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  • Why Is a US Ebola Facility in Kenya Sparking Protests?

    Why Is a US Ebola Facility in Kenya Sparking Protests?

    An Ebola quarantine station for US citizens, which is being constructed on a military base in central Kenya, has caused outrage in the East African nation amid a continuing outbreak of the deadly disease.

    Hundreds took to the streets of Nanyuki town on Monday and Tuesday and gathered in front of the planned centre, to which Americans who contract Ebola while overseas will be sent rather than being allowed back home. At least two people were killed, and one person was injured when the demonstration turned violent on Monday.

    US officials had earlier confirmed to reporters that the centre will be based in the town’s Laikipia Air Base and will cater to Americans exposed to the Ebola virus. The base serves the Kenyan military.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) declared an international public health emergency on May 17 after officials detected the rare Bundibugyo strain, which they discovered had been circulating for weeks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

    Unlike the more common Zaire strain, there are no approved vaccines or treatments against the Bundibugyo strain.

    The virus has spread to neighbouring Uganda.

    There are fears that the outbreak could become one of the worst on record due to the delay in detection, as well as recent declines in health funding from the US and other Western donors. Last year, the US axed most foreign aid and effectively shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) following the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president.

    At least 321 people are infected in the DRC, and 48 have died. One person has died in Uganda, while nine cases have been confirmed.

    There are currently no confirmed cases in Kenya. The country has never recorded the disease.

    Despite the protests in Kenya and a court order, plans for the centre have not been called off, with government officials doubling down in their defence of the project this week.

    US politics, Canada’s multiculturalism, South America’s geopolitical rise—we bring you the stories that matter.

    Here’s what we know:

    Red Cross workers bury an Ebola victim at the Rwampara Cemetery, in Bunia, Congo, Saturday, May 23, 2026 [Moses Sawasawa/AP]

    Why are Kenyans protesting?

    Kenyans across the country are worried about the risks of importing Ebola into the country.

    Health workers in the country have also reacted with anger: In the DRC, a lack of vaccines and protective gear has resulted in many health workers contracting the disease.

    The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union said in a statement last week that the group would not “watch Kenya be treated as a containment colony”.

    “If it is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya,” the statement added.

    US officials first announced last week that Americans who contract Ebola while abroad will be sent to the new facility in Kenya rather than flown home, according to The Associated Press. The facility at the Laikipia Air Base would be operational by last Friday and would have 50 beds to start, officials said.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the US “cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter” the country.

    In a statement on Thursday, Rubio’s spokesperson, Tommy Pigott, confirmed talks between Rubio and Kenya’s President William Ruto and said Washington intends to commit $13.5m towards “Kenya’s Ebola preparedness efforts”.

    Another $112m was donated to the regional response, the statement said.

    According to US media, the centre will have isolation and biocontainment units for holding and treating suspected and positive cases. Approximately 30 officers of the Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service departed for Kenya last week after three weeks of training.

    A US doctor who contracted the virus in the DRC after unknowingly operating on an infected person was flown to Germany for treatment two weeks ago.

    Anti-riot police officers stand by as demonstrators protest against a proposed Ebola quarantine centre to be established by the United States at Laikipia Air Base in Nanyuki, Kenya, Monday, June 1, 2026 [Andrew Kasuku/AP]

    Last week, Katiba Institute, a civil society organisation, and the Kenya Law Society separately challenged the plans at the High Court of Nairobi.

    The groups cited exposure risks to the public and the absence of consultation with Kenyan citizens. They also pointed out that Kenya’s fragile health system has a limited capacity to manage Ebola.

    Last Friday, the court suspended construction work on the facility and any patient arrivals. On Tuesday, it extended the suspension for at least three weeks.

    What has the Kenyan government said?

    On Monday, President Ruto defended the proposed establishment based on what he said was the US’s robust health aid support for Kenya.

    “When President Trump asked the government of Kenya to support them by having a centre at Laikipia Air Base, I gave the okay”, Ruto told reporters at a news briefing.

    “Because it was an agreement and a partnership with friends who have walked with Kenya for 30, 40 years,” he added.

    After slashing much of its foreign health aid budget early last year, the US signed controversial bilateral agreements with Kenya and other African countries that saw Washington request health data or minerals in exchange for funding that was much lower than previously provided. Kenya’s health minister said at the time that the government would only share “de-identified” data (which has had personally identifiable information about individuals removed) with the US.

    Ruto said on Monday that his government had “deployed every arsenal” to protect Kenya from an outbreak and said Kenyans should dismiss concerns the country cannot handle Ebola.

    He did not refer to the court case, nor did he confirm whether the construction of the centre will go ahead despite the court order.

    “We are a responsible government. We know what we are doing. People should relax. Politicians should avoid reckless, unnecessary talk that doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

    Adding to the confusion, Health Minister Aden Bare Duale wrote in an X post on Wednesday that the quarantine facility would be open to both Americans and Kenyans. This has not been specifically clarified by the US, however. The centre is among 23 facilities that will be set up in high-risk counties, he said.

    What has the US government said?

    The US’s Ebola centre in Kenya has also been criticised internally by some officials from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to reporting by CNN.

    Acting director Jay Bhattacharya advised officials against the plan, CNN reported, citing a CDC source working on the Ebola response.

    Some at the agency are “furious about it” and believe the plan “will make recruiting and staffing for Ebola response activities harder”, CNN quoted the source as saying. The official said facilities in the US would be better for treatment, and that patients will want to be closer to family and other support services.

    In the past, US citizens who have contracted Ebola have always been flown home for treatment.

    –Al Jazeera 

  • 10 Million Kenyans’ Personal Data Allegedly Being Sold on Dark Web in Chilling New Cybersecurity Scare

    10 Million Kenyans’ Personal Data Allegedly Being Sold on Dark Web in Chilling New Cybersecurity Scare

    A disturbing claim emerging from the murky corners of the internet has sparked fresh concerns over the safety of personal data belonging to millions of Kenyans.

    Cybersecurity monitors tracking criminal activity on dark web forums say a hacker using the alias “MrDarkRoot” is advertising what is claimed to be one of the largest collections of Kenyan citizen data ever assembled. The seller alleges the database contains personal information belonging to approximately 10 million people.

    If the claims are true, the implications could be staggering.

    According to screenshots and reports circulating among cyber intelligence communities, the alleged dataset contains an extraordinary range of sensitive information. The seller claims to possess full names, dates and places of birth, national identity card numbers, passport details, residential addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, tax information, banking records, vehicle ownership records, property details, medical histories, vaccination records, educational backgrounds, criminal records, business registration information and passport-style photographs.

    Screenshot

    For any cybercriminal, such information would be a goldmine.

    Yet there is an important caveat. No independent cybersecurity firm, government agency or regulator has publicly verified the authenticity of the alleged database. Experts familiar with dark web marketplaces caution that cybercriminals often exaggerate the size and value of stolen datasets to attract buyers and build credibility.

    Even so, the allegations have landed at a particularly sensitive moment for Kenya, which has experienced a growing number of data security incidents in recent years.

    The country has spent billions of shillings digitising public services and moving government records online. Platforms such as eCitizen have become central to everyday life, handling everything from passport applications and business registrations to driving licences and tax services. While digital transformation has improved efficiency, it has also concentrated enormous volumes of personal information in interconnected systems that are increasingly attractive to hackers.

    The latest claims follow a series of high-profile breaches and suspected cyber intrusions that have raised uncomfortable questions about how securely Kenyan institutions are protecting sensitive data.

    One of the most significant incidents emerged in late 2025 when reports surfaced that hackers had gained access to data linked to millions of users of the M-Tiba healthcare platform. The alleged breach involved highly sensitive medical information and prompted investigations by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

    Earlier, the Business Registration Service was forced to investigate reports that company records and shareholder information had been compromised and later appeared on underground marketplaces. The incident drew particular attention because some of the exposed records were linked to influential political and business figures.

    Cybersecurity analysts say the alleged MrDarkRoot database is especially alarming because of its breadth. Unlike many breaches that target a single institution, the advertised information appears to span multiple aspects of a person’s life. If genuine, it would provide criminals with a detailed profile of individuals, making it easier to commit identity theft, financial fraud, impersonation scams and other forms of cybercrime.

    The danger is not limited to stolen money.

    With access to personal records, criminals can open fraudulent accounts, apply for loans using stolen identities, target victims with convincing scams or even use sensitive information for extortion and blackmail. Medical records, financial information and family details are among the most valuable forms of data traded in underground criminal markets.

    For now, Kenyan authorities have not issued any public statement confirming the existence of the alleged 10 million-record database. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has also not announced any investigation specifically linked to the claims.

    That has done little to calm anxieties among cybersecurity experts, many of whom note that major breaches often first surface on dark web forums long before affected organisations acknowledge them publicly.

    The claims may ultimately prove false, exaggerated or based on recycled data from older breaches. But even if that turns out to be the case, the episode serves as another stark reminder of the growing cyber threats facing Kenya as more personal information moves online.

    For millions of Kenyans, the possibility that such an enormous volume of personal data could be circulating among cybercriminals is unsettling enough. Whether MrDarkRoot is bluffing or sitting on a genuine treasure trove of stolen records, the incident has once again exposed a difficult reality. In Kenya’s digital age, personal information has become one of the most valuable and vulnerable assets a citizen possesses.

  • Cement, Cash and Courts: How the Hashu Dynasty Crushed the Ramji Brothers for Fourteen Years and Why the Walls Are Now Closing In

    Cement, Cash and Courts: How the Hashu Dynasty Crushed the Ramji Brothers for Fourteen Years and Why the Walls Are Now Closing In

    WHEN HARISH RAMJI walked out of a Nairobi magistrate’s court in late 2025 after a judge threw out the case against him as a nullity, he had already been arrested, publicly branded a forger and a fraudster, dragged through every level of the Kenyan judicial system, and drained of money that most Kenyan families would not see in a generation. He had also just beaten one of the most resourced industrial families in East Africa. The problem for the Hashu dynasty of Mombasa Cement is that Harish, his brother Bharat, and youngest sibling Ashvin were not broken. They were sharpened.

    The saga that led to that moment began not in 2025 but in 2010, when three Kenyan-Asian brothers who had purchased a 7.4-acre parcel of land in Mavoko, Machakos County from the National Social Security Fund filed suit against Mombasa Cement Limited, which claimed the same piece of earth. At the time, Mombasa Cement was the expanding industrial crown jewel of Hasmukh Kanji Patel, popularly known as Hasu, a cement billionaire whose name was synonymous with charitable giving along Kenya’s coast. The disparity between the two sides could not have been more stark. On one side: a family of three brothers with a sale agreement dated December 2006 and a title in their names. On the other: one of the most politically connected industrialists in the country, a man who fed thousands of the poor daily, built schools, paid hospital bills, erected city sculptures, and enjoyed the company of Cabinet Secretaries, county governors, and opposition kingpins at his table.

    What followed was not merely litigation. It was, by every credible account available in court records and testimony from people familiar with the matter, a fourteen-year campaign designed to grind the Ramjis into financial ruin, social disgrace and criminal jeopardy. The outcome, confirmed by Kenya’s highest courts, proved that their title was valid. The question that lingers over the Hashu empire — now navigating a post-patriarch era after Hasu Patel’s unexpected death in August 2024 at the age of fifty-eight — is how much damage was deliberately done along the way, and who must now answer for it.

    THE LAND AND THE CLAIM

    The origins of the dispute lie in a land-sale programme that the National Social Security Fund ran in Mavoko in the early 2000s, offloading large parcels it held in what would become a contested and litigated stretch of Machakos County. Mombasa Cement entered the picture early. Court records show the company acquired a fifty-acre parcel, LR number 27159, in September 2004 and was subsequently offered an adjoining 7.4-acre piece, LR number 11895/50, which abutted its growing industrial footprint. By September 2006, the company had paid a ten percent deposit on that second parcel, eventually settling the full balance two years later. In their version of events, that money secured them a right of ownership.

    The Ramji brothers tell a different story, one backed by a sale agreement they signed with the NSSF in December 2006. The complication that allowed both claims to flourish simultaneously was a third party — a company called Harp Investco — that also claimed interest in NSSF land in Mavoko and filed a High Court case that froze multiple pending sales. A consent judgment in June 2010 purported to resolve the web of competing claims by allowing buyers to proceed. It was on the basis of that consent that Mombasa Cement said it finalised its payment, at a renegotiated price of Sh8.7 million. The Ramji brothers argue, and the Court of Appeal ultimately agreed, that their independent purchase, made through a valid process and supported by their own documentation, gave them the superior title.

    Crucially, Mombasa Cement never produced a direct sale agreement between itself and the NSSF for the 7.4-acre parcel. The Ramjis did. That absence would become central to every court that subsequently examined the dispute, but not before the Hashu machine had spent years burying the brothers under procedural rubble.

    “The office of Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Kenya Railways is a public office that must at all times be exercised in accordance with the Constitution and the principles of good governance.”

    THE LONG SIEGE: 2010 TO 2019

    The Ramjis filed their civil suit against Mombasa Cement in 2010 with a straightforward claim of ownership. What followed was anything but straightforward. People familiar with the litigation describe a relentless pattern of procedural delays, multiple applications, and manoeuvres that kept the case from resolution while Mombasa Cement’s operations continued to encroach on the disputed parcel. For nine years, the brothers waited for the Environment and Land Court to deliver its judgment. When it came in 2019, it dismissed their case entirely.

    The manner of that dismissal drew private disbelief from legal observers. The brothers had filed their documentary evidence. The cement company had not produced the one document that would have confirmed its claim above theirs: a direct NSSF sale agreement. Yet the court found in Mombasa Cement’s favour. The brothers appealed immediately. The Court of Appeal would take another four years to speak. What happened in the space between the 2019 defeat and the 2023 reversal forms the most explosive chapter of this story.

    Sources close to the Ramji camp describe an atmosphere during those years that went well beyond ordinary litigation pressure. Claims circulated, backed by what these sources describe as traceable expenditure, that money was moving from the Mombasa Cement side to people capable of influencing outcomes, including officers within law enforcement. Whether or not those specific allegations are ever proven in the criminal proceedings the brothers are now pursuing, the result of the overall period was undeniable: the Ramjis were exhausted, financially strained, and facing the prospect of permanent loss of a Sh350 million asset on which they had legitimate papers.

    Ramji Brothers.
    Ramji Brothers.

    THE FORGED FORGERY: HOW ARRESTS BECAME A WEAPON

    The criminal strand of this story requires particular scrutiny. While the civil dispute was still live, allegations emerged that the Ramji brothers had forged NSSF documents to back their ownership claim. These allegations, which Mombasa Cement’s camp pushed with considerable energy, were never findings made by the civil courts examining the same documents. In December 2023, a three-judge Court of Appeal bench comprising Justices Patrick Kiage, Kathurima M’Inoti and Francis Tuiyott delivered a landmark ruling affirming the Ramjis as rightful owners. The court examined the discrepancies in their documentation and found them attributable to clerical error, not fraud. The judges traced the process of acquisition and found it favoured the Ramji family.

    That should have been the end. It was not. In January 2024, a complaint surfaced at DCI headquarters, originating from the NSSF, asserting that the Ramjis had fraudulently obtained title to land the NSSF regarded as its own. The timing was remarkable. The complaint came barely a month after the Court of Appeal had vindicated the brothers, and a month before Mombasa Cement would attempt to take the matter to the Supreme Court. Investigators nevertheless pressed ahead. The Ramjis sought orders from the Kiambu High Court to block their prosecution. Justice Dorah Chepkwony dismissed that petition in July 2024, holding that the investigation was ongoing and that the brothers should present their evidence in criminal proceedings. The brothers appealed. In a brief but significant ruling, Justices Jessie Lesiit and John Mativo noted that the forgery allegations had in fact arisen and been addressed in the Court of Appeal proceedings, and that the existence of a final appellate judgment dismissing those allegations constituted exceptional circumstances.

    Mombasa Cement continued to call for the prosecution to proceed. It filed papers before the Court of Appeal characterising the brothers’ attempts to stop the criminal case as an abuse of court process. Then came September 2024: the Supreme Court delivered its ruling, dismissing Mombasa Cement’s application to escalate the civil dispute upward. The apex court found no new question of general public importance warranting its intervention. The Ramjis were confirmed as the owners. A fourteen-year civil war had ended in their favour at every meaningful level.

    Yet in December 2025, the DCI arrested all three brothers. They were charged with conspiracy to defraud, making a false document, obtaining registration by false pretences, and forgery. Their lawyers pointed to the September 2024 Court of Appeal order that had barred arrests and prosecutions related to the property while appellate proceedings remained active. The magistrate who eventually heard the matter threw the case out as a nullity. But the damage had already been done: public arrests, the spectacle of charges, and media coverage that had for years branded the brothers as suspects in a case the civil courts had already ruled upon.

    PHILANTHROPY AS POLITICAL COVER

    Understanding how Mombasa Cement sustained its position through years of adverse evidence requires an understanding of the Hasu Patel brand and the political architecture around it. Hasmukh Patel was not a conventional tycoon. He built visible goodwill on a staggering scale. His Sahajanand Feeding Centre in Mombasa was estimated to feed up to a thousand people a day. He ran scholarship programmes that put over ten thousand learners through school. He paid hospital bills for strangers. He erected sculptures along Mombasa’s roads and funded environmental beautification projects. When he died suddenly in August 2024, the funeral procession brought Mombasa City to a standstill. Cabinet Secretaries delivered condolences on behalf of the President. Opposition leader Kalonzo Musyoka attended personally. In death, as in life, the Hasu brand delivered extraordinary political insulation.

    But that insulation had limits, and they were always most visible at the coast’s edges. In Kilifi County, where Mombasa Cement built its main clinker factory at Vipingo, a different narrative competed with the philanthropist story. Local residents and their MPs repeatedly accused the company of acquiring land under questionable processes. Parliamentary committees investigated. In 2015, a committee directed managing director Hasmukh Patel to appear personally before it in Nairobi over questions about 1,233 acres the company held at Vipingo, which residents accused it of having wrested from ancestral owners through illegal procedures. In 2023, approximately five hundred machete-carrying youths invaded part of the Vipingo Sisal farm along the Mombasa-Malindi Highway, claiming the land belonged to their forefathers and that sisal estate leases had expired. Residents filed title deeds they said authenticated their claims, and human rights organisations accused the company of deploying fake title deeds to enforce its ownership.

    A parliamentary committee sided with critics of the acquisition, recommending the nullification of Mombasa Cement’s titles, directly contradicting the National Land Commission which had cleared the 2005 purchase from Vipingo Estate Limited at Sh68 million. Sources alleged that NLC chairman Mohammed Swazuri’s relationship with Hasu Patel gave the cement company an advantage in that acquisition. Swazuri was later acquitted in a separate Sh221 million land case, but his tenure at the NLC was itself one of the most scandal-tainted in Kenyan parastatal history.

    The Mombasa County government separately fell into open war with Mombasa Cement during this same period. The county moved to oversee and regulate Patel’s charitable donations at public hospitals, a move the tycoon and his company regarded as an intrusion. The response was extraordinary: Mombasa Cement physically removed sculptures it had installed at city roundabouts and carted them to Kilifi County in what observers widely characterised as retaliation. A billionaire was pulling art off public roundabouts in a grudge match with a county governor. In a normal environment, that episode alone would have generated the kind of sustained scrutiny the company never quite received.

    THE FAMILY IN PIECES

    While Mombasa Cement pursued the Ramji brothers through the courts, the Hashu family’s internal affairs were generating their own litigation. Court records from Mombasa reveal a succession dispute involving the estate of Hasmukh’s late elder brother, Arvind Kanji Premji Patel, who died in 2013. Arvind and Hasmukh were co-directors and co-shareholders in multiple companies, including Corrugated Sheets Limited, Vishnu Holdings Limited, Standard Rolling Mills Limited, Venus Metals Developers Limited and Vishna Investment Limited, as well as Mombasa Cement and Tororo Cement in Uganda. The combined value of those interests ran into billions.

    The complication arose from a woman named Moza Abdillahi, who bore Arvind two children during an extramarital relationship while she worked at one of the family companies. Moza and her twins subsequently claimed their share of Arvind’s estate. Her legal team accused Hasmukh of having forged Arvind’s will, arguing that Arvind was not in a sound mental or physical state when the document was executed. The irony of a man whose own legal campaign against the Ramji brothers centred on allegations of document forgery then facing his own will-forgery accusations before a court is the kind of detail that the Hashu family would very much prefer to stay buried in court archives.

