying out one and a half times what it is taking in.
The structural problem is compounded by the contribution base. Formal sector workers raised Sh51.99 billion, representing 90 percent of everything SHIF collected, from an informal sector that comprises the overwhelming majority of the population.
Of 27 million registered SHA members, 20.7 million in the informal sector contributed nothing at all during the year. The fund that was sold to Kenyans as Universal Health Coverage is in practice a levy on the employed few, with those contributions now being systematically looted before reaching the patients who need them.
St Mary’s Hospital in Mumias is on the edge of closure because SHA has not paid its admitted debt of Sh180 million. Paid-up contributors across the country have had legitimate claims rejected.
Meanwhile, a hospital that does not legally exist can be registered, empanelled, and paid Sh12.2 million in a single month. The contrast is not incidental. It is the operational logic of the fraud.
ACCOUNTABILITY DEFERRED
Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale and SHA Chief Executive Officer Dr Mercy Mwangangi did not respond to the Nation’s inquiries on the day the Auditor-General’s findings were published. For months, neither official has disclosed the full quantum of losses, despite having forwarded thousands of files to the DCI for review.
Duale had previously stated that SHA lost approximately Sh11 billion to fraud, but subsequently walked back that figure, characterising it as claims rejected before payment was made rather than money actually lost.
Mwangangi confirmed that the rejected claims represented 12.1 percent of total claims processed, and that the irregularities were escalated to investigative agencies.
Both positions are now rendered untenable by the Auditor-General’s report. The Sh26.8 billion in unsupported payments alone exceeds the Sh11 billion figure by a factor of two and a half. The question is no longer whether fraud occurred. The question is why the official narrative has been so systematically narrow.
Former Chief Justice David Maraga captured the public mood in August 2025 when he accused state officials of presiding over systemic failures that allowed billions of taxpayer funds to be siphoned to ghost hospitals while ordinary Kenyans continued to suffer.
He called for an independent forensic audit of all SHA funds, a demand that has gained new urgency with the publication of Gathungu’s findings. His demands remain unmet.
At the KAMMP Iftar dinner in Nairobi on March 8, 2026, CS Duale confirmed that multiple facilities had been shut down and cases forwarded to the ODPP for prosecution.
He welcomed a statement by the Kenya Association of Muslim Medical Professionals condemning fraud as haram and as a crime under law. He said the Ministry was committed to safeguarding SHA’s integrity. He did not address the Sh49.29 billion.
The charges approved by the DPP in February 2026 are a beginning, not a reckoning. Fewer than 40 prosecution recommendations have emerged from the 1,188 investigation files that DCI received from SHA in September 2025.
The facilities now in the dock received a combined total of roughly Sh22 million in irregular payments. Against the backdrop of Sh49.29 billion in queried transactions, the legal process has so far addressed less than 0.05 percent of the financial exposure.
What the DPP’s action has confirmed, however, is the structure of the conspiracy.
It runs from hospital ownership through facility registration at KMPDC, through the SHA empanelment process, through a payment system that the government does not own, and out through transfers that disappear into accounts of institutions that no longer legally exist. Every layer of institutional oversight failed, and in at least one case, a regulator is accused of actively facilitating the fraud.
The Social Health Insurance Act, 2023, was passed as the legal architecture for a new era of public health financing in Kenya. Section 2(1) and Section 6 of its First Schedule are now cited in the Auditor-General’s report as provisions violated by the transfer of Sh1.34 billion to the defunct NHIF.
The law was written. The regulations were gazetted. The technology was procured. The fund was capitalised. And then, while the architecture was being admired, Sh50 billion went missing.
The case against Harun Liluma and the eight facility owners is set for mention on March 12, 2026 at Milimani Law Courts.
When Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale stood before a gathering of Muslim medics at an Iftar dinner in Nairobi on Sunday evening and declared that 55 per cent of the 1,120 health facilities shut down for defrauding the Social Health Authority are Muslim-owned, he was not merely making a religious observation.
He was, knowingly or not, echoing a scandal that has brought an American state to its knees and sent shockwaves across Washington D.C., Mogadishu, and Nairobi.
More than 9,500 kilometres away, in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota, federal prosecutors have spent the better part of four years unravelling what the United States Department of Justice has described as the largest Covid-era fraud in American history.
The scheme, centred on a charity called Feeding Our Future, saw tens of millions of dollars meant to feed hungry children during the pandemic siphoned off by fraudsters, the overwhelming majority of whom are of Somali descent.
Out of 98 defendants charged in Minnesota fraud-related cases to date, 85 are of Somali origin. In Kenya, the eight facilities recommended for criminal prosecution by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions are all from Mandera County, registered between January and February 2025, within months of SHA beginning to integrate hospitals into its payment system. Every single one carries a name that leaves no ambiguity about the community running it.
The parallels are not coincidental. They are instructive. And in at least one documented instance, the two scandals are directly linked by money, property, and family ties rooted in Nairobi.
GHOST CHILDREN, GHOST PATIENTS
The mechanics of the Minnesota fraud were almost embarrassing in their simplicity. Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit, began claiming federal reimbursements for meals it said were being provided to thousands of needy children during the pandemic.
The US Department of Agriculture, eager to ensure no child went hungry as schools closed, had loosened oversight requirements and allowed nonprofits to claim reimbursements with minimal documentation.
What investigators eventually discovered was that the meals were never delivered. The sites either did not exist, were entirely unstaffed, or were shell operations registered solely to harvest federal payments.
The playbook was replicated so aggressively that US First Assistant Attorney Joe Thompson, standing before journalists in Minneapolis in December 2025, declared the situation was not a case of a handful of bad actors but rather an industrial-scale fraud swamping the state.
Half or more of the roughly Ksh1.5 trillion in federal funds supporting 14 Minnesota-run Medicaid programmes since 2018 may have been stolen, Thompson said. The figure is so staggering it has reshaped American politics, triggered congressional hearings, and prompted President Donald Trump to end temporary deportation protections for Somali immigrants in the state.
In Kenya, the SHA fraud bears a signature that investigators and analysts find disturbingly familiar. Forensic audits by SHA’s digital health system have uncovered upcoding, where facilities claim for expensive procedures never performed; falsification of medical records to inflate claims; conversion of outpatient visits into inpatient billing; and ghost patients, individuals billed for services they never received.
In Mandera alone, officials uncovered 312 false claims submitted on the same dates for the same patients across different facilities. Four facilities in the county were found to have colluded to submit duplicate claims for the same patient, in a level of coordination that investigators say goes far beyond opportunistic theft into organised criminal enterprise.
The eight Mandera facilities recommended for prosecution by the ODPP, including Danaba Care Hospital, Kamishawa Medical Centre, Kaafi Nursing Home, Mama Nerbeel Nursing Home, Alati Nursing Home, Julun Nursing Home, Adfaal Kids Care Medical Centre and Dimtu Nursing Home Limited, were registered between January and February 2025.
SHA itself only began integrating private hospitals into its payment system in late 2024. In the space of a few months, these facilities had apparently established themselves, enrolled patients, and begun submitting claims.
Just as in Minnesota, where providers were created specifically to exploit a new programme before oversight mechanisms could catch up, the Mandera facilities appear to have been registered with a singular purpose.
THE NAIROBI CONNECTION
The link between Minnesota’s Somali fraud network and Kenya is not merely thematic. It is documented in court filings, wire transfers, and text messages retrieved by the FBI.
Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, the Kenyan national who emerged as the central figure of the Feeding Our Future scheme, was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison in August 2025. Court documents detail how he sent millions of dollars in stolen federal funds to Kenya, where his younger brother Ahmednaji Maalim Aftin Sheikh, a resident of Nairobi, was awaiting the deliveries.
The indictment against Sheikh, filed in September 2025, alleges that he and his co-conspirators laundered more than Ksh5.2 billion in federal funds. The money was used to purchase a 20 per cent stake in a Kenyan real estate company, an apartment building in the South C neighbourhood of Nairobi adjacent to Nairobi National Park, and land in Mandera Town.
