President Donald Trump indicated for the first time Monday that US military operations in Iran could be coming to an end, saying the war was “very complete” and progressing ahead of schedule.
The war had sent stock markets slumping and oil prices soaring again on Monday as Tehran, under new leader Mojtaba Khamenei, fired a new barrage of missiles at its Gulf neighbours and signalled that the strategic Strait of Hormuz would likely remain closed.
But Wall Street vaulted into positive territory Monday after Trump’s remarks, despite the lack of details on any solution to the conflict still raging in the Middle East.
“I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force,” Trump told CBS News by phone, repeating battle damage assessments that he has given in previous days.
Trump told the US broadcaster that the United States was “very far” ahead of his initially stated timeframe for the war of four or five weeks.
He is set to give a press conference shortly at around 5:30 pm (2130 GMT) in the ballroom of his Doral golf club near Miami.
On the first day in power for the 56-year-old son of slain leader Ali Khamenei, Iranian troops mustered a fresh wave of missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Israel.
Another missile was also fired at NATO member Turkey, the second such incident in five days, with the alliance’s air defences intercepting it before it could hit its target.
With the Strait of Hormuz off Iran blocked for almost all oil tankers, the price of benchmark crude oil contracts rocketed past $100 a barrel on Monday — their highest levels since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — before edging back slightly.
French President Emmanuel Macron said that his country and its allies were working on a “purely defensive” mission to reopen the strait, through which nearly 20 percent of the world’s crude oil usually transits.
The mission would be aimed at escorting ships “after the end of the hottest phase of the conflict”, but experts say it would mean putting navy vessels at risk of incoming fire from the nearby Iranian coast.
Kamal Kharazi, a foreign policy adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, told CNN that Tehran was calculating that “the economic pressure will be beefed up to the extent that other countries intervene” to end the war.
Benchmark oil prices are up 40-50 percent since the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran on February 28, while stock markets around the world are down, hitting pension funds and savings.
Inflation caused by a sustained oil shock would also push up the price of goods for consumers everywhere.
Queues at petrol stations have been seen as far afield as Vietnam and the Philippines as drivers anticipate higher prices, while Hungary and Croatia in the EU announced fuel price caps.
– Rallies –
Iran faced a fresh blitz of US and Israeli strikes after its Assembly of Experts, the top clerical body, appointed its first new supreme leader in 37 years.
Iranian state media carried images of tens of thousands of people celebrating Mojtaba Khamenei’s selection in central Tehran on Monday, many carrying his picture.
Iran’s rebel Houthi allies in Yemen and the Hezbollah armed group in Lebanon pledged allegiance, while Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday promised “unwavering support”.
Unconfirmed US media reports over the weekend said that Moscow has been providing targeting intelligence to the Islamic republic’s military.
Trump told the New York Post newspaper he was “not happy” about Khamenei’s appointment, while Israel’s foreign ministry called him a “tyrant”.
Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, told AFP the new supreme leader was a hardliner who had “been involved in all the most violent repressions that have taken place over the last 15-16 years”.
Ali Vaez, of the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank, said the appointment was intended to send a defiant message that Trump’s war “has only replaced one Khamenei with another”.
– Oil risks –
Oil traders, policymakers and central bankers are all watching the Middle East for news about Gulf energy infrastructure, which is crucial for the world economy.
About 10 vessels in or near the Strait of Hormuz have come under attack since Iran blocked the waterway in retaliation for the US-Israeli attack, shipping experts say.
Global shipping giant MSC announced that it was formally halting some export shipments from the Gulf, meaning goods sitting on ships would be unloaded.
Following strikes on Bahrain’s Al Ma’ameer oil facility that ignited a fire, the country’s state-owned energy company Bapco joined its counterparts in Qatar and Kuwait in declaring “force majeure” — a warning that events beyond its control may lead it to miss export targets.
The Saudi defence ministry said Monday it had thwarted a drone attack targeting an oil field in the kingdom’s east, near the Emirati border.
– ‘Resistance’ –
In Israel, around 10 explosions were audible in Tel Aviv after the military announced it had detected missiles inbound from Iran.
At least one Israeli was killed when he was hit by shrapnel, emergency services said.
The multi-front war also intensified in Lebanon, which was dragged into the conflict last week when Israel and Hezbollah began trading fire.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Monday accused Hezbollah of working to “collapse” the state, while the head of the group’s parliamentary bloc said it had “no other option to preserve honour, pride and dignity than the option of resistance”.
Lebanese authorities said on Monday that Israel’s attacks since March 2 have killed at least 486 people and wounded at least 1,313.
Hackers have likely gained access to sensitive information
Hackers use fake Signal Support chatbots to access accounts
AMSTERDAM, March 9 (Reuters) – Russian-backed hackers have launched a global cyber campaign to gain access to Signal and WhatsApp accounts used by officials, military personnel and journalists, two intelligence agencies in the Netherlands warned on Monday.
Users are persuaded in chats initiated by the hackers to divulge security verification and pin codes, giving them access to personal accounts and group chats, they said in a statement.
“The Russian hackers have likely gained access to sensitive information,” the General Dutch Intelligence Agency (AIVD) and Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said.
“Targets and victims of the campaign include Dutch government employees” and journalists, the agencies said.
The chat apps offering end-to-end encryption are popular with government officials for sharing confidential or classified information, making them “the ideal place for malicious actors to try to capture sensitive information,” they said.
WhatsApp, in a reaction sent to Reuters, said users should never share their six-digit code with others and that it continued to build ways to protect people from online threats.
Signal said on social media that the targeted attacks were “executed via sophisticated phishing campaigns, designed to trick users into sharing information” and that its encryption and infrastructure had not been compromised.
USERS PERSUADED TO DIVULGE SECURITY CODES
The hackers most frequently masquerade as a Signal Support chatbot to induce targets to divulge the codes, enabling them to take control of the accounts, the statement said.
Another method is to use the ‘linked devices’ function within Signal, it said.
Contacts appearing twice in a user’s contact list, or numbers showing up as ‘deleted account’ could indicate that an account has been compromised, the agencies said.
Dutch authorities issued a cyber advisory notifying government colleagues of the vulnerability and providing assistance to eliminate the threat, a spokesman said, citing the joint operation with the AIVD general intelligence service.
“Despite their end-to-end encryption option, messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp should not be used as channels for classified, confidential or sensitive information,” said MIVD director, Vice-Admiral Peter Reesink.
When Kenya Airways unveiled its new board on March 5, 2026, the announcement had the trappings of institutional renewal.
Four fresh faces, led by veteran businessman Kiprono Kittony as chairman, were presented as the architects of the airline’s long-awaited turnaround. The fanfare lasted about 48 hours.
By the weekend, Kenya’s financial and legal commentariat had torn into a detail the airline’s press release buried in its third paragraph: Kittony is also the sitting chairman of the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the very bourse on which KQ shares trade.
The question now circulating in boardrooms, on social media, and increasingly in the offices of regulators is blunt.
Can the man who chairs the exchange that lists and oversees Kenya Airways simultaneously chair Kenya Airways itself without compromising the structural independence that market integrity demands?
“One can’t sit in the board of NSE and be a board member of a listed company. There is complete conflict of interest. It is worse when the board member is a chairman in both places.” — Governance commentator Ike Ojuku
Corporate governance commentator Ike Ojuku was among the first to go on the record. Writing on X, Ojuku argued that the dual positions amounted to a complete conflict of interest and called on the Capital Markets Authority and the National Treasury to account for what he described as a failure of regulatory vigilance. “National Treasury and Capital Markets Authority are not doing their work,” Ojuku wrote in a post that was widely shared and cited in online governance discussions.
The concern is not theoretical. NSE, as a securities exchange, holds a quasi-regulatory function over its listed companies.
It enforces listing rules, monitors continuous disclosure obligations, reviews board composition changes, and can recommend or initiate enforcement action against listed companies in concert with the CMA.
Kittony, as NSE chairman, presides over that oversight function. As KQ chairman, he is now the primary custodian of one of the listed companies that the exchange regulates. The two roles, in their most literal sense, put him on both sides of the oversight relationship simultaneously.
The Standard reported that the KQ announcement did not address how Kittony intends to manage the two roles, an omission that governance observers found telling.
The Capital Markets (Public Offers, Listings and Disclosures) Regulations, 2023, which currently govern listed companies, require issuers to disclose conflicts of interest at the point of appointment.
KQ made the announcement pursuant to those very regulations but included no such disclosure.
Professor Winnie Nyamute, also newly appointed to the KQ board, simultaneously sits on the NSE board, compounding the structural overlap critics have identified.
The conflict has layers. Beyond Kittony, Standard Media reported that Professor Winnie Iminza Nyamute, one of the three other new independent non-executive directors appointed to the KQ board alongside him, also currently sits on the NSE board.
The two now share seats in both the exchange’s boardroom and Kenya Airways’. That dual boardroom overlap between the same pair of individuals at the regulator and a listed company would raise eyebrows in any jurisdiction with functioning governance enforcement.
Kenya’s legal architecture does not make the arrangement outright unlawful. The Companies Act, 2015 permits multiple directorships. Kenyan governance codes allow a person to chair up to two publicly listed companies provided conflicts are declared and managed.
The CMA’s Circular No.06/2024, issued to clarify the 2023 regulations, specifies that non-executive directors must not hold executive or employee positions in related entities, but does not prohibit non-executive board chairmanships across the exchange and a listed company.
Kittony’s defenders will note that the NSE chairmanship is itself a non-executive governance role, not an operational regulatory post, and that the NSE board’s day-to-day market oversight functions are executed by management, not the chairman.
But governance does not run on legal technicalities alone, particularly when a national carrier at the centre of a government privatisation drive is involved.
Kenya Airways has been navigating a bruising investor search after years of accumulated losses.
The government is actively scouting for a strategic investor to revive the airline, a process that involves valuations, disclosures, and market-sensitive negotiations, all of which flow through or past the NSE’s oversight apparatus.
The argument that Kittony’s NSE role creates at minimum an acute perception of conflict in that environment is one that even commentators sympathetic to his personal credentials have found difficult to dismiss.
Kittony’s credentials themselves are not in question.
He co-founded Betway Kenya and Radio Africa Group, chairs Mtech Limited and CreditInfo CRB Kenya, serves as vice chairman of the World Chambers Federation in Paris, and is widely credited with the rehabilitation of the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry during his tenure as its chairman.
He holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Nairobi and a Global Executive MBA from USIU and Columbia University. He was awarded the Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear in 2019 under former President Uhuru Kenyatta. The question his critics are raising is not about his competence. It is about institutional design.
The government is actively scouting for a strategic investor for KQ. That process involves valuations, disclosures, and market-sensitive negotiations. Kittony’s role atop the exchange that oversees that market creates structural questions no amount of personal credentials can paper over.
David Ndii’s appointment to the same board has attracted separate scrutiny of a political nature.
Ndii previously served as chairperson of President William Ruto’s Council of Economic Advisors, a role that was declared unconstitutional by the High Court in January 2026 after Justice Bahati Mwamuye found the Executive had bypassed the Public Service Commission and the Salaries and Remuneration Commission in creating and staffing the advisory positions.
The court barred the National Treasury from disbursing any further funds to the 21 former advisers. Ndii dismissed the ruling as a pyrrhic victory and indicated the advisory relationship with the presidency would continue informally.
His presence on the KQ board raises questions about the commercial and political independence of a board now navigating a sale process under the same government whose economic agenda Ndii has publicly championed.
Kenya Airways, through Company Secretary Habil Waswani, congratulated the new board members and expressed confidence in their ability to steer the company forward.
The airline did not respond to specific questions about how the structural conflicts identified by critics would be managed or whether CMA had been consulted prior to the announcement.
Neither the CMA nor the National Treasury had issued a public statement on the matter at the time of going to press. The silence is itself a form of answer.
In jurisdictions where governance enforcement is robust, an appointment of this nature would typically require pre-approval from the market regulator or, at minimum, a formal conflict declaration and recusal protocol lodged with the exchange before the announcement was made public.
That none of this appears to have happened is the detail that governance observers are finding most alarming.
For Kenya Airways, the governance controversy arrives at the worst possible moment. The airline’s recovery strategy depends on the credibility of its leadership to attract institutional investors willing to take a long-term stake in a loss-making carrier.
Institutional investors, particularly foreign ones, apply their own governance screens before committing capital.
A board chairman whose other hat belongs to the very institution regulating the company they are evaluating is exactly the kind of structural anomaly that triggers red flags in due diligence. Whatever Kittony’s personal standing, the arrangement hands prospective investors a ready-made excuse to negotiate harder or walk away entirely.
The CMA and National Treasury now face a choice. They can let the appointment stand and trust that Kittony will manage the inherent tensions through robust conflict declaration and recusal mechanisms, a workable outcome only if those mechanisms are visible, enforceable, and credible.
Or they can require KQ and Kittony to resolve the structural conflict by vacating one of the two roles, a course that would be disruptive but would restore the institutional clarity that market integrity requires.
The third option, continued silence, is the one neither the market nor investors can afford.