    Hasmukh died before that succession dispute was publicly resolved. His death in August 2024 came barely five months after the family hosted a grand wedding in Nyali for his son Dhruv Hasmukh Patel, who now serves as a director of Mombasa Cement. Reports from the wedding described the kind of extravagance that belongs to a different universe from the Mavoko brothers they were simultaneously prosecuting: the internationally renowned Tanzanian entertainer Diamond Platnumz was flown in at fees estimated in the multi-millions. Mombasa’s business and political establishment turned out. The celebration was a statement of permanence and power. It was also, in retrospect, the last significant public display of the undiluted Hashu era.

    THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE

    The Ramji brothers are not the same men who first walked into the Environment and Land Court in 2010 with straightforward papers and reasonable expectations of a fair hearing. Fourteen years of litigation, two criminal arrests, reputational destruction, and financial attrition have not produced compliance. They have produced a calculated campaign of counter-accountability.

    Through senior counsel Nelson Havi, the brothers filed a constitutional petition naming DCI Director Mohamed Amin and DPP Director Douglas Kanja as respondents, accusing both of gross abuse of power, violation of their fundamental rights, and defiance of binding court decisions by sanctioning their arrest and prosecution after the dispute had been settled by superior courts. The petition seeks declarations that both officials are unfit to hold public office and demands that they jointly pay Sh300 million in damages for the rights violations alleged. In separate proceedings, the brothers are separately seeking Sh300 million from the DPP and DCI, bringing their total damages claim to Sh600 million.

    In parallel, the Ramjis are preparing private criminal proceedings targeting Mombasa Cement’s director Dhruv Hasmukh Patel and CEO Bhadra Shah over trespass on the Mavoko parcel and related offences. Those proceedings would, if they proceed to trial, represent a direct inversion of the story that Mombasa Cement spent over a decade constructing: that the Ramjis were the criminals, the forgers, the usurpers. Instead, the company’s own current leadership would sit in the position of accused.

    The criminal case the magistrate threw out as a nullity has not been forgotten. The brothers’ lawyers have pointed publicly to what they describe as the extraordinary alignment between Mombasa Cement’s Supreme Court defeat in September 2024 and the DCI’s decision to move against the brothers in December 2025, arguing that the sequence suggests coordination designed to frustrate the implementation of the courts’ findings. The DCI’s position, that the September 2025 NSSF complaint triggered an independent criminal investigation with forensic backing, has not satisfied the brothers or their counsel, who note that the NSSF’s involvement in a matter where NSSF documentation forms the core of the civil case raises its own questions about who was directing that complaint and why.

    WHAT THE RECORDS REVEAL ABOUT MOMBASA CEMENT’S STRATEGY

    Reviewing the full litigation trail, a pattern emerges that experienced commercial litigators in Kenya recognise immediately. When a well-resourced party knows its underlying claim is weak, the most effective legal strategy is not to win on the merits but to outlast the opponent. File applications at every junction. Appeal unfavourable procedural rulings. Open parallel fronts in multiple courts. Deploy criminal proceedings to drain the opponent’s finances and management attention, and to generate negative publicity that poisons public perception while civil hearings remain pending. Every element of that playbook appears in the record of Mombasa Cement’s engagement with the Ramji brothers.

    The company filed papers characterising the brothers’ attempts to defend themselves as an abuse of court process, a framing that, had it been accepted, would have left them unable to challenge the criminal proceedings at all. It opposed their applications at every turn, insisting that the forgery investigation was independent of the civil dispute even after the Court of Appeal had examined and dismissed forgery allegations in the same matter. When the Supreme Court closed the door on civil escalation in September 2024, a complaint appeared at DCI headquarters the same month from the NSSF, and arrests followed fifteen months later.

    None of this proves, on its own, that specific Mombasa Cement officials directed law enforcement action against the Ramjis. What it establishes, through the public record, is that every major escalation in the criminal dimension of this case followed a major setback for Mombasa Cement in the civil dimension. Coincidences, in Kenyan corporate litigation, have a tendency to cluster in patterns that only benefit one side.

    THE EMPIRE AFTER HASU

    The sudden death of Hasmukh Patel in August 2024 from what his family spokesman described as stomach pains removed the individual whose name, personal relationships, and charitable empire had provided Mombasa Cement with a level of political protection that no corporate strategy alone could replicate. Hasu’s relationships with Governor Abdulswamad Nassir, with Wiper’s Kalonzo Musyoka, with the coast political establishment from MP level upward, were personal bonds built over decades of community investment. His son Dhruv and CEO Bhadra Shah, whatever their individual capabilities, inherited a corporation carrying the weight of those relationships without the man who built them.

    The company now faces the Ramji brothers’ counteroffensive without Hasu’s protective halo. It faces the community land pressures at Vipingo without his ability to personally charm parliamentary committees into paralysis. It faces scrutiny of its acquisition history without the philanthropic narrative that historically deflected uncomfortable questions. And it faces all of this while managing an internal succession dispute over the assets of the late Arvind Patel that has yet to reach final resolution, with Moza Abdillahi and her children still pressing their claims through the courts.

    CEO Bhadra Shah has in recent years cultivated her own high-profile charitable initiatives, generating positive media coverage that mirrors the pattern Hasu Patel established. Private observers have raised pointed questions about the function of such giving in a company with Mombasa Cement’s tax profile and land-acquisition history, but those questions have not yet found a sustained public hearing.

    WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

    The Ramji brothers’ damages petitions against the DPP and DCI are live. Their intended private criminal proceedings against Dhruv Hasmukh Patel and Bhadra Shah are at an advanced preparatory stage. The Mavoko parcel, confirmed by courts from the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court as theirs, remains physically occupied by Mombasa Cement’s infrastructure, making the question of actual possession the next frontier of this battle. Trespass proceedings, if the brothers file and pursue them effectively, would force Mombasa Cement to either vacate industrial infrastructure it has operated for years on land a court has said belongs to three Kenyan-Asian brothers, or pay damages that could be substantial.

    For anyone watching Kenya’s accountability landscape, the trajectory of this case matters beyond the specific interests of the parties. It asks whether the systematic weaponisation of law enforcement against a legitimate property owner by a corporate adversary has consequences for those who did the weaponising, not only for those who survived it. It asks whether the DCI and DPP can be held financially accountable for deploying their powers on behalf of parties who have already lost in the courts whose authority those institutions are meant to enforce, not undermine.

    It also asks a question that Kenyans in business and outside it know from experience but rarely see posed this directly: when a billionaire’s philanthropy becomes the mechanism for avoiding accountability, what happens when the billionaire dies?

    For Harish, Bharat and Ashvin Ramji, the answer is becoming clear. The machine that spent fourteen years trying to bury them is now running without its most powerful component. The brothers are not celebrating. They are filing. And in Kenya’s courts, a company that once weaponised criminal law against three brothers who dared to hold a legitimate title now finds those same brothers using the same courts to come for its directors, its CEO and the state officials they allege were deployed against them.

    The Hashu empire is not finished. It is too large, too embedded in the coast’s commercial fabric, and too strategically positioned in Kenya’s construction industry to collapse from a single legal campaign. But it is, for the first time in its history, genuinely frightened. And in a country where money has too often been the last word on land, that fear is itself a kind of justice.

  • Fresh Move Launched to Remove Kenya Railways MD Mainga From Office After Awarding Sh817 Million Consultancy Contract

    Fresh Move Launched to Remove Kenya Railways MD Mainga From Office After Awarding Sh817 Million Consultancy Contract

    Philip Mainga has spent years constructing an almost impenetrable wall of silence around the most basic questions that governance demands of any public officer: What instrument authorises you to be here? When does it expire? Who approved your continuation? For years those questions went unanswered, buried under a combination of board inaction, judicial restraint and the raw political cover that comes from knowing the right people. That wall now faces its most serious battering yet, and the ammunition is accumulating from every direction simultaneously.

    On June 4, 2026, a Nairobi resident by the name of Masha Wario marched to the Employment and Labour Relations Court and filed a petition under a certificate of urgency, placing before Justice Monica Mbaru a direct demand: stop Philip Mainga from exercising any further authority as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Kenya Railways Corporation until his continued tenure can be shown to have a lawful foundation.

    The petition names the Public Service Commission and the Kenya Railways Board as respondents, enjoins the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission as an interested party, and is scheduled for hearing on June 15, 2026.

    The timing is not coincidental. The petition lands precisely one week after the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board cleared Kenya Railways to proceed with the award of an Sh817,677,187 consultancy contract to Mace YMR LLP for the design and construction of the Nairobi Railway City Central Station.

    That clearance, which came on May 27, 2026, formally dismissed a challenge by rival bidder Dar Kenya/Dar Plus Joint Venture. It should have been a moment of institutional triumph. Instead it has become the trigger for yet another escalation, because what accompanied the tender award in the shadows was far more damaging than any procurement board ruling could sanitise.

    Sources indicate at least Ksh130 million in promised bribes allegedly at play between Mainga and officers of the Mace YMR LLP consultancy firm.

    THE SH817 MILLION TENDER AND THE BRIBERY TRAIL

    The Public Procurement Administrative Review Board found that Mace YMR LLP’s proposal was substantially compliant and that Dar Kenya/Dar Plus Joint Venture had properly been disqualified at the preliminary evaluation stage for failing to submit certified audited accounts for three consecutive financial years and for submitting practising licences lacking proper signatures.

    Kenya Railways argued, and the board agreed, that Articles 227(1) of the Constitution alongside Sections 79 and 80 of the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act required strict adherence to mandatory criteria and did not permit the waiver of fundamental deficiencies.

    On paper the procurement process ended there: a clean ruling, a compliant winner, a cleared path to contract signature.

    Beneath the surface, however, an entirely different picture is emerging. Investigative sources with direct knowledge of the procurement negotiations allege that behind-the-scenes bribery discussions were ongoing between Kenya Railways officials and management officers of Mace YMR LLP, with at least Ksh130 million in promised inducements allegedly at play.

    A trail of communications and secret meetings between Mainga himself and officers of the firm is said to be available for scrutiny, and the development is expected to open the lid on possible multiple criminal investigations into the Nairobi Central Station procurement process at Kenya Railways.

    The Nairobi Central Station redevelopment is not a minor contract. It is the centrepiece of the broader Nairobi Railway City project, a flagship programme jointly financed by the governments of Kenya and the United Kingdom under the UK Export Finance framework and described by proponents as a transformative urban infrastructure intervention.

    That such a project may now be tainted by corruption allegations at the very moment of contract award raises profound questions about the integrity of Kenya’s entire infrastructure procurement pipeline and the continued credibility of the UK export finance relationship.

    THE PETITION: WHAT WARIO IS ASKING THE COURT TO COMPEL

    Masha Wario’s petition is notable for the breadth of what it demands by way of disclosure, which in itself speaks to the depth of the opacity surrounding Mainga’s continued service.

    The petitioner contends that the office of the Kenya Railways Managing Director is a public trust position, constitutionally required to be exercised in accordance with national values under Articles 10, 73 and 232 of the Constitution.

    The uncertainty over whether lawful authority for Mainga’s continued occupancy of that office exists, the petition argues, undermines public confidence and constitutional accountability.

    The court is being asked to compel the Public Service Commission and the Kenya Railways Board to produce employment contracts, renewal agreements, board resolutions, gazette notices, performance contracts and any instruments authorising his continued service.

    The petitioner additionally wants disclosure of agreements and instruments executed during the disputed period, including those linked to commuter rail developments and international engagements. Pending the full hearing, conservatory orders are sought barring Mainga from performing the duties of the office entirely. The June 15 hearing date gives Kenya Railways and the PSC fourteen days to file responses.

    The urgency is self-evident. Mainga’s tenure officially expired on January 3, 2026. Kenya Railways issued no public notice of competitive recruitment, the board maintained complete silence, and the managing director simply continued to operate as though nothing had happened.

    A whistleblower report submitted to the EACC has accused Mainga of securing a controversial 2023 term extension through alleged bribes paid to then Transport Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen and to KRC board members, ensuring a continuation to 2026 that activists describe as doubly irregular: irregular in how it was obtained and then compounded by an informal rollover beyond even that extended date. The Public Service Commission has reportedly opened its own inquiry into the circumstances of that extension.

    Mainga’s tenure officially expired on January 3, 2026. No competitive recruitment was announced. No board resolution was published. He simply stayed.

    THE EARLIER PETITIONS: A PATTERN OF FAILED ACCOUNTABILITY

    Wario’s petition is not the first. It is not the second or the third. It is merely the most recent in a long procession of legal challenges that have sought, and thus far failed, to dislodge Mainga through the courts.

    In September 2024, human rights defender Eric Kithinji Mwiti filed a constitutional petition before the High Court seeking Mainga’s removal over allegations of corruption, irregular procurement, fictitious compensation payments for land in the Datuto/Dafur Settlement Scheme and the embezzlement of public funds in violation of Articles 10, 73 and 232 of the Constitution.

    The High Court struck out that petition in November 2025 on preliminary jurisdictional grounds, ruling that the power to remove the managing director rests with the Cabinet Secretary under the Kenya Railways Corporation Act and that complainants should first channel grievances through the EACC. The substantive allegations of misconduct were never tested on their merits.

    Earlier in 2026, the Consumers Federation of Kenya filed a separate court challenge arguing that Mainga had served beyond two standard three-year terms, had remained in acting and substantive roles for combined extended periods and had continued past the mandatory retirement age of 60.

    COFEK’s filing cited fraud cover-up allegations and demanded that the board account for how someone operating without a transparent, publicly disclosed legal mandate had continued to sign contracts, award tenders, conduct international negotiations and bind a strategic national institution.

    Civic activists Matasi Yatundu, Timothy Rasugu and Julius Chebitok have filed or supported actions seeking EACC and Directorate of Criminal Investigations scrutiny of all financial transactions conducted under Mainga’s tenure and the recovery of allegedly lost public funds. Separately, Francis Owino and Ezekiel Okoth moved to court in 2023 alleging that Mainga’s tenure facilitated the loss of Sh700 billion in the Standard Gauge Railway tender scandal and accusing him of illegal tenure extension and gross transgressions of the law.

    In every instance so far, procedural hurdles and jurisdictional questions have provided Mainga with the legal breathing room he needs to continue.

    The Wario petition, filed through the Employment and Labour Relations Court with a certificate of urgency and supported by the specific framing of public trust, constitutional accountability and the absence of disclosed authorising instruments, attempts to navigate around those procedural obstacles. Whether Justice Mbaru will entertain it where earlier courts refused is the question Kenya’s governance watchers are now asking.

    TWO CONTEMPT CONVICTIONS: A RECORD WITHOUT PRECEDENT IN KENYA’S PARASTATAL SECTOR

    Before the ink on the Wario petition was dry, Mainga was already a twice-convicted contemnor of court. The significance of this cannot be understated. Very few senior state corporation executives in Kenya’s history carry even one contempt conviction. Mainga carries two, both within fourteen months of each other, both involving the deliberate demolition of private property in defiance of active court orders.

    The first conviction came in April 2025, when Justice Anthony Ombwayo of the High Court in Nakuru found Mainga guilty of contempt for failing to pay businesswoman Monica Macharia Sh45.5 million in compensation following the illegal bulldozing of her property on October 11, 2020. Macharia had owned the one-acre plot along the Nakuru-Kisumu highway since 1995, operating a bag manufacturing factory and rental premises from the land.

    Kenya Railways officials summoned her to their offices in March 2020, ostensibly to clarify ownership. Within months her business was rubble. She sued for Sh132 million and was awarded Sh45.5 million in October 2023. Kenya Railways refused to pay. By February 2025 the interest-accrued figure had grown to Sh54 million. Mainga was found in contempt, failed to appear in court on the day he was to show cause why he should not be jailed, and eventually consented to pay Sh10 million quarterly, with the final instalment scheduled for July 30, 2026.

    The second conviction arrived with far greater political resonance.

    In May 2026, Justice Oscar Angote of the Environment and Land Court found Mainga and Acting Corporation Secretary Stanley Gitari guilty of contempt for knowingly disobeying court orders issued on March 11, 2026, which had explicitly barred any demolition, construction or further activity on a contested parcel of land along Douglas Wakiihuri Road near Nyayo National Stadium.

    That land housed businesses associated with Kiambu Governor Kimani Wamatangi, specifically a car wash, carpet cleaning facility, restaurant and car yard operated by Superclean Shine Enterprises Limited and King Prime International Limited. The businesses were razed overnight in January 2026. An independent court-ordered inspection confirmed what the petitioners alleged: the land had become an active construction site with excavated trenches, piles of aggregate and workers in protective gear. Justice Angote concluded that the essential elements of contempt had been proved beyond doubt. Mainga and Gitari are scheduled to appear before the court for mitigation and sentencing on June 25, 2026, where they face fines, imprisonment or both.

    The pattern is not one of institutional failure. It is one of institutional culture. Kenya Railways under Mainga has demolished first and litigated later, counting on the delays of the judicial system to absorb the consequences while construction proceeds.

    In the Wamatangi-linked case, construction resumed on January 22, 2026, one day after service of the original orders, continued on January 24 and January 25, and received a cease-and-desist letter from opposing lawyers on January 23 that was simply ignored.

    Two contempt convictions. Seventeen billion in avoidable SGR penalties. Billions in fictitious land compensation. This is not a governance failure. This is a captured institution.

    THE LAND FRAUD ARCHITECTURE: 544 PARCELS AND COUNTING

    Perhaps no dimension of the Mainga era is more financially devastating than the land scandal. Audits and investigative disclosures have identified over 544 parcels of public railway land allegedly transferred to private individuals without proper authorisation under his watch, covering prime properties in Nairobi, Mombasa and Nakuru. The scale of the alleged theft is staggering in both breadth and method.

    The most extensively documented instance centres on the Dupoto/Dafur Settlement Scheme in Embakasi, a 90-acre parcel situated between the Standard Gauge Railway alignment, the flight path and the boundary of Nairobi National Park. According to investigative disclosures, the scheme was carefully orchestrated: proxies were identified and issued title deeds to the public land, the land was then sold to the government for a Kenya Railways project at a fraudulently inflated price, and the compensation money was wired to bank accounts opened by those proxies before being withdrawn by the masterminds.

    Billions of shillings are alleged to have moved through this scheme. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission attempted to investigate and was stopped, with sources attributing the interference to well-connected individuals within government circles.

    Earlier in Mainga’s tenure, accusations surfaced over the leasing of prime Kenya Railways facilities at Makongeni container yards in Nairobi for ten years without board approval, allegedly causing revenue losses exceeding Sh400 million.

    The Malaba godown occupied by Kristaline Salt Ltd was reportedly seized without cause in March 2018 and subsequently leased to a Mainga-favoured tenant, Multiple Solutions Ltd, exposing the corporation to a USD 10,315 claim plus general damages.

    Land at Limuru and Kikuyu stations is reported to have changed hands under circumstances that prompted investigations repeatedly stalled by powerful interests.

    Letters dated July 10, 2019, show Mainga indicating that the board at its 430th special meeting had recommended leasing of land to Kokotoni Investments Ltd and Mapset Maritime Ltd for 30 years, when sources contend the board approved no such thing.

    A legal notice from a senior official linked to the Qatar Chamber of Commerce alleges unfulfilled commitments in railway-linked real estate projects, a development that has damaged Kenya Railways’ credibility among foreign investors and generated concerns within international business circles about the reliability of commitments made by the corporation’s senior leadership.

    THE SGR FINANCIAL CATASTROPHE: SH28 BILLION LOST IN ONE YEAR

    Kenya Railways Corporation’s financial performance under Mainga presents one of the most damning indictments of state corporation management in recent Kenyan history.

    The Auditor-General’s report for the year ended June 2025 recorded a Sh28.17 billion loss, with the corporation operating with negative equity of Sh121 billion. Loan arrears tied to SGR financing have reached over Sh413 billion.

    The structural problem is the escrow arrangement under which all SGR revenues flow into a joint account managed by Kenya Railways and China Exim Bank, which requires a minimum balance of Sh25 billion before any surplus can be applied to loan servicing.

    That threshold has never been reached, meaning no loan repayments have flowed from SGR revenues, causing arrears to accumulate even as the line continues to generate income.

    The Auditor-General’s report for the year ended June 2024 separately found that failure to meet loan obligations when due had attracted avoidable expenditure of Sh34.1 billion in penalties amounting to Sh5.3 billion and interest of Sh28.85 billion, money that could have been directed to operations, maintenance or debt reduction.

    Kenya currently owes China Exim Bank 741 million dollars in principal, 222 million dollars in interest and 41 million dollars in penalties for the 2025-2026 fiscal year alone.