Court exhibits include photographs of stacked cash. On August 29, 2021, Sheikh sent his brother a photograph of Ksh17.8 million in cash.
On December 9, 2021, he sent a photograph of banker boxes stuffed with Ksh34.8 million. A message from December 16, 2021 documents a Ksh38.7 million wire transfer from Minneapolis to Nairobi, with the stated purpose listed as family support and the income source listed as salary. The defendant’s salary was, in reality, stolen American food-programme money.
The US Attorney’s office confirmed that a significant amount of Minnesota fraud proceeds were directed specifically to Nairobi’s real estate market, capitalising on the city’s large Somali diaspora and the relative ease of purchasing property. One defendant forfeited an apartment in Nairobi and an oceanfront resort in Kenya as part of his plea agreement.
Another wired Ksh193.5 million to China and Kenya. A third sent a text message boasting that he had invested Ksh774 million in Kenya over three years. In December 2025, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt specifically named Kenya as one of the countries benefiting from the Minnesota schemes.
The Capital View Properties case, reported by the Daily Nation, exposed how one of the registered Nairobi real estate firms, incorporated in February 2021, became a vehicle for laundering Minnesota fraud proceeds. Within months of its registration, millions of dollars were flowing from Minneapolis bank accounts into the company’s operations.
LITTLE MOGADISHU AND THE HEALTHCARE ECONOMY
To understand why Kenya became the preferred destination for laundered Minnesota fraud money, and why Kenya’s own health system appears to have been targeted through the same community networks, one must understand the extraordinary economic and demographic footprint of Kenya’s Somali population.
According to the 2019 Kenya census, approximately 2.78 million ethnic Somalis live in Kenya, making them the sixth largest ethnic group in the country. They are overwhelmingly Muslim. The counties of Mandera, Wajir, Garissa, and Tana River in the North Eastern region, which border Somalia, are their historic heartland.
In Nairobi, the suburb of Eastleigh, colloquially known as Little Mogadishu, has become one of the most economically productive neighbourhoods in the city, contributing nearly a third of Nairobi’s tax revenue and hosting an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 residents, predominantly Somali.
The Somali community in Kenya is entrepreneurial almost by definition. Somali refugees who were healthcare professionals in Somalia opened their own clinics and practices in Eastleigh, serving a community that is both densely populated and underserved by public hospitals.
This gave rise to a sprawling private healthcare economy in Eastleigh and across the northeastern counties, one that predates SHA and operated profitably under the now-defunct National Hospital Insurance Fund.
It is precisely this existing infrastructure of privately owned, community-run health facilities that appears to have been weaponised in the SHA fraud.
The Kenya Association of Muslim Medical Professionals, in its statement condemning the fraud, acknowledged that a significant proportion of the facilities implicated in the first and second waves of SHA closures appear to be Muslim-owned and are concentrated in counties with large Muslim populations.
KAMMP’s secretary-general Dr Abdallah Bajaber described the situation as a matter of profound concern, moral urgency, and deep national responsibility, noting that some individuals had attempted to rationalise defrauding public funds by arguing that stealing from the government was somehow less immoral than stealing from individuals.
This rationalisation, KAMMP stated clearly, is false, dangerous, sinful and completely contrary to Islam.
Duale, himself a Muslim and a son of the North Eastern region, put it more bluntly at the Iftar gathering. You must make sure you feed your children with halal money, he told the assembled medics.
Health CS Aden Duale.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF FRAUD
What makes the SHA scheme particularly alarming is its structural resemblance to the Minnesota model, not just in its perpetrators but in the specific mechanisms deployed to exploit a new, rapidly scaled public health fund.
In Minnesota, investigators noted that fraudsters moved with extraordinary speed when new welfare programmes were launched, registering as providers before oversight systems could be put in place.
The Integrated Community Supports programme, established in 2021 to help disabled adults live independently, paid out Ksh21.9 billion in 2024 compared to Ksh593 million in 2021 as fraudulent providers flooded the system. CBS News described the pattern as an explosion of fly-by-night operators.
SHA’s trajectory has been almost identical. Launched with the ambition of delivering universal health coverage to millions of Kenyans who had been locked out of NHIF, the scheme began integrating private hospitals into its digital payment platform in late 2024.
By March 2025, SHA had disbursed Ksh11.4 billion to hospitals in a single month. Civil society groups and doctors warned almost immediately that small private facilities were receiving disproportionately large sums and that some of these hospitals simply did not exist. A Ministry of Health audit later confirmed that SHA had lost Ksh11 billion to fraud between October 2024 and April 2025.
The ghost hospital phenomenon was brazen. Investigators from a multi-agency team that included the DCI found facilities in Mandera sharing the same physical building while claiming to operate as separate hospitals in different constituencies.
One Nairobi facility was found to have been officially established in the master health facility register five months before its parent company was even incorporated. It nonetheless received Ksh12.2 million in SHA payments within its first month of billing.
In Minnesota, the fraud was sustained partly because state officials were reluctant to challenge providers for fear of being accused of racial discrimination. Feeding Our Future, which served primarily Somali-owned distribution sites, had in 2020 sued the Minnesota Department of Education for racial discrimination after officials slowed their approvals.
The state auditor’s office later found that the threat of legal consequences and negative media attention had materially affected the state’s decision-making about regulatory action against the organisation. The pattern of regulatory paralysis in the face of fraud by a racially identifiable minority group is one that Kenya’s own institutions will need to guard against as the SHA crackdown deepens.
PUBLIC FUNDS, PRIVATE FORTUNES
The lifestyle financed by the Minnesota fraud was spectacular by any measure. A CBS News review of court filings documented defendants spending stolen federal funds on a private villa in the Maldives for a honeymoon, a suite at a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball game, a Porsche valued at over Ksh12 million, a GMC truck worth Ksh11.4 million, a Mercedes at over Ksh12.9 million, lakefront properties in Minnesota, and luxury real estate in Ohio, Kentucky, Turkey, and Kenya. One defendant purchased an aircraft in Nairobi. Another bought an oceanfront resort on the Kenyan coast.
In Kenya, while the SHA scheme has not yet produced the same level of documented personal enrichment in court filings, the scale of the fraud points to significant sums being extracted.
Duale confirmed that 30 per cent of SHA’s insurance payouts have been linked to fraudulent claims. The first audit covered only the October 2024 to April 2025 period and found Ksh11 billion in losses. More facilities are under investigation.
There is an additional dimension to the Minnesota scandal that Kenyan investigators and policymakers should note carefully.
The US Treasury Department has been investigating whether any Minnesota fraud proceeds made their way to al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate that controls significant territory in southern Somalia and taxes businesses operating in areas under its control.
Multiple federal investigators told CBS News there is no evidence taxpayer dollars were directly funnelled to the terror group, with former US Attorney Andrew Luger stating that the vast majority of the money went on personal luxury spending.
Nevertheless, the FBI’s director Kash Patel has called the prosecutions to date only the tip of a very large iceberg.
Given that al-Shabaab has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to operate across the Kenya-Somalia border, including through the 2013 Westgate Mall attack and the 2015 Garissa University massacre, the question of whether any SHA fraud proceeds could flow toward terrorist financing in the region is one that Kenya’s security architecture cannot afford to dismiss.
In Minnesota, the political and institutional reckoning has been severe. Governor Tim Walz faced congressional hearings in January 2026 at which Republican lawmakers accused him and his administration of lying about their knowledge of the fraud and silencing whistleblowers.
The DOJ has charged 98 defendants, conducted over 130 search warrants, and issued over 1,750 subpoenas. Federal agencies have frozen child care funding, paused Medicaid programme payments, and launched sector-wide audits.
President Trump has made the Minnesota fraud a centrepiece of his anti-immigration messaging, ending temporary deportation protections for Somali immigrants and calling for mass deportations.