Sh44bn Projected annual cash flow increase from Mombasa and Lamu ports post-PPP
Sh45bn Estimated rehabilitation cost for Mombasa berths 11 to 14, to be funded by the private concessionaire
Sh44.5bn Private investment being sought for Lamu Port development, including agri-bulk and liquid bulk terminals
5% Current capacity utilisation at Lamu Port, against a designed annual capacity of 1.2 million TEUs
45.46 million tonnes Total cargo handled at Mombasa Port in 2025, a record and up from 41 million tonnes in 2024
66 Commercial state entities being restructured into profit-oriented public limited companies under the GOE Act 2025
25 years Duration of proposed concession periods for Lamu Container Terminal berths and Mombasa Container Terminal 1
10,000 KPA employees whose employment conditions are at the centre of stakeholder concerns
The Kenya Ports Authority, the statutory body that has controlled every scheduled seaport on the country’s Indian Ocean coastline since 1978, is on the verge of extinction in its current legal form.
The government is in the final stages of repealing the KPA Act, a move that will dissolve the authority as a state corporation and reincorporate it as a Public Limited Liability Company under the Companies Act, simultaneously opening the door for private operators to take charge of three berths at Lamu Port and four berths at the Port of Mombasa under a public-private partnership framework.
Confidential disclosure documents from the government’s PPP process, seen by the Business Daily, show that KPA has already commenced the selection of private operators for Lamu Port berths 1 to 3, the Lamu Special Economic Zone, Mombasa berths 11 to 14, and Mombasa Container Terminal 1. The government expects the transition to generate additional cash flows of Sh44 billion annually from the two ports combined.
The legal scaffolding for the transformation was enacted in November last year when President William Ruto assented to the Government Owned Enterprises Act, 2025, which came into force in December.
The law repeals the State Corporations Act and converts commercial state bodies into profit-oriented public limited companies under the Companies Act, with the National Treasury as the central shareholder of record. It applies to entities where the government holds more than 50 per cent of share capital, and reorganises 66 commercial entities to operate as businesses rather than government departments, with dividends channelled directly to the Exchequer.
THE STRUCTURAL BREAK
Roads and Transport Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir has confirmed that KPA management will henceforth have full autonomy to make key decisions, including procurement of equipment, without prior clearance from the national government. Under the current model, KPA has been heavily dependent on concessional loans secured by the government to fund capital expenditure, a dependency the new framework seeks to permanently sever.
“The GOE Act will increase pressure on KPA to become profitable and self-sustainable. Public-private partnership transactions are the most effective way to achieve these goals. Once becoming a GOE, the authority is expected to operate as a commercial, profit-oriented entity,” the government’s PPP disclosure document states.
The reincorporation as a PLC is specifically designed to make KPA self-financing, ending its reliance on the National Treasury for borrowing.
The GOE Act separates ownership roles between the National Treasury and relevant line ministries, establishing performance contracts with each entity and a skills-based, largely independent board structure with tighter accountability and measurable targets. For KPA, adopting a PLC structure is projected to align terminal performance with Kenya’s growing port throughput, which reached 45.46 million tonnes at Mombasa in 2025, up from 41 million tonnes the prior year.
Constitutional law firm TripleOKLaw described the GOE Act as the most significant reset of Kenya’s state-owned sector since independence, noting that it makes “a further watershed” by repealing bespoke statutes that created commercial state corporations by legislative fiat, and converting them into limited-liability companies with an explicit mechanism to transfer their assets, liabilities, and businesses into the new vehicles.
WHAT THE PPP COVERS
At the heart of the restructuring exercise is the concurrent push to bring private capital into specific port facilities that the government has acknowledged it cannot upgrade on its own. The PPP framework as currently disclosed covers four distinct transactions.
For Lamu Port berths 1 to 3, the government is proposing a landlord concession model in which a private investor takes full responsibility for terminal handling operations for a period of 25 years, paying KPA agreed fixed and variable fees.
The port, constructed between 2014 and 2021 at a cost of approximately $480 million financed by the government, has been a colossal underperformance since it was commissioned.
KPA’s own data shows Lamu handled just 382 TEUs in 2021 and 1,779 TEUs in 2022, against an annual design capacity of 1.2 million TEUs. The port is currently estimated to be operating at just five per cent of that capacity.
The government is seeking up to Sh44.5 billion worth of private investment into the Port of Lamu alone, with a substantial portion targeted at developing the port’s agri-bulk and liquid bulk terminals, along with the Lamu Special Economic Zone, a 500-hectare parcel earmarked mainly for agricultural processing and warehousing activity servicing the LAPSSET Corridor connecting the port to Ethiopia and South Sudan.
For Mombasa berths 11 to 14, the proposed structure is a Design, Build, Finance, Operate and Maintain arrangement, under which the private investor would fund and execute a complete rehabilitation of a facility that was developed in 1967 and has not been modernised to international standards.
The PPP disclosure document puts the cost of this refurbishment at Sh45 billion. The work would include strengthening and deepening the quay, constructing a modern multipurpose terminal, building a container storage yard, and establishing a truck waiting area.
For Mombasa Container Terminal 1, comprising berths 16 to 19 built from 2012 onwards with Japanese financing, the proposed model mirrors Lamu, with a 25-year landlord concession requiring the private party to pay fixed and variable fees to KPA.
Under all four models, no public infrastructure will be sold. KPA retains ownership and regulatory oversight of the assets. Cargo operations are temporarily transferred to the private sector. The document’s language is unambiguous on the point: “The landlord model is expected to provide the private party undertaking day-to-day operations with the flexibility to make timely decisions while preserving public control over the strategic assets and functions.”
The model is not novel globally. Ports in Los Angeles, New York, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Tanger, Santos and Singapore all operate under landlord-type frameworks. Tanzania tapped DP World to operate part of Dar es Salaam port for 30 years in a deal that has piled significant competitive pressure on Mombasa’s traditional dominance of the northern corridor.
A FIVE-YEAR ROAD PAVED WITH OBSTRUCTION
The road to this point has been neither straight nor quiet. The government’s ambition to bring private operators into KPA’s port facilities has been in train since at least 2022, when the National Treasury under the previous administration first approached Dubai-based DP World with an invitation to table a proposal to finance, build and manage five major port projects. That process collapsed amid accusations of a secret deal, triggering fierce political opposition from politicians who are today in government.
When the Kenya Kwanza administration reversed course and embraced the same concept in September 2023, KPA Managing Director Captain William Ruto formally invited sealed bids for the qualification of private operators across the same four facility tranches. The tender, numbered KPA/052/2023-2024/CPS, set an initial submission deadline of October 12, 2023.
Within weeks, the process ran into the courts. The Taireni Association of Mijikenda, a civil society group that had previously challenged a 2019 attempt to hand Container Terminal 2 to a private operator, filed a constitutional petition in November 2023. Justice Chacha Mwita of the Milimani High Court issued conservatory orders suspending the tender on November 27, 2023, directing the government to respond within three days.
The association argued that the targeted berths were fully funded from public money and could not lawfully be disposed of under the PPP Act, citing the Sh60 billion construction cost of the Lamu berths alone and the Sh30 billion price tag of Container Terminal 2 berths 16 to 18 as evidence of the scale of public investment at stake.
The case was assigned to a three-judge bench constituted by then Chief Justice Martha Koome. The litigation extended into 2024, before the parties arrived at a consent agreement signed on April 2, 2024, and subsequently adopted as a court order by the bench.
The consent required KPA to comply with constitutional requirements and PPP legislation on public participation, value for money assessments, stakeholder involvement and local content obligations. It cleared the path for the process to resume, provided those conditions were met.
Then came a further legal blow. On September 24, 2025, the High Court ruled the Privatisation Act 2023 unconstitutional, invalidating a parallel government effort to privatise 11 additional parastatals including the Kenya Pipeline Company and the Kenyatta International Convention Centre.
That ruling did not directly extinguish the KPA PPP process, which is proceeding under the PPP Act 2022 and the newly enacted GOE Act 2025, but it reinforced the legal fragility of Kenya’s broader privatisation ambitions.
The Commission on Administrative Justice added its own pressure in February 2025, directing KPA Managing Director Captain William Ruto to release all privatisation-related documents to the public within 21 days, acting on a complaint from a human rights organisation that had been denied access. KPA’s information handling remained contested even as the transaction documentation was being finalised.
WORKFORCE: THE MOST EXPLOSIVE VARIABLE
Of all the fault lines in the restructuring, none is more politically combustible than the question of what happens to KPA’s employees. The authority employs approximately 10,000 staff. The Taireni Association’s 2023 petition was blunt: “With the coming in of the investors, the restructuring and staff reorganisation will ensue with attendant risks of redundancies and retrenchment.”
The PPP disclosure document attempts to address the concern through a voluntary secondment model. Under this arrangement, existing agreements between KPA and its employees are transferred to the new company. Staff would remain formally employed by KPA but have their services leased to the private operator. “The secondment will be voluntary,” the document states. KPA retains some berths under its own management, which the government argues creates a pricing counterbalance and preserves a pool of direct employment.
Maritime analyst Andrew Mwangura, who has closely tracked the port restructuring process, acknowledged the operational logic of the move but warned that workforce transitions must strictly comply with labour laws.
He noted that feasibility studies project KPA’s valuation could increase from three per cent to 13 per cent under various partnership scenarios, and that operational risk would be transferred to whichever entity is best positioned to manage it.
Shippers Council of Eastern Africa Chief Executive Agayo Ogambi said the rising throughput figures at Mombasa, growing at over 10 per cent annually, made private capital investment not only attractive but necessary.
He however issued a direct warning to the government: “The PPP must be transparent, ensuring public and national interests are safeguarded. Job security must remain a priority as the port supports millions of livelihoods and resultant job loss could be catastrophic.”
THE COMPETITIVE IMPERATIVE
Behind the bureaucratic restructuring lies a hard commercial reality. Mombasa handles cargo for over 200 million people across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Tanzania. It is the largest port in East Africa and the second largest on the continent. But its position is no longer uncontested.
Tanzania has handed DP World a 30-year concession at Dar es Salaam port, with the Dubai operator investing heavily in capacity expansion.
The shift has already been felt at Mombasa: total cargo throughput dropped to 33.74 million metric tonnes in 2022 from 34.76 million tonnes in 2021, as landlocked Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda moved increasing volumes through the Tanzanian route. The 2025 rebound to 45.46 million tonnes signals a recovery, but the competitive threat from Dar is structural and long-term.
Mombasa currently requires 14 reach stackers, 43 terminal tractors and 11 forklifts to handle existing volumes. Tenders have been issued for 10 rubber-tyred gantry cranes and two ship-to-shore gantry cranes to match increasing cargo volumes.
KPA’s master plan for 2018 to 2047 envisages Lamu as a landlord port from the outset, with private operators running the terminals and KPA acting as infrastructure owner and regulator. Private participation is not a deviation from that plan but its intended fulfilment.
Whether the current iteration of that plan survives political pressure, legal challenge and the rigours of financial closure is a separate question.
The National Treasury has previously estimated that reaching financial closure on the PPP transactions would take at least three years from the point of financial structuring.
Bidders must form joint ventures with Kenyan firms holding not less than 15 per cent of the project company. The government has been simultaneously courting international port operators including DP World, whose managing director for sub-Saharan Africa told Bloomberg that the firm was actively eyeing Lamu under a lease arrangement.
What is certain is that the government has now assembled more legal architecture for this project than at any prior point in its long and turbulent history. The GOE Act provides the restructuring vehicle.
The PPP Act 2022 provides the concession framework. The 2024 court consent provides the procedural cover. What remains to be demonstrated is whether the execution will match the ambition, or whether Kenya’s most profitable state corporation will again find itself trapped between an urgent commercial need and an unresolved political fight.
Joseph Owino Jonny was not a man who chased fame. He chased light. From the shores of Lake Victoria to the dusty roads threading through Nyakach Constituency, the young photographer and videographer known to everyone as Joe Miles built a quiet reputation doing what he loved: pointing a camera at life and making it matter. That life was taken from him in circumstances that have left his family, friends and Kenya’s creative fraternity not merely grieving, but demanding answers.
On Tuesday, March 3, Joe received a call from someone claiming to need photography services.
For a freelance cameraman in his mid-20s, such calls are the lifeblood of the trade.
He left home without suspicion, equipment in hand, heading towards what he believed was another routine job. Hours passed. His phone went silent. By the time the people who loved him realised something was wrong, Joe Miles was already dead.
BODY FOUND IN A THICKET
His lifeless body was discovered in a thicket in Naivasha, a town roughly four hundred kilometres from Kisumu, sending shockwaves through the lakeside city and the wider Kenyan media fraternity. But it was not the distance that disturbed those who saw the scene. It was what had been done to him.
Friends who subsequently viewed photographs from the scene described injuries of extraordinary brutality.
His throat had been slit to the back of the neck. There was a deep cut at the rear of his skull. His tongue had been removed. The tips of his fingers bore deep cuts. His legs carried further wounds.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations officer subsequently assigned to the case was said to have told the family plainly: “This boy was killed by someone who must have hated him so much.”
Significantly, the car Joe had been driving was found with its contents intact. His laptop remained inside.
Several other personal items were untouched. The only thing missing was his phone, and even the charger was still in the vehicle. His camera and photography equipment were reportedly recovered near the scene.
That the killers took nothing of obvious monetary value, while subjecting their victim to such prolonged and deliberate injury, has led friends and investigators alike to dismiss the robbery narrative outright.
THE WOMAN IN THE VEHICLE
Fresh details from the family have added a new and troubling dimension to the investigation. Joseph’s brother Robert, who travelled to Naivasha to meet DCI officers after the body was found, has disclosed that investigators told him Joe was not alone at the time of the murder. A female companion was allegedly in the vehicle when the killing took place.
Robert stated that a DCI colleague of the lead investigator, one Peter Orwa, revealed the detail informally after the formal briefing concluded.