    The corporation spends more than one billion dollars per year servicing SGR debt to China. Critics have long argued that the terms of the SGR deal were structurally disadvantageous and that the escrow mechanism made it mathematically impossible for SGR revenues to service the loan, but those criticisms do not diminish the significance of a management record that has allowed avoidable penalties of over thirty-four billion shillings to accumulate on top of the principal obligation.

    Earlier figures were no less alarming. Kenya Railways reported Sh33.5 billion in losses for the year ended June 2023.

    The Afristar deal, the flawed management contract with Africa Star Railways for SGR operations that was initiated by Mainga himself and ran largely unchecked, was alleged to have cost the corporation up to Sh1.4 million daily in avoidable losses.

    THE RETIREES: 270 PEOPLE, 19 YEARS, SH21.9 MILLION

    Against the backdrop of billions allegedly lost to fraud, ghost compensation schemes and financial mismanagement, one figure strikes with particular moral force: 270 retired Kenya Railways employees have been waiting since 2006 for Sh21.9 million in benefits that sit, unclaimed, in a State Department of Transport account at the Central Bank of Kenya. No comprehensive beneficiary list exists. No payment has been made. The Auditor-General flagged the matter in the 2022-2023 financial year report. The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee summoned Mainga in April 2025 to explain the delay. Committee members heard testimony that some of the retirees had fallen into depression and others had died in poverty while waiting for dues earned through decades of service.

    Separately, Kenya Railways faces a larger pension liability exceeding Sh2.26 billion owed to retirees under the Kenya Railways Staff Retirement Benefits Scheme. Mainga’s response before the Senate Labour Committee was to propose selling prime city assets, including Makongeni Estate valued at approximately Sh8 billion and Ngara Estate estimated between Sh8 billion and Sh10 billion, to generate the cash needed to stabilise pension payments. Critics found the irony difficult to absorb: land assets whose origins in some cases are themselves disputed, being proposed as the solution to a pension crisis that developed on the watch of the same management whose land dealings are under investigation.

    THE MURRAM SCANDAL, THE BACKDATED CONTRACTS AND THE PROCUREMENT TRAIL

    Beyond the Mace YMR LLP tender, Kenya Railways under Mainga has accumulated a significant archive of procurement irregularities. A Sh150 million tender for murram supply on the Nairobi-Nanyuki line rehabilitation is alleged to have bypassed open competitive bidding despite the value far exceeding the Sh30 million threshold for restricted tendering. Contracts worth Sh88.2 million to First Choice General Suppliers Limited and Sh34.5 million to Mosrach Limited were allegedly backdated, with work reportedly commencing before formal agreements were signed, a violation of fundamental procurement principles that the Auditor-General’s office has flagged repeatedly as an invitation to abuse and financial exposure.

    The Afristar contract deserves particular scrutiny in the context of the current Mace YMR LLP bribery allegations. Mainga himself initiated the Afristar deal, a contract that was subsequently found to have run unchecked and to have cost the corporation Sh1.4 million daily. The combination of contract initiation without adequate protective clauses, the subsequent absence of oversight mechanisms and the enormous daily losses that accrued follows a pattern that investigators say is now being replicated in the Nairobi Central Station tender, where behind-the-scenes negotiations allegedly designed the outcome before the formal evaluation process even concluded.

    THE ACCUMULATED RECORD: A CASE STUDY IN INSTITUTIONAL CAPTURE

    What distinguishes Mainga’s tenure from ordinary mismanagement is the systemic nature of the conduct alleged across multiple independent sources. From court records, parliamentary oversight proceedings, Auditor-General reports and investigative disclosures, a coherent picture emerges not of a poorly run institution but of a deliberately captured one.

    Procurement processes have allegedly been structured to deliver predetermined outcomes. Land transactions have allegedly been used to channel public assets to private beneficiaries. Court orders have been defied with a consistency that suggests institutional policy rather than individual error. Oversight institutions, including the EACC, the PSC and Parliament, have been navigated, delayed and in some cases frustrated. The renewal mechanism itself has allegedly been compromised through bribes to the very officials whose responsibility was to ensure integrity in the appointment process.

    The Public Service Commission’s reported investigation into Mainga’s 2023 term extension could be the thread that unravels the entire arrangement. If the extension is found to have been procured through corrupt payments to the former Transport CS and board members, it does not merely invalidate the tenure. It criminalises it. Every major decision taken under that invalid authority, including the Sh817 million Mace YMR LLP contract, becomes a procurement action taken by someone with no lawful mandate to bind the state. The legal exposure that creates is vast.

    For the Nairobi Railway City project and the UK Export Finance relationship, the reputational stakes are equally serious. British taxpayers’ money, channelled through UKEF guarantees, is ultimately underwriting a programme whose flagship contract may now be shown to have been awarded through bribery negotiations. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and UK Export Finance will have their own accountability questions to answer if investigations confirm what sources are alleging.

    WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: THE CONVERGENCE OF JUNE 15 AND JUNE 25

    Philip Mainga now faces two critical court dates within ten days of each other. On June 15, 2026, Justice Monica Mbaru will hear arguments on whether Masha Wario’s petition warrants conservatory orders that would immediately bar Mainga from exercising the functions of his office. If those orders are granted, Kenya Railways will be without an acting or substantive managing director at the precise moment when the Nairobi Central Station contract is due for execution, when ongoing Nairobi Railway City construction is proceeding and when the UK Export Finance framework is under scrutiny.

    On June 25, 2026, Mainga and Stanley Gitari will appear before Justice Oscar Angote for mitigation and sentencing in the Wamatangi-linked contempt case. A custodial sentence, even a brief one, would be unprecedented for a sitting state corporation chief executive in Kenya and would force the government’s hand on succession in a way that no petition alone has managed to do.

    Against these immediate pressures, the PSC inquiry into the 2023 extension continues, the EACC’s reported interest in the Mace YMR LLP bribery trail is developing, and the DCI faces renewed activist pressure to open a comprehensive investigation into all financial transactions conducted under Mainga’s tenure. The petition by Wario, layered on top of COFEK’s challenge, the Mwiti petition that failed on jurisdiction, the activist court filings, the whistleblower report, two contempt convictions, parliamentary summonses, Auditor-General flags and now bribery allegations tied to the corporation’s single biggest current procurement, collectively represent a dossier that Kenya’s oversight institutions can no longer plausibly ignore.

    The question is not whether Philip Mainga’s record is indefensible. By any objective measure, applied to any parastatal in any country that takes governance seriously, it is. The question is whether Kenya’s institutions, individually and collectively, have the will to act before the next Sh817 million contract is signed, the next court order is bulldozed and the next generation of retirees begins its own two-decade wait for money they were owed the moment they walked out of their offices for the last time.

  • Ruto Says US Plan To Build Ebola Facility In Kenya Is The ‘Right Thing’

    Ruto Says US Plan To Build Ebola Facility In Kenya Is The ‘Right Thing’

    Summary

    • US building Ebola quarantine facility in Kenya despite protests and court order
    • Satellite images show construction progress at Laikipia Air Base
    • President Ruto says building ​the facility is the right thing to do

    JOHANNESBURG, June 4 (Reuters) – Kenyan President William Ruto on ‌Thursday said his government was doing “the right thing” by allowing the United States to set up an Ebola quarantine facility in Kenya.

    Satellite imagery seen by Reuters showed the U.S. government is moving ahead rapidly with setting up the facility ​at an air force base in central Kenya, despite protests and Kenyan court orders ​blocking it.

    Riot police officers talk to a demonstrator during protests against a U.S.-backed Ebola quarantine plan on the establishment of a 50-bed facility at a Kenyan air force base that was intended to host Americans exposed to Ebola, in Nanyuki town, in Laikipia County, Kenya June 1, 2026. REUTERS

    The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    The ⁠tented facility in Nanyuki, a town in central Kenya, is due to host a 50-bed unit ​for Americans who might be exposed to the virus, which has infected hundreds in the Democratic ​Republic of Congo, the epicentre of the outbreak.

    The outbreak has also spread to neighbouring Uganda, which has reported 16 cases.

    “I can tell you without fear of any contradiction, and I can look at everybody in the eye, … and ​tell you we are doing the right thing,” Ruto told a press conference during his state ​visit to South Africa.

    “It would be most unfortunate if on one request by the Americans to set up a ‌facility ⁠at their cost, we would refuse, we would look very inhuman,” Ruto added.

    Since May 27, a block of land totalling around 0.046 square kilometres or 11 acres within the Laikipia Air Base has been cleared, according to satellite imagery seen by Reuters.

    By June 4, a collection of connected white ​tents had been set ​up in the middle ⁠of the clearing, where tarmac appears to have been laid.

    There are further structures, earth-moving equipment and other vehicles also visible in the cleared section, ​which lies to the east of the runway.

    On Thursday, more flights landed ​at the air ⁠base, with people and heavy equipment on board, an eyewitness told Reuters.

    At least two people were killed earlier this week in protests in Nanyuki against the base.

    A Kenyan court first ordered work on the Ebola ⁠facility ​to be suspended on May 28. The U.S. embassy in ​Nairobi has said it is working with the Kenyan government to resolve any objections.

  • KBC Secures Free-to-Air Rights for 2026 World Cup

    KBC Secures Free-to-Air Rights for 2026 World Cup

    Millions of Kenyan football fans will be able to watch the 2026 FIFA World Cup live and free after the government approved funding for the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) to acquire free-to-air broadcast rights for the tournament.

    The announcement ends months of uncertainty over whether the national broadcaster would secure the rights in time for football’s biggest event, which kicks off on June 11 and will be jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.

    Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi confirmed on Thursday that the government had unlocked funding for the deal after earlier financial constraints threatened to derail KBC’s plans.

    Speaking while hosting FKF Premier League champions Gor Mahia at the National Treasury Building in Nairobi, Mbadi said the government had moved to ensure Kenyans would not miss the global football spectacle.

    “I know we had some challenges in sponsoring KBC to air it, but we have unlocked that,” Mbadi said.

    He added that he had spoken with KBC Managing Director Agnes Nguna earlier in the day and confirmed that funding had already been approved to support the acquisition of the rights.

    Shortly afterward, Nguna announced during KBC’s lunchtime news bulletin that the Cabinet had authorized the release of funds to enable the public broadcaster to secure the free-to-air package.

    “We are pleased to inform the Kenyan public that the honourable Cabinet, through a directive, approved funds to acquire free-to-air broadcasting rights for KBC to air the FIFA World Cup,” she said.

    “This means that Kenyans will be able to watch the matches live and free on air without any subscription fees. Our team is now finalising the rights with the rights holder to ensure that every Kenyan is able to enjoy this global sporting event from the comfort of their home.”

    The development comes after concerns were raised in Parliament earlier this year that KBC lacked the estimated Sh150 million required to secure the broadcasting rights. In March, the National Assembly’s Committee on Communications, Information and Innovation warned that the country risked missing free-to-air coverage unless funding was secured.

    Before the government’s intervention, pay television operators including SuperSport International, Azam TV and New World TV were among broadcasters listed as rights holders for the tournament in the region.

    The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be the largest in the competition’s history, featuring 48 teams and a record 104 matches across 39 days. The tournament will be staged across three countries for the first time, with matches hosted in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

    For many Kenyan households, KBC’s acquisition of the rights will provide the only opportunity to follow the tournament live without paying subscription fees. Previous World Cups, including the 2022 tournament in Qatar, were also broadcast free-to-air by KBC following government support.

    The announcement has been welcomed by football fans across the country, many of whom had feared they would be forced to rely on costly pay-TV services to watch the tournament.

    With funding now secured and final negotiations underway, KBC is expected to unveil its full World Cup broadcast schedule in the coming days, paving the way for nationwide coverage of the world’s most watched sporting event.

  • EACC Raids Nairobi Planning Chief Patrick Analo’s Home, Recovers Sh65 Million in Cash

    EACC Raids Nairobi Planning Chief Patrick Analo’s Home, Recovers Sh65 Million in Cash

    The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has intensified its crackdown on alleged corruption in county governments after detectives raided the home of Nairobi City County Chief Officer for Urban Development and Planning, Patrick Analo Akivaga, and recovered more than Sh65 million in cash.

    The Thursday morning operation at Analo’s residence in Syokimau is part of an ongoing investigation into allegations of conflict of interest, abuse of office, bribery and possession of unexplained wealth. According to the anti-graft agency, the senior county official is suspected of amassing assets far beyond his known legitimate sources of income. (Radio47 (https://www.radio47.fm/news/eacc-32339/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

    EACC investigators said they recovered approximately Sh65.3 million during the search, including Sh51.3 million in Kenyan currency and about USD 113,000. Some of the money was reportedly found inside the residence while another portion was recovered from the boot of a vehicle within the compound. (Radio47 (https://www.radio47.fm/news/eacc-32339/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

    The commission also seized a range of documents and electronic devices believed to be relevant to the investigation. These included title deeds, motor vehicle logbooks, laptops, mobile phones, land sale agreements, vehicle sale agreements and county approval plans. EACC says the materials could provide crucial evidence in tracing the source of the funds and determining whether public office was used for personal enrichment. (Radio47 (https://www.radio47.fm/news/eacc-32339/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

    In a statement, the commission revealed that Analo is under investigation over claims that he received more than Sh170 million through suspicious cash and M-Pesa transactions between the 2019/2020 and 2025/2026 financial years. Investigators are examining whether the transactions were linked to the abuse of his position within Nairobi County’s planning department.

    “The Commission is investigating allegations of conflict of interest, abuse of office, bribery and possession of unexplained assets against him,” EACC said.

    Analo heads one of the most influential departments at City Hall, overseeing urban planning, development approvals and enforcement of building regulations in the capital. The department has frequently found itself at the centre of controversy amid concerns over illegal developments, building collapses and allegations that developers often secure approvals through corrupt means.

    The raid is likely to reignite scrutiny of Nairobi’s planning sector, which has faced repeated accusations of irregular approvals and weak enforcement despite rapid urban growth across the city. Urban planning experts have long argued that corruption within approval processes has contributed to unsafe construction practices and significant losses in county revenue.

    The operation also comes as EACC steps up investigations into corruption and unexplained wealth cases involving senior public officials across the country. In recent months, the commission has pursued several high-profile cases involving county governments, state agencies and constituency development funds, signaling a renewed push to recover stolen public resources and prosecute those implicated in economic crimes. (The Star (https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2026-05-07-eacc-arrests-11-suspects-in-sh85-million-eldama-ravine-ng-cdf-scandal?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

    EACC said investigations into Analo’s financial dealings are ongoing and that the evidence recovered during the search will be subjected to forensic analysis. The findings will determine whether criminal charges will be filed and whether the commission will move to recover assets suspected to be proceeds of corruption.

    As of Thursday evening, Nairobi County had not issued an official statement regarding the raid or the allegations facing the senior official.

    The investigation is expected to be closely watched given Analo’s influential role in Nairobi’s development approval system and the broader public concerns over corruption in county governments.

  • Lawyer Donald Kipkorir Says NTSA Instant Fines Are Illegal, Warns New Traffic Camera System Faces Constitutional Challenge

    Lawyer Donald Kipkorir Says NTSA Instant Fines Are Illegal, Warns New Traffic Camera System Faces Constitutional Challenge

    Prominent Nairobi lawyer Donald Kipkorir has launched a scathing attack on the government’s newly introduced instant traffic fines regime, arguing that the system violates fundamental constitutional principles and undermines the right to due process.

    His criticism comes just days after the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) rolled out a new enforcement framework that allows motorists and vehicle owners to receive penalties for minor traffic offences detected by police officers, traffic cameras and other digital surveillance technologies without first appearing in court.  

    Under the framework, which took effect on June 1, motorists can be fined between KSh500 and KSh10,000 for offences ranging from speeding and driving without proper documentation to operating vehicles without valid inspection certificates. The system is designed to reduce congestion in traffic courts and improve enforcement efficiency.  

    However, Kipkorir argues that while the objective of improving road safety may be legitimate, the legal foundation underpinning the instant fines regime is deeply flawed.

    “Before one is fined, one has to be proven guilty. Traffic laws are criminal in nature,” Kipkorir said in a statement that has sparked widespread debate among motorists, lawyers and constitutional scholars.

    According to the lawyer, Kenya’s criminal justice system is built on the principle that guilt must be established before punishment is imposed. He argues that authorities cannot simply issue fines based on camera footage or vehicle registration records without first proving who committed the offence and under what circumstances.

    Kipkorir pointed to two essential elements required in criminal proceedings: mens rea or criminal intent, and actus reus or the criminal act itself.

    “The system assumes that the registered owner of a vehicle was the one driving at the time of the alleged offence. That is not always true,” he argued.

    His concerns strike at the heart of NTSA’s new enforcement model, which allows notifications to be sent to registered vehicle owners once authorities gather sufficient evidence of a traffic violation.  

    Critics of the framework argue that vehicles are often driven by family members, employees, friends, chauffeurs or hired drivers, making it difficult to automatically attribute liability to the registered owner.

    Kipkorir further contends that even where an offence is captured on camera, authorities may not be able to determine whether the violation was intentional or caused by extraordinary circumstances.

    “A driver may have been responding to a medical emergency or other unforeseen situation. The law cannot simply presume criminal intent,” he said.

    The lawyer also challenged what he described as the transfer of criminal liability from a driver to a vehicle owner.

    “If the driver isn’t the owner, then to fine the owner is completely unconstitutional. There is no transferred malice in traffic laws. One person’s criminal conduct cannot automatically be transferred to another person,” he argued.

    The controversy is likely to reignite broader debates over the balance between technology-driven enforcement and constitutional rights.

    Around the world, automated traffic enforcement systems have faced legal challenges over privacy concerns, evidentiary standards and the presumption of innocence. Courts in several jurisdictions have been asked to determine whether camera-generated penalties amount to administrative sanctions or criminal punishments requiring full judicial oversight.

    NTSA has defended the new framework, saying it was developed in consultation with the National Police Service, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Judiciary. The authority says the system operates under Sections 117 and 117A of the Traffic Act and is intended to enhance compliance with traffic laws while reducing delays in prosecuting minor offences.  

    Still, legal observers say Kipkorir’s intervention could signal the beginning of a constitutional showdown over one of the government’s most ambitious road safety initiatives in recent years.

    While he acknowledged that technology can help curb dangerous driving and improve enforcement, Kipkorir maintained that the current framework lacks sufficient constitutional and legal safeguards.

    “NTSA camera instant fines is a noble idea but without constitutional and legal foundation. It is executive irrational exuberance,” he said.

    Whether the courts ultimately agree may determine the future of Kenya’s rapidly expanding camera-based traffic enforcement system and the thousands of fines expected to be issued under it in the coming months.

  • US Embassy Defends Ebola Facility in Laikipia, Says It Doesn’t Pose Health Risks To Locals

    US Embassy Defends Ebola Facility in Laikipia, Says It Doesn’t Pose Health Risks To Locals

    The United States has moved to reassure Kenyans that a controversial Ebola bio-isolation facility being established in Laikipia poses no threat to nearby communities, even as legal challenges, public concern and questions about transparency continue to surround the project.

    In a statement issued on June 2, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi said it was working closely with the Kenyan government to address concerns raised over the facility and to explain its role in the regional response to an ongoing Ebola outbreak.

    “We are aware of the court action filed in Kenya and are actively working with the Kenyan government to resolve any objections and communicate our shared objectives to the Kenyan people,” the embassy said.

    The statement comes amid growing scrutiny of the facility, which has become the centre of a heated national debate over public health, sovereignty and Kenya’s role in international disease response efforts.

    According to the U.S. government, the facility is designed to support efforts to contain Ebola and strengthen preparedness in East Africa at a time when neighbouring countries are battling outbreaks and health authorities remain on high alert.

    “The bio-isolation facility in Laikipia is part of a holistic response to prevent spread of the disease and lessen health risks for the region as a whole; it does not pose risk to nearby communities,” the embassy said.

    The United States and Kenya have maintained a close health partnership for decades, collaborating on programmes targeting HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other public health threats. American officials say the Ebola response is a continuation of that long-standing cooperation.

    “The United States and Kenya share a historic health partnership that over decades has benefitted both Americans and Kenyans,” the statement read. “Our joint response to the current Ebola outbreak is a natural extension of our longstanding cooperation.”

    Health experts involved in the response say the facility is intended to provide controlled isolation capacity for individuals who may have been exposed to the virus, helping prevent transmission while supporting testing, surveillance and emergency preparedness efforts.