In Kenya, the response has been more measured but is accelerating. Duale confirmed on Sunday that more facilities will be shut down this week and that 60 per cent of those on the upcoming closure list are also Muslim-owned.
Eight Mandera facilities have been referred to the ODPP for criminal prosecution. The DCI is on the ground in Mandera. SHA has frozen payments, launched surcharge recovery proceedings, and referred dozens of healthcare professionals for disciplinary action.
The Kenya Association of Muslim Medical Professionals has gone further than its equivalent organisations in Minnesota ever did, issuing a statement grounded in Quranic verse that condemns the fraud in unambiguous theological and legal terms.
It has called on members of the public to refuse to allow their SHA membership details to be used to generate false claims and warned that assisting fraud, benefiting from fraud, or remaining silent in the face of fraud is morally and legally unacceptable.
The warning is necessary. Evidence in Minnesota showed that some fraudulent schemes depended entirely on members of the public allowing their government programme membership details to be used to generate false claims.
In one case, parents were paid cash kickbacks to enrol their children in fictitious autism therapy programmes. The same dynamic, KAMMP has confirmed, appears to be operating in Kenya’s SHA fraud.
Former Chief Justice David Maraga has called for a forensic audit of all SHA operations. Former Rigathi Gachagua, in a striking intervention, has called on Trump to arrest beneficiaries of the Minnesota fraud in Kenya in the same manner the US president has pursued immigration enforcement elsewhere. The political temperature around the SHA fraud is rising rapidly.
What is clear from Minnesota’s experience is that industrial-scale healthcare fraud of this nature, once embedded in community networks and facilitated by weak oversight of a fast-scaling public programme, does not resolve itself quietly.
It expands. It metastasises into new programmes. It corrupts healthcare professionals, erodes public trust in the health system, and diverts critical funds from the sick and vulnerable who needed them most. Minnesota is still counting its losses. Kenya is just beginning to count its own.
Getting a tattoo often feels like a permanent commitment to a meaningful symbol, memory, or design. However, life circumstances change, and what once seemed like a perfect idea may no longer fit who you are today. If you’re considering tattoo removal, you’re not alone. Millions of people decide to remove or fade their tattoos each year for various reasons. Understanding why others make this choice can help you feel more confident about your own decision.
Career Advancement and Professional Image
One of the most common reasons people seek tattoo removal is to improve their professional opportunities. While workplace attitudes toward body art have become more relaxed in recent years, certain industries still maintain conservative dress codes and appearance standards. Visible tattoos can sometimes create barriers in fields like law, finance, healthcare, and corporate management.
Many professionals find that removing tattoos from highly visible areas like hands, neck, or face opens doors to promotions and new job opportunities. Even in creative industries, some people prefer to present a blank canvas that allows their work to speak for itself rather than their body art. The decision to remove a tattoo for career reasons doesn’t diminish the original meaning it held, but rather reflects personal growth and evolving priorities.
Relationships and Life Changes
Tattoos commemorating former romantic relationships are among the most frequently removed designs. Whether it’s a partner’s name, matching symbols, or dates that no longer hold positive meaning, these permanent reminders can feel uncomfortable in new relationships. Moving forward emotionally often means wanting to move forward physically as well.
Beyond romantic relationships, some people remove tattoos that represented friendships or group affiliations that have since ended. Life transitions like divorce, changing social circles, or distancing from certain communities can make previously meaningful tattoos feel out of place. Columbus tattoo removalspecialists frequently work with clients who want to close chapters of their lives and start fresh.
Regret Over Design Quality or Style
Not all tattoos are created equal, and quality varies significantly between artists. Some people seek removal because their tattoo was poorly executed, with blurred lines, incorrect spelling, uneven shading, or colors that didn’t heal as expected. Amateur tattoos or those done in unprofessional settings often fall into this category.
Additionally, tattoo trends change over time. Designs that were popular years ago may now feel dated or no longer reflect your personal aesthetic. Tribal bands, certain fonts, or specific imagery that seemed perfect at eighteen might not align with your taste at thirty-five. Removing or fading these tattoos allows for either a clean slate or preparation for a cover-up with better artwork.
Personal Identity and Self-Expression
As we grow and evolve, our sense of identity naturally shifts. A tattoo that represented who you were at one point in life might not reflect who you’ve become. Some people remove tattoos associated with beliefs they no longer hold, phases they’ve outgrown, or interests that have changed.
This reason is particularly common among people who got tattoos during their youth or during significant life transitions. What felt rebellious, meaningful, or important at the time may now feel disconnected from your current values and self-image. Removing these tattoos isn’t about erasing the past but rather making space for who you are now.
Medical or Skin Health Concerns
Though less common, some people pursue tattoo removal for medical reasons. Certain tattoos can cause allergic reactions, particularly those with red or yellow ink. Persistent itching, raised skin, or ongoing irritation can make removal the healthiest option.
Additionally, some medical procedures like MRI scans can be complicated by certain tattoo inks. People with chronic skin conditions may also find that tattooed areas become problematic. In these cases, removal becomes a health priority rather than simply an aesthetic choice.
Social Stigma and Family Considerations
Despite increasing acceptance of tattoos, some people still face judgment or discomfort from family members or their communities. This is especially true for tattoos with religious, cultural, or controversial imagery that may offend others or create unwanted attention.
Parents sometimes choose removal to set different examples for their children or to avoid difficult conversations. Others remove tattoos before major life events like weddings, where they want the focus on the celebration rather than explaining their body art to extended family.
Making the Right Choice for You
Deciding to remove a tattoo is deeply personal and doesn’t require justification to anyone else. Whether your reason is professional, emotional, aesthetic, or practical, modern removal technology makes it possible to fade or eliminate unwanted ink safely and effectively. Take time to research qualified providers, understand the process, and feel confident that you’re making the right decision for your life today. Your body is your canvas, and you have every right to change the artwork as you see fit.
NAIROBI, Kenya Mar 9 – The Country is pushing for stronger regulation and oversight of TikTok as the government moves to safeguard the digital space ahead of the next electoral cycle, Information, Communications and the Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo has said.
Kabogo said the government is engaging the global social media platform to strengthen content moderation, improve age-verification mechanisms and enhance tools to detect misinformation that could undermine election integrity.
The Cabinet Secretary spoke after holding talks with TikTok executives ahead of the TikTok Safer Internet Summit 2026 scheduled to take place in Nairobi.
During the meeting, Kabogo emphasised that while Kenya welcomes innovation and the growth of digital platforms, technology companies must take greater responsibility for the safety of their users.
“With over 17M users in Kenya, TikTok is a key pillar of our Creative Economy. I emphasized that while we welcome innovation, digital safety is a shared responsibility. We are strengthening content moderation and age-verification to protect our children and vulnerable groups,”he said.
However, the CS warned that the rapid growth of social media also presents risks, particularly during politically sensitive periods such as elections.
Kabogo said the government had sought assurances from TikTok on the effectiveness of its systems to detect and curb coordinated disinformation campaigns, warning that unchecked misinformation could threaten democratic processes.
“I sought clear assurances on TikTok’s tools to detect misinformation and prevent coordinated disinformation campaigns. It is vital that global platforms align with Kenya’s Data Protection Act and our evolving regulatory frameworks,”CS Kabogo noted.
He stressed that global platforms operating in Kenya must comply with the country’s legal and regulatory framework, including the Data Protection Act, as authorities continue to refine digital governance policies.
The government is also pushing the company to expand its operational footprint in the country to better support its activities across Africa.
Kabogo challenged the platform to invest more resources in moderating content in local languages, noting that many harmful or misleading posts often evade detection because automated systems are primarily designed for major international languages.
The CS said deeper collaboration between the government and technology companies will be key to building a digital ecosystem that balances innovation, economic opportunity and public safety.