According to Robert, he was told that a female friend had been in Joe’s car during the incident but that investigators had since released her without furnishing the family with any statement or formal account of what she witnessed.
“The DCI officer in charge said it is alleged that my brother had a female friend in his vehicle when the murder happened,” Robert recalled. He said the family was given no explanation for her release and no record of her account.
When Robert returned the following day with his parents seeking further information, the lead officer was absent, reportedly reassigned to duties in Kakamega and not expected back until March 11. The family says they have been left in a void of official silence at precisely the moment they need answers most.
THE SOCIAL MEDIA ERASURE
Among the details that have alarmed those close to Joe is the deliberate deletion of his social media presence.
Shortly after his disappearance, all his accounts vanished. Friends noted immediately that this was not consistent with a robbery.
Joe’s friend Evans Dims, who later travelled personally to Naivasha and viewed the photographs from the scene, told those around him that the deletion of the accounts confirmed, for him, that the murder was premeditated and targeted.
Whoever wanted Joe Miles dead also wanted to erase his digital footprint.
That the charger remained in the car while the phone itself was taken suggests the device was removed not for resale but for the data it contained, or to ensure that calls, messages and location history could not be recovered by investigators.
‘DIRECTOR, KUNA JOB?’
Joe Miles at work.
In the days since the murder, tributes have poured in from across Kenya’s creative and media communities. Lennox Omondi, a collaborator who first met Joe through Evans Dims in 2023, described a man defined by hustle and warmth in equal measure. The two had worked together on several significant productions, including the LREB documentary and a State of the County series.
“Myles was the kind of person who was always looking for the next challenge,” Omondi wrote. “Often calling me to ask, ‘Director, kuna job?’ He was a man who constantly stepped out of his comfort zone to provide and grow. Beyond his hustle, he was a truly gifted cameraman and editor. The news of his cold-blooded murder is a nightmare. Finding out his body was discovered along the highway in Naivasha is a level of cruelty I cannot process. You didn’t deserve this, Myles.”
Brian Odhiambo of the Political Headache Podcast described Joe as calm and vibrant, recalling a billboard shoot they had worked on together. “When I received the news of his murder by unknown people this Tuesday in Naivasha, my heart was broken,” Odhiambo wrote. “I am still deeply shocked. This is truly painful.”
A COMMUNITY DEMANDING JUSTICE
Grief has settled heavily over Jimo village in Nyakach Constituency, where Joe’s family is from. For those who knew him, the manner of his death compounds an already unbearable loss. The wounds described by those with access to the scene point not to opportunistic violence, but to a killing that was planned, sustained and deeply personal.
His family has called on the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to ensure full transparency in its inquiry and to provide them with regular updates on the progress of the case.
They want to know why a man who answered a phone call in the course of his work ended up more than four hundred kilometres from home with injuries that suggest he was subjected to prolonged torture before death.
As investigations continue, one question repeats itself in every tribute, every post, every conversation in the Kisumu creative community: who wanted Joe Miles dead, and why?
– ‘About 50 million barrels of Iranian crude are currently sitting offshore China and Malaysia, providing a supply cushion to any disruption,’ says Kpler analyst Matt Smith
– Halt in Iranian flows could force Chinese refiners to sharply cut processing rates or seek more expensive replacement crude on global markets, according to Argus Media analyst Tom Reed
Tensions in the Middle East have pushed oil prices higher and cast new uncertainty over Iranian crude flows, a development that experts say could ripple through China’s refining sector just as another key source of discounted oil, Venezuela, becomes increasingly constrained.
China is the world’s largest crude oil importer, bringing in roughly 11.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2025, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University. Analysts estimate that around 2.6 million bdp of these imports consist of discounted or sanctioned crude, including approximately 1.38 million bpd from Iran, making Tehran one of China’s most significant external suppliers.
These discounted barrels have become particularly important for independent refiners, often referred to as “teapot” refineries, which operate largely in the eastern province of Shandong. Unlike large state-owned companies, these installations typically rely on lower-cost crude supplies to remain competitive in domestic fuel markets.
But the supply cushion is now under pressure from two directions. Iran’s exports face growing risks as its war with Israel and the US escalates, while shipments from Venezuela – another key source of heavy discounted crude for Chinese refiners – have already begun to shrink after Washington captured President Nicolas Maduro and diverted Venezuelan oil toward American markets.
Iranian crude flows provide critical supply
Despite the potential risks, as Iran faces large-scale US-Israel attacks, including strikes on oil depots, analysts say China’s supply chain currently includes buffers that could mitigate the immediate impact of any disruption.
Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at energy analytics firm Kpler, said a significant volume of Iranian crude is already positioned near China in storage or transit. “About 50 million barrels of Iranian crude are currently sitting offshore China and Malaysia, providing a supply cushion to any disruption,” Smith told Anadolu.
He added that Iran increased shipments ahead of the recent escalation in the Middle East, meaning additional cargoes are already en route to Chinese buyers.
These barrels could help Chinese refiners manage short-term supply disruptions if exports from Iran were temporarily interrupted.
Smith, however, added that refiners have already begun adjusting their crude sourcing strategies amid shifting market conditions.
“China has increasingly been pulling in more Russian crude in recent months, given growing discounts as India has dialed back purchases,” he said.
According to him, Russia has become the leading supplier for Shandong since late last year, overtaking Iran as refiners search for alternative discounted barrels.
Middle Eastern supply routes remain key
While disruptions to Iranian exports would affect certain refiners, analysts say the larger concern lies in the stability of Middle Eastern supply routes, including the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively closed to oil shipping due to the war.
Smith said that nearly half of China’s seaborne crude imports originate from the Middle East, making the region a critical pillar of its energy security.
“Supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz are a much, much bigger issue than the loss of Venezuelan crude,” he said.
The strait carries about 20% of the world’s oil shipments and is considered one of the most important energy chokepoints. Any sustained disruption could affect not only Iranian exports but also shipments from other major Gulf producers that supply Asian markets.
Independent refineries most exposed
The most immediate effects of any Iranian supply disruption would likely be felt by independent refineries clustered in eastern China.
Tom Reed, China crude analyst at Argus Media, said these facilities depend heavily on Iranian oil as a core part of their feedstock mix.
“Shandong independent refineries process around 2.5 million bpd of crude, so Iranian supplies are absolutely central to their operations,” Reed told Anadolu. “It would be extremely difficult for the teapots to replace the 1.3 million bpd of Iranian crude they currently receive.”
These refiners have historically relied on discounted crude from sanctioned producers to remain profitable in a competitive domestic market. In recent years, Iranian supplies have become one of the most important components of that strategy.
Limited alternatives for refiners
If Iranian flows were interrupted, Reed said independent refiners would face difficult choices in securing replacement supplies.
“They would either have to cut runs drastically or compete in the global market for replacement grades,” he said.
Before 2022, Shandong refiners were among the largest buyers of Brazilian crude, which could once again become an alternative source if Iranian shipments were disrupted.
However, Reed said, switching to those supplies would come with a significant cost increase.
“That would mean accepting costs of around $15 per barrel higher than what they currently face,” he said.
Such a price increase could quickly erode refining margins, particularly for smaller facilities that already operate on relatively thin profit margins.
Potential refinery run cuts
Reed said the loss of discounted Iranian and Venezuelan crude could force refiners to adjust their operating rates.
“Both refinery run cuts and potential shutdowns are likely if discounted Iranian and Venezuelan crude becomes unavailable,” he said.
Lower refinery runs could then tighten fuel supply in domestic markets and push prices higher. “This would force up prices for gasoline and diesel in China,” Reed added.
But structural changes in China’s transport sector may limit the long-term impact of higher fuel prices.
Demand for gasoline and diesel has already been gradually declining as electric vehicles and alternative fuel technologies expand across the world’s second-largest economy.
“Demand for both fuels is currently being destroyed at the rate of about 200,000 bpd each year due to increasing use of electric vehicles and electric or gas-fueled trucking,” Reed said.
Petrochemicals likely less affected
Despite potential pressure on fuel markets, analysts say China’s petrochemical sector is less exposed to disruptions affecting independent refineries.
According to Reed, much of China’s petrochemical feedstock is supplied through large state-owned companies rather than independent refiners.
While Shandong refiners produce some petrochemical products such as ethylene and aromatics, the majority of China’s output comes from major state-owned firms or specialized cracking facilities that process imported naphtha.
As a result, disruptions affecting discounted crude supplies would likely have a greater impact on transport fuels than on petrochemical production.
Despite the potential risks associated with Iranian supply disruptions, analysts note that China maintains a relatively diversified crude import portfolio compared with many other Asian economies.
“China is the largest single market for Brazilian crude, West African crude and Canadian crude, giving it more supply options than other countries in the region,” Reed said.
NAIROBI, Kenya Mar 9 – Residents of Kahuro in Kiharu Constituency witnessed an unusual standoff on Monday after government administrators failed to attend the official opening of a newly built Assistant County Commissioner’s office presided over by area MP Ndindi Nyoro.
The new Kahuro Assistant County Commissioner (ACC) offices were launched in a ceremony attended by local residents, but the absence of the administrators expected to work from the facility cast a shadow over the event.
Sources indicated that the officials who had initially been scheduled to attend the launch reportedly stayed away after receiving instructions from senior authorities not to participate in the ceremony.
According to the sources, the administrators cited receiving “orders from above” directing them not to attend the event or formally take up the office.
Despite the absence of the officials, Nyoro went ahead with the opening ceremony, saying the facility was ready to serve residents of the area.
The event briefly turned dramatic when police officers arrived at the venue and attempted to stop the proceedings, prompting protests from residents who had gathered for the launch.
Nyoro criticised what he described as attempts to frustrate development efforts in the constituency.
“This office is ready to serve the residents. There were issues here and there. I want to tell those people, they are seeing us quiet but they should not forget who we are. Those who had sent the officers, next time don’t send them come face me one on one,” he said.
Residents confronted the officers, forcing them to withdraw from the venue before the ceremony continued.
The boycott by administrators mirrors a similar incident last year in Murang’a County, when several chiefs and police officers failed to attend another handover ceremony organised by Nyoro in the Mjini area of Kiharu.
That project involved the opening of another administration block funded through the National Government Constituencies Development Fund.
Following the latest incident, Nyoro dismissed the absence of the officials as an attempt to undermine his work, insisting he would continue pursuing development initiatives for his constituents.
In recent months, the Kiharu legislator has appeared to distance himself from the agenda of the ruling Kenya Kwanza Alliance, instead highlighting programmes aimed at improving education and social support in the constituency.
Among the initiatives he has announced is a plan to provide free primary education for learners in Kiharu. Secondary school students are also required to pay only Sh500 in school fees, while all learners benefit from a free lunch programme supported by the constituency leadership.
Israeli military images of an underground tunnel complex attributed to Ali Khamenei appear to confirm long-circulating rumors of a network stretching several kilometers beneath central Tehran, under medical centers, schools, and residential neighborhoods.
On March 5, shortly after heavy strikes targeted areas near the Pasteur government complex in central Tehran – a district that houses the Iranian presidency and several key government offices – the Israeli military published a video depicting what it described as Khamenei’s underground bunker system.
The complex resembles a subterranean city. According to the video and accompanying imagery, the facility appears to have been used as a secure shelter for Iran’s leadership and may still be used by remaining officials following Khamenei’s death.
A tunnel network stretching nearly five kilometers
Analysis of the imagery released by the Israeli military, using publicly available online mapping tools, suggests the tunnel network extends close to five kilometers in length.
To understand the scale of the project, it helps to compare it with ordinary infrastructure construction in Tehran.
According to statements by Tehran mayor Alireza Zakani and members of the Tehran City Council, building one kilometer of metro tunnel in Tehran currently costs between 5,000 and 6,000 billion tomans – roughly $30-36 million at an exchange rate of about 166,000 tomans per dollar.
This estimate covers only the excavation and structural work. It does not include interior finishing, equipment, ventilation systems, or other underground facilities.
Based on those figures, building five kilometers of underground tunnel would cost about 25,000 to 30,000 billion tomans, or roughly $150-180 million.
Given the secrecy and security requirements surrounding such a project, the actual cost was likely significantly higher than that of a standard transportation tunnel.
Under normal conditions, tunneling contractors in Tehran can excavate around 10 meters per day. At that pace, building a five-kilometer tunnel system would take at least 500 days – roughly 17 months.
Considering the classified nature of the project and the additional infrastructure involved, the construction timeline may have been considerably longer.
The core of the complex: beneath a medical facility
The video appears to place the central section of the bunker complex southwest of the presidential compound in the Pasteur district.
The site sits directly beneath the Shahid Shourideh Medical Center, a clinic affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Agriculture. The facility has operated since 1985 and effectively functions as part of the broader Pasteur government complex.
Based on the height of vehicle ramps and the dimensions of vehicles visible in the imagery, the central installation appears to be located 40 to 50 meters underground.
From there, the tunnel system extends northwest toward another entrance near the end of Rajabi Street, roughly 200 meters from the Shourideh hospital complex.
Shahid Shourideh Medical Center, which is affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Agriculture, sits above what appears to be the main core of Khamenei’s bunker complex, estimated to be 40 to 50 meters underground.
Easternmost entrance: next to an elementary school
The easternmost known entrance to the tunnel network appears to be located in the Sheikh Hadi neighborhood, along Valiasr Street, beneath the Jami multi-story parking garage.
This parking structure stands directly beside Hejrat Girls’ Elementary School, while Saheb a-Zaman Boys’ Elementary School lies about 100 meters away.