    The embassy said the broader response extends beyond Laikipia and includes support for border screening, laboratory testing, disease surveillance and preparedness measures in counties considered vulnerable to infection.

    Officials also revealed that the programme includes expanded capacity to isolate and test asymptomatic individuals involved in the response effort, including international health workers. The goal, they said, is to reduce the risk of wider transmission while ensuring Kenya’s healthcare resources remain available for local patients.

    The U.S. government emphasized that it remains the largest financial contributor to Ebola response efforts in the region. According to the embassy, direct American assistance has exceeded $162 million (approximately KSh20.9 billion), while additional funding continues to support emergency operations across affected countries.

    Washington further noted that it has contributed $350 million (about KSh45.1 billion) through humanitarian funding channels supporting emergency response activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and South Sudan.

    Officials said the strategy is focused on containing the outbreak before it spreads across borders.

    “The Department has provided funding to stop the outbreak at its source and prevent Ebola from reaching Kenya or the United States,” the statement said.

    The embassy’s defence of the facility comes as court proceedings challenging the project continue and public debate intensifies. Critics have questioned the level of public participation surrounding the project and demanded greater disclosure about agreements reached between Nairobi and Washington.

    Despite those concerns, both governments insist the facility is safe, tightly controlled and necessary to strengthen regional preparedness against one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.

    As the legal battle unfolds, Kenyan and American officials say they will continue working together to address public concerns while maintaining cooperation aimed at preventing a wider Ebola crisis in the region.

  • The Man Who Owns Maraga: Inside The Sexual Harassment Scandal Threatening UGM From Within

    The Man Who Owns Maraga: Inside The Sexual Harassment Scandal Threatening UGM From Within

    When David Maraga took the colours of the United Green Movement in October 2025 and declared himself a presidential candidate, the optics were perfectly assembled.

    The man who had annulled a presidential election on constitutional grounds, who had warned the country about the rot in its institutions, who had built a public identity around the language of restoration and justice, was stepping forward to finish what the constitution started.

    The crowd at the Green Action House in Nairobi was animated. The party founder, former Ndhiwa MP Agostinho Neto Oyugi, spoke warmly of what he called a liberation exercise. Kenya, he said, was ready to be saved.

    What was not assembled with the same care was the internal machinery of the campaign that was supposed to deliver that salvation.

    Within weeks of Maraga’s unveiling, reports began circulating inside the campaign secretariat about conduct that would prove deeply uncomfortable for a candidate whose entire pitch to voters rests on the idea that he is different.

    The conduct was attributed not to a minor functionary or a peripheral volunteer. It was attributed to Neto himself, the man who built the party, who owns its founding structures, and who selected Maraga as its presidential standard-bearer.

    This is the story of how that conduct surfaced, who carried it forward at enormous personal cost, what the party chose to do with the evidence it received, and what all of it means for a presidential bid that Kenya’s reform-minded voters had dared to take seriously.

    THE MAN BEHIND THE MOVEMENT

    Agostinho Neto Oyugi was born in Homa Bay County on the first day of 1976. He was the fourth child of Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Oyugi, educated first at Homa Bay and Asego primary schools before proceeding to Alliance High School, one of the most prestigious secondary institutions in the country. He then read law at the University of Nairobi, where he distinguished himself sufficiently in human rights advocacy to be named Africa’s fourth best oralist in human rights in 2004 at an event organised by the Centre for Human Rights in Pretoria, held at the University of Dar es Salaam.

    The human rights pedigree was not merely decorative. It fed directly into a political career built on a particular kind of defiance.

    In 2012, Neto contested and won the Ndhiwa Constituency parliamentary seat in a by-election on an Orange Democratic Movement ticket. He was re-elected in the March 2013 general election.

    In that same period, he was part of a coalition of activists that mounted a High Court challenge seeking to disqualify both Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto from the 2013 presidential race, positioning himself firmly in the camp of constitutional activism against the political establishment.

    During his parliamentary term, he was credited with infrastructure development in Ndhiwa roads, schools, healthcare facilities and a bursary programme that supported students from the constituency attending national schools. He presented as a lawmaker with a genuine local constituency and a broader progressive identity.

    He was a politician of the sort that Kenyan reform circles produce periodically: someone with real credentials whose trajectory seemed set towards something larger.

    What happened instead was a long and winding departure from the path he had set for himself. He lost the ODM primaries ahead of 2017 and ran as an independent, failing to retain his seat. The loss drove a wedge between him and the party infrastructure through which he had risen.

    Over the years that followed, the wedge became a chasm.

    By 2019, Neto was publicly attacking ODM leader Raila Odinga, accusing him of selfishness and charging that he used his following to enrich himself rather than deliver on the promises of revolution.

    He urged the Luo community to abandon Raila politics and, in a move that shocked many in his traditional political circle, urged support for Deputy President William Ruto, whom he credited with having stood with the community in 2007 when Raila and Ruto had worked together in the disputed election that preceded the post-election violence.

    The pivot towards Ruto was not a quiet one.

    Neto publicly vowed support, claiming there was a silent majority within the Luo community that was tired of ODM’s dominance and ready for a different political alignment.

    It was a calculation that placed him firmly outside the Luo political mainstream at a moment when that mainstream remained overwhelmingly loyal to Raila Odinga.

    Whether the calculation was driven by conviction, injury at his treatment within ODM, or a reading of where power was moving was a matter of debate in Homa Bay political circles. What was not debatable was that it cost him standing within the community he claimed to speak for.

    By 2022, as the presidential race hardened around William Ruto and Raila Odinga, Neto had already been building the United Green Movement, a party whose name invoked environmental consciousness and whose stated values emphasised total inclusivity, youth empowerment, anti-corruption, and green innovation.

    He positioned himself as the party’s founding force and eventually as co-party leader alongside other figures. The party became the vehicle through which he would re-enter national politics, not as a candidate himself this time, but as the man who could hand a credible name a platform and shape the politics of the 2027 race.

    The credible name he found was David Maraga.

    A FOUNDING FORUM AND A PRESIDENTIAL CERTIFICATE

    When Maraga arrived at the United Green Movement in October 2025, Neto was unambiguous about the power structure.

    As the party’s founding member and co-leader, it was Neto who presided over the founding members forum that served as an internal electoral college and pre-selected Maraga as the party’s presidential flagbearer, pending approval at the National Delegates Conference scheduled for early 2027.

    Neto was explicit in articulating this. The forum, he told those gathered, was mandated by the UGM party constitution to act in this capacity. It was his party. He had built it. He was now deploying it.

    Maraga, for his part, accepted the framework.

    He expressed alignment with the party’s ideology on rule of law, human rights, and democratic governance. He committed to building the party so that it would hold not only the presidency but the majority of seats in the next elections.

    He positioned himself as the face of the liberation campaign, the Ukombozi that Neto and UGM had been preaching. The partnership appeared clean and complementary: Neto’s party infrastructure and organisational muscle combined with Maraga’s irreproachable public reputation.

    What that arrangement obscured, and what was about to become devastatingly relevant, was the reality that in any dispute involving the party apparatus, the party and its grievance processes belonged to the man whose name appeared on the founding documents. The accused and the institution were, in the most functional sense, the same person.

    OCTOBER COMPLAINTS AND THE COST OF SPEAKING

    The trouble began in early October 2025, barely days after Maraga’s formal unveiling as the campaign’s presidential flagbearer.

    According to Shakira Wanjira Nalia Wafula, who had been appointed Secretary of the Political Committee within the campaign, she and other women on the team began raising concerns about harassment on or around October 7.

    The concerns were not anonymous whispers or corridor gossip.

    They were specific, they involved multiple women, and they were directed at someone with decisive authority within the party structure.

    Shakira was not an inconsequential voice to attach these concerns to.

    She had risen to national prominence during the June 2024 Gen Z protests that rocked the country, her face becoming one of the defining images of that uprising after video of her boldly confronting police officers and refusing to leave went viral. She was a fitness coach, a certified lifeguard, a civic educator, and the vice-chairperson of Kikao, an organisation focused on youth engagement and social impact. When Maraga’s campaign was being assembled, her recruitment was a signal to Gen Z voters that this was a candidacy attuned to their generation. She was not someone the campaign could easily dismiss.

    A meeting between the women and Maraga reportedly occurred on October 22. A formal written complaint was submitted on November 3. Four women of standing within the campaign had at that point registered their concerns.

    The name at the centre of those concerns was Agostinho Neto Oyugi.

    What happened next illustrated precisely why women in politics so often conclude that internal reporting mechanisms are not designed for their protection. Rather than an independent investigation, the matter was referred to an ad-hoc committee convened under the auspices of UGM.

    The party. Neto’s party. The party whose founding documents bear his name and whose leadership structure he dominates. From the perspective of the women bringing the complaint, they were being asked to participate in a process presided over, at its deepest structural level, by the man they were accusing.

    Shakira refused to participate and made her reasons clear. She had already resigned from the campaign. She had never been a UGM party member. And she regarded the referral to a party process controlled by the accused as a gesture lacking in any genuine goodwill.

    The ad-hoc committee proceeded without her full cooperation. It conducted its hearings. It recorded that the complainants had not provided written complaints or fully engaged with the process. It produced a finding of no evidence. Case closed, from the party’s perspective.

    THE RESIGNATION AND ITS AFTERMATH

    On November 17, 2025, Shakira published her resignation from the Political Committee and from all responsibilities associated with the campaign. The statement was carefully worded, diplomatic in its phrasing, and entirely legible to those who knew the internal context.

    She cited divergence in foundational values and priorities. She referenced the campaign’s Reset, Restore, Rebuild slogan and suggested that achieving those ideals required a depth of commitment to values that was not present in the campaign’s leadership. She extended best wishes to remaining team members and declared her continued commitment to a Kenya anchored in integrity and accountability.

    The media covered it as an interesting internal split. Several outlets noted it as a blow to Maraga’s Gen Z credibility. Radio 254 reported that within hours of the resignation being published, speculation was already circulating online that the diplomatic public letter was a stripped-down version of a more detailed account referencing misconduct allegations against a senior official.

    By Tuesday evening, Maraga was trending alongside phrases that were deeply unflattering for a candidate built on the promise of principled governance.

    Within the broader online discourse, activist Hanifa, laid out the allegations in greater detail in a thread that named Neto Agostinho as the central figure. Hanifa described Maraga in personal terms as a person she trusted and believed in while insisting that the problem was Neto and the team around him.

    She detailed the experiences of the four women who had left, challenged the framing of victims as people who did not fit the stereotype of the perfect victim, and made the argument that removing Ruto from power was not a goal worth pursuing if the means required women to endure harassment and remain silent about it.

    This was not, she argued emphatically, kushikwa shikwa udaku. This was not gossip. This was a political crisis with real victims.

    Screenshot

    Online discourse fractured in predictable ways. Defenders of Neto claimed that the women had formed a WhatsApp group specifically to remove him from the party structure and feminise the organisation, and that when that campaign failed through legitimate means it turned to social media smears. Critics pointed out that this defence was precisely the kind of structural delegitimisation that harassment complainants routinely face, and that the question of what actually happened to those four women remained unanswered by a party finding of no evidence produced by a process the complainants had declined to validate.

    FEMICIDE MARCHES AND THE POLITICS OF HYPOCRISY

    The matter did not resolve itself quietly. It smouldered through the early months of 2026 as UGM continued its grassroots mobilisation and Neto continued appearing publicly alongside Maraga at campaign events across the country, including in Homa Bay Town and during Maraga’s visits to Nyanza.

    The two men were photographed together, presented together, and continued to frame their partnership as the cornerstone of a liberation campaign built on integrity.

    Then came June 1, 2026. Thousands of Kenyans, predominantly women, took to the streets of Nairobi in one of the largest demonstrations against gender-based violence the capital had seen in months, organised by the End Femicide movement alongside women’s rights and human rights organisations. They carried empty coffins symbolic of the women killed. They held placards. They brought parts of the central business district to a standstill. And David Maraga joined the march, lending his voice to calls for stronger government action against femicide.

    For Shakira Wafula, this was too much. She called it political theatre. The characterisation was precise and devastating. Here was a man marching in solidarity with women against gender-based violence while the sexual harassment allegations against his party co-leader remained unresolved, cloaked behind a party process that the complainants themselves had refused to validate, and while that same co-leader continued to appear beside him at campaign rallies. The optics were not ambiguous. They were a direct collision between the performance of values and the reality of how those values had been applied inside the campaign itself.

    On June 3, 2026, UGM issued a formal statement detailing its internal process. The party described an ad-hoc committee that had conducted hearings. It noted that complainants including Shakira had not provided written complaints or fully participated.

    It reiterated its finding of no evidence.

    It emphasised due process, noted that no police reports had been filed, and pushed back against what it characterised as defamation aimed at undermining Maraga’s candidacy.

    The statement did not meaningfully address the central question of why the process had been administered by a party apparatus over which the accused himself exercises foundational authority.

    WHAT THE SCANDAL MEANS FOR MARAGA

    Maraga and Neto in a past event.

    David Maraga is running for president on a single compelling asset: the idea that he is constitutionally serious about accountability in a way that Kenya’s political class has never been. His most celebrated act in public life was annulling the 2017 presidential election on the grounds of constitutional irregularities, a decision that cost him and his family personally and that he has consistently described as having been made from a place of principle rather than calculation. Everything about his campaign, the Ukombozi language, the Reset Restore Rebuild slogan, the appeal to Gen Z idealism, the positioning as a jurist stepping into politics to finish what the constitution demands, rests on the credibility of that reputation.

    That credibility is now being measured against a different standard. The question being asked is not whether Maraga himself harassed anyone. It is whether a man who built his brand on accountability has chosen to stand beside someone accused of harassment while the mechanism designed to address those accusations was run by the accused’s own party infrastructure, and whether that choice reflects the same constitutional seriousness he has always projected.

    The political cost disaggregates across several lines. Among women voters and feminist civil society, who were already among Maraga’s natural constituents and who are now in a state of sustained mobilisation over femicide and gender-based violence, the image of the candidate joining a femicide march while his co-leader faces unresolved harassment allegations is a precise articulation of a hypocrisy they have seen before in Kenyan politics. It will not be forgotten by the demographic he most needs to energise.

    Among Gen Z voters, who represent perhaps the most volatile and consequential emerging electoral bloc ahead of 2027, the loss of Shakira’s credible endorsement and her subsequent public identification of the campaign as a space where women were harassed and then referred to the harasser’s own institutional process represents a rupture that is difficult to repair without concrete action. Shakira is not simply a former staffer. She is one of the iconic faces of the 2024 protests. Her departure and her subsequent framing of events carries weight proportional to her public standing.

    For Neto himself, the position is both more insulated and more exposed than it might initially appear.

    He is insulated because the party’s formal process, which he effectively controls, has produced a finding in his favour and because no criminal charges have been filed.

    He is exposed because his continued public visibility alongside Maraga, in Homa Bay, in Nyanza, at rally after rally, keeps the question alive and transforms every platform appearance into a reminder of what has not been resolved.

    The deeper problem for UGM is structural and has existed since Maraga joined the party.

    A presidential campaign built on a man’s personal integrity being handed to a party whose foundational owner is the subject of harassment allegations is not a combination that resolves itself through press statements.

    It resolves itself either through the accused stepping back and submitting to a genuinely independent investigation, or through the candidate making a public and irreversible demonstration that the values he campaigns on are not suspended at the party gate.

    As of early June 2026, neither of those things has happened.

    THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN

    Neto Agostinho Oyugi is a trained lawyer who spent years in human rights advocacy, who was once named among Africa’s best young oralists on human rights questions, and who built a political party around values of inclusivity and justice.

    That biography makes what he is alleged to have done more troubling, not less. Men who build institutions around the rhetoric of rights are not immune to the exercise of power over vulnerable women in informal spaces. In some cases the rhetoric serves as precise cover for behaviour that the institution it produces will never be equipped to address.

    The party process UGM deployed was not independent. The founding members forum that has the power to select and deselect presidential flagbearers belongs structurally to Neto.

    A committee reporting to that structure cannot be independent of him regardless of the personal integrity of its individual members. The complainants understood this. Their refusal to validate the process was not obstruction. It was a rational recognition that the process was asking them to submit their complaints to the man the complaints were about.

    Four women left a presidential campaign in the space of weeks. One of them was a nationally recognised activist with the credibility and the social media following to make her departure consequential. A party statement saying there was no evidence is not evidence that nothing happened. It is evidence of what a process controlled by the accused tends to find.

    Kenya goes to the polls in 2027.

    The question of whether David Maraga can mount a serious presidential challenge depends, as it always has, on whether the values he campaigns on are real or rhetorical.

    That question now has a very specific test case attached to it, with four names behind it, a June resignation, and a femicide march that a former Chief Justice attended while the women in his own campaign were still waiting for justice.

  • Fertility Point’s House of Horrors: Wrong Sperm, Disputed Babies, a Dead Donor, and a Clinic That Cannot Stay Out of Court

    Fertility Point’s House of Horrors: Wrong Sperm, Disputed Babies, a Dead Donor, and a Clinic That Cannot Stay Out of Court

    The brochures promise precision. The website speaks of internationally trained IVF consultants and proven expertise. The testimonials glow. Fertility Point, the trading name of NMC Fertility (K) Limited, markets itself from its Upper Hill offices in Nairobi as a beacon of reproductive science for families across East Africa and beyond, a trusted gateway to parenthood for couples who have run out of other roads.

    What the marketing materials do not mention is that the clinic is currently named in not one but two separate High Court cases alleging that children born through its services bear no genetic relationship to the specifications, or in one case the very parents, that commissioned them.

    They do not mention that a decorated Kenyan whistleblower has publicly alleged that a university student died inside the clinic during an egg donation procedure last year, and that her death was subsequently covered up with the alleged involvement of senior law enforcement.

    They do not mention that the clinic’s own IVF specialist spent years fighting it in the Employment and Labour Relations Court over a midnight dismissal she described as unlawful and punitive. The picture that emerges from Kenya’s court records, and from the public record of the man whose corporate umbrella now covers Fertility Point, is of a facility carrying institutional risks that its slick marketing has worked hard to obscure.

    The Sperm That Wasn’t Hers

    On 17 November 2018, a woman identified in court papers only as Ms JW walked into Fertility Point seeking intrauterine insemination. She had specific requirements. She had selected a donor according to preferred racial characteristics, provided those specifications to the clinic in writing, and trusted that a facility presenting itself as a specialised reproductive healthcare provider would honour them. She paid for a service. The clinic accepted her terms.

    Nine months later, on 25 August 2019, she gave birth to a child whose racial profile did not match the donor she had selected, and who carried a medical condition she says should have been screened out of any donor sample. Doubts corroded her from the moment she saw the child. Scientific certainty arrived on 16 June 2021 when DNA testing confirmed the child was of mixed race. The result was devastating. Ms JW says it triggered profound psychological suffering of a kind no damages award will ever fully repair.

    In August 2023, she filed suit seeking damages for emotional and psychological suffering, breach of contract, and punitive and exemplary damages. Fertility Point struck back hard. The clinic persuaded the magistrate’s court in September 2024 to throw the case out as time-barred under the three-year limitation period applicable to negligence claims, arguing the clock had started running at treatment or birth, not when DNA evidence arrived years later.

    Ms JW appealed.

    On 22 May 2026, the High Court ruled in her favour, finding the dispute could not be compressed into a simple negligence box because the relationship arose from a contractual arrangement with clearly agreed donor specifications. Allegations that the clinic failed to honour those specifications created what the court called a hybrid claim, simultaneously contractual and tortious. The magistrate’s court decision was set aside, the clinic’s preliminary objection dismissed, and the case reinstated for full hearing.

    “The appellant’s case powerfully illustrates the inadequacy of the current legal framework.” — High Court of Kenya, May 2026

    The court did not confine itself to the technicalities of limitation law. In language remarkable for its bluntness, the judge observed that the existing Kenyan legal framework is ill-suited to address the unique challenges presented by assisted reproductive technology disputes, pointed directly at the long-delayed Artificial Reproductive Technology Bill, and told Parliament that its enactment is long overdue.

    The ruling was, in effect, a public indictment of two institutions simultaneously: a fertility clinic that allegedly ignored a patient’s explicit instructions, and a legislature that has allowed Kenya’s reproductive health sector to operate in a regulatory desert for years.

    The Second Case: Another Baby, Another DNA Shock

    If the Ms JW case could be treated as an isolated historical dispute, a second independent High Court matter forecloses that comfort. In Civil Case E025 of 2025, styled AAD and ANA versus NMC Fertility (K) Limited and three others, an American couple has sued the clinic alleging that a child born to a gestational surrogate on 19 January 2025 is not biologically theirs. According to court filings, the couple engaged Fertility Point for IVF services in April 2024.