The ICT Cabinet Secretary emphasized that the country is positioning itself as a regional leader in digital transformation and is keen to ensure that the growth of its online platforms is anchored in trust, accountability and responsible use of technology.
“ I’ve challenged TikTok to establish a stronger operational presence in Kenya to support African operations and invest in moderation for local languages. Together, we are building a digital future anchored in innovation, trust, and safety,”CS Kabogo expressed.
MAR 10 – Oil prices fell on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump warned Iran to not block a shipping route crucial to global energy supplies.
“If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far,” he said on Social media.
In late morning trade in Asia, Brent crude was 6% lower at $93.05 (£69.33) and Nymex Light Sweet was down 6.1% at $88.96.
Oil had reached almost $120 a barrel on Monday over fears that the US-Israeli war with Iran would cause lengthy disruption to supplies from the Middle East, but fell back after Trump suggested that the war could end soon.
“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. Then, I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion,” Trump said during a news conference in Florida.
The fall in oil prices on Tuesday has given traders a moment to “exhale”, but energy markets remain in a state of “total tug-of-war”, said Alberto Bellorin from oil and gas investment firm InterCapital Energy.
Oil trading will “remain incredibly twitchy” and prices are likely to spike if the conflict escalates and fall if it seems to be easing, he said.
Share prices in Asia made gains as concerns about the economic impact of he conflict eased.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 was 3.3% higher, while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong was up by 1.7% and South Korea’s Kospi gained 6.2%.
Stock markets in the region were hit hard the previous day on investor concerns that disruptions in the Gulf could mean higher inflation and rising interest rates.
The Strait of Hormuz is crucial to the global energy market as around a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the narrow waterway.
While the price of oil has fallen from Monday’s peak it is still around 20% higher than where they were before the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran just over a week ago, said Park Kee Hyun from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Prices will remain “volatile” as the firms will charge a premium for shipments to account for any risk of the situation worsening, Park said.
Trump’s comments may suggest the war may end soon, but the bigger question is whether those remarks are followed by concrete changes in the conflict zone, he added.
G7 nations on Monday said it is ready to take “necessary measures” to address the global supply of energy in the light of surging oil prices.
A meeting between G7 leaders and the International Energy Agency (IEA) ended without a final decision on whether the nations would release oil from stockpiles, though the matter was discussed.
UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves said on Monday the UK used the meeting to urge for “immediate de-escalation” in the Middle East and guaranteed security for vessels in the region.
She said: “I stand ready to support a co-ordinated release of collective IEA oil reserves.”
Nairobi, March 10, 2026 — Kenyan authorities have arrested TikTok creator Maximilian Motara, popularly known as “Billionaire Son,” after he filmed himself tearing Sh100 banknotes and posted the video online.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) confirmed that Motara is in custody and awaiting arraignment on charges related to the defacement of Kenyan currency.
The arrest follows a video circulated on TikTok showing Motara seated in a white sleeveless shirt as he tears several pink Sh100 notes while looking directly at the camera. In the clip, he rips the banknotes into pieces and discards them.
According to the DCI’s Banking Fraud Investigations Unit, Motara was wanted for allegedly mutilating Kenyan currency notes and flaunting the act on TikTok.
Kenyan law prohibits the deliberate destruction or defacement of currency. Section 367A of the Penal Code states that any person who wilfully and without lawful authority defaces, tears, cuts or otherwise mutilates a currency note commits an offence punishable by imprisonment for up to three months, a fine of up to Sh2,000, or both.
The video triggered debate online, with some Kenyans condemning the act as irresponsible, while others questioned why authorities were pursuing what they described as a minor offence.
Authorities have not yet disclosed when Motara will appear in court.
Faida Investment Bank success fee: Sh1.06bn | Fixed advisory fee: Sh98.6mn | Placement fees (22 brokers, capped at 1.5%): Up to Sh1.59bn shared | Total government advisory spend (excl. success fee): ~Sh3bn | KPC listing date: March 9, 2026 | IPO subscription rate: 105.7% | Retail take-up: 19% of allocation | Foreign take-up: 0.15% of allocation | Oil marketers take-up: 0.14% of allocation
The cheque that Faida Investment Bank is set to collect from the Kenya Pipeline Company IPO dwarfs anything the firm has earned in its 31-year history. A success fee of Sh1.06 billion, a fixed advisory retainer of Sh98.6 million, and a share of the placement fees shared among 22 brokers — the cumulative payout to the bank linked to former Dagoretti South MP Dennis Waweru could surpass Sh1.16 billion.
To put that figure in context: in the year ended December 2024, Faida’s total net profit was a meagre Sh216,107. The KPC fee is not just a windfall. It is a structural transformation of the bank’s balance sheet.
The success fee is legally triggered and commercially clean. The information memorandum for the Sh106.3 billion IPO set the payment at one percent of gross proceeds plus 16 percent VAT upon oversubscription of the offer.
The IPO closed at a 105.7 percent subscription rate, raising Sh112 billion, and under the terms of the mandate, Faida earned every shilling of the bonus. Nobody is disputing the contractual arithmetic. The question is whether the market outcome that triggered the payout reflects genuine investor confidence — or something more complicated.
“The IPO received a 105.7 percent subscription rate. But retail Kenyans bought just 19 percent of their allocation. Foreign investors bought less than 0.2 percent of theirs.”
The anatomy of the IPO is unsparing. Local retail investors, whom President William Ruto publicly urged to buy shares for as little as Sh200, purchased stock worth Sh4.1 billion against their allocation of Sh21.2 billion — a take-up rate of roughly 19 percent.
Foreign investors, allocated an identical pool of Sh21.2 billion, spent a negligible Sh32.7 million, acquiring a rounding-error stake of 0.02 percent of the company. Oil marketing companies — the most natural strategic buyers in the entire transaction, the firms that feed fuel through KPC’s pipeline daily — took up shares worth Sh22.9 million against a Sh15.9 billion allocation, a participation rate of 0.14 percent. Major players including Vivo Energy, Rubis, and TotalEnergies abstained altogether.
Even KPC’s own employees, given a 5 percent reserved pool worth Sh5.3 billion, bought shares worth Sh99.1 million — an average of approximately Sh148,000 per person among the 670 staff reportedly participating.
Workers with the most intimate knowledge of a company’s operational realities — a 42 percent underspend on capital budget last year, an ongoing Sh3 billion environmental lawsuit over pipeline leaks — chose caution above enthusiasm.
The IPO was rescued in its final stretch by a concentration of buyers whose participation raises questions that regulators and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee cannot afford to ignore.
Local institutional investors — led by the National Social Security Fund and the Public Service Superannuation Fund — absorbed Sh67 billion in shares, oversubscribing their segment by 216 percent while every other investor category fell dramatically short.
Reporting circulated that the government leaned on both funds to ensure the offer crossed its minimum threshold of Sh53.1 billion. Both institutions deny this characterisation. What is not in dispute is the pattern: the entities closest to the state stepped in when the market would not.
“Uganda secured veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy, share dilution, and the appointment of the CEO — structural control over a company handling 80 percent of Kenya’s petroleum supply.”
The transaction’s single decisive actor, however, was Uganda’s state-owned Uganda National Oil Company, which acquired shares worth Sh34.7 billion — far exceeding its East African Community allocation of Sh21.2 billion — and secured a 20.15 percent stake in KPC. As part of a legally binding side letter negotiated ahead of the IPO, Uganda obtained veto powers over tariff adjustments, dividend policy changes, material amendments to the business plan, share dilution, governance restructuring, and the appointment of the company’s chief executive officer. Uganda also gained the right to appoint two directors to the nine-member KPC board.
Kenya financed this outcome by surrendering strategic governance rights over an asset that handles more than 80 percent of the country’s petroleum supply.
Whether this amounts to sound infrastructure policy or geopolitical improvisation by a government desperate to close a struggling deal remains a question Nairobi has not answered publicly.