At the northern edge of the network sits another multi-story garage known as the 12 Farvardin Parking Complex, located near the intersection of Jomhouri Eslami Street and Danesh Street.
Both parking structures were inaugurated on December 4, 2017, as part of a paired urban development project attended by Tehran’s then-mayor Mohammad Najafi.
One entrance to the tunnel network appears to lie beneath a building opposite the Karimeh Ahl-e Beit clinic near Hor Square in central Tehran.
An entrance beneath a mosque, beside a school
Another entrance appears west of Pasteur Square, between Hor Metro Station and the square itself.
This access point lies beneath Tohid Mosque. Adjacent to the mosque is a building, and behind it stands Shahid Kadkhodaei Boys’ Elementary School.
Roughly 200 meters away, another possible entrance is located on the southwestern side of Pasteur Square, along a street that houses the AJA University of Command and Staff – the staff college of the Islamic Republic of Iran Army.
Nearby are the Karimeh Ahl-e Beit dental clinic and medical clinic, as well as the 29 Farvardin Pharmacy, which is affiliated with Iran’s army.
The easternmost entrance to the tunnel complex appears to lie beneath the Jami multi-story parking garage, directly next to Hejrat Girls’ Elementary School.
Western entrance beside a football school
The westernmost identified entrance to the tunnel network appears to lie beneath a small building near an office responsible for issuing hunting weapon permits.
Immediately next to the building, sharing a wall, is a football training school, while dense residential complexes surround the area.
This location sits near the intersection of Sepah and Kamali streets, along Kashan Street, at the end of Fourth Street.
The tunnels also lie close to the Yas and Namjou residential complexes, which are affiliated with the Iranian army.
One of the entrances to the tunnel network appears to lie beneath a mosque next to Shahid Kadkhodaei Boys’ Elementary School.
The National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) is preparing to fundamentally change how traffic laws are enforced in Kenya, rolling out an automated system designed to detect violations, instantly notify offenders, and impose fines without the need for roadside cash transactions.
The new regime introduces instant penalties ranging from KSh500 to KSh10,000, targeting dozens of common offences committed by motorists, motorcycle riders, PSV operators and even pedestrians.
At the centre of the new enforcement system is a nationwide network of surveillance technology. Authorities plan to deploy 700 fixed traffic cameras and 300 mobile camera units along highways, urban roads and accident-prone corridors.
These devices will automatically detect violations such as speeding, driving on pedestrian paths, or ignoring traffic signs. Once a violation is captured, the footage will be transmitted to a National Command and Control Centre, where it will be processed in real time.
The system will then generate a digital offence record linked to the driver’s second-generation Smart Driving Licence (e-DL). From there, the registered vehicle owner or driver will receive a notification of the violation and the fine due.
Motorists will be able to pay the penalties electronically through mobile money platforms, banking channels, USSD codes, or a digital driving licence wallet. The move is meant to eliminate roadside cash payments and reduce bribery, which anti-corruption investigators have long identified as a major problem in traffic enforcement.
Kenya’s road safety record has deteriorated sharply in recent years, with fatalities rising from 3,875 deaths in 2019 to more than 5,100 by 2024, according to road safety data. Authorities say weak enforcement, corruption and limited surveillance tools have allowed dangerous driving habits to flourish.
The automated system is part of a long-term project expected to run for 21 years under a public-private partnership valued at roughly KSh42 billion, aimed at restoring discipline on Kenyan roads.
Highest Instant Fines — Up to KSh10,000
The most serious traffic offences attract the highest penalties.
Drivers will face KSh10,000 fines for offences including:
Driving without identification number plates.
Operating a vehicle without a valid inspection certificate.
Exceeding speed limits by 16–20 km/h or more.
Causing obstruction by leaving a vehicle blocking traffic.
PSV operators employing unlicensed drivers or conductors.
Common Traffic Offences and Penalties
The NTSA schedule lists 37 minor traffic offences and their corresponding fines.
Some of the most common include:
Speeding
Exceeding limit by 1–5 km/h: Warning.
6–10 km/h: KSh500.
11–15 km/h: KSh3,000.
16–20 km/h or more: KSh10,000.
Driving and Road Conduct
Driving on a pedestrian walkway: KSh5,000.
Failure to obey traffic signs: KSh3,000.
Failure to obey police directions: KSh3,000.
Failure to stop when ordered by police: KSh5,000.
Using a mobile phone while driving: KSh2,000.
Vehicle Compliance
Failure to carry a driving licence: KSh1,000.
Failure to renew a driving licence: KSh1,000.
Failure to wear a seat belt: KSh500.
Failure to install seat belts in a vehicle: KSh1,000 per seat.
Failure to carry reflective warning triangles: KSh2,000.
PSV and Matatu-Specific Offences
Public Service Vehicle operators face additional penalties aimed at tightening discipline in the sector.
Some of the key offences include:
Driving a PSV while unqualified: KSh5,000.
Employing an unlicensed driver or conductor: KSh10,000.
Driver or conductor failing to wear badge or uniform: KSh2,000.
Operating a PSV with tinted windows: KSh3,000.
Failure to install a speed governor: KSh10,000.
Picking or dropping passengers at unauthorized locations: KSh3,000.
Motorcycle riders will also face penalties, including KSh1,000 fines for riding without protective gear or carrying more than one passenger.
Pedestrians Not Spared
Even pedestrians fall under the new enforcement regime. Anyone found wilfully obstructing vehicles on the road can be fined KSh500, while passengers boarding or alighting vehicles at unauthorized points may face KSh1,000 penalties.
Officials say the automated system is intended to remove discretion from roadside enforcement and replace it with data-driven policing.
By linking violations directly to digital driver records and automated fines, authorities hope to close loopholes that have long enabled bribery, ignored offences and inconsistent enforcement.
For motorists across Kenya, the message is clear: once the cameras go live, every lane change, speed surge or illegal stop could be recorded — and the fine may arrive before the driver even reaches home.
When the Communications Authority of Kenya quietly confirmed that it has opened a formal review of Airtel Kenya’s application to introduce Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellite service, the announcement arrived with the understated tone of routine regulatory administration. It was anything but.
Beneath the procedural language of frequency coordination and interference thresholds sits one of the most consequential contests in Kenya’s telecoms history: who controls the invisible architecture of digital connectivity, and on whose terms does the next generation of internet access get built.
The answers to those questions are being written right now, in meetings between regulator and operator, in the corridors of Parliament, and in the strategic rooms of a company that has spent decades turning market dominance into institutional permanence.
“The satellites act as cell towers in space. Any 4G smartphone can connect. No extra hardware. No fibre contract. No incumbent.” That is the proposition Safaricom spent 2024 trying to bury.
Airtel Africa announced in December 2025 that it had signed a partnership with SpaceX to roll out Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell technology across all 14 of its African markets beginning 2026.
The service works by equipping satellites in low Earth orbit with evolved Node B modems, the same radio equipment used in conventional 4G towers, enabling standard smartphones to connect directly to satellites when terrestrial coverage is unavailable. No satellite dish. No specialised device. Just a sky view and a compatible handset.
The initial rollout covers text messaging and basic data for select applications, with voice capability and broadband-grade speeds on a roadmap through 2028.
The CA confirmed to the media that it has received a formal application from Airtel Networks Kenya Limited and that discussions are ongoing.
The regulator says its primary technical concern is the potential for harmful interference: transmissions from higher-power low Earth orbit satellites can degrade noise levels in the licensed spectrum bands used by ground-based 3G, 4G and 5G networks. It is a legitimate engineering problem.
It is also the kind of argument that has, in the Kenyan market, a habit of being deployed as cover for competitive resistance.
THE LETTER THAT STARTED IT ALL
Rewind to July 2024. Safaricom’s director for broadband services, Tom Waithaka, put his name to a formal submission to the CA that, had it succeeded, would have fundamentally altered Starlink’s position in Kenya.
The letter, later leaked and reported by multiple outlets including this publication, argued that satellite coverage inherently extends across territorial borders and, in the absence of effective management, could provide services illegally and cause harmful interference to mobile networks. Safaricom’s prescription was precise: satellite internet providers should not be granted independent operating licences. They should instead be classified as infrastructure providers, permitted only to operate through partnerships with existing local licensees.
The argument was dressed in regulatory language, but its commercial logic was transparent. Starlink had entered the Kenyan market in July 2023 and had immediately disrupted the pricing structure that local operators, Safaricom chief among them, had spent years calibrating.
The entry price for a Starlink kit was initially steep at Sh89,000, but the American firm moved aggressively, slashing terminal costs to Sh45,500 and introducing monthly rental options at Sh1,950, making it genuinely accessible to a swelling middle class that had grown restless with the quality and cost of terrestrial broadband.
Monthly data packages entered the market as low as Sh1,300, a figure that put competitive pressure on the entire local ISP sector.
The CA, to its credit, held its ground. It told the court handling a parallel challenge brought by rights group Kituo Cha Sheria that it viewed Safaricom’s submission as the position of a market participant with a direct commercial interest, and that it was not bound to act on it.
The regulator noted that Safaricom was, in the court’s own language, directly prejudiced by its market dominance and likely apprehensive about the entry of new players.
That was then. In August 2024, Safaricom’s subscriber-growth machine was still running at pace. Its market share stood north of 65 percent. M-Pesa was the unrivalled architecture of Kenyan mobile money. The company could afford to fight.
THE EROSION BEGINS
Eighteen months later, the numbers tell a different story. Safaricom’s mobile subscriber market share has slid in consecutive quarters, falling from 65.7 percent in September 2024 to 64.4 percent by the end of 2024 and further to 63.3 percent in the first quarter of 2025.
In the same period, Airtel Kenya added nearly three million new subscribers, lifting its share to a record 32.2 percent.
Airtel Money, the company’s mobile wallet, punched through to double-digit market share for the first time, squeezing an M-Pesa platform that has now spent six consecutive quarters losing ground, even as it still commands around 90 percent of the mobile money market.
The competitive strain does not end at subscriber numbers. In March 2026, the CA implemented a further reduction in mobile termination rates, cutting the interconnection fee that operators charge each other for completing calls from Sh0.41 to Sh0.37 per minute.
The revision is the latest in a series of phased reductions that have compressed an income stream Safaricom has historically relied upon.
In the year ending March 2025, the company collected Sh4.7 billion in interconnection revenue, down from Sh5 billion the year before, itself a decline from the higher figures that prevailed before prior regulatory reviews.
Safaricom is the net beneficiary of termination fees precisely because it is the largest network: when the regulator trims the rate, the biggest network absorbs the largest absolute loss.
The company has been open about its anxiety. In its most recent regulatory filings, Safaricom listed market disruption and competition among its top ten strategic risks, a disclosure that would have been unthinkable five years ago for a company that then appeared structurally immune to challenge.
Its response to the competitive pressure has been partly technical, partly reactive. In September 2024, weeks after the Starlink-driven pricing panic, Safaricom quietly upgraded speeds on its home fibre packages to stem subscriber flight. It worked temporarily. But the structural arithmetic has not changed.
Mobile data revenue has now overtaken voice revenue for the first time in Safaricom’s history, reaching Sh44.4 billion in the half-year to September 2025, an 18 percent increase.
That figure looks impressive until one considers that data pricing is under perpetual downward pressure from Airtel, which charges less for comparable bundles, and from Starlink, which is redefining what affordable broadband looks like in areas beyond the fibre grid.
A Direct-to-Cell service that brings satellite broadband to any standard smartphone, without infrastructure investment by the subscriber, threatens the one revenue pool that Safaricom has successfully grown while voice and interconnection decline.
Data is now Safaricom’s beating heart. A space-based competitor that can reach every corner of Kenya without a single fibre cable is not a nuisance. It is an existential variable.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF CAPTURE
Safaricom’s July 2024 letter was not the company’s first attempt to shape the competitive environment through regulatory channels rather than product competition.
The company has a documented history of engaging regulators, courts and government when new entrants threaten its ecosystem. It opposed the attempted merger of Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya on grounds of spectrum rebalancing and debt obligations. When Starlink introduced rental options and slashed kit prices in mid-2024, Safaricom’s submission to the CA arrived within weeks.
What makes the Starlink episode distinctive is that it activated the entire weight of the regulatory apparatus simultaneously.
Starlink.
The CA turned to the International Telecommunication Union for a global framework rather than applying existing Kenyan rules, effectively delaying a definitive regulatory posture.
A court case brought by Kituo Cha Sheria to defend Starlink’s independent operation was met with the CA arguing that the NGO’s suit was a proxy for Starlink’s commercial interests. The government, meanwhile, was simultaneously pursuing a registration and identity verification drive targeting Starlink subscribers specifically.
That verification requirement, announced in February 2026 under the Kenya Information and Communications (Registration of Telecommunications Service Subscribers) Regulations 2025, mandates that all Starlink users complete in-person identity verification at an authorised retailer by April 30, 2026, or face service interruption.
Starlink is required to collect national identity cards, postal addresses and phone numbers of each subscriber and authenticate them against the National Integrated Population Registration System. The consequence of non-compliance is deactivation.
The CA frames the requirement as routine extension of Kenya’s Know Your Customer framework to satellite services. The language of security and fraud prevention runs through every official statement on the matter.
But the practical effect is to eliminate one of the structural advantages that had made Starlink attractive to a specific and significant segment of Kenyan subscribers: those who had, after the events of 2024, become acutely conscious of what their digital footprint meant.