    Their eggs and sperm were collected, an embryo created, and it was implanted into a surrogate. When the couple later arranged for the child to travel and required documentation, DNA testing revealed what they say is an absence of any genetic link between them and the child they believed was theirs.

    The couple sought urgent orders to compel the clinic and associated parties to preserve all IVF records from April 2024 through to the birth date. In January 2026, Justice HK Chemitei granted partial relief, ordering the clinic and all respondents to preserve records and release certain documentation. The case remains active in the High Court. Two DNA shocks. Two sets of intended parents alleging their instructions, or their very genes, were discarded somewhere inside Fertility Point’s laboratory chain. The clinic has not been found liable in either matter. What cannot be contested is that two separate families are navigating courts over children who, according to DNA evidence, are not the children they were supposed to have.

    The Student Who Went In and Did Not Come Out

    The genetic disaster cases are alarming enough. What a prominent Kenyan whistleblower has alleged goes further, into territory that, if proven, would constitute not medical negligence but suspected criminal concealment of a patient’s death.

    On 15 April 2025, Nelson Amenya, the blue-tick activist who in 2024 single-handedly exposed the secret government deal to hand Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to the Adani Group, forcing a presidential reversal of the agreement, published a detailed account on his X platform. Amenya is not a fringe voice.

    He is a recipient of Kenya’s Top 40 Under 40 recognition, a Daily Nation columnist, and a figure whose previous disclosures have been validated at the highest levels of Kenyan public life. He has, since the JKIA exposure, faced judicial reprisals and harassment extensively documented by international press freedom organisations, which has done nothing to diminish his public credibility.

    In his April 2025 post, which reached at least 44,000 impressions before the linked thread was removed from public view, Amenya stated that around November of the previous year a university student walked into Fertility Point’s Upper Hill clinic to donate her eggs to a friend.

    According to his account, the life-monitoring machines at the facility were non-functional, described as decoration since they stopped working sometime back.

    The student died during the procedure.

    Amenya’s post alleges that rather than transparently reporting the death, staff gathered oxygen tanks and moved the patient to a recovery room, apparently attempting to manage the situation internally.

    The companion who had accompanied the student, growing impatient at the extended duration of the procedure, began raising questions.

    A doctor from Lifecare Hospital, a facility within the same Jayesh Saini-controlled healthcare network that owns Fertility Point, was called to assess the situation.

    According to Amenya, that doctor played along with clinic staff rather than independently reporting the death.

    The student was then transported, Amenya alleges, not to Lifecare for emergency treatment but directly to a mortuary, with the transfer presented as a hospital referral.

    Most gravely, Amenya states that a report of the death was forged with the assistance of DCI officers, and that Rufus Maina, the legal officer closely associated with Jayesh Saini’s healthcare empire, allegedly paid certain DCI personnel to bury the investigation.

    Amenya further states that the deceased’s father, a university lecturer based in Eldoret, refused to speak to the media, which he characterised as consistent with the family having been warned against going public.

    This publication cannot independently confirm the death at the time of writing. No death certificate, no OB number and no named victim has been provided to us. The linked portion of Amenya’s post, which presumably contained further detail, is unavailable.

    Amenya’s primary account is stated as information received rather than eyewitness testimony. These are the appropriate caveats and they are stated plainly. They are not, however, reasons to ignore the allegation.

    Amenya’s track record as a whistleblower is among the strongest of any public citizen in Kenya’s recent history. The specific details in his account, naming Rufus Maina, Lifecare Hospital, and a cover-up routed through the DCI, are not random. They are precisely calibrated details whose accuracy or falsity can be investigated.

    The linked thread was taken down. 44,000 people had already seen it. Deletion is not denial.

    The connection between Rufus Maina and Jayesh Saini’s healthcare empire is publicly documented and confirmed by multiple credible sources including the Daily Nation.

    Maina is identified in corporate records as a director of companies within the Africare group, which encompasses Fertility Point, LifeCare Hospitals, Bliss Healthcare, and Nairobi West Hospital.

    Amenya’s identification of Maina by name in the context of a Fertility Point incident is therefore not random. It is a specific allegation against a specific individual with a documented, verifiable role in the clinic’s ownership structure.

    This publication has formally sought comment from Fertility Point, from Jayesh Saini’s office, and from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations on the allegations contained in Amenya’s post. No response had been received at the time of publication. The DCI has not publicly confirmed or denied any investigation into a patient death at Fertility Point Upper Hill. No public inquest has been announced. If the allegation is false, the clinic, Saini, Maina and the DCI have the full right and opportunity to say so, on record, to this publication.

    The Doctor Who Was Thrown Out in the Dark

    The two genetic catastrophe cases and the alleged death are not the only legal storms gathered over Fertility Point. Employment and Labour Relations Court records show the clinic spent years fighting its own IVF specialist after dismissing her in circumstances she characterised as unlawful, vindictive and designed to destroy her career in Kenya.

    Dr Sarita Sukhija joined NMC Fertility (K) Limited on 5 June 2018 as an IVF Consultant on a salary of USD 11,000 per month. She worked there for over two and a half years. In March 2020, the clinic unilaterally cut her minimum guaranteed salary and moved her to a per-case payment structure, according to her court filings.

    By 14 December 2020, the relationship had collapsed entirely. She was summoned to a meeting with the CEO and HR head and told to leave the premises immediately and return to India. Police officers were stationed at her workplace to bar her from entry.

    What followed was worse. The clinic allegedly wrote to the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board making what she described as false accusations against her, resulting in the revocation of her practising certificate. It denied her a No Objection Certificate, trapping her professionally in Kenya while simultaneously preventing her from practising medicine here. She alleged the clinic attempted to have her deported.

    The Employment and Labour Relations Court delivered judgment on 4 February 2025, awarding her USD 7,811.57 in unpaid leave and air tickets. She subsequently filed a review application contending the court had failed to address her claim for terminal dues of USD 50,840. The litigation record paints a picture of an employer that weaponised regulatory bodies against a departing clinician.

    The Man Behind the Machine: Jayesh Saini’s Empire

    To understand what Fertility Point is, you must understand who controls it. The clinic is not an independent practice. It sits inside a sprawling corporate empire assembled by Jayesh Saini, whose Africare group encompasses LifeCare Hospitals across five major counties, Bliss Healthcare with over 65 outpatient centres in 37 counties, Dinlas Pharma, Medicross, Nairobi West Hospital, and Fertility Point Kenya. Saini presents publicly as a transformational healthcare entrepreneur. The record of his group’s encounters with Kenyan regulatory and investigative institutions tells a different story.

    Saini’s companies have faced DCI scrutiny over alleged NHIF misappropriation, with investigators obtaining court orders to search his father’s hospital servers over suspected fund diversions. His Gesto Pharmaceuticals was accused of supplying substandard drugs to KEMSA. He was identified as a principal figure in the shadowy SHA digital health platform contract, a Ksh 104.8 billion arrangement linking his proxy Rufus Maina, Adani-connected entities, and President Ruto’s personal lawyer Adil Khawaja.

    He was also named in a case alleging procurement of Ksh 120 million spyware for monitoring opposition figures. It was Amenya himself who first exposed Saini’s role in the Adani-JKIA deal, a disclosure for which Saini subsequently sued Amenya in France in a case that international press freedom bodies characterised as a strategic lawsuit designed to silence a whistleblower. The two men are not strangers to each other’s public allegations.

    That context matters when assessing Amenya’s April 2025 post. This is not a random member of the public making an accusation against an unknown clinic. This is the same whistleblower who exposed Saini’s airport deal, now alleging a patient died inside Saini’s fertility clinic and that Saini’s legal officer paid police to suppress the investigation.

    The Parent Company’s Global Fraud Implosion

    Beneath the Saini layer lies a further complication: the NMC Healthcare brand itself. NMC, once listed on the London Stock Exchange and presenting as one of the largest private healthcare providers in the Middle East, collapsed in 2020 after revealing more than four billion dollars in undisclosed borrowings. Its administrators later described what happened as fraud on a massive scale.

    The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority censured the company in 2023 for market manipulation and deliberate failure to disclose debts. The administrator Alvarez and Marsal launched a USD 2.5 billion negligence claim against auditor EY over its audits of NMC accounts between 2012 and 2018. Total creditor exposure across more than 80 financial institutions ran to billions of dollars.

    Fertility Point’s own website continues to describe itself as part of NMC Fertility, one of the largest providers of fertility services in the world. Patients browsing its services from Upper Hill to Kisumu to Mombasa see no mention of any of this. They see success rates and state-of-the-art embryology laboratories. They do not see the court dockets.

    The Regulatory Vacuum That Enables the Worst

    Kenya’s fertility industry operates without a dedicated regulatory framework. The Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council licences facilities and doctors but has no statutory instrument setting specific standards for donor screening, gamete chain-of-custody protocols, mandatory national registries or disclosure obligations to patients.

    The National Assembly approved amendments to the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill in November 2025, but the legislation has not yet been fully enacted.

    The High Court in Ms JW’s case stated plainly that existing contract and tort laws were developed for conventional commercial claims and do not adequately address the ethical, medical and deeply personal issues arising from fertility treatment, and that harm in these cases may not become apparent for years.

    Without that framework, what fills the vacuum is institutional self-regulation, and in the case of a clinic sitting inside a corporate group with Fertility Point’s documented litigation history, that is not enough.

    There is no mandatory reporting of suspected patient deaths to any independent authority. There is no prescribed protocol requiring external review when a patient does not recover from a procedure.

    There is no national registry that would surface patterns of adverse events across a clinic’s years of operation. The families whose stories are now playing out in Nairobi’s courts, and possibly in a mortuary in Upper Hill, are paying for that failure in the most irreversible way.

    The Children, and the Student Who Never Came Home

    In the end, whatever the courts eventually determine, there are real people living with the consequences of what allegedly happened inside Fertility Point’s operations. Ms JW carries psychological suffering that began when she saw a child whose face told her something had gone catastrophically wrong.

    The AAD intended parents are navigating life with a child whose biological origins are the subject of public High Court litigation. And somewhere in Eldoret, if Amenya’s account holds, a father who is a university lecturer is living with the loss of his daughter, a young woman who walked into a fertility clinic in Upper Hill to do something generous for a friend, and never walked out.

    None of these outcomes are adjudicated findings. Fertility Point has the right to contest every allegation at trial. Jayesh Saini and Rufus Maina have the right to respond to the specific allegations against them, and this publication has sought that response. The DCI has the right, and the duty, to confirm or deny whether any investigation into a patient death at the clinic was ever opened or closed.

    What cannot be contested is the accumulation. Two active genetic catastrophe cases in the High Court. A whistleblower of national standing alleging a covered-up death involving the clinic’s ownership network and the DCI.

    A dismissed IVF consultant alleging her medical licence was weaponised against her. A parent company whose global name became synonymous with institutional fraud. A tycoon owner whose other healthcare entities have faced regulatory investigation, KEMSA drug supply accusations, NHIF fraud probes, and a legal action in France designed, according to international bodies, to silence the very whistleblower now making allegations about his fertility clinic.

    Parliament has had the ART Bill since 2022 and has dawdled. The KMPDC has licenced Fertility Point as a Level 3 medical centre and said nothing public about any of these proceedings. The High Court has twice delivered language that amounts to a judicial rebuke of a regulatory system that has left patients exposed.

    The clinic sells hope to the most vulnerable customers on earth: people who desperately want children, or young women who want to help someone they love have one. What the record now shows is that for at least some of those people, what they received instead was a DNA shock, a disputed embryo, an alleged corpse quietly moved to a mortuary, or a bill for suffering that no court has yet been asked to fully calculate.

    Kenya Insights will continue investigating the alleged patient death. If you have information about the incident described in Nelson Amenya’s April 2025 post, or about any other adverse event at Fertility Point, contact us through secure channels listed on our website.

  • Trump Confirms He Called Netanyahu Crazy In Phone Call

    Trump Confirms He Called Netanyahu Crazy In Phone Call

    Summary

    • Trump confirms expletive-laden call with Netanyahu over Lebanon fighting
    • Netanyahu downplays rift, cites strong ties and common goals with Trump
    • Trump defends Iran policy, says Israel safer after US withdrawal from 2015 deal

    WASHINGTON, June 3 (Reuters) – U.S. ​President Donald Trump acknowledged calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “crazy” in an expletive-filled phone exchange over fighting in Lebanon, while the ‌U.S. was trying to negotiate an end to hostilities with Iran.

    In an interview broadcast on Wednesday, Trump was asked whether he had called the longtime Israeli leader “effing crazy” and accused him of ingratitude, paraphrasing a report by Axios.

    “I did,” Trump told the “Pod Force One” podcast. “I wouldn’t say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with ​Lebanon, you know.”

    Trump went on to say he and Netanyahu get along very well.

    According to the Axios report, which cited an unidentified ​U.S. official, Trump said to Netanyahu in a call on Monday: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it ⁠weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

    Trump said in the interview: “At some point, I said, ​Bibi, we got to stop this. We got to stop it.”

    NETANYAHU CITES COMMON GOALS

    Netanyahu, asked about the Axios report, declined to offer details of the conversation ​but said his relationship with Trump had not changed.

    “We have common goals. Sometimes we have, as in the best of families, you have these tactical disagreements,” he said in an interview on CNBC on Wednesday.

    “He’s been the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, and he respects me; I respect him. We always find a ​way to work out our differences.”

    Iran has said it will not agree to a deal with the United States to end the war that ​Trump and Netanyahu launched in late February unless a ceasefire also covers Lebanon, which Israel invaded in March in pursuit of the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militia that fired across the ‌border in ⁠support of Tehran.

    Hostilities have continued despite a U.S.-mediated agreement announced on Monday that led Israel to step back from attacking the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut, and the Iran-backed group to halt cross-border strikes.

    Israeli drone strikes killed at least six people in southern Lebanon and targeted a car south of Beirut on Wednesday, Lebanese security sources said. Israel said it intercepted a hostile aircraft likely fired by Hezbollah.

    Trump bristled when asked if Netanyahu “tricked” him into attacking Iran, saying ​his critics were “the enemy.”

    “I mean, I’m ​the one that started it,” Trump ⁠said. “I started because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

    “Now that pertains to Israel, because they probably would have been the first one to get hit. There would be no Israel. Tell you what, if there wasn’t ​me, there would be no Israel right now.”

    Trump maintained that Israel would have been in a far worse position ​if he had ⁠not abandoned a 2015 accord reached by President Barack Obama and other world leaders with Iran, under which Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear programme in return for the lifting of sanctions.

    After Trump withdrew from that deal during his first White House term in 2018, Iran produced stockpiles of near-weapons-grade highly enriched uranium, which ⁠Trump now ​demands it relinquish. Trump’s critics say Iran is now closer to making a nuclear weapon, ​and it will be hard for Trump to negotiate a better deal.

    Trump has used expletives about Israel in the past, including publicly saying last year that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the ​fuck they are doing.”

  • How Mohamed Jaffer Tightened His Stranglehold on Mombasa Port as Parliament Looked Away and a Dirty Fuel Scandal Engulfed His Empire

    How Mohamed Jaffer Tightened His Stranglehold on Mombasa Port as Parliament Looked Away and a Dirty Fuel Scandal Engulfed His Empire

    The vessel MT Paloma had barely cleared Mombasa port and entered South African waters when the full scale of Mohamed Jaffer’s double exposure became impossible to ignore. His fuel company stood accused of flooding Kenyan roads with contaminated petrol over Easter weekend 2026. His lawyers were fighting off a Ugandan importer demanding the release of wheat that had sat detained at berths three and four for years. And somewhere in the Ministry of Roads and Transport, a contract was being drafted that would hand him those same berths, and the grain monopoly they represent, for another twenty years.

    That contract, approved by President William Ruto’s administration and awaiting gazettement as of the date of this publication, extends Bulkstream Limited’s lease over the Port of Mombasa’s only specialized bulk grain discharge terminals seven years before the existing concession was due to expire. It is not a renewal born of competitive merit, transparent procurement, or public interest. It is the latest triumph of an empire that has outlasted four presidents, survived every parliamentary investigation thrown at it, and buried every rival who came close enough to threaten it.

    The deal cements what market analysts, parliamentary committee members, and competing operators have called for two decades the most consequential private monopoly in Kenya’s food supply chain. Bulkstream, formerly known as Grain Bulk Handlers Limited before a quiet 2024 rebranding, handles approximately 98 percent of all bulk grain imports into Kenya, including wheat, rice, and maize destined not only for Kenyan mills but for the landlocked nations of Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, Burundi, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Roughly 2.2 million tonnes pass through its terminals every year. No rival has been allowed to operate at scale since the original exclusivity window expired in 2008. It did not expire because the market decided so. Parliament tried to force open the door. The door stayed shut.

    Parliament warned. Courts ruled. Rivals were crushed. And the Ruto government handed him 20 more years anyway.

    THE ARCHITECTURE OF PERMANENT ADVANTAGE

    To understand why no competitor has successfully entered the bulk grain market at Mombasa for over two decades, one must understand the pricing structure that Parliament itself identified as the foundational problem. Bulkstream pays the Kenya Ports Authority a service fee of $3.85 per metric tonne to operate its specialized terminals. Conventional operators wishing to handle bulk grain through non-specialized berths are charged $10.40 per metric tonne for the same privilege. That gap of $6.55 per tonne is not a market outcome. It is a regulatory inheritance, embedded in the KPA tariff book, that makes it structurally impossible for any competitor to undercut Jaffer’s pricing regardless of how efficient, well-capitalized, or willing they might be.

    On top of the KPA fee, Bulkstream charges millers $16 per metric tonne for its handling services. The math is unambiguous. Across 2.2 million tonnes annually, the terminal extracts over $35 million a year in miller fees alone, against a cost base that includes a KPA service charge equivalent to approximately $8.5 million. The embedded price differential flows directly into the cost of bread, ugali, and animal feed across Kenya and several neighboring countries. It is a toll paid by every East African family that consumes grain. Parliament did not merely notice this arrangement in passing. It named it explicitly.

    The 2020 report of the National Assembly Finance, Planning and Trade Committee described the differential as a technical barrier to trade and competition and recommended the transparent appointment of additional bulk grain operators and expansion of port facilities to accommodate them. The Kenya Ports Authority set a 2022 deadline to license a second handler. That deadline passed without a single approval being granted. The committee’s language was unambiguous. Its recommendations were ignored with equal clarity.

    BULKSTREAM BY THE NUMBERS

    Market share of bulk grain imports at Mombasa: ~98%

    Annual throughput: 2.2 million metric tonnes

    KPA service fee paid by Bulkstream: $3.85/tonne

    KPA fee charged to conventional operators: $10.40/tonne

    Differential (competitive moat): $6.55/tonne

    Handling fee charged to millers: $16/tonne

    Lease extension: 20 years, approved 7 years early

    Original concession signed: ~2000 (33-year term)

    MJ Group estimated valuation (Africa Report, 2025): KSh16.3 billion

    TWO DECADES OF WARNINGS, ZERO CONSEQUENCES

    The 2020 parliamentary committee report is not a standalone intervention. It is the culmination of over two decades of parliamentary scrutiny of an arrangement that legislators, regulators, and trade observers have consistently identified as anti-competitive and harmful to the public interest. As far back as 2018, MPs were issuing directives to end Jaffer’s monopoly on the grain trade, as contemporaneous media records show. The problem was never lack of awareness. The problem was the persistent gap between parliamentary resolve and executive action.

    The original concession between Grain Bulk Handlers Limited and the Kenya Ports Authority was signed around the year 2000. It included an initial eight-year exclusivity window, explicitly granted to allow the company to recover its investment costs. That exclusivity expired in February 2008. The KPA board resolved at that point to liberalize grain handling and introduce competition. What followed was a series of cancelled tenders, aborted licensing processes, and unending delays that preserved the monopoly in practice while abandoning it in theory. Each successive government found a reason not to finish the process.

    When in 2022 interests linked to Mining Cabinet Secretary Hassan Joho appeared to have finally broken through, winning a Sh5.9 billion contract for Portside Freight Terminals to construct a competing facility, the Supreme Court quashed the procurement. The ruling found that KPA had failed to meet constitutional thresholds of fairness, transparency, and competitiveness. The irony was corrosive. The very procurement standards cited to cancel Jaffer’s competitor were standards that the original concession to Jaffer had never been compelled to meet. The playing field was cleared again. Jaffer remained the only player on it.