THE WAWERU CONNECTION
Dennis Gichahi Waweru is not a household name to most Kenyans who do not follow the capital markets. To those who do, he is a fixture of Kenya’s investment banking establishment. A Partner and Director at Faida Investment Bank, he served as the Member of Parliament for Dagoretti South from 2013 to 2017 before losing the seat to John Kiarie.
He holds an MBA in Strategic Management from Moi University and lists over 22 years of experience as an investment banker. He also serves as Chairman of the Kenya Investment Authority — the government investment promotion body operating under the Ministry of Investments, Trade and Industry — a position he has held across successive administrations.
That last detail deserves pause. Waweru chairs a state institution under the current Ruto government. His bank simultaneously won the mandate to lead the most significant capital markets transaction of the Kenya Kwanza administration — a transaction the President personally championed, repeatedly described as a transparency benchmark, and staked political capital on.
Waweru was initially associated with the Kenyatta political orbit, serving as BBI Co-chair and a visible Jubilee-aligned figure. His retention as KenInvest chairman under Ruto, and the award of the KPC mandate to Faida, indicates that his utility to the state has survived the change of administration.
Faida won the KPC mandate through a competitive tender process floated by the Privatisation Commission in October 2024, inviting bids for lead transaction advisory services. The firm was awarded the letter of appointment and named lead transaction adviser.
That the process was formally competitive is on record. That Faida’s principal shareholder simultaneously chairs a government investment promotion agency and that the mandate was for the most politically sensitive transaction of the year — these are facts that, in a stronger accountability environment, would trigger public disclosure and parliamentary scrutiny of conflict-of-interest frameworks.
“Faida reported a net profit of Sh216,107 in 2024. The KPC success fee alone is worth more than 4,800 times that annual profit figure.”
The firm itself is a legitimate market participant of standing. In 2025, Faida ranked third in value of equities trades handled at the NSE with Sh35.97 billion, commanding a 12.36 percent market share. In the bonds market, it held a 7.55 percent share with Sh409.34 billion in combined trades.
Its team lead for the KPC transaction, Dr Belgrad Kenne, chaired the allocation committee that determined share apportionment across investor categories. The firm held at least four roadshows with oil marketing companies to court their participation — meetings that ultimately yielded 0.14 percent uptake. Whether the failure of that effort reflects inadequate marketing, an unwinnable valuation argument, or simply a price that sophisticated commercial actors refused to accept at scale, is the central question about whether Faida earned its bonus in any meaningful market sense.
A PRICE THE MARKET REFUSED
Faida itself endorsed the Sh9 per share offer price as lead transaction adviser — the same Sh9 that Dyer and Blair, the lead sponsoring broker, also validated.
Against them stood a range of independent valuations that told a different story.
Old Mutual Investment Group Uganda priced KPC shares at Sh4.61, warning of an embedded premium that would force post-listing repricing. Sterling Capital placed intrinsic value at Sh3.70. Some independent online analysts went lower still. The government’s pricing implied a price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 22 times based on KPC’s earnings per share of Sh0.4122 for the year to June 2025.
Kenya Power, for context, trades at 1.2 times earnings. KenGen at 4 times. Safaricom — Kenya’s most profitable and liquid listed company — at 8 to 9 times.
The government priced a state monopoly carrying a corruption investigation, unresolved pipeline leaks, and a chronic capital budget underspend as though it were a high-growth technology firm. It then appointed a lead adviser financially incentivised by a one percent success fee to validate and defend that pricing.
The incentive structure is internally consistent: the higher the price at which the deal closes, the larger the fee. Whether it is compatible with independent adviser duty is a question the Capital Markets Authority has not yet addressed publicly.
Standard Investment Bank’s senior research associate Wesley Manambo issued a buy recommendation for the IPO but restricted it explicitly to investors with a long time horizon, warning of limited attraction for shorter-term participants.
With the KPC listing commencing today, March 9, and institutional holders expected to maintain positions indefinitely, secondary market liquidity is widely expected to be thin in the opening weeks. Investors who bought for income have accepted a dividend payout ratio cut from 94.5 percent to 50 percent to fund capital expenditure. Investors who bought for growth bought at a price independent analysts placed well above intrinsic value.
WHERE THE MONEY GOES
President William Ruto.
Of the Sh112 billion raised, none returns to KPC. All proceeds flow to the National Infrastructure Fund as seed capital for President Ruto’s infrastructure investment programme.
The Fund’s legal standing is currently before the High Court, which is examining whether its establishment bypassed constitutional safeguards. The National Infrastructure Fund Bill was still before the National Assembly this week.
Investors have purchased shares in a company whose proceeds flow into a fund whose constitutionality is under active judicial scrutiny — a structural risk that was not foregrounded in government communications ahead of the IPO.
Total government expenditure on the transaction, excluding Faida’s conditional success fee, reaches approximately Sh3 billion.
That figure covers legal advisers TripleOKLaw Advocates and G&A Advocates LLP at Sh31.9 million, reporting accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers at Sh13.45 million, public relations firm Apex Porter Novelli at Sh42.13 million, advertising agency Belva Digital at Sh12.26 million, Image Registrars for data processing and registrar services at Sh70.35 million, and the three receiving banks collectively at Sh16.35 million.
The CMA collected Sh30 million in approval fees and the NSE Sh1.5 million in listing fees. Against all of that combined spend, the single fee to Faida — Sh1.16 billion — exceeds the entire remainder of the advisory bill.
The 22 stockbrokers and investment banks enlisted to handle the sale will share a maximum of Sh1.59 billion in placement fees capped at 1.5 percent of the offer size. Faida will participate in that pool as well, collecting additional millions beyond its advisory retainer and success fee depending on the volume of shares it processed directly.
DID FAIDA EARN IT?
The contractual answer is yes. The fee was set in advance, the terms were disclosed in the information memorandum, the subscription threshold was met, and the oversubscription is real by the numbers. In that narrow commercial sense, Faida performed exactly what the mandate required. The more probing question is whether the mandate itself was designed for success — or for accountability.
A lead transaction adviser that endorses the government’s pricing, markets a product that retail, foreign, and strategic investors overwhelmingly reject, and then collects a nine-figure success fee because pension funds controlled by the same government stepped in to rescue the deal, has technically earned its fee while arguably demonstrating a market failure the fee structure was designed to obscure. The success fee mechanism rewards closure, not quality of demand. It rewards the headline subscription rate, not the distribution of ownership or the price integrity of the transaction.
The government raised its Sh106.3 billion. The numbers cleared the threshold. Faida triggered its bonus. But the retail Kenyan who was invited to buy shares for Sh200 owns 2.56 percent of the company.
A foreign sovereign with veto rights over its CEO appointment owns 20.15 percent. State-adjacent pension funds — whose fiduciary obligations to workers are now tied to post-listing price discovery against an entry point that independent analysts placed below fair value — own the largest single block.
The democratisation of national assets that the government promised produced a company that ordinary Kenyans fled, institutions were pressured to rescue, and a neighbour was rewarded with governance control for buying in. In that context, the Sh1.16 billion cheque heading to Waweru’s bank is technically deserved and analytically remarkable — a reward for presiding over a transaction that the free market declined to validate.
Joel Ombati Nyamweya is not a man who appears often in newspaper columns. He prefers the quiet corridors of Ardhi House, the hushed back rooms of county land offices, and the comfortable distance between his official title and the billions his directorate controls.
But sources inside the National Land Commission are talking, and what they describe is a pattern of conduct that has turned one of Kenya’s most powerful bureaucratic posts into what they call a ‘goldmine wrapped in a government gazette.’
Ombati is the Director of Valuation and Taxation at the NLC, the man who holds the pen over the single most consequential number in every compulsory land acquisition exercise in Kenya: the price.
It is a position that, in the hands of a venal operator, is worth more than any piece of land in the country. And sources within the commission, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the personal risks involved, say Ombati arrived in that seat not through merit but through a transaction.