THE SURVEILLANCE DIMENSION
The year 2024 was, for Kenya, a year of rupture. Gen Z-led protests against the Finance Bill brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets in June and July, producing one of the most consequential political upheavals of the Ruto administration.
The government’s response involved police live fire that killed dozens.
It also, according to investigations by the Daily Nation, Nairobi-based journalist Namir Shabibi and international outlet The Continent, involved the systematic use of subscriber data by security agencies.
The investigation, published in October 2024, alleged that Safaricom had allowed security agencies routine access to call data records and location data without court orders, assisting in the tracking and capture of individuals linked to the protest movement.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission and Muslims for Human Rights wrote a formal open letter to Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa detailing specific allegations: that the company had facilitated the handling of call data records by police attached to its own Law Enforcement Liaison Office, creating a conflict of interest in which the accused agency controlled access to evidence of its own conduct; that it had produced records bearing signs of manipulation before courts; that it had retained data it claimed had been deleted; and that it had, in partnership with Neural Technologies Limited, developed a software system granting security agencies what the rights groups described as virtually unfettered access to subscriber data.
The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented more than 80 cases of abductions and enforced disappearances following the protests.
Activists who had been targeted publicly said they had abandoned their Safaricom lines in an effort to evade tracking, encouraging others to do the same. US Ambassador Meg Whitman weighed in, describing the mobile phone surveillance by security agents as a breach of privacy.
Safaricom denied the allegations categorically.
CEO Ndegwa said during the company’s half-year results presentation that the reports were inaccurate and that sharing subscriber data without a court order would produce chaos in the business.
The company noted its ISO 27701 certification from the British Standards Institute for privacy information management. Its lawyers filed a complaint against Nation Media Group with the Media Council Complaints Commission, alleging that the publication had violated the journalism code of conduct.
Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa.
The Senate launched an ICT committee probe. Senators demanded to know whether Safaricom had a data-sharing agreement with the government and whether subscribers had been informed. The answers were never definitively provided.
What the episode established, beyond reasonable dispute, is that Kenyan security agencies regard telco subscriber data as an operational asset, that the legal framework governing access to that data is porous and contested, and that the established operators, whether by design or systemic pressure, have operated within a surveillance ecosystem that serves state objectives.
Against that backdrop, Starlink’s architecture represented something genuinely disruptive that had nothing to do with data speeds or pricing.
A satellite operator headquartered in the United States, routing traffic through a constellation in low Earth orbit, does not sit inside the reach of the Law Enforcement Liaison Office.
Accessing subscriber data from Starlink requires going through Starlink, which means navigating American corporate governance, US federal law and SpaceX’s own policy frameworks. For anyone who had spent 2024 watching their compatriots disappear after their calls were traced, that was not an abstract distinction.
Joseph Khago, a Nairobi-based IT specialist, framed the implications of the KYC mandate with characteristic directness when speaking to this publication.
Without the registration requirement, he noted, authorities seeking to identify a Starlink user from an IP address would have to go through the company itself. The new regulations give the government more control.
What he did not need to add is that they simultaneously diminish one of the most significant practical privacy advantages that satellite broadband had offered to ordinary Kenyan internet users.
Starlink’s architecture bypassed the surveillance architecture that terrestrial operators had spent a decade building with, and sometimes for, the Kenyan state. The KYC mandate closes that gap.
PEACE IN OUR TIME
Safaricom’s formal posture toward Starlink changed with conspicuous speed once the competitive arithmetic shifted. By late September 2024, CEO Ndegwa was telling interviewers that the company was open to discussions with satellite providers and viewed their technology as complementary.
In November 2025, Safaricom’s parent company Vodacom signed a continent-wide agreement with SpaceX authorising Vodacom and its subsidiaries, including Safaricom, to resell Starlink’s satellite internet equipment and services to enterprise and small business customers across Africa.
The deal was announced as a strategic evolution. In operational terms it is more accurately described as absorption: Safaricom gains a distribution relationship with the disruptor, integrating satellite backhaul into its network to reach remote areas without the capital cost of new towers, while Starlink gains a distribution partner with 50 million subscribers and a retail infrastructure that extends to the furthest reaches of the country.
Both sides benefit. But the dynamic is not symmetrical. Safaricom retains control of the customer relationship, the billing relationship and the data relationship. Starlink enters as a supplier.
The Airtel deal is structurally different, and that difference explains everything.
Where Safaricom’s Starlink integration uses satellites to relay data between remote towers and the core network, the Direct-to-Cell arrangement turns the satellite into the tower. The customer connects directly to the sky.
There is no Airtel-controlled data path in a dead zone; the connection is established between handset and satellite, with Airtel providing the licensed LTE spectrum that makes the integration legal.
This is the architecture that Safaricom’s 2024 letter was specifically designed to prevent. It is the model that was, in the language of that letter, too risky to license independently.
Airtel, of course, is not Starlink operating independently. It is a licensed Kenyan mobile operator using licensed Kenyan spectrum to partner with a satellite provider.
That is precisely the model Safaricom claimed to want: satellite as infrastructure, working through a local operator.
The irony is that the local operator enabling it is Safaricom’s most aggressive competitor. Airtel Kenya CEO Ashish Malhotra has not been coy about the strategic ambition.
The promise that every Airtel customer in every corner of Kenya will get coverage the day approval comes is not just a connectivity statement. It is a competitive declaration addressed to a market leader whose rural reach has been one of its most durable advantages.
THE REGULATOR’S TIGHTROPE
The CA’s position in this contest is genuinely difficult, and there is reason to believe that the current review reflects something more than procedural caution. The interference concern is real: the GSMA, the ITU and independent telecoms analysts have all noted that high-power LEO satellite transmissions in flexible-use spectrum bands can degrade noise floors in ground networks. The CA will need to model signal propagation, assess the satellite constellation’s orbital parameters and determine operational conditions that protect existing licensees. That work takes time and requires technical capacity.
What complicates the picture is that the CA’s track record on Starlink regulation has shown a consistent tendency to move slowly in ways that favour incumbents.
The ITU referral in 2024 was cited by some industry observers as a means of deferring a decision that would otherwise have required the regulator to either grant or deny Starlink’s operating model explicitly.
Safaricom is itself a partial government asset, with the Kenyan state holding a stake through the National Treasury alongside Vodacom and Vodafone. The institutional relationships that flow from that ownership structure do not require conspiracy to function as competitive cushioning.
Airtel Kenya has a record of filing competition complaints against Safaricom over regulatory processes.
In the LTE licensing process of the mid-2010s, Airtel and Telkom Kenya both raised objections about the manner in which the 4G licence was awarded to Safaricom. That grievance was never resolved in a manner satisfactory to the smaller operators. The frequency rebalancing dispute that Safaricom cited in opposing the Airtel-Telkom merger was, in the view of Airtel’s lawyers, precisely the kind of regulatory asymmetry that entrenches dominance under the cover of technical administration.
The CA has, under the current government, moved to address at least one dimension of competitive imbalance.
The reduction in mobile termination rates, opposed strenuously by Safaricom and implemented over its objections, is a structural intervention designed to reduce the automatic income advantage that accrues to the largest network.
The logic of the Airtel-Starlink review should, in principle, run along similar lines: a technology that demonstrably extends coverage into underserved areas, using a licensed operator and licensed spectrum, should face a clear regulatory path.
Whether it will is the question that the market, and Safaricom’s board, is watching with intense interest.
WHAT A DECISION WOULD MEAN
The CA’s approval of the Airtel-Starlink Direct-to-Cell service would reshape the competitive landscape in ways that cannot be contained by Safaricom’s current countermeasures.
The technology does not require terrestrial infrastructure in the areas it covers. It reduces the capital cost of extending coverage to rural and pastoral regions, which have been the most durable source of Safaricom’s network advantage.
An Airtel customer in a dead zone who can send a text, access emergency services or use a data application directly via satellite is no longer captive to whoever owns the nearest tower.
The data pricing implications are potentially more significant still. Direct-to-Cell is initially limited in bandwidth capacity per satellite, but the roadmap that Airtel and SpaceX have publicly committed to includes next-generation satellites with data speeds described as twenty times greater than the first generation.
If that roadmap executes on schedule, the service moves from a coverage solution for dead zones to a competitive broadband product for anyone with sky visibility.
In a country where Safaricom’s mobile data revenue has become the primary growth engine, a satellite-delivered alternative that bypasses the terrestrial network is not a fringe concern. It is a core revenue threat.
Starlink’s current position in Kenya’s fixed internet market, at 0.8 percent with roughly 19,470 subscribers, understates its competitive trajectory. The company grew at more than 2,500 percent between its entry and December 2024.
The KYC mandate, the CA’s regulatory pace and the absence of a Direct-to-Cell approval have collectively dampened that growth. Remove those constraints and the growth dynamics change. Add a distribution partner with Airtel’s subscriber base and agent network, and the dynamics change again, at Safaricom’s direct expense.
CONCLUSION: THE SATELLITE AND THE STATE
Kenya’s satellite internet story is not, at its core, a story about technology. It is a story about power: who holds it, who extends it, and who is threatened when the underlying architecture of connectivity shifts in ways that cannot be controlled from the top of the existing hierarchy.
Safaricom spent 2024 attempting to use the regulatory system to slow a competitor whose fundamental business model challenged the proposition that you need a tower, a cable and a licensed operator in your vicinity to get online.
It failed to stop Starlink’s entry, but it succeeded in framing the terms of Starlink’s integration into the Kenyan ecosystem in ways that preserve the data relationship between subscribers and a state that has demonstrated it regards that relationship as an operational resource.
The Airtel partnership now tests whether the CA is willing to approve a Direct-to-Cell model that, if it scales as its architects intend, materially changes the competitive landscape for the dominant operator and, as a consequence, changes the surveillance arithmetic for a state whose security agencies have shown a persistent appetite for subscriber data from within the country’s borders.
That is not a regulatory question with a clean technical answer. It is a political and commercial question dressed in the language of spectrum management.
The CA has said it is reviewing the application. The market is watching the clock.
He sensed it. For weeks before the night they finally caught up with him, Kasipul Member of Parliament Charles Ong’ondo Were had been telling anyone who would listen that his life was in danger. He had gone to the police. He had told his colleagues. He had said it to the media. Yet when darkness fell over Nairobi on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, and his white Toyota Crown turned off Parliament Road into the evening traffic, the danger was not approaching from outside — it was already seated inside the car with him.
Now, months after the fatal shots rang out near the City Mortuary roundabout along Valley Road, a devastating new exposé by KTN News has given Kenya its most detailed and harrowing account yet of how the plot unfolded. The broadcaster obtained exclusive CCTV footage spanning multiple cameras across Nairobi’s inner city — footage that, frame by chilling frame, shows the MP’s bodyguard not as his last line of defence, but as the door through which his killers walked.
“The bodyguard allegedly abused his position of trust to deliver the MP into the hands of his executioners.”
Senior Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Gikui Gichuhi did not mince words when she opened the State’s case before High Court Judge Lady Justice Diana Kavedza at Kibera High Court in February 2026. The killing of Ong’ondo Were, she told the court, was the result of a carefully orchestrated conspiracy. One suspect was the overall mastermind who ordered and financed the operation. Another supplied the murder weapon. A hired gunman pulled the trigger. And the bodyguard, Allan Omondi Ogola, delivered the MP to all of them.
A DAY THAT BEGAN AS ANY OTHER
The CCTV record of April 30, 2025 begins innocuously enough. At 8:37am, Were’s white Toyota Crown, registration KDM 783A, was captured entering Bunge Towers — Parliament’s administrative complex. The MP had a full legislative day ahead. Kenya’s Finance Bill 2025 was on the table, and the National Assembly was humming with political tension. A continent away from that tension, in a restaurant along Kimathi Street, two men were eating lunch and watching the parliamentary proceedings on a screen. They were not watching for the Finance Bill. They were watching for the moment the Speaker would rise to close the day’s business and send Charles Ong’ondo Were into the street.
At 3:14pm, as the afternoon began its slow slide toward evening, a vehicle bearing registration number KAZ 645Z entered the cameras’ field of view near the Parliament roundabout, approaching from Harambee Avenue. It was accompanied by a motorcycle. The two moved together with a practiced coordination that had nothing to do with ordinary Nairobi traffic — making deliberate loops around Parliament Lane, doubling back along Harambee Avenue, the motorcycle maintaining close proximity to the car at all times.
At 3:18pm, a man identified in court as the co-driver of KAZ stepped out near Equity Bank. He wore a checked long-sleeved shirt, blue trousers and brownish shoes. He carried a sling bag. He paused, entered the Equity Bank parking area, spoke briefly with the motorcycle rider, and returned to the car. Eleven minutes later, at 3:29pm, the same exchange was captured inside Equity Bank parking. The two men were coordinating. County Hall cameras then caught the sling-bag suspect pacing near Parliament’s entrance, crossing the road, making phone calls, watching.
KDM 783A, meanwhile, sat parked near Family Bank along Parliament Road. Were was still inside Bunge Towers. It would be another four hours before he emerged. Four hours in which the killing machine around him tightened its formation.
THE BODYGUARD BOARDS LAST
At 4:09pm, KAZ 645Z found parking. The sling-bag suspect stepped out again, walked toward Family Bank, lingered for several minutes, and returned. The waiting was meticulous, professional, unhurried. These were men who had done this before — or men who had been told exactly what they were doing and by whom.