    A senior KPA manager’s remarks to international media in the aftermath of the Portside ruling were telling in their candor. The official stated plainly that KPA cannot run the grain facility and that the two berths are likely to remain under private entities for a longer period. That is not the language of a regulator planning to introduce competition. It is the language of a captured institution confirming that the current arrangement will endure. The 20-year lease renewal that followed merely formalized what the official had already conceded.

    A senior KPA manager told media: ‘The two berths are likely to remain under private entities for a longer period.’ The 20-year lease simply made it official.

    MT PALOMA: CARCINOGENS, COVERUPS, AND THE EASTER WEEKEND CONTAMINATION

    On March 27, 2026, the vessel MT Paloma docked at the Port of Mombasa carrying approximately 60,000 to 68,000 metric tonnes of Premium Motor Spirit. The ship had last been in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. It had originally been destined for Angola. It arrived in Kenya under an emergency import authorisation signed on March 25, two days before it docked, for a cargo that laboratory tests would later show contained elevated levels of sulphur, benzene, and manganese, all above legally permitted Kenyan standards. Benzene is classified as a known human carcinogen. Elevated manganese destroys catalytic converters. Excess sulphur corrodes engines and elevates toxic roadside emissions.

    One Petroleum Limited, the importing company, is registered to the Jaffer family. Corporate registry documents list Mohamed Jaffer, his sons Mujtaba Jaffer and Ali Abbas Jaffer, and other family members among the directors and shareholders. The firm is headquartered in Mbaraki, Mombasa. It is not a new entrant in the fuel trade. It is a long-established company within the MJ Group ecosystem.

    The sequence of events that allowed contaminated fuel into the Kenyan market reads as a governance failure at multiple levels. Energy Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban wrote to the Kenya Bureau of Standards managing director requesting a temporary waiver on conformity certificates, citing disruption to the Strait of Hormuz following US-Iran tensions as the justification for emergency procurement outside the standard government-to-government supply framework. Trade Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui then issued a letter on March 28, by which time MT Paloma had already been docked for 24 hours, granting the waiver. The letter acknowledged in plain language that the petroleum aboard contained high levels of manganese, sulphur and benzene.

    The waiver directed that the substandard fuel be blended with existing stocks in KPC’s pipeline system to dilute the chemical concentrations. What that meant in practice was that contaminated fuel was deliberately commingled with Kenya’s strategic reserves and released to oil marketing companies serving retail stations across the country. Kenyan motorists who filled their vehicles over the Easter weekend, some of the highest-traffic days of the year, were doing so without any knowledge that the fuel entering their tanks had failed quality tests. Reports of engine damage linked to the consignment began circulating before the Directorate of Criminal Investigations had made its first arrests.

    Narok Senator Ledama Ole Kina became the most aggressive parliamentary voice on the scandal. In explosive testimony before the Senate Energy Committee, Ole Kina named three individuals at the centre of what he described as a coordinated scheme to manufacture a fuel shortage and exploit it for profit: Joel Mburu, Supply and Logistics Manager at the Kenya Pipeline Company; Joseph Wafula, Deputy Director of Petroleum at the Ministry of Energy; and Mohamed Jaffer. The senator alleged internal communications showed premeditated planning and an orchestrated crisis, with the emergency declaration being used to justify bypassing the G2G framework. His phrasing was blunt: he called it the most brazen act of energy-sector looting in Kenya’s recent history.

    The DCI opened its investigation quickly and its reach was wide. Former KPC Managing Director Joe Sang, former EPRA Director-General Daniel Kiptoo, and former Principal Secretary Mohamed Liban were arrested, questioned, and subsequently resigned from their positions. Two KPC employees, Joseph Wafula and Joel Mburu, were taken into custody and released on police cash bail of Sh100,000 each. Investigators summoned executives from One Petroleum and, separately, Swiss-owned Oryx Energies, which had imported a second controversial consignment of approximately 60,000 tonnes at prices Ole Kina alleged were set at $253.94 per metric tonne against the government’s own contracted rate of $84.00. The DCI confirmed it was working with both local and international investigative bodies.

    One Petroleum’s public statement attempted damage control. The company confirmed that four firms had responded to an emergency request from the Energy Ministry, that it was one of them, and that it had taken steps to ensure the MT Paloma consignment would not enter the market. That last assurance was contradicted within days. KPC confirmed that the fuel had in fact been mixed with existing stocks and released to oil marketing companies. Energy CS Opiyo Wandayi, who ordered the product withdrawn from the market and blocked payments to One Petroleum, stated that the importation would have pushed pump prices up by as much as Sh14 per litre. The government ultimately reversed its own waiver, but by then the fuel had traveled far beyond any pipeline.

    THE MT PALOMA TIMELINE

    March 25, 2026: Emergency import authorisation signed for One Petroleum

    March 27, 4:14 PM: MT Paloma docks at Port of Mombasa

    March 28: Trade CS Kinyanjui issues written waiver acknowledging benzene, sulphur, manganese violations

    March 30: MT Paloma departs for South Africa

    Easter Weekend: Contaminated fuel distributed via KPC to oil marketers

    April 5-6: DCI arrests Sang, Liban, Kiptoo; Wafula and Mburu held on bail

    April 7: Government orders fuel withdrawal; One Petroleum’s Sh11.8 billion exposure confirmed

    April 15: KPC confirms contaminated fuel already in market, commingled with reserves

    April 17: Senator Ole Kina names Jaffer, Mburu, and Wafula in Senate committee testimony

    THE SUCCESSION GAMBLE: PASSING THE EMPIRE TO THE SONS

    Even as the fuel scandal was burning through KPC’s senior leadership and generating its first Senate committee hearings, a quieter restructuring was unfolding inside the Jaffer business empire that goes to the heart of whether the family can sustain what the patriarch built. Mohamed Jaffer is 78 years old. He has been described in regional business media as a work-in-silence billionaire who guarded his empire jealously and brokered political friendships along the way to protect it. That political protection is now being redistributed across a more complex ownership structure, and the question of whether it survives the transition is genuinely open.

    In 2024, MJ Group indirectly sold a controlling stake in Bulkstream through its Mauritius-based holding company Incorp Limited to African Infrastructure Investment Managers, the South Africa-headquartered institutional fund manager with assets under management of approximately $3.8 billion and a portfolio spanning toll roads, renewable energy, and port logistics across Africa. AIIM is itself a subsidiary of the Old Mutual group. The Incorp Limited holding structure places the transaction at arm’s length from direct Kenyan regulatory scrutiny while maintaining the family’s operational influence through subsidiary roles.

    AIIM is now reported to be preparing to sell approximately half of its stake in African Ports and Corridors Holdings, its Mauritius-based platform covering port and commodity logistics assets in Zambia and Tanzania, to Globe In Limited. Globe In is another Mauritius-registered entity with active cargo handling interests in Kenya and Uganda and traceable connections to the Jaffer network. The circular logic of the restructuring is not lost on analysts who track the group: institutional capital comes in through the front door, and network control is maintained through affiliated entities at the back.

    Mujtaba Jaffer and Abass Jaffer, sons of the founder, are the visible faces of the next generation. Mujtaba has fronted Bulkstream’s public statements in the Pan Afric Commodities wheat detention case. Abass, a director at Bulkstream, did not respond to questions from international media in late May 2026 about the lease renewal. Their ascension to operational leadership coincides with a period of maximum external pressure: a live criminal investigation into One Petroleum, multiple court battles over detained cargo, an Sh1.8 billion land compensation dispute involving Miritini Free Port Limited, and the spectacle of their patriarch’s name being read into the record of a Senate committee hearing on a national fuel crisis.

    The institutional investors now holding a controlling interest in Bulkstream through AIIM bring governance expectations and reputational considerations that the family structure did not face in the same way. Foreign institutional capital does not tolerate the kind of opacity that enabled three decades of parliamentary investigation without consequence. Whether AIIM views the One Petroleum scandal as a reputational contagion risk to its infrastructure fund is a question that will play out in boardrooms, not courtrooms. The sons are entering leadership not in a period of consolidation but in a period of acute vulnerability, and the difference between inherited political capital and proven political acumen is a gap that no business school curriculum can close.

    Mujtaba and Abass Jaffer are inheriting an empire under criminal investigation, buried in lawsuits, and restructured through layers of Mauritius-registered entities. The patriarch made it look easy. It was not.

    A PATTERN OF IMPUNITY: THE CONTROVERSIES THAT KEEP ACCUMULATING

    The grain monopoly and the fuel scandal are not aberrations in an otherwise clean record. They are the two largest current expressions of a pattern of controversy that has attached itself to the Jaffer empire across multiple sectors and over multiple decades. Court filings, parliamentary records, and investigative reporting have documented a series of disputes that individually might be dismissed as the inevitable legal friction of large-scale business but collectively form a picture of an empire that uses institutional chokepoints, legal attrition, and political proximity as competitive weapons.

    The Pan Afric Commodities case is illustrative of how Bulkstream’s market power translates into leverage over importers. The Ugandan firm purchased approximately 2,837 tonnes of Ukrainian wheat in 2018 under a charter party agreement. The wheat was shipped to Mombasa and handled by Bulkstream. A portion of the consignment, 1,514 tonnes, remained in storage as a dispute over import taxes and the intervention of a Ugandan receivership manager complicated the release. By September 2025, Bulkstream was asserting a bailment lien over the wheat pending payment of $1.1 million in accumulated handling and storage fees. The Mombasa High Court was still hearing the case into early 2026. A cargo shipped in 2018 was still impounded in 2026. The firm controlling the only bulk grain terminal in Kenya has no commercial incentive to resolve such disputes quickly.

    Parallel civil suits from Kenyan maize millers alleging Sh90 million in damages have traversed the court system over similar grievances. The cases share a structural dynamic: importers and processors who depend entirely on Bulkstream for their grain intake have no alternative handler to turn to, which means any contractual dispute places them at the mercy of their only logistics option. Parliament recognized this leverage in its 2020 report. The market still operates with that leverage fully intact.

    The Miritini Free Port land dispute has brought a separate line of allegations into view. Court records show that Bulkstream’s related entity Miritini Free Port Limited received approximately Sh1.8 billion from the National Land Commission as compensation for land in Jomvu, Mombasa. Those payments have been challenged in court, with proceedings in the Environment and Land Court in Mombasa. Justice Ogla Sewe extended interim orders in the case in July 2024, and as of the period of this publication the matter remains unresolved.

    Reports have also circulated, some contested, regarding allegations of parliamentary bribery in connection with Bulkstream’s interests. A report in August 2025 described allegations that officials connected to Bulkstream paid bribes to members of parliamentary committees handling matters relevant to the grain terminal. President Ruto had around the same time ordered investigations into rising corruption in parliamentary committees. Bulkstream has not formally addressed these allegations. The individuals named in those reports have not faced charges that this publication can verify. But the allegations follow a company whose relationship with parliamentary oversight has always been one of attrition rather than accountability.

    The ProGas and LPG sector dealings attributed to the Jaffer network have generated their own trail of regulatory disputes and court actions. LPG pricing, market access, and cylinder standards have all featured in filings that critics say point to an enterprise that replicates at the energy level the same stranglehold it maintains at the port. The pattern is consistent regardless of sector: identify a regulated infrastructure chokepoint, secure the position through initial investment and political relationships, then use the position to price competitors out while using legal process to exhaust those who resist.

    WHO PAYS THE TOLL

    The 20-year lease renewal is not merely a business story. It is a food security story, a public health story, and a governance story about what happens when accountability institutions fail to act on their own findings. Every parliamentary committee report, every court hearing on competitive procurement, every DCI investigation into fuel quality, represents a moment when the system had the information it needed to act. The lease renewal confirms that having the information and acting on it are not the same thing.

    For Kenyan consumers, the cost of the grain monopoly is embedded in the price of every loaf of bread and every bag of ugali. The $16 per tonne handling fee that Bulkstream charges millers, in a market where no alternative exists, is a tax on food that Parliament labeled a technical barrier to competition six years ago and which remains unchanged today. The landlocked countries that route their food imports through Mombasa inherit the same embedded inefficiency. Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, and the DRC are food-secure only insofar as Mohamed Jaffer’s terminal is willing and able to move their grain. That dependency is not a result of geography alone. It is a result of a deliberate regulatory choice to allow a single private operator to control the only specialized facility for 25 years and counting.

    The fuel episode added a dimension of physical risk to the economic one. Kenyan motorists who filled up over Easter 2026 did not consent to receive benzene-laced petrol. They had no way of knowing. The blending directive issued by Trade CS Kinyanjui was not disclosed publicly until it leaked. The government’s first communication was that the fuel had been blocked from the market. That statement was false. The fuel was already circulating. Vehicles had already been reported damaged. The subsequent order to withdraw the consignment came after the damage was done.

    Whether criminal charges ultimately follow Jaffer or his sons in the One Petroleum investigation remains to be seen. The DCI has stated it is pursuing the matter with international cooperation. Several officials who facilitated the procurement have resigned and face their own legal exposure. The Sh11.8 billion question is whether One Petroleum’s principals will face the same accountability or whether, as has happened before across multiple sectors and multiple investigations, the institutional protection that has kept this empire intact for 25 years will once again absorb the impact.

    THE RUNWAY THAT NEVER ENDS

    Under President Moi, Grain Bulk Handlers Limited signed a 33-year concession that gave it exclusive rights over Kenya’s only bulk grain terminals. Under President Kibaki, the exclusivity window expired but the monopoly persisted. Under President Kenyatta, parliamentary committees investigated and recommended competition. Under President Ruto, the answer was a 20-year extension signed seven years early while the country’s DCI was actively investigating the same family’s fuel company for importing contaminated petroleum.

    The Billionaires Africa publication that broke the renewal story noted that across four presidencies, the answer to whether Jaffer wins at the Port of Mombasa has always been yes. That observation is accurate and damning. It points not to a single government’s failure but to a systemic failure of the Kenyan state to subordinate private infrastructure control to public interest when the private controller has sufficient political proximity and legal firepower to resist. That resistance has been sustained across decades, across party lines, and now apparently across criminal investigations.

    Abass Jaffer did not respond to questions about the lease renewal. Mujtaba Jaffer has been the public face of a grain company fighting a cargo lien case in Mombasa courts. KPA’s managing director, the Ministry of Transport, and Bulkstream representatives all declined to comment on the early renewal when contacted by international media. The silence is coherent with a business that has never needed to justify itself to the public because the public has never had a meaningful alternative.

    The 20-year lease simply extends the runway. Ordinary Kenyans will keep paying the toll on their bread. Ugandan wheat importers will continue navigating the lien disputes of the only terminal operator in East Africa’s largest port. Senators will keep naming names in committee rooms. Parliamentary committees will keep writing reports that no one is obliged to implement. And somewhere in the Ministry of Roads and Transport, the gazette notice is being prepared.

  • TRUST BETRAYED: How Senior DTB Bank Insiders Allegedly Looted Sh149 Million From a Customer’s Account Over Five Years

    TRUST BETRAYED: How Senior DTB Bank Insiders Allegedly Looted Sh149 Million From a Customer’s Account Over Five Years

    The customer had no idea her money was gone. For years, Rozina Nurdin Patelia trusted Diamond Trust Bank with a foreign-currency account held at the Parklands branch. She had no reason to suspect that the very people entrusted with safeguarding her savings had allegedly been picking it apart, one fraudulent instruction letter and one forged withdrawal slip at a time.

    On Tuesday, three people appeared before a Milimani court and heard 68 charges read against them. Salimah Ameen Pirbhai, 55, the former branch manager at DTB Parklands, Aabid Alkarim Kassam, 43, her former assistant, and Tazim Sidi Vassanji, 57, are accused of a scheme that allegedly drained more than Sh149.3 million from Ms Patelia’s Great Britain Pounds account between 2016 and 2021. All three denied the charges.

    The charges include conspiracy to defraud, stealing, money laundering and forgery. The magnitude, the duration, and the seniority of those accused have left the Kenyan banking industry with uncomfortable questions that do not go away just because three people pleaded not guilty.

    The very people entrusted with safeguarding her savings had allegedly been picking it apart, one fraudulent instruction letter and one forged withdrawal slip at a time.

    A SCHEME BUILT ON PAPER AND TRUST

    According to the charge sheet filed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the alleged theft did not happen in a single act of recklessness. It was allegedly methodical and sustained.

    Kassam bears the bulk of the individual counts. He is accused of stealing Sh58.2 million from Ms Patelia’s account between October 2016 and April 2018, and a further Sh10.9 million between June 2019 and October 2021, all while serving as assistant branch manager at Parklands. On top of these, he faces charges of forging withdrawal slips for GBP 8,500 and GBP 8,700 in June 2019, and allegedly generating fraudulent withdrawal documents amounting to more than GBP 7.6 million. He is further accused of creating false email instructions purporting to have come from Ms Patelia, authorising the liquidation of multiple fixed deposit accounts between 2016 and 2018.

    A particularly damning allegation is that Kassam prepared a false instruction letter dated June 5, 2019, purporting that Ms Patelia had authorised cash withdrawals from her account. The DPP further alleges that all three suspects jointly forged another instruction letter four days later making the same claim. The document trail, if proven, points to a level of premeditation that would suggest the perpetrators were not operating in panic, but in practiced confidence.

    The allegations against Pirbhai carry an additional dimension that is deeply unsettling. She is accused not only of the joint charges with Kassam and Vassanji but also of personally stealing Sh39.6 million from the bank on June 4, 2025, and of preparing a fake bank statement the following week with intent to deceive. That allegation, if proven, means that the alleged misconduct was still ongoing last year, nearly a decade after investigators say the first thefts took place.

    INVESTIGATIONS AND THE LONG DELAY

    Court records show that investigations into the alleged theft only began in July 2025. That is a striking detail. The alleged scheme, according to the prosecution, started in October 2016. The question of how Sh149.3 million could allegedly be siphoned from a single customer’s account over five years without triggering internal red flags goes to the heart of what banks owe their customers.

    The three accused persons cooperated with the Banking Fraud Investigations Unit once the probe began, according to submissions made in court. Their lawyers argued that they had attended every questioning session since July 2025 and had never attempted to leave the country. The court was sufficiently persuaded. Kassam was released on a bond of Sh2 million or a cash bail alternative of Sh500,000. Pirbhai and Vassanji were each released on a bond of Sh1 million or Sh300,000 cash bail.

    The case returns on June 17, 2026, when the prosecution is expected to have supplied witness statements and documentary evidence to the defence. Hearing dates will be set thereafter. In Kenya’s creaking criminal justice machinery, convictions in bank fraud cases frequently take years, and sometimes never arrive at all.

    DTB AND A RECURRING PATTERN

    For Diamond Trust Bank, the charges represent the latest chapter in a history that has repeatedly featured the word “insider” alongside allegations of fraud and regulatory failure.

    In 2018, the bank was rocked by a scandal at its Thika Road Mall branch when a South Korean businesswoman, Lim Sun Pil, alleged that Ksh150 million had been liquidated from two fixed deposit accounts belonging to her and her company, Daehan Pharmaceuticals, without authorisation. The accused in that case included a co-signatory with access to the accounts and the branch manager at the time. DTB denied wrongdoing and said it had not been served with court papers when the case broke, adding that the funds had been withdrawn on the client’s instructions.

    But the 2018 scandal itself was not isolated. When newspaper reports about the TRM case emerged, a DTB customer in Kisii county was prompted to check his own fixed deposits and discovered his account had been similarly raided. That disclosure led to the arrest of Peter Sungu Nyakomitta, the DTB Kisii branch manager, who was charged with stealing Sh25 million from customers’ fixed deposit accounts, theft that had been discovered only through an internal reconciliation process. Three DTB branch managers, across three separate branches, had by that point been accused of stealing from customers. The pattern, by any objective reading, pointed to systemic vulnerabilities rather than isolated individual misconduct.

    Three DTB branch managers, across three separate branches, had by that point been accused of stealing from customers. The pattern, by any objective reading, pointed to systemic vulnerabilities.

    REGULATORY PENALTIES AND TERROR FINANCING LINKS

    The bank’s regulatory record adds further layers to its troubled history. In 2018, the Central Bank of Kenya fined Diamond Trust Bank Sh80 million as part of a broader enforcement action against five Kenyan lenders for their role in facilitating suspicious transactions connected to the National Youth Service scandal. The CBK found that DTB, along with KCB, Equity, Standard Chartered and Co-operative Bank, had failed to report large cash transactions to the Financial Reporting Centre, failed to conduct adequate customer due diligence, and allowed customers to transact in cash without appropriate supporting documentation. The DPP at the time, Noordin Haji, warned that prosecution remained on the table even after the fines were paid.