‘He paid for that job,’ said one official who has worked at NLC for more than a decade. ‘Everyone at the commission knows it. He came in and the people he bribed were powerful enough that nothing was going to stop him getting the directorship.’
Kenya Insights could not independently verify the exact nature or amount of any alleged payment, and Ombati did not respond to detailed questions put to him before publication.
‘He paid for that job. Everyone at the commission knows it. He came in and the people he bribed were powerful enough that nothing was going to stop him getting the directorship.’
What is not in dispute is the timing of his arrival. Ombati assumed his position last year in circumstances that raised eyebrows among career valuers and administrators who had expected the role to go to officers with more seniority and institutional experience.
His appointment coincided precisely with the moment that Kenya’s two most expensive infrastructure projects in decades were entering the most financially sensitive phase of implementation: the compulsory land acquisition stage.
TWO PROJECTS. ONE MAN. BILLIONS ON THE TABLE.
The Rironi-Mau Summit highway, a 175-kilometre dualling of the A8 corridor connecting Nairobi to Nakuru and beyond, is estimated to cost between Sh170 billion and Sh200 billion under a public-private partnership with Chinese conglomerate China Road and Bridge Corporation and the National Social Security Fund.
President Ruto personally launched the project at Kamandura, Kiambu County, on November 28, 2025, calling it ‘a gateway to prosperity, unity and transformation.’ Government insiders say the President wants it done by June 2027, an immovable political deadline.
Running parallel is the even more ambitious SGR Phase 2B extension from Naivasha to Kisumu: 264 kilometres of rail traversing Narok, Bomet, Kericho, Nyamira and Kisumu counties, featuring 79 bridges, eight tunnels, 376 culverts and 26 stations.
The groundbreaking, to be led by President Ruto, is set for March 20, 2026. The combined Naivasha-Kisumu-Malaba corridor is estimated at five billion US dollars. The government has committed Sh47.55 billion from the national treasury for land acquisition alone.
Both mega-projects require NLC to compulsorily acquire land on behalf of the acquiring bodies: the Kenya National Highways Authority for the road, and Kenya Railways Corporation for the SGR.
The commission is in the process of acquiring more than 5,000 acres across five counties for the railway corridor alone. Every single one of those acres must be valued. Every single valuation passes through Ombati’s directorate.
According to multiple sources, those valuations are not being driven by prevailing market rates. They are being driven by a cartel.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF A HEIST
The operation, as described by insiders, is elegant in its simplicity.
A network of land surveyors, law firms and brokers with advance knowledge of the SGR and highway corridor routes identifies target parcels and positions proxies and associates to file inflated claims.
The valuers under Ombati, sources say, are largely sidelined from the process.
In a marked departure from standard NLC practice, junior officers with established institutional knowledge have been systematically excluded from the valuation work for both the Rironi-Mau Summit highway and the SGR acquisition exercises.
‘He does not work with us,’ said one career valuer at the commission who asked not to be named. ‘He brings in outsiders. We are told to stay away from the corridor files. When you ask questions, you are frozen out. The deals are being done somewhere we cannot see.’
The financial logic of what the insiders describe is stark. On the SGR’s Phase 2A Nairobi-Naivasha line, auditors already found that the government had paid more than Sh20 billion in land compensation, with the total bill on the Mombasa-Nairobi line alone exceeding Sh33 billion under the watch of a previous NLC leadership.
Independent investigators found properties inflated by as much as 310 per cent above market value.
A semi-permanent three-bedroomed house in rural Makueni was compensated at Sh9.2 million, a figure the auditors noted was comparable to Nairobi prices. A tin-sheet church was valued at Sh10.58 million.
On the current SGR Phase 2B acquisition, where the government is moving to compensate landowners across five counties with the groundbreaking less than two weeks away, sources say the same template is being applied at a scale that dwarfs anything seen before.
With 5,000 acres to be priced across diverse land markets from the Mau escarpment to the shores of Lake Victoria, the room for manipulation is, as one official put it, ‘essentially unlimited.’
With 5,000 acres to be priced across five counties, sources say the same template of overvaluation is being applied at a scale that dwarfs anything seen before.
THE DIGITAL PLATFORM OBSTRUCTION
Perhaps the most telling indicator of the cartel’s operation is its sustained resistance to transparency. The NLC, working with Kenya Railways, had identified digitisation as the single most effective tool to de-risk the acquisition exercise.
The plan was to deploy a digital platform to demarcate parcels, collect ownership data and verify claims in real time, specifically to prevent the kind of false insertions, name substitutions and phantom beneficiaries that hollowed out the Phase 1 compensation fund.
The targeted timeline was ambitious: full digital demarcation and data collection completed within eight months to ensure construction proceeds without delay.
Sources familiar with the project say the push for digital processing has been effectively sabotaged.
‘The digital system would make it impossible to do what they want to do,’ said one official with direct knowledge of the process. ‘It creates a paper trail. It closes the gaps where the money disappears. That is exactly why they do not want it.’
The opposition to digitisation is not administrative inertia.
It is, according to the officials who describe it, a deliberate and coordinated pushback from within the directorate that handles valuations.
The NLC had flagged digital data collection as its stated approach, with Ombati himself publicly assuring communities at forums in Kisumu and elsewhere that the process would be transparent. Behind the scenes, sources say, the digital architecture has been systematically stalled.
THE CORRIDOR INSIDER: A SCANDAL WITHIN A SCANDAL
The most explosive allegation circulating within NLC corridors concerns a claim that cannot yet be independently confirmed, and Kenya Insights presents it as an allegation that warrants immediate investigation by the EACC and DCI.
Sources say that Ombati, using proxies, acquired parcels of land along the planned SGR extension corridor in advance of the public gazette notices, and that his wife is among those positioned to benefit from compensation payouts.
If proven, this would constitute a criminal conflict of interest of the highest order under the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act.
NLC officials are not permitted to have any personal interest, direct or indirect, in any land compulsorily acquired by the commission.
The directorate that Ombati runs is the very organ that determines how much such land is worth. The allegation, if substantiated, would mean that the man setting the price had already bought the goods.
Separate from the corridor land allegation, sources describe Ombati as a man whose lifestyle and asset base are conspicuously inconsistent with his declared public servant’s salary.
Without producing specific details that could identify informants, insiders describe what they characterise as significant investments and account balances that go beyond what his government remuneration would ordinarily support. Ombati did not respond to questions about his assets and financial interests.
A HISTORY WRITTEN IN BLOOD MONEY: THE NLC VALUATION SCANDAL TIMELINE
What makes the current allegations so alarming is that they are not happening in a vacuum.
They are happening at an institution with one of the most comprehensively documented corruption legacies of any government commission in Kenya’s history, and crucially, the corruption has been concentrated in the very directorate that Ombati now commands.
In 2018, NLC chairman Muhammad Swazuri was charged alongside Kenya Railways managing director Atanas Maina with conspiracy to commit fraud involving a loss of Sh221 million in SGR land compensation.
The charges centred on the payment of Sh221 million for five railway reserve parcels that had been illegally subdivided and whose titles had been revoked by the commission’s own Review of Grants and Dispositions Committee.
The 2019 arrests, conducted by EACC detectives who swept into the homes of top NLC officials at dawn, were more comprehensive. Among those arrested was Salome Munubi, the then Director of Valuation and Taxation at NLC: Ombati’s predecessor in the same office he now occupies. Munubi was accused of facilitating overvalued compensation on the Mombasa Southern Bypass acquisition, where a parcel initially valued at Sh34.5 million was revalued under Swazuri’s personal order to Sh109.7 million, a 218 per cent inflation in two years.
The Sh75 million difference was distributed in kickbacks through a law firm to NLC officials, with then-acting Finance Director Bernard Cherutich and then-Deputy Director of Valuation Joash Oindo each allegedly pocketing Sh7 million. The EACC recovered Sh18 million from a raid, Sh16 million of it in foreign currency.