Then came the moment that would stand as the most damning single image in this entire investigation. At 7:15pm, with the evening already darkening over Nairobi, CCTV cameras captured a man in a suit running after KDM 783A in Ukulima House parking. That man was Allan Omondi Ogola — the MP’s own bodyguard, one of the accused persons now facing a murder charge at Kibera High Court. He caught the car. He climbed in.
Moments later, KDM exited through the DCI gate and drove to Parliament to collect Were at approximately 7:20pm. Almost simultaneously, KAZ 645Z left Equity Bank parking, while the sling-bag suspect positioned himself outside Parliament’s entrance, his face pointed at the door, waiting for the legislator to emerge.
“He fired four shots at close range. These shattered the window and went into Were’s hand and chest.”
At 7:24pm, Were’s vehicle left Parliament. It headed toward Holy Family Basilica roundabout. At the same instant, the sling-bag suspect mounted the waiting motorcycle, which immediately swung into pursuit along Parliament Road. KAZ 645Z, having already looped past the Senate gate, executed a U-turn at the Basilica roundabout at 7:26pm, now heading in the same direction as the MP’s vehicle — all three moving together through the Nairobi night like a dark and practiced tide.
THE M-PESA STOP THAT SEALED HIS FATE
On Wabera Street, footage from cameras mounted at the Standard Building recorded KDM pulling over near an M-Pesa shop at 7:35pm. A man in a suit — the bodyguard, investigators confirm — stepped out of the back seat and walked into the shop. He deposited Sh20,000 into Were’s phone. The M-Pesa attendant, who would later record a statement with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and furnish detectives with the shop’s own CCTV footage, watched the transaction without knowing she was a witness to the preamble of a murder.
Outside, on the street, the sling-bag suspect had dismounted from the motorcycle and walked toward the parked MP’s vehicle, donning a maroon beanie. He made phone calls. Then he walked away. The motorcycle idled. When KDM eventually pulled back into traffic and proceeded toward Kenyatta Avenue, the motorcycle resumed its pursuit. By 7:39pm, both vehicles were on Valley Road, heading toward Hurlingham roundabout. Were was sitting, in stark contradiction of all security protocols for VIPs, in the front passenger seat. His bodyguard sat behind him.
The assassins had long established this arrangement. They had been watching. They knew exactly which window to aim for.
SEVEN SECONDS ON VALLEY ROAD
Traffic backed up at the Nairobi Funeral Home roundabout — the chokehold the killers had been steering their target toward since 3:14pm that afternoon. At 7:40pm, KDM 783A was stationary. The motorcycle stopped alongside it. One man dismounted. He walked quickly to the front passenger door. He was wearing a balaclava now. He raised the weapon and fired four shots at point-blank range, shattering the window, the bullets entering Were’s hand and chest.
Hitman caught on CCTV in Nairobi streets as he trailed the MP
No sooner had the gunman turned back to the motorcycle than the rider gunned the engine, speeding back toward the city centre. The bodyguard, who was sitting directly behind the man he was supposed to protect, later told investigators that the shooting caught him completely unawares and that he had taken cover before giving chase — a statement the prosecution has treated with open scepticism given the mountain of CCTV evidence now placed before the court.
Were’s driver rushed him to Nairobi Hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival.
THE WEAPON, THE VEHICLE AND THE DIRTY MONEY
Ballistic investigators recovered a Sarsilmaz handgun and a Retay Falcon pistol linked to the murder, as well as to three prior armed robberies in Kiambu and Nairobi counties, the last occurring just days before Were’s death. The guns were not improvised street weapons. They were professional tools, part of an armoury that pointed to an organised criminal network with access to significant financial resources.
The vehicle KAZ 645Z, which had spent the entire afternoon of April 30 circling Parliament in pursuit of Were, was subsequently identified as a car that had previously belonged to an assistant police commissioner. It had changed hands for the suspiciously low price of Ksh 300,000 — a fraction of its market value.
That transaction left a digital trail so clean and so obvious that it has prompted serious questions among investigators and analysts alike: was the trail genuine, or was it deliberately lit, a controlled explosion designed to burn a specific figure within the security apparatus?
A search of suspect Edwin Oduor Odhiambo’s Nairobi residence produced two pistols with ammunition, five SIM cards, and multiple mobile phones now under forensic examination. At the home of William Imoli Shighali, another suspect, detectives found police uniforms, more than USD 4,800 in cash, and further mobile devices. In the home of suspect Juma Ali Hikal — an active Administration Police officer at the time of his arrest — investigators found ammunition and teargas canisters.
Preliminary police investigations established that meetings to plan the killing took place both in Nairobi and in Homa Bay County.
A deposit of Ksh 850,000 was paid to secure the hit squad’s services. Bodyguard Allan Ogola allegedly received Ksh 80,000 described as transport money, while both he and driver Walter Owino Awino were in constant communication with the planners before and after the murder.
Mobile phone triangulation placed all five original suspects in proximity to the crime corridor throughout the day.
THE STATE’S LONG SHADOW
The five charged before Kibera High Court are William Imoli alias Imo, Edwin Odour Odhiambo alias Machuani, Ebel Ochieng alias Dave Calo — a neighbour of Were’s in Kasipul, Homa Bay County, and a board member of the Lake Basin Development Authority — Isaac Kuria, and Allan Omondi Ogola, the bodyguard. All five have denied the charges. Two of them, Kuria and Ogola, were ordered to undergo mental assessments at Kamiti Prison before their trial could proceed.
Three suspects were denied bail after Ochieng allegedly threatened to kill the prosecutor handling the case — a development that sent a visible chill through the court.
The suspects in court.
But it is a name that does not appear on the charge sheet that has sent the loudest tremor through Kenya’s political class.
Embakasi East MP Babu Owino, went on KTN Prime and named Were’s main personal assistant, identified only as Calvince, as someone arrested in connection with planning the murder.
What made this allegation explosive was Babu Owino’s further claim: that Calvince had previously been employed at the Lake Basin Development Authority when it was headed by Raymond Omollo, who now serves as the Interior Principal Secretary.
“These things are being organised by the State. Are you aware that he was the one who was planning and executing the assassination of Ong’ondo Were?”
Omollo has not been charged. His office did not respond to inquiries by the time of publication. But the implication, made on national television by a sitting Member of Parliament, is one that has proved impossible to ignore — that the killing of Charles Ong’ondo Were was not merely a criminal conspiracy between a bodyguard, a hired gun and a few desperate men. It was, in the telling of those closest to it, a state-facilitated execution.
CCTVS ARE NOT ORNAMENTS
The Ong’ondo Were case has become, among other things, a landmark demonstration of what surveillance infrastructure — long dismissed in Kenya as decorative — can do when investigators choose to use it. Thousands of minutes of CCTV footage were reviewed. Cameras at Parliament, at Equity Bank parking, at the Standard Building on Wabera Street, at Valley Road businesses, at the Rubis petrol station in Hurlingham where the KAZ driver was captured pacing and making prolonged calls after the shooting — all of it assembled into a prosecution narrative that has left very little room for the accused to manoeuvre.
The chief inspector in charge of forensic imaging and acoustics testified at Kibera High Court that there was consistent interaction between the motorcycle rider, the driver and co-driver of KAZ across multiple locations, visible use of mobile phones, and synchronised stopovers at M-Pesa outlets and petrol stations along the MP’s route. The conclusion was direct: from 3:14pm to 7:40pm, the kill team moved with Were through the city as surely as his own shadow.
What the cameras could not capture — what no camera has ever captured — is the moment a man accepts money to betray the person whose life he is paid to guard. That moment happened somewhere in a hotel room, or across a table in Homa Bay, or in a quiet phone call on a night before the cameras switched on. The prosecution will attempt to reconstruct it through call data records, witness testimony and forensic analysis. Whether those threads lead all the way to the corridors of Interior Ministry headquarters remains the question that Kenya is now asking aloud.
A NATION WATCHES AND WAITS
Ong’ondo Were had publicly complained of threats to his life in February 2025. He had gone to the police. He had told Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga, who subsequently confirmed his concerns. He had been a marked man for months, and the machine that was marking him had been patient. When it finally moved, it moved in daylight, through the city, in a vehicle that had once belonged to a senior officer of the state, with a bodyguard holding the door open.
The trial continues before Justice Kavedza. The prosecution has promised further witnesses and further evidence.
Lead investigator Inspector Oliver Nabonwe has indicated that the probe extends to multiple counties and multiple scenes of crime not yet fully documented for court. Somewhere in those scenes, investigators believe, lie the fingerprints of whoever gave the final authorisation for what happened on Valley Road on the evening of April 30, 2025.
There is a Swahili proverb that Kenyans have been repeating since this story broke: Kikulacho ki nguoni mwako. The thing that devours you is within your own clothes. For Charles Ong’ondo Were, the man sitting behind him was not just within his clothes. He was holding the map to the ambush.
The cameras were watching. Every frame of what they saw is now in evidence. Whether justice will follow those frames to their logical conclusion — to whoever sits at the top of the chain that ordered, financed and directed this assassination — is the question that will define whether this nation’s institutions mean what they claim.
The Beverly Hills home of pop superstar Rihanna has been hit by gunfire, police say.
Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department responded to reports of gunfire at 13:15 local time (21:15 GMT) on Sunday. A suspect was located and taken into custody.
A police official told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that the home targeted belonged to Rihanna and that assault rifle casings were found at the scene.
No one was injured in the incident. Rihanna was in the mansion at the time, a law enforcement source told the Los Angeles Times.
Police say the suspect, a woman in her 30s, stopped in a car outside the home and fired seven shots before speeding away.
Her vehicle was located about eight miles (12km) away from the singer’s home, where the woman was taken into custody. She has not yet been publicly identified.
Last September the star gave birth to her third child, a girl, with partner A$AP Rocky.
The couple, who also share two sons Riot and RZA, announced Rihanna’s latest pregnancy at last year’s Met Gala.
The couple’s baby news was not the first time they made headlines in 2025. In February, A$AP Rocky was found not guilty of firing a gun at a former friend, in a trial that saw Rihanna bring her two sons to court.
The Barbados-born celebrity, whose real name is Robyn Fenty, shot to prominence in the early 2000s with hits like Pon de Replay and Umbrella. She recently celebrated 20 years since the release of her first album.
During that time, Rihanna has launched multiple businesses, including her popular makeup range Fenty Beauty and a lingerie company. The 37-year-old’s net worth has been estimated by Forbes at over a billion dollars.
The BBC has contacted Rihanna’s representatives for comment.
NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 9 — The National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) has launched a new Instant Fines Traffic Management System that will automatically issue traffic violation notifications to motorists via SMS.
In a public notice issued Monday, NTSA said the system is now live and is designed to enhance transparency, efficiency, and accountability in traffic enforcement by eliminating human intervention in the issuance of fines.
Under the system, motorists who violate traffic regulations will receive automated notifications indicating the offence and the fine payable.
NTSA said all fines issued through the platform must be paid through the KCB Group branch network within seven days.
Motorists who fail to settle the fines within the stipulated period will have the amount accrue interest.
In addition, vehicles or drivers with outstanding penalties will be unable to access NTSA service platforms until the fines are cleared.
The authority urged motorists to strictly observe traffic regulations and respond promptly to official notifications sent through the system.
NTSA said additional details about the system will be communicated through official government channels.
Mojtaba Khamenei, long known as the discreet and powerful son of slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was announced early Monday as Iran’s new Supreme Leader at a time when the country is at war and Israel has openly vowed to target any successor to his father.
Iran’s Assembly of Experts in a statement introduced Mojtaba Khamenei as the new leader of the Islamic Republic, five days after Iran International first reported that the body had selected him under pressure from the Revolutionary Guards.
For decades Mojtaba operated largely out of public view while building deep ties across the Islamic Republic’s political and security apparatus. His rise marks the formal emergence of a figure who had already been widely regarded as one of the most influential actors behind the scenes of Iran’s ruling establishment.
Mojtaba, the second son of Ali Khamenei, has long been considered the only member of his family with clear political ambitions. His younger brother, Masoud, worked only in administrative roles within their father’s office, while his other two brothers and two sisters are not known to have held political or bureaucratic positions.
Born in 1969 in Mashhad, Mojtaba continued his education in Tehran at the prestigious Alavi High School, which produced many of the Islamic Republic’s elite, including former foreign minister Javad Zarif. The school’s dean, Kamal Kharrazi, later became one of Ali Khamenei’s senior political advisers.
After graduating, Mojtaba began religious studies in Tehran before moving to Qom to pursue seminary education. In recent years, he has taught dars-e kharij — the highest level of jurisprudential instruction and a prerequisite for attaining the rank of mujtahid — at the Qom Seminary.
Mojtaba married Zahra Haddad-Adel, daughter of former parliamentary speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel. Zahra and one of their children were killed in the February 28 attack on Ali Khamenei’s residence. The couple had three children.
Because Mojtaba operated almost entirely behind the scenes under strict security, official information about him remained scarce, and unofficial reporting has often been fragmentary.
He held no formal executive or elected position for much of his career, yet he was widely believed to wield significant influence within the Office of the Supreme Leader and to oversee parts of his father’s administrative network.
Political orientation and policy views
A devoted pupil of Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, the ideological architect of the ultraconservative Paydari Party, Mojtaba has long been aligned with Iran’s hardline faction. Analysts describe him as an advocate of a “unified state” in which appointed institutions overshadow elected bodies.
This model was implemented most clearly during the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi, when moderate conservatives such as Ali Larijani were marginalized and gradually pushed out of the political arena. Mojtaba has also been widely regarded as a key supporter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise in 2005 and his continuation in power after the disputed 2009 election.