    The bank’s compliance failures reached their most alarming expression in 2019. Following the Dusit D2 terrorist attack in Nairobi in January of that year, investigations found that one of the attackers had conducted multiple large cash withdrawals from a DTB branch in Eastleigh in the days preceding the assault. DPP Haji confirmed publicly that Sh50 million had been withdrawn from the branch in the period leading up to the attack, and that none of these transactions had been reported to the Financial Reporting Centre as required by law. He further stated that funds were wired from that account to Jilib, Somalia, which he described as an Al Shabaab headquarters, and to accounts associated with ISIS. DTB Chief Executive Nasim Devji was arrested by the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit in connection with the bank’s failure to detect and report these transactions. She was subsequently released under circumstances that were not fully explained publicly.

    DTB has also faced major litigation in Uganda. City tycoon Hamis Kiggundu sued the bank in 2020 alleging that over Ugx 120 billion had been fraudulently debited from his company’s accounts. A Ugandan High Court found in his favour, a judgment that triggered criminal summons against senior DTB officials including Group CEO Nasim Devji, under charges that included computer misuse, making false entries in financial ledgers and conspiracy to commit a crime. The cross-border nature of these cases raised the question of whether governance failures at DTB were systemic across the group.

    WHAT THE PATTERN DEMANDS

    The Sh149 million case now before Milimani court is being treated, at least publicly, as a case about three individuals. The prosecution will pursue its charges. The defence will test the evidence. The magistrate will weigh the facts.

    But the case is also about something larger. It is about whether a bank that has faced repeated, documented instances of insider fraud, regulatory censure for failure to detect suspicious transactions, alleged terror-financing compliance failures, and multi-billion-shilling litigation in two countries has done enough to protect the people who deposit their money with it.

    The answers to those questions will not be heard in a magistrate’s courtroom on June 17. They should be demanded of DTB’s board and of the Central Bank of Kenya, which continues to license the institution to take deposits from the Kenyan public.

    Rozina Nurdin Patelia did not choose to become the most recent face of what critics say is a structural problem at one of Kenya’s largest banks. She trusted a branch manager, and allegedly that trust was repaid with forgery and theft conducted over five years by the very people whose salaries she and thousands of other customers indirectly helped pay.

  • Govt Confirms NYOTA Second Grant Disbursement Date

    Govt Confirms NYOTA Second Grant Disbursement Date

    The government has assured beneficiaries of the National Youth Opportunities Towards Advancement (NYOTA) project that the second tranche of business start-up grants will be disbursed by June 30, 2026, following delays occasioned by budgetary adjustments.

    Speaking during a press briefing in Nairobi on Tuesday, Principal Secretary (PS) for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) Development Susan Mang’eni said all eligible beneficiaries would receive the funds simultaneously across the country before the end of the current financial year.

    “To this extent, we wish to announce and confirm that the disbursement for the second tranche of business start-up capital will happen by June 30th, 2026. All beneficiaries will receive the grants at the same time, unlike the first tranche disbursement, which was phased out in clusters,” said Mang’eni.

    The World Bank-supported NYOTA project seeks to empower vulnerable and marginalized youth through business training, mentorship, entrepreneurship support, apprenticeship, recognition of prior learning, job placement, and access to market opportunities.

    The five-year programme, which commenced implementation in March 2025, attracted about two million applicants under its Business Support Component, demonstrating strong entrepreneurial interest among Kenyan youth.

    Mang’eni said 122,147 young people from all the country’s 1,450 wards had successfully undergone entrepreneurial aptitude assessments and business development support training and had received the first start-up grant of Sh25,000, with Sh3,000 retained as savings under the National Social Security Fund (NSSF).

    She noted that monitoring conducted after the first disbursement showed encouraging results, with more than 99 per cent of beneficiaries having established businesses.

    “The outcome of the first mentorship nationwide hand-holding session and the second business development support classroom training show that over 99 per cent of the beneficiaries of the start-up grant had already established their businesses,” she said.

    According to the PS, the Government revised the project’s original phased implementation model following the overwhelming response from applicants and interventions by President William Ruto and the World Bank.

    The move allowed all targeted beneficiaries to be enrolled at once instead of being spread across three separate intakes.

    She explained that the adjustment compressed project activities into a single financial year, creating budgetary pressure that delayed the second disbursement.

    “We regret the delay, but it was necessitated by the need for budgetary enhancements after the project design was adjusted to accommodate all selected beneficiaries at once,” she said, adding that the National Treasury was working to resolve fiscal constraints.

    Mang’eni said the project had engaged 46 business development service providers, over 3,600 trainers and 5,500 mentors nationwide to support youth entrepreneurs through training, mentorship and business growth guidance.

    Addressing concerns about accountability, she said beneficiaries were being closely monitored through structured mentorship programmes to ensure grants were invested in business ventures.

    “The second disbursement has to be earned. If beneficiaries have not demonstrated effort in establishing or running their businesses, they will not qualify for the next tranche,” she said.

    The PS attributed the project’s success to its digital implementation model, saying it had minimized opportunities for corruption and enhanced transparency in beneficiary selection and fund disbursement.

    She urged beneficiaries to remain vigilant against fraudsters exploiting the programme through fake messages, links and payment requests.

    “There is no payment required to access these funds. Anyone asking beneficiaries to pay money is a fraudster,” she warned.

    Mang’eni further revealed that the government was considering scaling up the programme in the 2026/2027 financial year to accommodate more youth who applied but were not selected in the current intake.

    She said the president had already expressed support for expanding the initiative, citing its success in using technology to distribute opportunities equitably across the country.

    “We have plans to scale up the project and create opportunities for more young people who expressed interest but were not successful in this intake,” she said.

    The NYOTA project is being implemented through a multi-agency framework involving the State Departments for Youth Affairs, MSME Development, and Labour and Social Protection, working through agencies including the Micro and Small Enterprises Authority (MSEA), National Industrial Training Authority (NITA), National Employment Authority (NEA), and NSSF.

  • Untouchable? How Bitok’s History Has Been Riddled With Mega Scandals and Why The PS Has Become Ruto’s Unnecessary Baggage

    Untouchable? How Bitok’s History Has Been Riddled With Mega Scandals and Why The PS Has Become Ruto’s Unnecessary Baggage

    Every government accumulates embarrassments. Some are policy failures, some are acts of God, some are the ordinary friction of a bureaucracy too large and too underfunded to be consistently competent. But there is a different category of scandal, rarer and more corrosive, the kind that attaches itself to one individual and follows him from ministry to ministry, compounding with each posting, and still the man does not go. Prof. Julius Kipyegon Bitok, Ambassador and Principal Secretary for Basic Education, is now that story.

    Since President William Ruto placed him in charge of the State Department for Immigration and Citizen Services in September 2022, Bitok has presided over or been directly implicated in three of the most consequential public administration failures of the Kenya Kwanza era. A passport scandal with international dimensions that drew censure from the United States and the European Union. A ghost learners fraud so vast it is estimated to have bled the public education budget of at least five billion shillings annually. And a chain of dormitory fires, the latest at Utumishi Girls Academy killing sixteen children, that exposes a ministry unable or unwilling to enforce its own safety directives.

    On June 2, 2026, the Consumers Federation of Kenya formally petitioned the Public Service Commission seeking Bitok’s removal from office. The seven-page document, signed by COFEK Secretary General Stephen Mutoro, catalogues six constitutional grounds including gross misconduct, incompetence, abuse of office, violation of public finance management provisions, and conduct unbecoming a State officer. It asks the PSC to suspend him pending investigation, commission a full integrity audit of the State Department for Basic Education, and refer the passport matter to the DCI, EACC and National Intelligence Service.

    The petition is damning not because it introduces new allegations but because it assembles everything that is already in the public record and forces the question that Ruto’s administration has conspicuously refused to answer: at what point does a pattern of failure become a reason to act?

    CHAPTER ONE: THE PASSPORT PIPELINE

    When Ruto appointed Bitok as Immigration PS in September 2022, the assignment was framed as placing a trusted technocrat in a critical security-adjacent role. Bitok held a PhD in Business Management from Oklahoma State University, had diplomatic credentials, and had moved in government and academic circles long enough to carry the look of competence. The Immigration department, long troubled by corruption and document fraud, was presented as a docket that needed steady administrative leadership.

    What happened instead was the emergence, under Bitok’s watch, of what investigators and critics have described as a passport pipeline that handed Kenyan travel documents to some of the most wanted individuals on the African continent.

    On February 19, 2026, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its sanctions listing for Algoney Hamdan Dagalo Musa, the youngest brother of Rapid Support Forces commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally known as Hemedti. The updated entry added to the existing Sudanese documentation a Kenyan passport and a United Arab Emirates identification number. Algoney is sanctioned for leading the procurement of weapons for the RSF, the paramilitary force accused by the United Nations of crimes against humanity including mass murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s catastrophic civil war. The European Union added him to its own sanctions list on January 29, 2026.

    A Kenyan passport, issued under Kenyan law, bearing the name of a man whose weapons procurement for a genocidal militia earned him the personal attention of the US Treasury. The document did not materialise by accident.

    His tenure at Immigration is now directly associated with a passport issuance scandal of national security dimensions, attracting adverse international commentary and implicating Kenya in the facilitation of sanctions evasion.

    COFEK petition to the Public Service Commission, June 2, 2026

    COFEK’s petition names Algoney Hamdan Dagalo Musa, holder of Kenyan passport number AK1586127, as the younger brother of RSF commander Hemedti. But the Hamdan family’s exposure in the Kenyan passport system does not end with one individual. The petition references multiple family members, including Mayada Hamdan, Abdaraheem Hamdan, Zahra Hamdan, Zariwa Hamdan and Musa Hamdan Musa, as also appearing on the leaked passport list. The US and the EU have both imposed sanctions on Algoney personally.

    The Standard reported in March 2026, alongside Daily Nation and other outlets, that senior government officials, including Bitok by name and Immigration Director General Evelyn Cheluget, had been photographed together inspecting passport booklets. That image, taken in the ordinary course of administrative duty, acquired a different weight once the leaked documents and the US sanctions update surfaced. The same officials who physically handled the passport infrastructure now stood associated with the same infrastructure’s worst documented abuse.

    Photographs of Bitok and Cheluget examining passport consignments circulated widely in the press under headlines that used words like ‘impunity’ and ‘betrayal.’ The government’s initial response was silence. A subsequent statement from the Immigration department under Bitok’s replacement, Belio Kipsang, claimed no non-Kenyan held legitimate documents. That denial satisfied no one and was rejected by the investigative reporting that had already named names, cited passport numbers and referenced US Treasury documents.

    What made the scandal structurally significant was its geopolitical context. For years Kenya had styled itself as a neutral regional mediator in Sudan’s conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF. Kenya hosted RSF leadership at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in January 2025. President Ruto had personally met Hemedti at State House, a meeting that drew immediate backlash and a Sudanese decision to recall its ambassador. Kenya’s tea exports to Sudan faced retaliatory trade restrictions. Against that backdrop, the revelation that Hemedti’s brother held a Kenyan passport, obtained through the system Bitok oversaw, was not merely an immigration scandal. It was a foreign policy wound that Kenya inflicted on itself.

    Kenya’s neutrality posture was already strained before the Algoney disclosure. The disclosure made it untenable. Sudan’s military government, the Sudanese diaspora, international human rights organisations and US senators all commented on what the passport’s existence implied about Nairobi’s true loyalties in the conflict. Not one of those comments mentioned Julius Bitok by name. But the question of how such a document was issued and who authorised or failed to prevent it pointed back to the same desk.

    Bitok was moved to the Education ministry in March 2025, a full year before the February 2026 Treasury update that made the scandal fully visible internationally. The reshuffle came just as investigative reporting on the passport irregularities was intensifying. Whether the timing was coincidence or calculation, it had the practical effect of shielding Bitok from the most intense scrutiny at the exact moment it was forming. He was no longer the Immigration PS. The next man would have to answer.

    CHAPTER TWO: THE GHOST SCHOOL EMPIRE

    The education sector had its own crises before Bitok arrived. But the scale of what emerged under his watch as Basic Education PS has been staggering, even for a system long accustomed to audit findings and revenue leakages.

    An Auditor-General’s report examined by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee found that falsified enrolment figures had cost the country more than four billion shillings in capitation funds over four years. A subsequent verification exercise ordered by Parliament and implemented by the Ministry of Education uncovered something that dwarfed the audit’s preliminary numbers.

    Basic Education PS Julius Bitok confirmed to Parliament that the exercise had identified approximately 87,000 ghost students in secondary schools and close to 800,000 non-existent learners in primary schools, a combined figure exceeding 880,000 fictitious enrolments drawing government capitation. In the third term of 2025 alone, ghost learners had received over 912 million shillings in government funding. On an annualised basis, COFEK’s petition estimates taxpayers are losing as much as five billion shillings annually through the fraud.

    The mechanics of the scheme were not complicated. Inflated enrolment data was submitted to the government to trigger higher capitation allocations. Non-existent schools, 33 of which the PAC audit found receiving government funds, collected payments against learner populations that did not exist. Secondary schools were collectively overpaid by 3.59 billion shillings through falsified figures. Two hundred and seventy primary schools received funding for non-existent learners. The fraud was widespread, involving multiple counties, hundreds of school heads, and at least 28 Sub-County Directors of Education against whom the ministry eventually issued show-cause letters.

    Bitok’s defenders would point out that he was the one who ordered the verification exercise, appeared before Parliament to announce the findings and initiated disciplinary action against the identified officials. That is accurate. It is also insufficient. The scale of the fraud, nearly a million phantom learners drawing billions from the public education budget, did not materialise in a single term. The PAC’s special audit had flagged ghost students in 723 of the 1,039 sampled schools. The Auditor-General’s report had already sounded the alarm before Bitok was moved to the Education department. The system had been hemorrhaging for years. The question that deserves answering is not whether Bitok discovered the problem, but why, under his watch as the ministry’s accounting officer, remediation was so slow that by the time he confirmed the full scale of the fraud to Parliament in early 2026, the losses had already accumulated into the billions.

    We have 28 Sub-County Directors of Education who are expected to be culpable and should show cause why they should not be disciplined.

    PS Julius Bitok, Lenana Primary School, February 17, 2026

    Parliament’s PAC had summoned Bitok to account for the Auditor-General’s findings months before the full ghost learner numbers emerged. When he appeared, the committee did not find a PS in confident command of his brief. What it found, according to accounts of the session, was a man seeking more time and more resources, managing the optics of a crisis rather than resolving it.

    The broader context of the education sector’s financial problems deepened the concern. The ministry was simultaneously managing a capitation funding shortfall, delayed payments to KNEC examination supervisors, teacher rationalisation disputes, the contested rollout of the CBC and the administrative chaos of Junior Secondary School autonomy. Each of those crises was significant in isolation. Together, under a PS simultaneously associated with the ghost learner scandal and the immigration scandal, they painted a portrait of a ministry in structural difficulty at the top.

    That difficulty was reflected in Bitok’s own budget requests. In March 2026 he appealed to Parliament for an urgent 66 billion shillings in supplementary estimates. In May 2026, before the Departmental Committee on Education, he requested an additional 71.77 billion shillings to avert what he described as a critical funding crisis threatening capitation, textbooks, examination payments, and the school feeding programme. Kenya’s education sector was not short of funding demands. It was short of confidence that the funds already committed were being properly accounted for.

    CHAPTER THREE: THE BURNING SCHOOLS

    At 2 AM on May 28, 2026, a fire tore through the Meline Waithera Dormitory at Utumishi Girls Senior Secondary School in Gilgil, Nakuru County. Sixteen girls died, burned beyond recognition near an emergency exit that was locked or inaccessible during the inferno. Approximately 79 others were injured. Survivors described waking to flames and pressing toward exits that would not open. DCI subsequently arrested eight students as persons of interest in what investigators believe was a planned arson attack.

    The immediate tragedy is irreducible. But its institutional context is indicting. Less than two years earlier, on the night of September 5, 2024, twenty-one boys had burned to death in a dormitory at Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri County. That dormitory was overcrowded, its exit doors dangerously narrow. The National Gender and Equality Commission called for an inquiry. President Ruto declared national mourning and ordered a safety audit of all boarding schools. Education CS Julius Ogamba committed to holding the culpable accountable. Head of Public Service Felix Koskei ordered immediate infrastructure inspections. The government promised to prosecute violators.

    Post-Endarasha safety directives were issued. The Kenya National Building Code 2024, which came into force in March 2025, mandated emergency lighting, fire detection systems, outward-opening exit doors, and fire compartmentalisation in large dormitories. The directives were clear, the legal framework was in place, and the accountability rhetoric from State House had been explicit.

    Eighteen months later, the emergency exit at Utumishi was locked. Girls died at a door that should never have been capable of being locked against them. Business Daily’s analysis of the Utumishi fire against the 2024 building code’s requirements found that at minimum four mandatory safety provisions, escape routes, emergency lighting, fire detection, and fire compartmentalisation, were absent or inoperative. The two-and-a-half-hour gap between when the fire started and when it was officially reported suggests no automatic detection system was active. The Basic Education PS had been overseeing schools through this entire period. The safety directives his own ministry issued after Endarasha had not reached Utumishi in time.

    COFEK’s petition holds Bitok directly responsible for the conditions that led to the Utumishi fire, citing the unimplemented post-Endarasha directives and noting that a comprehensive boarding school safety audit had been ordered following the 2024 disaster but had demonstrably not reached one of Nakuru County’s largest girls’ boarding schools before the next catastrophe.

    Bitok’s response was to announce, on May 31, three days after the fire, that the ministry was ordering a fresh round of inspections of all 3,200 boarding schools, to be completed within ten days. The announcement was almost a ritual repetition of what had been said after Endarasha. An inspection order. Serious warnings to non-compliant principals. Firm language about consequences. The structural problem, a ministry that issues safety directives without the verification capacity to enforce them, remained unaddressed in the announcement. The cycle of tragedy, announcement, and inaction appeared to be repeating itself in real time.

    We are going to take very serious action against any principal, any teacher, or any school that deliberately violates the provisions of the safety standards.

    PS Julius Bitok, Wajir County, May 31, 2026 (three days after sixteen girls died at Utumishi)

    CHAPTER FOUR: THE ABSENTEE PS

    Beyond the three crises of substance, a fourth problem has undermined Bitok’s authority in a way that is harder to dismiss as misfortune: his relationship with Parliament’s oversight function.

    In February 2026, the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Education, chaired by Tinderet MP Julius Melly, convened to review the education budget and receive a briefing on capitation and key education programmes including SEQUIP and KPEEL. Bitok did not appear. The committee, which had not received timely communication about his absence, was furious. Committee Chairman Melly said he was deeply saddened by what he described as the casual manner in which Bitok was carrying out his work, warning the committee would explore the harshest punitive measures available under parliamentary standing orders.

    It was not an isolated incident. Luanda MP Dick Maungu confirmed that Bitok had consistently failed to attend committee meetings since his transfer to the Education ministry, including in the period before the February confrontation when a similar summons had been issued and equally ignored. Mandera South MP Abdul Haro called for Bitok to be made an example to every other PS in government who might be tempted to treat Parliament with the same disdain. Igembe North MP Julius Taitumu said the House was done talking. The committee resolved to schedule an emergency accountability session.

    Bitok’s explanation, when he eventually appeared, was that the absence had been the result of a miscommunication. He apologised. He pledged respect for parliamentary oversight. He appeared before the committee at the rescheduled session. Then, in April 2026, with the committee having scheduled a comprehensive briefing for April 23, the State Department wrote to Parliament the day before the meeting requesting a further postponement to May 6, citing prior engagements. The letter, dated April 22, offered no elaboration on what engagement took precedence over a scheduled parliamentary accountability session.

    What made the social media dimension particularly combustible was that on the day he was supposed to appear before the aggrieved committee in February, Bitok instead posted photographs of himself inspecting schools in Kikuyu constituency, the constituency of an Education Committee member. The gesture, whatever its intent, communicated that field visits to schools were considered more important than facing elected representatives asking questions about how the ministry’s budget was being managed.

    Bumula MP Jack Wamboka called on President Ruto directly to remove Bitok from office, describing him as a politician unfit for a technical reform role and accusing him of presiding over systemic failures that had frustrated key government education reforms. Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wa, at a January 2026 parliamentary retreat in Naivasha, had reportedly described Bitok as the most clueless Principal Secretary in government, accused him of being out of touch with realities on the ground, and cited failures in teacher rationalisation where some schools of one hundred students had twenty-eight teachers while neighbouring schools with six hundred had none.