Auditors had by then separately documented the wider devastation.
A Standard Media investigation revealed that taxpayers had lost more than Sh4 billion in fraudulent SGR land compensation deals involving fake claims, double payments, overvaluations, and compensation for land outside the corridor.
At one farcical extreme, Kenya Railways Corporation paid compensation for land it already owned: a Sh636 million claim on its own marshalling yard, illegally subdivided into nine parcels.
At another, people illegally squatting on railway land received payouts. In Voi, landowners with dramatically different property sizes were uniformly paid Sh1.29 million each. In the most brazen inflation found, a single piece of land had been bumped from Sh9 million to Sh30 million, a 310 per cent markup.
A crucial piece of evidence: a computer hard drive containing compensation data from the Directorate of Valuation and Taxation was stolen from the second floor of the heavily guarded Ardhi House on December 17, 2019, the day before a tranche of Sh7.2 billion in payments was due. The hard drive was never recovered. The thieves were never identified. The directorate carried on.
The 2021 parliamentary inquiry was equally damning. Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee, NLC acting CEO Kabale Tache was forced to admit that valuation reports used to authorise a Sh12.1 billion SGR land payout had vanished without trace.
Committee members, accustomed to bureaucratic evasion, were visibly shocked.
The Auditor-General’s special report covering NLC’s accounts for the 2014/15 and 2016/17 financial years flagged the irregular acquisitions and named Swazuri specifically.
That is the institution. Those are the precedents. And now, with the single largest land acquisition exercise in the commission’s history underway, a man who sources say bought his directorship is running the valuation desk.
RUTO’S LEGACY IN THE CROSSHAIRS
William Ruto, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, dons the KDF jungle uniform as he presides over KDF Day at Moi Barracks, Eldoret.
President William Ruto has staked enormous political capital on the twin infrastructure projects.
The Rironi-Mau Summit highway is the most visible artery through the country’s commercial heartland, carrying nearly 40 per cent of Kenya’s trade traffic by some estimates.
The Naivasha-Kisumu SGR extension is the fulfilment of a promise stretching back to the original Vision 2030 blueprint: a railway that reaches Lake Victoria, transforming Kisumu into what Governor Anyang’ Nyong’o has called ‘a multimodal logistics hub’ for trade with Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan and beyond.
Ruto’s re-election prospects in 2027 are, at least in part, tied to the delivery of both projects before the electorate passes its verdict.
The groundbreaking for the SGR extension on March 20 is a set-piece presidential event. The Rironi highway was launched with a personal appearance and a personal promise. These are not technocratic exercises. They are political commitments delivered with fanfare.
Into this charged moment, the land compensation cartel has inserted itself with surgical precision.
Every billion shillings siphoned through inflated valuations is a billion less for genuine compensation, a potential court case from an underpaid landowner, a potential injunction that stops construction, a project delay that bleeds into the 2027 calendar.
And every credible allegation of corruption at the land commission is ammunition for those who want to frame the President’s flagship legacy projects as enrichment vehicles for his allies.
Gen Z Kenya, which erupted into the streets in 2024 with unprecedented force, making clear that public accountability for government spending is no longer optional, is watching every shilling.
The pressure has not dissipated. It has mutated into permanent scrutiny. Any scandal touching Ruto’s showcase projects in the months before the 2027 election will not be a news cycle. It will be a campaign issue.
Every billion shillings siphoned through inflated valuations is a billion less for genuine compensation, a potential injunction that stops construction, and ammunition for those who want to frame the President’s legacy projects as personal enrichment vehicles.
CS WAHOME AND THE QUESTION OF OVERSIGHT
Lands Cabinet Secretary Alice Wahome, who was re-appointed in August 2024 after her initial dismissal, appeared before the National Assembly Appointments Committee and promised to crush land cartels.
She disclosed a net worth of Sh327 million, up from Sh218 million when she first assumed the docket in 2022, a 50 per cent appreciation she attributed to rising property values and a lump-sum rent payment from a defaulting tenant.
At her vetting, Wahome was pressed on her relationship with the NLC, with MPs noting she had rarely convened formal meetings with commissioners.
She denied any friction, but acknowledged that the commission faced challenges.
The Lands Amendment Bill 2023, which sought to strip NLC of its compulsory acquisition powers and vest them in the Ministry of Lands, was withdrawn after public outcry, but it signalled the ministry’s ambition to control the very process that sources say Ombati’s cartel is currently exploiting.
The ministry of Lands and NLC were contacted for responses. NLC did not reply. Ombati did not respond to questions submitted to him regarding the allegations in this report. No response was received from CS Wahome’s office before publication.
WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW
The allegations against Ombati and the cartel operating within his directorate are serious enough to demand immediate independent investigation.
The EACC, whose own detectives previously conducted pre-dawn raids on Ardhi House and removed electronics from the Directorate of Valuation and Taxation, should not need a prompt from a newspaper to investigate credible reports of the same directorate operating on the same model.
Kenya Railways and KeNHA, as the acquiring bodies that will ultimately pay out the compensation, have both an institutional and a legal obligation to scrutinise every valuation report they receive from NLC.
The Senate Transport Committee, which previously threatened to stop SGR construction over compensation failures, should summon Ombati to answer specific questions about the exclusion of junior officers from corridor valuations, the stalling of digital data collection systems, and his personal financial interests.
The Treasury, which has committed Sh47.55 billion for SGR land acquisition, should not release a single shilling in compensation without an independent third-party audit of every valuation report produced under Ombati’s directorate.
And above all, President Ruto, whose political legacy and national transformation agenda depend on the clean, timely execution of these projects, should know that the men he has trusted with the most sensitive transactional work of his administration are, if these sources are to be believed, already carving up the compensation fund.
The pen that values Kenya’s land is worth more than all the land it values. And the man holding that pen is not, sources say, valuing for Kenya.
Botswana stands as one of Africa’s most spectacular destinations, offering pristine wilderness, incredible wildlife encounters, and unforgettable safari experiences. Whether you’re planning your first visit or returning to explore more of this remarkable country, making the most of your journey requires thoughtful preparation and smart choices. From the waterways of the Okavango Delta to the vast salt pans of Makgadikgadi, Botswana promises adventures that will stay with you forever.
Choose the Right Season for Your Visit
Timing can make or break your Botswana adventure. The dry season from May to October offers excellent game viewing as animals congregate around permanent water sources, making wildlife spotting easier and more predictable. The vegetation is also less dense during these months, improving visibility across the landscape.
However, the green season from November to April has its own unique appeal. This period brings dramatic thunderstorms, lush landscapes, and baby animals taking their first steps. Bird enthusiasts will find this time particularly rewarding, as migratory species arrive in spectacular numbers. Keep in mind that some remote camps close during the wettest months, so plan accordingly.
Explore Multiple Ecosystems
Botswana’s diverse landscapes each offer distinct experiences that showcase different aspects of African wilderness. The Okavango Delta transforms the Kalahari Desert into a watery paradise, where traditional mokoro canoe trips provide intimate encounters with nature. Meanwhile, Chobe National Park boasts one of Africa’s largest elephant populations, with river cruises offering front-row seats to their daily routines.
Don’t overlook the Makgadikgadi Pans, where endless white salt flats create an otherworldly landscape unlike anything else on the continent. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve offers a more remote, rugged experience for those seeking solitude and authentic wilderness. Splitting your time between at least two or three different regions will give you a comprehensive understanding of Botswana’s natural wealth.
Invest in Quality Accommodations
Where you stay dramatically influences your overall experience in Botswana. The country specializes in low-impact, high-quality tourism, with many camps and lodges offering exceptional service and expert guides. These accommodations often include game drives, bush walks, and other activities in their rates, providing better value than budget options.
Consider mixing luxury lodges with mobile camping experiences for variety and adventure. Many top-rated Botswana excursionsoperate from well-established camps that have spent years perfecting their operations and building relationships with local communities. The guides at these facilities possess invaluable knowledge about animal behavior, bird identification, and ecological systems.