Mesbah-Yazdi, a fierce opponent of republicanism who died in 2021, argued that the Supreme Leader should be appointed without regard for public consent. Mojtaba has embraced this worldview, supporting strong clerical authority and the exclusion of moderates from power.
He has also been widely viewed as the principal political and financial patron of the Paydari Front, whose members see him as the guarantor of the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary identity after his father.
His foreign-policy outlook is deeply distrustful of the West, particularly the United States, and rooted in the doctrine of “resistance.” He strongly supports expanding Iran’s regional influence and strengthening the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” opposing compromise with Western governments.
Position on protests
Although Mojtaba has rarely spoken publicly, political reporting has consistently portrayed him as favoring a forceful, security-driven response to domestic unrest.
During the 2009 Green Movement protests, he was widely identified as one of the key figures overseeing the crackdown. Demonstrators chanted directly against him for the first time, shouting: “Mojtaba, may you die before you see leadership.”
During the protests of 2022, media outlets close to the regime again depicted him as central to maintaining internal stability.
His supporters—including segments of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the paramilitary Basij, hardline clerics in Qom, institutions linked to the Supreme Leader’s Office, and state-aligned media—describe him as devout, discreet, and deeply knowledgeable about security affairs.
Opponents, including much of the public and the political opposition, view him as a symbol of hereditary succession and criticize both his role in crackdowns and his opaque political influence.
IRGC networks
Mojtaba has maintained extensive ties to Iran’s intelligence and military structures. His network dates back to his youth, when he served in the IRGC’s Habib Battalion during the Iran–Iraq War—a unit that later produced many senior commanders, including Esmail Kowsari.
He has had a particularly close relationship with Hossein Taeb, former head of the IRGC Intelligence Organization, and has widely been believed to exert influence over its operations. Mohammad Sarafraz, the former head of state television, wrote that Mojtaba and Taeb pressured him to allocate a large share of the broadcaster’s advertising revenue to their networks.
Many Iranian analysts believe Mojtaba has played a decisive role in shaping senior IRGC appointments and key security positions.
Implications of his leadership
With Mojtaba Khamenei now formally assuming the role of Supreme Leader, observers say his leadership could reinforce the dominance of Iran’s hardline institutions and deepen the role of the security establishment within the political system.
His extensive ties to the IRGC and his long-standing influence within the Supreme Leader’s office have given him a unique power base even before holding the title. For years he operated as one of the most consequential figures in Iran’s political hierarchy without occupying a formal public position.
Now, as Supreme Leader, the “shadow prince” of the Islamic Republic has stepped fully into the center of power.
Mojtaba Khamenei, a cleric long seen as one of the most influential yet least visible figures in Iran’s political establishment, has been named the country’s new supreme leader following the death of his father in a US-Israeli airstrike.
The 56-year-old cleric was selected by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body responsible under the Constitution for appointing the country’s top political and religious authority. His selection followed the established constitutional procedure rather than a hereditary transfer of power, although his family lineage and proximity to the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have long placed him at the center of speculation about succession.
With his appointment, Mojtaba becomes the third supreme leader of the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution, inheriting leadership at a moment of intense regional conflict and domestic uncertainty.
Early life and family background
Mojtaba was born on Sept. 8, 1969 in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, one of the country’s major religious centers. He is the second son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran as supreme leader from 1989 until his killing over a week ago in US-Israeli airstrikes, as well as the grandson of cleric Sayyed Javad Khamenei.
Growing up in a politically charged environment, Mojtaba witnessed the rise of his father as a key figure in the Islamic Revolution and later as president of Iran before assuming the role of supreme leader.
He married Zahra Haddad-Adel, the daughter of Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a prominent conservative politician and former parliament speaker who currently heads one of Iran’s leading cultural institutions.
Zahra was also among those killed in the US-Israeli strike that targeted the Khamenei family’s residential compound in the capital Tehran. Mojtaba survived the attack, but also lost his mother, sister, brother-in-law, and nephews.
Education and clerical training
Like many figures within Iran’s clerical establishment, Mojtaba pursued his religious education in the city of Qom, the country’s leading center of Shia theological learning and home to the seminaries that train Iran’s clergy.
He studied Islamic jurisprudence and theology under several prominent conservative scholars, including Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpaygani, and Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, an influential ideologue who mentored many conservative political figures in the Islamic Republic.
According to Iranian analysts, Mojtaba has spent much of his career teaching at the Qom seminaries, including advanced jurisprudence classes known as dars-e kharej, considered the highest level of seminary education.
Recent reports suggested he had temporarily suspended some of his classes for personal reasons, though this could not be independently confirmed.
Despite decades in the clerical establishment, Mojtaba has never held a formal government post or served in an elected or executive office.
Role and influence
International media frequently portray Khamenei as an opaque figure with possible behind-the-scenes influence. His limited public visibility reinforces this image, as there are no extensive public speeches, interviews, or political manifestos laying out his positions.
Mojtaba’s name has periodically surfaced in political discussions in Iran, usually in connection with presidential elections or speculation about which candidates he might support.
Yet Mojtaba himself has rarely entered public political debates. His appearances have mostly been limited to official ceremonies, national commemorations, and religious gatherings covered by Iranian state media.
The last time he was publicly seen was during a pro-government rally following widespread protests earlier this year.
According to Iranian reports, Mojtaba also took part in the Iran-Iraq War during the late 1980s when his father was serving as president.
He reportedly joined volunteer units as a young man, marking his first experience with military affairs.
Some Western media outlets have also linked him to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), one of Iran’s most powerful institutions, though he does not hold any formal role there.
Succession under threat
Mojtaba Khamenei is taking the nation’s leadership mantle at one of the most volatile moments in modern Iranian history.
The transition also unfolds under direct threats from Israel, whose leaders have vowed to assassinate any Iranian leader picked to succeed Khamenei.
“Any leader selected by the Iranian terror regime to continue leading the plan for Israel’s destruction, threatening the United States, the free world and countries in the region, and suppressing the Iranian people, will be a certain target for assassination, no matter his name or where he hides,” Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said on social media platform X.
The threats underscore the extraordinary pressure surrounding the succession, placing Mojtaba at the center of a geopolitical confrontation that extends far beyond Iran’s borders.
How different would he be from his father?
This is the most consequential question for Iran. The answer is likely less different than many might expect.
Ali Khamenei was a figure of the revolutionary generation. His authority rested on ideological legitimacy, decades spent amassing and consolidating power, and his ability to arbitrate between competing factions. Over time, he became the system’s final referee.
Mojtaba Khamenei, by contrast, is often portrayed as a product of the security establishment, rather than a public theologian or statesman. He is known less for speeches or religious authority than for his influence and the networks he has built behind-the-scenes coordination.
If that assessment is correct, the shift would be from a leader who balanced institutions to one who may lean more heavily on the might of the IRGC. This would deepen an existing trend toward the securitisation of Iranian politics.
In a period of war and instability, regimes typically prioritise continuity and control. Mojtaba’s appeal to the establishment, therefore, appears to rest on several factors:
his close ties to the IRGC and intelligence networks
his long experience inside the supreme leader’s office
his ideological alignment with hardline positions sceptical of reform and Western engagement.
A figure trusted by the most powerful security institutions also reduces the chance of power struggles or fragmentation at the top.
What might this mean for the war?
A new supreme leader rarely produces an abrupt ideological shift, especially during a military conflict. Continuity is the more likely outcome.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s profile suggests a more security-centred style of leadership with three possible ways forward.
First, domestic control may harden. Given Mojtaba’s reported ties to the security establishment, unrest is more likely to be met with swift repression rather than political accommodation.
Second, the IRGC could expand its influence in regional affairs, given how closely aligned Mojtaba is with the guards.
Third, any negotiations with the West would likely be tactical rather than transformative. They would be framed as a strategic necessity rather than an ideological shift.
And given the fact his father was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes, this will only reinforce a more hardline posture toward both countries.
In short, Iran under Mojtaba Khamenei would likely remain confrontational in rhetoric, but pragmatic when regime survival is at stake.
Iran’s Assembly of Experts announced in a statement on Sunday that Mojtaba Khamenei has been chosen as the country’s new supreme leader, days after Iran International first reported on Tuesday that the Assembly of Experts had selected him under pressure from the Revolutionary Guards.
“In today’s extraordinary session, the Assembly of Experts, by the decisive vote of its members, selected and introduced Ayatollah Seyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei as the third leader of the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the body said in a statement.
“In conclusion… (the Assembly) calls on the noble people of Iran, especially the elites and intellectuals of the seminaries and universities, to pledge allegiance to the leadership and preserve unity around the axis of guardianship,” it added.
Iran’s exiled prince Reza Pahlavi called on Australia to ensure the safety of members of Iran’s women’s national football team, saying they face pressure and threats after refusing to sing the Islamic Republic’s national anthem during the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia.
“The members of the Iranian Women’s National Football Team are under significant pressure and ongoing threat from the Islamic Republic,” Pahlavi said in a post on X.
“As a result of their brave act of civil disobedience in refusing to sing the current regime’s national anthem, they face dire consequences should they return to Iran. I call on the Australian government to ensure their safety and give them any and all needed support,” he added.
In the annals of Kenya’s judicial recruitment, few spectacles have been as simultaneously riveting and instructive as what unfolded on the morning of January 12, 2026, inside the JSC boardroom at CBK Pension Towers on Harambee Avenue.
Prof Migai Akech, constitutional law scholar, University of Nairobi lecturer, PhD holder from New York University, author of over 80 academic publications and the man widely regarded as one of the sharpest legal minds this country has produced, sat before the Judicial Service Commission. And within minutes, the panel wanted to talk about his tweets.
Akech had been selected as the very first candidate to face the JSC in the race for 15 Court of Appeal positions, chosen from a pool of 35 shortlisted applicants drawn from 95 who had applied by the July 2025 deadline.
That selection gave him pride of place in what Chief Justice Martha Koome’s commission had billed as a transparency-driven, publicly streamed process. What it also gave him was no warning of the ambush to come.
JSC public representative Caroline Nzilani told Akech during the interview that submissions from members of the public had flagged concerns about his conduct on social media platform X.
He was described as being “very vocal” on the platform, prone to “altercations with advocates” who disagreed with him, and condescending toward colleagues. The Chief Justice herself demanded to know how he would handle litigants and lawyers in court, given what she described as his “very strong expressions” online.
“In law and in administrative law, there’s something called the right to notice. It should never be an ambush.” — Prof Migai Akech
BLINDSIDED
Akech’s defence before the commission was that of a man who champions democracy through robust engagement, and who deploys humour as a tool of public discourse.
He told the commission he is an “active citizen” who believes democratic participation requires vigorous public conversation.
He acknowledged a single serious altercation with a fellow legal professional, an advocate who had once been his teacher, adding that he personally visited the man, apologised, and considered the matter closed.
He even offered a concession that in hindsight reads as almost poignant: he told the panel he would stop posting on X altogether if appointed to the bench. It was a promise of silence from a man who had built his public intellectual identity on loudness.
Prof. Aketch Migai
What stung him more deeply, he later revealed in an interview with Daily Nation’s on March 3, was that he had been given no prior notice of the specific posts that formed the basis of the commissioners’ concerns. “In law and in administrative law, there’s something called the right to notice.
It should never be an ambush,” he told the publication. “You should tell me in advance that, ‘The post that we have an issue with is this one. Please come prepared to talk to us about it.’ They didn’t do that.”
He also raised a separate grievance: that he was interrogated over the contents of a private email he had sent, which a recipient had leaked onto social media. “One of the people that received that e-mail made it public,” he said. “How do you side with the person that has done that? Then how do you then claim that is my social media post? I’m not responsible for it.”
THE ‘HOT AIR’ MOMENT
If the social media questions threatened to sink him, Akech did himself no particular favours with what became the most-quoted moment of an interview that was broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook.
Introducing himself to the panel, he declared that his academic record made him supremely qualified to serve on an appellate court that deals primarily with documents, adding that “words like hot air” would not find their way into his judgments.
The dig was unmistakeable. In the landmark 2022 Supreme Court presidential election ruling, Chief Justice Koome, sitting at the head of the very commission now interviewing him, had famously described opposition allegations of portal manipulation as “no more than hot air” for lack of credible evidence.
The remark drew laughter in the boardroom, including from Koome herself. But beyond the boardroom, it generated a storm of commentary online, much of it treating the quip as evidence of the very temperament problems that had already been raised.
Akech later dismissed the furore as a failure of national humour. “It was a joke,” he told Daily Nation.
“Kenyans don’t have a sense of humour at all. I was actually very surprised by the response to that remark, because it was just a joke. I’ve known the CJ for a very long time, and I respect her tremendously. It was not meant to be offensive in any way. It was just a light moment.”
He offered to stop posting on X altogether if appointed. It was a promise of silence from a man who had built his public intellectual identity on loudness.
THE VERDICT
He did not make the final cut. When the JSC released the names of 15 recommended Court of Appeal judges, Akech’s was not among them. Justices Issack Hassan, Katwa Kigen, Byram Ongaya, Hedwig Ong’udi and Chacha Mwita were among those picked and subsequently sworn in.
No reasons were published for any of the selections or rejections, a fact Akech found constitutionally objectionable.
He returned to X, the very platform that had partially undone him, to say so. Citing Article 47 of the Constitution, which requires the JSC to give reasons for its decisions, he argued that the entire process remained opaque and subjective behind a facade of public accountability. “The JSC gives the public a veneer of accountability, not real accountability,” he posted on February 26.