    CHAPTER FIVE: RUTO’S IMPOSSIBLE BARGAIN

    The question that follows from all of this is not complicated but its answer has remained conspicuously elusive. Why does Julius Bitok still have a job?

    This is not a rhetorical question. It is a governance question, and it is one that President Ruto himself has given the tools to answer. In November 2024, standing before Cabinet Secretaries and their Principal Secretaries at a performance contract signing ceremony at State House, Ruto said: ‘There is no room for excuses or delayed failure. Accountability must cascade through all levels of ministries, departments and agencies to individual officers.’ He said performance reports would carry ‘recognition, rewards or sanctions, which will be applied without fail.’

    His government is simultaneously developing a policy, advanced publicly by Public Service CS Geoffrey Ruku in February 2026, to move all civil servants from permanent terms to five-year renewable contracts tied to performance targets. Those who meet their obligations will be renewed, those who do not will not. The policy has been presented as a modernisation of accountability in public service. It is also a framework under which Julius Bitok’s record would be scored.

    By the metrics Ruto’s own administration has established, that record is not close. A national security scandal at Immigration. A multi-billion-shilling fraud in education. Sixteen children dead in a dormitory fire after his ministry’s own post-Endarasha safety directives were not implemented. A pattern of parliamentary contempt so consistent that multiple MPs from the government’s own benches have publicly demanded his removal. An international embarrassment touching Kenya’s credibility as a regional mediator. These are not disputed allegations. They are documented facts, sourced from government audits, US Treasury sanctions updates, parliamentary Hansard, and official investigation reports.

    The structural argument for retaining Bitok, to the extent one exists, would be continuity during a sensitive period of CBC rollout and junior school transition, and the implicit assumption that a replacement might need time to find their feet while the reforms are mid-stream. That argument is weaker than it appears. CBC’s implementation challenges are being driven by policy and resource decisions that predate Bitok. The junior school autonomy confusion is a governance design problem, not one created by the personality of a single PS. There is no reform so delicate that its stewardship cannot survive a change of administrative leadership.

    The likelier explanation for Bitok’s continued tenure is political, and it is not flattering to anyone involved. Bitok is a Kalenjin PS from a community central to Ruto’s political base. Removing him would require the President to absorb a political cost for a decision driven entirely by accountability rather than electoral arithmetic. That is not a calculation that the current administration has demonstrated willingness to make. The Cabinet dissolution of July 2024, forced by Gen Z protests rather than internal performance review, was an aberration of accountability driven from the street, not from the top.

    A Principal Secretary is not untouchable. Article 155(4) of the Constitution is clear, and the Public Service Commission has both the mandate and the obligation to act.

    COFEK Secretary General Stephen Mutoro, June 2, 2026

    The cost of that political logic is not abstract. It is borne by the family of every girl who died at Utumishi. It is borne by every Kenyan whose tax payment was absorbed by a ghost learner in a school that did not exist. It is borne by the Sudanese diaspora who watched a Kenyan passport enable a sanctioned weapons procurer to evade international accountability. It is borne by the reputation of a country that spent years arguing it was a neutral peace broker in a war and then discovered its own immigration infrastructure was serving one side’s hierarchy.

    President Ruto has said accountability must cascade through all levels of government. The cascade, apparently, stops at Julius Bitok.

    THE LEDGER

    The Public Service Commission’s mandate under Article 155(4) of the Constitution is not discretionary. COFEK has invoked it. The grounds it cites are not speculative. They are drawn from parliamentary records, government audit reports, official casualty figures, and an international sanctions document bearing the imprimatur of the United States Treasury.

    The PSC must now decide whether it agrees with COFEK’s core proposition: that no Principal Secretary is above accountability, and that the cumulative weight of what has occurred under Bitok’s watch crosses the constitutional threshold for formal proceedings.

    There are accountability institutions in Kenya, formal and informal, that have shown capacity to act when the political will exists. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has been called to investigate the passport dimension. The DCI has been asked to examine the same. The NIS operates in the space where passport fraud intersects with national security. The PAC continues to track the ghost learner money. Any one of those investigations, pursued seriously, could clarify the legal dimension of Bitok’s exposure.

    What none of those investigations can substitute for is the political decision that should already have been made. In Kenya, the most reliable indicator of whether a senior public officer will face consequences is not the severity of what they did but how close they stand to power. Bitok’s proximity to Ruto has, so far, been a more effective shield than any legal argument he could mount in his own defence.

    The question COFEK has put to the PSC, and through it to the presidency, is whether that shield is constitutionally legitimate. The Constitution, as COFEK correctly notes, says nothing about a PS being untouchable. It says the opposite.

    Julius Bitok has a PhD in Business Management. He was appointed with the implicit promise that he would bring technocratic discipline to whichever docket he led. The record of his stewardship, measured against his own government’s stated accountability framework, has not delivered on that promise. It has delivered a passport scandal with international repercussions, a fraud that saw nearly a million children’s names used to drain the public education budget, sixteen dead in a fire that a more diligent ministry might have prevented, and a relationship with Parliament characterised by absence and contempt.

    That is the record. The man who carries it is still in office. The president who retains him has staked his credibility on accountability without exception. One of those two things, the record or the rhetoric, has to give. As things stand, it is the rhetoric that is losing.

  • Google Must Let UK Publishers Opt Out Of AI Search Under New Rules

    Google Must Let UK Publishers Opt Out Of AI Search Under New Rules

    Summary

    • CMA imposes rules giving publishers more control over AI use
    • Google testing tools for publishers to manage AI search appearance and traffic

    June 3 (Reuters) – Britain ​has imposed new conduct requirements on Google’s

    search services, including allowing publishers to ‌stop their content being used to power the U.S. tech giant’s AI features, as the watchdog ramps up its oversight.

    The country’s Competition and Markets Authority has flagged concerns about Google’s dominance in search, designating the company with ​the “strategic market status” that allows it to set targeted rules to increase trust and ​transparency.

    Google accounts for more than 90% of UK queries and the regulator ⁠said in January it wanted to give publishers more control over how their content was ​used.

    The CMA on Wednesday said the requirements imposed on Google under the digital markets competition regime ​gave “publishers more control and stronger bargaining power over the use of their content,” while securing a fair deal.

    News websites and other publishers have seen click-through rates drop sharply as a result of users relying on overviews ​generated with the help of AI.

    Google said it was providing “new resources, insights and control for ​website owners” to navigate the changes in how users find and understand information using generative AI.

    It said it was testing ‌a ⁠new control that lets publishers manage how their links and content appear in generative AI search features.

    Sites that opt out would not receive traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode, it said in a blog post, but the controls would not affect traditional search results.

    It said it was also ​increasing the number of ​links in AI ⁠responses and it was starting to roll out new insights for publishers.

    The CMA said Google would be required to make sure content from publishers, ​including news organisations, was properly attributed in AI‑generated search results, using ​clear links.

    “Google has ⁠recently announced changes to its search business and the requirements we’ve introduced today are designed to respond to what Google is doing now and in the future,” CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell ⁠said.

    Google faces ​increasing regulatory scrutiny across the world, including in the United ​States and European Union, and the company in March said it was developing new search controls to address British competition concerns.

  • Maraga’s 2027 Bid Hit by Explosive Sexual Harassment Claims as Former Insider Alleges Cover-Up and Victim Intimidation

    Maraga’s 2027 Bid Hit by Explosive Sexual Harassment Claims as Former Insider Alleges Cover-Up and Victim Intimidation

    It was supposed to be a moment of solemn solidarity. On June 1, 2026, former Chief Justice David Maraga arrived at the anti-femicide sit-in on Kenyatta Avenue in Nairobi carrying what witnesses described as an exceptionally large bouquet of red flowers.

    He worked his way through the crowd to the front of the demonstration, waved at protesters, and reportedly requested to address the gathering a request that was declined.

    Thousands had gathered that morning to mourn women killed at the rate of at least one per day in Kenya, to demand that President William Ruto declare femicide a national crisis, and to carry symbolic coffins through the city’s central business district in memory of victims like gospel singer Rachel Wandeto, doused in petrol and set alight in May.

    For Shakira Wanjira Wafula, watching that scene unfold on her screen broke something open that months of careful silence had held in place.

    “Someone who was not seeking attention would not have come to a gathering where people were seated on the ground, made his way up to the front, carrying an exceptionally big and beautiful bouquet of flowers, and waved to the crowd, even requesting to speak.” — Shakira Wanjira Wafula

    Within hours, Wafula who had resigned from Maraga’s presidential campaign in November 2025 citing what she described diplomatically as differences in foundational values posted an account on social media that has since detonated inside Kenya’s political and feminist conversations.

    In meticulous chronological detail, she disclosed that the real reason she left was the campaign’s handling of sexual harassment and assault allegations involving two senior officials close to the campaign leadership, and what she called a systematic effort to gaslight complainants, sideline them from campaign activities, and engineer a party process from which the accused emerged practically untouched.

    The United Green Movement has not issued any detailed public statement responding to Wafula’s specific allegations. David Maraga has not addressed the substance of the claims.

    What is not in dispute is the timeline Wafula has reconstructed in extraordinary detail a timeline that maps the distance between a reform candidate’s stated values and the actual experience of women inside his machine.

    THE WOMEN AT THE DINNER TABLE

    The crisis traces its origins to October 7, 2025. Wafula met with two other women from the campaign for dinner in Nairobi. She had gone to share frustrations about the campaign’s direction. What emerged, she says, was far more alarming: a recognition across the table that sexual harassment within the campaign was not an isolated incident. Multiple women had been affected. The pattern had gone unreported and unaddressed.

    The group brought in a fourth woman a lawyer also embedded in the campaign and formed a private chat group to agree on a path forward. Almost immediately, they discovered that the campaign had no safety policy of any kind.

    There was no formal mechanism for women to report misconduct, no designated safe contact, and no written protocol for handling complaints.

    A presidential campaign premised on institutional reform and ethical governance had not even written down what to do when a woman said she had been harassed.

    “We realized there was no safety policy for the campaign.” — Wafula

    On the lawyer’s advice, the group approached a senior figure in the campaign someone they trusted, though Wafula is careful to note he did not hold a formal position.

    They convened a virtual call on October 11 and laid out what had happened.

    The man listened, she says, and promised to organize a follow-up meeting with officials who held defined roles inside the secretariat. That meeting was delayed by the death of Raila Odinga’s elder brother, a period of national mourning that disrupted the campaign’s schedule.

    THE MEETING THAT MADE THINGS WORSE

    When the group finally convened a wider call on October 16, the allegations that surfaced went beyond harassment. Wafula describes what she heard that day as even more serious allegations of predatory behavior that she believed eclipsed the original complaints. The response they received from the officials on the call would become the sentence she has not been able to forget.

    “Women have been through worse, and we would be taught how to fight.”

    Having listened to accounts of sexual misconduct by members of their own team, the men in the room told the complainants that women had endured worse, and that the women would be equipped to defend themselves.

    Then, in a move Wafula describes as staggering, the officials gave the complainants themselves the responsibility for drafting the policy guidelines that should have existed before any of them set foot in the secretariat.

    From that moment, she says, the gaslighting began in earnest. The complainants found themselves progressively sidelined from campaign activities. Attempts were made to approach and manage them individually rather than as a group a divide-and-rule dynamic that Wafula recognized and rejected. The accused, she says, remained front and center in the campaign’s public-facing operations throughout.

    THE CHIEF JUSTICE IS TOLD — AND HIS FIRST CONCERN IS NOT THE WOMEN

    The women requested a direct meeting with Maraga. They got it on October 22. Wafula could not stay for the full meeting, but she communicated her account directly to the former Chief Justice. She says he appeared genuinely surprised by some of what she shared, and that he promised personally to handle the matter.

    The following day October 23 Wafula drafted a proposed code of conduct for the campaign and circulated it within a WhatsApp group that had by then grown to include seven young members of the secretariat.

    On October 28, a message arrived from the official they had originally reported to, suggesting the campaign had been waiting to hear from the complainants about how they wanted the situation resolved a framing Wafula found deeply troubling given that the situation had been in the campaign’s hands for nearly three weeks.

    On October 29, Maraga called several of the complainants individually.

    He asked them to put their concerns in writing as a formal complaint. They did so on November 3, submitting both the complaint and a code of conduct proposal.

    The response arrived on November 5: the matter would be handed to the UGM Party itself — the party of which the accused officials were members and which Maraga leads.

    On November 13, the complainants received an email from a UGM committee informing them that the legal process had officially begun thirty-three days after the October 11 call when the campaign was first formally notified.

    Three days later, on November 16, Wafula attended a scheduled campaign meeting and made a decision.

    She would tell Maraga directly that she was resigning, and she would tell him exactly why. His response, she says, was not what she expected from a man campaigning on protecting the vulnerable.

    “His biggest concern from that conversation was not the safety of the women around him, but rather the public scrutiny that would come after my resignation.”

    Wafula sent her resignation letter that evening.

    The public statement she posted the next day, November 17, said nothing about what had happened. It cited differences in foundational values. Several media outlets and political commentators noted at the time that her letter appeared to have been stripped of something.

    Reports circulated that an earlier draft had explicitly referenced the sexual assault allegations. She confirmed this week that the more detailed version existed but did not specify who redacted it.

    On the same day she posted her resignation publicly November 17 Wafula received a formal invitation to participate in a hearing before the UGM’s ad-hoc committee. She declined.

    Her reasoning is direct: she had already resigned, she had never been a member of the UGM Party, and she saw no evidence of good faith in referring the matter to a party structure effectively controlled by the accused’s political home. ‘Extracting the resolution to the party, where the accused is termed as the owner or party leader — at that point, I was convinced there was obviously no goodwill in the process,’ she wrote.

    The other official complainants did participate in the hearing. On January 13, 2026, Wafula received a copy of the NEC report along with her response to it. She says she never received a reply to her email. None of the parties involved were satisfied with the process, the findings, or the final outcome.

    Since her exit in November, she says at least five additional women she knows personally have also left the campaign.

    The June 1 demonstration on Kenyatta Avenue was among the largest anti-femicide protests Nairobi had seen in months.

    It was organized by the End Femicide movement alongside women’s rights groups, human rights organizations, and child protection advocates who had issued the government a 40-day ultimatum in May.

    Participants carried symbolic coffins, wore white, and held red roses. The Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya has reported handling roughly seventy gender-based violence cases per week across its offices in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. According to government data, at least 10,500 child protection cases were recorded between January 2025 and March 2026 alone.

    Former Chief Justice Maraga, one of the more prominent men present, joined the march in a show of solidarity. His presence was noted and reported widely as evidence of cross-political commitment to the cause.

    What those reports did not know because Wafula had not yet spoken was what had been happening inside his campaign for the preceding seven months.

    Shakira Wafula on the streets during 2025 protests.

    Wafula’s reaction to seeing him there was what finally moved her to publish her account publicly. ‘On a day meant for us to grieve and send a message to the world to protect women and children, the sight of someone who should have protected women, and had failed to do so, broke something in me,’ she wrote.

    “A presidency that protects potential sex offenders is not the type of presidency I would have any confidence in. Not in an age where we are screaming and crying every day about the safety of women.”

    THE CREDIBILITY CATASTROPHE

    The political damage this scandal inflicts on Maraga’s candidacy is proportional to the pillar it strikes. His entire presidential proposition rests on the claim that he is different from Kenya’s political establishment: more principled, more accountable, more serious about institutional reform.

    His party, the UGM, promotes social justice, equality, and a vision of ethical governance that Kenya’s mainstream political culture has consistently failed to deliver.

    That proposition was already being tested by the realities of building a national political machine from scratch funding pressures, coalition tensions, and the brutal arithmetic of Kenyan presidential politics.

    But a scandal about how the party handled sexual misconduct complaints internally is a different kind of test. It does not ask whether Maraga can build a winning coalition. It asks whether he means what he says. And the answer emerging from Wafula’s account, and from the silence of the UGM in response, is deeply uncomfortable.

    Political analysts who follow the 2027 field note that Maraga’s appeal has been strongest among women, young Kenyans, and civil society constituencies precisely the people most attuned to questions about how organizations treat survivors of sexual misconduct.

    These are also the people most familiar with the enduring pattern in Kenyan politics where accountability rhetoric dissolves the moment it becomes inconvenient for those in power.

    Supporters of Maraga argue, with some validity, that he is not personally accused of misconduct and that holding a leader responsible for every action by team members sets an unworkable standard. Critics counter that leadership accountability is not merely about personal conduct.

    It is about what happens under your authority when serious complaints are raised. Did the accused remain front-facing in the campaign while complainants were sidelined? Did the formal process take over a month to begin? Was the matter handed to a party structure controlled by the accused’s political home? Wafula says the answer to all three questions is yes. The UGM has not disputed her account.

    FIVE MORE WOMEN GONE

    Perhaps the detail in Wafula’s account that carries the heaviest weight is the one that follows the formal process. She did not invent a dramatic conclusion. She offered a quiet statistic: since she left in November, at least five more women she knows have also departed the campaign.

    That figure, if accurate, points to something more systemic than one complaint that was badly handled. It suggests an environment in which women calculated, rationally, that the campaign was not a safe or rewarding place to work and left.

    Women like Wafula, who gave months of her life to a political project she believed in, who drafted a code of conduct at her own initiative, who asked to meet with the leader directly, who stayed longer than she wanted to because people reminded her of the big picture.

    ‘Leaving his campaign was honestly a painful and not easy decision,’ she wrote. ‘But tolerance to the indignification and harassment of women, even in the slightest, is not something I could comfortably sit with.’

    She has made clear that she holds Maraga in personal high regard. She is not calling for his campaign to collapse. She is calling for what the campaign promised in its own slogan a reset, a restoration, a rebuilding this time applied to the protection of its own people.

    “Silence is what creates room for these matters to continue rising. It is what emboldens this kind of behavior and normalizes abuse of women.”

    As of press time, neither Maraga nor the United Green Movement had issued any public statement directly addressing Wafula’s detailed allegations. The party faces a decision that will reveal more about its character than any policy launch or press conference. It can acknowledge the failures she has described, publish the findings of the NEC process, and commit to an independent review. Or it can stay silent and hope the news cycle moves on.

    The second option carries the greater risk. Wafula has shown over months that she is not a person given to impulsive disclosure. She stayed quiet when it was painful. She offered the campaign every opportunity to resolve the matter internally. She only spoke after watching Maraga stand at the front of Kenya’s most prominent anti-femicide protest, holding flowers, seeking a microphone.

    Kenya’s EndFemicide movement is not going away. The FIDA-Kenya figures, the child protection statistics, the murder of Rachel Wandeto, the government’s failure to implement a single recommendation from the femicide task force it commissioned in January all of these ensure that gender-based violence will remain at the center of Kenyan political discourse through 2027. Every major candidate will be forced to answer for their record on women’s safety. David Maraga’s record inside his own campaign is now part of that conversation.

    Whether the UGM can recover from this moment depends not on political strategy, but on whether it does what it has always claimed distinguishes it from the parties it seeks to replace: tells the truth, protects the vulnerable, and holds power accountable beginning with itself.

  • Tanzanian President Visits Russia

    Tanzanian President Visits Russia

    Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan begins a three-day state visit to Russia on Wednesday to meet Vladimir Putin, turning to Moscow as her country’s reputation and relations with the West badly fray.

    Western diplomats and rights groups have accused Hassan’s government of massacring hundreds of people during October’s election unrest and orchestrating a wave of abductions and murders of political critics.

    While the United States reviews its relations with Tanzania and recently sanctioned a senior Tanzanian police officer for torture, Putin was one of the first to congratulate Hassan on her 98 per cent vote victory.

    Hassan remains unapologetic about the political crackdown, describing activists and demonstrators as disrespectful children who should be beaten with canes.

    Tanzanian president visits Russia. Credit: African Initiative – News Agency

    She brought a business delegation to Moscow, hoping to cement deals in trade, tourism, and minerals during the first state visit to Russia by a Tanzanian president since 1969.

    While annual trade currently stands at just over $307 million, the nation hopes to advance a long-delayed uranium mining project.

    Analysts note that the visit offers mutual benefits for both isolated administrations.

    Russia can leverage the support of a weakened Tanzanian government, potentially securing crucial abstentions during critical United Nations votes regarding the war in Ukraine.

    Meanwhile, a Tanzanian government report recently confirmed that last year’s election violence killed 518 people, though the document failed to establish accountability or name those responsible.