Embrace Walking Safaris
While game drives offer comfort and extensive coverage, walking safaris provide an entirely different perspective on the African bush. Moving quietly on foot heightens your senses and creates a more intimate connection with the environment. You’ll notice smaller details like tracks, insects, and plants that you’d miss from a vehicle.
Walking safaris also generate an exhilarating sense of vulnerability and awareness that makes every encounter more meaningful. Always choose experienced, licensed guides for these activities, as safety depends entirely on their expertise and judgment.
Respect Local Culture and Communities
Botswana’s people are as important to your journey as its wildlife. Take time to learn about local customs, support community-run enterprises, and engage respectfully with residents you encounter. Many areas offer cultural visits where you can learn traditional skills, hear ancient stories, and gain insight into life in rural Botswana.
Purchasing crafts directly from artisans and choosing lodges that employ local staff and contribute to community development ensures your tourism dollars make a positive impact. This approach enriches your experience while supporting sustainable tourism practices.
Pack Appropriately for Bush Life
Successful safaris require practical packing choices. Neutral-colored clothing helps you blend into the environment, while layers accommodate temperature fluctuations between cool mornings and hot afternoons. Good binoculars, a quality camera with extra batteries, and a detailed field guide will enhance your wildlife observations significantly.
Don’t forget sun protection, insect repellent, and any prescription medications, as remote areas have limited shopping options. Most camps provide laundry services, so you can pack lighter than you might think.
Allow Flexibility in Your Schedule
The bush operates on its own timeline, and rigid schedules can lead to disappointment. Build buffer days into your itinerary to account for weather delays, unexpected wildlife sightings, or simply the desire to spend an extra morning watching lions at a kill. The most memorable safari moments often happen when you’re not rushing to the next destination.
Botswana rewards those who approach it with patience, respect, and curiosity. By following these strategies, you’ll create a journey filled with extraordinary moments and lasting memories that capture the true essence of this magnificent country.
Putin says oil output relying on Hormuz Strait could stop in a month
Russia says it is ready to supply oil and gas to Europe
Putin says Russian firms should make use of situation
Putin says high oil prices may be temporary
MOSCOW, March 9 (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran had triggered a global energy crisis and cautioned that oil production dependent on transport through the Strait of Hormuz could soon come to a halt.
Putin said that Russia — the world’s second-largest oil exporter and holder of the biggest natural gas reserves — was ready to work again with European customers if they wanted to return to long-term cooperation.
Western powers, however, have spent the past four years sharply reducing their reliance on Russian oil and gas in response to Moscow’s war in Ukraine and subsequent EU and G7 sanctions.
The loss of the European market has deprived Russia of its most lucrative customers and forced it to sell oil and gas at steep discounts to Asia.
Speaking at a televised meeting with government officials and the heads of Russia’s leading oil and gas producers, Putin said that Russia had repeatedly warned that destabilising the Middle East could lead to an energy crisis with grave implications for the global economy — a turn of events he said had now materialised.
Oil prices exceeded $100 per barrel on Monday to reach peaks unseen since 2022 as the Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas flows, has been effectively closed due to the Iran war.
“Oil production dependent on the Strait of Hormuz risks halting completely within the next month. It has already begun to decline, and storage facilities in the region are filling with oil that cannot be transported…is extremely difficult to transport, or is extremely expensive to transport,” Putin said.
He said Russian companies should take advantage of the current situation in the Middle East, though he noted that the spike in prices was probably temporary. Oil and gas revenues make up around a quarter of total federal budget proceeds.
G7 nations said on Monday they were prepared to implement “necessary measures” in response to surging global oil prices, but stopped short of committing to release emergency reserves.
“We’re ready to work with Europeans too. But we need some signals from them that they’re ready and willing to work with us and will ensure this sustainability and stability,” Putin said.
Last week he instructed the government to consider switching remaining Russian oil and gas flows away from Europe, before the European Union starts enforcing its decision to completely ban Russian fossil fuels.
Before the Ukraine war, Europe was buying more than 40% of its gas from Russia, but combined sales of pipeline gas and LNG from Russia accounted for only 13% of total EU imports in 2025.
Travel rewards programs can be incredibly valuable, but they’re only useful if you actually remember to use them. Between airline miles, hotel points, credit card rewards, and cashback programs, keeping track of everything can feel overwhelming. The good news is that with the right strategies and tools, managing your travel rewards doesn’t have to be complicated.
Let’s explore practical ways to organize your rewards so you never miss out on free flights, hotel stays, or valuable perks again.
Create a Centralized Tracking System
The first step to managing your travel rewards effectively is getting everything in one place. You might have points scattered across multiple airlines, hotel chains, and credit card programs, making it nearly impossible to remember what you have and where.
Start by making a simple spreadsheet that lists each rewards program, your account number, current point balance, and expiration dates. Update this document monthly or after significant purchases. This gives you a bird’s eye view of your entire rewards portfolio at a glance.
Alternatively, consider using a dedicated rewards tracking app. Many free and paid options exist that automatically sync with your accounts and provide real-time balance updates. These apps often send notifications about expiring points, special promotions, or opportunities to earn bonus rewards.
Set Up Account Alerts and Notifications
Most rewards programs offer email or push notifications for important account activity. Take a few minutes to enable these alerts for each of your programs. You’ll want notifications for point expirations, special earning opportunities, and account statements.
These automated reminders act as your personal assistant, ensuring you never lose points due to inactivity or miss limited-time bonus offers. Some programs also alert you when you’re close to reaching a redemption threshold, which can motivate you to earn just a few more points for that free flight or hotel night.
Consolidate Your Rewards Programs
While it’s tempting to join every rewards program you encounter, spreading yourself too thin can actually reduce the value you get. Instead, focus on a few programs that align with your travel patterns and spending habits.
Choose one or two airline alliances and one or two hotel chains where you’ll concentrate your loyalty. This strategy helps you accumulate meaningful point balances faster rather than having small, unusable amounts across dozens of programs. When you signup for My10x, you can maximize your rewards by strategically funneling your everyday spending through cards that earn transferable points to your preferred travel partners.
The same principle applies to credit cards. Having multiple cards can be beneficial, but make sure you understand the earning structure of each one and use them strategically for their bonus categories.
Schedule Regular Rewards Reviews
Set a recurring calendar reminder to review your rewards accounts quarterly. During these sessions, check for expiring points, evaluate whether your current strategy is working, and look for redemption opportunities.
This is also the perfect time to assess whether you’re still using the right credit cards or if newer options might serve you better. The travel rewards landscape changes frequently, with new cards launching and existing programs adjusting their benefits.
During your review, calculate the actual value you’re getting from your rewards. Are you earning points that you never use? Are you paying annual fees for cards that don’t deliver enough value? These quarterly check-ins help you course-correct before small inefficiencies become costly mistakes.
Take Advantage of Account Activity Requirements
Many rewards programs require some activity every 12 to 24 months to keep points from expiring. Don’t let inactivity cost you thousands of hard-earned points.
For programs you don’t use frequently, set annual reminders to make a small purchase, transfer points, or complete whatever action counts as qualifying activity. Sometimes something as simple as dining at a partner restaurant or shopping through an online portal is enough to reset the expiration clock.
Keep a list of easy, low-cost ways to maintain activity in each program. This might include subscribing to a magazine, making a small donation to charity through a rewards portal, or purchasing a small amount of points to trigger account activity.
Conclusion
Managing travel rewards doesn’t require hours of work each week. With a solid organizational system, strategic program selection, and regular maintenance, you can maximize the value of every point you earn. The key is creating sustainable habits that keep your rewards organized and accessible.
Start by implementing just one or two of these strategies today. As they become routine, add more techniques to your rewards management toolkit. Before long, you’ll have a streamlined system that ensures you’re always ready to redeem those points for your next adventure.