The irony is difficult to escape. A process that invited the public to submit “information of interest” about candidates effectively turned Akech’s digital footprint into an exhibit against him, wielded anonymously and without prior disclosure.
A man who built a career examining the relationship between law, democracy and power found himself on the receiving end of a process he now argues violates the very administrative law principles he has spent decades teaching.
THE SCHOLAR BEHIND THE SCREEN
Prof Akech is 54, Homa Bay-born, Starehe Boys-educated, and Cambridge and NYU-trained. He graduated from the University of Nairobi’s Faculty of Law in 1995 as one of only three students in his class to achieve a first class honours under the 8-4-4 system.
He was admitted to the bar in 1998 and went on to complete a second master’s at New York University before earning his PhD there in 2004. He was appointed a full professor in 2023 and delivered his inaugural lecture in April 2024, becoming only the third person to do so in the Faculty of Law’s history since 1970.
He has taught an estimated 8,000 students over his career, among them Law Society of Kenya president-elect Charles Kanjama and former LSK president Nelson Havi.
He has 80 published works to his name, has consulted for governments across Africa including advising on Lesotho’s constitutional amendment process in 2022, and submitted the basic structure doctrine analysis that the Supreme Court accepted in the BBI case in 2021.
He chairs the Football Kenya Federation’s appeals committee and once ran its disciplinary committee. Four framed degrees hang on the wall of his law firm in Hurlingham, alongside two football trophies.
None of that, it turned out, was immune to the intervention of an anonymous public submission about his conduct on social media.
Akech insists the characterisation is unfair. “I think I’m very measured in my social media,” he told Daily Nation. “Which posts are these they were talking about?” He remains unrepentant and unsilenced. The tweets continue. The scholarship continues. And the question he has now raised in full public view, whether the JSC’s opaque selection criteria meet the constitutional standard, is one that he, of all people, is well-equipped to litigate.
The Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) has opened applications for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) courses for the May 2026 intake.
The applications target students who sat the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in 2025 and previous years.
In a notice to candidates, KUCCPS said students can now apply for courses offered in National Polytechnics, Technical Training Institutes, Institutes of science and technology, and other accredited technical colleges across the country.
The placement body encouraged candidates to log in to the KUCCPS student portal and select courses of their choice, noting that students with any KCSE mean grade are eligible to apply for various TVET programmes.
KUCCPS also clarified that the opportunity is not limited to the 2025 KCSE class, as Form Four leavers from previous years are also eligible to submit applications.
The application window will remain open until March 18, 2026, after which the placement process will begin.
TVET institutions in Kenya offer practical training in fields such as engineering, ICT, hospitality, construction, and business, equipping learners with technical skills needed in the labour market.
The agency is a state corporation mandated to coordinate the placement of government-sponsored students to universities, colleges, and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions.
Established under the Universities Act, KUCCPS also develops career guidance programmes, disseminates information on available courses, and ensures equitable access to higher education opportunities.
The agency oversees application processes, sets minimum entry requirements, and allocates students to institutions based on merit, preferences, and available capacity.
Successful applicants will now join accredited institutions in May, beginning courses designed to equip them with practical knowledge in diverse fields.
The institution has online portals designed to help students, parents, and learning institutions conveniently access placement services and programme information.
According to KUCCPS, the digital platforms allow users to browse available courses, apply for placement, or update institutional programme details depending on their role.
Students seeking placement into universities, colleges, and technical institutions can access the Student’s Portal to view institutions, available programmes, and their minimum entry requirements.
Applicants can also submit their course applications through the portal.
The Institution’s portal is designed for university vice-chancellors, college principals, or their authorised representatives.
Through this portal, institutions can declare or update their programme capacities and institutional details to facilitate the national student placement process. The portal also allows them to access placement-related data.
The Principal’s Portal was previously used by secondary schools to submit course applications on behalf of their Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education candidates under the School/Centre Application system.
However, KUCCPS said the School/Centre Application process was discontinued in 2023, and schools seeking more information have been advised to contact the placement service directly.
KUCCPS continues to encourage students and stakeholders to use the online platforms to easily access placement services and information on academic programmes offered across institutions.
When Trans Nzoia Senator Allan Chesang and Chanelle Kittony exchanged vows on November 1, 2025, in a lilac-and-cream spectacle that had President William Ruto, Speaker Moses Wetang’ula and half of Kenya’s Who’s Who crammed into Trans Nzoia County, social media practically wept tears of joy. It was, by every measure, the wedding of the year. The hashtags trended.
The photos circulated. The couple glowed. Seven months later, that glow appears to have gone out.
Sources with intimate knowledge of the senator’s domestic situation are now whispering loudly that the marriage is in serious trouble, with claims of infidelity, substance abuse, and domestic violence swirling around a man who has always liked to live loudly.
“Chesang drinks like a nile perch in a swamp. Worst part… GBV!” – Blogger Maverick Aoko
THE BOYS CLUB
According to outspoken blogger Maverick Aoko, Chesang has been keeping company with a tight-knit clique of five men who paint Nairobi red on a routine basis.
The senator, per Aoko’s account, is a regular fixture at Club BLA in Westlands and at lounge 1824, where the crew reportedly arrives dressed head-to-toe in coordinated white outfits, cult-clique style.
From the clubs, sources allege the group retires to a Lavington apartment opposite the local Quickmart, a residence said to house predominantly foreign women, four or five crammed into a two-bedroom flat.
What happens there, Aoko says bluntly, involves hard, illegal substances.
It is further alleged that Chesang occasionally returns to the matrimonial home heavily intoxicated, after which physical confrontations reportedly ensue.
Sources claim that Chanelle has fled the home on multiple occasions following such incidents. Neither Chesang nor Chanelle’s camp had responded to these claims at the time of publishing.
THE WEDDING THAT HAD RUTO IN ATTENDANCE
To understand just how far the curtain has fallen, you need to remember how high it was raised in the first place.
The November 1 white wedding was the sort of affair that makes ordinary Kenyans spit out their chai. The venue dripped with lilac florals and cream decor.
Chesang, in a crisp white shirt under a regal purple vest and matching fedora, looked every inch the dynasty heir he was positioning himself to be. His bride, Chanelle Kittony, arrived in purple and white, radiant and composed.
The guest list read like a state function. President Ruto was there. Wetang’ula was there. Siaya Governor James Orengo attended. Nominated Senator Karen Nyamu made the cut. Media personality Oga Obinna was invited. Even the flamboyant Bolo Bespoke of Bespoke City fame was present. It was, in Nairobi social circles, the ultimate statement of arrival.
The couple had held their traditional engagement just four months earlier, in July 2025, at a ceremony graced by KANU Chairman Gideon Moi and the perennially ubiquitous Kapsaret MP Oscar Sudi, who gushed about the bride being the daughter of his good friend.
Days after the white wedding, Chesang posted a soppy Facebook message about two hearts and one journey. In January 2026, on Chanelle’s birthday, he was still publicly declaring that life with her keeps getting sweeter. Nobody saw any of this coming. Or so we thought.
THE WOMAN HE MARRIED
Chanelle Kittony is not a woman to be trifled with on paper. She is the daughter of Kiprono Kittony, chairman of both the Nairobi Securities Exchange and Radio Africa Group, one of the most powerful media empires in East Africa. Her grandmother is Zipporah Kittony, the legendary Maendeleo ya Wanawake chairperson and former nominated senator who remains a revered figure in Kenyan women’s leadership.
Chanelle herself holds a marketing degree from the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom and cut her professional teeth at Radio Africa Group before Governor George Natembeya appointed her as CEC in Trans Nzoia County, first overseeing Gender, Sports and Youth, then Roads, Energy and Infrastructure.
She was 32 years old when she married Chesang. She was, by every account, an accomplished woman in her own right.
Her past, however, has not been entirely without drama.
Reports surfaced at the time of her wedding that she had previously been in a stormy relationship with Brian Ng’ang’a, son of Valley Road Motors CEO Francis Ng’ang’a.
The two were allegedly held hostage by hotel management in Naivasha after destroying property during a heated fight, with police called in before matters were quietly resolved. The twist that seasoned gossipers savoured: Brian Ng’ang’a and Senator Chesang were reportedly friends. Old Nairobi, it turns out, is a small world.
THE MAN BEHIND THE FEDORA
Chesang, who is in his late thirties and represents Trans Nzoia on a UDA ticket, has never been a man who does things quietly. His critics would say he has always been better at optics than substance. His supporters would argue he is a sharp, youthful lawmaker unafraid to ruffle feathers. Both are probably right.
His relationship with Governor Natembeya has been a running political soap opera since 2022. The two have clashed repeatedly over county funds, with Chesang alleging that over Sh800 million in devolved money went unaccounted for under Natembeya’s watch. Natembeya, never one to absorb a punch quietly, fired back by disclosing that the senator’s own fiancée was a cabinet minister in his government while Chesang was publicly attacking him, calling the hypocrisy for what it was. It was deeply embarrassing.
More damaging have been the legal clouds. Chesang has been linked to a Sh181 million fake laptop tender at the Office of the Deputy President, with courts declining to drop the charges as recently as 2022. He has also faced allegations of involvement in a Sh25 million fake Department of Defence tender, in which he reportedly offered to repay Sh17 million to have charges dropped, only for the court to refuse. These are serious matters for a man who built his political brand on accountability.
And then there is the gold. In 2023, Chesang threatened legal action against blogger Cyprian Nyakundi and Citizen Weekly after they linked him to a Sh1 billion fake gold scam. The Senator denied everything, calling it political persecution. The case, like several others around him, lingered.
The guest list at the wedding read like a state function. Seven months later, sources say Chanelle has been fleeing the house.
WHAT THE GRAPEVINE SAYS
As of this weekend, the allegations have not been confirmed by either Chesang or Chanelle. No formal separation has been announced. No lawyers have gone on record.
But the volume and specificity of the claims now circulating online are difficult to dismiss entirely. Aoko, whose track record in breaking domestic dramas among the political class is well-established, has named venues, described the clique, and detailed a pattern of behaviour that sounds less like mischief and more like a lifestyle.
What makes this particularly combustible is the family Chanelle comes from. Kiprono Kittony chairs the NSE and controls Radio Africa Group. You do not embarrass that family quietly. If these claims have even a kernel of truth, the pressure from the Kittony side alone would be enough to reshape a man’s entire political future.
For now, Chesang continues his Senate duties. Chanelle has not posted anything that screams marital distress. But in Nairobi’s social circles, where everyone knows something and everyone is three degrees from the story, the whispers are getting louder. Watch this space.
President Donald Trump said Iran’s next leader would not “last long” without the approval of the United States.
“He’s going to have to get approval from us,” Trump told ABC News. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.”
“I don’t want people to have to go back in five years and have to do the same thing again, or worse let them have a nuclear weapon,” he added.
The US military issued a safety warning to civilians in Iran on Sunday, urging them to stay home and saying Iranian forces were conducting military operations from heavily populated areas.
“The Iranian regime is using heavily populated civilian areas to conduct military operations, including launching one-way attack drones and ballistic missiles,” US Central Command said in a statement.
The military said Iranian forces were launching drones and ballistic missiles from crowded areas in cities including Dezful, Esfahan and Shiraz.
“US forces strongly urge civilians in Iran to remain indoors. The Iranian regime, by using densely populated civilian areas to conduct military operations, including the launch of one-way attack drones and ballistic missiles knowingly endangers the lives of innocent people,” CENTCOM said in another statement posted on its Persian language X page on Sunday.
The Israeli military said it carried out additional waves of strikes in Tehran on Sunday, targeting facilities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and security forces.
“We completed additional waves of attacks in Tehran. The Aerospace Headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and 50 ammunition storage shelters were targeted,” the Israeli military said on its Persian-language X page.
“In this framework, the aerospace headquarters of the Iranian regime was targeted. This center was used as the site for receiving, distributing and researching by Iran’s Aerospace Organization,” it added.
The Israeli military said the complex included a control and operations building for the Khayyam satellite, which was launched in August 2022 and was used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for surveillance activities.
It also said it targeted dozens of other sites including an ammunition storage facility at a law enforcement base, a Basij unit base, law enforcement headquarters and a complex belonging to the ground forces of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Oman’s foreign minister condemned the US and Israeli attacks on Iran while also criticizing Iran’s retaliation against neighboring countries and calling for restraint and diplomacy.
“The action taken by Israel and the US against Iran is both immoral and illegal. But the retaliation by Iran against its neighbors is also deeply regrettable and unacceptable,” Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi said in a post on X.
“I call for restraint on all sides, a ceasefire, and an urgent return to diplomacy,” he added.
Pope Leo XIV voiced concern that the conflict involving Iran could spread across the Middle East and destabilize other countries in the region, including Lebanon.
“Reports from Iran and across the entire Middle East continue to cause deep dismay and raise the fear that the conflict will expand, and that other countries in the region, including dear Lebanon, may once again sink into instability,” Pope Leo XIV said in a post on X.
“Let us pray together for the roar of bombs to cease, weapons to fall silent, and space to open for dialogue, in which people’s voices may be heard,” he added.
The Arab League condemned Iran’s escalation against civilian targets and vital facilities in the Persian Gulf, warning that the attacks could push the region onto a “dangerous trajectory.”
Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the strikes on civilian targets and critical infrastructure were a grave strategic mistake and a reckless move that threatened regional stability.
The bloc said Iranian attacks on civilian facilities and infrastructure could widen the conflict and deepen hostility across the region.
Arab League foreign ministers are due to hold an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the escalating tensions.
